The Ripper's Wife(67)

But it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick who checked in at Flatman’s but Alfred Brierley and Mrs. Maybrick. Several of the cotton brokers who frequented Flatman’s recognized us. They knew at once that the man registered as James Maybrick and sleeping in bed with Mrs. Maybrick was not Jim, and that was just what I had intended.

But I didn’t count on Alfred walking out on me after the first night. He’d seemed so delighted when we’d made the arrangements, congratulating me on being so clever and saying how perfect it all was. But the fantasy didn’t quite match the reality. He was sullen and peevish instead of passionate. He accused me of trying to drag his name through the mud, of using him and wanting to see him named co-respondent in a divorce scandal. He said he didn’t love me, we’d had our fun, and he was done, he had no intention of marrying me.

“You mean nothing to me,” he said bluntly as he was putting his clothes back on and packing up his trunk, ignoring the lovely dinner I’d ordered brought upstairs for us, “no more than any other woman, just pleasure for pleasure’s sake, nothing more, and I cannot fathom how you ever thought otherwise; I certainly never said anything to give you that impression. If I like her, and the lady is willing, I’m willing to oblige her until I get tired of her. Afterward, if she doesn’t cling and cry too much and try to hold on to me, sometimes we can resume as friends, after a suitable interval, of course. That’s how I live my life, and I see no reason to change it; I’m having a thoroughly marvelous time being a bachelor, I couldn’t be happier.”

At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“No! You don’t . . . you can’t mean that!” I cried.

“Oh, but I do,” he was quick to assure me, eyes and words cold as ice, freezing me.

In that moment I felt my heart break like a trifling little crimson glass Valentine’s Day bauble. It was only when I was losing him that I realized how much I loved him. I just couldn’t bear to let him go.

I was so upset I snatched up the crystal bowl of jewel-lovely fruit medley and poured it over his copper head and slapped his face, sending fat, glistening drops of sugary-sweet syrup and chunks of pineapple, diced peaches, grapes, and cherries flying everywhere. “You cad!” I shouted. “You haven’t a chivalrous bone in your body!”

I wept up a storm and went back to Liverpool on the very next train. I told the people who saw me crying that there’d been an unexpected death in my family.

Aching with loss and longing, I returned to Battlecrease House, with leaden feet, to await the inevitable; the storm was bound to break soon. No one was expecting me, and when I walked heart-sore, travel weary, and tearstained into my bedroom I was astonished to find none other than Nanny Yapp, blind as a bat with her spectacles off, dancing and twirling before my mirror wearing my candy-striped satin corset and a flurry of pink and white ruffled petticoats trimmed with red satin bows and ribbon-threaded lace that also belonged to me. She lifted and shook them like a French dancer, displaying a pair of my frilly drawers and pink silk stockings. She even had her big flat feet crammed into a pair of my little red satin French heels, her toes bulging out at the sides in a way I supposed must be quite painful, and had my bracelets, a veritable fortune in icy-glistening diamonds, stacked up to her elbows over a pair of my pink satin opera gloves. She was singing in such an awful off-key manner I was suddenly immensely grateful that Jim and Mrs. Briggs had never seen fit to entrust her with the children’s musical education.



“While strolling through the park one day,

In the merry, merry month of May,

I was taken by surprise by a pair of roguish eyes,

In a moment my poor heart was stole away,

Da da da da da da

Da da da da da da. . . .”





This was simply too much; I just had to walk away. Luckily she was singing so loudly and without her spectacles she was so blind that she never noticed me standing in the doorway. I went back downstairs and told May I was feeling right poorly and would she please be so good as to draw me a hot bath; that would surely give Nanny Yapp time to get back into her clothes and out of my room.

While I was soaking in my bath, luxuriating in the rose-perfumed steam, I asked May to bring me any letters that had come for me during my absence.

Much to my surprise, amongst the many bills I found a letter from Alfred Brierley. He said he feared he’d been “far too precipitate” and “egregiously mistaken.” He’d been feeling foolish and out of sorts and worried after several men he habitually did business with had recognized him in the lobby, and one must expect a certain amount of fear and trepidation when a man sees the end of his bachelor days upon the horizon. That fear had made him unkind and he fully deserved being called a “cad” as well as having the fruit medley dumped over his head. I was “the most exciting, intoxicating woman” he’d ever known, and he couldn’t bear to go on without me. We must reconcile at the first possible opportunity or else he would find himself sitting with a pistol in his hand one night contemplating self-destruction, and did I really want a man’s blood, his heart’s blood that pulsed only for me, staining my lovely lily-white hands?

“Oh, Alfred, Alfred, Alfred,” I sighed. “Your love is just like a noose, always keeping me dangling!”

I tried to tell myself to buck up and show some pride and not go running back the moment he beckoned. But I knew myself too well to lie to me; I knew I would soon be back in his arms and in his bed again.