The Ripper's Wife(7)
He paused to allow some polite chuckles and to give the disapproving dowagers a moment more to glower through their lorgnettes and frown at us. But Jim and I just smiled into each other’s eyes and clasped hands across the table.
“I raise my glass to the health of two who met aboard this ship only seven days ago. They embarked as strangers, but found romance upon the high seas. This very afternoon they informed me of their intention to wed this summer. A toast, ladies and gentlemen, to the long lives and good health of Miss Florence Chandler and Mr. James Maybrick! A toast to the happy couple—to these two who shall soon become one!”
Everyone, even those who disapproved most vehemently of our romance, raised their voices and glasses to wish us well. It would have been the epitome of discourtesy to do anything else.
That night my whole world was rosy and filled with delight. The wine was sweet as nectar and I’m afraid I might have drunk a little too much.
Long after most of the lights had gone out, Jim and I lingered up on deck, wrapped in black velvet darkness and each other’s arms.
“I never want this night to end!” I whispered, safe and contented in his embrace. “If I go to bed, I’m afraid when I wake up in the morning it will turn out to have all been just a dream.”
We watched the golden sun rise over the deep blue sea. When a dolphin broke the surface Jim rubbed his diamond horseshoe and guided my fingers to do the same. Seeing a dolphin meant certain luck. “We’re on a winning streak,” Jim said. “With you at my side I’ll never lose.”
When he escorted me to my stateroom, lingering for one last long kiss before he let me go, he boldly whispered into my ear, “I dream of the time when I need not leave your side when we say good night, though, in this instance, it is in fact good morning.”
I was the happiest girl in the world, and I knew Lady Luck was smiling down on me, blessing this venture.
2
Jim and I were married on July 27, 1880, at the most elegant church in London, St. James’s in Piccadilly. All the most fashionable people had their weddings there. Members of the Currant Jelly Set, Jim told me, would never even think of being married anywhere else.
The society columns, to my secret shame, all described me as “an American heiress” and on my wedding day I looked like one, but that did not dispel my fear that someone would come charging up the aisle in the midst of the ceremony, yank my veil off, and denounce me as a fraud. Time and again I wanted to go to Jim, to kneel at his feet and tell him the truth about those two and a half million acres, but the fear of losing him was so great it made my stomach ache. I’d throw down my diamonds on the gaming table but never my heart.
My gown was from the House of Worth. Nothing less would do, Mama said, and Jim agreed, “It must be Worth, by all means!” in a tone that implied being wed in a gown designed by any other would be the equivalent of being married barefoot in a burlap sack.
“You shimmer like an angel’s wing!” Mama sighed, wiping a tear from her eye, the first time she saw me in it.
It was ice-white glacé satin that shimmered just like ice under the sun, embroidered with delicate silvery-white roses and lilies, hundreds of seed pearls and tiny crystals. Embellished lace stretched across my b-reasts and fell from my shoulders in demure little cape sleeves. The skirt cascaded voluminously over my bustle and flowed out behind me in a raging river of embroidered and beaded satin and lace ruffles, forming a train that four little girls in pink and blue dresses with silk rosebud wreaths on their curly heads would carry.
This was yet another indulgence my husband-to-be had granted me—blue and pink were my two favorite colors, and I had gone back and forth endlessly trying to decide which color my bridal attendants should wear, provoking the dressmaker at times to hair tearing and tears. Then Jim had come along and dispensed with the dilemma altogether by saying I should divide the attendants in two and have half wear pink and the others wear blue. In the end, I had twelve bridesmaids, half of them gowned in chiffon-draped silks and rose-laden hats in shades ranging from the palest baby’s blush to the most delicious, decadent rich raspberry pink and the other six in hues of blue from delicate aqua to the midnight perfection of the world’s finest sapphires.
When Mama stepped forward in her dusky-blue lace and satin to drape her very own pearls, a triple strand with a diamond-encrusted gold fleur-de-lis clasp, around my neck there were tears in her eyes even though she was smiling. I had never seen my mother cry, and I fell weeping into her arms. All morning I had felt like my life was only just beginning, but now, like a hammer’s blow from out of the blue, it came crashing down upon me that life as I had always known it was actually ending. My days of roaming the world with Mama were over. I would be saying good-bye to her and Holbrook. Though he would be “just a brief jaunt away” across the Channel in Paris, busy with his medical practice, and whenever the wanderlust did not seize her Mama would be there too, all of a sudden the Channel seemed as gigantic as the Atlantic.
Mama smiled and dried my tears and chased all my fears away. She made that grossly swollen Channel shrink right back down to size. “A mere pond,” she called it, assuring me that she would always be there whenever I needed her. We had always been not only mother and daughter but dearest friends also, and nothing, not even marriage, could change that, she said, reminding me that I had been with her through three marriages. “We’ve always been together, but now it’s time for you to take center stage, darlin’. It’s time for you to play the wife, an’, in time, someone else will come along to play daughter, an’ you’ll be the mother. But”—she took my face in her hands and gazed deep into my eyes—“no matter what happens, you will always be my daughter.”