The Ripper's Wife(71)

And all the Queen’s horses,

And all the Queen’s men,

Can never put this harlot together again!





I had to kill her. I know that now. It could never end any other way. She was the mirror and I had to break her. She was the medium who resurrected the whores I killed and brought them back to haunt me, to rattle their phantom chains and stand at the foot of my bed to rob me of peace and rest. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing them. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore in the green mirror of her eyes. The women I killed I thought were worthless, human dross no one gave a damn about, penny f*ckers who would even spread their legs for a stale loaf of bread if you offered it to them, but she made them real; through her own peculiar Irish-Welsh witchcraft, her storyteller’s tongue, she made them live again. She made me see them as something more, women more worthy of pity than scorn. Some of them had fought to redeem themselves. Even if they ultimately failed, they had tried! The earnest attempt counted for far more than the failure! She showed me how life’s misfortunes had made them what they were when I, Jack the Ripper, mighty, invincible, with my arsenic and my nice sharp knife, made them pay for another woman’s crimes, crimes she might never have committed had I been a better husband.

She was the mirror and I had to break her. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore, mirrored in uncanny green. Jack the Ripper masquerading as a gentle man—a gentleman—reflected in the emerald mirror of her Irish eyes! I saw a condemned man every time I looked in them. I saw my jury of four, my jury of whores—Polly, Annie, Liz, and Katie—declaring me guilty, damning me to Hell, every time. Some people believe that when someone dies violently the last thing they see is imprinted upon the retinas of their eyes and a photograph will reveal it. I shudder to think what the police will see if they bring their lights and cameras to photograph Mary Jane’s magical green eyes. The coward in me wanted to gouge them out, to grind them like grapes beneath my boot heels, so that could never happen, but I hadn’t the heart; I hadn’t the right. Let her eyes condemn and damn me; they already have. Even if they don’t lead the police to my door, I’m damned. Saucy Jacky is no more!

It was better this way, I tried to console myself as I sat on the edge of that bloody bed weeping and holding her dead hand, feeling her flesh as cold as my own. Drink would have destroyed her beauty all too soon; men are brutal creatures by nature and would not spare her the boot or the fist or their syphilitic cucumbers. She would have lost her teeth and roamed about Whitechapel miserable, drunken, riddled with lice, fleas, and disease, f-ucking for pennies to drown her sorrows in gin until despair drove her to the river, to suicide, another haggard, ugly whore, sick and old before her time. If not my knife, some other’s knife might have killed her, a scorned lover, a pimp who thought she owed him a share of her meager earnings, an abortionist on a bloodstained table in some dark back alley, Fishmonger Joe, or another man like him, who couldn’t tolerate her “jolly frolics” with other females. My knife was really the kindest cut of all. In my own way, I loved her.

In the fireplace I burned the green stockings and the fancy bonnet I had given her. I took some old clothes her laundress-whore friend had left behind and added them to the blaze. I couldn’t risk these pretty bits of greenery being traced back to me. I still had to think of my children.

I took Mary Jane’s heart away with me. I held it in my icy, trembling hands and imagined it still beating, pulsing faintly with life, just for me. And some souvenirs: a lock of her hair, the key she was forever misplacing, and a naughty French postcard, superbly hand tinted, the only one she had left to remember her decadent days in Paris by—Mary Jane striking a risqué pose, looking every bit the elegant lady in a mint-green and turquoise satin gown, with her long ladylike white gloves, lace fan, and high-piled mound of gleaming curls garnished with red roses. A saucy, mischievous glow lit up her face as she impishly lifted her skirt high to show she hadn’t a stitch on above her red-gartered stockings.

I stood over her and stroked her hair and kissed the bare, bloody bone of her brow. She just stared at me with eyes like cold green glass. I saw accusation, understanding, and tenderness in their glassy, dead emerald depths and knew I was forgiven . . . by her . . . but not by me, nor God, I fear; the Devil shall yet claim me as his own. I’ve a feeling a flaming throne is reserved for me at the left hand of Satan.

I left with the dawn. I left her more naked than naked. More naked than she had ever been in life.

The rage is suddenly all burned out of me. A cold and quivering husk, I stood for a long time gazing down into the black waters of the Thames. I wanted to jump, but I didn’t have the courage. There’s a poem about despairing whores taking their lives, jumping from the “Bridge of Sighs.” They had more courage than I did. My hands were cold and shaking so, I couldn’t bring myself to raise the knife and slit my throat. I emptied the contents of my silver box onto my palm, a little mountain of white snow, and swallowed it all, but I’ve become accustomed; it would take more than that to finish me. It only made the rats in my belly bite harder, sinking their teeth in deep to gnaw, Gnaw, GNAW. My eyelids twitch, Twitch, TWITCH! If I weren’t already mad, I think it would drive me so. My brain and bladder burn, Burn, BURN! The pains of Hell have got hold of me! Tears rolled down my face. All I could do was throw my knife in. I watched it flash silver as it fell. The dark waters were the last thing it would ever stab.