The Ripper's Wife(74)
“You can’t deceive me, Florie,” he whispered. “I know you still love me! See, your own body betrays you!”
Looking across the room at Jim’s angry red face, I could see him, sweating and shaking, clenching his fists and quaking, like a pot about to boil over. I don’t know how he got through the evening without striking either or both of us. I had terrible visions of him hurling himself at Alfred and the two of them falling, knocking over the Christmas tree, and the candles setting the curtains and the whole house afire.
How I dreaded the moment when the last good-bye was said and I was left alone with Jim. I prayed to God that the morning sun would find me still alive.
Jim gave me his worst, as I knew he would. After beating me bloody he ran and got his will from the safe, rolled the parchment into a tube, and beat me about the head and shoulders with it, then tore it into confetti and flung it in my face and said I’d seen and spent the last penny I would ever have from him. Then he hurled me flat, onto the floor, so hard I lost my breath along with my senses and awoke moments later to the most excruciating pounding, piercing pain and to the even more painful sight of my poor, innocent children standing in the doorway seeing for the first time in their innocent little lives that the act of love can also be an act of violence.
I felt so shamed before their wide-open eyes that I had to shut mine and turn my face to the wall. I was so ashamed to have them see me, see us, their father and mother, that way that I just wanted to die.
It was that exact same sight, and realization no doubt, that tore Jim from me as violently as though God Himself had reached down from Heaven and yanked him off me. Bawling like a baby, he ran and locked himself in his study, and it was up to me to drag my bloody, battered body off the floor, tug together the tatters of my gown, and force myself to smile and reassure the children as I led them back to bed.
The next morning I awoke to a bloody discharge trickling from between my thighs. When it persisted and grew heavier and I began to feel pains quite unlike those that often accompany the onset of a lady’s monthly, I had to summon Dr. Hopper. I just couldn’t lie there and let myself bleed to death; my children needed me! Before I let him examine me, I made him promise not to tell Jim. I said he didn’t know and it would be just too great a blow if he were to discover that in chastising me he had also murdered our unborn child. There was no telling what he might do, and I wanted to spare him.
As I lay there, knees open and bent, my nightgown turned up over my bruise-mottled stomach, silently submitting to Dr. Hopper’s ministrations, I never thought a day would come when I would find myself actually grateful for a beating.
25
THE DIARY
I am still he; he is still me. GOD HELP ME! I thought myself freed of this demon!
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”
I was dreaming, of a red waterfall, a waterfall of blood, and Mary Jane, waiting, on the other side of that red river for me. The other whores were there too, pointing the finger of blame, rattling their chains.
I awoke. It was as though my soul floated above the bed where my numb body lay, paralysis slowly overtaking my limbs, limbs I saw and commanded to move but no longer felt. I rose. I dressed. I went out. Because I was so weak, Michael didn’t think he needed to lock me in. I am visiting him again, to see a new doctor. I wanted to shout, NO! I wanted to shake and slap myself awake. But I was powerless, and I was awake yet not, I think, awake. On and on my body moved, no longer mine to command, wholly in the demon’s power.
She was a short little woman, a widow in black, as round as a barrel. “Victoria, like Our Gracious Queen,” she said her name was. Another whore with a tale of woe: driven onto the streets in dire need with seven kiddies at home to feed. Her black hair was striped with broad bands of gray. I wanted to laugh. It reminded me of my gray-and-black-striped cravat. She leaned forward and flipped her skirts up, revealing a fat, rosy pink, dimpled bum.
The phantom shade of Mary Jane must have slapped me awake. I awoke from my trance and stood there dumb and blinking with a knife, taken from Michael’s kitchen, glinting in my hand, not knowing where I was. The questioning glance, from over her shoulder, turned to one of sheer fright. She screamed. My skeleton nearly leapt out of my skin. I do believe I was as scared as she was. I dropped the knife and fled into the night.
I am still he; he is still me. Oh God, what can I do? I thought it was in my power to stop him! But the fiend I have made incarnate, the demon I have summoned up from the bowels of Hell and given a name, is still alive....
I awakened in my bed, in Michael’s house, the next morning. Mud and manure tracked across the carpet told me I did not just dream it . . . it was all most terrifyingly real!
26
When my body had healed and I could safely show myself in public again, I defiantly rekindled my romance with Alfred Brierley. Our passion for each other must have been the most stubborn, tenacious flame that ever burned. It just would not die out; try and douse it though we might, it persisted, flickering, sputtering, and flaring. One or the other of us just kept fanning the flame, keeping it alive; we might as well have been throwing kerosene on it for all the good it did us.