The Ripper's Wife(75)

We were seen together at the races in a pose some might call at best unwise and at worst compromising.

We’d all gone down to Aintree for the fiftieth anniversary of the running of the Grand National. Everyone who was anyone would be there, including the Prince of Wales. Jim and I were making a party of it with Edwin, Alfred Brierley, the Samuelsons, and Mrs. Briggs and her unfortunate husband, Horace.

Some mischief-maker with a camera took a photograph of Alfred and me, by intent or by chance, I’m still not entirely certain. They captured us standing close together, much too close apparently for it to be quite socially seemly. My kid-gloved hand was resting intimately on his arm, and we were staring into each other’s faces with raw and naked yearning. His hand, in elegant dove-gray kid, was resting lightly on the waist of my periwinkle-blue linen suit, fingers fanning down to lightly graze my hip.

The photographer printed out a copy and sent it to Jim suggesting he might like to have the negative, for a mere pittance of course, as though any sum with three zeros following a comma and a two-digit number could be accounted a pittance by anyone whose last name wasn’t Vanderbilt.

“Damn it, but I will not!” Jim declared, and balled the letter up and flung it into the fire.

I was proud of him for refusing to pay it.

I suggested he brazen it out and paste the picture in our album to show the world how much it truly did not matter, that some greedy fool was just trying to stir up a tempest in a teapot where none existed and Mr. Brierley and I had just been sharing a joke about the Prince of Wale’s latest amour. I’d said I would not sit so close to a man with such a notoriously gargantuan appetite if I were wearing a whole stuffed pheasant on my hat lest his stomach feel a grumble and he be tempted to reach up and tear off a wing. We were, after all, friends, we’d been sitting together in the same box, so really what was the harm of our strolling out together?

Jim was still smarting about it when we sat down to play cards with the Samuelsons that evening. I wondered idly if Christina was still bedding down with him, but I was long past caring if she was. I had Alfred, after all. Jim could do what he liked, with Mad Sarah, Christina, or any other willing party. I knew now that peace would never reign within our marriage. Fidelity, like honesty, was an unattainable dream.

The truth was we were both just too weak. Neither of us could make a promise and stick to it. We’d tried and tried and failed and failed each and every time. Jim couldn’t stop striking me, beating me bloody black-and-blue, anytime he was of half a mind to; his promises of “never again” had long ago lost all meaning. He wasn’t willing to renounce the medicines that brought out the beast in him, and I couldn’t stop shopping or keep out of Alfred Brierley’s bed, at least not for long. We were just treading water, and we all knew it. We’d just have to own up to our failure and figure out the right way to end it. I’d written to Mama about that last beating and the destruction of Jim’s will and told her that as long as the children were provided for nothing else mattered; I didn’t care.

Jim sat gloomy and glowering over his cards, displaying none of his usual charm. His eyes were dull and dead, and he never once smiled or even lifted a finger to stroke his diamond horseshoe. Mr. Samuelson either was too big of a fool to realize anything was awry or gave such a fine impression of being one that the stage was surely much poorer without his presence. He was clearly far more interested in a crystal dish filled with pretty fruit-shaped marzipan candies than he was in the flirty eyes his wife was flashing at my husband. Alfred and I kept quiet and mechanically played our cards. Only Christina was her usual giddy, giggling, simpering self, full of gossipy prattle, so annoying at times I wondered how all of us had the restraint not to shout at her to just SHUT UP! When the game was finally over and she had lost, Christina, with her typical redhead temper, burst into tears and threw her cards in her husband’s face and cried, “I HATE YOU!” and fled the room in a flurry of tears and teal taffeta.

Poor Mr. Samuelson sat there blinking in astonishment, cheeks puffed out with marzipan and a lot of bewildered hurt in his big innocent blue eyes. I felt so sorry for him that I just had to reach out and say kindly, “You mustn’t think anything of it; I say ‘I hate you’ to Jim all the time.” Words I would later come to regret; sometimes a kindness given freely ends up costing us dearly.





In April we were invited to a masquerade ball at the Wellington Rooms; it was to be the event of the season. Every dressmaker and tailor in town was worn to a shadow trying to meet the demand for costumes, each more elaborate and fanciful than the last, with every member of the Currant Jelly Set vying to outdo the rest.

Jim had taken to his bed again, moaning that this was surely the end and he would never rise again. I don’t mean to sound dispassionate, but it was the same old talk of cold hands and feet, numbness, paralysis, migraines, and bellyaches, and more than I wished to know about the state of any person’s stools, including my own. Our parlor had become like a waiting room for doctors; one would be going out while the maid was going in to announce to Dr. So-and-So that Mr. Maybrick would see him now. Even when Jim had their prescriptions in hand, he did nothing but criticize and disparage them and triple every dosage as though he knew better.

When he heard about the ball, Jim determined to rouse himself and summoned his tailor to make him a matador’s gilt-encrusted Traje de Luces, Suit of Lights.