The Ripper's Wife(77)
When I crept in to check on Jim I was greatly alarmed. His breathing seemed so labored and, in the gentle golden glow of the lamplight, there was a distinctly cadaverous appearance about his face. His head against the pillows looked like it had been carved out of wax, like something straight out of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
Icy fingers of fear gripped my heart and I burst into tears and flung myself against my husband’s body, clinging to him desperately and taking comfort in feeling the rise and fall of his chest and hearing his heart, still beating.
“Please, Jim, please get well! I need you! I love you!” I cried. “Think of Spain, sunshine and oranges! Our new start! Please, don’t leave me; don’t ever leave me! I’m sorry for everything!”
Despite his pain, Jim smiled at me.
“There, there, Bunny,” he whispered. “You mustn’t worry. I’ve never, no matter what I’ve said and done, stopped loving you for an instant. I sometimes think this pain I’m suffering now is God’s punishment for the pain I’ve caused you. But I shall soon be well, God is merciful, and I’ve been praying for His forgiveness. It’s spring you know, my favorite season. And you know what spring means—rebirth and renewal—and I hope, I pray, it may be so with us. . . .”
“It will, it will!” I cried fervently. “It will! Everything’s going to be all right; I just know it!”
And in that moment I believed it. I wanted it so bad I could almost taste the morsel of our future happiness melting like fine chocolate upon my tongue even as Fate hovered nearby threatening to snatch it away. I curled myself up into a little ball at Jim’s side, laid my head on his shoulder, and held him tight, trying to will him well, to send some of my strength into his body. I didn’t leave him again until morning’s first light.
27
THE DIARY
I’ve taken to my bed. I shall never rise again. Doctors come; doctors go. They dose and poke, prod, and purge me. Syringes—for veins and anus. I am pumped full of drugs, except the one I crave most—they stint so on the arsenic, and I am too weak to reach my private store!
Morphine suppositories, hydrate of potash, bromides and bicarbonates, Fowler’s Solution, nux vomica, potassium salts, soda water and milk, mustard in steaming-hot water to soak my ice-cold feet and purge my stomach, double doses of bismuth and brandy, Tincture of Jaborandi, Extract of Aloes and Chamomile Flowers, sulphur lozenges, laudanum, Du Barry’s Revalenta, chlorodyne, Valentine’s Meat Juice, Neave’s Invalid Food, prussic acid, lemonade gargles, celery nerve tonic, liver pills, antipyrine, enemas, and even leeches.
Dear Edwin sneaks me sips of champagne on the sly and assures me I will soon be better.
Why can’t I have my arsenic and strychnine tablets? I grow weaker and weaker without them, but the fools won’t give me any no matter how much I beg and plead. Michael says it is very ill becoming of me to behave in such a whining, petulant manner, like a tot throwing a tantrum because he is denied a toffee apple. I’m dying, Dying, DYING for want of arsenic! But all they will let me have is just a little sip, a very tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule, occasional sip, of Fowler’s Solution that only tantalizes me.
They hover together like a flock of blackbirds in their black coats for their consultations; they argue and contradict one another, blabbering about inferior sherry and chronic dyspepsia, indiscreet dining, a chill from when I was caught out in the rain last time I went to the races, or too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths. Have you ever in your entire life heard anything more absurd? Death by toweling in a Turkish bath! Each one thinks he knows better than the rest. Bunny weeps, Edwin frowns and rages, “I tell you it’s those damn strychnine pills; he’s been taking them like candy!,” and Michael glowers and summons more doctors.
My legs are as stiff and useless as dead things. They lie there stretched out before me, rigid as steel bars.
It’s May outside, but my windows are shut tight. “Nature,” John Calvin so rightly said, “is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.” But not revealed to me . . . only concealed. . . . The velvet curtains are drawn tight against the fresh, sweet air, blue skies, and sunlight. My children will never again grab me one by each hand and pull me out to walk in the park, to fly kites, chase hoops, and sail toy boats, feed the birds and squirrels, and buy them toffee apples and ices—lemon for Bobo, raspberry for Gladys. The next time my little girl brings me a bouquet of bright flowers it will be to lay upon my grave.
Outside my window, Gladys and her little chums are skipping rope. I hear God’s voice in the nonsense rhyme they are chanting and it brings me a peculiar kind of peace:
“Jack the Ripper’s dead,
He’s lying on his bed.
He cut his throat
With Sunlight Soap,
Jack the Ripper’s dead!”
I pray God she will never know, that a day will never come when she looks back with those heart-melting violet eyes and remembers herself as a six-year-old child, in bouncing black ringlets, big satin hair bow, button boots, and purple plaid frock, and realizes just how close she came to the truth:
Jack the Ripper’s dead,
He’s lying on his bed,
He hasn’t the courage to
cut his throat,
But Jack the Ripper’s dead.