The Ripper's Wife(78)
Today will be the last time I confide my thoughts to this loyal diary. I’ve made up my mind, I am going to give it to Bunny to read and reveal to her in all his blood-crazed jealous madness the Jekyll and Hyde monster she married. Afterward, I will most humbly implore her forgiveness and beg her to find the courage and strength to do what I cannot and kill me.
A public trial and execution would destroy our children; they would be forever tainted, tarred and feathered, as the accursed spawn of Jack the Ripper. But Justice must be done. I cannot suffer the beast inside me to go on living, and he will as long as I draw breath. Bunny must be brave and kill the husband she once loved; it’s the only way.
This diary I will ask her to hide away, somewhere secret and safe, and hope someday, long after Bunny and my dear children have departed this earth, when the truth can no longer touch or hurt anyone I once loved, someone will find it and those who read it will understand that love can make sane men mad and turn a gentle man into a fiend and they will find it in their hearts to forgive me.
God have mercy upon my sorry, tormented soul, grant my guilty heart peace and my unquiet spirit eternal rest, forsake me not, instead forgive, and remember the gentle man I was before love’s madness made me into a monster.
Signed, for the LAST time, in red, for my heart’s blood and in memoriam of that I have spilled, from the depths of my guilty heart . . .
28
Bicker, bicker, bicker, that’s all the doctors did, and all the time Jim just kept on getting sicker and sicker. He was sinking so fast, and no one seemed able to pull him back up. And I was caught right smack in the middle of it. I just didn’t know what to do or who to believe. They kept saying words like gastritis and nervous dyspepsia and melancholia and talking about bad sherry and gross indulgences while dining, and pumping more drugs into his poor body through every orifice. He moaned and groaned and tossed in terrible pain, and every time they gave him anything in the way of medicine or food he was sick at one end or the other, sometimes both at the same time. Finally they would let him have nothing to eat but a kind of bottled invalid food, a weak beef broth, called Valentine’s Meat Juice, since everything else seemed to disagree with him.
But Jim kept crying for champagne, lemonade, and, most of all, arsenic and strychnine, insisting that he would soon be right as rain if he could only have his “pick-me-up” tonic. But everyone acted like they were deaf and dumb, as though my poor husband were a man deranged by delirium crying out some vile obscenity that it was best to ignore for propriety’s sake.
In desperation, I sought advice in Jim’s own medical books. When I found a passage suggesting that sudden and complete deprivation could be deadly to a man accustomed to arsenic eating and brought it to the physicians’ attention they just smiled at me, patted my hand, and said I must put my trust in them and advised me to try to calm my nerves with needlework and prayer.
Michael came up from London, furious that I hadn’t called in more doctors and nurses; it was obvious Jim was in need of more specialized care than Liverpool could provide. When Edwin interjected that it was “those damn strychnine pills; he’s been killing himself with them!” Michael snapped at him to be quiet: “When you attain a medical degree I will be pleased to consider your opinion, but until then I will thank you to keep your mouth shut!” Poor Edwin just stood there blinking and baffled; he’d only been trying to help, and what he’d said made a lot more sense than any of the doctors’ prattle about inferior sherry and too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths.
Mrs. Briggs agreed with Michael that I was quite incompetent and flooded his ear with tales about the “slipshod fashion” in which this household was run, then proceeded to take full charge. Then I looked out a window and saw Nanny Yapp in the garden gesticulating wildly, talking urgently to Edwin. Later I came across the two of them, with Mrs. Briggs and Michael, huddled in the hallway outside Jim’s room thick as thieves. They broke apart at my approach and the looks on their faces almost froze my blood. Suddenly I found myself forbidden access to the sickroom without supervision. There would be times when I would hear Jim calling for me and I would try to go to him and find the door barred against me by a nurse whose features were as hard as her marble heart. “Can’t you hear he’s calling for me?” I would cry as the door was closed firmly in my face.
I didn’t know then, but I had made another mistake. Alfred Brierley had informed me by letter that he had made up his mind once and for all to end everything between us forever and go away to South America. Jim being so ill and me feeling so friendless, alone against Michael, Mrs. Briggs, Nanny Yapp, and the dizzying array of doctors and nurses marching in and out of the house, I just couldn’t bear the thought of parting. All I could think about was Alfred lazing away the days amidst coffee beans and brown-skinned beauties wearing little more than beads fanning him with palm leaves. The cold tone of his letter made me long suddenly for the warmth of his body and the comfort of his arms. I know better than any just how horrible that sounds, with my husband lying there sick, maybe even dying, and me weeping and wailing and walking the floors and hardly sleeping, hoping and begging and praying that he would get well, wanting, yet again, to make yet another fresh start. Heavens, but I do look a contrary, contradictory, deceptive, duplicitous female! Even I can see it. Yet the purpose of this memoir is truth, and I cannot deny what I felt, even if that truth shows me in the poorest and most unflattering light.