The Ripper's Wife(79)
I had dashed off an impulsive letter to Alfred, to try to stop him from leaving, the words flying from my pen so fast I hardly knew what they said, thrust it into an envelope without giving it a second glance, and told the maid to mail it. She left it lying on the hall table, and it happened that as Nanny Yapp was passing, to take the children out for “their afternoon constitutional,” she saw it. She would later say that she gave it to Gladys to carry and that my little girl, skipping along on the way to the post office, excited about doing this favor for Mama, had dropped it in a mud puddle.
Being the kind, considerate woman that she was, that viper who had nursed at Satan’s own teat, Nanny Yapp decided to open my letter and put it in a fresh envelope and in so doing discovered my shameful adultery and decided that it was her “Christian duty” to alert Edwin and Michael, choosing that time to also tell them about the flypapers I had been soaking in my bedroom before the ball.
There had been a dreadful murder case a few years back in which a pair of sinister spinster sisters who ran a rooming house had sent some of their lodgers to the grave with arsenic they obtained by soaking flypapers, and Nanny Yapp leapt to the conclusion that I was no doubt up to the same thing, endeavoring to “hasten the poor master’s end,” and my “sinful passion for Mr. Brierley” was the reason.
Melodrama had leapt right off the stage and become real life! No wonder they regarded me with suspicion! But I was too overwrought; I couldn’t see it through their eyes then, so I missed the chance to take precautions to protect myself. Murder had never even tiptoed to the threshold of my mind at any time! And Jim took so much arsenic himself and was even then lying there in his sickbed bleating for it like a baby for its mother’s milk.... I thought everyone who knew him, even casually, knew about his habit; he was always whipping out that silver box, dropping a pinch into his wine, and raising his glass to wish everyone “a fine complexion, good health, and longevity!” I was too blind and weary to see it then, but I was playing right into their hands. Michael would see to it that Jim’s reputation would be safeguarded at all costs, while my own already-tarnished honor would be sacrificed, even if it meant my life must also be lost. But I didn’t know until after . . . and by then it was already too late....
Jim sent for me to sit with him. This time they allowed it. Outside in the hall, where I was left waiting, I heard him arguing with them, demanding would they deny a dying man his final wish, the consolation of what just might be his last meeting with his beloved wife. Michael and Mrs. Briggs tried to speak against me, but Jim, to his credit, would not hear them.
“She’s my wife,” he said, “and I love her, and I will see her alone—without busybodies and chaperones!”
And in the end, they let me in.
“Oh, Jim, I’m so afraid!” I cried, clutching at his hands. The skin was gray, cold, and clammy and looked waxy and dead. It was an awful thing to hold and part of me wished I didn’t have to, but another part of me never wanted to let go.
I bent forward, meaning to kiss him, and nearly vomited right onto his chest. It took all my strength to persevere and deliver the intended kiss. His breath was absolutely fetid. I’d never smelled anything so foul coming out of a human mouth.
“Oh, Jim!” I sobbed, wishing I had strength and power enough to pull him back to health and life.
“Hush, now,” he said, his voice weak and raspy, and squeezed my hand. “It’s all for the best.” He smiled gently at me, a real smile this time that was in his eyes as well as upon his mouth.
“But, Jim,” I protested, “when we married we swore for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” And now, when I could see the very life ebbing out of him, I knew I had failed to keep the most important promise of my life, the one I had intended never to ever break. Yet I had broken it again and again, so many times, and now it was too late to make amends. I had done the unforgivable, and even if Jim could find it in his heart to forgive me I could never forgive myself. In that moment I hated Alfred Brierley and Edwin too, but even more than them, those Devil-sent temptations I had succumbed to, I hated myself.
“Hush,” Jim said gently, raising, with a mightily trembling hand, my own to his lips and letting his cracked, fever-hot lips linger there. “It doesn’t matter now. I forgive you for everything, and I hope you can forgive me—”
“Oh, I do, I do!” I cried. “Anything! Everything!”
“Not yet . . .” he said with an adamant shake of his head, “not yet, not until you know . . . all.”
It was then that he pushed from beneath the covers a black book. After a moment I recognized it as the diary I had bought for him all those years ago as a happy young bride skipping spontaneously into a stationer’s shop to buy a gift for her husband. I’d wanted to give him something for his study, to lie on his desk and to say for me, whenever he touched or looked at it, I love you and I’m thinking of you. I hadn’t seen it since; in my silly, frivolous way, I’d forgotten all about the gift after the pleasurable moment of giving it had passed; I’d had no idea that he had even kept it.
“Before I give you this,” he said in a raspy, rough, whisper-soft voice, “you must promise me first that after you’ve read it, no matter what you think of me, you must come back and sit, talk with me again, one last time.”