The Ripper's Wife(80)
“Of course I will!” I assured him, a trifle baffled as to why he would even ask such a thing. Of course I would come back; I would be with him every moment if only they would let me! How could he think anything written in that silly old book could change that, and at a time like this, when his very life was in peril? It all seemed so absurdly trivial!
Jim shook his head. “This is a promise you cannot make lightly, Bunny. If you give your word, you must be fully prepared to keep it, no matter what you find in these pages.” He tapped the book’s black cover.
“I promise,” I said, thinking no doubt that he had chronicled his adulteries, or gambling debts I had no inkling of. But given my own sins, I could surely face his. Knowing the details might hurt, I couldn’t deny that, but I could bear the punishment; maybe I even deserved it after the way I had carried on with Alfred Brierley. “I promise faithfully, no matter what you’ve written, I will come back to you after I’ve read it.”
“Even if you find a monster inside?” he persisted, his eyes boring like nails into mine.
“Even if I meet a monster inside,” I promised, “you are still my husband, and I love you, and I will always come back to you, as God is my witness. I mean it, Jim; this is one promise I will keep!”
Jim nodded, satisfied, and pushed the book across the bed to me.
“Leave me now,” he said, “go and read it, and then, come back to me, and, if you can, forgive everything.”
“I’ll come just as soon as I can.” I rose and pressed a kiss onto his brow.
As I reached the door, just as my hand was on the knob, he called out to me, forcing his weary, worn voice to carry—how it must have hurt his poor throat to make that effort! “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!”
“I do!” I assured him. “I do! We’ve both hurt each other so much, my darling, but it really was all for love! People do bad things in Love’s name all the time; we’re not unique in that. I think we’ve just made a worse muddle of it than most do.” I forced myself to smile through my tears.
“Indeed we have!” With a wry, weak little chuckle, Jim nodded and lay back and shut his eyes. I had a sense, in that moment, that I had, with my words, given him a sense of peace, and I was glad that that at least was something I could give him.
The time I spent alone in my bedroom with that book changed my life forever.
It took me hours to read it because I kept stopping, sick with horror, dumbstruck and disbelieving, going back and reading the same lines over and over again, hoping I had misread it, that I was tired and overwrought and imagining things and that this time the barbaric mutilation of a woman of the streets would become a mundane business luncheon where the talk was as dry as the cotton the men were discussing.
I sat and stared and ran my hands, like someone blind groping gently to discern a person’s features, over that mad, erratic, furious scrawl, so different from my Jim’s genteel, gentlemanly hand. This can’t be him, I kept telling myself. It just can’t be. This is not the man I love, the man I married.... It must be the drugs; it had to be the drugs! Combined with the ghastly and lurid stories filling all the newspapers and the anger he was feeling toward me, the jealousy and betrayal, it had all combined, melded into one mad arsenic fever dream and given birth to this medley of horrors. It was no more than a ferocious, furious fiction! Oh God, please, let it be so! It just couldn’t be anything else! Because if it was the truth . . . that was just too horrible to contemplate.
The more I read, the more incredible it seemed. My blood turned to ice and the horror cut through me just like Jack the Ripper’s knife. I shivered so hard there were times I could scarcely read the words; whether I held it in my hands or laid it on my lap, the book shook so badly, and there were moments when my face went green and I had to thrust it from me and grope blindly, through my tears, for the chamber pot.
I just couldn’t believe it! I didn’t want to believe it! If this was true . . . Oh God, it couldn’t be true! I wanted to believe that my husband was mad, better a madman who sat and wrote out his crazed, drug-fueled fantasies than a murderer, because with madness there was always hope, hope of a cure, of a return to normalcy, but with murder it meant a life for a life, prison until the last breath was drawn or he perished on the gallows!
But it all seemed so terribly real! I could feel the hate burning off every page, and the rage that wielded the pen, and the knife, it was all so vividly real to me. This was not Charles Dickens drawing the reader into a story, spinning and binding a spell with words; this was too terribly, nauseatingly, horribly REAL! And the pain . . .
Oh God, those poor women! I could see their faces, I could feel their fetid breath upon my flesh, along with their heart-pounding fear the moment when they realized . . . It was as though I were standing right there, looking over his shoulder, helpless, deaf and dumb, unable to warn them, unable to shout, RUN! SAVE YOURSELF! I had no choice but to stand there and watch them die, watch him—my Jim!—kill them!
If these wild, wicked words were true . . . Jack the Ripper was no longer a faceless fiend stalking the streets of Whitechapel and my own bad dreams, he had another name, an ordinary mundane man’s name, James Maybrick, and he was my very own husband, the father of my children. If this sick fantasy was indeed fact . . . my husband was a killer and I was the cause! I was the blind White Queen who had reigned, unwittingly, beside the mad Red King over that Autumn of Terror! He had projected my sins onto those poor, unfortunate women, so, in a way, I killed them too; they had died because of me. No matter how horrified and sickened I was by what he had done, I could never forget that—that I was the cause of it all. Our damaged, distorted, and perverted love had brought death, in the most violent, frenzied form, to five innocent women.