The Ripper's Wife(81)
With his words he took me back, back to where I never wanted to be again, back onto the wretched streets of Whitechapel, the site of my first illicit tryst with Alfred Brierley, and even further, Jim took me to Hell and showed me such horrors there that I knew I would be forever scarred by them. He introduced me, one by one, to his victims, so that they could never again be just names in a newspaper. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—now they were all real women to me! I had seen them through his eyes, and through his hands I felt them; I felt their blood surge and their hearts race with terror and then grow cold, still, and die. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg their forgiveness. I now knew just how true it was that one small pebble cast into a pond creates great ripples that spread far and wide and can indeed touch and change, horribly and incredibly and indelibly, many lives. My sins were no longer my own; others had suffered and died because I was vain, hurt, lonely, foolish and weak. God help me, I was in my own way, a murderer too!
Love makes sane men mad and can turn a gentle man into a fiend, my husband had written. I now knew what he had meant when he had called after me as I was leaving his room, “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!” The horrible thing was that I did, I did believe it, I knew it was true. Love, like Justice, is blind, but only Love is mad and impetuous and shouldn’t ever be trusted to wield a sword; it causes only more harm, leaving hearts and lives lying broken and bleeding in Love’s debris. Do the dead and wounded, I wonder, weep for the ones left behind to pick up the pieces? Or is it a penance they are destined to pay? God alone knows the answers.
As I lifted the diary from my lap a brass key fell from its binding. I was catapulted at once back through time to the morning I had sat as a young, na?ve bride at my husband’s desk and rattled the locked drawers. My life had indeed turned out to be a fairy tale after all, only not one of the pretty, happily ever after stories but the most sinister one of all—I was indeed Bluebeard’s bride, Jack the Ripper’s wife. And amongst the many secrets my husband was harboring was a cachet of murdered, butchered women, like the dead wives in Bluebeard’s secret chamber. When I had opened the covers of that diary I had peeked into that secret room, and now, now I held in my hand the key. . . . God help me! I prayed as I walked into my husband’s study.
Seated behind his desk, I shuddered and stared at the snake-haired Medusa heads that stood guardian over each keyhole. My blood is already turned to ice; if she turns my body to stone that just might be a mercy, I thought as I forced myself to try the key in each one until the third lock yielded. I was as afraid as though I knew it contained a live serpent that would rear up and strike me. I sat there for quite some time, the little brass handle at first cold growing hot in my hand, rattling gently as I trembled, trying to find the courage to open that drawer.
Finally, I could bear it no more. I took a deep breath, gave the drawer a tug, and found myself staring down at a candy box beauty with big, innocent blue eyes set in a porcelain and roses face, framed by a pompadour of golden curls and a big pink picture hat trimmed with tulle and roses. She might have been me at my best. With trembling hands, I lifted the box out and set it on the desk.
Whoever would have thought such a beautiful box that had once contained the most heavenly, exquisite chocolates—cream centers, caramels, liqueurs, jellies, nuts, nougats, pralines, and juicy red cherries floating in sweet pink cordial—could now be the repository of such horrors? Grisly trophies, souvenirs of the foulest murder, not tenderhearted tokens of love, sweet love, letters and valentines. One by one, I laid them all out in a row, knowing that I would never look at a chocolate box in quite the same way ever again.
A big brass button embossed with the figure of a naked lady with long flowing hair on horseback, it had to be Lady Godiva; two brass rings; a little prayer book in a language I now knew was Swedish, its cracked binding flopped open to reveal a crude woodcut depicting the Devil, stained reddish brown at the edges with the life’s blood of the woman who had owned it; a stubby little knife; a cheap glass brooch with a pink flower inside, like a sad valentine, the fluted ruffle of gilt metal that framed the poor, pathetic little thing turning green and black in spots like moldy, mildewed lace; a well-worn key with a long lock of braided ginger-gold hair threaded through the top and tied with a fraying green ribbon; a bottle of red ink; a cache of newspaper clippings about the Whitechapel murders; and several slim volumes bound in innocuous, unadorned cardboard covers with some rather suggestive, titillating, and thought-provoking titles: Freaks of Youthful Passion; Lady Lilywhite & the Lumberjack; A Case of Early Morning Stiffness; Three in a Coach: The Clergyman, the Countess, & the Cowpoke; The Schoolmaster & the Waif; The Schoolmarm’s Birch Rod; The Amorous Adventures of a Kentucky Farmboy in New York; The Minister & the Milliner; and The Vicar of Make-Love. Last, there was a postcard, delicately tinted, to put roses back in a now dead woman’s cheeks and recall the vibrant green of her eyes and the ginger-gold of her hair, the only parts of her left for her lover to recognize her by after the carnage.
Despite the vulgar, indecent pose the elegantly clad model was striking, brazenly lifting her skirts high to reveal her naughty, naked, lasciviously rosy-tinted lady parts, it was her face I sat and stared at. It was the face that had been carved away in the Ripper’s mad frenzy, and I knew, sitting there at my husband’s desk, that I was the very last person to look upon the now effaced and forgotten features of Mary Jane Kelly.