The Ripper's Wife(82)
Was it my imagination? I reached across the desk for the silver-framed photograph my husband always kept of me and held the postcard up alongside it, trying to will my hand to stop shaking and the tears to stop pooling long enough for me to compare them. Her hair was gingery while mine was pure spun gold, my eyes were limpid violet-blue and hers a saucy, insouciant emerald, and hers was definitely the more voluptuous figure, but we might have been sisters raised in two different worlds. The same lively hint of mischief tweaked at both our smiling mouths, mine more refined, gentle, and sedate, while hers was entirely unrestrained, but it was there just the same.
“He might have left you be had it not been for me! God forgive me!” I laid the postcard facedown in the bottom of the candy box and piled my husband’s other souvenirs back on top of it. Last, I added the diary. It fit perfectly, as though it belonged, like a big, deep, dark chocolate heart at the center of it.
There was no turning back and retreating to blissful ignorance. I could no longer doubt and deny it, make up excuses, grasp at straws, and pretend. These grotesque souvenirs were the last nail in the coffin; all hope was dead. I now knew, beyond all doubt, that my husband was Jack the Ripper. This night he had taken me to Hell and shown me his very soul with my own, damned alongside it, shackled perpetually to it by guilt.
I caressed the band of gold on my left hand, which now seemed to me suddenly to have become a golden shackle. “Bound forever,” I whispered, “till death and ever after!”
I started to lock the candy box away, back in its drawer, but at the last moment I hesitated and took it with me instead, back to my room. I had some peculiar notion, an urgent, unexplainable compulsion to keep it safe, protect and preserve it; I had become the sole guardian of a terrible secret. I knew if Michael got his hands on it, it would be in the fire before I could even blink an eye. He wouldn’t hesitate to destroy the truth to maintain the fiction of the Maybricks’ outward respectability.
In my dressing room I kept a lovely little tapestried chest that I’d had since I was a girl in Germany; I called it “my treasure chest.” Inside were my postcard album and some odds and ends, postcards I had not yet pasted in, photographs, pretty or amusing pictures, advertisements, stories, poems, articles, recipes, and anecdotes and such that I’d clipped from various periodicals with the idea of someday creating a scrapbook, and stray buttons, ribbons, and trinkets. It had a deep tray that lifted out, made in such a way that one didn’t immediately realize it, so it had the effect of having a false, or secret, shallow bottom compartment. Into this I put the candy box, burying it under all the scraps of pretty fabric I’d been saving for years, intending to make a quilt someday.
Satisfied that the candy box was now safe, I took a few moments to compose myself, and then I went back to Jim, just as I had promised.
The night nurse didn’t argue and let me in; she was so wrapped up in the romance she was reading I think she would have let Satan himself in with scarcely a nod over those enthralling pages. She resumed her cozy seat by the fire and just let me and Jim be. At times I heard her murmuring what sounded like “kiss her, kiss her!” as though urging the hero on to loving action.
When I sat down on the bed beside him, Jim opened his eyes and looked at me, searching, hopeful, and wary.
I just sat and looked at him with tears welling in my eyes.
He hesitated a moment, then took my hand. I think we were both surprised that I didn’t pull it away. There was a part of my mind and my heart that just couldn’t reconcile it. Jim was still Jim, yet he wasn’t. . . . But how could I reproach him? I had made him what he was. I was the potion that had brought evil Mr. Hyde out of gentle Dr. Jekyll. If I had been a better wife, a faithful wife . . . those five women would still be alive.
“You’ve come back to me,” Jim said, his voice so coarse and faint I had to lean down to hear it.
I nodded. “And forgive everything,” I added as the tears overflowed my eyes.
“I always knew you were as kind and gracious as you are beautiful,” Jim said with the ghost of his old gallantry. “I was the luckiest man in the world to have you. I’m sorry I didn’t value you as highly as I should. My own bloody temper, and my wretched stupidity, my secrets, and lies, my dalliances, led to your own—”
“I was weak and foolish too!” I sobbed.
“You were a sweet, beautiful child. I spoiled and neglected and abused you in my fashion,” Jim said, “and you had every cause to rebel. You deserved better, Bunny, much better—”
“You were everything I ever wanted; you still are!” I cried, and laid my head down on his chest until his nightshirt was soaked clean through with my tears.
“Bunny.” Jim plucked gently at my gown, trying to pull me back upright so I would sit up and look at him. “Bunny, all is forgiven that can be between man and wife, but there is one thing more I must ask of you. . . . Compose yourself, my love, and be brave, and listen. . . .”
I sat up, mopping at my eyes, though the tears welled right back up, seemingly unending.
“You know now, having read the book, what a frightful coward you married. I need you now to do what I cannot.”
I started back in shock. “Jim, you can’t mean . . . !”
He nodded with the gentlest, most understanding little smile and reached out for my hand again. “It will be so easy, my dear, and you will have nothing to reproach yourself for. Remember, you do not do murder, but Justice! You are sparing our children the shame that would forever tar them if I were to stand trial. I’m so sick already, and the doctors don’t know what to do for me. Instead of making me better, they keep making me ill, so this, what you are about to do for me—and I know you will be brave and do it, Bunny! It will be so simple; the meat juice is right here.” He indicated the nightstand. “And my coat is in the dressing room, and my silver box within the pocket. They’ve weaned me, against my will, and my body can no longer withstand the doses it once could. Just add a pinch or . . . make it two for good measure, since, as I’ve always said”—his face lit up once again with the same boyish smile that stole my heart on the decks of the Baltic—“one spoonful, or pinch, of anything never did anyone any good, and I will slip quietly away and face my Maker, and His justice, and take my guilty secret to the grave, and with it, my undying love for you—”