The Ripper's Wife(84)
I awakened some hours later to a loud bang, like a gunshot—my door had just been kicked open!—and Edwin was leaning over me, grasping my shoulders, and shaking me hard, demanding my household keys. “Your keys!” he kept shouting right into my face. “I want your keys!” Out in the hallway Michael’s voice, as commanding as a general’s on a battlefield, was telling someone that Mrs. Maybrick was no longer mistress of this house.
Suddenly my doorway was filled with faces—doctors, servants, neighbors, nurses—all of them staring in at me as though I were some rare, exotic animal in a zoo.
“JIM!” I sprang up screaming. “JIM!” I hurled myself through them like a cannonball, before any of the hands they reached out could stop me, and ran to his room. I knew in my heart that he was already gone. He’d slipped away while I was sleeping; their faces told me so. But I didn’t want to believe them. I had to see him one last time.
I flung open the door and thought I’d just stumbled across the threshold of Hell. The bed was stripped down to the bottom sheet, every gaslight in the room was blazing, and Jim lay there naked, blind dead eyes staring up at the crimson velvet canopy. His poor, wasted body, sagging skin white as a fish’s belly, had been cut open from breast to groin, and three men, doctors I presume, stood over him. One was busy writing; another was scooping out Jim’s innards in a big bloody heap and depositing them into the big stone jar yet another man was holding out for him. An image of Jim in a much more dark and squalid setting, alone, enacting a similar scene, standing over Mary Jane Kelly flashed before my eyes, and I fell with a scream.
When I opened my eyes I was back in my room prostrate on the sofa again. A dull ache filled my heart as I realized it had not all been just a terrible dream. Jim was dead and he’d taken Jack the Ripper with him to the grave and everyone was treating me, his widow, abominably, and I couldn’t understand why.
Nurse Gore was sitting by the door, speaking words I couldn’t quite comprehend and had to ask her to repeat again and again—the words just wouldn’t sink in—until I finally understood that I was forbidden, on “Mr. Michael’s orders,” to leave this room. I was now a prisoner in my own home. I saw then that my desk had been ransacked. It stood there with every drawer open, and those papers deemed meaningless and unimportant strewn carelessly across the carpet, but all my personal letters, my ledger, and my household keys were missing. Anything that might have vindicated me or reflected badly upon Jim had been destroyed. I knew even before I found the fragile fragments amongst the ashes in the fireplace that the love letters Edwin had written me had been burned, just as surely as Alfred Brierley’s had been taken into Michael’s safekeeping.
“My children!” I bolted up with a sudden cry, racing for the door. How could I have been so thoughtless, lying here in a swoon like this, instead of rushing straight to them? Their father was dead, and they needed me. I had to explain what had happened and give them what comfort I could. I needed to reassure them that everything would be all right.
But Nurse Gore was there, barring my way, her hands closing with an iron grip around my tender wrists, pushing me back, away from the door.
“Sit down and be quiet!” she ordered. “It does no good to make a fuss! Your children have been taken away, on Mr. Michael’s orders, where you can’t get your hands on them!”
“My children . . . gone? . . . Taken away? . . . Why? . . . Where?” I stared up at her uncomprehendingly. “I must go to them. I must—”
The door opened and one of the doctors came in. There was something in his hand as he came toward me, and I shrank back into the sofa cushions, wishing there were some safe haven I could run to. The syringe glistened menacingly in the gaslight, the needle pierced my arm through the black lace of my sleeve, and my mind turned into a sopping-wet cotton ball, my limbs felt weighted with lead, and all I could do was sleep. In those days, whenever my brain bobbed blearily back to the surface, before the sharp bite of the needle sent it sinking back down, I discovered that I was more in love with Sleep than I had ever been with any man. The comfort and oblivion I found in darling Sleep’s arms kept all the terrible pain, the cruel world, and the wolves howling, clawing, and clamoring at my door at bay.
The next I knew it was daylight again and Nurse Gore was shaking me roughly awake. “If you want to see the last of the husband you murdered you had better stand up.” She pointed to the window.
I struggled unsteadily to my feet and stumbled and tottered my way to the window, my head swimming with every step, and clutched desperately at the windowsill to keep from falling. It was then I saw the coffin, covered with white carnations, being carried out to a glass-sided hearse drawn by four black horses with puffs of ebony ostrich plumes on their heads. I swung round, my skirts tangling in my feet, the heel of my shoe catching in the black lace and tearing it with a loud RIP! as I lurched toward the door.
“Stand back!” I screamed in Norse Gore’s cruel gorgon face. “Stand back, I say! I must go to him! I must! Jim!”
Nurse Gore, who looked like a wrestler dressed in nurse’s garb, shoved me back hard, sending me tottering and flailing over the sofa arm with my feet flying up in the air. “You are not to leave this room,” she said, positioning herself before the door, arms folded across her breast, with an expression on her face just daring me to try to get past her.