The Ripper's Wife(85)

I had no choice. I was trapped. I rushed back to the window and watched as Jim’s carnation-covered coffin was loaded into the hearse and the glass doors closed upon him. Hysterically I began to hammer on the glass with my fists, shouting his name, “Jim! Jim!” as though I expected the din I was making to rouse him from his coffin and for him to push off the lid and sit up and look back to see what I was making such a god-awful ruckus about. In my desperation, I picked up a little footstool and was swinging it toward the window, meaning to shatter it, when Nurse Gore grabbed me and wrested it from my hands. “No! No!” I fought her as hard as I could. “Leave me be! I must go to him! Jim! Jim! Don’t leave me!” I fell sobbing to the floor, irrationally crying out for him not to leave me, even though I knew he already had and, what was even worse, he’d left me alone against the world in a house filled with enemies.

Then the doctor was there again with the needle and sweet oblivion opened its arms to catch me as I fell. I was dimly conscious of Nurse Gore picking me up by my shoulders and the doctor taking hold of my ankles and the two of them swinging me like a sack of potatoes onto the sofa. That’s the last thing I remember.

I kept dreaming I was a bride again in my blue linen suit waltzing through Versailles with my happy, smiling husband, so handsome, so charming, in his black Savile Row suit with the lucky diamond horseshoe sparkling in his black-and-gray-striped silk cravat. We were so in love, laughing, and smiling into each other’s eyes. We danced through every room, the vast grand ballroom, the presence chamber, and the Hall of Mirrors, and down every corridor, up every staircase, even through the kitchens. Jim even lifted me up onto a long banqueting table and we danced across its smooth, polished surface before he swung me back down onto the marble floor again. Then we were out in the garden, dancing down the pebbled paths and even on the rims of fountains.

We must have waltzed for hours! Every time I started to float back to the surface, to glimpse reality through the glassy waters, I felt even more exhausted, as though I really had been dancing all that time without ever stopping to catch my breath. I’d feel dizzy and my stays pinching, even my feet aching, and before I broke the surface I sank like a stone gratefully back down into the thick, warm mud of sleep. But in no time at all I would be back in Jim’s arms, waltzing through Versailles again.

During the days that followed—I never was sure just how many—someone must have carried me to my bed, but they didn’t care enough to undress me and put me properly to bed, so when I awakened I found myself still wearing the same black dress, now grown quite rank and smelly, and my petticoats stained by urine and a light, bloody discharge, too faint to be the onset of my monthly courses but similar to the “sanguineous discharge” I’d suffered before. They hadn’t even cared enough for my comfort to take off my shoes or to pull the pins from my hair, which now had the appearance of an oily, frizzed, and matted yellow rat’s nest.

I sat up, blinking and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, to find a policeman standing at the foot of my bed. That horrible nurse, Michael, Edwin, Mrs. Briggs, and Nanny Yapp all crowded behind him, staring at me. Then the doctor was feeling my pulse, nodding, and declaring me fit.

“Mrs. Maybrick,” the officer began, “Mrs. Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband, Mr. James Maybrick. If you choose to reply, be very careful, because whatever you say may be used as evidence against you.”

“Please!” I managed to blurt out before I lost consciousness again. “Somebody send for my mother!”

Apparently Edwin, who would never forgive me for Alfred Brierley, found it in his heart to do me one last kindness. He sent a cable to Mama in Paris that I was in trouble and needed her desperately.

She came at once as I knew she would. “The indomitable Caroline,” Baroness von Roques, barging right in, as fearless as an angel entering a burning building, coming to my rescue, not a knight in shining armor but a voluptuous white-blond matron clad head to toe in lavender chiffon trimmed with silk periwinkles and the most enormous hat I’d ever seen. Pearls and diamonds clacking, she shoved past Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp, sending the maids scattering and Edwin running for cover, swinging her handbag and parasol left and right, like a medieval warrior’s mace, warning them to get out of her way or she would knock them all down like bowling pins.

When a policeman caught up with her on the stairs, telling her I was under arrest on suspicion of murdering my husband by administering an irritant poison, she poked him aside with her parasol and said, “Don’t be absurd. If anyone poisoned James Maybrick it was James Maybrick; that man was a drugstore walkin’ on two legs. I’m surprised he lasted this long! Now unhand me, sir. I’ll have you know that my second husband was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin an’ the illegitimate son of Napoleon III! An’ another of our illustrious ancestors stood right beside Christopher Columbus on the deck o’ the Mayflower holdin’ the map that he steered by!”

Then she was there, in my room, gathering me in her arms, and I, just like a terrified little girl, was clinging to her and crying, begging my mama to help me, saying that I didn’t understand what was happening and why they were treating me like this.

Apparently they’d searched the house and found packets of arsenic I’d never seen before marked “POISON!” hidden amidst my underlinens or rather planted there; it certainly wasn’t mine. And they’d collected a vast array of medicines; I believe the tally ran to 147 different pills, potions, and powders. But those were all Jim’s. I had nothing to do with them! And Nanny Yapp wouldn’t shut up about those damned infernal flypapers, which I’d only used to replicate Dr. Greggs’s prescription to get rid of my blemishes in time for the ball. Then there were those two sacks labeled Industrial Arsenic that Jim had been bragging about his “stupendous luck” in acquiring from a business associate. On the whole, the policemen said, there was enough arsenic in Battlecrease House to do away with the entire British Army and take a good bite out of the Navy too.