The Ripper's Wife(86)
I told Mama the truth, except the bit about my husband being Jack the Ripper, of course, and that all I’d done was sprinkle a little white powder into the Valentine’s Meat Juice bottle at Jim’s bidding, because he was suffering so and swearing he needed it. But, before I could give it to him, and I was already thinking twice about it, I tripped and spilled it. I had refilled the bottle with water. Most of the white powder had been left on the floor in undissolved clumps. I had mopped it up myself. And what, if any, was left in the bottle was surely not enough to have killed him. Yet apparently Michael had sent the bottle out for testing and found a trace amount of arsenic in it. My handkerchiefs had also been examined and one of them was found to have arsenic on it. But that must have been either from wiping my face, after using the facial wash, or from when I mopped up the mess I made when I spilled the bottle of meat juice; it had to be one or the other.
“Surely I am guilty of no crime?” I looked up at Mama uncertainly. “Jim has been taking that arsenic for years, and there was only a teeny-tiny amount found in the meat juice bottle, not enough to kill anybody. I heard the doctors saying so! They said the attempt was clearly ‘inept’ and ‘the work of a bungler’!”
“Listen to me, Florie.” Mama braced her hands on my shoulders. “You are not to blame for this. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Jim had been poisonin’ himself for years, an’ there’s no telling what all those doctors have been givin’ him. In tryin’ to cure him they may actually have killed him. But he wouldn’t have been in this state anyway if he’d treated his body like a temple an’ kept it pure o’ all that poison! Arsenic an’ strychnine!” She rolled her eyes. “An’ now he’s died and left you in a devil of a fix! I shall have a lawyer for you by this afternoon,” she promised, “an’ we’ll clean this mess up so you can bury the past with Jim an’ come back to Paris with me and put all this behind you!”
That was my mama, “the indomitable Caroline.”
While she was in the guest room changing her dress, someone locked her in. That was when they took me away to jail. I was so weak I couldn’t walk. They had to carry me out in a chair. Mrs. Briggs yanked a silk cord from the window curtains and tied me to it to keep me from falling out as I slumped there, swooning. Two constables carried me out the door, with Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp following, graciously thanking them for taking the trash out.
29
My trial began on August 1, 1889, in the worst heat of summer; it was one full week of unrelenting torment. I sweltered in my black crepe widow’s weeds, shrouded in thick veils, in the crowded courtroom at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool and shivered in my tiny jail cell that was like a living tomb carved out of Arctic ice.
You’ll forgive my indignation I hope, but I simply cannot think back to that time without getting my temper up.
They tell me as many as seven thousand people observed my trial. That includes those who just stuck their head in for a peek at the accused murderess, “hiding her guilty face from the world behind her impenetrable black veils.”
Many of them were people I knew, members of the Currant Jelly Set I had danced and dined with. Ladies came, dressed in the height of fashion, in huge hats to the dismay of those seated behind them. They came to my trial as though it were a matinée, a fun, festive occasion, not my very life and death, my freedom, at stake. Many brought a boxed lunch so they need never relinquish their seat and risk losing it to another, and opera glasses through which to gawk at me, and chatted gaily with the journalists who obliged them by describing their hats and dresses in detail in the newspapers in return for their opinions and reminiscences about me. Women I knew who were avid players of the game of musical beds, couples who indulged in discreet wife swapping during weekends at genteel country houses, all sat there frowning, shaking their heads, and mouthing, SHAME! and calling me a “brazen American hussy” just like the Puritans who had surrounded the marketplace scaffold where Hester Prynne had stood, staring at the scarlet A embroidered with flamboyant defiance upon her breast. Their eyes bored into me and they put their heads together and whispered about me and Alfred Brierley, who had, upon his physician’s advice, conveniently set sail for South America. The papers reported that Alfred “appeared reserved and to feel the delicacy of his position most acutely.” Before he went, he issued a terse statement to the press: “I have figured more prominently in this case than my real connection with it warranted. Besides this I have nothing to say regarding anything.”
As I stood there in the dock gazing out at them through the hazy black of my veil it was all I could do not to shout, You’re all a bunch of hypocrites! These people who were so fickle and free with their affections, not a one of them would have recognized true sincerity, instead of the feigned variety they donned and doffed just like carnival masks, if it had come up and slapped them in the face or kicked them in the pants!
They even put up a waxwork figure of me in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, “most carefully modeled after actual photographs,” gowned in “an authentic replication” of my widow’s weeds. A packet labeled “ARSENIC!” peeked from my pocket and a red taffeta petticoat peeped from beneath my black skirt as I, with my hand also clutching a black-bordered mourning handkerchief and a bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice, coyly raised it to give the people a glimpse. For weeks, they tell me, people were lined up around the block from morning till night, over fifty thousand of them, waiting to get in to see it, and souvenir postcards of it sold so briskly the printing presses were taxed to keep up with the demand. Edwin even dared flash one at me, when I was being led out of the courtroom, smiling and saying, “I’ll save one for you, Florie, in case they don’t hang you.” I didn’t know whether to spit at him or slap him. I felt like doing both, but, of course, I did neither. With all the eyes of the world upon me, just waiting to catch a glimpse of the evil they were convinced was lurking inside me, it wouldn’t have been wise. All I could do was “accidentally” tread upon his toes, then falter and gasp out an apology, and we both knew just how sincere that was!