The Ripper's Wife(91)
But would it make any difference to my children’s lives or would it only be packing and piling on the sins, crushing their dear little shoulders beneath the weight of shame? They would grow up with Michael poisoning their minds against me—no doubt he’d already begun, believing that I had killed their father—but if they knew their father was Jack the Ripper . . . But the world would also know, and once the truth was told it could never be untold. It would never be forgotten; they would live out their lives as Jack the Ripper’s children, endlessly pursued by journalists and curiosity seekers, pointed and stared at everywhere they went, never knowing a moment’s peace. The father they had loved, the man who used to read them stories and get down on the floor and play with them, would be lost forever; horror would steal all those sweet memories away.
Every time I got so frightened of the hangman’s noose that I was tempted to hammer on my cell door and beg them to send for Sir Charles I imagined my son and daughter grown to beautiful man-and womanhood, falling in love with someone wonderful they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with, only to be denied, cheated of that love, maybe even having it turned to hate and disgust, because their father was Jack the Ripper and, if that were not bad enough, their shameful, wanton adulteress mother had been convicted of murdering him. Such evil, people were sure to believe, must run in the blood, and they would stare at my children, scrutinizing their every move, suspiciously citing their every human foible and mistake as proof that bad blood tells. They would never be free! I couldn’t take the chance, I just couldn’t do that to them! Sometimes the greatest love of all demands a sacrifice, and mine would be my silence, and my life.
To further guard against weakness and temptation, I made Mama promise to lock that trunk away in a very safe bank vault in London and bring me the key. I would hide it away, drop it in a crack or crevice somewhere so that it would never be found until they tore this prison down and maybe not even then, and if it was . . . would anyone really care about an old key? I would do that, I promised myself, before they led me out to die. I would leave it to Chance, the Fool’s name for Fate, and the eternal curiosity of mankind to find that key and where it fit and reveal the truth long after anyone it could hurt was dead. Tempus Omnia Revelat, Time Reveals All—my husband had indeed chosen a most fitting motto. God, Who knows all, past, present, and future, must have been guiding his hand that day.
Until then I kept that key close to me, hidden in a seam in my dress, feeling it burn like temptation through the black cloth every time the fear threatened to overwhelm me. But each time I would fight it back down, like a mother lion defending her cubs, by thinking of Bobo and Gladys and the one thing it was still in my power to give them. I couldn’t save them from being my children, but I could save them from being Jack the Ripper’s. The world would only pity them for being mine—a weak and foolish woman who had thought a pinch of white powder was the path to passion’s fulfillment. It was better this way.
The morning I laid the seventeenth stone down, Mama was allowed to see me. They led me into a little room where she was already waiting, with two sharp-eyed, stiff-backed matrons standing sentry to make sure she didn’t slip me any poison or a razor to help me cheat the hangman. Wordlessly I fell to my knees before her, burying my face in her black taffeta skirts. Both of us were so overcome by emotion the words stuck in our throats. We clung to each other and cried the whole half hour allotted to us to say good-bye.
When the matron said it was time to go back to my cell, I clung to Mama like a frightened child, even as the matron reached to pull me away. Mama clasped my face between her two hands and smiled through her tears and kissed me; then she gently put me from her.
“You must be very brave,” she said. “Because you are innocent, you must be strong and carry yourself without reproach, with all the confidence, grace, an’ pride of a queen. I will be there, right beside you, darlin’, walkin’ with you every step o’ the way, an’ God will be on the other side o’ you, bearin’ you up, givin’ you strength. Whenever you feel yourself about to falter, you can lean on us, lean on Him. We’ll see you through to the end.”
“Yes, Mama.” I nodded through my tears, gazing back at her longingly as they led me away. The rest of the day I spent weeping with the silver-haired and spectacled prison chaplain, clinging to him, groveling, and swearing my innocence upon my very soul, until he began to cry too because, though he was fully convinced of my innocence, it was not within his power to grant me earthly salvation.
The next morning, as I sat and watched the sky of my last morning lighten to buttery gray between the bars of my tiny window, I laid down the eighteenth stone. I knew it was only a matter of hours that stood between me and the great mystery of death.
I steeled myself, pacing the floor, praying God to help me be brave. I thought of Marie Antoinette on her last morning in the Conciergerie, golden hair bleached white by sorrow, her once beautiful face haggard and careworn, still regal and proud even when stripped of all her grandeur, preparing to face the guillotine, making her peace with God and man. She had mounted the scaffold with her head held high, every inch the queen she had been in life. No matter how much they degraded and insulted her, they could not take away her dignity and grace. That was the woman I wanted to be during the last precious moments of my life. “It takes courage to live, not to die,” she said as they led her out to the tumbril. I repeated those words like a prayer until they were engraved upon my heart.