The Ripper's Wife(92)
I stood in the center of my little cell, hugging myself tight with my own arms, since there was no one else to hold me. I shut my eyes and hummed a waltz. And in that moment I was in Jim’s arms again, in my blue linen suit, whirling through the vanished splendor of Versailles. He was smiling down into my face, and I was gazing up at him, a young bride, her heart in her eyes, and it was so good to be alive! Soon, I knew, we would be dancing together again, in Heaven where we would never hurt, dishonor, or disappoint each other ever again.
“I didn’t lie,” I whispered to his shade. He felt so near me now, like he was waiting for me just on the other side of a veil. I could almost reach out and touch him. “All really is forgiven.”
When the door of my cell opened and the prison governor and the chaplain came toward me, all my courage disappeared. I cried out in terror and fell fainting to the floor.
When I next opened my eyes I was lying on a cot in the infirmary, a matron holding a vial of vinegary smelling salts under my nose. I saw the governor and the chaplain hovering over me, and only their hands, raised in a staying motion, and the smiles lighting up their faces stopped me from fainting again.
No, no!” they cried. “It is good news!”
It wasn’t a pardon; Queen Victoria was of the same mind as Judge Stephen and firmly convinced that I was a wicked woman who truly deserved death. But Sir Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, had become convinced that the medical evidence was insufficient to condemn me without lingering doubt. The end result was that I was reprieved from the gallows and my sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Even as I was sitting up groggily, gingerly touching my bandaged temple, the Black Maria was waiting to take me to the train station, to begin the journey to Aylesbury Prison, where I was to spend the rest of my life.
“God help me,” I whispered as they assisted me, weak kneed and shivering, into the black van. “I am only twenty-seven!”
As I sat on the hard, swaying seat, my handcuffed hands folded primly in my lap, I saw myself growing old and gray, wrinkled, stooping with a dowager’s hump, my sight dimming, my steps slowing, and my hands gnarled with rheumatism, as the weeks became months, and the months became years, and the years stretched into decades. My children would grow up without me, and I would never know love, maternal or carnal, ever again. I was alive and I knew I should be grateful and fall on my knees and thank God that I had been spared, but a life devoid of warmth, comfort, and love was scarcely a life at all.
I felt the key burning me through my gown. I felt so weak and frightened then I wanted to scream out the truth, but I thought of Bobo and Gladys and bit my lips until they bled. At Aylesbury Prison they would take my clothes away and that temptation, the key that could set me free, would go with them to be locked in a storage box until the day I died. If it was found then . . . Chance is the Fool’s name for Fate and I’ve been a gambler all my life.
31
At Aylesbury Prison the first thing I lost was my name. Henceforth, no one would call me “Florie” or “Mrs. Maybrick.” I was now L.P. 29, the twenty-ninth woman in the year of 1889 to be condemned to penal servitude for life.
The second thing I lost was my clothes and with them the last tattered shreds of my dignity. They made me stand stark naked in the center of a cold little room as a hard-faced matron with rough hands scrutinized every inch of me while three others and the prison doctor stood by and watched with bored, unfeeling eyes. Somehow the brusque, businesslike way her hands moved over me, the way they had rudely, intrusively brushed over hundreds of women before me, seemed worse than all the beatings I had endured at my husband’s hands. At least he had loved me. Now I would never be touched in love again. Afterward I was ordered to lie upon a table, deprived of even the modest veiling of a sheet, with my knees up and my thighs parted wide, while the doctor poked his impatient fingers into my most intimate parts. I yelped as his fingers twisted within me like a corkscrew and he snapped, “Hush! I can’t possibly be hurting you!” I could tell by his tone that he would not have cared if he was.
When I got up, shaking on unsteady feet, I was ushered out into a long room where I was ordered to fall into line behind the other women who had gone before me. Petty thieves, prostitutes, pickpockets, failed suicides, abortionists, and condemned murderers like me. We’re all criminals now, I thought. Some were very young—one girl looked no more than fifteen—some were very old, gray and bent backed with gnarled fingers, and there were all ages in between, slim and stout, fair and dark, all stripped naked of their name, clothes, and anything else they had ever called their own. Some stood blatantly, brazenly naked, as though the cool air felt deliciously refreshing upon their bare skin, occasionally scratching a crotch or hairy armpit, while others, faces aflame with shame, hunched and huddled and tried to hide themselves like me. A matron grabbed my arm and yanked me back, barking my vulnerable bare heels on the cold, stone floor, and said sharply into my ear that I must always remain three full steps behind the woman in front of me whenever we were in a line or else I would be punished and a notation made in my permanent record. I was also informed that any attempt at conversation between inmates, or even murmuring, singing, or humming to oneself, was strictly forbidden.
I who had once enjoyed hot rose-scented baths in my own private tub was forced to wade quickly through a long vat of cold, dingy gray water. When I emerged, the soles of my feet feeling like they were coated in slime, a blast of white powder hit my crotch in a billowing puff to kill any lingering vermin and a matron barked at me to put my hands behind my head so she could fumigate my armpits in the same manner. The powder and my pride stung and brought tears to my eyes.