The Ripper's Wife(95)

My children grew up without me. Michael arranged for them to be adopted by one of Jim’s doctors who had testified against me at my trial, Dr. Charles Fuller, and his wife. For one hundred pounds per annum they would raise Bobo and Gladys as their own and send them to spend every summer with their chilly, arrogant, and otherwise indifferent uncle Michael at his house on the Isle of Wight. The Fullers even changed the children’s names. Bobo was now James Fuller—he’d even dropped my family name of Chandler, which he’d been given as a middle name—and my daughter became Gladys Evelyn Fuller.

Michael was determined that they should despise me. But Mrs. Fuller at least had a heart. No matter what else she might have thought of me, she knew the pain of a mother’s heart, perhaps because a string of miscarriages had dashed her hopes of having children of her own. Every Christmas without fail, she sent me a photograph of Bobo and Gladys, so I could, from this sad, disgraced distance, see the changes each year wrought.

How my heart lived for those pictures! I was as greedy for them as any child for toys and treats on Christmas morning. No present, not even the jewels and dresses I used to take for granted, could ever have meant as much to me as those precious pictures.

Through still images, frozen moments captured in sepia tone, I got to see my beautiful black-haired boy, dressed like a man in miniature now, in suit and tie, growing up, tall and slender, so handsome he should have been posing for artists and preparing for a career on the stage. When he posed in profile, I saw his lashes were as long and luxuriant as ever. Only he was never smiling in these photographs. It worried me so to think of that laughing, happy little boy I had known becoming such a dour, frowning sourpuss, so grave and serious, cold and arrogant. I remembered how he loved to cuddle, kiss, and hug and could not reconcile those memories with the strange cold-fish little character staring morosely back at me with blank, bored eyes. I wished I had magical powers so I could reach into those photographs and shake him and shout, No, Bobo, no, this is not who you were meant to be! He was becoming Michael in miniature, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was forbidden to write to my own children. I was like a beggar every year waiting with hands outstretched and yearning for those pictures. Michael, I knew, was determined that the children be brought up strictly. “A flawed tree grows from a flawed root,” he had told the Fullers, making that an ironclad condition of the adoption. The summer visits were his means of ensuring it was being enforced.

Gladys showed every sign of blossoming into a great beauty. A violet-eyed, black-haired, porcelain-skinned belle, she had a flat, boyish figure that was gradually rounding into the tantalizing promise of beautiful, bountiful womanhood. Mrs. Fuller sent me a lovely hand-tinted picture of Gladys wearing a lilac chiffon dress. I could see so much of myself in her, the longing almost killed me. She was at an age when a girl really needs her mother, and I could not be there for her, not even by letter. Her little bosoms were just appearing when the pictures abruptly stopped coming.

After I had been in prison six years Christmas came, but the pictures didn’t. I was so upset I couldn’t stop crying or keep down my food and had to go to the infirmary for a fortnight. When Mama came to visit me I begged her to go and see Mrs. Fuller and find out what had happened. I was terrified some awful fate had befallen my children. Or maybe Mrs. Fuller had died and no one else knew of the yearly charity she had unfailingly dispensed to me? Perhaps Dr. Fuller or Michael had found out and forbidden her to continue? Mama wept herself to see me so distraught and frantic, gnawing my nails bloody, and my eyes bloodshot and dark circled from crying through so many sleepless nights. She promised she would find out and an explanation would be in her very next letter.

Trapped behind iron bars, I had no choice but to wait . . . and hope. Maybe the pictures had been lost in the mail or misdirected, which had caused a delay in their delivery? Or maybe an illness, not a serious one, from which the children, or Mrs. Fuller herself, had quickly recovered had merely postponed the pictures’ being taken and mailed in time for Christmas?

I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break, but the truth is the human heart endlessly regenerates itself and there’s no counting the number of times it can break over the course of a lifetime. No one was dead or dying and England’s postal service was as prompt and efficient as ever. Nor had Dr. Fuller or Michael forbidden Mrs. Fuller this act of charity; it was my son.

With no one to pet and feed him lumps of sugar my little Bobo had, as the pictures had made me fear, grown hard and sour. Bobo—it was impossible for me to think of him by any other name, though I knew he now answered only to the strictly formal James—had been thoroughly persuaded of my guilt. He believed that I had deprived him and his little sister of a loving father. And the fact that I was permitted the pleasure of gazing upon Bobo’s and Gladys’s features once a year made him sick. Maybe that was why he was never smiling in those pictures? Had he been sending me a silent message all along and I had failed to see it? Now that he had attained the age of fourteen and was standing on the cusp of manhood, he had adamantly expressed the wish that no further photographs be sent to me. And everyone felt, given his age and the maturity with which he had expressed himself, that this was no childish whim and that his wishes should be respected. And Gladys . . . Gladys felt the same; she also hated me. Michael had patted them both upon the shoulder and promised, “She will forget your faces, just like you have forgotten hers.”