“Whether I like it or not.”
“Whether either of you likes it or not.” He paused, seemed suddenly embarrassed. “Look, Mother, I’m sorry, I don’t want things to be like this with you. I shouldn’t have gotten mad like that, told you that about Father. He really loved you. It wasn’t true, what I said, he never did anything like that. I was just so mad I didn’t know what I was saying. You never did anything to deserve that. I’m sorry.”
He hesitated again, looking pleadingly at her, waiting for her to tell him it was all right, she forgave him, he was a good boy after all, so that they could pretend together that he’d never said anything. So that she could lie to herself and go back to believing that Nathan had always been the good and glorious and godly man whose strength she’d built her life upon and whose memory had sustained her all these years, instead of just another hypocrite like all the others.
She stared at her son, despising him for his abject cowardice, his spineless, irresponsible cruelty, as she’d never despised anyone before in her life, not Kelly or Annie Chapman or any of the others.
“Look,” he said, “you’ve got the wrong idea about Sharon, anyway. Maybe you’ll understand when you get to know her better. She’s not like you think she is.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll bring her with me next time I come.”
“I just want to see Mary.”
“I can’t allow that. Not without Sharon and me there, until I’m sure you won’t just make things harder for her than they already are.”
“Do you want my promise that I won’t ‘poison her mind’ against you?”
“I want you to see how things really are between me and Sharon first. Then when you understand, maybe you can see Mary on her own.”
She lay awake that night wondering what could have happened to make Nathan change, make him into something as abject and contemptible as Teddy. Worse than Teddy, because where Teddy was just a fool, he had never claimed to be anything he wasn’t, while Nathan had known what he was doing, had lied about it for years, preaching God’s love on the radio every day after committing adultery with his whores, while she waited for him at home, so proud of him, so grateful.
She had thought that Nathan was so much stronger and more loving than Father, when all he had been was a bigger hypocrite, living out his life of sin and luxury with the greatest of ease, lying, corrupting his son. She had always thought that Teddy’s cowardice was due to his own lack of character, or perhaps to some taint that had come down to him through her from her own mother or father, but maybe he had only been too dutiful and uncritical a son, too eager to imitate the man she herself had tried to model her life after.
All the little details she had dismissed as nonsense for so many years, forced herself to explain away and forget, were coming back to her: the nights he’d been kept late at the studio, all the phone calls from women that he said were from his listeners, people who needed counselling and help so he could bring them to Christ. The retreats he went on every few months without her, so he could be alone with God. And she knew that she must have known somewhere, must have chosen to be blind and comfortable despite all her pride in never lying to herself.
But Nathan had been a good man when she had met him and fallen in love with him, she was still certain of that, every bit as good a man as she had gone on believing him to be. She had loved and cherished him, never complained back in the beginning when things were hard or when there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills, tried to free him from day-to-day worries so he could devote himself entirely to doing the Lord’s work. What had gone wrong, what could have made him into what he had become?
Perhaps if she’d been less blind, less complacent and confident and proud, she would have seen what was happening in time to stop it.
Two days later, when the attendant who was supposed to be pushing her wheelchair back in from the garden left her alone for a few minutes outside the geriatric wing’s infirmary to go answer a phone call, she managed to wheel herself in and steal a scalpel, then get back out and into place before he returned. Maybe if she killed herself and left a note for Teddy, there would be some way to use her death to put pressure on Teddy, make him feel so guilty he would give up his idea of abandoning Jean and Mary.
But to do that, she would have to abandon Mary herself. She felt confused, nothing made any sense; she didn’t know what she could do with the scalpel, what good it could possibly do, but it made her feel a little less helpless to know it was there, hidden between the pages of a magazine in the drawer by her bed.
When Teddy showed up with his Miss McClure, Emma could see that she’d tried to dress less provocatively than usual, in discreet beiges and browns, low heels, but even so her sweater was too tight, emphasizing her enormous, cow-like breasts, and her skirt was just a little too short for the dignified effect she was trying to achieve, as if she couldn’t bear not to show off her too-long legs in their sheer nylons. Her lips were covered with blood-red lipstick and she stank of perfume: musk, like some animal in heat.
Teddy made some excuse about checking with the doctor, said he’d be back in a few moments, and left them there alone together. Cowardly as always.
She seemed ill at ease. “Ted said you wanted to see me. He thought it was a good idea for us to get to know each other better.”
Emma just looked at her.
“Look, I know you don’t like me. Ted told me what you said. About how you think I’ve been flaunting my body at your son so I can steal him away from his loyal, dutiful, wonderful, devoted, but unfortunately just a bit mousy Christian little wife. Right?”
“Well, isn’t that what you’ve been doing?”
“No! Ted and me, it’s not like that at all. We want to get married, spend the rest of our lives together. Have children of our own. If he likes my body, that’s his business, his business and mine, not yours or anyone else’s. And as for that wife of his— You always approved of her, didn’t you? Thought she was the perfect wife and mother, exactly what your son and granddaughter needed, right?”
“And you’re telling me she isn’t like that at all?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you! Sure, I’m a loudmouth and she’s demure, and she’s had a lot more education than I have, and she’s a real whiz at church rummage sales and all that. So what?”
“And what do you have to offer that she doesn’t?”
“I’m in love with Ted and she isn’t. That’s all. She’s in love with being somebody’s wife, having a nice house and a nice car and having people call her Mrs. Blackwell. But she doesn’t care about Ted. She could be Mrs. Anybody, and as long as she had the house and car she wouldn’t care who that Mr. Anybody was.”
She went on and on, talking about how much she loved Ted, how much Ted loved her, but Emma was no longer listening. She was just another victim like all the others, too weak and stupid to resist the corrupton that had sunk its root into her, was devouring her from within and would eventually destroy her immortal soul, too blind to see it for the cancer it really was. There was no hope for any of them.
Exactly half an hour after Ted left them alone, he returned. They must have planned it out, decided on how much time it would take his Miss McClure to lay out her true love and devotion for Teddy for Emma to see, give her her maximum chance to convince the old lady. It was all right to abandon Mary, destroy her home and her faith and her hopes for a future any better than they themselves had had, because they were going to do it for love. Like Father in the alley with Kelly, shouting Emma’s mother’s name as Kelly taunted him on. All for love.
But Emma knew more about love than any of them, and she loved Mary. She had sacrificed her immortal soul for love of her father, though her love had not been enough to save him; she had dedicated her life to her love for Nathan, though she had not been strong or wise enough to save him, either. This was her last chance. She could not let herself fail again.
The next time Ted returned, he had Jean and
Mary with him. Jean was subdued, quiet, talking about how things were all going to work out for the best. The time on her own would give her a chance to decide what she was going to do with her life, and though it might be hard for Mary at first, Jean was sure she would be happy with her father until Jean was well enough established that Mary could come live with her. And anyway she was sure that Sharon would be a very good mother to Mary, and grow to love her the same way Jean did. It was all said in a subdued monotone, rehearsed and passionless, and, listening to her, it came to Emma that Teddy’s Miss McClure was right after all. Jean never had loved Teddy, had probably never even felt much more for Mary than she had for Teddy: perhaps a sense of duty, of her responsibilities as a wife and mother, a respectable woman living a respectable life in a respectable way and expecting a respectable recompense in return. Nothing more.
Mary sat there, listening, not saying anything, her face closed and tight and desperately blank, while Jean and Teddy talked about her as if she weren’t there, in the same tones of voice they probably used when they were talking about dividing up the furniture. As if none of them were really there, and they were all already dead, just ghosts reciting speeches that might have meant something to them when they had still been alive, but that were now only empty words echoing over and over again in a void, long after even the memory of the fact that they had once meant something had faded and was gone.
She remembered the night her own mother had gone, how she had just stood there, silent, watching her pack while the carriage waited for her out front, then staring out after her as she drove away. How Father had come back from his lodge meeting to find Mother gone, and Emma had had to tell him about watching her pack, but couldn’t tell him where she’d gone or why or for how long, couldn’t tell him anything because Mother hadn’t told her anything, hadn’t even left a note. How she’d had to sit there with Father, holding his hand and watching him cry, and there’d been nothing she could do to make it any better, to save him. She would have done anything for him, but there was nothing he needed that had been hers to give.
And then, finally, she knew what it was she had to do, how her whole life had been leading up to this, everything, her father, Nathan, even the cancer devouring her from within. Everything.
Her father had failed his vision. She must not fail hers.
But it was a month before they allowed Mary to take a bus out from town to come see her on her own.
“Mary, do you remember that other time your father came here with you, when he went out and got us two Coca-Colas?”
“Of course, Grandmother. That was when he told you he was leaving Mother.”
“I never got a chance to drink that Coca-Cola with you. Do you think you could ask the nurse on duty where the machine was and get us two more bottles?”
“All right, Grandmother.”
“Then get me my purse. It’s in that drawer.”
Mary handed her the purse. Emma took two quarters out, handed them to her.
“Here. Hurry back.”
She was back five minutes later with the two bottles.
“Here they are, Grandmother.”
“Do you think you can go get us some cups? I know that girls like you can drink things straight from the bottle, but I’m from another generation, and I need a cup. There should be some cups down by the water machine at the nurse’s station at the end of the hall.”
As soon as Mary was gone, Emma slipped one of the green-and-red capsules into her bottle, watched anxiously until it dissolved. She took a cautious sip, but the capsules weren’t bitter like the pain pills they gave her, and she couldn’t taste anything. She put eight more capsules into the bottle, watched them as they dissolved.
They were almost gone, with only a few mushy fragments of the capsule shells left swirling around at the bottom, by the time Mary returned.
“Mary, can I ask you another favour? I know I must be a bother, constantly asking you favours like this—”
“Not at all, Grandmother.”
“Could you help me sit up? And then come up here”—she patted the left side of the bed beside her with the flat of her hand—“and sit here next to me while we drink our Coca-Colas together? Just like we were friends the same age, instead of you being polite to your old grandmother?”
“We are friends, Grandmother.”
“Good. I love you very much, Mary.”
The pills were completely gone by the time Mary crawled up onto the bed beside her. They drank their Coca-Colas together while Emma listened to Mary and asked her questions, not just about Teddy and Jean and Miss McCullen, but about everything Mary felt and believed and cared about, trying to take this last chance to get to know everything she would ever know about her. And all the while she told Mary how much she loved her, and that she knew how hard things were for her now, but if she just had faith they would turn out all right in the end.
When Mary finally slipped down to sleep beside Emma, still holding her hand, she looked so beautiful, so calm and peaceful and innocent, that Emma wanted more than anything else she could imagine just to let her lie there in peace forever like that, just lie there and never wake up. But she knew that that was hopeless, that even if the nine sleeping pills in Mary’s Coca-Cola were enough to give a girl her size a fatal overdose, the hospital staff would still just discover her and pump out her stomach and bring her back, to have her purity tainted and destroyed as Nathan’s and her father’s had been, as her own had been when her mother abandoned them.
The knife was ready, hidden beneath a magazine, and she knew how to use it. She had done it before, and though that had been more than seventy-five years ago, it was not the kind of thing you could ever forget, no matter how hard you tried. Coming up behind that drunken whore in that passage off Mitre Square and grabbing her scarf with her left hand, the scalpel already ready in her right as she yanked the whore back, slashed her across the throat—
A nurse she didn’t recognize poked her head in through the door, saw Mary sleeping by Emma’s side, her hand clasped in Emma’s. Emma put her other hand to her lips, whispered, “Shhhh!” and the nurse smiled back at her, gently closed the door behind her as she left so as to leave the two of them undisturbed.
Emma disengaged her hand gently from Mary’s, picked up the scalpel, gripped it as tightly as she could. The motions, the gestures, would be the same as they had been all those other times, with all those other women, yet everything would be different. She had killed the others out of hatred and rage: that had been why it hadn’t been enough to just slash their throats and watch the blood come spurting out as they died, why she’d had to hack and mutilate them afterwards, humiliate and degrade them in their deaths for the way they had humiliated and degraded her father in his life. But this time what she had to do she would do with love, and Mary’s soul would soar free of the filth and corruption that would otherwise be her inevitable fate, ascend directly to Heaven, to that paradise of purity and innocent joy that was all that Emma had ever wanted for herself and those she loved, and that she had always known she herself would never see.
Don’t Fear the Ripper
HOLLY WEST
Holly West (1968– ) is the author of the Mistress of Fortune series, set in seventeenth-century London and featuring Lady Isabel Wilde, a mistress to King Charles II. Wilde is an amateur detective who secretly works at night as a psychic, soothsayer, and fortune-teller under the alias Mistress Ruby.
The first book in the series, Mistress of Fortune (2014), is based on the real-life murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a magistrate whose body was found in a drainage ditch in 1678. The crime, a sensation in its time, helped to create an anti-Catholic uproar; the murderer was never identified. The crime also served as the basis for a lengthy examination of the circumstances by the mystery writer John Dickson Carr titled The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), his sole book-length work of true crime. Mistress of Fortune was nominated for the Rosebud Award for Best First Novel at Left Coast Crime in
2015.
The second book in the series, Mistress of Lies (2014), introduces a beggar girl claiming to be the twelve-year-old daughter of Isabel’s brother, believed to have died of the plague. The girl, however, claims that he was murdered and is seeking help from her aunt.
West has also written hard-boiled stories for such publications as Feeding Kate: A Crime Fiction Anthology (2012), Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels (2012).
“Don’t Fear the Ripper” was originally published in Protectors 2: Heroes, edited by Thomas Pluck (Middletown, DE, Goombah Gumbo Press, 2015).
DON’T FEAR THE RIPPER
Holly West
31 August 1888
The young woman lay sideways atop a rickety metal bed. Her thin cotton shift stuck to her skin, adhered by the sweat of brutal exertion. Beyond that, she was naked, her legs spread open and bent at the knees as she heaved herself forward. She screamed from the pain.
“Hush, now, Mrs. Levy,” Caroline Farmer, the midwife, said. “You mustn’t yell; it’ll only tire you out.”
Mr. Levy, as young and inexperienced as his wife, paced from one end of the room to the other. It now seemed ridiculous to Caroline that she’d hesitated to go with him when he’d arrived on her doorstep twenty-four hours earlier, begging for help. Having grown up in the East End, most of her neighbors were well known to her. She kept a running tally of the women who were expecting and called on each of them regularly, knowing that she was their only source of medical knowledge beyond the superstitious clap-trap passed down through generations.
But Mr. Levy was a stranger and she didn’t fancy going out into the night with him, especially with the recent murder in Whitechapel. One month prior, Martha Tabram’s body was found in a nearby stairwell, stabbed thirty-nine times. Though the district was rife with all manner of criminal goings-on, no one could recall so savage a killing.
Mr. Levy had insisted. “Please, come quick, ma’am,” he said. “My wife is dying, I’m certain of it.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 91