by Brandy Purdy
We planned to do much the same thing in London before we returned to Paris, which we worldly wanderers were pleased to call our home, though more for stylistic reasons than any fixed address, and where “Handsome Holbrook” had his medical practice, his waiting room packed with excited and excitable females all suffering from some form of womanly or nervous complaint.
Just like one might expect in a play or a film, James Maybrick literally swept me off my dainty little feet. It was our first night out to sea. I was so excited. I loved ocean travel. It never made me ill. I had already lost count of the number of times I had crossed. Though I had a fine collection of postcards, souvenirs of all the ships I had sailed upon, I had never bothered to count them. I was eager to purchase one of the SS Baltic to paste into my album and explore every splendid inch of this magnificent 420-foot ship; Captain Parsnell had already promised me a personal tour. He commended my daring and adventurous spirit. I wasn’t even afraid to venture down into the belly of the beast to see the boiler room manned by sweaty bare-chested stokers black faced with coal dust and rippling with hard muscles.
In a new gown of Wedgwood-blue satin with a wide white embroidered chinoiserie border edging the full, draped skirt, and a waterfall of white silk roses, blue ribbon streamers, and cascades of snowy lace falling from my bustle, I was hurrying from my stateroom. I had dallied too long over dressing, fussing and fidgeting, dancing around the room, humming love songs, and making sure I was perfect in every way.
The leather soles of my blue satin slippers pattered and my taffeta petticoats rustled like a flock of bellicose doves as I raced to the dining saloon.
On the companionway there was a moment of sheer panic when all of a sudden I seemed to go from stairs to air. I felt myself falling, and then, just as suddenly, I was safe, my quivering body cradled in a pair of strong masculine arms.
When I dared open my eyes, a diamond horseshoe was winking at me from a gentleman’s black silk tie. He’s caught me in his arms like he has his luck in that glittering U, I thought. Slowly, I raised my eyes to see a pink mouth smiling at me from beneath a dapper mustache, so deep a brown it was deceptively black, carefully formed and waxed beneath a fine patrician nose, and then I was staring into a pair of intense dark eyes, sharp and sure as a surgeon’s knife, I vividly recall thinking. My unknown savior held me like a bride about to be carried over the threshold of her new home. My bosom heaved, but I couldn’t breathe. I felt all aflame, as though I’d just emerged from a visit to the boiler room. I felt the perspiration pool between my breasts and a flaming blush dye my cheeks a pepper-hot red. I couldn’t speak. My tongue felt like a clumsy knot of wet pink ribbons. I must be scarlet as a lobster and seem about as dumb as one! I thought. Where, oh where was that coy, flirtatious, smiling miss I had always been with my beaus? I needed her!
Before the gentleman and I could exchange a single word—surely I would have said something soon!—General Hazard and his wife were upon us, reaching out to me with the most tender concern. Exclaiming that they had seen the whole thing and watched in heart-stopping horror as I began to plummet but hadn’t been able to reach me in time.
The Hazards were like an uncle and aunt to me; they kept homes in New Orleans and Liverpool on account of the General’s dealings in the cotton trade, and we had often visited and traveled with them. The General and Mrs. Hazard both suffered from rheumatism and other age-related infirmities and loved to go anywhere they might enjoy the baths, luxuriating in the hot, sulfurous waters and sipping mineral-rich tonics, being pampered by nice doctors, who brought sweet dreams instead of nightmares to one’s bedside and never prescribed nasty medicines, pretty, smiling nurses in starched white caps and uniforms that rustled like angels’ wings, and sure-fingered muscular masseurs with faces fit for magazine covers but bodies that looked poised to enter the boxing ring. Mama and I had accompanied the Hazards to several fashionable spas and sampled such delights for ourselves, though neither one of us was ailing and we were both in the bright bloom of health. But it was always fun to be petted and pampered, especially by such nice, attractive people.
“Florie! Oh my dear, I’m trembling still! When I saw you start to fall my heart stopped!” Mrs. Hazard exclaimed, patting her heart through her black bombazine bodice.
“Thank heaven you were here, Jim, to save our Florie,” General Hazard was saying to my gallant savior, mopping his worried brow and frowning beneath the upside-down horseshoe of his droopy pewter mustache. “If it hadn’t been for my gout, my heels would have spouted wings and I would’ve caught you myself, my dear!”
I felt my slippers touch solid ground again. I was on my feet, and still flustered and speechless. What was wrong with me? Mrs. Hazard’s arm was around my waist, and I was leaning weakly against her, ever so grateful for her support, as I didn’t quite trust my feet, and introductions were being made.
His name was James Maybrick; he was a wealthy cotton broker with offices in Norfolk, Virginia, and England’s prosperous port city of Liverpool, where he was born and still made his home. The Hazards had known him for years. The General had often done business with him and enjoyed his hospitality at the Liverpool Cricket Club, and Mrs. Hazard had lost count of all the times he’d shared their table. They were clearly very impressed with him. “Solid as a rock, my dear! You need have no fears about James Maybrick!” Mrs. Hazard assured Mama when she took her aside and asked for his particulars.
After that, we were almost constantly together, sitting in the deck chairs, wrapped in warm tartan flannel blankets, deep in conversation over steaming cups of tea or beef broth, or just leaning back, resting and enjoying the salty sea air; strolling the promenade deck, a proud pair of seasoned travelers, smilingly reassuring those of our fellow passengers who were nervous and green; playing cards; dining and dancing; sitting beside each other, our fingers sometimes discreetly, daringly, entwining, at the ship’s concerts; or with our two heads bowed over a single hymnal during religious services. Every evening Mr. Maybrick would call for me at my stateroom and escort me in to supper and then, afterward, to the ladies saloon for coffee and conversation, while he retired to the smoking room for brandy and cigars with the other gentlemen. Then he would retrieve me for a moonlit stroll before seeing me safely back to my stateroom.
The attraction was instantaneous; we were like two moths drawn to the same flame. But no one seemed to understand; they all accounted it some great mystery, like some dime museum oddity in which some element of chicanery might be commingled with the wonderment it inspired. All were in agreement as to why Mr. Maybrick should be so smitten with a ravishing young belle like me, but when they looked at him all they could see was a portly, paunchy, pasty, middle-aged Englishman who talked a great deal about cotton and horse racing. Were they all blind and deaf? Why couldn’t they hear his enthusiasm and see how when he smiled he lit up like a jack-o’-lantern? He was like a great big overgrown boy, and my heart just wanted to reach out and hug him. I couldn’t help but love him. Their confusion was the conundrum, not my feelings!
They made so much of the fact that he was forty-two and I a mere eighteen. I didn’t understand all those frowns and behind our backs whispers that had a way of always reaching my ears, all those muffled murmurs about pretty babies being snatched from cradles. In the South where I was born and spent my early childhood, husbands were often considerably older than their wives, and in the sophisticated European society I had grown accustomed to in my teens this was also commonplace; I had met men in their seventies with wives my age.
I only ever worried about Mr. Maybrick’s age upon those occasions when I noticed that his pallor seemed much more pronounced and his eyes appeared bloodshot, like the dark pupils were snared in a scarlet spiderweb, and I detected a slight tremor and cold clamminess in his hands. Sometimes they appeared so pasty white and limp that I actually shrank from touching them. There were times when he would rub them vigorously, complaining of numbness.
Many times he would take f
rom his pocket a beautiful wrought-silver box with a rather charmingly risqué bas-relief design on the lid of Nelson’s notorious mistress, Lady Hamilton, as a scantily draped “nymph of health,” more bare than bedecked, and put a pinch of the white powder it contained into his tea, soup, or wine. But I was too well-bred to ask what it was.
I was sorely afraid some illness might swoop down and carry my Mr. Maybrick away from me on the Wings of Death. But whenever I tentatively expressed my concern he would smile, call me his dear “Bunny,” and say, “I’m afraid I’m not as good a traveler as I like to pretend,” and, with a sweet shamefacedness, blame it all on a slight touch of mal de mer.
I believed him because I wanted to believe him. And why should I have doubted him? In those days, it was “the demon rum” the do-gooders crusaded against, not the contents of the medicine cabinet.
Gullible and innocent, I had no way of knowing that some gentlemen, especially those of middle or advancing age and those of weak constitution or insecure nature, routinely took “virility powders” or a “pick-me-up” tonic containing such dangerous, potentially deadly, ingredients as arsenic and strychnine to stimulate their masculine powers. Certainly no gentleman of my acquaintance would ever have been so boldly indelicate as to discuss impotency and aphrodisiacs with a well-bred virgin like me. Not even my doctor brother would have dared broach the subject. And if Mama, who was the wisest and most worldly woman I had ever met, knew about this peculiar manly indulgence she never saw fit to enlighten me.
Why could all those naysayers and frowning faces not see all the wonderful things Mr. Maybrick and I saw in each other? We both loved travel, good food, and books, keeping au courant with the fashions, and the heart-pounding excitement of the green table and turf; we were both spellbound by the roulette wheel and avidly courted Lady Luck.
He was no callow youth bent only on getting my bloomers off. I could talk to him and learn from him. He even made speculating on cotton seem exciting as a game of chance when he told me all about “bear sales” wherein cotton one doesn’t actually possess is sold in the hope of being able to cover the obligation by buying at a lower price later and thus making a profit of thousands of dollars. I was utterly fascinated. He was the first man who had ever made me feel like I was more than a living doll.
Why couldn’t they understand? How could I not love him? And what he could give me—a solid, steady, and respectable English home, real roots, a foundation, the chance to build a life and, God willing, grow a family. Though none would ever have guessed it to see the giddy girl caught up in the social whirl I was then, I was bone weary of wandering, of living out of a trunk, in luxurious hotels or the chateaux of the aristocrats and millionaires Mama sometimes intimately befriended. I didn’t want to stop dancing or for the excitement to ever end, but I wanted to settle down, to go home after the dancing was done to a place that really was home, to my own fireside, familiar and dear, not just another house or hotel in which I was merely a guest.
But they didn’t understand. Whenever Jim and I strolled past on the promenade deck, people would whisper and shake their heads. Dour old dowagers and iron-gray spinsters, who had long since given up all hope of marrying, would turn and stare or glare after us, branding our backs, determined to make their disapproval felt. They whispered about indiscretions, making our courtship sound so sordid, speaking in hushed, appalled tones about how late I stayed out, “after dark, my dear, and without a chaperone!,” and our lingering on the deck, watching the moon and the stars mirrored in the glass-smooth sea with his arms about me, his breath warming my skin, and my soul, as he called me his darling “Bunny,” and how when he brought me back to my stateroom he tarried overlong in the sitting room saying good night to me.
Mama thought Jim would make a grand husband for me. So what if he was older? He was respectable and rich, “solid and dependable as the Bank of England.” I imagined his face as an engraving surrounded by dictionary entries for words like Strength, Stability, and Security. Mama and I were from the South, where cotton was king, and knew enough cotton brokers to know that Jim’s boast that “trade is enthroned in Liverpool with cotton as prime minister” was absolute truth.
Jim was equally impressed with my pedigree. I feared Mama would drive him mad with all her chatter about the important men nesting like fat partridges in our family tree, friends and relations of royalty and founding fathers, like Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, high-ranking clergymen, Harvard graduates, bankers, founders of schools and railways, real estate barons, the first Episcopal bishop of Illinois, a Secretary of the Treasury, and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My grandfather had founded the town of Cairo, Illinois, and been caricatured by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, and my father had sat on the Supreme Court and served as Assistant Secretary of State for the Confederacy. And, of course, there were our cousins the Vanderbilts.
Though I wished she wouldn’t, Mama made me sound like some kind of heiress, one of those wealthy American girls the newspapers had dubbed “Dollar Princesses,” girls who traveled to Europe on fishing expeditions to catch a title to put the crowning touch on their millions. My stomach was all queasy and I felt like a fraud, a sham heiress, when she dropped hints about the two and a half million acres of land in Virginia and Kentucky that I might one day inherit, conveniently neglecting to mention that it was all swampland and there was some complicated legal tangle about just who in our family actually owned it. It was all a great muddle that would have cost too much to unravel, the lawyers would have gotten richer and us only poorer, and the land would have just sat there stagnating without a buyer, so we just left it be; no one really thought it was worth all the bother.
She also glossed over the scandals of her own past, the label of “adventuress” many affixed to her name along with words like conniving, duplicitous, ingratiating, sychophantic, and scheming; the two dead husbands whose deaths the gossips claimed too conveniently coincided with Mama’s desire to change partners; her numerous love affairs—they said she went through men like handkerchiefs—and her amicable separation from my worldly and debonair Prussian stepfather, Baron Adolf von Roques. She deftly deflected attention away from his absence with nigh constant reminders that he was attached to the embassy in St. Petersburg and thus of necessity spent much of his time in Russia away from the bosom of his loving family. Glowing with wifely pride, she described his service under Crown Prince Frederick as a cavalry officer in the Eighth Cuirassier Regiment. His troupe of ballet girl mistresses and handsome male secretaries, always tall and candlestick slim, with hair slick and shiny as black patent leather, his hot and hasty temper fueled by a taste for vodka in vast quantities, and his penchant for dueling over the slightest perceived insult were of course never mentioned. Mama was always a practical woman who preferred to accentuate the positive and ignore the negative like dust swept under the carpet.
Their arrangement was entirely amicable. It was not by any means an unhappy marriage; on the contrary, it was all very sophisticated and civilized. But Mama was prepared to admit that it might seem distressingly bohemian and unconventional to the typically traditional, and narrow, English mind. So why risk muddying the waters by talking about it? After all, what had their marriage to do with mine? At the time, I thought it made perfect sense. It was not, of course, the kind of marriage I wanted for myself; I wanted the whole beautiful fairy tale of everlasting love and happily ever after. I wanted no storm clouds to mar my perfect blue sky, so I kept smiling and silent and let Mama do all the talking. She said she knew best, and I believed her. I didn’t want to make a single frown or worry line crease my beloved’s brow. I really was the sweet, old-fashioned girl he thought I was, not some wild bohemian child of the demimondaine, so why give him any cause to doubt me?
I loved Jim and truly I did not want to mislead him, but when I voiced my concerns to Mama she insisted that I keep silent. I would never be able to forget or forgive myself, she said, if such an overt display of honesty dashed my hopes ent
irely.
“Darlin’ ”—she clasped my face between her hands—“your face is your heart, you are incapable of lyin’, but you’ve yet to learn that honesty can cost a woman dearly. You will blame yourself every day o’ your life, an’ quite rightly too, for costin’ yourself that which would have brought you perfect happiness. In this world, a woman must be cunnin’, not naïve an’ timid, or else she loses out to another, a rival, who is not afraid to be clever an’ take chances. Listen to your mother. I know; I have vast experience in these matters.”
She was adamant that I must leave everything to her; besides, it was unbecoming for a young girl to talk of business and financial matters. “If you’re goin’ to do that, Florie, you might as well put on some blue stockin’s an’ spectacles and scrape your hair back into a bun an’ give up all hope of a husband, for you’ll certainly never get one by talkin’ o’ those matters!
“After you’re married you’ll fall to quarrelin’ an’ quibblin’ about finances soon enough; every couple does.” She sighed, reminding me that as a third-time wife she was in a position to know. “Enjoy the bliss o’ ignorance an’ freedom from bein’ tied down by facts an’ figures while it lasts, darlin’. The honeymoon’ll be over soon enough; it always is.”
What could I do? She was my mother and a wise and worldly woman who “knew how the game is played an’, more important, how to win it.” I loved her, and I knew she loved me and always had my best interests at heart, so, as always, I nodded and said, “Yes, Mama.” Some might say that was a mistake, that any marriage begun in deception is doomed. All I can say is that she was my mother. All little girls are brought up being told to listen to their mothers and that they’ll be sorry if they don’t, and I didn’t want to be sorry and looking back years later, still nursing a broken heart and longing for Jim and what might have been. I wanted to be Mrs. James Maybrick with all my heart and Mama was determined to make my dreams come true. “The heart doesn’t lie, but sometimes the tongue has to,” she said, “an’ which would you rather have, a whole honest tongue or a broken heart?” Of course, I chose my heart; I always did.