The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  “Dark Annie,” she said they called her on account of her dark, brooding moods. She wanted pity. A dollop of kindness for a dying trollop. She went on about the cruelty and unkindness of men, displaying two highly polished farthings another gent had passed off on her as sovereigns. Money is money to a whore like you, so why are you complaining? I bit my tongue to keep from saying. She was the worse from a fight with another whore a few days past, over a sliver of soap no less, that had left Annie with a black eye. She opened her bodice and showed me the bruises on her chest where the other whore had kicked her, and her just only out of the infirmary, she said; it was most unkind.

  She had two pills; she gripped them like treasures, wadded in a scrap of paper. Afterward, I took them and left her two of my own, piled with the rest of her meager possessions at her feet. Whatever will the police make of it? Shall they waste hours wondering why and if this gesture is one of particular, or peculiar, significance? Don’t the fools know it was only for jolly? I don’t know what the pills were, but since they have done me no ill, they must have done me good; she certainly did. I left the scrap of paper; there was, of all the splendid ironies, an elegant M written on one side. I was giving them a clue if the fools could but see it; I felt as though I were leaving behind my calling card.

  “Poor thing,” I said. I peeled off my gloves and let my overcoat fall. The poor, weak bitch didn’t have the time or strength to squeal. I twisted the scarf—her own, knotted tight, to keep out the chill of the night—savagely around her neck, like a noose, and silently laughed as her eyes and tongue bulged out. She bit it in her dying throes.

  Death came silently and swiftly. It was a mercy considering what I did next.

  She lay dead at my feet, tongue lolling out by my boots as though she wanted to lick them. I stood over her and licked the white powder from my palm and felt such power, like lightning coursing through me; I felt the strength swimming in my veins; I almost fancied I could hear it humming. I cut her throat. Her hot harlot’s blood warmed my ice-cold hands. The numbness vanished; I could feel again! Hallelujah! I wanted to raise my bloody hands to Heaven and shout like one of those American fools at their tent revivals. But I knew better; already I was playing the ultimate game of chance—Murder!—risking my own life by taking another’s. If I were caught now—red-handed, ha ha!—nothing could save me from the gallows!

  My knife grated against bone. I worked and worried at it, sawing back and forth for longer than I should have as the sky lightened. I wanted to take her head away with me. I wanted to boil the flesh from it and make it into a vase, a memento mori, filled with bloodred roses for my study, or maybe to adorn my wife-whore’s boudoir. At last I gave up. I just could not get through the bone, and there was so much more I wanted to do to Dark Annie; I mustn’t squander precious time.

  I flung up her filthy skirts, exposing candy-striped stockings that made me smile, recalling my wife-whore’s favorite corset. I pushed up her knees and spread them wide, parting them in an obscene parody of passion or childbirth. I felt the Devil in my knife, guiding me. I slashed and ripped and tore and still I wanted more, More, MORE! I gutted her. I flung her innards out onto her shoulder, a fleshy—not a feather—boa for milady’s shoulders. My wife-whore tells me that particular shade of pink—“intestinal pink” I shall call it from now on in memoriam of Dark Annie, ha ha!—is all the rage this season! Perhaps I shall visit one of the fashionable shops tomorrow and buy her a feather boa that color—and if it has accents of bloodred and shit brown so much the better, ha ha!—so I can look at her, laugh, and remember the little whore who died for the sins of the Great Whore.

  I took her womb away with me along with some blood in a ginger beer bottle, locked in my Gladstone bag lined with newspapers about Polly’s murder. I’ve a fancy to fry it. It’s the only way I can bring myself to taste her! And last, from her dead finger I snatched a pair of brass rings, a wedding and a keeper, like the cheap set I had given my Mrs. Sarah, a souvenir, something to remember Dark Annie by, though I was quite sure I would never forget her.

  As I walked away, I was preoccupied with pulling on my gloves, to hide my bloody hands until I could wash them, and forgot the unevenly paved ground. I stumbled and fell and barked the heel of my palm upon the broken stones—jagged and ragged like the cuts I had made. My blood mingled with hers. We are one—one forever, I thought as I swiftly made my way back up the passage and out onto the street. I lost myself in the early-morning market traffic, people hurrying to set up stalls, to sell their wares, or on their way to work. No one noticed me. Why should they suspect a gentleman—a gentle man—like me? The whores, they say, are wary of a Jew boot finisher who has been harassing them, a man they call “Leather Apron.” I was just another slumming gent on his way back to his wholesome, respectable home after a night of wanton carousing, tomcatting in wicked Whitechapel. No one looked twice at me.

  The womb was awful, just AWFUL! So spongy and springy I exhausted my jaw trying to eat it. Tough as an old whore! I spit it out—damn the rotten and repulsive cunt!

  I lay back on my bed, smoked a cigar, sipped some brandy, licked my medicine from my palm, slowly, savoring each dainty white grain, and stroked my prick and thought of Mary Jane Kelly and my wife-whore, watching them blur together in my mind, face merging with face, two sides of a spinning coin, until I could no longer tell one from the other; they were one, sister sluts, wife, whore, wife-whore. Tomorrow, I promised myself, tomorrow I shall see Mary Jane. . . .

  I found I could not sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw that pathetic drab before me, begging for pity, so I rose and did what I had been longing to do—I wrote a letter. At first I thought to address it to the police. Then I thought better of that; it would make a far greater impression on the gentlemen of the press. The police would only file it away in annoyance, but the newspapers would be sure to publish it. But I would not mail it just yet. First, I wanted to have the pleasure of walking around with it in my pocket, knowing it was there, savoring the thrill, the thrill of the kill, and the risk of having such a damning document upon me. What if I should forget and leave it in when I gave my coat to be laundered? Oh, what a thrill it is, being both hunter and hunted!

  The blood I had taken away with me was no use; it had gone dark and thick, caked inside the ginger beer bottle. Even when I tried diluting it with water, still it was no use. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to purchase a bottle of red ink. I am so bloody clever!

  I began to write in a hand elegant enough to grace the finest wedding invitation, but scattered with a smattering of misspellings and grammatical errors no educated gentleman would ever make to further confound the fools:

  Dear Boss,

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they

  wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look

  so clever and talk about being on the right track.

  That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I

  am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them

  till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I

  gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch

  me now. I love my work and want to start again.

  You will soon hear of me with my funny little games.

  I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer

  bottle over the last job to write with but it went

  thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough

  I hope Ha Ha. The next job I do I shall clip the

  lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for

  jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit

  more work then give it out straight. My knife’s so

  nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I

  get a chance. Good luck.

  Yours truly,

  But what to sign myself? Something catchy for the man they cannot catch. A name that will live forever. A name that will still inspire fear long a
fter my bones have turned to ashes. I am a gentle, almost saintly, man when the rage is not upon me. . . . Saint James the Whore Slayer? Sir Jim, as Nanny Yapp calls me when I play knights with Bobo and my little princess Gladys? Something less formal? Something with a common touch for common people? I have it—Jack! Like Spring-Heeled Jack, with his long, icy claws and eyes glowing like fireballs, the demon who terrorized London half a century ago and still springs out to terrify audiences in stage melodramas and the penny-dreadful novels Edwin adores so. Or . . . OH YES! YES! Like Michael’s Jack, the lady-loving jolly jack-tar from one of his most popular songs—“They All Love Jack.” That’s it! Jack the Whore Killer . . . Jack the Slut Slayer . . . No, something sharper like my knife. A name that will make every woman’s quim quiver with fear of what I would do if only I could get my hands, and my knife, upon her. What wouldn’t I do to her? Ah, I have it now; thank you, my Muse, for visiting me instead of Michael. . . .

  Yours truly,

  Jack the Ripper

  Now they’ll never forget me!

  I stroked myself with my red-ink-and-bloodstained fingers and spent before I put down my pen.

  I’ll put it away now, folded carefully, for this document, the first I’ve signed with my new name, is so very precious and I might want to add a postscript later, after I’ve seen the papers. Leather Apron indeed! He’s not fit to finish my boots, much less wear them.

  I returned to my bed, red ink still upon my hands and Dark Annie’s blood caked beneath my nails, and touched myself again, harder and faster, jerking, as though I were furious with my own flesh. This time I thought only of my wife-whore and her lover, how much they must be enjoying themselves in my absence. Does she bring him into the house, beneath the same roof where our children sleep, and fuck him in her own bed, or do they compound the insult and betrayal and soil mine?

  I imagined myself standing outside, peeping in through a window, watching them naked, bucking and fucking hard upon my bed, the wife-whore with her golden hair unbound, straddling him, his hands gripping her hips so hard each fingertip will leave a bruise, marking her as his whore and himself as her master.

  When I return to Battlecrease House I shall rip her skirt off and place my own fingers there. I shall show the whore who is really her master! I can see myself standing there in the darkness, bush at my back, thorns stabbing through my clothes, glass at my nose, my hard prick in my angry hand, jerking—furious pleasure, furious pain! OH GOD, HOW IT EXCITES ME SO! It shouldn’t, but it does! Oh, God help me, IT DOES!

  I think I shall let her continue seeing him a while longer . . . just so I can have this pleasure, so I can lie here alone afterward and imagine . . . London is full of little whores who can pay for the Great Whore’s sins and keep my children safe from the rage I would, without their sacrifice, most assuredly turn upon their whore-mother, my wife-whore, and, God help me, in my madness, maybe even them. I cannot bear the thought! That fear is enough to keep my knife sharp! I would kill every whore in the world to save Bobo and Gladys!

  In Mary Jane’s room, I savored her fear as well as her sex. I lapped it up like arsenic. But damn her green eyes, when she talks about those drabs she makes them come back to life; she resurrects the human flotsam from the cesspool where they would have drowned had it not been for me and my merciful knife and brings them back to haunt me.

  I now know Annie Chapman was a guardsman’s daughter who, despite spending her life surrounded by men in military barracks, thought she was destined to die an old maid until, most unexpectedly, at the forlorn age of almost thirty, she fell in love with a coachman—John Chapman. The happy couple made their home in Windsor. They posed for a photographer once, Mr. Chapman in checkered trousers and watered-silk vest, and Annie in a lilac calico crinoline with a pattern of white stripes and little flowers, her late mother’s Bible on her lap and her long brown hair gathered back, the curls smoothed and subdued and coiled in a fat bun at the nape of her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. She’d shown Mary Jane that picture once, though the frame had long since been pawned, still so proud of that long-vanished dress and its skirt, made from yards and yards of material billowing over the then fashionable hoop. She’d sat there and pointed and told her what color everything was, painting the colors back in on what was now only a faded sepia memory.

  Those were the days before it all went wrong. John Chapman was a man, fickle like any other. Time and familiarity bred boredom, and another, younger and prettier, soon caught his fancy. Annie found that the children he had given her were scant consolation and turned to the bottle. She had a son who had to be sent away to a home for cripples and a daughter who married up, moved to France, and forgot all about the folks she left behind her.

  Forced to fend for herself in London, Annie had tried to earn her keep by doing crochet work and selling flowers. In desperation, she had even sold her hair to a wig maker.

  When suicide seemed the only alternative—“ ’twas either that or the river”—she became a whore, “an’ hated herself every moment for it.” Annie sought oblivion in gin. She could no longer bear to face her own Bible and, not having the heart to pawn it, left it abandoned on a bench in Hyde Park, hoping someone would find it and give it a good, and more deserving, home. “She didn’t half seem to care when the doctor told her she was dyin’. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m already dead,’ she’d say to us who knew her; her sisters in sorrow, she called us.”

  The papers are full of my naughty deeds, but, curse them, they keep crediting them to this Leather Apron! How dare he try to fill my shoes! I shall have to send my letter soon and set the fools straight! I bought them all and read them aloud to Mary Jane, taking fiendish delight in her fear. I’d never seen a woman not facing my knife so afraid. I wanted to whip it out and show her, let her feel it cold against her throat, or maybe her cunt, but her terror excited me so much I gave her my cock instead, to comfort her, the dear little whore. She wanted more, and I wanted more, and we gave it to each other. We suit each other so well!

  Some think I’m a doctor driven by some unholy madness onto the streets, to use my skill to kill, to take instead of save human lives—if you can even call a whore human. And then there’s this “Leather Apron,” a whore-hating Jew boot finisher. Already the whores cower and creep about cautioning each other to “beware of The Knife!” and “watch out for Leather Apron!” I didn’t see it, but apparently there was a leather apron folded under a water tap—I also missed that, or I could have washed my hands!—not two feet from where I slew Dark Annie. The street lamps in Whitechapel are so scant, it’s a wonder anyone who goes about at night can see their hand before their face, or Jack’s knife, when it comes out of the dark.

  I shall have to send my letter soon and set the fools right or else this poor fellow might end up a gallows dancer.

  I’ve fooled them ALL—police, press, and populace, and all the witless whores who live in terror of my knife. I’ve made the City of London the City of Fear, the City of Frightened Whores! I’ve baptized it in blood—whores’ blood.

  The gentlemen of Scotland Yard are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The blind leading the blind! Catch me if you can! I howled with laughter over Punch. There was a cartoon of a blindfolded bobby playing blindman’s buff with a group of ruffians and beneath it the caption “Turn round three times and catch whom you may!” May—the first three letters of my surname, right there in the paper for all to see, a clue hiding in plain sight—May, clever, clever, so bloody clever! They’ll NEVER catch me! It’s so frightfully funny!

  Across the breakfast table the wife-whore shudders and swoons over the headlines and wonders, “Why don’t the police do something? ” I comfort her as best I can. I, the most hated and hunted criminal since the world began, play the loving husband and pat her shoulder or hand, kiss her cheek, and tell her that our police force here in Liverpool is one of the finest in the world and such things could never happen here—I’m not such a fool as to soil my own backyard! �
��or to women of her class; the whores of Whitechapel die as they live, on the knife’s edge of danger. Every time they toddle drunkenly up to a man and say, “How’s about a poke, Old Cock?” they’re taking their lives into their own drink-trembling hands. They’re asking for it every time!

  How my dear little wifey frowns and worries over those damned dead whores! Bedraggled hags who are better off dead! If she only knew that it is her own sins I am punishing, every little no-account whore I kill is dying in her stead! They die so she can go on living, so our children’s names will never be sullied by her sins and my crimes of punishment by proxy, so I will never make the mistake of bringing my hate home with me. What would she do if she knew? Would she give me, and herself, away? Would she think of the children like I do? She’s such a selfish bitch, my wife-whore, she would act impulsively; she doesn’t have the sense to stop and think about tomorrow. She would only think of the moment, the lives lost, and the blood spilled, not that it might stain our children. The bitch is lucky to have me; I think of everything.

  I’ve mailed my letter. I’m tired of reading about Leather Apron and speculation that I’m a doctor or a mad butcher and that no Englishman could ever do such a thing. Others trying to snatch the gory glory away from me! It’s time for me to take it ALL back!

  Before I sent it, I couldn’t resist adding a postscript:

  Dont mind me giving the trade name Ha Ha.