The Ripper's Wife (33 page)

I sat up, blinking and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, to find a policeman standing at the foot of my bed. That horrible nurse, Michael, Edwin, Mrs. Briggs, and Nanny Yapp all crowded behind him, staring at me. Then the doctor was feeling my pulse, nodding, and declaring me fit.

“Mrs. Maybrick,” the officer began, “Mrs. Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband, Mr. James Maybrick. If you choose to reply, be
very
careful, because whatever you say may be used as evidence against you.”

“Please!”
I managed to blurt out before I lost consciousness again. “Somebody send for my mother!”

Apparently Edwin, who would never forgive me for Alfred Brierley, found it in his heart to do me one last kindness. He sent a cable to Mama in Paris that I was in trouble and needed her desperately.

She came at once as I knew she would. “The indomitable Caroline,” Baroness von Roques, barging right in, as fearless as an angel entering a burning building, coming to my rescue, not a knight in shining armor but a voluptuous white-blond matron clad head to toe in lavender chiffon trimmed with silk periwinkles and the most enormous hat I’d ever seen. Pearls and diamonds clacking, she shoved past Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp, sending the maids scattering and Edwin running for cover, swinging her handbag and parasol left and right, like a medieval warrior’s mace, warning them to get out of her way or she would knock them all down like bowling pins.

When a policeman caught up with her on the stairs, telling her I was under arrest on suspicion of murdering my husband by administering an irritant poison, she poked him aside with her parasol and said, “Don’t be absurd. If anyone poisoned James Maybrick it was James Maybrick; that man was a drugstore walkin’ on two legs. I’m surprised he lasted this long! Now unhand me, sir. I’ll have you know that my second husband was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin an’ the illegitimate son of Napoleon III! An’ another of our illustrious ancestors stood right beside Christopher Columbus on the deck o’ the
Mayflower
holdin’ the map that he steered by!”

Then she was there, in my room, gathering me in her arms, and I, just like a terrified little girl, was clinging to her and crying, begging my mama to help me, saying that I didn’t understand what was happening and why they were treating me like this.

Apparently they’d searched the house and found packets of arsenic I’d never seen before marked
“POISON!”
hidden amidst my underlinens or rather
planted
there; it certainly wasn’t mine. And they’d collected a vast array of medicines; I believe the tally ran to 147 different pills, potions, and powders. But those were
all
Jim’s. I had
nothing
to do with them! And Nanny Yapp wouldn’t shut up about those damned infernal flypapers, which I’d only used to replicate Dr. Greggs’s prescription to get rid of my blemishes in time for the ball. Then there were those two sacks labeled
Industrial Arsenic
that Jim had been bragging about his “stupendous luck” in acquiring from a business associate. On the whole, the policemen said, there was enough arsenic in Battlecrease House to do away with the entire British Army and take a good bite out of the Navy too.

I told Mama the truth, except the bit about my husband being Jack the Ripper, of course, and that all I’d done was sprinkle a little white powder into the Valentine’s Meat Juice bottle at Jim’s bidding, because he was suffering so and swearing he needed it. But, before I could give it to him, and I was already thinking twice about it, I tripped and spilled it. I had refilled the bottle with water. Most of the white powder had been left on the floor in undissolved clumps. I had mopped it up myself. And what, if any, was left in the bottle was surely not enough to have killed him. Yet apparently Michael had sent the bottle out for testing and found a trace amount of arsenic in it. My handkerchiefs had also been examined and one of them was found to have arsenic on it. But that must have been either from wiping my face, after using the facial wash, or from when I mopped up the mess I made when I spilled the bottle of meat juice; it had to be one or the other.

“Surely I am guilty of no crime?” I looked up at Mama uncertainly. “Jim has been taking that arsenic for
years,
and there was only a teeny-tiny amount found in the meat juice bottle, not enough to kill anybody. I heard the doctors saying so! They said the attempt was clearly ‘inept’ and ‘the work of a bungler’!”

“Listen to me, Florie.” Mama braced her hands on my shoulders. “You are
not
to blame for this. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Jim had been poisonin’ himself for years, an’ there’s no telling what all those doctors have been givin’ him. In tryin’ to cure him they may actually have killed him. But he wouldn’t have been in this state anyway if he’d treated his body like a temple an’ kept it pure o’ all that poison! Arsenic an’ strychnine!” She rolled her eyes. “An’ now he’s died and left you in a devil of a fix! I shall have a lawyer for you by this afternoon,” she promised, “an’ we’ll clean this mess up so you can bury the past with Jim an’ come back to Paris with me and put all this behind you!”

That was my mama, “the indomitable Caroline.”

While she was in the guest room changing her dress, someone locked her in. That was when they took me away to jail. I was so weak I couldn’t walk. They had to carry me out in a chair. Mrs. Briggs yanked a silk cord from the window curtains and tied me to it to keep me from falling out as I slumped there, swooning. Two constables carried me out the door, with Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp following,
graciously
thanking them for taking the trash out.

M
y trial began on August 1, 1889, in the worst heat of summer; it was one full week of unrelenting torment. I sweltered in my black crepe widow’s weeds, shrouded in thick veils, in the crowded courtroom at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool and shivered in my tiny jail cell that was like a living tomb carved out of Arctic ice.

You’ll forgive my indignation I hope, but I simply
cannot
think back to that time without getting my temper up.

They tell me as many as seven thousand people observed my trial. That includes those who just stuck their head in for a peek at the accused murderess, “hiding her guilty face from the world behind her impenetrable black veils.”

Many of them were people I knew, members of the Currant Jelly Set I had danced and dined with. Ladies came, dressed in the height of fashion, in huge hats to the dismay of those seated behind them. They came to my trial as though it were a matinée, a fun, festive occasion, not my very life and death, my freedom, at stake. Many brought a boxed lunch so they need never relinquish their seat and risk losing it to another, and opera glasses through which to gawk at me, and chatted gaily with the journalists who obliged them by describing their hats and dresses in detail in the newspapers in return for their opinions and reminiscences about me. Women I knew who were avid players of the game of musical beds, couples who indulged in discreet wife swapping during weekends at genteel country houses, all sat there frowning, shaking their heads, and mouthing,
SHAME!
and calling me a “brazen American hussy” just like the Puritans who had surrounded the marketplace scaffold where Hester Prynne had stood, staring at the scarlet
A
embroidered with flamboyant defiance upon her breast. Their eyes bored into me and they put their heads together and whispered about me and Alfred Brierley, who had, upon his physician’s advice, conveniently set sail for South America. The papers reported that Alfred “appeared reserved and to feel the delicacy of his position most acutely.” Before he went, he issued a terse statement to the press: “I have figured more prominently in this case than my real connection with it warranted. Besides this I have nothing to say regarding anything.”

As I stood there in the dock gazing out at them through the hazy black of my veil it was all I could do not to shout,
You’re all a bunch of hypocrites!
These people who were so fickle and free with their affections, not a one of them would have recognized
true
sincerity, instead of the feigned variety they donned and doffed just like carnival masks, if it had come up and slapped them in the face or kicked them in the pants!

They even put up a waxwork figure of me in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, “most carefully modeled after actual photographs,” gowned in “an authentic replication” of my widow’s weeds. A packet labeled “ARSENIC!” peeked from my pocket and a red taffeta petticoat peeped from beneath my black skirt as I, with my hand also clutching a black-bordered mourning handkerchief and a bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice, coyly raised it to give the people a glimpse. For weeks, they tell me, people were lined up around the block from morning till night, over fifty thousand of them, waiting to get in to see it, and souvenir postcards of it sold so briskly the printing presses were taxed to keep up with the demand. Edwin even dared flash one at me, when I was being led out of the courtroom, smiling and saying, “I’ll save one for you, Florie, in case they don’t hang you.” I didn’t know whether to spit at him or slap him. I felt like doing both, but, of course, I did neither. With all the eyes of the world upon me, just waiting to catch a glimpse of the evil they were convinced was lurking inside me, it wouldn’t have been wise. All I could do was “accidentally” tread upon his toes, then falter and gasp out an apology, and we both knew just how sincere
that
was!

From the start Judge Stephen displayed a shocking prejudice against me, describing my late husband as a man “unhappy enough to have an unfaithful wife” and using words like
adulterous intrigue
every chance he got. Every single time he addressed the jury he seemed more concerned with my infidelity than whether the evidence presented was truly sufficient to convict me of murder. In truth, he seemed quite bored with that, though given the dry, ponderous nature of the medical testimony I could hardly blame him. There were moments when those doctors and scientists were on the stand when I could hardly keep my eyes open and was grateful to my heavy black veil for hiding my yawns. Time and again Justice Stephen would swat the medical arguments aside like a bothersome fly, commenting on their complexity and declaring them too difficult for his mind to grasp, and draw the jury’s attention back to my adultery. He seemed to particularly relish the reading aloud of my love letters and the testimony of those witnesses brought in to provide proof of my illicit trysts. Like a Bible-banging zealot he saw in me the reincarnation of all the evil women of history—Eve, Delilah, Jezebel, Salome, Agrippina, Cleopatra, Messalina, Catherine de Medici, and Lucrezia Borgia, to name just a few he cited in his apparent passion for the subject.

There was a lengthy parade of scientific witnesses largely consisting of bickering doctors. I wondered even if you could get them all to agree to the sky being blue if they would fight one another like tigers over the precise hue; I could picture them coming to verbal blows over
celestial
versus
cerulean.
The tide seemed to be turning unexpectedly in my favor when a Mr. Davies who was an analytical chemist, brought in by the prosecution no less, admitted that the traces of arsenic found in Jim’s organs were too slight to be measured and insufficient to cause the death of a normal person, let alone a habitual arsenic eater like James Maybrick was said to have been. But then a Dr. Stevenson, an esteemed toxicologist, took the stand and spoke with such a resounding air of authority when he declared, “I have no doubts that this man died from the effects of arsenic,” that the jury could not fail to be impressed.

Michael was there every day, staring at me, smiling like the cat that got the canary, and stroking his gold Mason’s ring. When he was called to the stand he emphatically declared that Jim was not a person given to dosing himself with medicines. Michael recounted Nurse Gore’s tale of my tampering with the bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice, claiming “my brother grew gradually worse from that time on.” When queried about Jim’s habitual use of arsenic, Michael briefly lost his composure, sitting forward with his fists clenched. “Whoever told you that is a damned liar!” he said, his eyes daring anyone to disagree. “They should think of my brother’s children before uttering such rubbish!”

Then it was Edwin’s turn. He admitted that he was “very fond of Florence, and I would never have believed anything wrong about her . . . until a letter to a man was found. . . .” Judge Stephen
loved
that! He was actually leaning over, nodding encouragingly at Edwin, almost
begging
for more, and Edwin, his pride still smarting, eagerly acquiesced. Following in Michael’s footsteps, Edwin feigned ignorance about Jim’s use of drugs, which he
knew
to be habitual; standing over what turned out to be Jim’s deathbed he had blamed his brother’s sad and sorry state on those “damn strychnine pills; he’s been taking them like candy!” Edwin sat there, after laying his hand on the Holy Bible and swearing to tell the truth, insisting that “on the whole my brother enjoyed very good health and only occasionally took digestive remedies as prescribed by his physician.” There was a moment of comedy when Edwin sought to mop his sweat-beaded brow in the sweltering courtroom and drew out a whole string of rainbow silk handkerchiefs and couldn’t quite manage to cram them all back into his pocket, so that when he exited the stand they were trailing behind him like the tail of a kite. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been crying.

Then the servants had their moment to bask in the sun of fame or infamy, call it what you will. They got to see their names and pictures in the newspapers, souvenirs to save for their grandchildren. Everything I had ever done suddenly seemed sinister and suspect to them in hindsight and they tattled and prattled on endlessly about my ineptly run household and the occasionally violent quarrels between the master and mistress, the cause of which was, no doubt, some grievous fault of mine, since it was quite obvious by this point that James Maybrick had been a saint. I was expecting Judge Stephen to usurp the Pope’s authority and canonize Jim at any moment. Jim and I got along like a house on fire in our passion and our fury. There was no denying that; even I would have admitted it if anyone had ever asked. Mr. Maybrick, each and every one of our servants avowed, had been the best and kindest master and gentleman it had been their pleasure to serve; he was one of the finest men who ever lived. And it hurt all their hearts to see how Mrs. Maybrick, to save her own skin, was trying to paint a picture of this goodly and godly Christian gentleman as some kind of drug fiend. They were simply appalled when my counsel
dared
to bring up the fact that Jim had a mistress and
five
bastard children to try to balance the scales when everyone knew it was different for men and what was good for the gander wasn’t necessarily appropriate behavior for the goose.
Oh, what hypocrites!

Next Nanny Yapp came flouncing up the center aisle, for all the world like a Floradora girl—a
blind
Floradora girl, since she had forsaken her spectacles for this performance. She was wearing one of
my
dresses, custard-yellow satin trimmed with rows of black velvet bows and black lace flounces, with stuffed canary birds perched amongst frills of black lace on her—
my!
—hat, twirling her—
my!
—parasol like a flirtatious belle promenading in the park trying to catch a gentleman’s eye. I could just hear her in my mind again singing,
While strolling through the park one day, in the merry, merry month of May . . .

She took the stand and regaled the crowd with a melodramatic rendering of how she—the heroine of the hour!—had alerted the household to my murderous intentions, rousing the alarm by crying out in turn to Edwin, Michael, and Mrs. Briggs that
“the mistress intends to poison the master!”
With stage-worthy gestures, Nanny Yapp vividly recounted her discovery of the flypapers soaking in my bedroom, in a washbasin covered with a towel in the hope of concealing my “nefarious intentions,” and how in innocently intending to do a good deed by putting the letter my little girl had soiled by dropping it in a mud puddle into a clean envelope she had inadvertently discovered my adultery—the obvious motive for my crime! She went on to tell how she had been the one to discover the packets of arsenic nesting amidst my underclothes and yet more hidden in the linen closet. “I always
knew
she was up to no good!” she cried, staring daggers at me before bursting into tears. “Oh, the poor master! The poor, poor master!” she blubbered into her, or rather
my,
handkerchief; I spied my initials embroidered upon it in sky-blue silk.

Judge Stephen looked like a stage-door johnny wanting to shower Alice Yapp with gems and roses after that performance! He actually told the jury that she was “an exceedingly nice young woman” and that “her courageous act in retaining the letter and handing it to Mr. Edwin Maybrick must be commended.”

When she was asked about any medicine she might have seen Jim taking she was simply aghast. Mr. Maybrick had been “the most godly and temperate man” she ever knew, and she knew for a fact that he was loath to take even a simple cough remedy, preferring to trust Jesus Christ, Our Savior, to save him from any earthly infirmity.
BALDERDASH!
Not one year ago, my husband had stood right in the middle of the nursery, in
full
sight of Nanny Yapp’s adoring eyes, and drunk straight from a bottle of cough syrup to prove to the children, who were both sick, that it didn’t taste bad. He ended up drinking the whole bottle right then and there and having to send out for more—for himself
and
the children!

Mrs. Briggs took the stand in full mourning, replete with a complaisant air that seemed to confirm without actually saying a single word that she always knew something like this would happen from the moment she discovered that Jim had jilted her for me. She behaved as though Jim had been her husband, weeping as she recounted how Nanny Yapp, in a state of wild, weeping despair and frenzy, had met her at the door, crying out, “Thank God you have come, Mrs. Briggs! The mistress is poisoning the master! For God’s sake, go up and see him for yourself!” Wings must have sprouted from her heels, she flew so fast to his side, and found him a mere faint and fading shadow of his former self. She pooh-poohed the “absurd and ridiculous notion” that Mr. Maybrick had been an arsenic eater, then went on to enumerate all my grievous and many faults, harping, for the benefit of the housewives in the audience and all those who judged a woman by her house, on my inept and ill-managed household, my extravagance, shopping sprees, racking up debts that led me into dealings with moneylenders, and then, of course, there was “that business with Mr. Brierley.. . .”

Nurse Gore and the two other nurses who had been in attendance at Battlecrease House also had their little tale to tell, namely how Michael had forbidden me the sickroom and cautioned them to be very vigilant whenever I was near and to report any suspicious behavior on my part promptly to him.

And Mr. Samuelson, whose wife had betrayed him with my husband, took the stand against me to testify to my admission that I often said I hated Jim, taking it totally out of context and turning what I had intended to be an act of genuine kindness against me.

Mr. Schweisso, the headwaiter at Flatman’s Hotel, was the sensation of the sixth day when he was called to give evidence about how I had stayed there with Alfred Brierley, registering the two of us as man and wife—Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick—and confirming that the two of us had slept in the same room, in the same bed, together.