I, Ripper

Though this confession should have stirred horror in me, it inspired compassion. He was so in pain.

“Sir, would you like me to get you some water? Perhaps you have a fever and need a doctor?”

He wasn’t listening. He opened his hand to examine what he gripped so hard in his fist, and I nearly fell out of my own divan. He held Annie’s rings! I had to make certain I wasn’t the one hallucinating, so I closed my eyes hard and long, then opened them and made certain I saw what I saw, which was indeed two rings in his large palm.

“She wore them both, you know,” he said. “It fell to me to take them from those still, bloody fingers. I am beyond damnation. Hellfire awaits, and rightly so.”

With that he arose, turned, and walked out.

CHAPTER FOURTY-THREE The Diary

November 19, 1888

he funeral. It seemed that once the papers recounted the thoroughness with which I had hashed poor Mary Jane, she became London’s favorite martyr. It was not to me to point out that, alive, she was invisible to the gentry who would not so much as spit in her direction, unless of a dark night they were tupping her sweet loins for a few pennies’ worth of ejaculate deposit, after which it was back to nothingness for her. In death she became magnificent, a star, however briefly, more so than any actress or opera singer. They had not read her letters to her phantom mum, they had not wondered at her addiction to demon gin, they had not missed her brothers and sisters.

When it turned out no money was available to send her on, a churchman named Wilson, the sexton of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, put up the sum. I’m guessing he thought it would get him to heaven, and I’m guessing that it will, assuming heaven exists, which it doesn’t. According to the Times, Mary Jane was laid into polished oak and elm, a box, that is, with metal fittings. A brass plate would accompany her into the dirt: “Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9 November 1888,” so that He above would not get her mixed up with another Marie Jeanette Kelly, unless that one, too, had died on the ninth.

Sexton Wilson’s crown and pounds and guineas went rather far: They obtained two wreaths of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart seed, which went upon the coffin, which was put into an open two-horse hearse to be drawn all the way from the mortuary to St. Leonard’s.

The crowds – I was one of the thousands, in a dowdy bowler, lumpy dark suit, and black overcoat, looking like the clerk of a clerk who clerked for a clerk, but a really important clerk – were quite hysterical with grief. A crowd is a fearsome thing. If you are in it, you cannot fight it, and I did not. It frothed and flashed and rolled and rumbled, filling all the streets around the mortuary and the path from that grim little house of the dead to the slightly more prominent St. Leonard’s, whose steeple, though a piercing construction, was no match for the Christchurch missile that soared Godward. But it was, as the shopkeeps say, nice.

Absorbed in the bosom of the crowd, I did note something of interest and must mark it down. In this case it was the women who were the driving force of that mass of flesh and sadness called The People, and you could feel them yearning to be close with Mary in her box, to touch it somehow. What possible motive did they have? To assure themselves that they were alive and that she was not? Or to remind themselves that as long as Jack was about, their own grip on life was fragile? No, I think it was something vaster, more universal: They invested in her, poor Welsh-Irish whore given to song when drunk and knowing no way of saying no when a thruppence was offered by a cad who wanted to have a spasm of jizz with someone other than his dour old lady; they invested in Mary Jane, shredded and splayed in her box, as Woman Universal. Somehow, I don’t know how, it would link up with the suffragette movement and other uniquely feminine power dynamos who are only now finding the voice and the means to express themselves. Mary Jane was the eternal woman, I, Ripper, was the eternal man, even though sex had been quite far from my mind as I ripped.

I watched from afar as the coffin was removed from its transportation and borne by four men into the church, where presumably Sexton Wilson and the St. Leonard’s parish priest said the proper wording in our tongue and the ancient papal one, sufficient to consecrate the poor bird and send her on the next step.