I, Ripper

I stood, shaking my head. The great Jeb, at last with nothing to say.

“All right,” said Abberline, “you’ve had your peek. Now be a good boy and share your findings with your peers and keep them out of my hair while we set about to learn all that can be learned until Dr. Phillips makes his own determinations.”

I was escorted out and set free. I went to the press boys and told them what I had learned, and they appreciated my generosity. Though our papers were at war, we were friends and colleagues at ground level, and I shared what I had, then joined the general scramble to find a phone cabinet and get it off.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE The Diary

November 11, 1888

read poor Mary Jane’s letters. Perhaps as an homage to her youth in a reasonably happy family in Wales, she signed them in her Welsh baby name, Mairsian, as Mary Jane translates into that language. They seemed to be to an ideal mother, as her own had abjured contact with her whore daughter, which again seems to me a tragedy. Is not the passion between mother and daughter one of the most intense in human life? It should never be sundered, for the damage it does to both parties is incalculable. It says something for the hideous sanctimony of our age that Mary Jane’s mother cared more for the pressure of society than for any loyalty to the produce of her own loins. A whore daughter was a disgrace, and the poor mum probably sat up nights haunted by ghosts of sexual imagery, which she tried to banish but could not, of what was being done to her daughter by various blackguards and rogues. And yet what is done by them is really, as Mary Jane knew, nothing. It swiftly becomes so routine as to be utterly meaningless.

The Mary Jane revealed is not without interest. She seems bright, though hardly brilliant, at least in her powers of observation and her knowledge of her own self. When I read of her weakness for the taste and blur of gin and how it drove her to destruction, I am not so moralistic (Jack? moralistic?) as to see it as a “weakness,” a flaw that only discipline and punishment can overcome, if one were to make the effort, and since Mary Jane was one of eleven children, no parent could spare the time to make the effort.

Her symptoms seem to me more of a sickness than a weakness. For some reason she needs the drink, it completes her, it fills her with confidence and self-value. Thus it can be treated only with medicine, not moral posture.

Why, in our modern age, has not science created something to relieve the symptoms of alcohol longing? If we can create substances that enslave people – gin, opium, tobacco, laudanum – why can we not create substances to unslave them?

I suppose, now knowing Mary Jane, I wish to construct a dream world in which she was retrieved from her descent, and thus it was not her under the blade of my butcher. She’d had her six kids and was happily married to a mill foreman in Manchester and her brightest boy would go to university, the next would take up a trade, the third would go to service, and the three girls would marry solid men and repeat the cycle. However true that may be, some other unfortunate would have been the subject of my enterprise on November 9, and who’s to say she was more or less deserving of what mad Jack served up that night.

It should come as no surprise that I am by now tired of Jack. His use is at an end. I hope to kill him soon and go on about my life, that is to say, the life I deserve, the life I am destined to have, the life I have so brilliantly contrived and boldly acted to obtain. It’s fine that I feel a little down now. It’s to be expected.

CHAPTER FOURTY Jeb’s Memoir

y prime regret was that I had been so wrong about Major Pullham, and even as we were set to prevent him from getting what he so desired, the actual Jack was stalking Mary Jane. I cursed myself for imposing my prejudice upon Dare’s superior, Holmesian deducting process. I had been a fool to open my mouth.