The Ripper's Wife Read Online Free

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