The Ripper's Wife by Brandy Purdy Read Free Book Online

years. It was simply that this time I was not a guest; this was my home! I had never felt such an instant connection to a place, as though the walls had a life of their own and were reaching out with invisible hands to welcome me. I wouldn’t be packing up and leaving when boredom set in or a new sensation beckoned. Jim and I would live, love, and grow old here together. This wasn’t fleeting; this was forever! Everything here that was new now would become old, familiar, and dear, timeworn, and even more wonderful. I would give birth to our children in one of the beds upstairs, play with them in the nursery, celebrate their birthdays, and someday toast their engagements in the dining room. And if Heaven blessed me with a daughter, when she turned sixteen I would host a ball here in her honor.
    Mrs. Briggs cleared her throat and Jim gently nudged me forward.
    A man with a big black walrus mustache and fast-retreating hairline was seated at the piano, idly tricking out a tune. Abruptly he stopped and with the cold and distinctly superior air of a Prussian general stood up and came to bow stiffly over my hand.
    This was my husband’s famous brother, Michael, better known and beloved by the British public as Stephen Adams, the composer and singer of popular songs. Jim had told me all about him. Michael, whose brilliance had first been remarked when, as a boy, he sang in the church choir, was the darling of the music halls. He had toured the world, given concerts at Covent Garden and command performances for crowned heads. His fine baritone voice, equally adept at grand opera and popular ditties, everything from stirring sea chanteys to sentimental ballads, had been heard soaring in Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Wagner’s Lohengrin . I had seen him in the latter myself during my travels with Mama and had even thrown a red rose at his feet when he took his bow. But, of course, he hadn’t noticed me. Why ever would he? I was just one amongst the admiring throng. I had even heard that when he played the music halls, where the atmosphere was wont to be rowdy, some—I hesitate to call them ladies—had even been so brazen as to throw their drawers onto the stage. Some even attached little notes giving an address where he might meet them for some amorous disport if it pleased him.
    Michael’s talent had afforded him two fine homes—a London mansion overlooking Regent’s Park and a summerhouse on the Isle of Wight—and a reputation as one of London’s most desirable bachelors, rendered even more irresistible to covetous females because he appeared entirely impervious to their charms. Some whispered that he and his songwriting partner, Frederick Weatherly, were partners in an even more intimate manner. But I never knew Michael well enough to ascertain whether there was any truth to those rumors. He would later, albeit in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde scandal, suddenly marry his housekeeper, the aptly named Laura Withers, a butcher’s forty-year-old icebox-cold spinster daughter with a face like a meat cleaver who was happy to be married in name only to a famous man if it meant she could gad about town in feathered hats and fine dresses in a black japanned carriage and lord it over all the shopkeepers who had once looked down upon her as a servant.
    When he spoke to me, Michael’s words were cold and precise, like daggers of ice, and his eyes were no warmer. After meeting him, I could never again quite convince myself that I had actually seen this man bounding across a stage with a big, cheerful smile plastered across his face, joyously belting out song after song for his adoring public. Surely the footlights had played a trick upon my eyes and it was only a man who resembled my brother-in-law. This arrogantly sneering cold and condescending man standing in my parlor and that hale and hearty, bubbly and bouncy, singing and dancing fellow couldn’t possibly be one and the same man!
    Whenever Michael looked at me, his eyes