Read The Ripper's Wife for Free Online

buying me things seemed to give him as much pleasure as it did me, and I didn’t want to spoil it for either of us. If money must be worried about, time enough for that later, I decided. Tomorrow shouldn’t be allowed to spoil today . Right now we’re still dancing; the fiddler can wait to be paid!
    Back at the hotel, with my hair unbound, in a boudoir gown of lavender silk overlaid with sheer white net embroidered with a swarm of shimmering, iridescent pearly-winged butterflies, I sat on Jim’s lap and grew blissfully giddy and dizzy from his countless kisses and the bubbly gold champagne from the glass he held to my lips. He fastened a necklace of amethysts framed by golden flowers and opal-winged butterflies around my throat and slid a luscious lavender and creamy mint jade-winged butterfly comb into the “molten gold waves” of my hair and told me how much he loved and adored me before he lowered me onto the polar bear rug before the fire and made love to me until we fell into an exhausted slumber.
    The next day he took me to a photographer’s studio and, holding a pink rose and wearing the cerulean-blue satin and silver lace gown he had bought me and the pearls Mama had given me, I imitated Madame Vigée-Lebrun’s famous portrait of Marie Antoinette. Afterward, an artist would carefully apply colors to tint it. It would always be Jim’s favorite picture of me. He would even take it with him when he traveled without me; it would proudly adorn his desk in a beautiful silver frame until the day he died.
    At the races and gambling tables I stood beside him, breasts heaving, lips parted, with ecstatic excitement, eyes bright and intent upon the horses, cards, ebony-eyed dice, piles of clacking chips as sweet and enticing as candy, or the spinning black and red wheel that could make or break fortunes. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but Jim said that like the diamond horseshoe he felt naked without, I always brought him luck. He had even taken to kissing my hand after I had stroked the horseshoe before he placed his bets.
    We both believed that games of chance were the most fascinating, exciting thing in the world; nothing surpassed the thrill that took possession of us when we played, not even the passion we found together in bed. We reveled in Lady Luck’s fickle and flighty embrace, constantly trying to coax, court, and woo her. She was aloof and cool one moment, passionate and all-embracing the next. Beautiful and pitiless, sometimes she hurt us, but we always came back for more. Many years later, when Lady Luck had long since spurned and turned her back on me, I would see a most delightful film, full of dancing, fun, farce, and mistaken identities, The Gay Divorcee, in which the debonair Fred Astaire loftily spoke the words “Chance is the Fool’s name for Fate.” I wish those words had come to me in those heady, halcyon days with Jim; I would have embroidered them on samplers to deck the walls and handkerchiefs for both of us, and even on the hems of my petticoats, they so perfectly expressed how we felt.
    On our last day in Paris Jim woke me with a kiss, then hurried me into the frothy white muslin frock with the pearl buttons and straw hat he had laid out for me. He took me back to Versailles, to picnic at the Petit Trianon. We fed the swans and golden carp bits of bread and cake and lay back in each other’s arms, filled with contentment, lazy as two cats who had supped their fill on cream, and kissed and dreamed. Life could not have been more perfect or exquisite!
    Then came Florence, Rome, and Venice. The Grand Canal, like a picture on a postcard: a starless black night lit by torches. A golden-haired girl in a golden gown and a shawl of beaded black lace. Black plumes in the rich gleaming coils of her high-piled hair. A mask twirled idly on a long gilded stem, playing a coy game of peekaboo with her face. She reclined languidly in a gondola, leaning back against her husband’s chest, watching in