The Ripper's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

granted me—blue and pink were my two favorite colors, and I had gone back and forth endlessly trying to decide which color my bridal attendants should wear, provoking the dressmaker at times to hair tearing and tears. Then Jim had come along and dispensed with the dilemma altogether by saying I should divide the attendants in two and have half wear pink and the others wear blue. In the end, I had twelve bridesmaids, half of them gowned in chiffon-draped silks and rose-laden hats in shades ranging from the palest baby’s blush to the most delicious, decadent rich raspberry pink and the other six in hues of blue from delicate aqua to the midnight perfection of the world’s finest sapphires.
    When Mama stepped forward in her dusky-blue lace and satin to drape her very own pearls, a triple strand with a diamond-encrusted gold fleur-de-lis clasp, around my neck there were tears in her eyes even though she was smiling. I had never seen my mother cry, and I fell weeping into her arms. All morning I had felt like my life was only just beginning, but now, like a hammer’s blow from out of the blue, it came crashing down upon me that life as I had always known it was actually ending . My days of roaming the world with Mama were over. I would be saying good-bye to her and Holbrook. Though he would be “just a brief jaunt away” across the Channel in Paris, busy with his medical practice, and whenever the wanderlust did not seize her Mama would be there too, all of a sudden the Channel seemed as gigantic as the Atlantic.
    Mama smiled and dried my tears and chased all my fears away. She made that grossly swollen Channel shrink right back down to size. “A mere pond,” she called it, assuring me that she would always be there whenever I needed her. We had always been not only mother and daughter but dearest friends also, and nothing, not even marriage, could change that, she said, reminding me that I had been with her through three marriages. “We’ve always been together, but now it’s time for you to take center stage, darlin’. It’s time for you to play the wife, an’, in time, someone else will come along to play daughter, an’ you’ll be the mother. But”—she took my face in her hands and gazed deep into my eyes—“no matter what happens, you will always be my daughter.”
    A knock on the door told us it was time. My knees buckled beneath my gown. Suddenly I wanted to sit down on the floor and bawl like a baby. But Mama was there, bearing me up, giving me strength.
    “Just think of it, Florie. You an’ Jim are embarkin’ on a grand adventure!”
    I took a deep breath and stood up straight and Mama walked around me, arranging my veil. Silver and white mingled so closely in its fine mesh I could never decide if it was more silver or white, and little embroidered silver flowers, seed pearls, and crystals encrusted its edges. The mirrors and my mother’s eyes told me that I looked like a princess, and now, I knew, I must behave like one.
    With a nod of approval Mama pressed a bouquet of white lilies and roses framed by scalloped silver-veined lace into my hands, and I walked forward to confidently embrace my destiny.
    “Everythin’ will be all right,” Mama whispered in my ear as she relinquished my arm to Holbrook, to walk me down the aisle, and with all my heart and soul I believed her. Like a sudden summer storm, all my fears had passed.
    The smiling faces of our guests passed by me in a blur. The women’s gowns and feathered hats were like sherbet-colored clouds. Ever afterward whenever someone told me they were at my wedding, I would just nod and smile; I had to take their word for it. Those pink fairy floss clouds my head was wrapped in kept me from even remembering meeting Jim’s brothers, Michael and Edwin, though it was little more than a hasty smile, a “how d’you do?,” and a peck upon the cheek. I couldn’t have described those fellows fifteen minutes later if the police had asked me to. All