Mary

by Amberlin

Before he was famous, she knew him. In the red autumn of 1888, secluded by the four walls of her dismal room against the choking air of Whitechapel, Mary Kelly sits to compose a lone letter to a lover long past. But what she creates instead is a clear and moving look at her own life as a servant girl in Yorkshire and her descent into the disreputable underbelly of London.

1. Chapter 1

I Am As Constant As the Northern Star

Chapter Text

On the eve of my second wedding, my good friend of many years asked me an odd question- how do you manage it?

I had asked him to clarify, unaccustomed to hearing such a tone from him and feeling discomfited by the sudden switch of roles after twenty years of a routine relationship.

"How did you find another one? Did you not love Mary?"

"You can love more than one person," I'd replied, surprised by the question. He knew how I had felt about Mary.

"You can?" he murmured and then abruptly dropped the subject like a hot kettle. I brushed it off as his natural naivety when it came to all things about women and the softer emotions. It would not be until thirty years later that I would discover the full import of his words. He died in 1938, peacefully, and passed all his belongings onto me, though my own age is creeping up on me, and I feel they will not stay in my possession for very long.

It was amongst these effects that I discovered the truth about my friend, that aloof and confirmed bachelor I had known so well. In his square tin box, the one in which he stored all his important papers for safekeeping and the one which I had not been allowed to touch, I found an odd assortment of effects: an ivory comb, an old scrap of paper with the oblique statement: St. Patrick 10-66-66, a man's emerald ring, another ring that looked startlingly like a wedding band, and a book with drops of old blood, dark and purple like drops of plum juice, dotted all over the soft leather cover. The book was an early copy of the Lewis fairy tale, probably worth a great deal if it had been in better condition. Stuffed inside was a cluster of papers, not dusted with blood but soaked in it. The bottom of each aged page was dry and brittle to the touch.

I stared at it for a great length of time, shocked at what I was seeing. My friend had somehow gotten his hands on these things, which belonged to a woman of considerable fame (from her death, not her life), and the only way he could have come across them was thievery. I would not have been surprised at this, for he was not above such things when he felt it necessary, and as I read the manuscript I noted that nothing it contained would have aided the police, had it been handed over to them.

But what it did contain was certainly enlightening.