The Celtic Heart of Tillytops

The Celtic Heart of Tillytops

 - the Secret Life of Mary Jane Kelly 

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton 

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"A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets."

- Rose Dawson 

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Mary knew that she'd left London too soon. The fact that she'd given the girl she knew her apartment in Whitechapel the night when she couldn't sleep was one thing. The fact that she'd been searching for her ex-boyfriend at the fish market after that was another. But coming back to her apartment at 13 Miller's Court and finding the body of the woman she had given her apartment to brutally murdered in her place was a shock not only to her system, it was a shock to her entire spirit. It was an attack on her as a woman. 

And she'd felt that she'd been a man in her earlier life, a man in love with a woman. And she'd felt that the man she had been had lost the woman he loved. And now she was a woman that had lost a man. Not only was the woman that she'd given the apartment to brutally murdered in her place, her boyfriend marched out of her apartment with the heart of the woman in his hands. Mary turned around and threw up in a corner of a neighboring street, crying bitter tears that felt as if they penetrated her deepest spirit.

The world reeled around her until she could scarcely remain standing. It was a shock that reached far beyond her body. It struck at her very soul, as though someone had murdered not only another woman, but the life Mary herself might have lived.

At 15, she'd already left home, home in Ireland, knowing that she couldn't go back because of her father and his enormously strong temper. He blamed her for killing her mother, and she hadn't. Her mother had fallen into the lake and drowned. But it wasn't Mary's fault. Mary was innocent to begin with. So she left Ireland at a whim, her dear home, to leave for the unknown world of England. And somehow she fell into luxury prostitution and ended up in Paris, calling herself Marie Jeannette, walking around in the Tuileries palaces. But she'd only been there for two weeks when she came back to London, still calling herself Marie Jeannette, not knowing that Mary Jane Kelly actually only called herself Marie Jeannette because her soul remembered that she'd been in love with Marie Antoinette back when she was Axel von Fersen. Her soul didn't know, but she was still in love with Marie Antoinette, her soul remembering the twin flame that once had been guillotined in 1793. And now she was standing near Miller's Court, seeing her ex-boyfriend take off with a heart of a woman murdered in her place. 

A woman that she only knew very, very slightly came up to her and asked her what was the matter. And Mary stuttered some irreconcilable strange words, not knowing what to answer. There were words of pain, of ex-boyfriends, but no words of any woman that had been killed in her place. And so Mary Jane wandered about the streets of Whitechapel, remembering that she'd wanted to warn Elizabeth Stride of the strange man in the Ten Bells that had looked at them. But Elizabeth Stride was nowhere to be seen. And a few hours later, Elizabeth Stride had been murdered by Jack the Ripper. And now, now she found out that her ex-boyfriend probably was Jack the Ripper, Joseph Barnett, who had hated the fact that Mary Jane Kelly had given over her apartment to another prostitute. But Joseph Barnett had the key to her apartment, so naturally she was able to be murdered by her ex-boyfriend, the woman that she'd given her bed to over the night because she didn't sleep. And so Mary Jane, crying like crazy, wandered the streets of Whitechapel, the hundred pounds in her pocket just there because a good rich friend that she knew had given it to her. 

He had told her: "Take care of yourself, Mary, there's way too much pain in your heart. You have to nourish your soul. Use this money wisely. Leave London. You know what is happening here right now. You don't want to be the next victim." 

After witnessing Joseph leaving the flat with the heart, Mary remembered Joseph threatening her with her life if she ever disobeyed him, threatening to track her down and kill her.

And so around ten thirty that morning when another woman had died in her place, a woman she had given her bed to out of the goodness of her heart, Mary found herself back at the Ten Bells, drinking a gin. This was way before the body had been discovered, mutilated, and Mary Jane ended up in the Ten Bells with her good friend Lizzie Albrook, who told her, "please leave London, do not worry. The woman mutilated in your place will be called Mary Jane Kelly, but you've suffered too much. Your sponsor was right. Go back to Ireland. 

"But Lizzie," Mary Jane said, "people will think that the murdered woman is me. History will say that I am dead."

Lizzie answered: "My dear, Kelly is not your real name. Your name is O'Brien. No one will ever know. So go back to Ireland, make up with your father and your brothers, live another life, leave all this behind you. You've been a mother to all of us. Your secret is safe with me."

Mary Jane responded: "Wait a minute, Joseph Barnett is Jack the Ripper. Isn't it right that I tell the world this?"

And Amanda said: "No, you've suffered enough. Just go. I will not reveal your secret. Your soul is in shambles. It has been for 11 years."

Mary Jane smiled. "I love you, Lizzie."

Lizzie nodded. "Live a good life, Mary Jane O'Brien."

And as Mary Jane walked out of the Ten Bells that day, leaving everything behind, she took a coach to the harbor and a boat to Ireland. And there she arrived at home in Limerick, embracing her father, who cried as he saw her, calling her by her nickname, Tilly Tops.

Mary looked across the landscape of her youth. The hills and valleys still evoked a sense of gratitude in her spirit. It was the feeling she'd had walking with her father over to the hillside lake to pick daisies, daisies that she had given to her mother for her birthday. And standing there overlooking the hills she felt as if she were nine again and suddenly, in spite of the horrors she had experienced the last few years, little Mary awoke again and sat down next to her in her mind and spoke to her. Little Mary was a figment of her soul, but she was also the dearest part of her tender soul. The child she thought she'd left behind. 

Adult Mary looked over at herself as a nine year-old with a feeling that felt like admiration. It had been there when she walked the half hour to the lake with her father. The sheer fact that he walked with her to the lake to pick a bouquet of her favorite flower at all to give to her mother, that was enough for her to feel a kind of love for her father she had never ever felt before. "You must really love me, father," she had thought to herself. And the funny thing was that he saw her expression and knew it was admiration and answered: "I love you, too, Tillytops!" 

Little Mary had giggled at the name her Aunt Tilly had given her after making her three small blouses with flowers for her sixth birthday. She had wanted to wear these Tillytops so often that she wore nothing else and so her father just called her Tillytops.

The daisies had not wilted by the time her father and Mary arrived at the house and her mother put them in an old small brandy glass and set them on the garden table. 

Now, sitting there with her younger self, Mary gave herself the admiring gaze she had given her father. 

When little Tillytops leaned against her older self, Mary sighed. "I love you, Tillytops, you know that?"

Little Tillytops nodded. "I love you, too!" 

There was a small pause in the conversation, where the girl seemed to wonder what to say. When she did, it felt like sunlight. The sun that showered down on Kilkenny. "Then why are you sad?"

Little Tillytops reached up and put one finger on the falling tear that rolled down the adult Mary's cheek. Mary chuckled sweetly, touched by her younger self's compassion. "I just think all that pain that I've gone through the past years wasn't necessary."

The adult Mary looked into the open of Ireland and shivered, the warmth of her younger self causing her to smile. "After Mom died, you know, I just lost track. Dad blamed me for the accident because I was picking daisies again, something I adored doing, and then ..." 

Mary started weeping, guffawing gulps of tragedy. 

"Oh, God, Tillytops, I never meant for that to happen."

The little version of herself leaned closer, embracing her old self. "You weren't to blame. You were doing something you had been taught would bring your parents joy, wanting to connect with your mother as you did with your father."

Little Tillytops looked up at Mary and smiled, drying another tear. This time, she held up the tear on her left forefinger and held it up toward the light. 

"See? The tear shines in the sunlight." 

Little Tillytops smiled at her adult self. 

"Tears are diamonds searching for the light." 

Mary looked over at the little girl. "I haven't lost you, have I? In spite of the bad roads I took into ging and the late nights in Whitechapel, the mean drunks and prostitution rings, the escape now from London, where the girl I gave my flat to at Miller's Court died in my place, everyone thinking I was the butchered girl, Joseph yelling at me for being a horrible girl, all of that doesn't make me a horrible girl, does it?"

Tillytops shook her head. "How many poor girls did you give a night's sleep in your small room at Miller's Court, Mary?"

Mary shrugged, now feeling like a woman wrapped in a blanket again. "I don't know. 17, 18. Why?" 

"You think everyone does that?" 

"What?"

"Well," Tillytops nodded. "Walks about Whitechapel at night to give another poor girl a night's rest away from the poor house. Lizzie was right. You were like a mother. You never hurt anyone. This will end the murders. Joseph can't continue now that he lied about you. The police are now aware of his whereabouts. He is no longer anonymous. If you tell the police now, they will likely wonder who you are and why you know. The other woman was buried in your place. " 

Mary shook her head.

The little girl took her older self's hand. "You were not to blame for Joseph breaking in to your flat. He likely murdered her because he hated the fact that you gave your bed to other prostitutes. He didn't want you to solicit." 

Mary shook her head again.

"You gave the girl what you thought would be a good night's sleep. Nobody could have foreseen what happened. Live a good life."

Mary now felt hope. For the first time in the month since the escape, she could stop blaming herself. The December wind was not as ferocious and the temperature was lukewarm enough to have her keep her coat open. 

"I know who Jack the Ripper is, Tillytops. He fooled me with his love. He has been playing a double game with the police this entire year, sending them letters, but at the same time going to them to give them pointers about suspicious people. And who would suspect a person that comes up to you and tells you about suspects?"

The little girl nodded. "Yes. But it is out of your hands. It is either them or you. Choose you. Choose your family."

Tillytops looked down. "And you thought it was unemployed man in the Ten Bells."

Mary nodded. "He was sitting in the corner of the Ten Bells, you know, and I was playing cards with Lizzie and another girl, Liz Foster, and glanced over at this man who was pretending to do bookkeeping or something. For an unemployed man, unnecessary if you ask me. It was creepy. I think Liz, who somehow still wasn't really a completely used to East End ways due to her Swedish heritage, just felt uneasy around someone gazing at her all the time. So she broke off our game, ordered another pint for the road. I sat there with Foster for an hour, getting drunk, but I had such an uneasy feeling that I told my friend I had to warn Liz. I think the guy noticed my glances and took a note of me."

Little Tillytops withdrew from her adult self and raised her eyebrows. "He took of note of you?"

"Well, yes," Mary started, feeling the chills running down her back, the slight chill of Ireland not even a whiff of a reason. In fact, this bench was the one she had always sat at when she had been Tillytops. "Everyone knew the bloke as an antisemetic and misogynistic bastard, to tell the truth. Annie Chapman, God rest her soul, called him 'the rat' because he always squealed during the act."

Tillytops shook her head. "I didn't want to know that." 

The slightest warm wind ruffled Tillytops hair as the Irish flair bound old and new together. 

"What was his name?"

"George Hutchinson."

"But the Ripper was never Hutchinson. You met Joseph roaming about that night and never suspected him. He said he was on the way to the Fishmarket. But you forgot his shift started three hours later."

"Joseph was on his way to kill Elizabeth."

Mary shook her head. 

"I didn't even tell anyone over there my real name. Everyone thought I was Mary Jane Kelly. No one will be looking for Mary Jane O'Brien. They even think my family lives in Wales because of my ex-husband who died in that factory accident. Peter Davies." 

Mary closed her coat, shook her head and pulled Tillytops closer to her body. 

"I only married Pete to spite my father and because we had that fight I didn't dare return and called myself Kelly after Aunt Tilly's new husband. So, my daisy picking killed Mom and my favorite blouses were drenched with prostitution."

"How so?"

"Every time I think of my time as a hooker, I think of Aunt Tilly's husband."

Tillytops ripped herself out of Mary's embrace and pulled the woman toward her. The look was stern. Even angry. It was almost as if this vision was not her younger self. She almost saw her mother in that gaze. The mother that knew that her daisy picking was not to blame for her death. What confused Mary more was that she saw someone else in Tillytops gaze. Someone from another time entirely. Someone she had thought of when she took walks in the garden of the Tuileries palace. It was uncanny how she had somehow been pulled into the prostitution rings in France and chosen the name Marie Jeannette for herself. Then, taking breaks between customers, she walked the gardens, hearing tourguides speaking of Marie Antoinette's presence here during her dark times. She had heard of that woman and immediately felt a deep connection to this unfortunate woman, who she believed was nothing like they had said. 

Sitting there at her favorite bench in Ireland, her real home, she saw the soul of Marie Antoinette, the champion of misunderstood women, almost as if she were her own guardian angel.

"You were never to blame, Mary, just misunderstood," the girl said. "Pushed into situations that had nothing to do with you. Picking daisies because you had learned that people liked that, especially your mother whom you wanted to impress. When she actually agreed to come with you to the lake, picking daisies were the perfect way to affirm that love. You could never have known that she would trip on that stone and fall. The subsequent fight with your father became a domino effect of escape, a bad marriage and following tragedy of getting involved with the wrong people. The mix-up in Whitechapel with your live-in poor girl who looked like you and probably was mistaken for you was a cataclysm that had to happen. Her death was not your fault. It brought you back home." 

Mary looked back across the wasteland of lost majesties into the haunted kingdom of the past, feeling the shadows of a forlorn realm of yesteryear, feeling how imperfect angels like the misunderstood Marie Antoinette caressed her cheek with understanding masquerading as her younger self.  

"All you need is to find back home inside your heart, Mary."

The voice of the woman was so familiar that Mary began to cry. She had no idea what it meant, only that it was an echo of a bygone past of another life lived as a secret love, as secret as her own past as the illusion of Mary Jane Kelly. 

"I am home," Mary spoke in a soft whisper. 

But the creature, the entity, whatever it had been, posing as her younger self or Marie Antoinette, was gone. Mary looked around and saw only thin air on the bench. But further away, her father stood looking at her. He wore an expression of melancholy. There was nostalgia there. He half smiled. It was a smile of recollection. 

"I brought you these."

He stretched one aging hand holding a bouquet of small daisies bound together by a grass straw between his thumb and his forefinger. 

Mary took the flower bouquet and as she did, she held on to his hand, clutching it, stroking his forefinger with her hand. Another tear, happy this time, rolled down her cheek. 

"Thank you," she said. 

The father nodded and came to sit down. As he did, he sighed and within the sight words were formed. Words of searching wisdom caught between the oncoming dusk and the eternal consciousness. 

"Amazing that Ireland still has daisies in December," he spoke. "But the lakeside always has some," the father answered, "even now." 

He turned to his daughter.

"Mary," he smiled bitterly. "Stay with me and never leave. There are jobs. There are men. There is food. There is family. You are now Mary Jane O'Brien and if anyone asks, you were in America."

And so, Mary and her father embraced as her brothers came and joined them. They all cried, because the sky had never looked so beautiful. 

Mary Jane O'Brien worked in Limerick as a seamstress and married a pub owner. They had children. In 1912, Mary won tickets to board the Titanic. 

In April 12th, 1912, she and her husband died in the North Atlantic when the ship sank. The children survived. 

Noone ever found out that Joseph Barnett was Jack the Ripper. 

Mary and Lizzie and their families kept the secret. 

But Mary Jane reincarnated and remembered her past. Her soul has now found peace.