Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  The man alighted at Gracechurch Street and went up, in the teeth of a north wind, to Cornhill. A Mile End omnibus was going by; he got aboard and rode it down Leadenhall Street into Whitechapel. At Mile End Road, Stepney, he got off and, going past the alms houses and the Jews’ Burying Ground, came to the Regent’s Canal, where he turned off into the blackness.

  The next day was Christmas Day. London awoke to a heavy fall of snow. The man made his way up Camberwell Road to a house in Portland Street, Walworth. The landlord, Mr. Wignal, had recently let the back parlor to a woman and her young child; the man and the woman dined there on boiled turnips and a scrag of mutton. When, after midnight, the man walked back to Camberwell, it was no longer snowing, but the mercury had dropped to twenty-five degrees. In Carpenter’s Place, he took a latchkey from his pocket and let himself into No. 6.

  The “Babel din” of the city was blunted by the snow. There was “such a silence in it,” said Thomas Carlyle, who had at last submitted himself to the metropolis. Many persons were drunk, and the sober few, “not the fifth part of the usual number,” went “tripping along muffled in cloaks, with blue noses.”

  Carlyle was at work, that winter, on his book The French Revolution, and murder was much on his mind. How to fathom the slaughterous abysses into which France had descended in those years theoretically consecrated to liberté, égalité, and fraternité? Certainly not by emulating the historians of the previous age, the urbane, polished, ironical style of Gibbon and Voltaire. No, to interpret the fever-frenzy of France in her killing-time, he must forge a new style, as broken and obscure as Gibbon’s is lucid and elegant. A new idiom, too, he must have. He could hardly make his reader comprehend the convulsions of Paris by regurgitating the commonplaces of “enlightened Philosophism,” the soulless creed, with its desiccated abstractions and “algebraic spectralities,” that had made the mischief in the first place. He must find more primal poetries.

  Wordsworth told Emerson that he thought Carlyle “sometimes insane.” The appearance of madness in his writing is in part the effect of its construction. Its organizing unit is not, as with most writers, the sentence or the paragraph, but the sometimes verbless, often curiously capitalized phrase, which Carlyle spits out one after the other. Yet it is not merely the eccentric style and imagery of The French Revolution—with its “murky-simmering Tophets” and “Night-birds on the wing,” its “turbaned Ishmaelites” and “astrological Chaldeans”—that sets the book apart, but its expressiveness of the bewitchments under which men commit appalling acts. Carlyle’s revolutionists dance their death-dances under the influence of so many sorcerers’ spells; he paints motive and psychological impulse, not in the eighteenth-century language of reason and common sense, but with symbols lifted from archaic demonologies and defunct grimoires. The French Revolution swims with Maenads, Syrens, Gorgons, each apparently “fabulous,” yet each a mimic sign embodying (Carlyle supposes) some truth of our nature not to be articulated in a vulgar commonplace tongue.* Quite as much as De Quincey, his rival for murder’s laureateship, he finds the secret springs of wickedness in those places in the mind where reason’s writ does not run.

  The man came out of the house at 6 Carpenter’s Place with another, heavier bundle in his arms. Going up Camberwell Road, he wearied of his burden and called to a passing carrier. Might he place his load on the tailboard of the carrier’s cart?

  “Certainly,” the carrier replied. He offered to take the parcel into the cart itself; but the man demurred and placed it on the tail. He followed the cart to the Elephant and Castle, the “Piccadilly Circus of South London,” where the carrier stopped for beer. The man called for porter. He was on the point of drinking it down when he saw a stranger eyeing his parcel.

  “What are you about?” he shouted. “Are you going to steal my property?”

  The stranger denied it. The man, however, was unnerved, as one assailed by snake-haired furies might well be. He hailed a cab and, putting the bundle beneath the flap, directed the driver to take him across the Thames.

  * This was a Romantic commonplace. “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire—stories of Celæno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition,” says Lamb in his essay “Witches, and Other Night Fears,” “but they were there before. They are transcripts, types,—the archetypes are in us, and eternal.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Suspect

  A fool’s mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul.

  —Proverbs

  If William Gay entertained any doubts as to whether the head in the jar in Paddington Work House was his sister’s, the scar on the ear put them to rest. Many years before, a girl had pulled an earring out of Hannah’s ear and in doing so had torn the flesh of the lobe.

  The parish warden notified the Metropolitan Police, and Inspector George Feltham of the T Division was assigned the case. After consulting property records, he identified one James Greenacre of 6 Carpenter’s Place, Camberwell, as a suspect and applied to the magistrates for a warrant. By the evening of Sunday, March 26, he had traced his man to a house in St. Alban’s Street, Kennington Road, Lambeth. Accompanied by a constable of the L Division, Feltham reached the house between ten and eleven o’clock. The landlord told them that Greenacre had gone to bed for the night.

  Feltham knocked on his door. “Greenacre?”

  “Yes, what do you want?”

  “I want to speak to you. Open the door.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Never mind that. I want to say something to you.”

  “Wait a bit till I get the tinder-box and a light.”

  Feltham did not wait; he lifted the latch of the door, which was not fastened, and went in.

  In the dimness he saw a man in his shirt, and laid hold of him by the arm.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m an inspector of police,” Feltham said, “and hold a warrant for your apprehension on suspicion of having murdered Hannah Brown.”

  The landlord brought a candle, by the light of which Feltham read the warrant. He then asked Greenacre if he knew Hannah Brown.

  “No, I know no Hannah Brown.”

  “Were you never asked in church to a person of that name?”*

  “Yes, I was,” Greenacre admitted as he pulled on his stockings.

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know . . . you have no right to ask me these questions.”

  “I don’t mean to ask you any more questions,” Feltham said before giving him what in the United States has come to be called a Miranda warning: “and I caution you what you say to me, for whatever you do say to me I shall be obliged to repeat elsewhere.”

  Greenacre’s trousers lay beside the bed. Feltham, going over to search them, saw a woman lying in the bed, partially covered by the bedclothes.

  “What woman is that?”

  “Why, that is a woman that comes to sleep with me.”

  “She must get up also, and dress and go with me.” Feltham’s eye fell upon the woman’s hand. “What is that you have in your hand? Let me see it.”

  It was a brass “Pinchbeck” watch. Feltham took it from her, and two rings from her fingers besides. “Get up,” he said, “for you also must go along with me.”

  The woman did as she was bade. As she dressed, Feltham saw her slip something into her pocket.

  “Stop, what have you got in your pocket?” He searched it and found, among other things, a pair of Cornelian ear-drops and two tickets for articles pawned in a Walworth pawnshop.

  Greenacre gestured toward some boxes that stood packed and corded for traveling.

  “It’s a good job you’ve come [tonight],” he said to Feltham. “I should have been off to America [tomorrow].”

  The prisoners were conveyed by coach to Paddington Green police station, where they were confined in separate cells. About half past twelve, the night sergeant, Michael Brown, found Greenacre lying on his back on the floor with a
silk handkerchief “tied into a noose round his right foot, and the other part of the handkerchief tied round his neck.” He had apparently preferred a slow and painful death by strangulation to the ignominy of public trial and execution. When Sergeant Brown cut the handkerchief, Greenacre was “stiff” and “apparently dead.” Dr. Girdwood, however, revived him. “I don’t thank you for what you have done,” Greenacre said afterwards. “I wish to die—damn the man that is afraid to die—I am not.”

  News of the arrests spread swiftly, and when at noon the next day the prisoners were taken in a coach to Marylebone Police Court, crowds of people lined the streets to see them pass. Greenacre, in a brown greatcoat, put on a brave front. Although he was in pain on account of his neck, he carried himself with much coolness, and it was observed that he steadily met the eyes of those who fixed him with their stares. His paramour and fellow prisoner, Sarah Gale, was more placid still and “seemed quite unconcerned at her situation.”

  The prisoners were led into the police court and placed at the bar before the magistrates.

  * That is, had banns of marriage been published (“asked”) by a clergyman inquiring whether any of his flock knew cause or just impediment why Hannah Brown and James Greenacre should not be joined together in holy matrimony.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Peculiar Odor

  No man truly knoweth himself but he groweth daily more contemptible in his own eyes.

  —Jeremy Taylor

  Many people have affected, and some few sages have perhaps genuinely felt, indifference at the prospect of their own deaths. But surely Carlyle spoke for the greater number of us when he said that it is a hard thing to die. Were it not, we should feel less interest than we do in the man who knows that the odds are a hundred to one he will be hanged in a fortnight. If the Crown proved its case, James Greenacre would find a halter around his neck before the roses bloomed. Few things bring out a man’s character as effectually as the prospect of the hangman’s knot. The death-grapple of Greenacre was no exception: it laid bare the truth of his nature and reproduced, in a compressed form, its peculiar moral odor.

  He had been born, in 1785, into a family of farmers in Norfolk. Possibly through the agency of a generous stepfather, he had been able to set up, before he was twenty, as a greengrocer in London; in time, he had become the proprietor of a greengrocer’s shop in the Kent Road. He had speculated as boldly in real estate and politics as he had in greengrocery. He was, at one time, master of more than a dozen properties in Southwark and Camberwell, and when he was not pushing his business interests south of the Thames he might be found in the White Lion in Wych Street, voicing radical opinions on the great public questions of the day. Such, indeed, was his reputation as a coffee-house politician that he was elected, in 1832, overseer of his parish, that of St. George the Martyr in Southwark.

  But like many another man who would brazen his way into eminence, Greenacre courted fortune with borrowed money, and soon enough the bills came due. He attempted to recoup his losses by going into the tea trade, and his method of establishing himself in that market was, to say the least, ingenious. Drawing on the rhetorical skills he had refined in the White Lion, he composed a pamphlet warning his fellow citizens of the evils of spurious teas adulterated with the leaves of the sloe tree or blackthorn. Doubtless many customers were only too happy to purchase their tea from a merchant so devoted to the purity of his merchandise; but just as Greenacre’s fortunes seemed likely to mend, the Excise officers seized a quantity of sloe leaves in his shop. A heavy fine was laid upon him “for this fraud upon the public and government.”

  Unable to pay the fine, Greenacre fled to America, leaving behind him a mass of debts and three dead wives.* In New York he attempted to redeem his failures with a washing machine of his own invention. But although he obtained a patent for the device, the venture failed. He took to writing pamphlets in which he set forth his grievances against his persecutors, and he appealed to the citizens of the United States to come to the aid of an “injured Englishman” who had suffered unjustly at the hands of His Majesty’s Excise. But the appeal went unanswered and, after being twice imprisoned in New York for libel, he returned to England, where he had been declared a bankrupt. In London he engaged in a new venture, peddling an “amalgamated candy” which, he claimed, had for its principal ingredient a potent herb he had discovered in America, a most effectual remedy for maladies of the throat and chest. At the same time, he continued his exertions as a pamphleteer, publishing an address in which he implored a “generous public” to help him “satisfy all his just debts, and re-establish himself in business again.” Oddly enough, this appeal, too, went unanswered.

  With the failure of these projects, Greenacre determined on another path to ease and plenty: he would marry a woman of property. The untimely death of the first object of this speculative affection, Hannah Brown, did nothing to diminish his faith in the underlying soundness of his plan, and in January 1837 he placed the following advertisement in The Times:

  Wanted, a partner, who can command £300 to join the advertiser in a patent to bring forward a new-invented machine, of great public benefit, that is certain of realising an ample reward. Applications by letter only (post-paid), for J. G., at Mr. Bishop’s, No. 1, Tudor-place, Tottenham Court-road.

  At least one woman answered the notice. On February 4, two days after Hannah Brown’s severed legs were found among the willows of Coldharbour Lane, Greenacre replied to the lady. Describing himself as a thirty-eight-year-old widower (in fact he was past fifty), he told his correspondent that no man could “have a greater aversion than myself to advertising for a wife.” But circumstances had forced him to overcome his natural delicacy; he had in his possession an invention (the washing machine) of incalculable value; he wanted only “a female companion, with a small capital, one with whom a mutual and tender attachment might be formed, who would share with me in those advantageous pecuniary prospects which are now before me, and thereby secure the advantages of my own production.” Greenacre assured his prospective bride that a number of “scientific gentlemen of property” were “anxious to co-operate” with him in the washing-machine venture; but he shrank from so mercenary an arrangement. He wanted a “partner for life.” His propositions were of an “honourable nature,” and offered in a spirit of “sacred candour”; and yet, strange to say, the lady refused him.

  * The first of Greenacre’s wives, a girl from Woolwich, died suddenly of what Greenacre called “a putrid sore throat.” He next married the daughter an Essex farmer; according to Greenacre, she “died of a brain fever brought on by exerting herself, I believe, riding on horseback, whilst on a visit at her own relations.” Fifteen months later he wed Miss Simmonds; she succumbed, by his account, to cholera in 1833, the year he fled to America. None of the deaths, it seems, excited suspicion at the time; but given Greenacre’s subsequent history, one would like to know more about them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sarah Gale

  She was sparing of the truth, loved equivocation and duplicity. . . .

  —D’Alton

  A new age was struggling to be born. It did not yet have a name, but the figure who was to give it one was about to make her debut on the world stage. This, however, is to anticipate, for in April 1837 she was a girl of seventeen living in seclusion in Kensington Palace. With the coming of the spring, she and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, resumed their walks in Kensington Gardens. They were followed, at a respectful distance, by a detective tasked with keeping an eye on an old man who had taken to bowing repeatedly to the young lady, and who had named his cottage in her honor.

  Greenacre had but one hope of living to see the dawn of the Victorian age. He must convince if not the world, at any rate a jury of his peers that the death of Hannah Brown was an accident—a dreadful one to be sure, but not the sort of thing that justified his being hanged by the neck at Newgate. In his initial examination in Marylebone Police Court, Greenacre offered the first of s
everal accounts he was to give of the circumstances in which Mrs. Brown had paid her debt to eternity. He admitted at once that he knew her, had indeed engaged himself to marry her; but he had sought her hand only because he believed that she could “command at any time three or four hundred pounds.” On Christmas Eve he was cruelly undeceived. Mrs. Brown appeared on the doorstep of his house in Camberwell Place that afternoon, somewhat “the worse for liquor.” Over tea, he told her he had made “inquiry about her character, and had ascertained that she had been to Smith’s tally-shop in Long Acre, and tried to procure silk gowns” in his name. Hannah conceded that she had very little savings; she seems in fact to have been living day to day, hand to mouth. Yet when Greenacre quite naturally expressed displeasure at the deception that she had practiced upon him, she “put on a feigned laugh” and coolly replied that he was as guilty as she. Had he not lied to her about the extent of his own property? The imaginary farm at Hudson’s Bay? She “then began to sneer and laugh,” Greenacre said, “at the same time rocking herself backwards and forwards in her chair.”

  This was too much for him; and while she was “on the swing” he impulsively put his foot to the chair. She fell backwards in it to the floor, and the back of her head came with “great violence” against a clump of wood which lay there. This “alarmed me very much,” Greenacre said, “and I went round the table and took her by the hand, and kept shaking her, but she appeared entirely gone.”

  “I deliberated for a short time” and “unfortunately determined on putting her away” in order to “conceal her death.” “I thought it might be more safe that way than if I gave an alarm of what had occurred.” He did not seek help lest he “should be set down for a murderer”; to dispose of the body secretly was altogether the “safest and most prudent plan.”