Garrett refused. She coaxed him, said there were no children in the house and she would take care that it only passed through her own and her husband’s hands. Garrett told her he could only supply it if there were a witness, and that witness well known to herself. She said the only person she knew in the vicinity was the milliner, Mrs Stone, three doors down from his own shop. Christiana fetched Mrs Stone, gave Garrett her own name as Mrs Wood, Hillside, Kingstown. He filled out the details in his book, which was duly signed by both women. The court’s clerk read out the transaction from. Garrett’s ‘Sale of Poisons, Registry Book’: ‘March 28,1871. – Mrs. Wood, Hillside, Kingstown; strychnia, 10 grains; destroying cats’.
Masquerading as Mrs Wood, the prisoner had come to his shop several more times over the next two months, Garrett further testifies. She talked of her garden and brought him asparagus from it and complained that the strychnia had had no effect on the destructive cats, and she needed more. Garrett was persuaded, and on 15 April supplied her with ten more grains, following the same procedure as before. After several more visits on which she began to mention that she and her husband were moving to the country, on 11 May she asked Garrett for more strychnine, this time to kill an old and diseased dog whom they couldn’t take with them. He finally granted her wish. He never saw the prisoner again until her appearance in court. The pages that had been torn out of his register under the ploy of the coroner having sent for it corresponded to the dates on which Christiana had purchased poison as Mrs Wood
Milliner Mrs Stone, the witnessing signatory in the poison register, corroborates Garrett’s evidence. She testifies that the prisoner, heavily veiled, had been to her shop to purchase another veil, giving as her reason for the need of a second that she ‘suffered from neuralgia’. She had then returned to ask her the favour of signing Garrett’s poison register. Mrs Stone went reluctantly. Mrs Wood came back a second time saying she had lost her veil: she bought another and asked for the same favour again. She needed the poison, she had said, to stuff some birds.
After Inspector Gibbs’s narrative about visiting a reclining and supposedly unwell Christiana on Sunday 13 August, there comes a clinching statement from one of those ‘downstairs’ witnesses who haunt the sinners of ‘upstairs’ Victorian life. Adelaide Ann Friend, housemaid to a woman who let rooms in her Margate house, testified that a room had been rented for half-a-crown to the prisoner on 8 August. She had stayed for two nights. In Christiana’s room the maid had seen several deal boxes, like the ones deposed. Opening them, she had found two peaches inside one – peaches had been sent to Mr Garrett. In another there were crystallized fruit. Another was empty. But after the lady left on the eight o’clock morning train to London the next day, the maid had found a small round cake, like that in the exhibits. She had eaten it and was none the worse for it.
Another servant, this time from Christiana’s Brighton address, testifies that Miss Edmunds and her mother at seven o’clock on the morning of 8 August had left to get the train for Margate. Only Christiana had a case with her. She was going to visit her sister’s grave and to look over a house. Her mother returned half an hour later, Christiana the next evening at six-thirty. The servant further tells the court that on the Friday before, 4 August, Miss Edmunds had asked her to throw away some powder packets, which were partly undone. She had kept one, thinking it might be myrrh, and had given that to Inspector Gibbs.
In response to the prosecutor’s query, the servant says that, no, the house was not bothered by cats. However, another resident’s perfectly healthy dog did suddenly die, twisting about and suffocating on 27 May, having an hour before spent a little time being patted by Miss Edmunds.
It is more or less on this morbid note that the hearing, having lasted for nearly six hours, is adjourned until the following week. When it is reconvened amidst even greater excitement, the prosecutor formally announces that he wishes to extend the charges against Christiana Edmunds to include not only attempts against all the individuals who had received parcels by post on 10 August, but also earlier attempts to administer poison to a number of people, one of whom has been seriously ill in hospital.
By the end of these preliminary hearings, the charge against Christiana will rise to murder, a rare charge against a middle-class woman. As witnesses detailing her activities – to obtain poison, infuse it into chocolate, return poisoned chocolates to Maynard’s, leave bags of poisoned sweets in sundry shops – and their effects grow in number, ‘deeply veiled’ Christiana, The Times comments, remained ‘perfectly calm and self possessed’ and employed ‘her time in writing notes to her sister [Mary] who sat below the dock, for her solicitor’. The prisoner’s countenance, the reporter goes on to observe, ‘is one likely to be remembered if once seen, and this will account for the readiness with which she was identified’. Christiana is indeed identified by a range of boys and young men who had acted as her messengers, as well as the various shopkeepers who had served her.
The excitement around the case is now such that the courtroom is completely filled an hour before start time. Lawyers overseeing the case for other implicated parties – Maynard’s, Garrett’s – and soon one representing the family of the dead boy, Sidney Barker, join the principal prosecution and defence counsels. Each poisoning charge is heard in turn and the inevitable repetition makes the evidence against Christiana rise with damning momentum. A bird-stuffer testifies to collecting, and another to examining, a dead dog picked up from 16 Gloucester Place: when opened up the dog was found to be full of poison. A handwriting expert from London deposes that the writing on the deal gift boxes and their notes corresponded to Christiana’s, while that on the notes to the chemist didn’t correspond to anyone at the neighbouring establishment, Glaisyer’s, or to the coroner’s. Christiana, in other words, has written all the notes herself.
Various expert witnesses, doctors and a professor testify to finding dangerous quantities of arsenic in the cake sent to Mrs Beard and lesser amounts in the sweetmeats in other parcels, as well as to treating those who had eaten fruit and cakes for symptoms corresponding to the effects of ‘irritant poisoning’. More young messengers depose that over the summer they had bought chocolates from Maynard’s at Christiana’s request and then brought them back to the shop after showing them to her. Shopkeepers claim that she had left bags from Maynard’s in their shops from as early as last March. When asked by one shopkeeper if she had forgotten a bag of Maynard sweets in her store, she denied it. Their contents eaten, serious illness followed. The chemist Professor Letherby reiterates the evidence he had given at the Barker inquest as to the strychnine contained in little Sidney’s stomach. The difference now is that it is clear that Christiana Edmunds not only had access to strychnine some days before the child’s death, but had also, through her messengers, had chocolates purchased from and then returned to Maynard’s, where they were put back on display shelves. These chocolates contained poison.
On 7 September, Christiana Edmunds is charged with the murder of Sidney Barker. Like a woman in a trance, she seems oblivious to the seriousness of this new charge. Nor do the newspapers indicate any particular response from her as Sidney’s uncle, Charles David Miller, a superintendent to a coach builder, describes how he asked for the ‘best’ chocolates from Maynard’s on 12 June, then took them home for his nephew who was holidaying with his parents in Brighton. The chocolate the child ate at around eight in the morning had no effect. But the one he consumed in the afternoon he complained had a ‘nasty’ taste: after about ten minutes, he started crying, his limbs became stiff and within twenty minutes he was dead. The uncle’s evidence is corroborated by his brother, the landlady and the doctor who arrived just as little Sidney was suffering his last convulsions. The post-mortem had shown a healthy child killed by poison. The doctor cut out his stomach whole, sent it in a sealed bag to Inspector Gibbs, who sent it to the expert Professor Letherby for analysis. It was found to contain a quarter of a grain of strychnine – enough to ‘produce the d
eath of a child of the age of this little boy’.
Christiana’s ‘self-possession’, the term the papers repeat in describing her, has an ambivalent weight. In part it is a compliment to her ladylikeness. But it is also an attack, a condemnation of her imperturbability in response to the death of a child. This hard-heartedness utterly undermines Victorian notions of femininity. It turns Christiana into a monster, a threatening femme fatale, whose sexuality is so rampant in its pursuit of her male prey that she can only, in the eyes of some, be mad.
3. A Wilful Killing?
In charging Christiana Edmunds with murder, the prosecutor underlined that he had
the most painful duty to discharge of proceeding against the prisoner for wilfully killing Sidney Albert Barker ... Her object.. .was that she had conceived a passion for Dr Beard, and having endeavoured to remove Mrs Beard out of the way so long ago as September last, by placing in that lady’s mouth a poisoned cream, she had endeavoured, by spreading poisoned sweets about, to give the idea that the poisoned cream she had thus tried to give to Mrs Beard was only one which she might have innocently received. The prisoner had this passion for Dr Beard, and in the desire to renew the intimacy broken off by her attempt of September last must be seen her reason for tampering with sweets.
The next day Christiana’s letter to Charles Beard which included material about the inquest was again read out in court. Against the background of the new murder charge it had a far more ominous ring. The Times reprinted it in full and noted, at the end of its ever-dry account of Friday’s proceedings, that ‘the friends of the prisoner frequently wept’. Prosecutor Stuckey spelt out that he had now found a motive for Christiana’s murderous actions following her first attempt to poison Emily Beard. Christiana ‘was influenced to poison the sweetmeats’ in order ‘to draw off Dr Beard’s suspicions, and lead to a renewal of the friendship formerly subsisting between them’.
The details of Christiana’s letter against this background of mounting incriminatory evidence took on a newly dramatic significance. They gave reasons as to why she had sent chocolates from Maynard’s for chemical analysis; why she had made a point of appearing at the Barker child’s inquest; why she had written anonymously to his father afterwards to protest that Mr Maynard hadn’t been held responsible. Everything had been done so that Charles Beard would exonerate her from his accusation of attempting to poison Emily:
My dear boy, do esteem me now. I am sure you must. What trial it was to go through, that inquest. La Madre was angry I ever had the analysis; but you know why I had it – to clear myself in my dear friend’s eyes. She always said nothing was meant by you. No, darling; you wanted an excuse for my being so slighted.
The immensely complicated plot of buying arsenic and strychnine, of testing out quantities on animals, of masquerading and hiding her tracks, of initiating random poisonings in Brighton, of travelling as a lone woman to Margate and London, of lying to all and sundry, had all been undertaken in order to deflect the suspicions of the man she loved. She needed to have Charles allow their intimacy, and perhaps crucially also allow her letter-writing to begin again. The French would have called it a crime passionnel: her favoured Italians, a delitto passionale. Both countries might have been lenient with her and rather more understanding than the Victorian English about that temporary madness – that delirium – that love and jealousy could provoke. In the English courtroom, where Christiana was tried, no legal precedent was cited. Her relationship with Charles Beard was probed only once, in the initial court proceedings.
Pressed by Christiana’s lawyer, Charles Beard stated emphatically that he had never written any letters to Christiana. He hadn’t known immediately about the first attempted poisoning of his wife because he had been out of town. Nor had he seen Christiana for some months after that time because he was travelling:
Mr Lamb – Why did you not tell her [Christiana] then that you had told your wife [about the letters]?
Witness – I had never answered her correspondence, and when I saw her I told her that I must decline to have a continuation of our friendship which had existed hitherto. I thought that was sufficient.
Mr Lamb – Say ‘intimacy’ instead of ‘friendship’.
Witness–You can put it as you like; I saw her twice about Christmas, once with her mother and once alone.
Mr Lamb – Did you take any means to prevent letters being sent to you?
Witness – I took no action in the matter to prevent letters being sent.
Whatever Christiana might have hoped, there would be no defence for her from Dr Charles Beard, nor any greater indication that the man she addressed as ‘Caro’ or ‘dear boy’ acknowledged any substantial part in what for her was a patently obsessive, but also a reciprocal, passion. Upright Victorian family man that he was or pretended to be, respectability and reputation came first for Beard, who certainly wouldn’t put his name to potentially incriminating letters. Yet that aura of respectability is one that Christiana also apparently honours. She may finish her letter to Charles ‘... make a poor little thing happy, and fancy a long, long bacio [kiss] from ... ’, but she then signs in another and secret name, ‘DOROTHEA’. In recounting her appearance at little Barker’s inquest in her letter to him, she repeatedly stresses that she never mentioned ‘your name or La Sposa’s’. ‘No, the rack shouldn’t have torn your name from me, and the only reason I said September [as the time the first poison chocolates circulated] was, that you might see I had concealed nothing.’
Unconsciously (or consciously) tempting fate, she presses her honesty home, writing that when at the inquest the reporters’ pens rushed to take down everything she uttered, these lines flew into her memory: ‘The chiel’s amang them taking notes/ and faith he’ll prent it.’ They come from Robert Burns’s ‘On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland’; translated, the full stanza reads:
If there is a hole in all your coats,
I advise you care for it:
A fellow is among you taking notes,
And faith he will print it.
The sentiment is one Burns often repeated: If you have anything to be ashamed of, beware: there’s a scribbler in your midst who’s taking notes. The truth will out and he’ll make sure of it. Power should expect no free pass from the Muse.
Christiana, like so many reading Victorians, evidently knew her Burns; but in quoting him here to Charles Beard, was she expressing not only a worry that the interrogators at the inquest would find her out, but also a veiled threat to the man she patently considered her lover?
Their secret would out, and she might be the scribbler who – at once knowingly and unwittingly – revealed it.
4. The Rumbles of History
Who was this woman who is evidently well read, who clearly enjoys writing and does so in a style not all that different from the sensation novels of her day? A woman who in her attempt to rid the world of the wife of the man she was in love with unleashed an elaborate plot of wholesale poisoning on a town in order to cover her tracks – a plot worthy of Wilkie Collins or Mary Braddon, who were themselves inevitably, like Christiana, also inspired by the press reports of their day?
In early July 1857, when she was in her twenties, Christiana would have been aware of one of the most sensational of the period’s court cases, one mingling sex and poison, and eagerly followed by all the newspapers. Twenty-one-year-old Glaswegian Madeleine Smith, like Christiana the daughter of a well-known architect, was accused of poisoning a young Frenchman, Pierre Émile L’Angelier, who, as Madeleine’s letters scandalously proved, had been her lover. ‘Our intimacy has not been criminal,’ Madeleine wrote to Émile, in a letter of 30 April 1856 quoted in court, ‘as I am your wife before God, so it has been no sin our loving each other. No darling, I am your wife.’ But Émile was only a struggling foreign clerk, one her father couldn’t approve. When a better match presented itself and Émile made himself difficult to shed and wouldn’t return her many telltale letters, it is likely
that Madeleine administered a deadly dose of poison, having tried lesser doses unsuccessfully in the past.
In any event, on the night of 23 March 1857 L’Angelier was found dead and large amounts of arsenic were discovered in his stomach. He had a letter from Madeleine on him, bidding him to come to her side – though she claimed it was from the day before. In court, neither judge nor jury wanted to believe in her guilt, and since the evidence was largely circumstantial, and hanging a terrible fate for a pretty, effervescent middle-class young lady, she was declared not guilty. ‘There is something so touching in the age, the sex and the social position of the accused,’ the judge stated, summing up a widespread wish that Madeleine be innocent and womanhood saved.
During the trial, detailed scientific evidence was given by a professor of chemistry, Frederick Perry, that Christiana might have been impressed by. Dr Perry was only one of several chemical experts who in the course of the latter half of the century took the stand in court and whose evidence was widely quoted in newspaper reports. Indeed ever since 1836, when James Marsh had developed the first test for detecting arsenic in the stomach, science had grown increasingly prominent in the witness box. In his evidence Dr Perry talked, like one of the many readily available domestic handbooks on medicine and drugs, of the quantities of arsenic needed to kill a man, the number of grains in a drahm, the most efficient forms of administering the poison. The fact that cocoa or chocolate were substances in which a considerable dose might be conveyed without the taste being instantly detected was mentioned several times. The evidence also seemed to suggest that a solid medium would be more effective than a liquid one. Some of these sensational facts may well have lodged themselves in Christiana’s mind, together with the ‘innocence’ of the attractive young middle-class woman in the dock.
Trials of Passion Page 4