Maria, on the other hand, demonstrated the same firmness of character that she had shown from the beginning and indeed right throughout her trial. She went to her grave, taking all her secrets with her.
As Elizabeth herself would.
“Why, Mr Lacey, what a coincidence. This must be the third weekend running that we have bumped into one other!”
Coincidence be damned, and it also was the fourth time that she had encountered him. The first occasion, of course, she’d dismissed as pure chance. Then she noticed the glint in his eye. The same glint Sir Henry Wilton used to get when a rare Eastern treasure came on the antiquities market, which meant he wouldn’t rest until he had added it to his collection. Like all collectors, Sir Henry was obsessive and Elizabeth recognized the trait in William Lacey at once.
“Upon my soul, Mr Lacey, I do believe you have grown a set of mandy whiskers since last I saw you.”
He made an expansive gesture with his hands. “I cannot deny it.”
Elizabeth stepped back to admire what was still little more than stubble. “I do declare, whiskers make you quite handsome, Mr Lacey.”
He gave her that sly, sideways smile from beneath his ginger lashes that somehow made her skin crawl.
“Not handsome, Miss Clarke.”
With a body that had grown pudgy from too much rich food and too little exercise and skin that was waxy from too much time spent indoors, William Lacey was fully aware of his physical shortcomings. Just as he was conscious of his assets.
“Never handsome, I think.”
He wound his ridiculously expensive timepiece, to prove the point.
Elizabeth’s smile was wry. “Distinguished, then.”
He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Might I buy you a cream tea, Miss Clarke?”
And so it was, over scones and jam and clotted cream, that the dance began. Elizabeth was no fool. In certain circles, for a woman to remain unmarried when she was approaching thirty was the ultimate humiliation. But a governess, being neither fish nor fowl, fell into no such category, and she, too, knew her worth. She had no money, no prospects, and although she made the most of her appearance and lacked neither wit nor intelligence, there were plenty with more to offer.
Except men are men.
They all want to melt the Ice Queen . . .
“It is unfortunate, Miss Clarke, that I was forced to evict a widow, a toddler and her baby from that very house on Wednesday.”
Cream teas had grown into long walks, dinners, picnics, carriage rides. He particularly liked to show her the properties he owned in Shoreditch, Mile End, Stretford, Stepney, and would always let drop the amount he raked in from rents and what he liked to describe as “other enterprises”.
“Number 19, at the end there, is currently leased at three times the customary rate.” His tongue flickered over his thick, pink lips. “The gentleman in question is being sought by the police, although he assures me it is a misunderstanding and that he is completely innocent. Naturally, I would not rent to him otherwise.”
“Naturally.”
And so the dance moved on, with both partners keeping smoothly in step with William Lacey continuing to promote his wealth and Elizabeth remaining out of reach. It was exactly as she told Inspector Haywood in her statement. No impropriety took place. But the situation could not continue for ever, and it came to a head at the end of September.
“The orphans you threw in the street, Mr Lacey. Do you not fear for their future?”
More tea, more cakes. Elizabeth did not think she would eat another scone again.
“It is a very different future I am preparing, Miss Clarke.” He shot her his strange, sideways glance. “The increase I will be able to obtain from the next tenant will add towards a very comfortable retirement.”
Elizabeth folded her hands on the table. “You are a long way from retirement age, I think, Mr Lacey.”
Another sly glance. “With the right financial background, a man can retire to the country earlier than one might otherwise have expected.” He cleared his throat. “I’m told two can live as cheaply as one there.”
At long last the dance was at an end –
“You seem to forget that you are still married, Mr Lacey.”
“Technically speaking, Miss Clarke. But in the, uh, country, folk may not always be privy to the full details of a person’s marital status. If you take my meaning.”
A bogus marriage? And what would she get out of it, if he died? He could change his will at any moment without her knowing, and she wouldn’t have a leg to stand on and Elizabeth knew all about collectors. It wasn’t that they didn’t cherish what they had. But the pleasure of ownership didn’t compare with the excitement of chasing after something new.
Elizabeth leaned across the table and smiled from under lowered lashes.
“I have always enjoyed the country, Mr Lacey.”
And before he could say anything in reply, the bell in the tea-shop was tinkling at her departure, and by the time he had settled the bill, she was out of sight.
A week passed, a week in which she did not reply to any of his notes. Notes which arrived every day, sometimes twice, and which she burned immediately. Especially since the address was still Sir Henry’s.
“Thank you.”
She gave the boy who intercepted them his usual farthing, and ten days after their last meeting, set off for Stretford, knowing full well that William Lacey would be at home, going through his accounts, as he did every Thursday afternoon.
“Miss Clarke! Elizabeth!” His surprise was unambiguous, his delight genuine. “Come in.”
As he poured them both a glass of sherry, there was no reference to his recent blizzard of letters, no mention of the proposition made across a plate of Eccles cakes. Instead, he tried to kiss her.
She pushed him away with a firmness that surprised him. And a new dance began.
“You do not find me attractive, do you?” he asked at length.
“No, sir, I do not.”
“No.” He nodded slowly. Sipped the remainder of his sherry. Then stood up, walked across the room and unlocked the top drawer of his bureau. “But you find these attractive, I suspect. Securities, madam. Five thousand pounds in this sheaf alone.” He pursed his lips. “Now don’t tell me you don’t find that attractive.”
As she stared at the bundle of papers tied up with red string, Elizabeth knew there could be no more beating around the bush. For either of them.
She drew a deep breath. Looked him squarely in the eye.
“The honest truth, Mr Lacey? The honest truth is that those things mean nothing to me, nothing at all.”
She paused, then walked across to stand so close to him that her breath misted up the lenses of his spectacles.
“But if you were to turn those securities into twenty-pound notes and spread them over the bed in the honeymoon suite of the Claybourne Hotel in the name of Mr & Mrs John Smith—” She blew softly in his ear. “Why, William, I would be yours to command.”
Breezing out without a backward glance, she tried to dispel the notion of his oily little body pounding up and down on hers. Surely that was the most repugnant prospect in the world but, after five months, Elizabeth knew William Lacey inside out. She knew he would not hesitate to cash in those securities. Just as she knew he would not hesitate to buy them back the following day!
But one step at a time . . .
For not once, since standing beneath that gaunt, dark gibbet in Horsemonger-lane, had she forgotten Maria Manning. Maria Manning had also grown used to a life in which the beds were soft, the rooms were warm, there was sufficient money to pay for both food and fuel. Maria the lady’s maid wanted that for the rest of her life, as did Elizabeth the governess, and hearing about the widows and orphans who were thrown into the street only hardened her resolve against being in thrall to landlords like William Lacey.
The trouble was, Maria Manning was greedy. If she hadn’t tried to sell Patrick O’Connor’s railway
stocks so soon afterwards, if she hadn’t kept his valuables to sell on later, indeed if she hadn’t tried to have her cake and eat it, in all probability she would have got away with it. And Elizabeth had had twenty years to learn from Maria’s mistakes . . .
Drawing on all those Saturdays spent shoring up contacts, putting out feelers and generally testing the market for husbands, she decided John Albert Markham was the best man to take that long walk down the aisle. He drank, he gambled, he bragged and he was lazy, but equally he was handsome, strong and funny, and the marriage bed was hardly an ordeal. Crucially, John Albert Markham was infatuated. He, too, had a passionate desire to melt the Ice Queen and was young enough, and not quite bright enough, to believe that the attraction of opposites would last. Most importantly, however, John was no collector. He was a simple soul who lived on debt in rented lodgings, yet saw a future in which he and Elizabeth raised children, grandchildren, lived and died together. And because he was a gambling man, he had no realistic vision of what financial threads might sew this miracle together.
But understood exactly what five thousands pounds could do –
Taking her cue from Maria, Elizabeth brought her husband into her plan. And like Frederick Manning twenty years before him, John was a willing partner.
“You’re sure he’ll bring the money to the house?”
“Absolutely certain,” she assured him, with a kiss. “Trust me.”
And so, just like Maria Manning, Elizabeth lured William Lacey to Lexington-place (she claimed it was a friend’s house), shot him in the same manner as the Mannings had killed O’Connor, with an air pistol (although thankfully, the first bullet killed him outright, the second was simply a precaution) and together she and John buried William Lacey in the quicklime purchased by her husband, just like the Mannings had before them. In fact, so famous was the trial that the prosecution couldn’t fail to pick up on the similarities, but if Maria could so easily have escaped arrest, how was it that Elizabeth got caught?
“No matter how intelligent murderers think they are,” thundered Mr Lockhearte for the Crown, “they always make that one mistake.”
He had turned and stared directly to where Elizabeth Markham was sitting, and she saw the triumph in his eyes.
“That one mistake that allows us to claim justice for the victim.”
With a jolt of surprise, Elizabeth saw that the sky was changing colour. The dawn, which had been so long in coming, had suddenly arrived, pink, and streaked with grey. With a deep, shuddering breath she adjusted the fringe of black lace that almost, but not quite, covered her eyes. In her mind she had lived this moment a thousand, two thousand times. The chaplain’s pious murmurs. The pinioning of the hands. The long walk down the passageways fenced in with gates and side rails. Stepping over the condemned prisoner’s own gaping grave.
From somewhere a male voice intruded on the horror. “It’s time now, Miss.”
Time. What did time mean, when a white cap was about to be placed over one’s head and a noose fitted round one’s neck? “Thankfully, I shall never know,” she whispered to herself, collecting her gloves and reticule.
Through the tiny aperture that passed for a window on this little ferry boat, the lights of the ocean-going liner that would carry her across the Atlantic loomed into view.
New York. New World. New life . . .
CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT, 4. Oct.
It was not the fact that Mrs Markham suddenly got up and whispered to her husband, however, that caused excitement round the courtroom.
It was because, shortly after she had re-seated herself, Markham jumped out of his own chair and shouted “Very well, I confess! It was me! I shot William Lacey with the pistol that I procured for the purpose. My wife is as innocent of this crime as she claims!”
The Times. 5, Oct. 1868.
Do they, Mr Lockhearte? Do all murderers make that one mistake? To be caught waiting to board that boat to Boulogne had been part of Elizabeth’s plan. Standing trial was key to it, as well. For, once acquitted, no person may be tried twice for murder. Double jeopardy is not recognized in law.
She picked up the book, whose ending she would never know. Or rather would never care to know. In these past twenty-four days, when all she’d had to do was read and wait and wait and read, she’d had enough Dickens to last her for a lifetime. But what else could she do? It was always possible that John Albert Markham might receive a pardon, or that the truth would somehow come tumbling out.
But now, at the time the prison bell would be tolling and the public executioner positioning her husband over the trapdoor, Elizabeth saw that Mr Lockhearte was quite wrong. With twenty years to learn from Maria Manning’s mistakes, she had learned her lessons well.
“Mr & Mrs John Smith?” William Lacey had murmured.
“If I am to give myself to you on a bed of twenty-pound notes, I would prefer to retain at least some small modicum of pride,” she replied, with eyes oh-so-demurely downcast.
And there it was. At ten o’clock precisely, William Lacey liquidated five thousand pounds of securities into cash at his bank in Bloomsbury and carried the suitcase . . . straight across the road to the Claybourne Hotel. He obviously made no connection between his bank and the hotel she had chosen. It was, after all, second only to the Ritz. But Elizabeth needed to be sure there was no trail for the police to follow. And who would suspect William Lacey would simply carry his cash over the road?
She watched him leave the hotel after twenty minutes or so. She already had a hackney standing, so that even as the doorman was hailing him a cab, she was already on her way, ahead of him. Having spun her tale of running out on Sir Henry and using her friend’s house as a hiding place, she waited. And then, once the body was buried and John on the train to Brighton, a rather tarty-looking Mrs Smith checked into the Bridal Suite, gathered up the bank notes spread across the bed, packed them back in the suitcase, settled the account and deposited the trunk in the Left Luggage Office at Victoria Station.
As Mrs Markham once again, she booked a passage to Boulogne and calmly waited while the alarm was raised and the body found. And what foresight, to send a note to his house after he had left that fateful morning, to make sure the interval would not be long! Then, it was simply a question of waiting.
Waiting to be arrested.
Waiting to be tried.
Waiting for John Albert Markham to bear full responsibility for the crime.
Waiting to claim the trunk of money.
Waiting for this dawn, when the only other person who knew the truth would now be dead . . .
For days after her acquittal, the newspapers had been brimming with speculation about this astonishing reversal of events. What, they goggled, had Mrs Markham whispered to her husband? What could possibly be of such great importance that he instantly changed his plea to guilty?
Oh, what fools men are!
“I’m pregnant, John.” She patted the black satin gown that had also attracted so much attention in the press. “I’m carrying your child.”
It was all the spur he’d needed. The thought of his name, his very bloodline, dying out, when all he had ever wanted was a family was too much for John to bear. He would rather go to his death shouldering the blame than kill his only child.
As Elizabeth knew he would.
And poor, simple, trusting John. Did no one tell him that they don’t hang pregnant women?
Ascending the gangplank, dwarfed by the giant liner overhead, Elizabeth dropped her copy of Great Expectations into waters turned scarlet with the breaking sky. Never mind Pip’s chances of marriage to the vile Estelle. Once in America, and with five thousand pounds behind her, Elizabeth did not think it long before she became a wife again herself.
Or a widow, come to that.
The Letter
Joan Lock
Even before David Copperfield was completed Dickens had started new commitments. He launched and edited a weekly magazine, Household Words, which appeared in March 18
50, and to which Dickens contributed copiously, mostly with articles or short stories and his next book, A Child’s History of England, which was serialized during 1851. He employed as his assistant on the magazine his former secretary at the Daily News, William H. Wills, who was a godsend in helping an ever-ambitious Dickens. During all this, Dickens also planned to move house but during 1851 he was struck by three cruel blows. First his wife Catherine was taken seriously ill, shortly after the birth of their ninth child, Dora. Secondly his father died and two weeks later, baby Dora also died, aged barely eight months. Dickens was grief-stricken by Dora’s death. As for his father, the two had not been on the best of terms in recent years, but they had become reconciled at the end and the old man’s passing clearly closed a chapter in Dickens’s mind. After moving house Dickens began his next novel, Bleak House.
Of particular relevance is the fate of Lady Dedlock and the role played by the cunning lawyer Tulkinghorn to find the truth about her ladyship and the mysterious stranger Nemo, who dies early in the book. Tulkinghorn engages the help of police detective, Inspector Bucket, who subsequently has to investigate the murder of Tulkinghorn. Thus, in Bleak House, we have Dickens’s first genuine “whodunnit”, incorporated within and crucial to the denouement of the novel.
The Detective Branch of Scotland Yard had been formed in 1842. Starting in 1850, Dickens wrote a series of pieces for Household Words, looking at the work of the police force. Two of them, under the common heading “A Detective Police Party” (27 July and 10 August 1850), feature Inspector Wield and tell how he and his colleagues tracked down and arrested a horse thief. Wield was a transparent disguise for a real detective, Inspector Charles Field, who had headed the Detective Branch since 1849. Dickens wrote about Field’s work in “On Duty with Inspector Field” (14 June 1851) and it is clear from Dickens’s description of Inspector Bucket that he was also based on Field. Field retired from the Police Force in December 1852 though continued to operate as a private detective. Dickens was the first popular writer to take an interest in the police force and the matter of crime and its detection continued to fascinate him.
The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits Page 32