Hitherto, the argument against Mr. Darwin’s theory has been that no creature has been found in a state between man and monkey. The Primitive Eve is that creature—an attractive, well-formed maiden covered entirely with a pelt of dark hair.
Found as a child in the wild forests of Borneo, she has been brought back to England and taught the benefits of civilized society. Hear her read from the Bible. Watch her perform her native dances and then curtsy with the nicety of an English schoolgirl. All should see this living marvel!
Viewing at 8.30, special lecture at 9.00 by Professor L. Merwin, M. Phil., D. Litt., LL.D., Member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Tickets two shillings, half price for children.
MY MOTHER FIRST showed me the diary when I began developing Lewandowsky-Lutz. She wanted me to understand where it had come from—why I had bumps on my hands and feet, although evidently it had skipped a generation, because she never developed symptoms. But my grandmother died young of cancer from Lewandowsky-Lutz. My great-grandmother, Daisy Merwin, lived to a hundred and one, although she had to clip the growths on her forearms at regular intervals. It affects us all differently.
After Daphne’s death, Lewison sent their daughter Daisy to the United States, to be raised by his sister’s family in Virginia. That would free him to travel with his newest marvel, Lucy Barker, advertised as the Primitive Eve. She belonged to the ‘hairy woman’ type of freak show performer, like her contemporaries Krao and Julia Pastrana, both of whom are discussed in Chapter One. Merwin traveled all over Europe with the Primitive Eve, who became particularly popular in France—until she died of a laudanum overdose. Deprived of his major source of income, he returned to New York and worked in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, becoming one of its managers after Barnum’s death in 1891. Although he tried to arrange his own shows on the side, he never again attained the success he had with Daphne or Eve.
After his death, his daughter Daisy received a small inheritance, mostly wiped out by his debts, and a box of her mother’s effects. They included Daphne’s diary, as well as a silver brush and comb set that I still use to subdue my hair and a necklace of coral beads I wear almost every day. In the nineteenth century, coral was believed to protect against diseases—that is why children were given coral necklaces to wear. The necklace didn’t help Daphne; nevertheless, I find it reassuring. It is an attractive placebo.
We must remember that Lewison was a charlatan. Despite his claims, he was not a university professor, nor had he earned any of the degrees or distinctions listed on his advertisements. He had started his career at a theological seminary in Virginia, training to be a minister. One week, P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus, as it was called in the 1870s, came to town. Lewison bought tickets for every show, and finally asked to meet Barnum himself. That was the beginning of his career as a showman. Barnum hired him as an agent and sent him to London to arrange bookings for his various shows. And that is where he found Daphne, the Living Dryad.
Her diary contains no dates. It is rambling and impressionistic, written in large looping letters made by a woman who had difficulty simply holding a pen. There are misspellings, although her grammar is almost self-consciously correct, for which, I suppose, we must thank Lewison: he taught her to write. Nevertheless, the entries are suggestive.
What they suggest is that Daphne Merwin was not killed by Alfred Potts.
—The British Freak Show at the Fin-de-Siècle, D.M. Levitt, Ph.D.
THIS CANNOT CONTINUE. I will speak to him, I will tell him that he cannot have us both.
Think of the publicity! he says. Think of the money we will make! But I do not care about that.
I would rather be back on the streets of London, begging for crusts of bread. Am I insensate, a piece of wood for him to move about as he wishes? Am I the mythical creature he likes to call me? No, I am human, whatever I may appear to be. I breathe, I feel, I love.
I will not let him treat me like this. I will not let her speak to me as she has in the past few days. She has been boasting about how successful she will be, more successful than I am. She has been wearing my dresses, neglecting the child. My child—who deserves better, who deserves everything. I cannot let this continue.
I will speak to him and tell him so.
WESTERN UNION
MISS LETITIA MERWIN
CLOVERFIELD, V.A.
JUNE 23
SENDING YOU DAISY CARE OF IRISH NURSE ARRIVING U.S.S. MERRIMACK AT NEWPORT JULY 3RD WILL SEND CHEQUE FOR EXPENSES SOON AS NEW SHOW OPENS AT ALHAMBRA LOVE LEWISON
WESTERN UNION
MISS LETITIA MERWIN
CLOVERFIELD, V.A.
JUNE 24
ALSO REMEMBER WATCH FOR SYMPTOMS SHE MAY BE AS DISTINCTIVE AS HER MOTHER IF SO SEND WORD IMMEDIATELY IMAGINE THE SENSATION A CHILD DRYAD
THE EVIDENCE FROM the Merwin murder case is collected in a small box in the basement storage facility of the Metropolitan Police. In the summer of 2014, I traveled to London for two weeks on a research grant. I visited the neighborhood in Spitalfields where Daisy Potts, who would become Daphne Merwin, spent her childhood. It is now filled with restaurants—Indonesian, Albanian, Bangladeshi. I stood near the corner of Brick Lane Market, thinking of what it must have been like for Daisy, begging here, almost blind, until Lewison Merwin found her.
I visited the house in Marylebone where she had lived, but it was now a dentist’s office, with flats on the upper floors. I visited Leicester Square, where the Alhambra used to stand. Even Newgate, where Alfred Potts was hanged for her murder.
Then I went to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. It had been difficult to get an appointment. The head of my department had written a letter describing my research, on university stationery. When that received no response, I asked a friend at Oxford, with whom I had gone to graduate school, to intervene. I thought Oxford would mean more than a regional American college. At long last I received an e-mail from the head archivist: I would be allowed to examine the evidence for two hours, 4:00-6:00 p.m., on a Thursday afternoon. A camera would be allowed, without flash.
The junior archivist who met me in the waiting room was a serious young woman in glasses with thick black frames. Her badge proclaimed her Dr. Patel.
She handed me a similar ID badge, conspicuously marked TEMPORARY, with my name on it: Dr. Daphne Levitt, University of Southern Vermont.
“I’ve never been to America,” she said as we rode down the elevator. “I would be a little nervous, especially in New York. You have so many shootings!”
“Not so many where I live,” I told her. “My university is in a small town up north. They mostly shoot deer there. And street signs.”
She looked at me as though scandalized that I would joke about such a thing.
“Your job must be so interesting,” I said. That is my magical phrase. As an introvert, I’ve always found it supremely useful at parties. Once I say it, I don’t have to talk for the next half hour.
She described it to me enthusiastically, but I only half-listened. I was wondering what I would find in the evidence box, and whether it would help me solve the Merwin case. When I started writing this book, I asked my mother to send me Daphne’s diary. I had not read it since I was a teenager. Then, I had only been interested in the disease itself, in what might happen to me if the Lewandowsky-Lutz progressed. But something about the newspaper account of the trial kept bothering me, and when I looked at the diary again, I saw it. Daphne had mentioned a brother. Could it be Alfred Potts? If so, Lewison had lied. Why?
I followed Dr. Patel down a long beige hallway that reminded me of middle school, and then into a room filled with shelves, rather like university library stacks except that all of the shelves were filled with carefully labeled boxes. We walked down one of the rows while she scanned them. “There,” she said, and took down a box labeled Merwin, Daphne 1888.
I had expected an evidence box out of Dickens, yellowed a
nd moldering, but this was thoroughly modern.
“Everything was recataloged in the 1990s,” she said, I suppose in response to my expression. Perhaps the Metropolitan Police trained even archivists to read people.
She carried the box to a long table under fluorescent lights. “Just a moment,” she said, as I reached for the lid. From a nearby cabinet, she produced two surgical masks and gloves of some artificial material that felt like plastic trying to be cotton. When I was properly outfitted, I sat at the table and opened the box.
In it were the items the police had collected on the day of Daphne’s murder. At the top of the box, protected by a plastic sleeve, was a stack of yellowing papers. On the first sheet of paper was written, in a sloping nineteenth-century hand:
Evidence in the death of Mrs. Lewison Merwin:
Item 1: Nightgown torn by knife, with bloodstain.
Item 2: Branches broken from the body of Mrs. Merwin in altercation.
Item 3: Photograph of Mrs. Merwin.
Item 4: Statement of Professor Merwin.
Item 5: Statement of Lucy Barker, housemaid.
Item 6: Statement of Mrs. Polansky, neighbor.
Item 7: Statement of Alfred Potts, suspect.
Item 8: Statement of Alice O’Neill, barmaid.
Item 9: Kitchen knife stained with blood.
I opened the sleeve and drew out the stack of papers. Beneath the list was the statement of Lewison Merwin, describing how he had found his wife in the parlor, stabbed to death. He had been out of the house all morning, attending a business meeting at the Alhambra, where Mrs. Merwin had shows three nights a week. Under his statement was written, Husband clearly distraught. I took photographs of each page with my iPhone. Next was the statement of Lucy Barker, describing how she had answered the door at around ten o’clock and found Alfred Potts on the doorstep. She had not wanted to let him in, but her mistress had insisted, out of the goodness of her heart. She was always one to help the poor. Lucy had given him a meal in the kitchen at Mrs. Merwin’s request, at which point he must have taken the knife, and no, she could not have watched him more carefully. She had lunch to prepare, hadn’t she? Then he had gone out into the garden. She had heard nothing more until noon, when Professor Merwin rang the bell and she had let him in. A few minutes later, he had run into the kitchen, saying that her mistress had been stabbed. Of course he was upset, Mrs. Merwin had been stabbed, hadn’t she? He had asked for a towel and hot water, but by then there was nothing to be done. Mrs. Merwin was dead. No, she had heard no sounds of an altercation in the parlor. The kitchen was in the basement, on the other side of the house, so why should she? And now if he could stop bothering her, she needed to feed the child. Under her account was written Seems devoted to her mistress. UGLY! The statement of Mrs. Polansky was short: she had been sitting in her parlor at around 11:30 when she had heard a man and woman arguing next door at the Merwins’. The walls were that thin, to the shame of these modern builders. Yes, she remembered the time because she had a grown son who was a clerk and came home for lunch, so she kept looking at the clock, knowing he would return around quarter till. No, she could not hear what was being said, but one voice was deep, a man’s voice, and the other she thought was Mrs. Merwin’s. A nice lady, although one couldn’t exactly invite her over for tea, could one? Under her statement was written Not English—Polack? The statement of Alfred Potts was not much longer. He had gone to the Merwins’ house asking for money, had been given money out of the hall table drawer, and had left, that was all. He had gone to the pub, where he had been sitting on this [objectionable language] chair ever since, as Alice could tell you. Asked why he had gone to the Merwins’, which was half across town, rather than begging in Spitalfields, where he was no doubt better known. He had assaulted the officer and sworn in the most inventive and objectionable terms. At that point, he had been arrested. Under his statement was written DRUNK. The statement of Alice O’Neill was also short: Alfred Potts had come into the pub at 11:00, sat down in that chair right there, and had been sitting there ever since. Under her statement was written Known to police as Alice O’Connell, Alice Ferguson.
Dr. Patel sat patiently while I photographed each page. At the bottom of the stack was the photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book. It is the only photograph we have of Daphne Merwin, since in her advertisements she was usually drawn in a way that exaggerated her arboreal qualities. When I first located it on the internet, on a website devoted to freak show history and paraphernalia, I printed out a copy and pinned it to my office bulletin board. But this was one of the original prints. It shows her seated on what looks like a column with a Corinthian capital, about the height of a kitchen stool, wearing a long white gown that leaves her arms bare. She is holding her arms up as though they were a bifurcated trunk with branches and twigs growing from them. Her skin is rough and bark-like to the elbows, but perfectly smooth above. Her hair is done up in the Victorian idea of a classical chignon. The gown is floor-length, but she is raising one foot so you can see the thick, gnarled growths on her toes. They do, indeed, look like tree roots. You have to give Lewison Merwin credit for one thing: he did a good job pruning her. The branches are thinned out, trimmed back in places. Despite their weight, she could lift her arms. She could walk. If you look closely at the original photograph, you can see what is not obvious from the online version: the rough skin on her forehead. But it does not grow down to her eyes. She could see. She could even have a child. She looks off to the side rather than at the viewer, but her chin is raised, elegantly, proudly. If you ignore the growths on her arms and feet, it is the photograph of an ordinary, if very attractive, Victorian woman.
“My God,” said Dr. Patel, leaning across the table. “What was wrong with her?” She had been quiet for so long that I had almost forgotten she was there.
“Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia,” I said. “Or, you know, being murdered. Can I take out the nightgown?” I had now photographed every piece of paper in the stack. I slipped the stack back into the plastic sleeve and set it aside. It was time to look at the physical evidence.
“Yes, as long as you’re wearing gloves,” said Dr. Patel. Now she was leaning forward, clearly interested. I pulled the nightgown out of the plastic bag. It was made of a thin white cotton batiste, very finely embroidered: an expensive article in the 1880s.
“You see all these buttons on the shoulders,” I said, as though lecturing one of my students. “She couldn’t have pulled the nightgown over her head. It had to be buttoned up, probably by her maid.”
“A wound that deep would have killed her almost instantly,” said Dr. Patel, looking with professional curiosity at the place where the nightgown was torn. Around the tear it was bloody, and blood had soaked down one side, probably where it had dripped and pooled. “You see, the knife went right in: the hole isn’t ragged. But there’s a lot of blood. It would have been a deep, clean wound.” She put on a pair of fake-cotton gloves, pulled the plastic sleeve of papers toward her, and started reading through them.
I imagined Daphne Merwin lying on the floor, with a deep, clean wound in her chest, bleeding her life away while my great-grandmother lay in her cradle upstairs. Did she cry out? There is no record of any cry, so maybe she was too startled, maybe she died too quickly. Who stood over her, watching her die? That was the question I wanted to answer. I folded the nightgown and slipped it back inside the plastic bag. It had told me only that Daphne was indeed stabbed—and that the Living Dryad had bled like an ordinary woman.
Below the nightgown were two other plastic bags, both containing pieces of linen. Perhaps wrapped around whatever was inside? I lifted the one on the left, distinguishable from the other only because it was more square than oblong. I unwound the linen. Inside were a bunch of horny, bifurcating growths.
“Some of her branches,” I said in response to Dr. Patel’s inquisitive expression. “Parts of her, hardened like keratin, almost like your nails? They must have broken off during the struggl
e.”
“There was no struggle,” Dr. Patel responded, frowning above her glasses. “Not judging by those bloodstains—just stabbing and bleeding. She wouldn’t have had time to fight back. Can I take a look?”
“I’m glad you’re here, because bloodstains don’t tell me anything,” I said. “Then I suppose these must have broken off when she fell, after she was stabbed?” I pushed Daphne’s branches toward Dr. Patel and turned to the third and final plastic bag, knowing what it must contain: the murder weapon. While I unwrapped it, she examined the broken growths. It made sense that she would be curious—after all, how often did you hear of a person like Daphne Merwin, a malnourished nineteenth-century orphan with a full-blown case of Lewandowsky-Lutz, turned into a living myth? And then a murder case.
I unwound the final piece of linen. Here was the knife that had killed her. I laid it on the table in front of me.
It was about seven inches long, four of handle and three of blade: a sharp, curved knife that would inflict a particularly vicious wound below the skin. The blade and part of the handle were stained an ancient, rusted red.
“That’s a strange-looking knife,” said Dr. Patel. She had the branches spread in front of her and was lining them up, like a child playing with twigs.
“It is,” I answered. “The Victorians often used very specific tools. I wonder if it had some sort of specialized use in the kitchen...”
I took a picture of it with my phone. “Can I use your Wi-Fi? I want to do a Google search, but it says I need a password. I can’t get a cell signal down here.”
“You won’t, in the basement of one of these old buildings,” said Dr. Patel. She pulled off one glove and held out her hand. “Here, I’ll type in our guest password.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 60