For the rest of the week, the victim’s clothes were on view at Lee police station, and the woman herself on view at Guy’s Hospital, for anyone who thought they might identify her as their sister, daughter, wife, or friend. Several came, but no one succeeded in recognizing her for certain. That failure surely raises a question: why hadn’t a family member or acquaintance—or even an employer—come forward within hours sure that a person they knew was the one in the hospital? In reporting two possible, but far from certain, identities for the woman, the newspapers suggested one dark answer to that question. If the woman remained unidentified, that must be because she had severed all connections with polite society. She had, in other words, crossed that moral line defined so clearly and absolutely for a woman in English society in 1871: she had fallen. Recently, obviously, she had been a humble servant, respectable in her sphere, but she must have made the fatal decision to trade honest labor for the dubious pleasures of a life of vice: a life once chosen, all respectable Victorians believed, entailed a bitter and inevitable path of degradation, disease—and death.
On Thursday evening, George Evans, a butcher who lived on New Oxford Street, crossed the Thames to view the comatose woman at Guy’s Hospital. Evans had read descriptions of her in the papers and thought she might be Mary Caladine, his servant. Caladine had left his home two nights before on an errand, and had never returned. Looking at the smashed, torn, and swollen face of the woman at Guy’s, Evans was baffled; the injuries were simply too great to know if she was or was not Caladine. Later, when he saw the clothes, he thought they might belong to Caladine. But again, he could not be certain. Admittedly, he had not known Mary Caladine very long—two or three weeks, at most. Before that—as demonstrated by the 1871 census, taken at the beginning of April, just three weeks before the crime—twenty-one-year-old Mary Caladine slept not in the attic of Evans’s New Oxford Street home, but in the adjacent slum of St. Giles, as one of the twenty-three female inmates of the Dudley Street Working Girls’ Dormitory. That Christian charitable institution was devoted specifically to the task of “reclamation”: rescuing the poor women who had once worked as flower sellers or watercress girls or underpaid and overworked seamstresses, but who had been “lured,” as the founder of the house put it, “over the line that bounds virtue from vice in an unwary moment.” The Working Girls’ Dormitory offered these women a rare second chance at respectability, and they were to find it through a rigorous regimen of Christian rehabilitation. Inmates were carefully guarded against dissolute behavior and expelled for drunkenness. They engaged in prayer morning and night, went to church on Sabbath, and underwent regular proselytizing sessions with pious and charitable society women. In the time remaining they trained for domestic service. Thus cleansed and reborn into respectability, inmates were placed by the matron of the home as servants in respectable homes. And so in early April Mary Caladine entered George Evans’s service. And then, apparently, the regular, respectable, but drudgery-filled servant’s life had proved too much for her, and she bolted: she had assuredly fallen back into her vicious ways. And if the woman at Guy’s was Mary Caladine, then she had abruptly paid the ultimate price for her error.
George Evans was not the only one who thought the girl at Guy’s Hospital might be Mary Caladine. The matron of the Dudley Street Home, Jeanie Kay, came to Guy’s on the Friday, also having read descriptions of the girl in the papers. She entered the ward, looked at the horror that used to be a human face, and immediately fainted; she could not identify anyone from that. But she, like Evans, later thought she recognized the clothing as Mary’s.
For three days the London daily newspapers surmised Mary Caladine most likely to be the victim at Guy’s Hospital. And then they proffered another, with the sad story of Alice, her surname withheld—withheld, one newspaper claimed, “for the ends of justice”—but the true reason, obviously, was to shield Alice’s family from the shame the news would otherwise have heaped upon them. The story of Alice—and of her older sister, Sarah—reads as a melodramatic Victorian morality tale that charts the progress of two young Victorian women as they traverse that absolute moral divide and fall from disgrace to doom. Sarah and Alice had lived with their parents in the Essex countryside, but had made the disastrous choice to move to Woolwich, near the arsenal, obviously captivated by the masculine and military excitements there. And they found in Woolwich exactly what they were looking for; newspaper accounts depict their life there as one of ceaseless temptation by several cavalier and predatory soldiers. The elder sister, Sarah, soon gained the attentions of a carpenter at the arsenal, but rejected these for the less honorable but far more exciting attractions of a soldier. As a result—an almost inevitable result, to any Briton in 1871—she “fell from the path of virtue, and was induced to leave her situation, and live at a house of ill-fame.” The virtuous carpenter turned his attentions to Alice, but she, too, wanted more—or less—and rejected him for a soldier. After her sister abandoned her, Alice clung to respectability for a time, seeking shelter, much as Mary Caladine had done, in a Christian home for women, this one in Greenwich. Alice’s soldier-friend fusilladed her with letters there and another soldier began to follow her about; Alice told the matron that one of these men had attempted to violate her. The matron of the home implored Alice to leave the soldiers, to wait for a “better offer,” to marry a civilian. But she couldn’t help it, she told the matron; she liked soldiers best. Alice did manage to find a place as a servant. But soon afterward—on the very same day that Mary Caladine disappeared from her place, as it happens—Alice was visited by a Minnie, an acquaintance of Sarah’s, darkly described as “a companion of soldiers at Woolwich.” That night, Alice walked away with Minnie and never returned.
The chaplain of the Alice’s Greenwich home, as Mary Caladine’s employer and matron had done, read the descriptions of the battered woman and went to Guy’s to view her. He, like all who had so far looked at her, was baffled by the battered face, but he was half convinced by the clothing that this was the person he knew. Rumors that the victim had been calling out “Sarah,” as Alice would to her sister, helped sway him. But he was not certain. The Standard carried the story of Alice and Sarah to the latest possible moment on Saturday, with a cliff-hanger: Alice’s sister had been found. She had been sought among the “lowest dens of infamy in Woolwich,” places where “sat great bloated women, with many young girls, only half-clad, over whom they seemed to exercise either a fascination or a terror.” In one of these places the dark companion Minnie was found, and—after a good deal of pressing—she revealed Sarah, who had been hiding there. Sarah was asked what dress Alice had worn when she last saw her and answered “without the slightest prompting, ‘a brown barège, trimmed with brown fringe’”: a dead match for the victim’s dress. At press time Sarah was reportedly on the next train to Guy’s—en route to a dramatic denouement.
But none of the newspapers reported on the outcome of that meeting, because by the next day it became very clear that the victim at Guy’s was not Alice and was not Mary Caladine. And so Alice and Sarah and Mary disappeared from the newspapers altogether. Whether the woman at Guy’s had fallen or not remained an open question.
*
Mrs. Jane Mary Thomas was alone in the family ironmongery, Samuel Thomas’s Mechanical Tool Warehouse, on Saturday evening, April 29; her husband was out on business when the officer came in. By the time the police got to this shop in Deptford, they had already scoured the shops of Lee, Blackheath, Lewisham, and Woolwich. None of them carried a J Sorby #2 plasterer’s hammer. Nor was one to be had in Greenwich. The police had tracked down the London agent for J Sorby hammers and learned from him that within R District only a single ironmonger’s carried them: this one in the High Street, Deptford. In fact, a Sorby #2 hammer was hanging by a string in the shop window by the door, a string looped and tied exactly like the string on the hammer found at Morden College.
Mrs. Thomas, the officer observed, was a mousy, nervous woman, seemin
gly unable to give a straight answer to any of his questions. Even though the assault had been all anyone had talked about in the area over the last few days, when he mentioned it to her he was surprised to find that she hadn’t heard about it. And so the officer enlightened her, her uneasiness certainly growing as she understood she was somehow involved in this grisly business.
The officer asked to see the ledger. Mrs. Thomas produced it immediately—a book filled with neat entries, all of them written in her hand from receipts she and her husband had made. The two of them scanned the book, Mrs. Thomas running her finger down each page. There had been no sale of a J Sorby hammer at all from the beginning of the year until April 15—when a larger #3 hammer had been sold. Mrs. Thomas’s finger slipped ahead and stopped at April 22, exactly a week before: a J Sorby #2 had been sold on that day. The ledger listed items sold and prices, and thus the officer noted the odd fact that the larger #3 hammer sold for two pennies less than the smaller #2. But the ledger did not list names: any information about the buyer would have to come from an eyewitness. Who sold it? he asked her. Either she did or her husband did, Mrs. Thomas told him. And she had absolutely no recollection of selling it herself.
At that moment they were interrupted by a woman who needed a compass saw. Mrs. Thomas went to help, leaving the officer at the counter with the book. He noted other tools sold on the twenty-second—a spoke-shave (a tool for carving wheel-spokes), a chalk-line. And then he left, planning to return in the hope of getting an account of the buyer from Mr. Thomas. But in that he was disappointed. When he poked his head into the shop a third time that evening and finally saw Samuel Thomas, he learned no more from him than from his wife.
Whether they could remember that sale or not, the Thomases were potentially important witnesses—important enough to bring Detective Inspector Mulvany to the shop the next morning to speak with the couple, accompanied by another officer—likely Sergeant Sayer. Mulvany carried with him the hammer found at Morden College. He had the new J Sorby #2 fetched from the shop window; it was a cleaner, sharper twin to the hammer Mulvany held. Mulvany promptly bought it. He then looked over the ledger and saw the entries for hammer sales on the fifteenth and the twenty-second. Mulvany was fairly certain that whoever had walked out of the Thomases’s shop eight days before with the #2 J Sorby hammer had committed the assault. And if either Mr. or Mrs. Thomas had sold the hammer, then one of them had almost certainly looked into the eyes of the criminal. But the past few hours had not helped their powers of recollection: they still both claimed to have no memory of the transaction. The police, Mulvany realized, would have to find another eyewitness—if there was one—to the sale. And soon afterward, placards went up all over Deptford, and throughout the district:
Eltham Murder.
—On the evening of Saturday, the 22nd of April, a man purchased a lathing hammer at the shop of Mr. Thomas, High street, Deptford. At the time he did so two or three persons were in the shop, one of whom purchased a spoke-shave. These persons are requested to communicate at once with Superintendent Griffin, Police Station, Blackheath-road, Greenwich.
As Mulvany goaded the memories of the Thomases in Deptford that Sunday morning, something remarkable was happening in Greenwich and at Kidbrooke Lane. The still-anonymous victim at Guy’s, now just barely alive, was becoming—had indeed become—a martyr.
From the time her battered body was discovered, the sympathetic and the curious had gravitated to the crime scene. First came the locals: cottagers of Kidbrooke Lane, elderly residents of Morden College, villagers from Eltham, townspeople from Blackheath and Shooter’s Hill. As the story quickly became a national one, people came from farther and farther afield. And on this Sunday, April 30—four days after the discovery—thousands came. Most made their way from London by cheap transport, on the ferry from Hungerford Pier to Greenwich, or on the train from London Bridge to Greenwich station. From there they walked, streaming south in a seemingly unending line, over Greenwich Hill and across Blackheath, by footpath around Morden College, over stiles and through fields, to Kidbrooke Lane. By Sunday, thousands of pilgrims’ footprints in the slushy mud had obliterated the crime scene almost completely. Only the spots where she had lain and where she had bled were untrodden—the blood, amazingly, still visible in defiance of rainshowers of the days before. Around those spots the crowd gathered, shoving and jostling to get a look. And, having gotten it, everyone sought out a souvenir—a relic—to take with them. They stripped the landscape bare, taking twigs from the hedge, taking brambles, grass, even dabs of mud. Someone placed a rudely constructed cross at the site, but that memento too was quickly snatched away.
The press, reporting on the thousands making the journey on this day, and the even greater numbers that would come over the next few weeks, were unanimous in their disdain, even their disgust. These “pilgrims,” it was obvious, were overwhelmingly working-class. And as far as the newspapers were concerned, their pilgrimage only demonstrated the debased nature of a class that would travel so far on their single day of leisure to experience the cheap thrill of standing in the shoes of a brutal assailant and gawping at a pool of blood. “There are among us,” stated an affronted editorialist in the Daily News, “large numbers of men and women who have an unmistakable craving for this sort of ghastly stimulus,” whose morbid imaginations confer a “fictitious and repulsive interest” upon the scene of the crime. The Pall Mall Gazette judged that “the neighborhood of Eltham at present offers a spectacle which is the reverse of hopeful for the prospects of our moral and aesthetic progress.” But there was more than morbid thrill-seeking in the minds of the thousands who converged at Kidbrooke on this day, and the tens of thousands more who would come in the following weeks. There was an element of a holy day in their holiday. On this Sunday, no one knew who the woman was. But they did know something about her. They knew she was young and they thought she had been pretty. They knew that she had been decoyed to this place, knew that the hell she endured was monstrous, and knew that she had lain weltering in her own gore for hours, slipping in and out of consciousness, desiring only death. Whoever she was, what she had endured had rendered her larger than life: her overwhelming suffering alone demanded their respect. And they knew more about her than this. They knew that she was one of them, the calluses on her hands and knees the stigmata of hard manual labor. One of their own had stared down an overwhelming horror; she had suffered greatly, and soon she would die.
A writer for the Daily News smirked about those converging on Kidbrooke Lane, “If in other and less favoured countries Saints are canonized and relics are manufactured by authority, here in England a free people elects its own saints and manufactures its own relics.” Sarcasm aside, this writer was absolutely correct. With their feet, the people had elected one of their own as their secular saint, as a martyr for their age and their condition.
Michael Harris, house surgeon at Guy’s hospital, knew the moment he looked upon the woman that she would die. The only question was when, and by this Sunday morning the answer was clear: she was fading quickly, and wouldn’t live through the day. House surgeons served by the month at Guy’s. This was the last day of April. And so Michael Harris, who had watched over her as she lay insensible, who had set watchers over her day and night, realized that morning his patient would die under his care.
Just after nine o’clock on Sunday evening, April 30, the woman—still unidentified—succumbed to her many wounds, got her wish, and died.
Michael Harris’s final duty as house surgeon that month, then, was to conduct a post-mortem on her. The cause of death, of course, was obvious. Nonetheless, Dr. Harris made a discovery.
When she died, the woman was two months pregnant.
*1 The whistle now considered a dog whistle—a whistle inaudible to humans—was invented five years after this by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin. (Galton 26; “Galton Whistle.”)
*2 Only the London Times resisted reporting the crime; its first report appeared on
May 1, 1871, five days after the discovery of the victim.
2
Jane
At the same hour, the same minute, that the victim at Guy’s quietly died, William Trott sat four miles downriver in his little house in Deptford, reading Reynolds’s Weekly, his Sunday newspaper. Trott’s home was hard by the Thames and by the now-defunct Deptford Dockyard. The river was Trott’s life. He was a lighterman, plying the Thames in his bargelike lighter, loading, unloading, transporting goods to and from the many merchant ships undocked and anchored in the river. His father had been a lighterman, his brother was one now, and his sons would become lightermen: throughout the nineteenth century Trott men lived off of the river. Trott women, on the other hand, worked on land as servants to the burghers of Greenwich, Deptford, and Lewisham: worked, that is, until they found husbands and raised lightermen, laborers, and servants of their own. That was the path Trott’s wife, Elizabeth, had taken and the one Trott’s daughters would take.
William Trott had certainly heard of the brutal assault in Kidbrooke before this evening: it had been on everyone’s mind and everyone’s tongue that week in Deptford and on the river. But he had not read any account of the case in the daily newspapers, and he had managed not to see any of the two thousand descriptions of the victim that the police had placarded throughout the metropolis. Now, coming to page five of Reynolds’s, he finally read of the “Mysterious Outrage at Eltham.” The article largely consisted of rumors and speculation. But in the middle was a verbatim copy of the police description of the victim. “...Aged about twenty-five years... Hair, brown; 5 feet 3 inches in height. Dressed in a chocolate ribbed barege dress, black cloth jacket trimmed with black silk braid, crochet work round the neck; black lace bonnet, with three red roses in it.” As he read on, he felt the odd thrill and then horror of recognition. He knew. The dress, the jacket, the bonnet—braid, lace, the roses. He was reading a description of his niece, Jane. Those clothes were without question Jane’s walking-out clothes. She had worn those clothes exactly a week before, when she had come to the Trotts’ house for Sunday tea. And that was the last time that any of the Trotts had seen Jane alive.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 3