The Girl on the Gallows

by Q. Patrick

  From now on the letters completely dominate the case. Percy Thompson slips further and further away from the limelight. Even Freddie Bywaters becomes no longer just a handsome twenty-year-old ship’s clerk; he is seen no more by the direct stare, but obliquely through the mirror held in the hand of Edith Thompson. He is Lancelot, Tristram, Abelard, Romeo—he is every romantic beloved of literature. And Edith Thompson, who wrote the letters, is just as deeply engulfed by them as her lover. We might almost say that, at this point, even the real Edith Thompson disappears and her place is taken by the other Edith Thompson—the reader of romantic novels, the dream-liver of romantic novels, the writer of romantic novels; Edith Thompson, the woman sitting alone with the pen in her hand, swiftly covering page after page, spinning what seemed to her a beautiful shining net of love, but what in the end turned out to be a web as gruesome, as charnel as a spider’s web hung with the corpses of the spider’s prey.

  The letters burst like a bomb over England in early November at the time of the prisoners’ appearance before the Magistrate’s Court. Here extracts from the letters, hastily digested by the police, were produced for the first time and proved more than enough to commit both Mrs. Thompson and Bywaters to trial at the Old Bailey. But the stir they caused in court was as nothing to the stir they caused in the country.

  “Astounding Letters from a Wife—Ilford Case Revelations.” Every newspaper in the land for days on end printed column after column from the seemingly endless source provided for them by Peidi’s scribbling pen and Bywaters’ extraordinary rashness in preserving the correspondence. All over England the Thompson-Bywaters case was the principal topic of conversation. Even the historic fall of Lloyd George’s coalition government, which had brought the country triumphantly through the First World War, took second place in the public’s interest. Except in a narrow fringe of society, the “jazz age” had not really got under way in England at this time. For the great public the dusty plush draperies of Victorian morality still smothered the topic of sexuality. What might be done was very different from what might be talked about. And here, for the first time, the English newspaper audience was given a head-on look at a love affair stripped naked. And not only a love affair—a love affair between a twenty-eight-year-old married woman and a “virgin youth,” a titillatingly adulterous love affair, a titillatingly horrendous seduction by a mature “vampire” of an adolescent innocent.

  And not only that. Here was a love affair that had ended in murder, a love affair stained from its very opening with the appalling, bloody hand of homicide.

  For hadn’t Mrs. Thompson been subtly infecting her young lover from the start with her lust for killing? Weren’t there passages in the letters that were almost unreadable for the shock of their impact? Weren’t there hints of poison, of ground glass, of deeds unmentionable even in the faintest whisper?

  This, and more, was what the British public found in Edith Thompson’s love letters. This, too, was what the police found. (When Superintendent Wensley had read all sixty-two of the letters, before he bowed out of the case he had so smoothly managed, he commented, “They showed that the project of murdering her husband had been long in the mind of the pair.”) There is no need to state what the prosecuting attorneys were to read into the letters.

  Whatever we may feel about the letters, we are forced to admit that there was justification for the public reaction of shock. In the cold hard light of the fact that Percy Thompson was dead and that Bywaters had killed him, there runs through Edith Thompson’s letters, as Wensley noticed, a definitely sinister undercurrent. Certain passages viewed in retrospect, tom from their context, make the eye pop. But the context is all important to their interpretation, as is a degree of psychological insight perhaps not available to the public of 1922. Examined carefully, this undercurrent loses much of its sinister quality for a modern reader who no longer recoils in horror when confronted with the fact that human beings do not always behave as they are “supposed” to.

  But in 1922 the horrified recoil took place all over England. Long before Edith Thompson appeared, with Bywaters, for trial at the Old Bailey, her compatriots had condemned her as the most pernicious female monster ever to have been exhibited before the public view.

  Was Mrs. Thompson a “monster”? Was her love affair with Freddie Bywaters “an older woman’s evil seduction and corruption of a bewildered, adolescent victim”?

  There is, of course, no record of this poignant love affair except the record of the court testimony and of the “monstrous” letters themselves. If we are to reconstruct it, we can do so only from the same source as that used by Edith Thompson’s detractors. But that an attempt should be made to reconstruct what actually happened, as opposed to what seemed in the letters to have happened, is essential if we are to get at the “exact truth” so cherished by Superintendent Wensley—for later, at the trial, no clear picture was ever given by either side.

  Part II: The Dream House

  Chapter Four

  Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters fell in love with each other in the early summer of 1921. In June of that year, the Thompsons took their annual holiday at Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight, a resort of polite scenic beauty, sea bathing, and the refined distractions of a pier with a Pierrot show at the end of it and afternoon band concerts on the Esplanade. Since Edith’s younger sister, Avis, accompanied them, it was natural to include Freddie Bywaters in the party, for at that time it was believed that an “understanding” was forming between the Graydons’ unmarried daughter and the boy who had gone to school with her brothers.

  Before this holiday, Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters, although old acquaintances, had never shown any particular interest in each other. This was understandable, for Edith Thompson, busy with her work, busy at home with a husband whose demands had increased while his charms diminished, had little time to think about her young brothers and their friends, while Freddie Bywaters, who had already been some time at sea and who had already experimented in romance with at least one Australian girl, was hardly likely to associate glamour with the household at Kensington Gardens. But all this, on the trip to the Isle of Wight, was changed. Now, for the first time, the two of them were more or less forced upon each other’s attention, and the spark was kindled. Perhaps the graph of Freddie’s burgeoning manhood and that of the romantic Edith’s disillusionment in her peevish husband happened at that moment to coincide. In any case, on a charabanc excursion of the island so beloved by Queen Victoria, the two of them found themselves for a few minutes alone, and they kissed.

  This kiss seems, at that time, to have been the extent of their intimacy. Whether it had been the result of mere midsummer madness, or whether, even in those early moments, the passion in each of them had recognized its counterpart, will never be known. But, ironically, as the holiday drew to a close, Percy Thompson, mellowed perhaps by the afternoon band concerts, suggested to Freddie Bywaters that he become a paying guest in the Thompsons’ household. A few days later, Bywaters was established for the remainder of his shore leave at 41 Kensington Gardens. And he and Edith Thompson were doomed to be lovers.

  We must never forget that Edith Thompson was very much a woman of her time and class, even though both her contemporaries and her peers were later outragedly to disclaim her. By “lovers,” in reference to Mrs. Thompson and 1921, we must form no picture of the quick amoral leap into the adulterous bed. For Edith Thompson and the many other potential Edith Thompsons of that period, “lovers” was a word intimately connected with the romantic novels and songs of the time. “Love” was something that, though it had its physical aspect, was cherished largely for the sensibilities that it aroused. “Lovers” were people who yearned, who courageously faced dreadful odds, who exchanged meaningful glances over a proffered rose, whose fingertips, touching, brought a charge of electricity, whose lonely pillows were moistened at night by the dew of secret tears.

  It is certain that, at the start of her romance, Edith Thompson sa
w herself and Freddie Bywaters in this light. Of course, she was married, and this made a slight variation on the classic motive. But there was an established romantic pattern for that too. She was the Sensitive Female, chained to the surly, insensitive husband, made to suffer, oh, ever so, a thousand times a day by his churlish lack of refinement. She was lovely, wasted womanhood who at last, in Freddie, had found “the one who understood.”

  We have one glimpse, in the letters, of the two of them in these first days, after Freddie had become a boarder. One evening—and, fittingly enough, it was Freddie’s birthday—Edith came into the sitting room and found Freddie alone, brooding in the dusk. (At that time, as the popular songs of the period attest, the dusk was accepted as the most romantic moment of the day.) Edith, seeing Freddie lost in pensive somberness, listening to the flutter of her own heart, asked, “What is the matter?”

  And Freddie (“In the gloaming, oh, my darling”) turned quickly to her and said, “You know what’s the matter. I love you.”

  That, then, had been the declaration—in a form ideally designed to charm Edith’s romantic ear. One can imagine her that night lying in the bed next to Percy, who had automatically become her “brute of a husband,” caressingly telling over to herself her lover’s avowal. She was beloved. Under the very same roof was a young pure sensitive champion who understood, who could appreciate her unhappiness.…

  That was probably the only way in which an Edith Thompson could have been trapped into a “sordid affair”—and she was trapped. From that moment on, the groundwork for her conception of her love affair had been formed. Whatever happened later, whatever slips into carnality may have been made for Freddie’s hot-blooded, virile sake, nothing could blur or change her first perfect image of “love”—the “love” for which Robert Hichens, R. K. Chambers, and W. B. Maxwell so generously provided blueprints through the medium of the rental libraries.

  After the avowal, the love affair went on its way—or rather on Edith’s way. During the next few weeks, she and Freddie read romantic novels together and discussed them, a literary pursuit that they never abandoned, and which later developed for them into a terrible boomerang. They also made little excursions, to Kew Gardens (rather late for “lilac-time,” but no matter) and to Metroland, “appreciating beauty together.” There was an occasional kiss, perhaps, but certainly there was no more than that.

  Edith was leaning on her young champion; Edith was luxuriating in the voluptuous pleasure of being misunderstood by her husband and understood by her lover.

  And what of Freddie? Freddie was not an imaginative young man, but he was passionate, and passion can substitute, for a while at least, for imagination. It is more than probable that passion carried him, rather clumsily, up to the same peak as Edith, so that he saw everything through her eyes. Here was a fine little woman, married to a callow brute; here was a wonderful, spiritual girl who needed his protection, who affirmed his manhood.

  That this innocent but dangerous and affected relationship must soon have become apparent even to the imperceptive Percy is plain from the bombshell that suddenly shattered the idyl.

  On the afternoon of August Bank Holiday, England’s main summer national holiday, Edith, Percy, Freddie, and Avis, still Freddie’s supposed near fiancée, were sitting in the Thompsons’ back garden. Edith was sewing. She said, “I want a pin.”

  Instantly Freddie jumped up from his place beside Avis and ran into the house to find her one. Percy Thompson looked after his departing figure and said to his wife in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “You like to have someone always tacked on to you, to run little errands and obey all your little requests.”

  This “coarse, insensitive” remark started an argument with the wounded Edith—an argument that was still in progress when Freddie returned with the pin. It petered out soon afterward, however, only to erupt again later when Percy and Edith were alone in the dining room, having prepared tea. Avis, it seems, had disappeared somewhere, and the tea was getting cold. Percy, still smoldering, started to pass derogatory remarks about Edith’s relatives and their habits. A real quarrel started. Edith lashed back. Percy, completely losing his temper, struck her, knocking her across the room so that she stumbled against a chair and sent it spinning.

  Freddie, who had been out in the garden, heard the fracas and rushed in to Edith’s rescue. Ironically, Percy had once again played into Edith’s hand. He had acted in the classic fashion of the brutish, misunderstanding husband and had given Freddie an opportunity to play the classic role of chivalrous champion.

  After this episode, the precarious balance between the three of them was never restored. A few days later Freddie Bywaters left the house for good.

  The first phase of Edith’s romance, then, was over. This phase, so prettily innocent, so infinitely tantalizing, so ideally suited to a sentimental feminine nature, could never have lasted anyway. There was still a full month before Freddie had to return to his ship. And in that month, the Thompson-Bywaters romance slipped inevitably, from this “innocent” phase into a “guilty” phase.

  Edith must have found this development justifiable enough. Hadn’t it been Percy, with his crass, vulgar jealousy, who had forced the issue? And weren’t there plenty of romantic blueprints for a “guilty” relationship too? Now the time had come for her to play a role that was almost as satisfactory as the one she had been forced to abandon. Now she was to be the Erring Wife, the woman with the pain behind her eyes, the woman of the hastily secreted billet-doux, the woman of the veiled journeys to clandestine rendezvous, the woman who had become the Great Sinner, but whose sin was the glorious one of Loving Too Well.

  Probably, in spite of Mrs. Thompson’s innate respectability, adultery, now that it had come, was fairly easily accepted. Because, to her, it was no longer adultery, it was love’s consummation, and, as such, perfectly assimilable into the dream world. When Freddie sailed with the S.S. Morea on September 9, he was leaving behind him not a married woman with whom he had had a tumble, but “His Only True Love, with whom he had a right by love and nature to everything to which Percy had a right by law.” The pattern, the inexorable, unrealistic, frightening pattern of sentimentality had been fixed.

  During the trial, there was a great deal of shocked comment upon the “carnality” of this affair. Actually, its sexual side was almost nonexistent. This was due partly to the fact that Edith Thompson was not essentially “carnal” at all. She was a rhapsodic sentimentalist. But it was just as largely due to the fact that for people at Edith and Freddie’s social and financial level, the opportunities to commit what the courts call adultery were almost impossible to find. Edith and Freddie, who became to the outraged general public the very symbols of orgiastic lust, were in fact little more than a pathetic, earnest, and high-minded couple of hand-holders in the park. This, of course, was one of the reasons why their emotions became so intense, one of the reasons for the final and terrible explosion.

  If Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters had ever been able to give full rein to their infatuation, it is probable that it would have worn itself out, as all such essentially incongruous relationships are apt to do. After sufficient relaxed intimacy with Edith, young Bywaters might very possibly have waked up to the fact that she was, after all, eight years older than he, and also of a possessive, fanciful nature hopelessly beyond the simple needs of his own realistic, uncomplicated masculine nature. If Edith Thompson had ever had time to look closely and clearly at the handsome face of her young lover, it might well, at last, have dawned upon her that the face, though handsome, was not enormously interesting, and that the statements that issued from the finely chiseled lips were, after all, much the sort of statements one might expect from a nineteen-year-old laundry steward.

  But none of these conjectures apply, because the moment for placidity never came. Freddie was at sea until October 29 and thereafter he was absent for much longer stretches of time than he was ever on shore, and, even when he was home, his opportunities to me
et Edith were few.

  During the first separation, Edith must certainly have written to him copiously, but no letters from that period remain. On his return there was a rapturous secret reunion, and soon afterward came an episode that gave the lovers their first real chance to achieve their “freedom to love.” It was an opportunity that they hopelessly botched.

  Since Freddie’s return, Edith had been coming home late from work with a regularity that aroused even Percy’s suspicions. One evening, unknown to the lovers, Percy set up an ambush at the Ilford tube station. Sure enough, he saw Edie and Freddie emerge from the train, he saw their farewell squeeze of hands, he saw Freddie slip away toward the train bound back to the West End.

  But Percy Thompson was not one to make public scenes. He did not show himself or make his presence known. It was only later, when he had Edith-alone at home, that he revealed his discovery and denounced his wife. It is possible that at this time Percy’s suspicions were still short of the mark, for he did not go so far as to accuse his wife of infidelity. He merely berated her for keeping him in the dark and railed against Freddie Bywaters.

  “He is no man,” he said, “or he would ask my permission to take you out”

  He also accused Freddie of “running away from him,” which, since he had not made his presence known, was a rather confused accusation. However, all this coarseness was terrible to Edith, particularly Percy’s slur on Freddie’s manliness. She immediately told Freddie all that had happened, and the next evening, to show how far he was from running away, Freddie brought Edith right back to the house and her irate husband.