“There is one other curious and chance connection between murder and the Romantic movement. De Quincey’s Confessions were first published anonymously, and one of those who falsely laid claim to their composition was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Wainewright was a critic and journalist of great refinement; he was one of the few men of his time, for example, to recognize the genius of the obscure William Blake. He even praised Blake’s last epic poem, Jerusalem, when all of his contemporaries considered it the work of a madman who had located Jerusalem itself in, of all places, Oxford Street! Wainewright was also a vociferous admirer of Wordsworth and the other ‘Lake Poets,’ but he has one further distinction which was celebrated by Charles Dickens in ‘Hunted Down’ and by Bulwer-Lytton in Lucretia. Wainewright was an accomplished and malevolent murderer, a secret poisoner who dispatched members of his own family before turning his attention to chance acquaintances. He read poetry by day, and poisoned by night.”
George Gissing put down the journal; he had not yet finished the piece, but he had already noticed three errors of syntax and several infelicities of style which disturbed him more than he could have anticipated. How could his first essay come so lame into the world? His melancholic disposition began to reassert itself, after the first great rush of enthusiasm and optimism, and he closed the Pall Mall Review with a sigh.
TEN
MR. GREATOREX: Can you explain how it was, then, that your husband should commit suicide two days after you had purchased the prussic acid from the druggist in Great Titchfield Street?
ELIZABETH CREE: I had told him that evening, after I had returned home, that I had bought something for the rats.
MR. GREATOREX: Now, these rats. Your maid, Aveline Mortimer, has already testified that there were no rats. Yours is a newly-built house, is it not?
ELIZABETH CREE: Aveline hardly ever went down into the cellar, sir. She is of a nervous disposition, and so I did not tell her of my discovery. As for the house—
MR. GREATOREX: Yes?
ELIZABETH CREE: Even a new house may harbor rats.
MR. GREATOREX: Will you tell me now where you placed the bottle of prussic acid?
ELIZABETH CREE: It was in the scullery, beside the irons.
MR. GREATOREX: And did you tell Mr. Cree of its location?
ELIZABETH CREE: I presume I did. We had a general conversation at dinner that night.
MR. GREATOREX: We will return to that conversation later, but I would like to remind you now of a remark you made earlier. You said that your husband was of a morbid disposition. Can you explain that a little more fully to me?
ELIZABETH CREE: Well, sir, he dwelled upon certain matters.
MR. GREATOREX: What matters?
ELIZABETH CREE: He believed that he was condemned. And that demons were forever watching him. He believed that they would destroy his mind, before they destroyed his body, and that he would be then consigned to hell. He was a Romanist, sir, and this was his fear.
MR. GREATOREX: Am I correct in thinking he had a substantial private income?
ELIZABETH CREE: Yes, sir. His father had speculated in railway shares.
MR. GREATOREX: I see. And will you tell me now how a man of such uncommon anxieties managed to conduct himself through the day?
ELIZABETH CREE: He went each morning to the Reading Room of the British Museum.
ELEVEN
The early autumn of 1880, in the weeks just before the emergence of the Limehouse Golem, was exceptionally cold and damp. The notorious pea-soupers of the period, so ably memorialized by Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, were quite as dark as their literary reputation would suggest; but it was the smell and the taste of the fog which most affected Londoners. Their lungs seemed to be filled with the quintessence of coal dust, while their tongues and nostrils were caked with a substance which was known colloquially as “miners’ phlegm.” Perhaps that was why the Reading Room of the British Museum was unusually crowded on that raw September morning when John Cree arrived with his Gladstone bag and his ulster neatly folded over his arm. He had removed his coat beneath the portico, as was his custom, but before stepping into the warmth of the Museum he looked back into the fog with a curiously mournful expression. Some wreaths of it lingered about him as he walked into the great entrance hall, and for a moment he resembled some pantomime demon rising onto the stage. But he bore no other resemblance to any such apparition: he was of middling height, as the phrase then was, and he had neat dark hair. He was forty years old, sturdily built, with perhaps a trace of stoutness, and his round bland face only served to emphasize the extraordinary paleness of his blue eyes: at first sight you might have thought him blind, so pale they seemed, but a second glance would convince you that he was somehow looking into you.
He had a customary seat in the Reading Room, C4, but on this particular morning it had already been taken by a pale young man who was nervously tapping the green leather desk with his hand while he read a copy of the Pall Mall Review. There was a vacant place beside him, in a room which was already very busy, and John Cree put his bag carefully upon it. On his other side sat an elderly man with what in those days was considered an unusually long beard. The fact that he was sitting between George Gissing and Karl Marx, if he had recognized it, would have meant nothing at all to John Cree; he would have known them neither by name nor by reputation, and his only sensation that morning was one of annoyance at being, as he put it to himself, “hemmed in.” Yet Marx and Gissing would, within a very short time, have a place in his history.
What books had John Cree chosen to read on this foggy autumn day? He had reserved a copy of Plumstead’s History of the London Poor and Molton’s A Few Sighs from Hell. Both books were concerned with the life of the indigent and the vagrant in the capital, and for that reason they were of especial interest to him; he was fascinated by poverty, and by the crime and disease which it engendered. It was, perhaps, an unusual preoccupation for a man of his class and background; his father had been a wealthy hosier in Lancaster but John Cree himself, much to the disappointment of his family, had not been a success in trade. He had come to London in order to escape from the shadow of his father and also to pursue a literary career, as a journalist on The Era and as a dramatist; yet he had so far proved no more successful in these areas than in any other. But he believed that now, in the life of the poor, he might have found his great theme. He often recalled a remark by the publisher Philip Carew that “there was a grand book to be written about London.” Why not release his own private misery within the general sufferings of so many?
On his right hand, Karl Marx was dividing his attention between Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Bleak House by Charles Dickens; this might seem odd reading for the German philosopher but at the end of his life he had returned to his first enthusiasm, poetry. In his early years he had read fiction eagerly and had been moved, in particular, by the novels of Eugene Sue; but Marx had characteristically expressed himself through the medium of epic poems. Now he was once again contemplating the composition of a long poem, which was to be set in the turbulent streets of Limehouse and entitled The Secret Sorrows of London. That was why he had spent many hours in the neighborhood of the East End, often in the company of his friend Solomon Weil.
On John Cree’s left hand, George Gissing had put down the Pall Mall Review and begun to skim through a number of books and pamphlets on the subject of mathematical machines. The editor of the Review had a particular fascination for the work of Charles Babbage, who had died nine years before, and he had commissioned this ambitious young writer to compose an essay on the inventor’s life and work. No doubt much of the technical detail would be beyond Gissing’s comprehension but the editor, John Morley, had admired “Romanticism and Crime” and trusted the young man to produce another “bright” offering for his pages. Morley also paid well—five guineas for five thousand words, an amount which would keep Gissing for at least a week. So he had eagerly immersed himself in accounts of computing machines, dif
ferential numbers and modern calculus theory.
At this particular moment he was reading Charles Babbage’s essay on artificial intelligence, while John Cree himself was studying an account of Robert Withers. Withers was a self-employed cobbler from Hoxton who had been so worn down by poverty that he had destroyed his entire family with the mallets and chisels which he employed in his meager trade. Cree was disturbed by the details of malnutrition and degradation, but he probably could not have admitted to himself that, in reading of such misery, he felt more alive now than he had ever done before. Karl Marx, meanwhile, was making his own notes. He was reading the last installment of Bleak House, and had reached that point where Richard Carstone asks, on his deathbed, “It was all a troubled dream?” Marx seemed to find the remark interesting, and wrote on a sheet of lined paper, “It was all a troubled dream.” At the same moment George Gissing was transcribing this arresting passage into his own notebook: “The quest for machine intelligence must arouse fresh speculation in even the most orthodox mind: think of all the calculations which might be performed in the field of statistical inquiry, where we might find ourselves able to make many very intricate deductions.” Karl Marx had turned the pages of Bleak House—at his age, he tired of fiction too easily—and had come upon that passage where “… poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me that she had given her birds their liberty.”
And so the three men sat side by side on this autumn day, as unaware of each other as if they had been sealed in separate chambers. They were lost in their books, as the murmuring of all the inhabitants of the Reading Room rose towards the vast dome and set up a whispering echo like that of the voices in the fog of London.
TWELVE
MR. GREATOREX: You have said that your husband was of a morbid disposition. But he was regular in his habits, was he not?
ELIZABETH CREE: Yes, sir. He always returned from the Reading Room at six o’clock, in good time for dinner.
MR. GREATOREX: And in the months before his death you observed no change in these habits?
ELIZABETH CREE: No. After he had returned from the Reading Room, he always went to his study and sorted out his papers. I would call him down at half past seven.
MR. GREATOREX: And who prepared the food?
ELIZABETH CREE: Aveline. Aveline Mortimer.
MR. GREATOREX: And who served it?
ELIZABETH CREE: The same. She is a good maid, and looked after us well.
MR. GREATOREX: Is it not odd to have only the one servant in a household such as yours?
ELIZABETH CREE: It was to spare Aveline’s feelings. She had something of a jealous nature.
MR. GREATOREX: Now, please tell us, what was your practice after dinner?
ELIZABETH CREE: My husband drank a bottle of port each night, and had done so for a number of years without any ill effects. He used to say that it calmed him. I would often play the piano and sing to him. He liked to hear the old ditties from the halls, and sometimes he would join with me in the vocalization. He had a good tenor voice, sir, as Aveline will confirm.
MR. GREATOREX: You were once in the music hall yourself, were you not?
ELIZABETH CREE: I … Yes, sir. I was an orphan when I went upon the stage.
THIRTEEN
My mother descended into hell at last, having been taken there by the fever. I ran out of our lodgings and purchased a jug of gin; then I poured it all over her mouth and face to cover up the smell. The young doctor scolded me for that but, as I told him, a dead body is a dead body however you look at it. She was put into the earth of the paupers’ graveyard by St. George’s Circus; one of the fishermen gave me a sail in which to wrap her body, and the ferrymen built a wooden box for her from some old ship planks. Little did they know where this new craft was sailing. I would have gladly helped them in their work but they still thought of me as “Little Lizzie” or “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.” I smiled then when I thought of the names that my mother had called me, when she confessed to her god that I was one of her sins. I was the sign of the devil, the bitch from hell, the curse upon her.
They collected ten shillings for me after the funeral, when we gathered in the Hercules tavern, and I cried a little for the sake of it. I can always produce the goods. I left them as soon as ever I could and took the money back to Peter Street, where I hid it beneath one of the floorboards—but not before I had taken out three shillings and put them on the table. Oh what a dance I did then, among the litter of Bible pages which I had scraped from the walls, and when I could no longer dance I acted out the scene I had watched in Craven Street. I was Dan Leno mocking his naughty daughter; then I took my mother’s stained pillow, cradled it, kissed it, and flung it to the floor. If I did not make haste I would have been late for the show, and so all at once I grabbed my mother’s old coat from its hook on the door. I knew it would fit me snugly: I had measured myself against it even as she lay upon her bed in death.
The theater in Craven Street was so brightly lit that I might have been watching it in a dream; all the gaslights flared around me, and in the brightness my mother’s coat looked so faded and threadbare that I would gladly have exchanged it for any piece of outlandish stage gear. There was a small crowd outside, wondering at a poster—they must have been flower girls and cab touts and hawkers and such trades—and one boy was spelling it out for his father. “It’s Jenny Hill,” he said as I joined them. “The Vital Spark. And then there’s Tommy-Move-Over-for-Your-Uncle-Farr.”
“He dances with a skipping rope.” His father shook his head with immense satisfaction. “And then it turns into a hangman’s piece of cord. But where’s that tiny one with the clogs?” He was there, billed on this night as “The Infant Leno, the Whipper-Snapper with a Million Faces and a Million Laughs! Every Song Funny! Every Song in Character!” I could no more have prevented myself from walking towards the lights than I could have stopped breathing. All thoughts of Lambeth Marsh and of my mother disappeared as I took my ticket and went up into the gods. This was where I belonged, with the golden angels all around me.
The Dancing Quakers came on first, with a shuffle routine, and some peel was thrown at them from the pit. Then there were a couple of swagger songs from a lion comique, a pair of patterers called The Nerves who did some encores and “obligings again,” until Dan Leno made his appearance. He was dressed as a dairy girl, complete with a little apron and a bonnet frilled in blue, and he danced his way across the stage with a milk pail on either arm. There was a lovely picture of the Strand behind him once again and, this time, I managed to pick out some of the signs and shop windows which were much more glorious here than they were in reality. In my old life I had seen things darkly, but now they were most clear and brilliant. Even the dust on the stage seemed to shine, and the painted green door at the corner of Villiers Street seemed so inviting that I wanted to knock and walk in. But then Dan Leno dropped his milk pails and began to sing:
Our stores! Our stores!
Our nineteenth-century stores!
There’s eggs overlaid,
And old marmalade,
In our nineteenth-century stores.
He came forward and started squirming and simpering, putting forward one dainty foot and then withdrawing it, advancing towards the pit and then retreating, with such a wistful, piteous, put-upon face that you could not help but laugh. “This morning a lady came in and said, ‘How do you sell your milk, dear?’ I said, ‘As quickly as possible.’ ” Who would have thought that he was still a young boy? “ ‘And how do you go with those big buckets?’ she asks me. ‘Well, believe me or believe me not,’ I says, ‘I goes natural.’ ” There was some more patter and then, when the little orchestra struck up a tune, he began swaying across the stage and singing “I’m Off to Get Milk for the Twins.” He came on next as Nelson and then as an Indian squaw: you never heard such laughter when he accidentally set fire to his pigtail by rubbing two sticks together. “Kindly give me a few moments to change,” he said, joining in with the fun, althou
gh we all knew that it was part of his spoof. “Just a very few moments.” And then he came back, in a battered old hat, and sang a cockney solo.
I had not had a bit to eat since my mother’s death, but I felt so revived and refreshed that I could have stayed in the gods forever. When it all came to an end, and when the last copper had been thrown upon the stage, I could hardly bring myself to leave: I think I would be sitting there still, staring down at the pit, if the crowd had not pushed and pulled me out into the street. It was like being expelled from some wonderful garden or palace, and now all I could see were the dirty bricks of the house fronts, the muck of the narrow street, and the shadows cast by the gas lamps in the Strand. There was straw scattered on the cobbles of Craven Street, and some pages from a magazine lying in a puddle of filth. A woman or child was crying in an upper room, but when I looked up I could barely see the silhouettes of the chimney stacks against the night air. Everything was dark, and the sky and the rooftops merged together. Now, with all my strength, I longed to be in the theater once more.
There was an oil lamp gleaming at the corner near the river, with some people gathered around: I could see that it was some kind of pie stall, and so I walked that way to purchase a saveloy for myself. It was a bitter cold evening, and the hot coals offered some comfort as well. I must have been standing there for a minute or two, shuffling my feet on the cobbles, when a beery-looking man in a bright yellow check suit ran over. “Harry,” he said to the pie-seller, “they’re all in dire need of pies. Be a good boy and heat some up.” I knew at once that he had come from the theater, and I stood in awe of this blessed creature who lived within the light; he saw me staring, I think, and tipped me a wink. “Be a good girl,” he said, “and help your uncle with these pies. Be careful, though. They’re too good to drop, as the pregnant woman said to the midwife.” I followed him across Craven Street, holding some of the pies—I could scarcely feel them, hot though they must have been, and I could barely contain my trembling as we walked down a narrow alley by the side of the theater, and then up a flight of iron steps into the building itself. He pushed open a door covered in green baize and we walked into a passageway that smelled of beer and spirits. My eyes were so wide that I noticed everything, even the faded purple carpet which curled up at the edges and the skipping rope which one of the shufflers must have left against the wall. “Here’s a little bit of what you fancy,” the man who had called himself my “uncle” was saying now to a dancer who opened a door at the sound of his footsteps. “Nice and hot as you like it, Emma dear. But perhaps not quite big enough.”
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Page 4