“You can say that again.” He could see that I was about to burst into tears and so, weak though he was, he got me laughing with a remark about his “India-rubber neck.” Then he insisted on going back to the performance: he was, as I said, always the professional.
But I think he remained nervous of me, and never again did he involve me in any knock-about farceries. Uncle took my side, naturally, and blamed it all on my eagerness; he had become quite a favorite with me now, and sometimes I even allowed him to pat my hand or stroke my knee. He was never permitted any other familiarities but he called me his “little Lizzie,” and once took the liberty of addressing me as his “darling girl.”
“I am not your darling, Uncle, and I am not your girl.”
“Have a heart, Lizzie. Don’t play so innocent with me.”
“I am not playing. I am real.”
“If you say so, Lizzie, if you say so.”
Uncle did not live in diggings but had purchased a smart new villa in Brixton; Dan and I, with one or two of the others, would sometimes make up a tea party there. What fun we had in those days, with Dan pretending to be overawed by Uncle’s signs of gentility. He would point at a silver teapot or a piece of lovely ebony furniture and ask us, in cockney slang, “Don’t it dumb yer?” Then our new resident turn, Pat “It’s All in the Patter” Patterson, would take up the business with a running commentary on the plush curtains, the ormolu clock, the paper flowers and everything else. Uncle always laughed when we spoofed his possessions but, as I was soon to discover, he kept his choicest items to himself.
I happened to be visiting him for tea one day, a few hours before a performance, when I realized that I was to be the only guest. “My dearest niece,” he said. “Come into the parlor.”
“Isn’t that a nursery rhyme, Uncle?”
“It may be, Lizzie, it may be. But come in nevertheless.” He pronounced the last word in a deep, rich voice like some lion comique. “Sit down and rest your pegs.” He filled me up with tea and cucumber sandwiches (I can never resist a nice bit of cucumber) and then, quite out of the blue, he asked me if I would like to know a secret.
“I love mysteries, Uncle. Is it a shocker?”
“Well, my dear, I believe it is. Come upstairs for a moment and we’ll see.” So I followed him up to the attic regions. “This is my dark room,” he whispered, tapping one door. “And here is the surprise!” He opened the door, and I barely had time to notice the extraordinary expression upon his face before he ushered me into what I took to be an office: there was a desk and chair in a corner but then, of all things, in the middle of the room was a camera with its cloth and tripod.
He was such a darling man I would have expected him to take up watercolors, or something of the kind. “Whatever do you want with this, Uncle?”
“That’s the secret, Lizzie.” I could smell spirits on his breath, now that he was close to me, and I supposed that he had been taking a little something with his tea. “Can I count on you to keep mum?” I nodded, and drew my hand across my mouth like the old servant in The Great Fire of London. “These are some of my girls. Over here.” He went across to the desk, unlocked it, and took out some papers. At least they seemed to be papers but, when he handed them to me, I saw that they were photographs—photographs of women, half-naked or entirely nude, with whips and rods in their hands. “What do you think of them, Lizzie?” he asked me eagerly. I was too surprised to say anything at all. “It’s just my fun, Lizzie. You understand. I like a good beating now and again. Doesn’t everyone?”
“I know her.” I held up one of the photographs. “That’s the girl who used to assist the great Bolini. She used to be sawn in half.”
“That’s her, ducks. What a performer.” Of course I was horrified by Uncle’s dirty little secret, but I was determined not to show it. I think I even smiled. “And you know, dear, I have a favor to ask of you.” I shook my head, but he preferred not to notice and went over to the camera. “Would you oblige me with a pose plastique, Lizzie? Just a tableau?”
“I would rather be destroyed first,” I said, unconsciously repeating a line from The Phantom Crew. “It is very disgusting.”
“Come on, dear. There’s no need to play your games with me.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Oh, darling. Uncle knows all about precious Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.” I suppose he must have startled me, because I felt myself blushing. “That’s right. I’ve followed you, dearest, when you’ve put on your male duds and strolled down Limehouse way. Do you prefer to be a man, Lizzie, and attract the women?”
“It is nothing to you what I choose to do.”
“Oh dear, I quite forgot. And then there was that business with Little Victor.”
“What nonsense is this now?”
“I saw you and him in the Canteen that night. You gave him quite a kick, didn’t you, Lizzie? It just so happened to be the night that he fell down a flight of steps and left his mortal coil. Surely you remember that, Lizzie? You were so heartbroken at the time.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Uncle.”
“You don’t have to say anything, dear.” What could I do? Some foul-minded people might listen to his stories about me, and I was only a defenseless artiste. Half the men and women of London would already have branded me as shameless for doing the halls, and the rest would be happy to believe the worst. It was in my interest to keep Uncle sweet. So that is why, every Sunday afternoon, I would take a cab to Brixton and in his attic room administer a very sound beating to the dreadful man; I was rather rough with him, I admit, but he never seemed to mind. In fact every time I drew blood he would shout “Go on! Go on!” until I was quite exhausted. That is the penalty of my nature, you see, since I always do everything to the utmost of my ability. I am a professional. But I don’t think that Uncle’s heart was up to it: he was very friendly with the bottle and, being such a heavy man, he was bound to feel the strain.
About three months after he had persuaded me to wield the lash, he was taken poorly with palpitations. I remember the occasion well: he had come to our rehearsals of The Mad Butcher, or What’s in This Sausage? when he suddenly fell against the scenery. He was sweating and shaking so much that I urged Dan to call for a doctor but, by the time he arrived, it was too late. Uncle was gone to his reward, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that the last word he breathed was my name.
THIRTY-TWO
MR. GREATOREX: So this is Elizabeth Cree. She stands here, according to the account you have just had the pleasure of hearing, as a much wronged and much maligned woman. She is an exemplary wife who has been charged with the foul crime of murder on the evidence of circumstance and gossip alone. You have been told that her unfortunate husband, John Cree, destroyed himself by eating arsenic powder. And why did he willingly embrace such a painful and protracted death? It seems that he was a Romanist who, according to his wife, was so afflicted by morbid piety that he believed he was condemned by God and watched by demons. Self-murder was his deliverance, although it might strike you as a trifle odd that he should thereby deliver himself to those same demons for eternity.
But let us leave religious speculation on one side for a moment, and contemplate the facts of the matter. Elizabeth Cree visited a druggist’s shop in Great Titchfield Street a few days before the death of her husband. “For the rats,” she said—although the maid of the house, Aveline Mortimer, has testified that the newly-built residence in New Cross harbored no vermin of any kind. Then her husband is found dead of arsenic poisoning. The coroner has already testified that the victim must have imbibed quantities of that substance for at least a week before his untimely and unfortunate demise. You may find this unusual in the suicide of a desperate man. And then we have the evidence of a fatal dose, on the evening of October the 26th last year, when the maid has testified that she heard John Cree exclaiming to his wife, “You devil! You are the one!” Only a short while later, as he lay upon the Turkey carpet in his bedroom, Mrs. Cree r
an into the street shouting “John has destroyed himself” and other such words. It may seem odd to you that she already knew that this was the intention and the act of her husband—more peculiar still that she realized he was dying of arsenic poisoning without having examined him—but, in any case, it was not until some minutes later that she was able to rouse Doctor Moore. It was he who pronounced John Cree dead, at which point Mrs. Cree fainted into the arms of her maid.
Let us consider Mr. Cree now. His wife has informed you that he was a morbid papist, but no other witness has given evidence to that effect. We are, in other words, supposed to rely upon the sole testimony of Mrs. Cree in order to account for her husband’s self-murder. The maid, who lived in the same house for some years, has denied each one of Mrs. Cree’s allegations. On the contrary, she tells us, Mr. Cree was a kind and liberal employer who gave no sign of any religious obsession at all. Once a week he attended the Catholic church of St. Mary of Sorrows in New Cross with his wife, but this was at Mrs. Cree’s urging; she had a great desire, according to the maid, to appear respectable. And since Mr. Cree’s temperament and state of mind are so important in this case—indeed it is the sole point of the prisoner’s defense—it will be appropriate to consider his life and character in a little more detail. His father was a hosier in Lancaster, but he came to London in the early 1860s to seek his fortune as a literary man. He wished to be a playwright, it seems, and so naturally he was inclined towards the world of the theater. He found employment as a reporter on the Era, a journal devoted to the stage, and it was in this capacity he met and eventually married the woman who stands in the dock before you. Some time after this marriage John Cree’s father died of a gastric fever, and his only son came into a large fortune. This is the fortune, of course, which his wife has now inherited. He gave up his post on the Era and from that time forward devoted his life to literary pursuits of a more serious nature. He frequented the Reading Room of the British Museum, as you have heard, and continued writing his drama. He is also, from the notes found in his possession, supposed to have been compiling a record of the London poor. Is this the kind of man who would succumb to religious delusions, as his wife has stated? Or perhaps John Cree was some evil domestic tyrant, some Bluebeard, who promised a life of unendurable misery? But this is not the case. By all accounts he was a quiet and courteous man who had no reason to kill himself, and against whom his wife could have no possible complaint. He was not, to use a modern analogy, some kind of Limehouse Golem.
THIRTY-THREE
SEPTEMBER 26, 1880: My dear wife loved the pantomime so much that, last night in the carriage back to New Cross, she sang the reprise with which she and Dan used to close in the old days. As soon as she entered the house, she clasped the maid’s hand and recounted the business of the whole performance. “And then Dan did a little bit of back-walking with Bluebeard. ‘I’m going out and then I’m coming in again, just so you’ll know I’m here.’ Do you remember it, Aveline?” My wife even imitated the hoarse voice of Sister Anne. I went upstairs to my study in order to settle an argument I was having with myself; I seemed to remember an essay on the pantomime by Thomas De Quincey, but I could not recall its name. Was it something like “Laughter and Screaming,” or “The Trick of Screaming”? I had only remembered it as a very fine title indeed, but the precise wording now escaped me. So I went through the great writer’s works and, by curious coincidence, found it in the same volume as my other cherished piece, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Its exact title was “Laugh, Scream and Speech” and I discovered that I had even marked a passage in the margin, where pantomime is described as “the short for fun, whim, trick and atrocity—that is, clown atrocity or crimes that delight us.” What a wonderful phrase that was—crimes that delight us—and of course it quite explained all the popular interest in my own little dramas on the streets of London. I could even see myself appearing before the next whore with a mallet in my hand, exclaiming “Here we are again!” in the right tone of screaming excitement. I might even put on costume before I slit them. Oh what a life it is! And of course the audience loves every minute of it—was it not Edmund Burke, in his very suggestive essay on the Sublime and Beautiful who explained how the greatest aesthetic sensations come from the experience of terror and danger? Horror is the true sublime. The common people and even the middling classes profess to be sickened or alarmed by my great career but, secretly, they have loved and admired each stage of it. Every newspaper in the country has dwelled reverentially upon my great acts, and sometimes they have even exaggerated them in order to satisfy the public taste—in a sense they have become my understudies, who watch every move and practice every line. I once worked on the Era, and I know how absurdly gullible newspaper reporters can be; no doubt they now believed in the Limehouse Golem with the same fervor as everybody else, and willingly accepted that some supernatural creature was preying upon the living. Mythology of a kind has returned to London—if indeed it ever really left it. Interrogate an inhabitant of London very carefully, and you will find the remnants of some frightened medieval churl.
I hired a cab to Aldgate, and then took a stroll towards Ratcliffe Highway; there was a policeman outside the house of the beautifully slain, and a small crowd who stood in the street with no other purpose than to gape or to gossip. I joined them readily enough, and was pleased to hear the evidence of their great respect and admiration. “He did it without a sound,” said one. “He cut their throats before they even knew it.” That was not strictly true, since the wife and children had seen me on the stairs, but, still, it is the thought that counts. “ ’E must be invisible,” a woman was whispering to her neighbor. “Nobody saw ’im come or go.” I wanted to thank her for her flattering report but, of course, I was compelled to be invisible among them again. “Tell me,” I asked an odd-looking fellow with a red scarf knotted around his head, “was there much blood?”
“Tubs of it. They were washing it down all day.”
“And what of the poor victims? What will happen to them?”
“The cemetery in Wellclose Square. The same grave for them all.” He opened his eyes very wide as he imparted this interesting information to me. “And I’ll tell you what will happen to the Golem when they find him.”
“If they find him.”
“They’ll bury him underneath the crossroads. With a stake through his heart.”
It sounded almost like a crucifixion, but I knew it to be the old penalty for extravagant crime: better that than to be left in chains by the riverside, while the tides washed over my body. Infinite London would always minister to me in my affliction.
I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano.
THIRTY-FOUR
When the police detectives came to interview Dan Leno on the subject of the Gerrard murders in the Ratcliffe Highway, only a few hours after John Cree had been consulting Thomas De Quincey’s essay on pantomime, they happened to discover a copy of that author’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” in the great comedian’s drawing room. But Leno had no interest in death of any kind (in fact he was thoroughly frightened of the topic), and the presence of this volume in his house had a much more unlikely explanation; it was a result of his passion for Joseph Grimaldi, the most famous clown of the eighteenth century.
The history of pantomime had been Leno’s study ever since he had made his name in the music hall; it was as if “The Funniest Man on Earth” wished to understand the conditions which had, in a sense, created him. He collected old playbills as well as such items of memorabilia as the Harlequin’s costume from The Triumph of Mirth and the wand from The Magic Circle. Of course he knew of Grimaldi from the beginning—forty years after his death, he was still the most famous clown of all—and one of the first theatrical souvenirs he purchased was a color print of “Mr. Grimaldi as Clown in the Popular New Pantomime of Mother Goose.” He had been “the most wonderful creature of his day,” accord
ing to one contemporary, because “there was such mind in everything he did.” The phrase had appealed to Leno when he first read it, because it seemed to summarize his own performance; for him, too, it was a question of “thinking through” (as he used to put it) an entire character. It was not enough to dress as Sister Anne or Mother Goose; it was necessary to become them. He also relished the famous story of Grimaldi’s visit to a doctor while he was performing in Manchester; he was already in the grip of that nervous exhaustion which would eventually destroy him, and the doctor took one look at the poor man’s face and gave his verdict: “There is only one thing for you,” he said. “You must go and see Grimaldi the Clown.”
But Dan Leno knew very little else about his great predecessor until a few weeks before when, on the advice of Statisticon, “The Memory Man,” he visited the library of the British Museum. Here, in the catalogues beneath the vast dome, he discovered The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, edited by “Boz.” Leno was a literate, if not an educated, man—he always said that his school had been a traveling trunk—and he knew well enough that “Boz” was the late Charles Dickens. This afforded him greater pleasure still, because he had always admired Dickens’s portrayal of theatrical folk in Nicholas Nickleby and in Hard Times; he had once even met the great novelist, when he was playing at the Tivoli in Wellington Street and Dickens had come around afterwards to congratulate him on his performance. Dickens himself was always an admirer of the halls, and divined in Leno some bright image of his own desperate childhood.
Of course Leno immediately ordered the edited memoirs, and spent the rest of the day reading the narrative of Grimaldi’s adventures. He had come naked and piping into the world on December the 18th, just two days before the date of Leno’s own birth—whether they had both emerged under a lucky or unlucky star was, as yet, uncertain. He discovered that Grimaldi was born in Stanhope Street, Clare Market, in 1779 and had first appeared upon the stage three years later; Clare Market was not very far from Leno’s own birthplace and he, too, had started work at the age of three. Here, then, was a kindred spirit. With increasing enthusiasm and excitement he noted down the details of Grimaldi’s characteristic costume of white silk with variously colored patches and spangles; Grimaldi, generally being mute upon the stage, would point to the color which symbolized his mood. Leno wrote down the details of an entire scene between Guzzle the Drinking Clown and Gobble the Eating Clown; then he transcribed the words of Grimaldi’s most famous and popular song, “Hot Codlins,” and even went so far as to memorize certain sentences from the clown’s last speech to the theater-goers of London: “It is four years since I jumped my last jump, filched my last oyster and ate my last sausage. I am not so rich a man as I was then for, as some of you may remember, I used to have a fowl in one pocket and sauce for it in the other. Eight and forty years have passed over my head, and I am sinking fast. I now stand worse on my legs than I used to do on my head. So tonight has seen me assume the motley for the last time—it seemed to cling to my skin as I took it off a few moments ago, and the old cap and bells rang mournfully as I quitted them forever. I have overleaped myself at last, ladies and gentlemen, and I must hasten to bid you farewell. Farewell! Farewell!” At this point, as Dickens records in a footnote, he was assisted from the stage. Dan Leno thought it the most wonderful speech he had ever encountered and, under the dome of the Reading Room, he recited it again and again until he had got it by heart. And as he whispered it to himself he thought of all the poor lost people who haunted the streets of the city, the children without a bed and the families without a home; for some reason Grimaldi, in his last days, seemed to represent them and console them. He remembered the speech, too, when he himself lay sick and dying; then Dan Leno spoke it aloud, word for word, while those around his deathbed believed that he was delirious.
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Page 16