The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

by Peter Ackroyd

  I put on my bonnet at once, and, without saying a word to the dear dramatist upstairs, I left the house and hailed a cab on my own account. It seemed an age before we arrived at Misery Junction (or Poverty Corner, as Dan always used to call it) and I looked out of the window eagerly at the crowd of artistes: I recognized many of them, naturally, and it took quite an effort not to wave as I passed by. I stopped the cab around the corner of York Road, asked the driver to wait a few moments, and then walked quickly towards the sad ensemble. There was a contortionist there I had known from the Queen’s in Poplar; he greeted me with a very low bow, no doubt assuming that I was also out of a shop. I passed a terribly bad seriocomic from the Paragon, who professed not to recognize me, when quite by chance I noticed Aveline Mortimer leaning wearily against a wall. I admit that I smiled when I saw her: it had been Aveline, after all, who had counseled me to proclaim Meesa Meschina to the Hebrew crowd and almost brought about my own sudden death. She tried to perk up a little when I walked over to her, but I am glad to say that she looked desperately tired and defeated. “Why,” she said, “it’s Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.”

  “It is not. It is Mrs. John Cree.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  The idea occurred to me at once. “How long have you been out of a shop, dear?”

  “Only a week or so.”

  I knew, from the state of her clothes, that she was lying. “Would I be right in thinking, Aveline, that you are looking out for a nice little part?”

  “What’s it to you, Lizzie?”

  “Only that I am willing to give you a position.”

  She gazed at me in astonishment. “You don’t have a hall, Lizzie, do you?”

  “Not as such. No. But I do need a full house.” She did not understand what I meant. “I want to employ you, dear. As a maid.”

  “A maid?”

  “Just consider it for a moment. Thirty shillings a week plus full board. And every second weekend will be your own.” It was a very attractive offer, and she hesitated for a moment. “I will not be a difficult mistress, Aveline, and any unpleasantness in the past has already been quite forgotten.”

  “It is easy to say—”

  I could see that she did not yet fully trust me, and suspected this was some elaborate revenge on my part. “Think of all the fun we will have in talking over old times.” She hesitated still, and I whispered in her ear. “Anything would be better than this degradation, would it not? Do you wish to end on the streets?”

  “Will you make it two guineas?”

  “Thirty-five shillings. I can give you no more.”

  “Very well then, Lizzie. I am with you.”

  “That’s a good girl.” I took a shilling from my bag, and put it in her hand. “I will have returned here in half an hour. Buy yourself some nice bacon and greens while you wait for me.” I was about to take the cab to Haste and Spenlow in Catherine Street, where I could purchase a neat little maid’s uniform with starched cap and collar, but then I turned back. “On second thoughts, Aveline, it is better that you accompany me. No doubt you know your own size, dear.” So we returned to the cab, where she sat quite pertly beside me.

  “Will I have to cook?” she asked, as the driver whipped the horses.

  “Of course, Aveline. I presume that is one of your many skills.”

  “Yes. They taught me in the workhouse.” I must have looked surprised for a moment, because she became quite fierce. “You might as well know it now, so I can forever have my peace.” It was just like her to misquote from the wedding service.

  “Were you in the Magdalen, dear?”

  “No, I was not, thank you very much. I may have been poor, but I wasn’t a whore. I was always a clean virgin.”

  I did not believe this for an instant, but I decided to humor her: what was the point of an argument before I had even purchased a uniform? “Did you know your parents, Aveline?”

  “I knew my mother. She was on the parish for as long as I can remember.”

  “That is very sad.” It is extraordinary, is it not, how some women can escape their backgrounds altogether while others remained trapped in them? Poor Aveline was still no better than her mother, while I was driving around in a hansom as if London was my oyster. “Poverty must be a terrible thing.”

  She was about to say something foul to me, I knew, but at this moment we drove up to Haste and Spenlow. Aveline jumped out very smartly into Catherine Street, and I waited only a second before tapping on the glass. “Will you hand me out, Aveline? We are entering an establishment.” It was her first lesson in general deportment and with rather bad grace, I thought, she took my hand and guided me onto the cobbles. The shop was almost empty but, still, she would barely submit to being measured. Eventually, I found her a wonderful little costume, with a gray border, and I came back to the cab in high good humor. As soon as she was beside me again, I took the maid’s cap out of its parcel and popped it on her head. “There now. Don’t you look a picture?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of young womanhood, Aveline. Womanhood in service. Now shall we try on the rest?”

  “Where are we going? The Alhambra?” She was referring to the fact that, in the old days, we often changed our costumes in the brougham as we hurried from hall to hall. I suspect that is why she entered the spirit of the occasion and, by the time she had put on her black cotton collar, she looked every inch the lady’s maid. “A change of dress works wonders,” I said. “A new woman is born.”

  “I must look like a walk-on part.”

  “Will you add madam to that sentence, please?”

  “I must look like a walk-on part, madam.”

  “Very good, Aveline. No. You are not walking on. You are one of the main characters. Now say after me, ‘Will that be all, sir?’ ”

  “Would I be right in thinking that ‘sir’ is the party from the Era you were sweet on?”

  “I would not use those exact words, but you are correct. Mr. Cree is my husband. Now say it!” I tapped her on the cheek with my glove.

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes, thank you, Aveline.” I had adopted my husband’s deep voice for a moment, but now I returned to my own. “What is it for dinner tonight?”

  Aveline thought for a moment. “Minced beef and potatoes?”

  “Oh no. Be more select.”

  “Fried fish?”

  “Go higher, Aveline. This is Bayswater, not the Old Kent Road.”

  “Oxtail soup. Then goose with all the trimmings.”

  “Very good. That will be splendid. Now do you remember how we used to do the comedy curtsy?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Show me then, dear.” So she got up from the seat and, narrow though the space was, she managed a short dip. “Excellently done, Aveline. I will be giving you a notebook with some phrases in it, which you will learn by heart. Do you understand me?”

  “I can learn a script, Lizzie. You know that well enough.”

  I gave her a real slap this time. “Mrs. Cree!” She made no effort to fight back, and I realized that I had already gained the upper hand. “Now act nice and demure. We have come into Bayswater.”

  In fact she looked the very picture of neatness and propriety as we approached the house and, when she got out of the cab and held the door open for me, I could tell that she was already becoming accustomed to her new part. I suspect that, even then, she was beginning to enjoy it. Of course I could not have explained to her the true reason I had employed her—I believe that it did not really even occur to me until I had actually seen her loitering in the Waterloo Road like some creature of the night.

  That reason concerned my husband. I had discovered, very soon after our marriage, that he was a man of ungovernable lust; he attempted to have intercourse with me on the night after the wedding, and it was only after much pleading on my part that he agreed to pleasure himself with his hand. I could not endure—I cannot endure—the thought of being entered by a ma
n and I made it quite clear to him that anything of such a nature was quite out of the question. I could not allow him to touch me in that place, not after my mother had been there already. She had pinched me savagely, she had pricked me with her needle and once, though I was very young, I remember her taking a stick to it. Even though she was long dead, I could feel her hands there still. No one would ever touch it again.

  So I would sleep in Mr. Cree’s bed, I would allow him to caress me with his hands or even with his tongue, but I would not permit that act. He seemed surprised and even dismayed by my decision, but he knew well enough that I was too accustomed to the world to be swayed by the so-called “rights” of the husband—on the halls, as Dan used to say, we treat each other equal or not at all. A woman’s voice was always heard, as much in the green room as on the stage. Fortunately my dear husband was too much of a gentleman to force himself upon me, and I appreciated his courtesy to the extent that I decided to repay him: it was then, while musing about the artistes crowded around Misery Junction, that the idea of lady’s maid had occurred to me. If I could divert Mr. Cree’s attention to an adjacent and easy female, then his lust would be slaked and I would remain happily untouched. It was a great piece of luck that my eye should have fallen on Aveline Mortimer; I knew her to be of loose morals—she had once set herself up with a black-faced turn in Pimlico—and she could no doubt be persuaded to do the needful. “Now then, Aveline,” I said, as we sat in the drawing room soon after our arrival. “Do you think you will be quite happy with your new situation?”

  “I hope so, Lizzie.”

  “Mrs. Cree.” Now that she was wearing her maid’s uniform she had become more compliant and respectful; it is marvelous what a good costume can do. “Then you must promise me this, Aveline. You must promise to obey me, and to do my bidding in every respect. Is that agreed?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Cree.”

  She suspected that some game was at hand—I could tell from her seriocomic air—but I had not the slightest intention of forewarning her. I left Mr. Cree and Aveline together on several occasions and, while I watched secretly from the wings, allowed nature to take its course. But I still pitied him, each time that I saw him put on his ulster and travel to the British Museum.

  THIRTY-NINE

  John Cree often visited the Reading Room now because he was quite unable to continue work on his play. He was nervous and uneasy but his failure as a writer was not the sole reason for his distress—he was, in fact, most disturbed by his wife. He had first known her as a performer on the halls but, since their marriage, she had become a more unfamiliar and disquieting figure. He recognized very well what troubled him—she played the part of a wife perfectly, and yet in the very definition and completeness of her role there was an air of strangeness. There were times when Elizabeth Cree did not seem to be there at all, as someone else took over the part, but there were also occasions when she became “wifely” with a fierceness and determination that were almost professional. This was the cause of his unease, and he often found himself wandering from the melodrama of Misery Junction to the unacknowledged drama of his domestic existence. So instead he read books concerned with the sufferings of the London poor, and passed his time beneath the great dome of the library.

  A young man had developed the habit of sitting at the desk beside him—C3—and for the last week John Cree had watched him write in a flowing hand across sheets of foolscap paper. He had long dark hair, and wore an Astrakhan fur coat which he refused to give to Herbert, the cloakroom attendant, and which, against all propriety, he draped across his blue leather chair. He also seemed inordinately fond of his own compositions, because there were times when in the course of a particularly long sentence he glanced across at John Cree to make sure that he was being observed. He would often leave the Reading Room in order to take some air (John Cree had once glimpsed him walking among the pillars, smoking a Turkish cigarette), but he was always most careful to leave his papers visible.

  Cree was not particularly interested in the young man’s activities, however; he guessed, correctly, that he had recently come down from one of the great universities and was attempting to pursue a literary career in the capital. But the books which he ordered were of some interest—on one morning he had seen him read Longinus and Turner’s Liber Studiorum. These were the marks of an authentic sensibility and he became more intrigued by the young man’s work, laid so ostentatiously on the desk beside him. He even went so far as to take a page, after the author had left for his smoke among the pillars, and scan the contents inscribed in a beautiful hand: “However we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How Thomas Griffiths Wainewright first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about ‘The Excursion’ and the ‘Poems Founded on the Affections.’ Murder may have been his occupation, but poetry was his delight.”

  FORTY

  My husband was not advancing with his play. He spent so many fruitless hours in his study, sucking on his pipe and taking cups of coffee (from the hand of Aveline, naturally), that I became quite exasperated with him. I urged upon him the virtues of concentration and perseverance but he would sigh, get up from his chair and go to the window that looked out over the gardens. I even believe that, sometimes, he became quietly angry with me for reminding him of his duty. “I try as much as I can!” he shouted at me one evening in the autumn of that year.

  “Calm yourself, John Cree.”

  “I do try.” He lowered his voice. “But I seem to have lost my way. It’s not like the days when we used to sit in the green room together—”

  “That time is long gone. Don’t ever wish it back. It is past.”

  “But then, at least, I had a sense of the world which sustained me. When I visited the halls and worked for the Era—”

  “It was not respectable.”

  “At least I felt that I belonged to something. Now I am not so sure.”

  “You belong to me.”

  “Of course I do, Lizzie. But I cannot make a play out of our own lives.”

  “I know. There is no dramatic interest. No sensation.” Even as I stared at him, and pitied his weakness, I formed my own resolution. I would finish Misery Junction for him. I knew more than enough about hall folk and, as for poverty and degradation, was there another writer in the country who had stitched sails in Lambeth Marsh? Had I not also flayed Uncle until the blood ran from his back, and walked through the streets of Limehouse in male duds? I had seen enough. So I would complete the play and then assume the role of its heroine upon the legitimate London stage. I knew the point my husband had reached in the drama, since I read it secretly at night, and had been eagerly expecting Catherine Dove to faint away from starvation in her Covent Garden garret. Then, at the last moment, she is found by her theatrical agent and taken to a private sanatorium near Windsor. But John could go no further. So I purchased a plentiful supply of pencils and paper from Stephenson’s in Bow Street, and began work on his behalf. I must admit I have a certain talent for dramatic composition and, as a woman, found a natural affinity with Catherine Dove; with Aveline as my audience, I would rehearse scenes in the drawing room before committing them to paper and even found some of my greatest effects in improvisation. Already I had determined that Catherine Dove, the poor orphan girl, would be fully restored to health and would go on to triumph over her enemies. But still she had not suffered enough, and so I added one or two little moments of horror to my husband’s version. There was one scene, for example, where in the depths of her distress she drinks gin until she collapses; she finds herself at dawn lying in a doorway off Long Acre, her
dress torn and her hands caked with blood, with no knowledge of how she came to be there in such a condition. It was a most powerful idea and, I must admit, it was given to me by Aveline Mortimer: I half-suspected that she had once been involved in something of the same nature, but I said nothing. So I improvised it, and recited it, and walked furiously up and down the drawing room until I had done it justice: “Can this be me, who lies here? No, I am not here. It is someone in my place whom I do not know. [Raises her hands to the sky.] Oh, God in heaven, what might I have done? My sanguineous hands must bear witness to some terrible deed. Could I have killed an innocent child and recalled nothing of the crime? Could I commit murder and know nothing of it? [Tries to rise but slumps down again.] Then I would be lower than the beasts of the field who, though they show no remorse, are at least conscious of their deeds! I have some dark life which is hidden from me. I live in the cave of my own horror and am deprived of light! [Faints away.]” In my excitement I had knocked over one of the chairs and shattered a small vase on a side table, but Aveline had cleaned up behind me. It was all very inspiring and, when the audience learn that the blood was shed in saving the life of a child from a drunken father, it would be very uplifting as well.