Guilty Thing (62 page)

The wind was in his sails; it was time to move on. ‘
I often
', De Quincey told Findlay, ‘feel an almost irresistible inclination to rush away and bury myself among books in the heart of some great city like London or Paris.' Taking only his coat, he left Mavis Bush, walked the seven miles to Edinburgh and returned to the rooms at 42 Lothian Street where, sixteen years earlier, he had written ‘The Household Wreck'. Removing from the cupboard the set of clothes he had then left behind, his landlady, Frances Wilson, unlocked the door to his lair. He was, he told Hogg, planning his own version of
Arabian Nights
, which in a sense was true. Mixing his opium with water, De Quincey began work on the fourth volume of
Selections: Grave and Gay
. Blending into one continuous essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' and ‘Second Paper on Murder as One of the Fine Arts', he now added a ‘Postscript' which proved to be the finest murder essay of them all.

It was required of him, De Quincey's ‘Postscript' began, to provide ‘
some account of Williams
, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation' who, ‘in one hour. . . exterminated all but two entire households'. The artist's performances were remarkable not only for their aesthetic value, but also for their continuing ‘mystery': ‘Had the murderer an accomplice?'

For his final piece of theatre, De Quincey's design, grouping, light and shade were all perfectly arranged. The Ratcliffe Highway was ‘a public thoroughfare in a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London'. There were as many turbans to be seen here as hats; ‘every third man might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars, Chinese, Moors, Negroes, were met at every step.' The serpentine figure who ‘forced his way through the crowded streets' on the night of 7 December 1811, his tools buttoned up in his oversized coat, stood five foot seven inches tall, and judging from De Quincey's plaster cast of his face, his features were ‘mean'. John Williams had been at sea during the war, when the navy was composed of ‘murderers and ruffians' and all types of men on the run; those who knew him noted his ‘polished hatred of brutality' and the ‘exquisite suavity' of his manners. A woman who had seen him at the Thames Police Office told De Quincey that the hair of Williams ‘was the most extraordinary and vivid colour, viz, bright yellow'. Ruminating on this information, De Quincey wondered if, having been in India, Williams had disguised its natural colour by dying it with paint used to decorate high-caste horses of the Punjab. This same woman also revealed that Williams had a ghastly pallor, as though ‘green sap' rather than blood circulated in his veins.

Like Titian and Rubens, who practised their art in wigs and diamond buckled shoes, De Quincey imagined Williams setting out ‘for a grand compound massacre' in full dress. ‘It is really wonderful,' he mused, picturing the silken murderer clad in black stockings and pumps, gliding like a hellkite through the turbaned crowds, ‘
to pursue the successive steps
of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop.'

Watching the detective slither his way into the mind of the murderer is now a staple form of popular entertainment. But when De Quincey entered the interior of Williams, a man of ‘snakey insinuation', he was going where only Milton had gone before when, in
Paradise Lost
Book IX, Satan penetrates the head of the sleeping serpent through his mouth.

The victim towards whose house Williams was aimed was an ‘old and very intimate friend'. At least, Marr had ‘originally had been a friend; but subsequently, on good cause arising, he had become an enemy. Or more probably, as others said, the feelings had long since languished which gave life to either relation of friendship or of enmity.' The two men had sailed to Calcutta together and quarrelled over the girl who eventually married Marr. This, at least, is what the public wanted to believe, De Quincey suggested; they preferred to think of Williams as a spurned lover rather than a hound from hell. Timothy Marr, a ‘
stout, fresh-faced young man
of twenty-seven', had invested ‘about £180' in refurbishing his small drapery at 29 Ratcliffe Highway. The unpaid bills were accumulating and he was alarmed by the prospect of debts; as he closed the shop that night he looked forward to resting his head on the breast of his wife, who was in the basement nursing the baby.

Leaving the house shortly before midnight to buy oysters for her master's supper, Margaret Jewell – who De Quincey renamed Mary – saw a figure in the shadows. The elderly watchman saw him too, peeping into the shop window. The servant girl had left and Marr was alone: Williams ‘bolted' inside ‘and by a dexterous movement of his left hand. . . turned the key'. ‘
Let us leave the murderer alone
with his victims,' De Quincey now instructed, tip-toeing away. ‘For fifty minutes let him work his pleasure. The front-door, as we know, is fastened against all help. Help there is none. Let us, therefore, in vision, attach ourselves to Mary; and, when all is over, let us come back with
her,
again raise the curtain, and read the dreadful record of all that has passed in her absence.'

It had turned midnight, and was now the morning of Sunday 8 December. Mary made her way down the coffin-narrow passageways, ‘
in an area of London where ferocious tumults
were continually turning her out of what seemed to be the direct course'. The shops had shut, she was losing her bearings, and her mission had failed. Nothing remained ‘but to retrace her steps'. A watchman with a lantern guided her back to the door of 29 Ratcliffe Highway. ‘In many cities,' De Quincey paused to explain, ‘bells are the main instruments for communication between the street and the interior of houses: but in London knockers prevail. At Marr's there was both a knocker and a bell. Mary rang, and at the same time very gently knocked.' She listened for the thud of footsteps coming up from the kitchen. Silence. One person in the household might possibly have fallen asleep during her absence, but surely not everyone – ? Had the child been taken ill? An ‘icy horror' crept over her as she remembered ‘the stranger in the loose dark coat, whom she had seen stealing along under the shadowy lamp-light, and too certainly watching her master's motions'. The silence deepened; Mary's heart was pounding. Then came a sound which filled her with ‘killing fear'.

What was it?
On the stairs, not the stairs that led down to the kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single story of bedchambers above, was heard a creaking. . . Next was heard most distinctly a footfall: one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage to the door. The very breathing can be heard of that dreadful being, who has silenced all breathing except his own in the house. There is but a door between him and Mary. What is he doing on the other side of the door?. . . How hard the fellow breathes! He, the solitary murderer, is on one side of the door; Mary is on the other side. . . The unknown murderer and she both have their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard; but luckily they are on different sides. . .

There was not a doubt in De Quincey's mind about the murderer's purpose. ‘Quietly opening the door,' he would ask, in a whispering ‘counterfeit' of Marr's voice, why Mary had been out for so long. Thus inveigling the girl into ‘the asylum of general darkness', Williams would have ‘perfected and rounded the desolation of the house'.

Behind the counter, Marr's body ‘told its own tale'. He had been bludgeoned on the back of the head while reaching for a pair of unbleached cotton socks. Then, ‘
by way of locking up all
into eternal silence', his throat had been cut. Hearing groans, Mrs Marr and James Gowan, the apprentice boy, made for the front rather than the back door, where the heavy swing of the murder's mallet stopped them in their tracks.

‘
I was myself at the time nearly three hundred miles
from London,' De Quincey recalled, but even here ‘the panic was indescribable'. Southey himself had been struck by the degree of terror felt across the nation, while Coleridge, delivering his Shakespeare lectures in London, noted there the ‘many thousands of households, composed exclusively of women and children', and later drew De Quincey's attention to the many other households ‘who necessarily confide their safety, in the long evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl'. Should she find herself ‘beguiled by the pretence of a message from her mother, sister, or sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one second of time', goes the wreckage of the house. It was the murder twelve nights later of the Williamson household which revealed the ‘absurdity of ascribing to [Williams] any ruralising tendencies'. A killer of this calibre would not ‘abandon for a moment. . . the great metropolitan
castra stativa
of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames'.

John Williamson, publican of the King's Head tavern on New Gravel Lane, around the corner from Ratcliffe Highway, had served his last customer when, at twenty-five minutes to midnight ‘
the house-door was suddenly shut
and locked' by ‘a crash, proclaiming some hand of hideous violence'. It is through the eyes of John Turner, the ‘poor, petrified journeyman' who had retired for the night, that De Quincey now describes the events. Driven by the fascination of ‘killing fear', Turner rose from his bed, opened the door and, ‘quite unconscious of what he was doing, in blind, passive, self-surrender to panic, absolutely descended both flights of stairs'. Four steps from the bottom, he could see directly into the blood-soaked parlour where, swathed in a coat of the finest quality, Williams was pacing about in creaking shoes, deciding which of the keys from Mrs Williamson's pocket would lead him to the hidden treasure. Had the murderer been less occupied, he would have heard the breathing of the journeyman who now leapt back up the stairs, passing as he did so the door of the Williamsons' sleeping granddaughter. ‘Every minute,' John Turner felt, ‘brings ruin nearer to
her.
' His ‘first thought' had been to take the girl ‘out of bed in his arms' but what if she were to wake and cry out? She would endanger the lives of them both. The only way to save the child was by first saving himself. John Turner then pushed his bed against the door and began to rip the bedding into shreds. Downstairs, Williams filled his pockets with coins and his sack with plate. ‘Murderer is working in the parlour; journeyman is working hard in the bedroom. . . Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe and antistrophe, they work each against the other. Pull journeyman, pull murderer.'

The murderer was certain to find another throat on the upper storeys, but to loiter would hazard his night's work. He had to leave in haste, shave off his yellow hair, blacken his eyebrows and return to sea. But blood beckoned; rather than slip out of the house he began his ascent. Still knotting his sheets together, the journeyman heard the approaching tread. ‘As the Alpine avalanches, when suspended above the traveller's head. . . come down through the stirring of the air by a simple whisper, precisely on such a tenure of a whisper was now suspended the
murderous malice of the man below
.'

For De Quincey, writing involved the projection of the writer's ‘own inner mind'. Words, he wrote in an essay on ‘Style', needed to ‘
pass through a prism
, and radiate into distinct elements, what previously had been even to himself but dim and confused ideas'. Virginia Woolf, in her essay on ‘Impassioned Prose', put it more succinctly: De Quincey's enemy was ‘
the hard fact
'. Despite his knowledge of the background and character of John Williams, garnered from the newspapers and Fairburn's ‘Accounts', De Quincey had no interest in the hard facts of the case. What he understood was that a man calling himself John Williamson had murdered a man called John Williamson; it recalled the time he was pursued by the shadow of Monsieur Monsieur De Quincy, or the time when Mrs Quincey believed that her son, returned from his own sea adventures, was not Richard De Quincey at all but an imposter calling himself Richard De Quincey.

In
The Maul and the Pear Tree
, their skilful re-examination of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, P. D. James and T. A. Critchley cast doubt on the guilt of John Williams and suggest that William – ‘Long Billy' – Ablass, who had orchestrated the mutiny on the
Roxburgh Castle
, and Cornelius Hart, the carpenter for Marr's new shop front, were the killers. The murders, argue James and Critchley, were linked to the mutiny, ‘and
we think that the circumstances of that mutiny
, could they now be traced, would bear out our own hypothesis'. De Quincey, for whom there was little difference between being guilty and seeming so, did not countenance the thought of Williams as having a collaborator. He had read about the tall man and the shorter man seen hurrying from the King's Head on the night of the Williamson murders; he knew that two or even three men had been seen loitering on the Ratcliffe Highway when Marr's household was slaughtered, but De Quincey's object was to prove that Williams was an actor, a connoisseur, a dandy, an aesthete, a scourge of God who walked in darkness, a tiger, a man of snaky insinuation, and a domestic Attila. The murderer was, like Wordsworth's vision of the poet, a solitary artist, lonely as a cloud.