Murder by Candlelight (14 page)

But the four of them never did meet again. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, a north wind was blowing when, about ten o'clock, Hannah's fiancé appeared on the Davises' doorstep in Bartholomew Close. Had they seen Hannah? No, Mrs. Davis said, not since the breaking up of the party Thursday night. Whereupon the man said he had “closely investigated” Hannah's affairs and discovered that she had deceived him “with regard to her property.” The match had therefore been broken off, as it would not do “to plunge headlong into poverty.”

He “went away much agitated,” Mrs. Davis remembered, and his “countenance presented an aspect of such peculiarity” that she remarked upon it to her husband.
^†

Sunday, March 12, 1837, dawned clear and frosty. William Gay crossed the Thames and made his way southward to his sister's last known address, 6 Carpenter's Place, Windmill Lane, Camberwell. The woman who answered the door told him that the previous occupant had gone away in January. Where had he gone? Not very far, the woman supposed, for he owned the house and had recently told her that he would send someone round next week to collect the rent. Before taking the house, she and her family had lived at 9 Carpenter's Place, and they had often seen the man coming and going. He had a wife, a brown-eyed woman in her thirties, and a little boy perhaps four years old who was given to violent tantrums, so much so that his mother had often scolded him, “You naughty cross child.”

Eight days later, having followed the scent as far as it would take him, yet without having found his sister, William Gay made his way to Paddington Work House, where he applied to Mr. Thornton, the parish warden, for permission to see the head of the dead woman, which had been preserved in a jar of spirits.

*
The late-Romantic prose of Dickens and De Quincey illuminates the London of the 1830s and '40s in much the same way that the Oxford Movement illuminates the religion of the period and the Young England Movement the politics. Each was in part a reaction against what John Henry Newman, the foremost figure of the Oxford Movement, called the “dry and superficial character” of the thought of the eighteenth century: each sought to replace it with a “deeper philosophy” of the soul.

†
Mr. and Mrs. Davis were themselves mystified by Hannah Brown's abrupt disappearance; and their daughter, Hannah, called on Mrs. Blanchard in Goodge Street to inquire after her. But the Davises did not suspect foul play; they thought rather that Hannah “was ashamed to come, on account of her great disappointment in not being married.”

CHAPTER SIX

Furies

There are creative agencies in every part of human nature, of which the thousandth part could never be revealed in one life.

—
De Quincey

I
t is the impotence of our senses that deceives, saves us—conceals from us the abysses that lie hidden all around us, in the souls of others. But for that, a walk down a crowded street would show us things which “might appall the divil.” The man who, on Christmas Eve, 1836, made his way to Camberwell Green with a parcel wrapped in a handkerchief was in outward aspect unremarkable; yet inwardly he was in the grip of Melinoë, the “black one” who imposes on mortals their just burden of nightmare.

At Camberwell Green, the man got into one of the new horse-drawn omnibuses that had recently begun to ply the streets of the metropolis. It took him north into Southwark, over London Bridge,
and down Fish Street Hill past Sir Christopher Wren's Monument, a memorial of the fire of 1666 much favored, in the early nineteenth century, by those in contemplation of suicide.

The man alighted at Gracechurch Street and went up, in the teeth of a north wind, to Cornhill. A Mile End omnibus was going by; he got aboard and rode it down Leadenhall Street into Whitechapel. At Mile End Road, Stepney, he got off and, going past the alms houses and the Jews' Burying Ground, came to the Regent's Canal, where he turned off into the blackness.

The next day was Christmas Day. London awoke to a heavy fall of snow. The man made his way up Camberwell Road to a house in Portland Street, Walworth. The landlord, Mr. Wignal, had recently let the back parlor to a woman and her young child; the man and the woman dined there on boiled turnips and a scrag of mutton. When, after midnight, the man walked back to Camberwell, it was no longer snowing, but the mercury had dropped to twenty-five degrees. In Carpenter's Place, he took a latchkey from his pocket and let himself into No. 6.

The “Babel din” of the city was blunted by the snow. There was “such a silence in it,” said Thomas Carlyle, who had at last submitted himself to the metropolis. Many persons were drunk, and the sober few, “not the fifth part of the usual number,” went “tripping along muffled in cloaks, with blue noses.”

Carlyle was at work, that winter, on his book
The French Revolution
, and murder was much on his mind. How to fathom the slaughterous abysses into which France had descended in those years theoretically consecrated to
liberté, égalité,
and
fraternité
? Certainly not by emulating the historians of the previous age, the urbane, polished, ironical style of Gibbon and Voltaire. No, to interpret the fever-frenzy of France in her killing-time, he must forge a new style, as broken and obscure as Gibbon's is lucid and
elegant. A new idiom, too, he must have. He could hardly make his reader comprehend the convulsions of Paris by regurgitating the commonplaces of “enlightened Philosophism,” the soulless creed, with its desiccated abstractions and “algebraic spectralities,” that had made the mischief in the first place. He must find more primal poetries.

Wordsworth told Emerson that he thought Carlyle “sometimes insane.” The appearance of madness in his writing is in part the effect of its construction. Its organizing unit is not, as with most writers, the sentence or the paragraph, but the sometimes verbless, often curiously capitalized phrase, which Carlyle spits out one after the other. Yet it is not merely the eccentric style and imagery of
The French Revolution
—with its “murky-simmering Tophets” and “Night-birds on the wing,” its “turbaned Ishmaelites” and “astrological Chaldeans”—that sets the book apart, but its expressiveness of the bewitchments under which men commit appalling acts. Carlyle's revolutionists dance their death-dances under the influence of so many sorcerers' spells; he paints motive and psychological impulse, not in the eighteenth-century language of reason and common sense, but with symbols lifted from archaic demonologies and defunct
grimoires
.
The French Revolution
swims with Maenads, Syrens, Gorgons, each apparently “fabulous,” yet each a mimic sign embodying (Carlyle supposes) some truth of our nature not to be articulated in a vulgar commonplace tongue.
^*
Quite as much as De Quincey, his rival for murder's laureateship, he finds the secret springs of wickedness in those places in the mind where reason's writ does not run.

The man came out of the house at 6 Carpenter's Place with another, heavier bundle in his arms. Going up Camberwell Road, he wearied of his burden and called to a passing carrier. Might he place his load on the tailboard of the carrier's cart?

“Certainly,” the carrier replied. He offered to take the parcel into the cart itself; but the man demurred and placed it on the tail. He followed the cart to the Elephant and Castle, the “Piccadilly Circus of South London,” where the carrier stopped for beer. The man called for porter. He was on the point of drinking it down when he saw a stranger eyeing his parcel.

“What are you about?” he shouted. “Are you going to steal my property?”

The stranger denied it. The man, however, was unnerved, as one assailed by snake-haired furies might well be. He hailed a cab and, putting the bundle beneath the flap, directed the driver to take him across the Thames.

*
This was a Romantic commonplace. “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire—stories of Celæno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition,” says Lamb in his essay “Witches, and Other Night Fears,” “but they were there before. They are transcripts, types,—the archetypes are in us, and eternal.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Suspect

A fool's mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of his soul.

—
Proverbs

I
f William Gay entertained any doubts as to whether the head in the jar in Paddington Work House was his sister's, the scar on the ear put them to rest. Many years before, a girl had pulled an earring out of Hannah's ear and in doing so had torn the flesh of the lobe.

The parish warden notified the Metropolitan Police, and Inspector George Feltham of the T Division was assigned the case. After consulting property records, he identified one James Greenacre of 6 Carpenter's Place, Camberwell, as a suspect and applied to the magistrates for a warrant. By the evening of Sunday, March 26, he had traced his man to a house in St. Alban's Street, Kennington Road, Lambeth. Accompanied by a constable of the L Division,
Feltham reached the house between ten and eleven o'clock. The landlord told them that Greenacre had gone to bed for the night.

Feltham knocked on his door. “Greenacre?”

“Yes, what do you want?”

“I want to speak to you. Open the door.”

“Who are you?”

“Never mind that. I want to say something to you.”

“Wait a bit till I get the tinder-box and a light.”

Feltham did not wait; he lifted the latch of the door, which was not fastened, and went in.

In the dimness he saw a man in his shirt, and laid hold of him by the arm.

“What do you want?”

“I'm an inspector of police,” Feltham said, “and hold a warrant for your apprehension on suspicion of having murdered Hannah Brown.”

The landlord brought a candle, by the light of which Feltham read the warrant. He then asked Greenacre if he knew Hannah Brown.

“No, I know no Hannah Brown.”

“Were you never asked in church to a person of that name?”
^*

“Yes, I was,” Greenacre admitted as he pulled on his stockings.

“Where is she now?”

“I don't know . . . you have no right to ask me these questions.”

“I don't mean to ask you any more questions,” Feltham said before giving him what in the United States has come to be called a Miranda warning: “and I caution you what you say to me, for whatever you do say to me I shall be obliged to repeat elsewhere.”

Greenacre's trousers lay beside the bed. Feltham, going over to search them, saw a woman lying in the bed, partially covered by the bedclothes.

“What woman is that?”

“Why, that is a woman that comes to sleep with me.”

“She must get up also, and dress and go with me.” Feltham's eye fell upon the woman's hand. “What is that you have in your hand? Let me see it.”

It was a brass “Pinchbeck” watch. Feltham took it from her, and two rings from her fingers besides. “Get up,” he said, “for you also must go along with me.”