Murder by Candlelight (20 page)

‡
In an essay published after his death as
My Relations with Carlyle
, Froude drew attention to an entry Carlyle made in his journal in which he said “that there was a secret connected with him unknown to his closet friends, that no one knew and know one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true biography of him was possible.”

§
Of course it is easy to exaggerate Jane's victimhood. She bore no resemblance to that conventional figure, the meek, long-sufferering Victorian wallflower of a wife. On the contrary, she had, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed, “trenchant opinions” of her own and was “in the habit of expressing them incisively,” acts of self-assertion which Carlyle himself encouraged.

¶
In preparing his life of Carlyle, Froude asked Jane's friend Miss Jewsbury if she remembered the “bluemarks.” She remembered them “only too well.” The marks, she said, “were made by personal violence,” inflicted on Jane by her husband. It was said in Carlyle's defense, although not, so far as I know, by Carlyle himself, that Jane was an inordinately provoking woman; this, of course, was what Greenacre, in self-extenuation, said of Mrs. Brown.

#
How interesting that Carlyle, the prophet of the will, should in this instance have embraced self-mortification rather than invoke that familiar maxim of the heroic egotists he admired, “You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He did not, by any means, turn Christian, Buddhist, or Schopenhauerist; yet in his atonement for the evil he had done he was closer to the self-abnegationary philosophies than he was to that of, say, Bonaparte, whom he numbered among those heroes deserving of our worship. When asked by Madame de Brienne whether Turenne was justified in burning the Palatinate, Bonaparte replied, “And why not, Madam, if it was necessary to his designs?”

PART THREE

The Butler Didn't Do It: A Murder in Mayfair

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,

Ere human statute purg'd the gentle weal;

Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd

Too terrible for the ear.

—
Shakespeare

CHAPTER ONE

The House of Russell

What a tragic, treacherous step dame is vulgar fortune to her children.

—
Thomas Carlyle

I
n May 1840, Lord William Russell was in his seventy-third year. He had had a great advantage in life; he had never needed to explain what he was. He was a Russell; a scion of one of those families which, like the Cavendishes and the Spencers, had long been at the pinnacle of the Whig aristocracy of England, that polite and skeptical oligarchy which, for many generations, lorded it over the kingdom.

Yet born though he was into the midst of riches and power, Lord William had, until the night his throat was cut, passed a comparatively uneventful life. His elder brothers, the fifth and sixth Dukes of Bedford, had lived in the glare of politics and the great world; but Lord William himself, although he had dutifully sat in Parliament, had never distinguished himself there. His nerves were delicate; they “disqualify me,” he said, “from expressing myself in
public,” and as a politician he had never risen above dilettantism. When the Tory statesman Mr. Canning became Prime Minister, Lord William supported him, though it cost him the wrath of his Whig brethren to do so; his brother the sixth Duke, who thought Mr. Canning a “political rogue and mountebank,” was singularly displeased. It would be pleasant to record that Mr. Canning himself was grateful for Lord William's defection; but this was not the case, and he privately dismissed his disciple as “an acknowledged driveller.”

It is unlikely that, constituted as he was, Lord William should under any circumstances have had a brilliant public career; but the death, in 1808, of his wife, the Lady Charlotte Anne,
née
Villiers, foreclosed any lingering hopes he might have had of Parliamentary usefulness. They had married in July 1789, three days before the fall of the Bastille; and he had been devotedly attached to her. After he buried her, the shattered widower passed an aimless existence abroad, now at Lausanne, now at Chamonay, now at Florence, now at Rome, degenerating, at last, into a caricature of the absent-minded
milord
, tottering toward his dotage. His eccentricities grew upon him; and after one of his visits to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, the country seat of the Russells, his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Bedford, unsympathetically observed that he “chatters more and more to himself every day.”

To mental debilities were soon added physical ones, and the dried-up grandee was at last constrained to pass the greater number of his days in London, in his house at 14 Norfolk Street (it is now called Dunraven Street) in Mayfair. The house was a small one for a lord,
^*
but it was, a contemporary who visited it said, “adequate for his lordship's wants, and beautifully adorned with pictures and china.”

Tuesday, May 5, 1840, was a day of peculiar gloom; the bright weather with which the month had opened had given way to a sullen sky. Lord William came down to breakfast, as usual, a little before nine o'clock. He was waited on by Mary Hannell, his cook, and François Benjamin Courvoisier, his valet. (Lord William would have pronounced the word
val
-it, not, as the French do, val-
ay
.) Like his house, his lordship's household was, for a man of his station in that age, a small one; in addition to the valet and the cook, he employed a housemaid, a coachman, and a groom. He did not keep a butler, that is, a head-servant of the household; but his valet had in some measure the duties of that office, and in particular had care of Lord William's “plate,” the gold and silver ware that adorned his lordship's table. He slept in the servants' quarters on the uppermost story of the house, as did also (in a separate room) the cook and the housemaid. York, the coachman, and Doubleday, the groom, slept in a nearby mews.

After breakfast, Lord William attended to his correspondence, and later in the morning he gave Courvoisier his instructions for the day, one of which would in retrospect appear significant—the order to “send the carriage to fetch his lordship from Brooks's at five o'clock.”

Courvoisier was new both to Norfolk Street and to valethood. A twenty-three-year-old Swiss, born at Monte-la-Ville, he had entered Lord William's service five weeks before, bringing with him a good “character” from his previous employer, the banking heir John Minet Fector. Upon his lordship's going out that day, Courvoisier went down to the kitchen for the servants' midday meal. He told the housemaid, Sarah Mancer, that he was apprehensive lest he forget one or another of his lordship's instructions. And what, he wondered, was Brooks's? Miss Mancer said that it was a club. Indeed it was; it was a club in roughly the same way that Buckingham Palace was a house, or St. Peter a fisherman; it was a great citadel of opulent Whiggism.

After servants' dinner, Courvoisier set out upon his errands, returning to 14 Norfolk Street a little before five o'clock, where he encountered Miss Mancer cleaning one of the passages. He told her he must get his lordship's things out, for his lordship would soon be home and wish to dress for dinner. Miss Mancer gestured toward a stepladder which lay in the passage. Courvoisier had left it there after hanging some pictures.

“Will you take this away?” she asked.

Courvoisier carried the ladder into the small yard at the back of the house and propped it against the wall; it reached almost, though not quite, to the top.

The bell rang at the servants' gate.
^†
It was the upholsterer's man, come to adjust the bell-pull in Lord William's bedroom. While the upholsterer's man was at his task, there was another ring of the bell at the gate; it was Carr, a great friend of Courvoisier's. He sat down to tea with Courvoisier in the kitchen.

At ten past five, York (the coachman) came in. Courvoisier started. “You should have been at Brooks's at five o'clock,” he said, “but I forgot to order you; you had better go directly.”

York went away at once, in what would prove an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve his lordship from Brooks's.

Courvoisier shrugged off the blunder; he would simply say that his lordship had ordered the carriage for half-past five rather than five.

Miss Mancer said he had “better tell his lordship the truth, and his lordship would forgive him.”

“No,” Courvoisier said. He “should tell his lordship half-past five o'clock; his lordship was very forgetful, and must pay for his forgetfulness.”

Courvoisier took his friend Carr into the pantry, where they were closeted together for some time. It was called the butler's pantry; but as Lord William did not employ a butler, it was
de facto
Courvoisier's own peculiar domain.

*
Lord William was not a peer of the realm, entitled to sit in the House of Lords; but where the nobility are concerned, the English courteously extend certain of the father's honors to the sons. Lord William's father, Francis, being the eldest son of a peer (the fourth Duke of Bedford), was in courtesy styled Marquess of Tavistock, one of his father's inferior titles. As Francis was in courtesy styled as though he were a peer, so William, his youngest son, was in courtesy styled as though he were the younger son of a peer.

†
This was a gate at the front of the house which gave access, from the street, to the “area,” a flight of outdoor stairs that led down to a sunken pavement and the basement door. In those days servants and tradesmen were admitted to the houses of the well-to-do through the basement door: as a rule only rich or gentle people entered through the front—the main or “hall”—door.

CHAPTER TWO

Castles

What is the reason that in all ages the noble's château has been an object of terror? Is it because of the horrors that were committed there in the old days? I suppose so.

—
Eugénie de Guérin

L
ike many another Whig grandee, Lord William cherished a solicitude for the common people. Languid valetudinarian though he was, he had, on one or two occasions, exerted himself in the cause of Progress and Humanity with something that might almost have been mistaken for passion; and he had once gone so far as to propose, at a reform dinner in Covent Garden, a toast to the “Sovereignty of the People.”

But however egalitarian Lord William was in theory, he was practically a patrician, and it was only natural that, after an afternoon spent lounging in Brooks's, he should have been vexed that, on
coming down to St. James's Street, he was not met by the familiar sight of York, in wig and powder, seated on the hammer-cloth of his carriage. Clearly he must have a word with his valet. The young man, perhaps on account of his Swiss birth, seemed not to understand that in the England of 1840 democracy was a sentiment, but aristocracy was real.

Miss Mancer was looking out the window into Norfolk Street when, about twenty minutes to six, she saw Lord William descend from a hackney cab. She went at once to the pantry.