Murder by Candlelight (22 page)

Two constables, Baldwin and Rose, were soon upon the doorstep. Sarah Mancer led them to Courvoisier, whom they found seated
behind the door of the dining room with his elbows on his knees and his hands covering his face. Baldwin asked him why he did not get up and tender assistance.

Courvoisier made no answer.

The question was repeated, with the same result.

“Rose,” Baldwin said to his colleague, “he must know something about this.”

The policemen went down to the basement, where they found marks of violence on the door to the back yard. Yet on going up the ladder and inspecting the tops of the walls, they found them covered with a layer of dust apparently undisturbed.

Inspector Tedman had in the meanwhile arrived. Together with Courvoisier and Miss Mancer, he went down to the basement. Courvoisier pointed to the marks on the back door. “Here is where they came in,” he said.

They went next to the pantry, where Baldwin and Rose joined them.

Baldwin looked hard at Courvoisier. “You have made a devilish pretty mess of it. You must know all about it.”

Courvoisier said nothing.

Miss Mancer said, “Oh dear, my lord is murdered!”

Inspector Tedman asked to be taken to the body.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Queen Conveys Her Sympathy

Thus those celestial fires,

Though seeming mute,

The fallacy of our desires

And all the pride of life confute. . . .

—
Habington

T
he news of the murder excited, in places of the highest importance, an interest greater than the habitués of those rarefied realms were accustomed to take in London throat-slashings. In the Palace of Westminster, in Downing Street, in Buckingham Palace itself, there was curiosity, and perhaps even a faint alarm. The Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was informed of the crime by Lord William's nephew, Lord John Russell, who, having given up the Home Office, held the portfolio of Colonial Secretary in the Cabinet. Lord Melbourne was not a man to be unduly moved by passing events, however momentous; when
he was told that he had been summoned to kiss hands as Prime Minister, he said he thought it “a damned bore.” But the murder in Mayfair roused him from his blasé indifference, and he wrote at once to Queen Victoria to deplore what he called a “most shocking event.” He went on to inform Her Majesty that the earliest reports suggested that the “persons who did it came for the purpose of robbing the house; they entered by the back of the house and went out at the front door.”

Meanwhile, in 14 Norfolk Street, Courvoisier was conducted to the scene of the crime. He went to the foot of Lord William's bed and, raising his hand, seemed to swoon. It was, he said, a “shocking job.” He then fell back into an armchair and lamented the effect the death of his master was likely to have on his prospects in domestic service. “O my God . . . I shall lose my place and ‘character' . . . they will think it is me, and I shall never get another place.” Romantic Gothicism was quite evidently on the way out; the criminals themselves seemed to sense it. Courvoisier behaved precisely as though he were the Suspected Servant in one of the ironical, drawing-room-comedy murders which Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were later to compose.

In the meanwhile, Inspector Tedman had been looking about. A pompous, self-complacent man, much taken, like Inspector Lestrade in the Holmes stories, with his own sagacity, he was struck both by what he saw and by what he did not see. Conspicuously absent was any instrument capable of causing the injury Lord William had sustained; suicide, therefore, could be ruled out. As conspicuously present were such articles as a silver candlestick, a gold pin, and a Russia leather box, which proved to contain a gold ring. On the dressing table, crested, silver-mounted dressing articles were arranged before the looking glass, while the cupboard near the chimney-piece contained four silver-mounted tobacco pipes and an opera glass.

“It is a very curious thief,” Tedman said, “to leave all this valuable property behind.”

“It certainly is very strange,” Courvoisier replied.

After being briefed by the Home Secretary, who had gone in person to Norfolk Street, Lord Melbourne wrote again to the Queen. He now called the crime “a most mysterious affair.” “The bed was of course deluged with blood,” he wrote, “but there were no marks of blood in any other part of the room; so that he had been killed in his bed and by one blow, upon the throat, which had nearly divided his head from his body. The back door of the house was broken open, but there were no traces of persons having approached the door from without. His writing-desk was also broken open and the money taken out, but otherwise little or nothing had been taken away.” The Queen, in a letter to the Prime Minister, asked him to convey her sympathy to Lord William's nephew, Lord John Russell.

The police suspected the servants; but when they searched their bedrooms and personal effects, they found nothing incriminating. In particular, none of the servants' clothing showed the slightest trace of blood. The police were baffled. They had not enough evidence to justify an application for a warrant of arrest; but they nevertheless put the servants under watch, and “care was taken to prevent their having any conference with one another.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Servants and Masters

Hail fellow, well met,

All dirty and wet:

Find out, if you can,

Who's master, who's man.

—
Swift

A
ll London, the society gossip Charles Greville wrote in his diary, was frightened “out of its wits” by the murder in Mayfair. “Visionary servants and air-drawn razors or carving-knives dance before everybody's imagination, and half the world go to sleep expecting to have their throats cut before morning.” Greville was exaggerating; “all London,” for him, meant several hundred great households whose inmates relied on large and continuously changing staffs of menials to see them through the day. But however unrepresentative they might have been of London as a whole, Greville's happy few did indeed feel themselves touched
in a sensitive place. Top-drawer Englishmen in that age passed the greater part of their lives in close proximity to their servants. From the moment he woke in the morning until the moment he went to bed, a well-to-do English gentleman had a small army of servants at his beck and call; and some of these had access to his person when it was most vulnerable. His servants helped him to bathe and to dress, they brought him his coffee and his tea, they served him his dinner and (when the cloth was withdrawn) brought him his port.

A gentleman knew his familiar servants as well as he knew anyone, and understood them hardly at all. Constantly thrown together with them though he was, he was separated from them by nearly impenetrable barriers of class, education, and money.
^*
Members of the highest classes passed their lives, for the most part, in luxurious ease; if they worked, they devoted themselves to the higher employments of politics or the bar, diplomacy or finance, the church or the army. Members of the servile class labored at their daily drudgery not because they (most of them) found the employment congenial, but because the alternative was beggary and the workhouse. What made their labor still harder, it offered them glimpses of a world of grace, order, and refinement which could never be theirs or their children's.

Yet however strained the master-servant relation was, violence was rare. In 1840, more than a million and a half people were engaged in domestic service in the United Kingdom out of a population of some 26 million. Yet in the three decades between 1810 and 1840, the number of cases in which servants slew their masters could be counted on one hand. The most notorious instance, before
Lord William's murder, was the Chislehurst murder in 1815. On the night of Sunday, May 30, Mr. Thomson Bonar, a prosperous London merchant, went to bed in his country house in Chislehurst, Kent; his wife, Mrs. Bonar, retired a short time later. The next morning, a servant coming into the master bedroom found Mr. Bonar dead on the floor in a bloody heap. Mrs. Bonar, who had herself been badly beaten, was still alive but expired a short time later. Suspicion fixed on a footman in the household, Philip Nicholson, who afterwards admitted to having been the killer; he was hanged at Pennenden Heath. No satisfactory motive for the murders, however, was ever proved; Nicholson himself said that he had borne no grudge against his master, and he blamed the crime on his having been maddened by drink.

Another notorious instance of servant-on-master crime—if that is what it was—took place in May 1810, when His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, a younger son of George III,
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was attacked in his bed in St. James's Palace in London. The Duke attempted to flee from his assailant and sustained a superficial wound in the leg. Cornelius Neale, one of the Duke's two valets, heard his master's cry for help and came to his aid. The other valet, Joseph Sellis, did not appear. Search was made, and Sellis was found in his room with his throat cut: the jurors at the inquest returned a verdict of suicide. According to the officially sanctioned theory, Sellis, having attacked his royal master with a saber, fled to his room, and either from remorse or dread of punishment took his own life. But the theory was not universally credited, and the rumor went round that Sellis had been murdered with the Duke's connivance—either because he had remonstrated with his master after finding him making love to Mrs. Sellis, or on account of his having knowledge of his master's secret homosexuality.

However rare such violence was in fact, the idea of it haunted the imaginations of the patrician classes, much as the vengeful slave haunted the imaginations of the slaveholding classes of the American South and the vindictive serf those of the Russian landowning nobility: in each case, the master class paid for its pre-eminence in the coin of fear and a bad conscience. So great, indeed, was the morbid fascination which the Mayfair murder exercised over the English upper classes that scarcely had the news broken when a long line of carriages was seen wending its way through Norfolk Street. The gentle occupants wanted to have a look at No. 14.