Murder by Candlelight (23 page)

Two days later, Inspector Pearse took off the skirting boards in Courvoisier's pantry and found a purse, an assortment of gold coins and rings, a silver medal commemorating the Battle of Waterloo, and a £10 Bank of England note. He went at once to Courvoisier, who was being kept under watch in the dining room, and asked him whether he could now look him “in the face.”

“I know nothing about them,” Courvoisier replied. “I am innocent, my conscience is clear, I never saw the medal before.”

Courvoisier's person was then searched, and during this proceeding a gold locket dropped from his breast pocket.

“What's this?” the constable asked.

“Oh, that's a locket—it's mine.” Courvoisier took it out of the constable's hand and put it back in his pocket. But when, the next day, the same locket (it proved to be the one Lord William had missed at Richmond) was found concealed between the hearthstones in the kitchen, the valet was taken into custody on suspicion of murder.

*
During World War I, a patrician officer, on seeing a group of enlisted men bathing, confessed himself startled to find that they had such white skins. Arthur Balfour, the early-twentieth-century Prime Minister, figured in the eyes of many as the most perfect gentleman of the age. And yet Mr. Balfour is said to have been “wholly unaware of those who minister to his comfort. Of his servants he never knows the least detail, not even their names. . . .”

†
He was the King's fifth son. In 1837 he ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Hanover, his niece Victoria being debarred from the succession by the Salic Law.

CHAPTER SIX

Bloody Linen

But without considering Newgate as no other than human nature with its mask off, which some very shameless writers have done, a thought which no price should purchase me to entertain, I think we may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid palaces of the great are often no other than Newgate with the mask on.

—
Fielding

C
ourvoisier was examined by the magistrates in Bow Street and remanded to Tothill Fields Prison in Westminster; but already there were those who were inclined to doubt his guilt, or at least to question whether it could be established beyond a reasonable doubt. “The circumstances of the case are certainly most extraordinary,” Charles Greville wrote in his diary, “and though every day produces some fresh cause for suspecting the man Courvoisier, both the fact and the motives are still enveloped
in great mystery. People are always ready to jump to a conclusion, and having made up their minds, as most have, that he must have done the deed, they would willingly hang him up at once.”

Greville pointed out that there seemed to be “no evidence to convict” the valet “of the actual commission of the deed, and though I believe him to be guilty, I could not, on such a case as there is as yet, find him so if placed on a jury. I am very sceptical about evidence, and know how strangely circumstances sometimes combine to produce appearances of guilt where there may be none.”

Others were positively convinced of Courvoisier's innocence. Lady Julia Lockwood, who had previously employed him as second footman in her house, declared herself willing to testify to his good character; Sir George Beaumont, whose butler Courvoisier's uncle was, subscribed £50 toward his defense; and Mr. Fector, his old master, offered to take him back into his service upon his acquittal.

There were, indeed, reasons to doubt the valet's guilt. A quantity of Lord William's silverware, duly catalogued in the most recent inventory, was nowhere to be found in the house. Where had it gone? How had Courvoisier managed to cut a man's throat without getting any blood on his clothes? And if he
had
gotten blood on his clothes, where had the clothes gone? 14 Norfolk Street had been searched from top to bottom, yet no bloody linen was found, with the exception of that in the bed where the murdered man lay and two dirty handkerchiefs with “some spots or marks of blood on them,” which were found in Courvoisier's portmanteau. (These, curiously enough, had been overlooked by the police during their initial search of Courvoisier's personal effects.)
^*
It is true that there was no convincing evidence that an intruder had gotten in through any of the three doors to the house; but might there have been another means of entrance?

Courvoisier himself told the police that “it would not look so bad against me had not the property been found in my pantry,” and this
was doubtless true. Yet there was no evidence that
he
had hidden the property behind the skirting boards in the pantry; indeed, if he was the murderer, he would have had every motive to conceal the things in any place
other
than his own particular lair.
^†
It was held against him that he fretted about his future in the valet trade when his master lay murdered before him; yet this singular candor was perhaps more suggestive of innocence than of guilt. If he really had killed Lord William, surely he would have had wit enough to feign those feelings of horror and sorrow which the Crown lawyers were afterwards to tax him for failing to display.

Those who doubted Courvoisier's guilt naturally cast a skeptical eye over the two female servants in the household. Was it merely coincidence that on Lord William's last day on earth, Miss Mancer had directed Courvoisier to move the ladder into the yard? Why, on the morning the body was found, had she told Young, Mr. Latham's butler, that his lordship was murdered, when she had fled the bedroom too hastily to have been able to confirm the fact? What was the nature of the errand on which Mary Hannell had gone after supper the night before the killing? If either she or Miss Mancer, acting, perhaps, in concert with an outside party, was at the bottom of the crime, they would naturally have had strong inducements to make it look as though the valet were the villain.

On remand in Tothill Fields, Courvoisier found himself famous. His name was on countless tongues; newspaper placards blazoned forth the crime of which he stood accused; newsboys cried the latest developments in the case about the streets; and in the plebeian precincts of public houses no less than in the patrician clubs of
St. James's Street, wagers were laid as to whether or not the valet would be hanged. Important personages, smitten with jailhouse prurience, asked to be conducted to the cell of the accused, curious to see how a caged animal bore itself in its last extremity. “He is rather ill-looking, with a baddish countenance,” Charles Greville wrote after his visit to the prison, “but his manner was calm though dejected, and he was civil and respectful, and not sulky. The people there said he was very restless, and had not slept, and that he was a man of great bodily strength. I did not converse with him.”

While Courvoisier awaited the decision of the magistrates in Bow Street, the mortal remains of his late master were removed from Norfolk Street to Chenies, the ancestral manor of the Russells in Buckinghamshire. The cortège was led by two mutes (professional mourners) on horseback, lugubriously dressed in black. Three page boys followed, one of whom bore aloft a plume of black feathers. Next came the principal tenants of the dead man's nephew, His Grace the seventh Duke of Bedford, followed by the pallbearers and a hearse drawn by six horses richly caparisoned. The cortège halted before the church of St. Michael, and the coffin was borne in. Another of the dead man's nephews, Lord Wriothesley Russell, who was also his son-in-law, read the Order for the Burial of the Dead.

“I know that my Redeemer liveth. . . . The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. . . . Blessed be the name of the Lord. . . .”

At the conclusion of the service, the coffin was taken into the side chapel that served as the mortuary of the Russells. Here, amid monuments of the family's dynastic glory—facsimiles, in marble and alabaster, of stars, garters, and coronets—the remains of the dead man were laid to rest.

The next day, Courvoisier was committed by the magistrates for trial and taken to Newgate.

*
It was suggested at the time that the handkerchiefs were placed there by the policemen themselves, desirous of reward money.

†
It could hardly be doubted that it was Courvoisier who attempted to conceal, between the hearthstones in the kitchen, the locket which he had filched from Lord William at Richmond. But he would have had the same motive to do this even were he guiltless of his lordship's murder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Witness for the Prosecution

sit thou a patient looker-on:

Judge not the play before the play is done.

—
Quarles

O
n Thursday, June 18, 1840, the Old Bailey was from an early hour crowded with illustrious personages—peers of the realm, foreign diplomatists, a royal duke. The air was sultry, and ladies of rank and fashion vainly sought to counteract the effects of the heat through a liberal use of fans and bouquets.

At ten o'clock, Courvoisier, looking “very pale, but perfectly composed,” was brought into the court and placed in the dock. The Clerk of the Arraigns read the indictment and afterwards apprised the prisoner that, as a foreigner, he had the privilege of being tried by a jury composed of both foreigners and Englishmen. Courvoisier waived the privilege and said that he was content to be tried by Englishmen.

The jury was sworn, and the judges came in. Lord Chief Justice Tindal, who had presided at the trial of Greenacre, and Mr. Baron Parke,
^*
a judge of the Exchequer of Pleas, took their places on the bench. When the prisoner was asked how he pled, he responded, in a feeble voice, “Not guilty.” Mr. Adolphus then rose to open the case for the prosecution. The powers of the great advocate, who was now in his seventy-second year, were manifestly declining. For want of better arguments, he was reduced to playing upon the Englishman's congenital distrust of foreigners, who, he said, did not like to rob a man unless they murdered him first, “for they imagined that if they destroyed the life of the person they robbed, there would exist no testimony against them.” But such forensic slumming could not make up for the weaknesses in the Crown's case, and Mr. Adolphus was unable to account either for the missing silver or the absence of bloody linen. It is true, as we have seen, that two dirty handkerchiefs with “spots or marks of blood on them” were found in Courvoisier's portmanteau; and after he was taken into custody, a pair of white cotton gloves, lightly stained with blood, was discovered in the same place.
^†
But in a masterly cross-examination, the defense counsel, the Anglo-Irish lawyer Charles Phillips,
^‡
broke down Constable Baldwin's claim that he was not aware that as a result of such discoveries (which were made only after the initial police searches had taken place), he and his fellow officers were eligible for reward money. When, after Phillips finished tossing and goring the hapless Baldwin, the court adjourned for the day, knowledgeable observers were of the opinion that the
Crown's case was in jeopardy of miscarrying; and in the clubs, “the betting was heavily in favour of Courvoisier's acquittal.”

When, the next day, the court met again, there occurred one of those reversals of fortune which savor more of the theatricality of the stage than the mundaneness of real life. Rumors that a significant discovery had been made were already abroad when the prisoner took his place in the dock. The reporter for
The Times
thought “he appeared more anxious and depressed than on the previous day,” and the sergeant-at-law told him that he might be accommodated with a chair. The offer, however, was declined.

A little before ten, the judges came in and took their seats on the bench. The suspense was great as Mr. Adolphus rose to tell the court that on the previous afternoon, a most important piece of information had come to the attention of the prosecution. Mr. Phillips rose instantly to protest. “In justice to the prisoner,” he said, “a communication of the facts should have been made to me as soon as they came to the knowledge of the prosecution.”