Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  PART ONE

  The Murder in the Dark Lane

  This lane is a d—d nasty dark place; as dark as the grave.

  —Jack Thurtell

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Body in the Brook

  Horrible thoughts of death, and shrouds with blood upon them, and a fear that has made me burn as if I was on fire, have been upon me all day.

  —Dickens

  On an autumn day in 1823, a coach set out from the town of Watford, in Hertfordshire, and drove toward the nearby village of Elstree, some ten miles north of London. “That is the place,” a voice said. The coach came to a halt near a brook called Hill Slough; as the occupants alighted, it was evident from the expression on their faces that they were looking for something. With rake, fish-fork, drag, and Indian ladder, they searched the waters of Hill Slough. At last, in the deepest part of it, they found something and drew it up with a grapple. It was a large sack—just under six bushels. The lower extremities of a human corpse protruded from it: its feet were crossed at the ankles and tied with a cord.

  The sack was brought ashore; the body, when taken out, looked as though it had lain in the water for some time. With the exception of a red shawl, which had been tied around the neck and filled with stones, the body was naked; and there were marks of violence about the head and face. The right cheek had been pierced clean through; the throat had been cut; and the skull had been broken open to reveal the brains, in which fragments of skull-bone had become stuck.

  The story behind the corpse in the brook at Hill Slough is a story of murder. For “cold-blooded villainy,” The Times opined shortly after the body was found, the crime was one that had “seldom been equalled.” There was a “ferocity” in it that had “awakened the drowsy sensations of the world into feelings of horror.” As usual in such cases, the public was at once appalled and secretly delighted by an episode that promised to interrupt what The Times called “the dull uniformity of civil life.” A hundred newspapers followed the story closely; innumerable books, chapbooks, pamphlets, and broadsides were printed and sold; plays dramatizing the crime were put on in London theaters; and penny peep shows re-enacting it were performed at market fairs. The Times itself, a little defensive, perhaps, on account of its own extensive coverage of the case, said that it would “offer no apology for presenting” its readers with the most minute particulars connected with the “dreadful event.”

  For much of the nineteenth century, the murder of the man fished out of Hill Slough was a byword for depravity, its status as a cause célèbre secured by the lurid impressions it left upon the English mind. The naked body, stuffed into its coarse shroud and thrown into the water; the groans and strange cries that were heard in the nearby village of Radlett after sunset on the Friday before the body was recovered; the revelation that the killing was connected with secretive figures in the London underworld—such were the circumstances of the crime that its horror could not easily be overlooked. Indeed, it was the fascination the case exercised over such figures as Lord Macaulay, William Cobbett, Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer Lytton, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens that accounts for the mark it made upon the literature of the age; in the words of murder scholar Albert Borowitz, it was the most “literary” of British murders.

  At length, the case was submerged in the tidal flood of crime in which the nineteenth century culminated, and its notoriety forgotten. But after the lapse of two centuries, it may be instructive—it may even, in a morbid way, be entertaining—to go back in time and see what all the fuss was about.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Bad Bet

  A SPORTING MAN; a dashing fellow; a statute breaker; a Newmarket lounger . . .

  —Gradus ad Cantabrigiam (1824)

  The crape-and-bombazine business, a branch of the silk trade, is apt to seem dull to anyone who has tasted a higher sort of life. So, at any rate, it seemed to Jack Thurtell, who in January 1821 was a rising young crape-and-bombazine man in the English city of Norwich. The son of a prosperous burgher, Thurtell devoted laborious days to the production of twilled and twisted silk; but he dreamt of becoming something more—he dreamt of becoming a sporting man. He was passionately fond of boxing; and already, at the age of twenty-six, he was a familiar figure in the sporting circles of London. The previous summer he had got up a fight, in a meadow in Norfolk, between Painter and Oliver, the celebrated boxers. The feat favorably impressed even the jaded connoisseurs of the capital, and in his hour of triumph Thurtell seemed to outshine the pugilists themselves. The author George Borrow, then a mere stripling, remembered how, as Thurtell drove through the twilight in a splendid barouche, his face illumined by a blood-red sky, he seemed the master of the scene, the “lord of the concourse.”

  For there was something in Thurtell’s look and manner that enforced respect. His eyes “were grey, with an expression in which there was sternness blended with something approaching to feline.” He was extraordinarily muscular, and the lower part of his face was large and powerful, like a mastiff’s jowl. But it was not his looks alone, or even his bodily strength, that accounted for the ascendancy he obtained over other men. It was the union of physical prowess and a certain lightness of touch—the easy smile, the ready joke—that made Jack Thurtell lord and master of the spheres in which he moved.

  At the beginning of 1821 he was in London, where his silks fetched £1,500, a great sum in those days. But the money he made from the sale was not altogether his; he owed the greater part of it to creditors in Norwich, merchants who had supplied him with the materials out of which he had fashioned his wares. They, however, could wait; the gambling clubs of Pall Mall and Spring Gardens beckoned. In them, swells in striped waistcoats and wide pantaloons sauntered about at their ease, living on their winnings from billiards or roulette, the turf or the prize-ring. For Thurtell, each was a model to be emulated.

  There was old Rexworthy, in whose billiard rooms young men of fashion were daily fleeced of large sums. There was Tom “Squire” Elliot, “a gentleman of fortune, and a great patron of the prize-ring sports, the turf, &c.” And there was William Weare (the last name pronounced to rhyme with “fear”), a dapper little man who was “particularly neat and clean in his person, and rather gentlemanly in his manners.” Weare had no visible occupation, yet he appeared to be in the pink of prosperity. He was said to be courting a young lady in Bayswater, an heiress with £300 a year, and he was often to be seen, of an evening, in Rexworthy’s, or in a club in Pall Mall, where he was known as a lucky hand at Rouge et Noir.*

  Thurtell “flattered himself that he was a knowing, clever fellow”; and knowing and clever as he was, why should he not, like Weare and Elliot, have a goodish pile of his own? Nay, why should he not do as well as old Bill Crockford himself, the “Crœsus of the great community of gamesters, the Rothschild of the betting-ring”? Crockford, as every gamester knew, had started in life as a fishmonger near Temple Bar, and after sitting up at cards one night with Lord Thanet and Lord Granville had come away with £100,000.

  There was nothing for it; Thurtell staked his newly acquired banknotes on the chance of a fortune. But unlike old Crockford, he lost his bet.

  He could, of course, go back to Norwich, confess his folly, and throw himself on the mercy of his creditors. But Thurtell was not one to bend the suppliant knee. Toward the end of January, he appeared at Norwich, his face bruised and bloody. He claimed that he had been robbed, and a short time later he advertised, in one of the Norwich papers, a reward of £100 for the capture of the villains. But Thurtell’s story that he had been set upon by footpads was not believed. He was declared a bankrupt and soon thereafter absconded to London.

  Hell, Shelley said, is a city much like London, and, like the infernal City of Dis, the London in which Jack Thurtell sought to push his fortune had its different circles of perdition. For the aristocracy, life passed in a succession of pleasures. Glittering chariots, with coats of arms blazoned on the panels and powdered footmen standing on
the footboards, flashed through the streets, carrying gentlefolk from one opulent house to the next. There were dinners, soirées, balls, levées, and in rooms done up in yellow satin or Genoa velvet the magnificos drank old claret and dined on pheasants stuffed with pâté de foie gras. In the intervals between parties there was Parliament, for in their spare time the grandees, “coaxed and dandled into eminence” by a nepotistic system that favored blood over brains, governed an empire that stretched from Saskatchewan to Singapore.

  In their more serious hours, they made dissipation into an art, after the fashion of Byron’s dying patrician, who, “having voted, dined, drunk, gamed, and whored,” breathed his last and gave “the family vault another lord.” The apathetic scions of pedigreed families amused themselves by drinking champagne from human skulls or losing vast sums in “deep play” at their clubs. They scattered their seed promiscuously in the bawdy houses of Soho and Covent Garden, or squandered their patrimony on the turf of Epsom and Ascot. George Payne of Sulby Hall was not yet twenty when he lost £21,000 in bets at Doncaster in September 1823. “If one could suppose such a knockdown blow wd. cure him,” the society diarist Thomas Creevey wrote, “it might turn out to be money well laid out; but I fear that is hopeless.”

  Unlike their male counterparts, high-bred ladies could not allay their boredom with politics and prostitutes. They could not even divert themselves, as their men-folk did, by going down to Leicester Square to take in the scandalous performances in the patent theaters, which were judged too degrading to be witnessed by decent women. The lady who found herself ennuyé to the last degree was not, however, without resources. If she were bold, she took a lover; if vain, she amused herself with the extravagancies of dress and ornament. “Lady Londonderry is the great shew of the balls here in her jewels,” Creevey wrote in September 1824, “which are out of all question the finest I ever beheld—such immense amethysts and emeralds, &c. Poor Mrs. Carnac, who had a regular haystack of diamonds last night, was really nothing by the side of the other. . . .”

  Other ladies of the ton—the highest ranks of society—found an antidote to dullness in publicly shedding the last vestiges of feminine modesty. The spirit of Miss Chudleigh, who in the eighteenth century appeared at a masquerade “so naked,” Horace Walpole said, “that you would have taken her for Andromeda,” was alive in Regency London, and indeed attained a new height when at a dinner party Lady Caroline Lamb served up her own flesh for dessert, springing nude from a silver tureen.

  Yet however outwardly splendid it was, the life of the grandees was not without its savor of horror. Lady Caroline would herself succumb to it: the romantic heroine who in a fit of mania bedded Lord Byron in the spring of 1812 died a lunatic, in 1828, at forty-two. The destiny of another Regency magnifico, Francis Charles Seymour-Conway, third Marquess of Hertford, was as black. The model for Thackeray’s Lord Steyne and Disraeli’s Lord Monmouth, Seymour-Conway was “a sharp, cunning, luxurious, avaricious man of the world” given up to “undisguised debauchery.” One day, he went down to his villa in Richmond, a fat, swollen, grotesque figure, intent on another gaudy night with his trio of whores. He drank a glass of champagne and, looking up in terror, cried out that the devil had come for him. His valet rushed over to him and found him dead.

  But however damnable the ways of the aristocrats, life in London’s lower depths was more palpably hellish. Scarcely a mile from the palaces of St. James’s Square were the rookeries of St. Giles, where, a contemporary wrote, “multitudes of the squalid and dissolute poor” lived, and where filth, vermin, and disease throve “with the most rank luxuriance.” While Lady Caroline danced in Devonshire House and Seymour-Conway whored in Dorchester House, unwashed children frolicked in the mire of the Seven Dials, interrupting their play only to scratch the infected pustules on their scalps, or to go into gin-palaces where they stood “on tiptoe to pay for half a glass of gin.” Nakedness in these quarters was not, as in Mayfair, exhibited on silver platters, or betwixt silken sheets; in Dyott Street, a notorious sink of poverty and vice where lodgings were to be had for as little as twopence, men and women, often strangers to one another, lay together in foul beds or in stalls strewn with soiled straw. One physician told a committee of the House of Commons that in such establishments he had come upon lodgers “without a single shred or piece of linen to clothe their bodies.” They were “perfectly naked,” or clothed only “with vermin.”

  * Rouge et Noir is a form of roulette in which bets are made as to which color the roulette wheel will show.

  CHAPTER THREE

  False as Dicers’ Oaths

  It is a curious feature in the career of a gambler at these “hells,” that he gets reconciled, apparently, to his degradation and downfall: though now and then a thought of happier days, and of what he might have been, flashes across his mind, and penetrates his heart with a desolate misery.

  —The London Literary Gazette (1827)

  It was through such streets that Jack Thurtell made his way to his own abyss. More often than not, his destination was one or another of a class of houses in the vicinity of Piccadilly, the Haymarket, or the “Quadrant” at the south end of Regent Street. A handsome gas lamp illuminated the door. Going in, he would find himself in a passage that led to another door, this one plated with iron and covered with green or red baize—the recognized hallmark of a gaming establishment. Such places were “appropriately denominated ‘hells,’” a contemporary writer said, and he believed that there were more of them in London than in any other city in the world.

  The “proprietors, or more properly speaking, the bankers of these houses of robbery,” according to an article in The Westminster Review, “are composed, for the most part, of a heterogeneous mass of worn-out gamblers, black legs,* pimps, horse-dealers, jockeys, valets, petty-fogging lawyers, low tradesmen, and have-been dealers at their own, or other houses.” They preyed upon rich and poor alike, but the rich were of course the most desirable victims. William Weare, in the prospectus for his Rouge et Noir establishment in Pall Mall, described the house as “a Select Club, to be composed of those gentlemen only whose habits and circumstances entitle them to an uncontrolled, but proper indulgence in the amusements of the day.” The grandees must indeed have laughed at the vulgarity of this; but the vulgarity was part of the fun. The larger gaming houses were gauchely fitted up “as a bait for the fortunes of the great.” Invitations to dinner were “sent to noblemen and gentlemen,” and those who accepted were “treated with every delicacy, and the most intoxicating wines.” After dinner, a “visit to the French hazard-table in the adjoining room” was “a matter of course.” A man “thus allured to the den, may determine not to lose more than the few pounds he has about him; but in the intoxication of the moment, and the delirium of play, it frequently happens that, notwithstanding the best resolves, he borrows money upon his checks, which being known to be good, are readily cashed to very considerable amounts. In this manner, £10,000, £20,000, £30,000, or more, have often been swept away.”†

  It was in this Hogarthian atmosphere of luxury and dissipation, of great expectations and imminent ruin, that Thurtell attempted to retrieve his fallen fortunes. At the same time, he took the lease of a public house, the Black Boy in Long Acre between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, signing the document in the name of one of his brothers. (As an absconded bankrupt, he could hardly use his own name.) Thurtell’s motive in taking the Black Boy seems not to have been to make money, but rather to make a name for himself by creating a congenial resort for gaming men. He installed as barmaid one of his Norwich sweethearts, a girl with “a fine full figure” called Miss Dodson, and he was soon “hailed as a jolly good fellow” by those who came to sup with him or to drink of his “prime liquors.” The refreshment was “cheap and good,” one of his acquaintances remembered, and “a number of choice spirits in the town handled a knife and fork” at his table, or “took their glass in the evening” with him.

  Thurtell soon found himself in the clutch
es of the rankest gamesters of the metropolis, confederates of a mysterious Mr. Lemon, one of the “cryptarchs” or secret rulers of London’s gaming netherworld. These black legs, though they were outwardly all smiling affability, looked upon Thurtell as little more than “a good flat”—a “flatty gory,” a naïf to be plundered. Behind his back they called him the “Swell Yokel” and were eager to get “a slice of his blunt (cash).”

  Mr. Lemon and his minions were deeply versed in all the arts of crooked gaming, and Jack Thurtell was soon near to being bled dry by them. At last he could take no more; exasperated by his continual losses, he questioned Mr. Lemon’s good faith. The prudent villain soothed his victim’s rage and suspicion with a conciliatory invitation. Would Thurtell like to come down to Wadesmill, where the boxer Tom Hickman was in training? Naturally, Thurtell leapt at the chance. Hickman was the foremost pugilist of the day, ferocious “even to bull-dog fierceness,” and known as the “gas-light man” because his punches “put the lights out.”

  * In the eighteenth century, a “black leg” was a turf swindler, but the term came later to designate other varieties of swindling rogues: more especially, the “sharper” or fraudulent gamester.

  † Some patricians, so far from discouraging their sons from gambling, took pains to initiate them in the costly amusement. Among these was Henry Fox, Lord Holland, who educated his boys, Lord Shelburne wrote, with an “extravagant vulgar indulgence.” In the spring of 1763, Lord Holland “could think of no better diversion than to take Charles from his books, and convey him to the Continent on a round of idleness and dissipation. At Spa his amusement was to send him every night to the gaming-table with a pocketful of gold; and, (if family tradition may be trusted where it tells against family credit,) the parent took not a little pains to contrive that the boy should leave France a finished rake.” Charles James Fox was fourteen years old at the time, and a scholar at Eton. On the other hand, it is said that the Duke of Wellington became a member of Crockford’s only in order that he might blackball his son, Lord Douro, in the event he sought election to the club. The Duke, who thought nothing of the satire of cartoonists, admitted that there was one caricature of himself that genuinely pained him—Douro.