Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  CHAPTER THREE

  William and Maria Gay

  Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness.

  —Thomas Carlyle

  There was in London at this time a Norfolk man named William Gay. At the beginning of 1837, Mr. Gay was perhaps forty years of age; he did not know the precise day or even year of his birth. He was employed as an assistant to a a pawnbroker in Goodge Street called Mrs. Blanchard; he and his wife, Maria, had a room above the shop.

  The couple had come to London two years before. Like many others freshly arrived in the metropolis, they were doing their best to adapt themselves to a new age. They had grown up in the English countryside, amid thatched cottages and village greens; but the England of their childhood was passing away; Oliver Goldsmith had pronounced its epitaph so early as 1770, in his poem The Deserted Village.

  In London, the Gays encountered the new England that was rapidly superseding the old one into which they had been born. It is an England that is even now familiar to us, preserved as it is in the engravings of Gustave Doré and in the early daguerreotypes, with their weird tints and unearthly chiaroscuros. It is the England of the young Dickens, whose Oliver Twist was just then appearing in Bentley’s magazine—an England that had for its chiefest symbol London itself, choking under its pall of smoke and soot and river mist. London in those days had a Gothic morbidity peculiar to itself; Doré was to bring it out in his engravings, and Dickens in his books—the sense that there lurked, in the murk and shadow just beyond the reach of the tallow-light, an unspeakable beastliness.*

  The days were short now, and darkened by yellow fogs. At midday there was “hardly light enough,” Thomas Carlyle said, to see one’s way in Chelsea. Farther east, in the heart of the metropolis, it was darker still: “beyond Hyde Park Corner, think what it must be,—Erebus, Nox and the great deep of gases, miasmata, soot and despair. . . .”

  William and Maria Gay brightened the gloom with newspaper accounts of the latest demonism to afflict the capital. The mystery of the mutilated corpse was for them, as it was for so much of Londonry, a diverting story, one with a quantity of hellishness sufficient to beguile a long winter evening. The truth is, William and Maria Gay needed diversion. Newly arrived in London as they were, they had not many friends—had perhaps not had time to make them, for in those days working people were commonly about their business twelve hours a day, six days a week. When once Mr. Gay was asked about those with whom he habitually conversed, he replied, “I hold very little conversation with any one.”

  Boredom and curiosity might have induced William and Maria Gay to take an interest in the anonymous corpse of a murdered woman; but by degrees the sensations of pity and pleasure which appalling acts naturally arouse in the human heart gave way to the apprehension that they themselves might be closely related to the victim.

  * In 1837, a creature of diabolic countenance known as Spring-Heeled Jack was said to be preying upon lone servant girls in London, swooping down upon them in forlorn places and ripping their gowns with his claws. Such stories were widely credited in an age in which ghosts and ogres and scaly things in their naïvest forms still haunted men’s imaginations. Matthew Arnold told the story of a man who ventured to ask the poet William Blake whether he had ever seen a ghost, and “was surprised when the famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered frankly, ‘Only once!’”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hannah Brown

  Yes, yes; a very good woman, in the main.

  —Lillo

  I should think my sister was forty-seven years of age, or about that,” William Gay said. “She was much older than me—I am only guessing at her age—I do not know my own age.” Hannah left home when William was a boy, to go into the service of one of the Norfolk magnates, Lord Wodehouse of Crimley Hall. Later she went up to London and was cook in the house of Mr. Barclay, of the banking family. In due course, she found herself caught in the “parson’s mousetrap,” having wedded a shoemaker named Brown, with whom she went to live in the country. An unsatisfactory man, this Brown, living an unsatisfactory but, as it fell out, sharply abbreviated life. He took ship for Jamaica, intent on claiming a property that had been bequeathed to him, and was washed overboard.

  Hannah Brown, a widow now, returned to London and her former occupations. She kept house, at different times, for an anchor-smith in the Docklands, a hatter in the Strand, sundry others. But she chafed at the constraints of a mop-squeezing life. She had always been a frugal woman, and through her thrift had accumulated a small capital. This she used to purchase a mangle, a device for wringing the water out of laundered clothes. Henceforth she would get her living by taking in other people’s washing. She “earned her bread by very hard labour,” her sister-in-law Maria Gay said, for “a mangle requires power.” But the mangle also conferred power, and Hannah Brown hereafter lived, not as a dependent servant, but as an independent woman.

  Still she remains dim to us; comes, at best, into an imperfect focus. She had a gray eye, a “delicate” skin, and (what was unusual in those days) a “very nice set of teeth.” Her hair, which she wore long, was still brown, though “mingled with a little grey.” A “tall and rather good-looking woman,” all in all, with a fund of self-respecting dignities and femininities. She possessed a dress of black silk with a black veil, and a white dress of jaconet muslin with a white veil. A silk cloak, a feathered boa, and a pair of Cornelian ear-drops are also distinctly mentioned.

  Nor was a more valuable species of commodity wanting to her: Hannah Brown had friends. Mrs. Blanchard, her brother’s employer, had been her chum from childhood, as had Sarah Ullathorne, the wife of a prosperous baker in the Strand. Her acquaintance with Evan and Hannah Davis, a couple who lived in Bartholomew Close above St. Paul’s, had ripened into a deeper intimacy. They were probably her closest friends, and she had sometimes joined them, in her white dress, on summer excursions to Gravesend, in those days a popular bathing place. Yet, for all that, there was a vacancy in her life that friendship could not fill; for this “tall, fine, genteel, respectable-looking female” (so Mrs. Davis’s daughter thought her) was a woman, in the language of the Prayer Book, with a “womb that never bare” and “paps which never gave suck.” A “remarkable peculiarity in her formation of body,” it was said, made it “impossible that she could ever have been a mother.”

  It seems likely that Hannah Brown drew on her friendship with Mrs. Blanchard to obtain a place for her brother William in the shop in Goodge Street. At all events, she lived with William and Maria in their apartment in Mrs. Blanchard’s house at the beginning of 1835, staying for two or three weeks, possibly as long as a month. But there had been a quarrel. “We had words,” Maria Gay recalled. “My husband was at variance with his sister . . . they had rather differed. . . . The variance took place while she lived with us—that was the reason we parted. . . .”

  Hannah found lodgings of her own, in the kitchen belowstairs in a house in nearby Union Street. But the breach in the blood-relation was never mended, and whenever Hannah encountered her brother’s wife in the street, she cut her dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mr. Gay’s Inquiries

  Art thou not the man that I found crying, without the walls of the City of Destruction?

  —Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  There were more than a million souls in greater London; the odds were distinctly against it. And yet, there was something odd about it. When had they last seen their sister Hannah? Before Christmas, surely. Yes, the Thursday before—Thursday, the twenty-second. It was William who saw her; he was in the shop in Goodge Street when Hannah came in. As was their custom now, the siblings exchanged not a word with one other; Hannah made it clear that she had come to see not her brother but his employer, her friend Mrs. Blanchard. Hannah’s mood, however, was far from sour; in fact she was distinctly cheerful—in fact, she was to be married!

  Within the week, William had further news of his sister. On the
Tuesday after Christmas, a man whom he had never seen before came into the shop. It was “about seven o’clock or so—it was candle-light,” William remembered. “I was not exactly in the shop—I came from the low kitchen.”

  Mrs. Blanchard was behind the counter when the man came in. “I heard him speaking to her,” William recalled, “and telling her the wedding was put off, that he had investigated into the character of Mrs. Brown.” When he agreed to marry her, he said, he “thought that she had” property, for such was “the report he had heard from some people.” In fact she “had no property,” and had “run him in debt at the tally-shop” in Long Acre. He had “had a few words” with Mrs. Brown over this, and afterwards they had thought it best not to marry.

  Mrs. Blanchard gestured toward William. “This is Mrs. Brown’s brother,” she said; “won’t you walk in?”

  “No,” the man replied. “I am in a hurry.”

  The “countenance of the man changed,” William recalled, and he walked off into the December night “saying something which I could not understand.”

  The London night in Goodge Street is familiar to readers of English literature. It is the De Quinceyian night of a metropolis coated with a “paste composed of ancient soot and superannuated rain,” a Dickensian night of candles flaring in the windows, of fog pouring in at every chink and keyhole, of houses that seem mere phantoms in the mist.

  Earlier Londons are not so accessible. One can picture—just—Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in the eighteenth century, dining at the Mitre, or Addison drinking coffee at Button’s. But the vision is dim; one does not know those Londons as one does the London of Dickens and De Quincey. They make the reader feel of London what Balzac makes him feel of Paris: that it is not merely a city, but a living organism, one that possesses not only a personality but a soul of its own. Paris, Balzac says in Le Père Goriot, is “an ocean that no line can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers and pearls, monsters of the deep overlooked or forgotten by the divers of literature.” It is the same with the London of Dickens and De Quincey. Like Balzac, they are late-Romantic personalities, and like him they have the late-Romantic intuition of the presence, in apparently mundane things, of infinite mystery, of spiritual power, of invisible kingdoms of beauty and terror, of submerged realms of supernatural beastliness and grace.* The real city, for the Romantic writer, is shadowed by one that is unreal, visionary, a place where “ghosts in the open air hang upon the sleeves of the passer-by.”

  The ghost of Hannah Brown was the latest specter to figure in the metropolitan nightmare. There is a traditional belief that it was Maria Gay who, through some feminine prevoyance, first suspected that it was the severed corpse of her sister-in-law that had spooked the city. According to one report, she would not let her husband rest until he had made inquiries; at all events, it is certain that he did eventually make them. He went first to his sister’s landlady, Mrs. Corney, in Union Street. She told him that Hannah had slept away on the Friday before Christmas, but had returned the next day—Christmas Eve—in a hackney coach. There had been a man with her, who had helped her retrieve her boxes and trunks. Afterwards they had driven off. Mrs. Corney never saw Hannah again; the following Wednesday, another of her lodgers, Mrs. Hawksworth, brought her the key to Hannah’s room, which she said had been given her by a strange boy. Later that day, Mrs. Corney and her husband inspected the apartment; they found nothing in it but an empty birdcage. It had belonged to the late Mr. Brown, before he had fallen into his watery grave.

  Mr. Gay’s inquiries next took him eastward, to Bartholomew Close, where he called upon Evan and Hannah Davis. Evan Davis was a cabinetmaker and upholsterer; he and his wife had gotten to know Hannah Brown through Evan’s sister. (The two women had once been servants together in the same house.) The acquaintance had deepened into affection, and Hannah Brown had been in the habit of calling frequently on Hannah Davis.

  Evan Davis remembered how, shortly before Christmas, he was in his workshop when his wife called him into the parlor. There he found Hannah and a man upon whom he had never before laid eyes; Hannah introduced him only as her “beau.” He was stoutish of figure, well-dressed, voluble, with the air of one who thought himself a person of some consequence in the world. Evan welcomed him warmly and proposed that they go over to the Hand & Shears for a drink. Over a pint of ale, Hannah’s beau spoke of America. He had a farm of a thousand acres there, at Hudson’s Bay, and planned to return to it after Christmas.

  Hannah and her man came again to Bartholomew Close on the Thursday before Christmas, the same day William Gay saw his sister for the last time in Goodge Street. After a drink in the parlor with the women, the men went over to the French Horn, a public house close by. Hannah’s beau was again full of talk of America, the “grand place it was, and the railroads there, and his farm,” which was “a beautiful place.” The two couples supped together in Bartholomew Close and afterwards seated themselves in the parlor.

  “Well,” Hannah’s beau said as he sat beside her on the sofa, “we may as well tell you our intentions, as we are not children . . . we intend to get married on Sunday morning (Christmas Day).” It was all arranged; the banns had been entered by the parish clerk, and been duly published by the minister; the wedding clothes had been procured. All that remained was to find a man to give the bride away and a maid to attend her to the altar. The ornamental offices were soon filled; Evan Davis would give the bride away, and the Davises’ eldest daughter, who was also named Hannah, would be the bridesmaid. In a handsome gesture, Evan offered to give a dinner to the wedding party after the ceremony. Hannah expressed to Mrs. Davis her hope that she would come to see her in her new home in Carpenter’s Place, Camberwell. Of course the “state of the house,” she said, would not be “very nice,” for they would be “going away soon to America,” to the farm at Hudson’s Bay.

  The party broke up about ten o’clock; but not before it was agreed that they would all meet again on Christmas Day at the Angel in Camberwell, from whence they would make their way to St. Giles, where the marriage was to take place.

  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 o
f 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

  It 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.