Despite the ravages of the previous day, next morning James took another hit of ‘the London Medicine’. To consume more of it was clearly crazy, but he was a junkie, and addiction is a kind of insanity. Predictably, the servants’ bells were soon clattering. Florence didn’t wait for anyone to answer, but ran downstairs, dispatching Mary Cadwallader to fetch the nearest doctor.
‘Without waiting for him to arrive, she told Alice Yapp to be with her master, while she went downstairs and told the cook, Humphreys, to make up immediately some mustard and water, as the master had taken another dose of that “Horrid Medicine”. She would not wait even for the cook to make it, or for a spoon, but stirred up some herself with her fingers, and rushed back into the bedroom with it,’ and as Yapp is her witness, said, ‘Drink this mustard and water in order to make you sick.’ Until assistance arrived Florence could do little more, except confiscate what was left of the ‘Horrid Medicine’ and throw it down the sink. She later told the cook that if James had swallowed even another drop ‘he would have been a dead man’.27
The above account is Alexander Macdougall’s, gleaned from various transcripts. He makes it clear that Maybrick’s reaction to the strychnine on Sunday morning was infinitely more severe than to the Saturday dose. In order to get an idea of what all or any of these reactions might have been, I quote from Husband’s Forensic Medicine: ‘The effects of the poison come on suddenly. The earliest symptoms are a feeling of suffocation and great difficulty in breathing. Twitching of the muscles rapidly passing into tetanic convulsions. The head after several jerks becomes stiffened, the neck rigid; the body curved forward, quite stiff and resting on the back of the head and heels.’28
All this is accompanied by staring eyes and an expression of ‘intense anxiety’. It must have been shared by everyone in the room, who could only look on in alarm as Maybrick’s spine rose in an approximation of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘During the intervals of the paroxysms,’ continues Husband, ‘the intellect is usually clear, and the patient appears conscious of his danger, frequently exclaiming, “I shall die!”’29
James Maybrick had probably swallowed enough strychnine to kill the entire household, horse thrown in, but it’s testament to his elephantine tolerance that it didn’t kill him. Although the stuff had all but murdered him and Florence had probably saved his life, the reality of this ‘London Medicine’ was to be distorted under the charlatan eyes of the Irish Judas, to her fatal disadvantage.
Russell was well aware of the strychnine incident, but conspired with no less a personage than Michael Maybrick to conceal it. Keen attention must be paid to Dr Fuller’s so-called medicine. It was to become one of the principal ingredients in Russell’s betrayal, confirming beyond doubt that he was treacherously active on behalf of Florence’s prosecution.
By the time the doctor arrived Maybrick was on top of it, chronically poisoned but with the immediate crisis past. Dr Humphreys (no relation to the cook) arrived at Battlecrease House just after 11 a.m. He was hurried upstairs, where he ‘found Mrs Maybrick at the bedside’. James was in it, looking like he was halfway to hell. Humphreys probably knew less about medicines than his patient. He certainly knew less about strychnine, and Maybrick didn’t tell him he’d taken it.
‘Mr Maybrick,’ said Humphreys at the inquest, ‘complained about some great fear and anxiety in consequence of a pain in the region of his left side, the region of his heart, and said he was frightened of dying. He further said he was afraid of paralysis coming on. I asked him when these symptoms began; he told me after breakfast, and he put it down to a strong cup of tea he had taken.’30
Whether Humphreys laughed out loud or not isn’t known, but this rubbish was repeated in court without laughter, and puts the prosecution into perspective. Any problems with the flypapers, and they would have nailed Florence for a teabag.
‘He showed me Dr Fuller’s prescription,’ said Humphreys, ‘and had an idea the stiffness in his limbs was due to that. He was a man who prided himself on his knowledge of medicine. He said, “Dr Humphreys, I think I know a great deal of medicine.”’31
‘He deceived Humphreys,’ wrote Macdougall, ‘by attributing it to Doctor Fuller’s tonic-medicine. He knew perfectly well what was the matter with him and that his illness was not due to that, but to an overdose of strychnine.’32 (Macdougall’s emphasis.)
Attributing Maybrick’s symptoms to a tea attack, with associated indigestion, ‘distress and palpitations of the heart’, Humphreys told him to lay off the London brew, prescribing dilute prussic acid in its place. With a recommendation of bed rest for a day or two, the physician then bade him good morning.
Dr Humphreys had been in attendance at Battlecrease House once before, though not for James Maybrick, but for whooping cough in the kids. He could therefore have no idea of the maniac he was dealing with – or rather, he wasn’t astute enough to put two and two together. On that occasion in early March, Florence had told him of her anxieties over her husband’s surreptitious use of ‘white powders’. ‘She was alarmed about it,’ he said, ‘and didn’t know what it was. She thought that possibly it was strychnine.’ He clearly didn’t take her too seriously, actually making a somewhat inopportune joke of it. ‘Well, if he should die suddenly,’ he said, ‘call me, and I can say you have had some conversation with me about it.’33
I’m relieved this quack wasn’t treating me. She had called him, reiterating her apprehension about the ‘white powders’, and with a prospective corpse upstairs, it’s astonishing that strychnine poisoning didn’t cross Humphreys’ mind. The witless physician later claimed that he’d questioned James Maybrick on the topic, apparently eliciting a strong denial. ‘I cannot stand strychnine,’ was the answer, from which Humphreys ‘drew the conclusion that he wasn’t in the habit of taking it’.34
If Florence got nowhere with the doctor, she naturally fared no better with the psycho in London. In that same month she’d written to James’s brother Michael expressing the anxieties she’d shared with Humphreys over ‘white powders’. Considering it was Michael who was engineering the murder of James and the utter destruction of Florence herself, it was a wasted stamp, and the letter must have brought a smile to the bastard’s face as he crumpled it.
How terrible were to be the coming weeks. How pathetic was this woman’s fate. As Macdougall was to write of her accusers, who charged that it was on 27 April that she administered the first of a cumulative and ultimately fatal dose of arsenic: ‘I cannot conceive how the conduct of Mrs Maybrick on that day leads to any other conclusion than innocence and anxious solicitude for her husband. A woman engaged in poisoning her husband with “arsenic” would not have rushed to give him an emetic to throw it up, or told Doctor Humphreys and Alice Yapp and the cook that it was dangerous medicine [“the London Medicine”] he was taking which had made him so ill on those two days, the 27th and 28th April.’35
James remained in bed, with two more visits from Humphreys. The first was that same night, Florence recalling him at about ten o’clock. In acute discomfort, Maybrick complained of ‘stiffness in the lower limbs’, which not everyone might interpret as an obvious symptom of dyspepsia. The bewildered doctor rubbed James’s legs, bent them at the knee and changed the prescription, believing ‘papine irridan’ might hit the spot that prussic acid had evidently missed. He also prescribed a diet of coffee and bacon for breakfast, ‘for luncheon he was to take some beef-tea with Arabica Revalenta (Du Barry’s Food), and for dinner, on alternate days, a little chicken and fish’.
Next day James was well enough to sit up in bed and write a letter to his brother Michael. At least, that’s what Michael was to tell Fitzjames Stephen and his conspirant wigs in secret conference. Dated 29 April 1889, it was addressed to ‘My Dear Blucher’:
Liverpool April 29th 1889
My Dear Blucher
I have been very seedy indeed. On Saturday morning I found my legs getting stiff and useless, but by sheer strength of will shook off the feeling and we
nt down on horseback to Wirral Races and dined with the Hobsons. Yesterday morning I felt more like dying than living so much so that Florry called in another Doctor who said it was an acute attack of indigestion and gave me something to relieve the alarming symptoms, so all went well until about 8 o’clock I went to bed and had lain there an hour by myself and was reading on my back.
Many times I felt a twitching but took little notice of it thinking it would pass away. But instead of doing so I got worse and worse and in trying to move round to ring the bell I found I could not do so but finally managed it, but by the time Florry and Edwin could get upstairs, was stiff and for five mortal hours my legs were like bars of tin stretched out to the fullest extent, but as rigid as steel. The Doctor came finally again but could not make it indigestion this time and the conclusion he came to was the Nuxvomica [strychnine] I had been taking. Doctor Fuller had poisoned me as all the symptoms warranted such a conclusion. I know I am today sore from head to foot and layed out completely.
What is the matter with me none of the Doctors so far can make out and I suppose never will, until I am stretched out and cold and then future generations may profit by it if they hold a postmortem which I am quite willing they should do.
I don’t think I shall come up to London this week as I don’t feel much like travelling and cannot go on with Fuller’s physic yet a while but I shall come up and see him again shortly. Edwin does not join you just yet but he will write you himself. I suppose you go to your country quarters on Wednesday.
With love,
Your affectionate Brother Jim.36
This letter has much to say for itself, and what it says reeks of deceit. Taken literally, it could have set Florence Maybrick free. Here we have James Maybrick accusing not his wife, but Dr Fuller in London, as his poisoner – ‘Doctor Fuller had poisoned me as all the symptoms had warranted such a conclusion.’ Whether James believed ‘the London Medicine’ had come from Fuller or not, it is beyond conjecture that he and everybody else in the house (including Alice Yapp) knew it was a hotshot of strychnine. He swallowed it on 27 April 1889, the very day the Crown accused Florence of administering the first dose of arsenic. It was an absurd and wicked accusation. The revelation of this text, purported to have been written by the victim himself, would have constituted all Sir Charles Russell needed to secure the liberty of his client. Everyone in that rotten little cesspit of a court – Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Fat Jack’ Addison, and the Irish Judas himself – was only too aware of this letter, and it is a criminal obscenity that both prosecution and defence suppressed it.
Notwithstanding the state’s filthy little secret, we’re supposed to believe that a roaring hypochondriac in constant terror of the Reaper, who had told Dr Humphreys he was ‘frightened of dying’, should announce twenty-four hours later that he was perfectly gung-ho for a stretch on the slab, and only too delighted to be hacked to bits for the profit of ‘future generations’.
James Maybrick suffered from a maniacal fear of death, and in my view is an unlikely advocate of his own posthumous butchery. Ripping up bodies was more in his brother’s line. The last thing James wanted was his dick flopped out in a mortuary, and no way did he write this letter. It was faked by a man with ‘many pens’ who was proficient in various schools of handwriting. Michael Maybrick had been systematically poisoning James with pills he claimed were from Dr Fuller, but which in fact had no more to do with him than the postal hotshot of strychnine. The so-called ‘Blucher’ letter was composed to validate a variety of intentions. In the first place, it’s probable that Michael thought his mystery brew might actually kill James, and this letter would then serve as his alibi; and second, had ‘the London Medicine’ done the trick, the letter would have vanished, and Florence would have been accused of murdering her husband with strychnine.
As with the unfortunate Bradford milkman William Barrit, malign articles began to appear in the press – the Liverpool Post of 15 May, by way of example: ‘It is not impossible that some very startling revelations will be made. The suspicion of the police and of the medical gentlemen being that the deceased succumbed to poisoning by strychnine.’ This calumny was enhanced by the Liverpool Weekly News: ‘An extraordinary rumour prevailed yesterday to the effect that Mrs Maybrick has not lately been accountable for her actions, and that she is really suffering from some mania.’ As far as certain sections of the Liverpool press were concerned, murdering husbands was a family trait. Florie’s mother was forced into broadcasting a public disclaimer following accusations that she had disposed of not one but two of her previous spouses. ‘These malicious rumours,’ reported the Liverpool Review, ‘without a particle of feasible evidence to support them, have been freely circulated in Liverpool, and have found their way into print in London.’
But it is the malicious journey of the ‘Blucher’ letter that takes precedence. Artfully abbreviated, it was to reappear, surfacing when it could do maximum damage to Florence, and then disappear when it could easily have proved her innocence.
On the day after he was supposed to have written it, James was feeling recovered, and returned to his business affairs in the city. That evening Dr Humphreys called at the house, and found him much improved. James told the doctor not to trouble himself further. If necessary, he would call on him.
It was a misguided forecast. The following day, on 1 May, James having forgotten to take his lunch to work, Edwin graciously volunteered to make the train journey to his brother’s offices in the Knowsley Buildings with a ceramic jugful of the prescribed Revalenta. James ate it, complaining of the sherry in it, and was ill that evening. He was well enough to go in to his office the next morning, and again took a dose of Revalenta for lunch. Once again he complained of feeling ill that evening. At ten o’clock next morning Dr Humphreys was listening to tales of fresh gastric woe.37
‘He said that he had not been well since eating lunch the day before,’ recounted the doctor, who not knowing his diagnostic arse from his elbow, suggested a Turkish bath might tone James up. It didn’t. At midnight the same day, Humphreys got another urgent summons. His patient had been vomiting – ‘green bile’ was mentioned – and suffering a ‘gnawing pain that extended from the hips to the joints of his legs’. A morphine suppository went up, and Maybrick was back in bed. He would not get out of it until his corpse was carried away a week later in a coffin.
It was the Revalenta Edwin had brought to the office that had kicked off this new bout of illness. There’s no doubt that somebody was poisoning James, and apparently no doubt who that somebody was. Mrs Maybrick had prepared the jugful that travelled to her husband’s office that day. She had personally concocted it. James had eaten it. Ergo, she had poisoned him. This neat syllogism was presented by her prosecutors, ignoring one glaring ingredient: the jug of lunch on 1 May was carried from the kitchen of his home to the Knowsley Buildings by Edwin Maybrick.
Michael Maybrick was over two hundred miles away, but was fully in control of the evolving wickedness at Battlecrease House. He had his rats on leashes, and one of them was Edwin. It was Edwin, jilted by Florence in favour of Alfred Brierley,38 who I believe put a little top-up into the jug on Michael’s behalf. Like everyone else, he was totally subservient to Michael’s will. Edwin’s daughter Amy Maine was to write that her father ‘couldn’t buy a pair of shoes without referring the matter to Michael’. But this story isn’t about shoes and boots (be they tight or not). It’s about murder, and I’d be the last person to bring footwear into the equation as any credible explanation for the activities of Jack the Ripper.
On some midnight in late spring 1889, certainly after Edwin Maybrick had returned from America on 25 April, a twenty-year-old man was lurking about the shadows of downtown Liverpool. His name was Robert Edward Reeves, and it was his practice to lurk. He was a small-time felon, a deserter from Her Majesty’s Liverpool Regiment, and perpetually on the lookout for an easy quid. Reeves had been in and out of jail since the age of fifteen, for theft in general, and thi
s night he was sniffing around the columns of the Royal Exchange, looking for an unlocked door. He heard voices in the darkness, urgent whispers, and silent as the little thief he was, stopped to listen.
What he heard was Michael and Edwin Maybrick discussing the forthcoming murder of their brother James. ‘They could not see me as I was behind a pillar,’ said Reeves. ‘I drew near as I could to hear what they were talking. One said to the other, “How will you manage this?” The other said, “I will manage that alright with the servant. I will get her to put a bottle of laudanum in Mrs Maybrick’s drawers and leave one on the table just as if it had been used and we can get Mr Maybrick to go and have some drink with us tomorrow and you can engage him in talking about the business and I will slip a strong dose in the drink that will settle him by tonight.”’39
Reeves’s statement totally contradicts contemporary perceptions of Florence Maybrick’s supposed infamy, and in that it is starkly correct. Michael murdered James with Edwin as his besotted assistant.
‘Blame will fall on our sister,’ said one of the two men. ‘The other said, “What do that matter, you know she don’t like Mr Maybrick and she is in keeping with that other fellow that she seems to like best. She will be glad to get him out of the way, you know that they can’t prove it was her poisoned him, if they do send her away the whole business will fall to us you know and we shall be two lucky fellows, then it don’t matter about getting rid of one or two out of this world, will you agree with me about it?”’40 Edwin agreed: ‘“Yes, you will see that that will manage this business alright.” Then the other said, “It is settled.” They then left their hiding place and went as far as the Merchant Tavern close by. I followed them. I could not go in as I had no money with me at the time, I was a deserter at the time, else I should have gone to Dale Street Police Court. I was afraid of getting taken back to my Regiment. I belonged to the Eight of King’s Liverpool Regiment, my regimental number was 2955, at the depot at Warrington.’41
They All Love Jack Page 67
