“True. That is why I would discuss them. They must be looked upon with eyes less ingenuous than your own, and less tender towards knaves of his sort.”
It was as though, hitherto, Justice Fielding had lurked in ambush. He held up a hand for silence.
“Here we have a man, a physician who should have set better example, but who is of violent feelings and strong physical appetite. We will allow he tried to stifle both; what honourable man does not? We will allow he is not affluent; other men are in like case. We will allow he worked hard for the poor; so do others, including myself. We will allow him amiable qualities; many a deservedly hanged knave has given halfpence to children and used kindness towards his dog. What men?
“No, Jeffrey, be pleased not to interrupt!
“This doctor has been wed to a woman of low birth but aristocratic carriage, maiden name Cresswell. She has thought to better herself. She goes on to better herself, or so she thinks, when secretly she marries Hamnet Tawnish in the belief the man Tawnish is both well born and rich. She makes no blunder when she becomes the mistress of Sir Mortimer Ralston, but does err again in discovering (as you have been good enough to tell me at last) that this man’s pretended niece is his daughter, and uses it as a threat.
“Meanwhile, Dr. Abel must persuade her back to his bed at any cost. You have explained the scheme to rob an old woman after killing her with a knitting-needle in such fashion as to pretend her own spells have frightened her to death. You have not dealt with details quite as bad.
“He is determined to kill her; he carries the sharpened weapon in that box of phials; but he dithers and can’t set his mind to it, though he must act soon or both he and this woman will be turned from the bridge. Your case for the defence—”
“I make out no case for the defence.”
“No? Well, hear me out”
“As you please.”
“On Friday night he is at the Grapes, tippling and bemoaning his lot; when his mind is made up, Miss Ralston enters. He does not guess who she may be; he has not yet seen that famous portrait you tell me of. But she does say she means to take refuge with Grace Delight If she has come to stay here, he will get no further opportunity for murder and robbery.
“Since Miss Ralston seems determined, he will not truly try to prevent her from going. But he must kill the old woman now, in haste, and rob afterwards. He says he will accompany this girl, if she will wait while he fetches this instrument-phial box from a small adjoining room. It is an empty room; it has a door leading not only to the jakes but to a lane at the back by which he can very quickly reach the footway beside London Bridge and the window to Grace Delight’s lodgings.
“That was when he killed her, and there was no scream or cry at the time he did.
“It was a brief matter of minutes before he made haste back to the inn, where he met Mr. Sterne. The girl had gone. You appeared; he could weave his tale of ghosts, and in hypocritical sympathy urge you to follow her.
“But the man still could not rest What was happening? What had happened? Had Miss Ralston perhaps not gone there at all? Observe, Jeffrey, the character of the born criminal; he will not let well alone, as Dr. Abel could not.
“He must learn what went forward. No person at a tavern will question an absence on the excuse of visiting the jakes. By that time Dr. Abel is alone with Mr. Sterne, who assuredly would never mark it and in any case is becoming so drunk that afterwards—as we both know—he does not even recall assaulting the watch in Cheapside. And so this born criminal returns again.
“Miss Ralston, as she informed you, has dallied ‘an unconscionable time’ on the bridge; so long that you overtook her. When the face of our good doctor is once more pressed through that open window, the body is undiscovered as yet.
“Grace Delight lies where he has struck her down, without pretence of visiting her as kindly physician. But you and Miss Ralston can be heard speaking to each other outside the street-door, both of you crying in loud voices as to what may have occurred inside. The murderer now conceives what he imagines will put the last touch of credence to his prophecy of death by fright
“He climbs through the window. Miss Ralston shouts the words, ‘God, God, do you think I always tell you lies?’ and flings open the street-door. The murderer, a figure as grotesque as any conceived by my late half-brother the writer, utters an unearthly cry as though of terror; he lifts and lets fall the shoulders of his victim; and he retreats to the Grapes Tavern for assurance from Mr. Sterne that he has never been absent save at the necessary-house.”
Justice Fielding pointed with the switch.
“Since you guessed so much,” he added, “did this point occur to you? That it was the murderer uttering a false scream of fear? That it might have been the voice of a man and not a woman?”
“Yes. Or, in exactness, I suspected it long before I knew Dr. Abel must be guilty. Hamnet Tawnish had uttered a noise which sounded precisely like the other—a kind of bubbling shriek—when he fell through the trap-opening after I had wounded him. Sir, why do you so dilate upon facts well known? Why do you insist that two and two must make four?”
“I stress it,” answered the other, “to put the question with which I began.”
“Well, sir?”
“In doing so,” said Justice Fielding, “let me conclude with the account you yourself were relating of the events on Saturday night. You and Miss Ralston returned from Ranelagh to St. James’s Square. Dr. Abel had been talking long with Mrs. (let us continue to call her that) Mrs. Cresswell in her room? Presumably just after Dr. Hunter arrived?”
“Yes.”
“He had sat on the dressing-stool by the dressing-table. In spilled rice-powder on the table-top there was the oblong print where his box of instruments and phials had rested? There were the smudged prints of a fist where repeatedly he had struck it, as though in argument and persuasion? There was even the mark, like that of a broom, to show his cane had been leaning against the edge. Therefore the man was George Abel and no one else?”
“So I read the signs.”
“He did not tell her he had killed for her sake? He told her merely that he could lay his hands on a fortune in jewels, and it would be hers for the asking if she fled away with him to a farther clime and a happier sky?”
“It seemed likely they would flee away. I could not say where.”
“And she, being in dangerous plight after schemes which might undo her, allowed herself to be persuaded? Deering had been following him on Saturday, and continued watch today? Since the street-door to Grace Delight’s lodgings was locked as the rear window was locked on the inside, none could enter these rooms until Dr. Abel got his skeleton key he had bespoke from the locksmith in Cheapside? Therefore one or both of them must walk into a trap you and Deering set?”
“Such proved to be the case.”
“It did indeed. Yet you still planned to let these people escape, even after you had trapped them?”
“I—I had thought of it, I confess. But …”
“Well, that is my question. It is late, as you say; you may go from here when you have been open with me. The woman had tried to have you killed. The man had hoaxed you as much as you had hoaxed him, and had even written me an anonymous note so as to direct suspicion away from himself and at you. Yet you still could even once have considered letting them go, because you yourself might have behaved as they did?”
“No. It was to keep Peg from learning the truth of her parentage. Mrs. Cresswell will shout this in the dock at her trial; it won’t help her, but it will delight Lavinia Cresswell. It is true Peg does know, as I learned only late tonight, and says she does not care. Yet I feared Peg might be of another mind afterwards.”
“Then the answer …?”
“The final answer, sir, is no. I could not have let them go. A long look at them, here in this room when the truth was revealed, and even my tolerance found its limits.”
Justice Fielding sat back on the chest.
“At
long last, my dear Jeffrey,” said the magistrate, “I have contrived to teach you. You will leave my service, with so much money to spend, but you will not forget this. There is no more for you to fear from the law; I give you your quittance; go hence without remand. You have learned to observe truth.”
Jeffrey Wynne, so tired that he could scarcely stand, turned towards the trap-opening with the candles burning beside it.
“Oh, agreed,” he said. “And yet…”
“There are reservations?”
“Only, sir, in a sense that neither of us can help. “‘What is truth?” asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’”
Notes For The Curious
THE CHARACTERS IN THIS novel sometimes go strange ways to strange places, and view strange sights when they get there. Therefore the following notes are submitted as evidence that the author is not always so bubble-headed a romancer as he must appear.
1
Of London Bridge
It must be remembered that Old London Bridge, which was not demolished until 1832 after the completion of New London Bridge a year earlier, stood about sixty yards to the east of the present one. Nearly all the houses were pulled down during 1757 and 1758; Knight’s London (Charles Knight & Co., 6 vols., 1841) says that a few remained as late as 1760. Details of the bridge’s history and appearance, including a drawing of it as it looked just before the houses were pulled down, will be found in Knight; and also in H. B. Wheatley’s London, Past and Present (John Murray, 3 vols., 1891). Charles Pennant’s London, which first appeared in 1790 and was reissued in the heavily illustrated three-volume edition of 1814, contains Pennant’s eyewitness description:
“I well remember the street on London Bridge, narrow, darksome, and dangerous to passengers from the multitude of carriages; frequent arches of strong timber crossed the street from the tops of the houses, to keep them together and from falling into the river.”
Next, with regard to the idea on which the novel was based:
“Nothing could preserve the rest of the inmates, who grew deaf to the noise of the falling water, the clamour of watermen, or the frequent shrieks of drowning wretches. Most of the houses were tenanted by pin or needle makers, and economical ladies were wont to drive from the St. James’s end of the town to make cheap purchases.”
2
Of St. James’s District
No reader need make incredulous noises at finding a large artificial pond—120 feet in diameter, to be exact—in the middle of St. James’s Square. Volume XXIX of the London County Council’s admirable ‘Survey of London,’ The Parish of St. James Westminster (Athlone Press, University of London, 1960), tells us that the basin was constructed in 1726 and was not filled in until 1818. Volumes XXIX and XXX, edited by F. H. W. Sheppard, make fascinating reading for anyone who wants to know who lived in what house, and exactly how the whole district looked.
Between 1759 and 1761 William Pitt the elder rented a house on the north side, not far from the one ascribed to a fictitious Sir Mortimer Ralston; but in 1757, according to this ‘Survey,’ the elder Pitt inhabited a house which is described as unidentified, and so I have taken the liberty of putting him on the west side.
3
Of Bagnios
The bagnio, in addition to being bath and medical centre, also formed a unique if disreputable feature of eighteenth-century life. Plate number five of William Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode (1745) depicts the murder of the husband by his wife’s lover after he has surprised them at a bagnio. In Henry Fielding’s novel Amelia (1751) the improvident hero, Billy Booth, is lured into an affair with the tempestuous Miss Matthews while they are imprisoned at Newgate; the governor of the prison genially offers them both the use of Miss Matthews’s private room for half a guinea a night, and points out that any good bagnio would have cost as much.
London’s only Turkish bath at the Hummums—whose name, according to Wheatley, is derived from the Arabic word ‘hammam,’ or bath—seems to have been held in somewhat higher esteem. It is true that profligate Parson Ford, a riotous figure in Hogarth’s Modern Midnight Conversation, died at the Hummums and his ghost was said to have appeared twice to a waiter. But many years afterwards so stern a moralist as Dr. Johnson had no hesitation in telling Boswell (Life of Johnson. May 12, 1778) of his late wife’s curiosity about the ghost, and bow she had gone there to ask questions. On the other hand, after Johnson’s statement, “My wife went to the Hummums,” Boswell makes him add as though in quick explanation: “It is a place where they get themselves cupped.”
With one exception, no inn or tavern mentioned in the novel is imaginary. A painting now at the London Museum shows the ‘Golden Cross’ as it was in 1757. A. E. Richardson’s Georgian England: a Survey of Trades, Industries, and Art from 1700 to 1820 (London: Batsford, 1931) illustrates innkeepers’ habit of giving names rather than numbers to rooms or sets of rooms. The ‘Rainbow,’ in Fleet Street, was established as a coffee-house in 1657 and is later mentioned as such in Number Sixteen of the Spectator; it afterwards became a tavern and survives (or did survive) as a pub-restaurant to the present day.
4
Of the Waxwork—and the ‘Gothic’
Mrs. Salmon’s Waxwork, between the Temple gates, very much belonged to real life. It was already famous when Boswell visited it on July 4, 1763, as we find from Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, edited by Professor Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: William Heinemann, 1950). It had a very long life of popularity. As late as 1785 a lyrical admirer extolled it thus:
Tall Polygars,
Dwarf Zanzibars,
Mahomed’s Tomb, Killarney’s Lake, the Fane of Ammon,
With all thy Kings and Queens, ingenious Mrs. Salmon!
And Pennant reproduces a drawing which shows the crazily sloping floors, the many-paned windows, the wooden salmon over the door, the modern brick buildings on either side. Presumably its star dimmed when Madame Tussaud’s exhibits were first displayed at the Lyceum in 1802. Since this cannot be proved, and since so little is known of the lady, perhaps apology should be made for giving her a pair of fictitious nieces.
But no apology need be made for the ‘Gothic grotto at Mrs. Salmon’s. It is customary to attribute popular interest in the Gothic to Horace Walpole, with whom we shall deal in a moment. In 1757 the elegant Horace had not yet finished bedizening his house at Strawberry Hill with so much Gothic gim-crackery, and published his comically horrendous novel, The Castle of Otranto, only in 1764. But the craze for the Gothic, as for the Chinese, long antedated either time. Evidence of this will be found in a very valuable work, John Gloag’s Georgian Grace; a Social History of Design From 1660–1830 (London: A. & C. Black, 1960). What Horace Walpole did was to turn the Gothic into the grotesque, and fill it with spooks whose descendants cause mirth or profanity in horror films even yet.
Still, the mischief he did in this respect is a small price to pay for The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Oxford, edited by Peter Cunningham (Edinburgh: John Grant, 9 vols., 1906), a whole pageant from the first letter in 1735 to the last in 1797.
“Fiddles sing all through then,” wrote Thackeray in a famous passage: “wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine equipages glitter and sparkle there; never was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us.”
Jane Austen ridiculed the spooks he inspired. We ourselves dislike him as a person, and enjoy his ‘dandified treble’ as little as Thackeray or Macaulay did; we can’t trust him an inch when he is being malicious or improving on a good story. But few source materials are so important as this incessant round of high life throughout two reigns.
5
Of Ranelagh and Masquerades
Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens have high testimonials. Goldsmith and Johnson admired the place; Boswell felt a ‘glow of delight’ on entering; Walpole, though not enthusiastic when he saw its opening in 1742, was soon won over; Fielding thought a masquerade there might be aphrodi
siac enough to get a heroine seduced in a novel, unless the author intervened to prevent it.
Rotunda and gardens were at their best in 1757. Knight quotes a long description of the rotunda, and reproduces a picture showing rotunda and gardens—including the canal and the pavilion—from the south side. Though they were closed at the end of the century because the Company went on spending too much money, Horwood’s Plan of London, 1792–1899 gives a map of the gardens and the surrounding streets. In the matter of near-nudity in fine ladies at masquerades, however, we must be very careful.
The suggestion appears often enough in satires. Most such satires, when traced back, appear to stem from an escapade of the notorious Elizabeth Chudleigh, who in 1749 appeared at a masquerade in the character of Iphigenia dressed for the sacrifice.
“Miss Chudleigh was Iphigenia,” wrote Walpole to Sir Horace Mann on May 3, “but so naked you would have taken her for Andromeda.”
The trouble is that this masquerade was not held at Ranelagh; it was held at the Opera House in the Haymarket for the edification of the King. Mrs. Montagu, writing to her sister of the same affair, agrees that “Miss Chudleigh was so naked the high-priest might easily have inspected the entrails of the victim,” but adds: “The Maids of Honour (not of maids the strictest) were so offended they would not speak to her.”
On the other hand, we must not go too far in the opposite direction. Portraits of the most virtuous ladies, in mid-eighteenth century, show them wearing gowns which today would be more suited to a strip-tease show than to the Court of St. James’s. Let us therefore, like honest historians, accept a pleasant compromise.
6
Of Rogues and Crime
Anyone fascinated by this subject is recommended to approach it by way of Fielding’s novels Jonathan Wild and Amelia. The first treats satirically of a nightmare half-world and is unsparing in outspokenness; in the second, even apart from its unsavoury crew at Newgate, there are few characters who would have been permitted within miles of a Victorian drawing-room.
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