John Williams had climbed those stairs, and clubbed her down even as she bent over the grate. “And do you wonder, then, that these are not for me or my maid? Good day to you. I have a little business waiting for me elsewhere.” I walked out into Ratcliffe Highway, but I could not resist looking up at the rooms above the shop. What wonders had been performed in that narrow confined space? And what if they might come again? That would be a consummation never before seen in this city.
But I had other fish to fry—some little sprat to catch and cook. It was growing dark now, and the gas was being lit by the time I came into Limehouse. It was the hour to show my hand but, as yet, I was a mere tyro, a beginner, an understudy who could not appear on the great stage without rehearsal. I had first to perfect my work in a secret hour, stolen from the tumult of the city: if only I could find some secluded grove and, like some pastoral being, shed London blood within a green shade. But that was not to be. I was still in my own particular private theater, this garish spot beneath the gas lamps, and here I must perform. But, at first, let it be behind the curtain …
There was a pert little thing lingering outside the alley by the Laburnum Playhouse; she could have been no more than eighteen or nineteen, but in the ways of the street she was already old. She knew the bible of the world, for she had learned it by heart. And what a heart it might prove to be, if it were removed with love and care. I shadowed her as she walked towards the lodging house for seamen at the corner of Globe Lane. You see how I had studied the streets? I had purchased Murray’s New Plan of London, and had plotted all my exits and entrances. There she stood and a few moments later some laboring man, still with the brick dust upon his clothes, came up and whispered to her. She said something in return, and it was all quick motion after that: she led him down Globe Lane towards a ruined house. She had his dust on her when they came out into the light again.
I waited until he had left her, and then made my approach. “Why, little chicken, you must have performed a nice bit of business to become so dusty.”
She laughed, and I could smell the gin upon her breath. Even now her organs were being pickled, as if they were in a surgeon’s jar. “It’s all one to me,” she said. “Have you any money?”
“Look.” I brought out a shining coin. “But consider me. Am I a gentleman? Can you expect me to lie upon the street? I need a good bed and four walls.”
She laughed again. “Well then, gentleman, you must stop at the Bladebone.”
“Where is your bladebone?”
“We need gin, sir. More gin, if you want to be pleased with me.”
It was a public saloon off Wick Street, and looked to be a den of the vilest sort filled with the refuse of London. I would have enjoyed the reek of it, as a plain man—I would have raised my arms, and joined the general uproar against heaven—but, as an artist, I demurred. I could not be seen before my first great work. She noticed that I hesitated, and seemed to smile. “I can tell you are a gentleman, and there is no need to accompany me. I was born here. I know my way well enough.” She took some coins from me and returned a few minutes later with a chamber pot filled with gin. “It is clean,” she said, “quite clean. We never use it for that. We have the streets, don’t we?” She led me into a nearby court, no bigger than a pocket handkerchief; she staggered as she began to climb the worm-eaten stairs, and some of the gin spilled over the side of the pot. Someone was singing in one of the rooms which we passed, and I knew the words of the old music-hall ditty as well as if I had written them myself:
When nobody was looking,
I took my virgin mild,
It must have been her cooking,
Because I got rather wild.
Then all was silence as we climbed up to the topmost story, and entered a room which seemed to be no more than a den or hut. There was a soiled mattress upon the floor, while on the walls she had pasted photographs of Walter Butt, George Byron and other idols of the stage. Everything smelled of stale drink, and a torn sheet had been carelessly draped across a tiny window. So this was to be my green room or, rather, my red room. This was to mark my entrance upon the stage of the world. She had taken a dirty cup and dipped it into the chamber pot, swallowing the gin all at once. I was concerned that she might miss the fun but I knew well enough that she wished to be free of this sad world, in one way or another. Who was I to forestall her, or persuade her otherwise? I made no move but watched her take another cup of gin. Then, as she lay down upon the bed, I leaned over her and began to brush the dirt and brick dust from her dress. She had almost passed out with the drink, but she managed to clutch my arm as I touched her. “What do you intend to do with me now, sir?” She still lay upon the bed quite dazed, and it occurred to me that she suspected my game and offered herself willingly to my knife. There are those poor souls who, on hearing of an outbreak of cholera, have hastened to the district in the hope of being infected with the disease. Was that her way? Then it would be a crime to leave her in suspense, would it not?
I did not want a drop of her blood upon my clothes and so I took off my ulster, jacket, waistcoat and trousers; hanging upon the back of her door was a faded coat, bordered with thin fur, and I wrapped it around myself before taking out my knife. That knife is a lovely object with a carved ivory handle; I purchased it at Gibbon’s in the Haymarket for fifteen shillings and the pity of it was that, after I had entered her, its shine would be lost forever. I remember in my schooldays how I mourned when my first line of ink spotted the purity of a new book of exercises—now I was about to write my name again, but with a different instrument. She only began to stir after I had taken out a piece of intestine and blown softly upon it; there was a moan or sigh coming from her although, on looking back and surveying the scene in my mind’s eye, I believe that it might have been her spirit leaving the earth. Her eyes had opened, and I had to take them out with my knife for fear that my image had been seared upon them. I dipped my hands into the chamber pot and washed off her blood with her gin; then, out of sheer delight, I shat into it. It was over. She had been evacuated from the world, and I had evacuated. We were both now empty vessels, waiting for the presence of God.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1880: May I quote Thomas De Quincey? In the pages of his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” I first learned of the Ratcliffe Highway deaths, and ever since that time his work has been a source of perpetual delight and astonishment to me. Who could fail to be moved by his description of the murderer, John Williams, who committed his acts out of “pure voluptuousness, entirely disinterested” and who provoked an exterminating tragedy worthy of Middleton or Tourneur? The destroyer of the Marr family was “a solitary artist, who rested in the center of London, self-supported by his own conscious grandeur,” an artist who used London as the “studio” to display his works. And what a marvelous touch by De Quincey, to suggest that Williams’s bright yellow hair, “something between an orange and a lemon color,” had been dyed to create a deliberate contrast to the “bloodless ghostly pallor” of his face. I hugged myself in delight when I first read how he had dressed for each murder as if he were going upon the stage: “when he went out for a grand compound massacre he always assumed black silk stockings and pumps; nor would he on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a morning gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed and recorded by the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of fear was compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become the solitary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk.” But no more now: I can heartily recommend this work. Is that not what they say?
SEPTEMBER 8, 1880: Rain all day. Read some Tennyson to my dear wife, Elizabeth, before we retired.
EIGHT
ELIZABETH CREE: I believed that my husband had come down with a gastric fever. So I recommended that he send for a doctor.
MR. GREATOREX: Was his health good usually?
> ELIZABETH CREE: He always had a bad stomach, which we took to be the gases.
MR. GREATOREX: And did he have any medical attention that night?
ELIZABETH CREE: No. He declined it.
MR. GREATOREX: He declined it? Why?
ELIZABETH CREE: He told me that it was not necessary, and asked me instead for a lime cordial.
MR. GREATOREX: That was a very extraordinary request, was it not, for a man in such severe pain?
ELIZABETH CREE: I believe that he wished to bathe his forehead and temples with it.
MR. GREATOREX: Can you tell the court what happened next?
ELIZABETH CREE: I had gone downstairs to prepare the cordial, when I heard a sudden noise from his room. I returned to him at once, and saw that he had fallen from his bed and was lying upon the Turkey carpet.
MR. GREATOREX: Did he say anything to you at that point?
ELIZABETH CREE: No, sir. I could see that he was breathing with some difficulty and that there was some sort of bubbling around his lips.
MR. GREATOREX: And what did you do then?
ELIZABETH CREE: I called for our maid, Aveline, to watch him while I went for the doctor.
MR. GREATOREX: So you left the house?
ELIZABETH CREE: Yes.
MR. GREATOREX: And did you not say, to a neighbor whom you passed, “John has destroyed himself”?
ELIZABETH CREE: I was in such a hot haste, sir, I do not know what I might have said. I had even forgotten my bonnet.
MR. GREATOREX: Go on.
ELIZABETH CREE: I returned with our doctor as quickly as ever I could, and together we went into my husband’s room. Aveline was bent over him, but I could see then that he had expired. The doctor smelt his lips and said that we must inform the police, or the coroner, or some such.
MR. GREATOREX: And why did he say that?
ELIZABETH CREE: He believed from the odor that my husband must have consumed some prussic acid, or other poison, and that there would have to be a post-mortem examination. I was naturally very shocked at this, and I am told that I fainted away.
MR. GREATOREX: But why had you shrieked out in the street, a few minutes before, and told your neighbor that your husband had destroyed himself? How could you possibly have reached that conclusion if, as you still then believed, he was merely suffering from a gastric illness?
ELIZABETH CREE: As I explained to Inspector Curry, sir, he had threatened self-murder before. He was of a very morbid disposition and, in my anxiety at the time, my mind must have carried me back to those threats. I know that, by his bedside, there was a book on laudanum by Mr. De Quincey.
MR. GREATOREX: I think Mr. De Quincey is immaterial on this occasion.
NINE
A young man sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum and, as he opened the pages of that month’s Pall Mall Review, noticed that his hand was trembling slightly. He put it up to his straggling mustache, smelled the faint traces of sweat upon it, and then composed himself to read; he wished to savor and to remember this moment when he first saw his own words printed between the thick covers of an intellectual London journal. It was as if some other and more glorious person were addressing him from the page but, yes, this was his essay: “Romanticism and Crime.” After quickly scanning some opening remarks on the lurid melodrama of the popular press, which he had written at the request of the editor, he read his own argument with great pleasure:
“I might turn for a suggestive analogy to Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ which is justly celebrated for its postscript on the extraordinary theme of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812 when an entire family was butchered in a hosier’s shop. The publication of this essay in Blackwood’s provoked criticism from those members of the reading public who believed that he had sensationalized, and therefore trivialized, a peculiarly brutal series of murders. It is true that De Quincey, like certain other essayists from the early part of this century (Charles Lamb and Washington Irving spring immediately to mind), could on occasion introduce passages of levity and even whimsicality into the most serious arguments; there are moments in his essay where he excessively glamorizes the short career of the murderer John Williams, for example, and seems somewhat unsympathetic to the suffering of that man’s unfortunate victims. Yet it would hardly be fair to assume, on this evidence alone, that the mere tendency to sensationalize these sanguineous events did in any pronounced way trivialize or demean them. Quite the opposite case might be inferred—the Marr murders of 1812 reached their apotheosis in the prose of Thomas De Quincey, who with purple imagery and soaring cadence has succeeded in immortalizing them. Indeed the readers of Blackwood’s would also have recognized the presence of beliefs and preoccupations just beneath the surface of De Quincey’s ornate prose which are manifestly at odds with any desire to trivialize the deaths along the Ratcliffe Highway.” He stopped for a moment and inserted his finger between his neck and the stiff collar of his shirt; there was something chafing him, but then he ceased to feel the irritation as he read on.
“It is well known that murders, and murderers, are variously considered in various periods. There are fashions in murder just as there are fashions in any other form of human expression; in our own period of privacy and domestic insularity, poisoning is the favored means of dispatching someone into eternity, for example, while in the sixteenth century stabbing was considered to be a more masculine and combative form of vengeance. But there are various forms of cultural expression, as the recent work of Hookham has suggested, and this essay by Thomas De Quincey may be studied more appropriately in a quite different setting. It is perhaps worth remarking that the writer was associated with that generation of English poets who have by common consent been labeled ‘the Romantics’—Coleridge and Wordsworth had been his close friends. The term hardly seems appropriately attached to a man obsessed with murder and violence, and yet there is a network of most curious associations which brings the foul butcheries of Limehouse into the same world as that of The Prelude or ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Thomas De Quincey has, for example, created a narrative out of the Marr murders in which the killer himself emerges as a wonderful Romantic hero. John Williams is seen to be an outcast who enjoys a secret power, a pariah whose exclusion from social conventions and civilization itself actually invests him with fresh strength. In truth the man was a nondescript ex-seaman forced to live in a mean lodging house, whose own absurd stupidity led to his eventual capture, but in the pages of De Quincey’s account he is transformed into an avenger whose bright yellow hair and chalk-white countenance afforded him the significance of some primeval deity. At the center of the Romantic movement was the belief that the fruits of isolated self-expression were of the greatest importance and were capable of discovering the highest truths; that is why Wordsworth was able to construct an entire epic poem out of his private observations and beliefs. In De Quincey’s account John Williams becomes an urban Wordsworth, a poet of sublime impulse who rearranges (one might say, executes) the natural world in order to reflect his own preoccupations. Writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey were also heavily influenced by German idealistic philosophy, as were all men of culture at the beginning of this century, and they were as a consequence peculiarly interested in the concept of ‘genius’ as the epitome of the intense, isolated mind. So it is that John Williams is transformed into a genius of his own particular sphere, with the advantage that he is also associated with the ideas of death and eternal silence: one has only to recall the example of John Keats, who was seventeen at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, to understand how potent that image of oblivion might become.” An attendant brought two books over to his desk; the young man did not thank him, but glanced down at the titles before smoothing his hair with the palm of his hand. Then he put his hand to his nose again, and sniffed at his fingers as he continued to read.
“There are other very suggestive currents which swirl across the surface of De Quincey’s prose. He is primaril
y concerned with the fatal figure of John Williams, of course, but he takes care to place his creation (for that is what the murderer essentially becomes) before the scenery of a massive and monstrous city; few writers had so keen and horrified a sense of place, and within this relatively short essay he evokes a sinister, crepuscular London, a haven for strange powers, a city of footsteps and flaring lights, of houses packed close together, of lachrymose alleys and false doors. London becomes a brooding presence behind, or perhaps even within, the murders themselves; it is as if John Williams had in fact become an avenging angel of the city. It is not difficult to understand the force of De Quincey’s obsession. In his most notorious work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he recounts a period in his life (before he began to take laudanum) when he was an outcast upon the streets of London; he was then just seventeen, and had absconded from a private school in Wales. He traveled to the city, and at once became a prey of its relentless, powerful life. He starved, and began to sleep in a derelict house near Oxford Street where he found ‘a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old’ who ‘had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came.’ Her name was Ann, and she lived with a perpetual and inextinguishable fear of the ghosts who might surround her in that crumbling dwelling. But it is the great thoroughfare, Oxford Street itself, which haunts De Quincey’s imagination. In his Confessions it becomes a street of sorrowful mysteries, of ‘dreamy lamplight’ and the sounds of the barrel organ; he remembers the portico where he fainted away from hunger, and the corner where he and Ann would meet in order to console each other among ‘the mighty labyrinths of London.’ That is why the city and his suffering within it became—if we may borrow a phrase from that great modern poet Charles Baudelaire—the landscape of his imagination. It is this interior world which he places within ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’—a world in which suffering, poverty and loneliness are the most striking elements. By chance it was in Oxford Street, also, that he first purchased laudanum—it could be said that the old highway led him directly to those nightmares and fantasies which turned London into some mighty vision akin to that of Piranesi, a labyrinth of stone, a wilderness of blank walls and doors. These were the visions, at least, which he recounted many years later when he lodged in York Street off Covent Garden.
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Page 3
