Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  He had been left out of the whole affair, yet it was he who had designed and configured the power system at Poldhu and who during his many grueling trips to the station had made it all work.

  He was hurt and angry.

  JOSEPHINE HOLMAN PROFESSED to be delighted. In an interview she revealed that she had known all along about Marconi’s plan to span the Atlantic. “It has been a terrible state secret with me for more than a year,” she said. She omitted the fact that during that year she had seen him only rarely. She hoped that she would see more of him, now that his great goal had been achieved, and that he might even pay a visit at last to Indianapolis to meet her family.

  “I would rather marry that kind of man than a king,” she said, and pronounced herself “the happiest woman in the world.”

  Several days later her grandmother hosted an engagement party at her home in Woodruff Place in Indianapolis—without Marconi. Josephine now lived in New York with her mother but had come down for a six-week visit. The party occurred at its end, during a spell of deep cold that raised fears of what the newspapers called a “coal famine.” After the party, she set out to return to New York to rejoin her mother and, most important, to be reunited with her fiancé, who was headed there now, booked to stay at his favorite hotel, the Hoffman House.

  It seemed a delightful prospect: Christmas in New York, with her husband-to-be, now more famous than ever.

  TO THE BALL

  WHEN ETHEL LE NEVE ARRIVED at work on the morning of Wednesday, February 2, 1910, she found a packet on her desk with a note on top that caused a soaring of spirit. Written in Crippen’s hand, the text was simple and direct: “B.E. has gone to America.” The note asked Ethel to deliver the packet to Melinda May, secretary of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild.

  “Shall be in later,” Crippen wrote, “when we can arrange for a pleasant little evening.”

  So Belle was gone. “I was, of course, immensely excited at this disappearance of Dr. Crippen’s mysterious wife,” Ethel wrote. “I knew well enough that they had been on bad terms together. I knew that she had often threatened to go away and leave him. I knew also that she had a secret affection for Mr. Bruce Miller, who lived in New York.” Ethel assumed that Belle had at last made good on her threat and had run off to join the ex-prizefighter. If true, if really true, it meant that Crippen now would be free to seek divorce and, despite the strictures of British law, likely would prevail. It was, as she put it, “amazing news.”

  Ethel took the packet down the hall to the offices of the guild, which was due to meet that day, then returned to Yale Tooth to await her lover. She had many questions.

  At noon he still had not appeared. She believed he was conducting business at nearby Craven House, on Kingsway. She busied herself with the work of the office, though Crippen’s news made it hard for her to concentrate.

  Crippen did not come back until four o’clock that afternoon. “He was not in a mood then for a long conversation on the subject,” she recalled, “and his reticence I readily understood.” But she had to speak with him.

  “Has Belle Elmore really gone away?”

  “Yes,” Crippen said. “She has left me.”

  “Did you see her go?”

  “No. I found her gone when I got home last night.”

  “Do you think she will come back?”

  Crippen shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

  On this score Ethel needed reassurance: “Did she take any luggage with her?”

  “I don’t know what luggage she had, because I did not see her go. I daresay she took what she wanted. She always said that the things I gave her were not good enough, so I suppose she thinks she can get better elsewhere.”

  Though Crippen seemed downcast, Ethel offered neither condolence nor sympathy. “I could not pretend to commiserate with him,” she wrote. “He had led me into the secret of his unhappy married life, and now that his wife had disappeared it seemed to me best for him, perhaps also best for her.”

  Now Crippen surprised her. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of jewels that Belle had left behind. “Look here,” he said. “You had better have those.” He held them out. “These are good, and I should like to know you had some good jewelry. They will be useful when we are dining out, and you will please me if you will accept them.”

  “If you really wish it,” Ethel said, “I will have one or two. Pick out what you like. You know my tastes.”

  He chose several diamond rings; a more elaborate ring with four diamonds and a ruby; and a brooch in a pattern that evoked a rising sun, with a diamond at its center and pearls radiating outward in zigzag fashion.

  The jewels were lovely, and Ethel believed them to be of the finest quality, for Crippen, as she put it, “was a real expert in diamonds.” Previously he had shown her how to judge a diamond by color and clarity, and how to tell at a glance whether a diamond had been set in New York or London.

  She suggested he pawn the remaining jewels—a dozen rings and a large brooch inlaid with rows of diamonds in the shape of a tiara. The idea of doing so had not struck Crippen, but now he told Ethel it was a good plan. He walked to a pawnshop on the same street as his office, Mssrs. Jay & Attenborough.

  He showed a clerk named Ernest Stuart three diamond rings. After examining them closely, Stuart agreed to lend Crippen £80. Crippen returned a few days later with the rest of the jewels, and got another £115 pounds, for a total of £195—nearly $20,000 today.

  That night Ethel Le Neve slept in Crippen’s bed at Hilldrop Crescent for the first time.

  FOR THE LADIES of the guild, the news was equally amazing. The packet delivered to the guild office that morning contained two letters—one for Melinda May, and one for the guild’s executive committee. It also contained the guild’s ledger and checkbook, which Belle in her role as treasurer had kept at home.

  The letters were dated that same day, February 2, and were from Belle Elmore. A notation after the closing of May’s letter indicated it had been prepared by Crippen at Belle’s request.

  “Dear Miss May,” it began, “Illness of a near relative has called me to America on only a few hours’ notice, so I must ask you to bring my resignation as treasurer before the meeting to-day, so that a new treasurer can be elected at once. You will appreciate my haste when I tell you that I have not been to bed all night packing, and getting ready to go. I shall hope to see you again a few months later, but I cannot spare a moment to call on you before I go. I wish you everything nice till I return to London again.”

  The letter to the executive committee repeated the news and noted the enclosure of the checkbook and ledger. It urged the committee to suspend the usual rules and appoint a new treasurer immediately. “I hope some months later to be with you again, and in meantime wish the Guild every success and ask my good friends and pals to accept my sincere and loving wishes for their own personal welfare.”

  The news of Belle’s departure and the selection of her replacement consumed most of that day’s meeting, though no one thought to walk the short distance to Crippen’s office to ask for a fuller explanation.

  A FEW DAYS LATER—MOST LIKELY it was Saturday, February 5—Ethel and Crippen arranged to spend an evening together at the theater. “He thought it would cheer us both up,” Ethel said, though she herself needed no cheering. She reveled in her new status. No longer would she have to endure the sight of Crippen going off with his wife to some evening function, when rightfully it should have been she, Ethel, who accompanied him.

  They were both in the office, Saturday being a workday, when Crippen remembered that he had forgotten to leave out food for his pets—the seven canaries, two cats, and bull terrier. He could not get away to feed them, but the prospect of leaving them so long without food troubled him.

  Lest this problem destroy the evening and their first opportunity to go out together in public without fear of discovery, Ethel volunteered to go to Hilldrop Crescent and feed the animals. Crippen offe
red his keys. She left after lunch.

  Ethel entered the house through the side door and found herself alone in the place for the first time. She had seen little of it so far, only the kitchen, the parlor, the bathroom, and of course Crippen’s bedroom. She made her way to the kitchen, where she found most of the pets. She went to the pantry, near the door to the coal cellar, to get some milk for the cats, but as she did so, one of the cats, a beautiful white Persian—Belle’s favorite—escaped and dashed upstairs. Ethel gave chase.

  The cat led her throughout the house. “The faster I ran the faster went the cat,” she recalled. At last she cornered it and brought it back downstairs to the kitchen.

  Her tour had taken her through rooms she had never seen before, giving her a new sense of what life had been like for Crippen—nothing “uncanny,” as she put it, just a sense of loneliness and what she termed a “strange untidiness.”

  “Rich gowns lay about the bedrooms, creased and tumbled in disorder,” Ethel wrote. “Lengths of silk which had never been made into frocks were piled up, and on the pegs was a regular wardrobe, like part of a dressmaker’s show-room.” There were piles of clothes and “cheap stuff” that appeared never to have been worn or used. “I was struck,” she wrote, “by this extraordinary litter.” That Belle had left so much jewelry and clothing behind, even a number of gorgeous and expensive furs, seemed to Ethel a measure of how thoroughly her marriage to Crippen had failed. “I did not question the fact that she had walked straight out of the house, abandoning her old home life, and relinquishing everything it had contained.”

  What did surprise Ethel was the decor, especially in light of Belle’s obvious attention to her own appearance. The house had been furnished “in a higgledy-piggledy way,” Ethel wrote. “There was scarcely anything which matched. The only thing in the house which I liked was the ebony piano. All the other things had been picked up at sales by the doctor and his wife, and were of the most miscellaneous description. There was a tremendous number of trumpery knickknacks, cheap vases, china dogs, and occasional tables. There were lots of pictures—small oil and water-colour paintings by unknown artists—with bows of velvet on them to add to their beauty.”

  The air was stale, the rooms dark. Overall a sense of loneliness and gloom suffused the place. “From the first,” Ethel said, “I took a dislike to the house.”

  THAT MONDAY CRIPPEN stopped in at the Martinettis’ flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. Clara asked, “What is all this about Belle? She has gone to America and you said nothing about it.”

  “We were busy packing the whole night the cable came,” Crippen said.

  Clara asked why Belle had not sent her a message; Crippen replied they had been too busy getting Belle ready for departure.

  “Packing and crying?” Clara asked.

  “No,” Crippen said, “we have got over all that.”

  The next week he told Clara that he had received disturbing news from Belle, by telegram. She was ill, a pulmonary ailment. Nothing to worry about, but troubling all the same.

  WITH EACH DAY that Belle did not return, Ethel Le Neve found her confidence growing. She began wearing the jewelry Crippen had given her and allowed herself to be seen with him on the street, at the theater, and at restaurants. Her landlady, Mrs. Jackson, noticed that Ethel seemed to be in fine spirits almost all the time, noticed too that she had begun wearing new clothes and jewelry, including a brooch with a central diamond and radiating beams of pearls, and a trio of bracelets, though one of the bracelets, set with amethyst stones, seemed far too big for Ethel’s tiny wrist. Ethel also showed off two new gold watches. One evening, beaming, she showed Mrs. Jackson a diamond solitaire ring and called it her “proper engagement ring.” A few nights later Ethel displayed yet another ring. She flashed the diamond in the light. “Do you know what this cost?” she exclaimed.

  “I have no idea,” Jackson said.

  “Twenty pounds.” More than $2,000 today.

  One night, playfully, Mrs. Jackson asked Ethel if someone had died and left her a lot of money.

  No, Ethel replied with delight. “Somebody has gone to America.”

  ETHEL BEGAN SPENDING NIGHTS away from Mrs. Jackson’s house. In the first week of February she was gone only one or two nights, but soon she was spending nearly every night away. She told Mrs. Jackson she was staying with friends and was helping Crippen search the house for certain papers and belongings of Belle’s, and she mentioned too that he had been teaching her how to shoot a revolver, a small nickel-plated weapon that he kept in a wardrobe in his bedroom.

  Soon Ethel began giving gifts of clothing to her friends and to Mrs. Jackson. A widow with two daughters roomed at Constantine Road, and Ethel now gave the children an imitation pearl necklace, a piece of white lace, an imitation diamond tiara, two spray scent bottles, a pink waistband, two pairs of shoes with stockings to match, and four pairs of stockings—white, pink, and black—all of which became the daughters’ most-loved possessions. To her sister Nina she gave a black silk petticoat, a dress of gold Shantung silk, a black coat, “a very big cream coloured curly cape with long stole ends,” a white ostrich neck-wrapper, and two hats, one of gold silk, the other saxe blue with two pink roses.

  At the time Nina said, “Fancy anyone going away and leaving such lovely clothes behind.”

  Yes, Ethel agreed, “that Mrs. Crippen must have been wonderfully extravagant.”

  But it was Mrs. Jackson who received the greatest windfall. She later had occasion to make a precise list:

  1 outfit of mole skin trimmed in black

  1 long coat, brown

  1 long coat, black

  1 coat and skirt, dark gray, striped

  1 fur coat

  1 coat, cream-colored

  1 voile blouse and skirt, black

  2 blouses, black (old)

  2 blouses, one blue silk and lace, the other cream lace (new)

  1 pair slippers

  11 pairs stockings, brown, black, blue, white, pink, and black-and-white-striped

  1 felt hat, brown, trimmed

  1 lace hat, brown, trimmed with flowers

  1 mole hat, pink, covered in sateen

  1 imitation diamond 1 lizard-shaped diamond

  1 harp-shaped brooch

  2 hair stones, paste

  3 night dresses, white (new)

  1 skirt, yellow

  1 outfit, heliotrope (new)

  Ethel and Crippen grew more and more bold about declaring their romance to the world. Ethel wore Belle’s furs on the street and to work at Albion House, despite the proximity of the ladies of the guild, to whom Belle’s clothing was nearly as familiar and recognizable as their own. Crippen bought two tickets to one of the most important social events of the variety world, the annual banquet of the Music Hall Artists Benevolent Fund, set to take place on Sunday, February 20, at the much-loved Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly.

  “Neither of us was very anxious to go,” Ethel wrote. “The doctor had bought a couple of tickets, and naturally he wanted to use them. He asked me if I would go with him. I said that I was not very keen, as I had not danced for some years, and I had not a suitable dress.” Ethel ordered a new one, in pale pink, from Swan and Edgar, a prominent draper.

  This decision to attend the ball was the couple’s most daring declaration yet and, as it happened, most unwise.

  BUILT IN 1873, the Criterion combined glamour and raffishness, especially its Long Bar, for men only, where a Scotland Yard inspector might find himself in amiable conversation with a former convict. In its dining rooms painters, writers, judges, and barristers gathered for lunch and dinner. Later, after the theaters of the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue closed for the night, the city’s population of actors, comedians, and magicians thronged the “Cri” and its bar and its Grand Hall and its East Room and West.

  Crippen wore an evening coat, Ethel wore her new dress, and as a further touch, she pinned to her bodice the rising sun brooch that Belle had left behind. Men watched
her and admired the way her dress set off her slender figure. The ladies of the guild watched too, but what most caught their attention was the brooch. They knew it well—it had been a favorite of Belle’s. Louise Smythson saw it. Clara Martinetti saw it, and later noted that the typist “wore it without any attempt at concealment.” Annie Stratton saw it, as did her husband, Eugene, who sang in blackface with Pony Moore’s minstrels. Lil Hawthorne, attending with her husband and manager John Nash, sat opposite Crippen and the typist, and they too noticed the brooch. John Nash said, “it impressed me.” Maud Burroughs saw it: “I know [Belle] was very particular whenever she went away to have all her jewelry, except what she took with her, placed in a safe deposit, and this is why it struck me as so strange that the typist was seen wearing a brooch of hers.”

  The atmosphere shimmered with hostility. Crippen sat between Clara Martinetti and Ethel. The two women did not speak, but at one point their eyes met. Mrs. Martinetti nodded. She recalled that Ethel seemed “very quiet.” John Nash said, “I noticed that Crippen and the girl were drinking very freely of wine.”

  Mrs. Louise Smythson approached Crippen and asked for Belle’s address in America and said how strange it was that Belle had not yet written, to anyone.

  “She is away up the mountains in the wilds of California,” he said.

  “Has she no settled address?”

  “No,” Crippen said, but then offered to forward anything that Smythson wanted to send.

  For the moment, Mrs. Smythson let the matter drop.

  “AFTER THIS,” ETHEL WROTE, “I noticed that the members of the Music Hall Ladies Guild were showing marked curiosity in my movements.” Her sense of being spied upon and gossiped about became acute. She could not help but run into the ladies of the guild when she entered and left the building and walked the hall to Crippen’s office. Nothing was said directly, but much was communicated by glance and rigid cordiality, deadly for its iciness. “Often when I went along the street with Dr. Crippen,” she wrote, “I remarked people staring at me in a curious way.”