A QUESTION OF GUILT

Sweetheart Tonight?._

The thin notes fell into the auditorium like shot sparrows. 'Blackleg!' and 'Scab!' came from the same seats, whistling and hissing from the gallery. Belle interpreted the noise as shouts of approval and hoots of delight. She favoured her audience with repartee-not the daggered Cockney wit of Bessie Bellwood, the rabbit-skinner's daughter who lived with the Duke of Manchester, but 'Oh, you naughty boy!' and 'Wouldn't you like me to hold your hand?' Expression and utterance had the mawkish combination of ardent promise and coy chastity in equal proportions.

The conductor was looking nervously over his shoulder. Belle stopped. The house was in uproar. She nervously exchanged a word with him, smiled bravely and began _Something to Warm your Feet On._ Ha'pennies started to fly across the footlights. The strikers had come well armed. Coinage was augmented by eggs, one cracking against Belle's skirt. She burst into tears, rushing from the stage still clutching her mirror. The curtain fell. The noise coalesced to a chant, 'We want our money back!' Three rough-clothed men had quit the frustrating remoteness of the gallery to climb over the footlights. A rousing roll came on the drums.

'Stand up,' Eliot hissed at Nancy.

'Why?'

'The National Anthem. Always played after a show.'

Everyone in the house, even the intruders on the stage, stood stiffly while the orchestra on their own feet played _God Save the King._ The conductor cautiously signalled for another drum-roll and repeated the verse. The tension had gone. A heavily-moustached man in evening dress appeared gingerly through the curtain to announce hastily that money would be returned at the box-office.

'Belle's talents aren't suited to these audiences,' said Crippen. 'She was born for opera.'

His face was pink, his bland expression blighted with disappointment and shame. The evening had done Ethel good, Eliot thought.

13

'Well, Belle dear, I forgive you, though I daresay hundreds wouldn't,' said Clara Martinetti amiably.

'Oh, gee, don't go on about it,' Belle told her curtly.

'I shan't dear, I promise I'll not utter another word, now I've had my say. But you are Honorary Treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild, aren't you, dear? And to go strike-breaking-'

'Wasn't Belle punished enough on the night?' Paul Martinetti asked charitably.

'Getting the bird is the worst punishment in the whole world,' Clara agreed. 'I'm sure Peter could see that.'

'Oh, yes, I'd much rather be hanged,' Crippen assented mildly.

'But Clara sweetie, don't you see? I only got hissed because I was a blackleg. There were folk planted in the house for no other purpose than to wreck my act. I'm not downhearted, no sir!' Belle's voice rose. 'I've had offers last week from the Euston, from Collins's across in Islington, even from the Hippodrome. And I could take my pick of the provincial touring companies tomorrow. Couldn't I, Peter?'

Clara's expression indicated sour disbelief sugared with politeness.

It was a week later, just before ten on the evening of Monday, January 31, 1910. The four sat in the downstairs breakfast room at Hilldrop Crescent. They had just finished dinner-loin of pork with jacket potatoes, followed by blancmange with strawberry jam. Eliot and Nancy had been asked, too.

Crippen had called at the surgery with the invitation the morning after the fiasco. Eliot had politely declined it- he had stomached enough of the grotesque Crippens-but asked sympathetically after Belle.

'Not in bad shape. Mr Atherstone was wonderful last night, you know, comforting her. She bounced back, she's like a rubber ball.' He paused. 'Sometimes she's like a tiger.' He looked round the bleak consulting room, sitting in the spoke-backed chair. 'Do you use henbane in your practice, Dr Beckett?'

'Luckily, I have no maniacal patients.'

'I first learned of it at the Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane,' Crippen continued quietly. 'It's given a good deal in America, you know, in asylums. I've prescribed it as a nerve remedy, in a homoeopathic preparation. Very diluted, in sugared discs. Naturally, in its pure form, which the chemists call 'hyoscine'. The dose would equal l/3600ths of a grain.'

'Extremely minute.'

'As demanded by the laws of homoeopathy,' he asserted. 'I bought five, grains from Lewis and Burrows' chemist shop in Oxford Street last Friday.'

'Five grains!' Eliot exclaimed. 'That's enough to kill a platoon of guardsmen.'

'I also find it useful for spasmodic coughs and asthma,' he explained. 'And I am persuading Belle to take it.' He hesitated again. 'I can satisfy her demands in the way of clothes and jewellery. Others I cannot. You understand, Dr Beckett? I'm not a young man like you. And it is Ethel and I who are proper hub and wife.' He continued solemnly, 'Our wedding day was December 6, 1906. Seven years had passed since Ethel and I first met. It's a date I can never forget. It was a Thursday. It was the time Belle finally got rid of the Germans. It was rainy, but it was all sunshine in our hearts.'

His colleague's double life seemed to Eliot more sickly than exciting, and he had a roomful of waiting patients.

'Since then, we have had one long, lovely honeymoon. We have an absolute communion of spirit. It is not a love of a debased or degraded character, it is a wonderful good, pure love,' Crippen continued with muted passion. 'Her mind is so beautiful to me. Ethel will always be my wifie, not even death can come between us. We meet in the afternoon, once or twice a week, at King's Cross station, and go to one of the little hotels for railway travellers.'

Crippen fell silent. Eliot began to look upon him more kindly, as a patient. To share a man's secrets was to fractionize his mental tension.

'We were to have had a little one, you know, Ethel and I,' Crippen divulged in his flat voice, 'in the early part of last year. But poor Ethel suffered a miscarriage. No one knew at the office. Ethel was so often away from work because of her health. Her parents did not know. Only Mrs Jackson, her landlady. Ethel went to her aunt in Hove for recuperation. We so wanted the child to live. It would have been part of us both. That was something Belle could never give me, not after her operation. Belle has a gentleman, you know.'

Eliot was not surprised. 'An American, in the real estate business at Chicago.' Crippen's bulgy eyes fixed Eliot's. 'He was an actor, on the music-hall, called Bruce Miller. He met her when I was visiting America, I'd left Belle in rooms at Guildford Street, over the river in Lambeth. He was across the herring pond for some business with the Paris Exhibition, so it must be ten years ago. He's often here, he writes almost every month. 'Love and kisses to Brown Eyes,' I've seen some of the letters. I've never met him. He calls when I'm out, I stay away from his path. I'm easygoing. I don't care for fuss. I'm sure that one fine morning I'll find Belle has disappeared, gone to join him in America.'

'Which would be a solution to your difficulties?'

'I cannot give Belle what he does,' Crippen said simply. 'Do you know why I was attracted to her? I expected Belle to be a great favourite on the stage, thunderous applause, flowers across the footlights, delightful suppers… That's a vanished dream. Mind, I enjoy the company of stage people, like the Martinettis. But they're so excitable, so emotional. They're not cultivated like Miss Grange and yourself.'

The dinner which Eliot declined ended with the two men going upstairs to prepare for whist, and Clara following Belle with the dishes into the kitchen.

'Put the bones in the sack under the sink,' Belle directed. 'Peter takes them to Poupart's in the Cattle Market. What's the point, missing a few pennies which are there for the taking?'

'How Peter does look after you,' Clara said admiringly. She touched Belle's rising sun brooch, adding playfully, 'If you're ever tired of that lovely thing he bought you, you can just pass it on to me.'

'Ain't there more to a husband's job than keeping his wife dressed?'

'A whole world more, dear.'

'Peter and me have had our own bedrooms since we moved in here.'