WITHIN THE CRIPPEN HOUSEHOLD the weather did not improve. They moved to another address on Store Street, No. 37, but this new apartment did not offer enough additional space to allow them to stay out of each other’s way. They still had to sleep in the same bedroom. They could not afford anything larger, at least not in Bloomsbury. Crippen was only earning a fraction of the salary Munyon’s had paid. Nonetheless he continued to allow Belle to spend heavily on clothing and jewelry. Crippen said, “although we apparently lived very happily together, as a matter of fact there were very frequent occasions when she got into most violent tempers, and often threatened she would leave me, saying she had a man she could go to, and she would end it all.”
It was clear to Crippen that the man in question was Bruce Miller. In early April Miller came by the apartment for what would prove to be the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to Belle. He told her he was taking her advice and returning to Chicago to reunite with his wife. He sailed from England on April 21, 1904.
If Miller’s departure reignited in Crippen any hope that his own marriage could now be restored, he immediately found those hopes dashed. Belle’s temper worsened, and so too did the couple’s financial situation, though he still made no effort to curb her expenditures. He began looking for another home that would be much larger but also cheaper, which meant necessarily that he would have to look outside the core of the city, at grave risk of annoying Belle even further.
THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE negotiated each day by the Crippens grew still more contorted. On her brief visits to Crippen’s office, Belle had taken note of his typist, Ethel Le Neve. She was young and striking and slender. Her looks alone may have made Belle uneasy, or Belle may have sensed an unusual degree of warmth in the way Crippen and the young woman behaved toward each other, but there was indeed something about the typist that made Belle uneasy.
One morning a friend of Belle’s named Maud Burroughs, who lived in the same building on Store Street, stopped by as Belle was getting dressed. In the course of their conversation, Belle mentioned her past surgery and asked Burroughs if she would like to see the scar.
Burroughs said no.
“Give me your hand,” Belle said, “and you can feel where it was.”
Belle took Burroughs’s hand and, as Burroughs recalled, “placed it underneath her clothing upon her stomach. I felt what seemed to me to be a hole, so far as I remember, a little on one side of the lower part of her stomach.”
The conversation shifted to Crippen, who by now, for reasons unclear, had taken to calling himself Peter. It was by this name that Belle and her friends addressed him.
Belle said, “I don’t like the girl typist Peter has in his office.”
“Why don’t you ask Peter to get rid of her then?” Burroughs asked.
Belle replied that she already had asked him, but Crippen had told her the typist was “indispensable” to the company.
CRIPPEN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ETHEL deepened. Later he would recall a particular Sunday in the summer of 1904 when “we had a whole day together, which meant so much to us then. A rainy day indeed, but how happy we were together, with all sunshine in our hearts.” He recalled it as a time when he and she were in “perfect harmony with each other. Even without being wedded.”
For her part Ethel came to view Crippen as “the only person in the world to whom I could go for help or comfort. There was a real love between us.”
It was at about this point that Ethel, “by sheer accident,” came across the letters Bruce Miller had sent to Belle. “This, I need hardly say, relieved me somewhat of any misgivings I had with regard to my relations with her husband.”
WITHIN SIX MONTHS Aural Remedies also failed, and Crippen went back to work for Munyon’s, this time out of a new location in a building called Albion House, also on New Oxford Street. Again he brought Ethel but also another past employee, William Long. Crippen returned not as a full-time employee but rather as an agent paid by commission. He made less than he had hoped. Finding a cheaper place to live became imperative, but here a challenge had no easy resolution: to find lodging that was not only less expensive but also much bigger and nice enough to keep Belle happy, or if not happy—which at this point must have seemed an impossible goal—at least to stop her behavior from degrading further. These clashing imperatives drove his search farther and farther from Bloomsbury.
“THE THUNDER FACTORY”
THE HUNT FOR LAND ON WHICH to build his first American station lasted far longer than Marconi had planned. Accompanied by Richard Vyvyan and an employee named John Bottomley, a nephew of Lord Kelvin, Marconi toured the coasts of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, taking trains as far as possible, then proceeding in wagons or on foot. Marconi before leaving Britain had appointed Vyvyan to build and run the new station.
Every piece of land seemed to harbor a critical flaw. No drinking water, no nearby town to supply labor and supplies, no rail line, and—a flaw that particularly rankled Marconi—no fine hotels of the kind that were common on the windswept coasts of Britain.
In February 1901 the group made its way to Cape Cod, landing at Provincetown. On a map the cape looked appealing, especially its midpoint where it hooked northward and the land rose to form oceanside cliffs over one hundred feet high.
In Provincetown Marconi hired a guide named Ed Cook, who was said to have a thorough knowledge of the cape’s coastal lands. Cook did indeed know the beaches well. He was a “wrecker” who salvaged ships and boats wrecked off the cape on their way to Boston. In the previous century Henry David Thoreau had toured the cape and in his book
Cook led Marconi the full length of the cape, traveling in Cook’s wagon exposed to the frigid winds of February. When Cook led Marconi to the Highland Light, near the north end of the cape, opposite North Truro, Marconi believed he had found exactly the location he needed. The lighthouse stood atop a 125-foot cliff overlooking the shipping lanes that led to Boston harbor, which lay about fifty miles to the northwest. Here the keepers watched for inbound ships and consulted guidebooks to identify them, then telegraphed the news to the ships’ owners in America and abroad, the latter messages traveling first by land line, then by cables laid under the Atlantic.
But the operators of the Highland Light did not trust Marconi. “They thought he was probably a charlatan,” his daughter Degna wrote, “and they
Next Cook led him a few miles south to a parcel of land just outside South Wellfleet, consisting of eight acres atop a 130-foot cliff that overlooked the same beach along which Thoreau had walked half a century earlier. Buffeted by wind, now Marconi walked the ground. The land in all directions had been shaved to a stubble by gales
