That evening, before the
In the middle of the meal a telegram arrived, addressed to Marconi.
AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, November was proving ferocious. The Weather Bureau called it the coldest November “for many years,” with a mean temperature that was “phenomenally low.” All month there was wind, rain, sleet, and snow, but the last week proved especially violent. On Saturday night, November 23, a nor’easter blew in and continued raging all the next day. Over the following two days the wind on Block Island reached eighty miles an hour, hurricane force. Storm flags went up and stayed up.
On Tuesday, November 26, the storm reached its peak. Powerful gusts of wind tore across the clifftop and caused the masts to undulate and twist. The triatic stays linking the tops of the masts caused them to move in unison, like dancers in some primitive ceremony.
The dance turned jagged. Eerily, the South Wellfleet station now experienced the same disaster that had destroyed its sister station in Poldhu. One mast failed; then all failed. A segment of mast the size of a tree trunk pierced the roof of the transmitting room. Another nearly struck Richard Vyvyan. It fell, he wrote, “within three feet of where I was standing at the time.”
Now this station too lay shattered. Marconi’s lavish investment had yielded only a dozen shipwrecks’ worth of damaged spars, royals, and topgallants.
VYVYAN SENT WORD of the disaster via undersea cable to the company’s headquarters in London, which relayed the news to Marconi, now dining aboard the
THE POISONS BOOK
IN SEPTEMBER 1908 ETHEL LE NEVE became a lodger in a house a few blocks south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west of Hilldrop Crescent. The house was occupied by Emily and Robert Jackson. Robert was a “traveler,” or salesman, for a company that sold mineral water; his wife managed the letting of bedrooms in the house and provided the tenants with meals. Mrs. Jackson and Ethel took to each other immediately. Each evening when Ethel returned from work, Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room, where the two would spend a few moments catching up on the day’s events. Soon Ethel was calling Mrs. Jackson “Mum” and “Ma.”
What Mrs. Jackson did not know was that Ethel was four months pregnant, but this became apparent two weeks later, when Ethel had what Mrs. Jackson called a “miscarriage,” though that could have been a euphemism. Female doctors were rare, but one such physician, Ethel Vernon, came to the house to care for Le Neve. “I never saw the baby,” Mrs. Jackson said, later, “and I was present in the room when Miss Vernon asked her where it was.” Le Neve said she did not know, “but eventually said she had been to the lavatory and whilst there felt something come from her.”
The doctor and Mrs. Jackson questioned Ethel “closely” for the name of the father, but she would not reveal his name.
Ethel became ill and Mrs. Jackson tended to her as if she were her daughter. Two or three days later Crippen came to the house and asked to see Ethel, giving Mrs. Jackson his card. He stayed only a few minutes. A week later he returned, but this visit was just as brief as the last. Mrs. Jackson said of him later, “I thought him quite the nicest man I had ever met.”
Ethel remained in bed about two weeks, then returned to work.
CRIPPEN RETAINED A VAGUE connection to Munyon but threw most of his energy into founding a new business, a dental practice, with a New Zealand dentist named Gilbert Mervin Rylance. They called their new venture the Yale Tooth Specialists. “He was the financier,” Rylance said, “and I was the dental partner.” Crippen managed the company and produced the necessary anesthetics. They agreed to split all profits evenly. The practice occupied an office in the building where Crippen already had been working, Albion House on New Oxford Street, and where the Ladies’ Guild maintained its headquarters. Crippen continued to concoct and sell medicines of his own design, including a treatment for deafness called Horsorl.
The miscarriage changed the tenor of Ethel’s relationship with Crippen. Where once the affair had been carefree and daring, especially given the proximity of the Ladies’ Guild, now there was loss and along with it a realization on Ethel’s part that her love for Crippen had grown deeper. She found it increasingly difficult to endure the fact that each night he returned to his home and to his wife, she to a single room in Hampstead, alone.
THE MUSIC HALL LADIES’ GADIES’ continued its good works. Its members grew fond of Belle Elmore and her energy, and Belle returned their affection. Though she herself was not performing, she daily encountered those who were, and at least for the time being this seemed to be enough. The one stubbornly dreary part of her life was her husband. She assured him time and again that there were many men who would have her in a heartbeat. With increasing frequency she reiterated her threat to leave.
She appeared not to realize, however, that her threat had lost a good deal of its power. Crippen was in love with Ethel Le Neve and promised her that one day he would make her his legal wife. She was, he believed, the woman who should have shared his bed all along. Belle’s departure would be a blessing, for desertion was one of the very few grounds that British law accepted as cause for divorce.
In turn, Crippen did not realize that Belle had become increasingly serious about her threat and had begun planning ahead. Their savings account at Charing Cross Bank in the Strand now contained ?600 (more than $60,000 today). Under bank rules, Belle and Crippen each had the right to withdraw money, without need of the other’s signature. There was a catch, however. Only the interest could be withdrawn on demand. Closing the account or withdrawing any of the principal required advance notice of one full year.
On December 15, 1909, the bank received a notice of intent to withdraw the entire amount. It was signed by Belle alone.
BELLE WAS GENEROUS with her new friends at the guild. On Friday, January 7, she and Crippen went together to the guild offices, and there Belle gave a birthday gift, a coral necklace, to her friend and fellow member Louie Davis. Belle was troubled by something that had happened the night before, and now, as she handed the present to Davis, she said, “I didn’t think I should be able to come to give it to you as I woke up in the night stifling and I wanted to send Peter for the priest. I was stifling and it was so dark.”
Belle turned to Crippen. “Didn’t I dear?”
“Yes,” Crippen agreed, “but you are alright now.”
The three then left and walked together to a nearby Lyons & Co. teahouse, crowded as always, and there Belle repeated her story, with still more drama.
“I shall never forget it,” she said. “It was terrible.”
She put her hand to her throat.
