before him effectively in a right light, I shall feel bound to make a formal communication to the Board with reference to his general position.”
None of this, however, made it into a report by Luigi Solari on the
In this case, however, someone else happened to have been listening in, without Marconi’s knowledge.
That summer the Eastern Telegraph Co., an undersea cable concern, had decided to install a wireless station of its own, at its cablehead at Porthcurno in Cornwall, about eighteen miles from Poldhu. The transatlantic cable industry still did not expect much competition from wireless but did see that it might have value as a source of additional traffic to be fed into their cables and for communicating with cable-repair ships. Eastern Telegraph hired Nevil Maskelyne for the job, and in August 1902 the magician erected a temporary antenna twenty-five feet tall. Immediately Maskelyne began picking up Morse signals from Poldhu, something the Marconi company had touted as being next to impossible given its tuning technology.
Maskelyne picked up a repeated signal, the letters CBCB. “Knowing that experiments were in progress between Poldhu and the Carlo Alberto,” Maskelyne wrote, “it did not take a Sherlock Holmes to discover that ‘CBCB’ was the call signal for the Carlo Alberto.” He and Eastern’s men nicknamed the ship the
Maskelyne not only listened but kept copies of the tapes that emerged from his own Morse inker. Their true significance was not yet clear to him.
THE LADIES INVESTIGATE
FIRST SHE DISAPPEARED, ALLEGEDLY TO AMERICA, and now she was dead. None of it made sense; all of it stretched credibility. It was wonderful, in the Edwardian sense of the word, yet here was Crippen, the very soul of credibility, telling them it was so. He was, according to Maud and John Burroughs, “a model husband”; so “kind and attentive,” said Clara Martinetti; a “kind-hearted humane man,” said Adeline Harrison.
And yet.
There was the rising sun brooch worn so brazenly by the typist, and the fact that Belle had neither written nor cabled her friends since her departure and had not thought to send a wireless message—by now a “Marconigram”—from her ship, the kind of thing she would have delighted in doing for the surprise of it. There was the fact too that Crippen all along had seemed unsure of Belle’s exact whereabouts and was unable to produce an address. She was in the “wilds of California,” as he had put it, yet Belle never had mentioned relatives in California, let alone in the state’s nether portions.
Even before word arrived of Belle’s death, her successor as guild treasurer, Lottie Albert, asked a friend, Michael Bernstein, to make inquiries about Belle on behalf of the guild.
Crippen had said Belle had sailed aboard a ship of French registry and that it had sailed out of Le Havre. The name, he thought, was something like
On March 30, a Wednesday and thus a day when the Ladies’ Guild met, Clara Martinetti and Louise Smythson walked down the hall to Crippen’s office ostensibly to offer condolences. In fact, they intended to perform a kind of interrogation.
Mrs. Martinetti asked him for the address of the person who had nursed Belle in her last moments, but Crippen said he did not know who it was.
She asked how long Belle had been ill. Crippen said she had become ill on the ship and failed to look after herself and as a consequence contracted pneumonia.
Mrs. Martinetti asked where Belle was buried and explained that the guild wanted to send an “everlasting wreath” to place on her grave. Crippen said she had not been buried—she had been cremated, and that soon her ashes would arrive by post.
Cremated.
Belle had never once mentioned a wish to be cremated after death. She was so forthcoming about everything in her life, to the point of having friends touch her scar, that surely she would have mentioned something as novel as cremation.
Mrs. Martinetti asked where Belle had died. Crippen did not answer directly. He said only, “I will give you my son’s address.”
“Did she die with him, and did he see her die?” Mrs. Martinetti asked.
Crippen answered yes, but in a confused manner, then gave her Otto’s address in Los Angeles.
She and Mrs. Smythson left, their suspicions aflame. Mrs. Martinetti immediately wrote a postcard to Otto asking for details of Belle’s death.
It took him a month to reply. He apologized for the delay but explained that he had been distracted by the illness and death of his own son.
Turning to the subject at hand, he wrote, “The death of my stepmother was as great a surprise to me as to anyone. She died at San Francisco and the first I heard of it was through my father, who wrote to me immediately afterwards. He asked me to forward all letters to him and he would make the necessary explanations. He said he had through a mistake given out my name and address as my step-mother’s death-place. I would be very glad if you find out any particulars of her death if you would let me know of them as I know as a fact that she died at San Francisco.”
AT NO. 39 HILLDROP CRESCENT Ethel Le Neve cleaned house. This proved a challenge. To begin with, the place smelled terrible, especially downstairs in the vicinity of the kitchen, though the odor to a degree had permeated the entire house. Mrs. Jackson sensed it immediately on her first visit and mentioned it to Ethel. “The smell,” Jackson said, “was a damp frowsy one, and might have resulted from the damp and dirt. It was a stuffy sort of smell.”
“Yes,” Ethel told her, “the place is very damp and in a filthy condition. This is how Belle Elmore left it before she went away to America.”
Ethel opened windows and cleared away clothing and excess furniture, piling much of it in the kitchen. Crippen invited his longtime employee William Long to come over and see if there was anything he wanted. “A night or two after this,” Long said, “I went there and in the kitchen he shewed me a pile of woman’s clothing such as stockings, underclothing, shoes and a lot of old theatrical skirts, and old window curtains, table cloths, rugs, etc.”
Over several evenings Long took it all. Crippen also gave him the gilt cage and the seven canaries.
Ethel hired a servant, a French girl named Valentine Lecocq. “I have at last got a girl which I am thankful for,” Ethel wrote to Mrs. Jackson. “She is only 18 yrs. but seems anxious to learn & willing enough. The poor girl however hasn’t hardly a rag to her back, not a black blouse or anything & as Dr. is asking some friends to Dinner next Sunday, I feel I must rig her out nice & tidy.”
With the French girl’s help, Ethel made progress. In another letter to Mrs. Jackson she wrote, “Have been ever so busy with that wretched house and think you would hardly recognize same.” She found it hard to keep the house “anywhere near clean” and at the same time attend to her duties at Crippen’s office. “It gives me little time to myself,” she complained.
But the housework soon would end, she knew. Crippen’s lease was to expire on August 11, at which point they planned to move to a flat in Shaftesbury Avenue.
“Still,” she told Mrs. Jackson, “notwithstanding the hard work [I] am indeed happy.”
She delighted in the little moments with Crippen. In her memoir she wrote, “He used to come with me to the
