coal cellar, scuttle in hand, and while he was shoveling up the coals I would lean up against the door holding a lighted candle and chatting with him.”
The house grew brighter and more welcoming, and the awful scent dissipated. Crippen helped whenever he could and every day held her, kissed her, talked with her. They were not yet married in the eyes of the law and could not be married until Belle’s death in America was duly certified, but they were as much husband and wife as could be.
“So time slipped along,” Ethel wrote, “—both of us extremely happy and contented, working each of us hard in different ways.”
THE LADIES WATCHED.
They saw Crippen leave with the typist and arrive with the typist. They saw them walking together. The typist wore furs that looked very much like Belle’s, but of course one could never be sure, as furs were hard to tell apart. They saw them together at the theater and at restaurants. One day Annie Stratton and Clara Martinetti ran into Crippen on New Oxford Street. “Whilst we were talking to him,” Mrs. Martinetti said, “he seemed anxious to get away, and after he left us I saw him joined by the typist, and both got into a bus.”
And the ladies learned a troubling fact: Only one French liner had been scheduled to sail for America on the day of Belle’s departure, a steamer called
The ship had never left port, however. It was under repair.
STRANGE NEWS, BUT THEN these were strange times. On May 6, 1910, at 11:45 P.M. King Edward VII died, casting the nation into mourning. For the first time in England’s history the directors of Ascot ruled that all in attendance must wear black, a moment known ever after as “Black Ascot” and familiar in future generations to anyone who saw
As if the world really were coming to an end, Halley’s comet appeared in the skies overhead, raising fears of a collision and prompting rumors of dire events yet to come.
A DUTY TO BE WICKED
MARCONI’S LONG VOYAGE OF EXPERIMENT aboard the
By now Marconi had completed construction of the new stations at South Wellfleet and Poldhu, and on Table Head at Glace Bay, the most powerful of all. Each station had more or less the same design: four strong towers of cross-braced wood, each 210 feet tall, supporting an inverted pyramid of four hundred wires. Each station had a power house nearby, where steam engines drove generators to produce electricity, which then entered an array of transformers and condensers. At South Wellfleet the process yielded 30,000 watts of power, at Glace Bay 75,000. At South Wellfleet a thick glass porthole and soundproof door had to be installed between the sending room and the sparking apparatus to prevent injury to the operator’s eyes and ears.
Marconi began his new attempt the day after his arrival, coordinating each step with his operators at Poldhu through telegrams sent by conventional undersea cable. The first signals to arrive “were very weak and unintelligible,” according to Richard Vyvyan. But they did arrive. Heartened by the fact that Poldhu had been operating only at half power, Marconi ordered his engineers there to increase wattage to maximum, expecting it would resolve the problem. It didn’t. Now he heard nothing at all.
The hundreds of wires that comprised the Glace Bay aerial could be used all at once or in segments. Marconi and Vyvyan tried different combinations. Again, nothing. Night after night they worked to find the magic junction with only trial and error as their guide. To attempt to receive by day seemed hopeless, so they often worked the entire night. Over eighteen consecutive nights they received no signals. Tensions grew, especially in the Vyvyan household. He had brought his new wife, Jane, to live with him at Glace Bay, and now she was pregnant, hugely so, the baby due any day.
Snow began to fall and soon covered the clifftop. At night the sparks from the transmitter lit the descending flakes. With each concussion a pale blue aura burst across the landscape, as if the transmission house were a factory stamping out ghosts for dispersal into the ether. Three-foot daggers of ice draped wires.
In the midst of it all Marconi received a telegram from headquarters, stating that the price of his company’s stock was falling. Though Marconi did not yet know it, the decline was conjured by a magician.
NEVIL MASKELYNE LOATHED FRAUD but loved to mislead and mystify audiences. His base was the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, one of London’s most popular venues for entertainment and one of the city’s strangest buildings. “It is beyond the powers of delineation to attempt any thing in the shape of a description of the front of this most singular piece of architecture,” wrote one early visitor. Built in 1812, its facade mimicked the entrance to an Egyptian temple. Two huge figures jutted from its yellow cladding, and hieroglyphs covered its pilasters and sills. The building originally served as a museum of natural history but failed to draw many visitors and became instead a venue for the display of a succession of oddities, including an entire family of Laplanders, an eighty-pound man called the Living Skeleton, and in 1829 the original Siamese twins. Its most famous living exhibit was one of its smallest, a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Charles S. Stratton, placed on display here in 1844 by Phineas T. Barnum. By then Stratton was best known by his stage name, General Tom Thumb.
Nevil’s father, also named John Nevil Maskelyne, took over the Egyptian Hall with a partner, George A. Cooke, and by 1896 turned it into “England’s House of Mystery,” where twice a day audiences watched magic shows and encountered illusions and mechanical chimeras. By then Maskelyne and Cooke, as they were known, had achieved fame by exposing two celebrated American spirit mediums, the Davenport brothers. The magicians billed themselves as “The Royal Illusionists and anti-Spiritualists.” One of their most popular attractions was an automaton named Psycho, an oriental mystic whose robe and turban disguised internal mechanical devices that enabled him to solve math problems, spell words, and most famously, play whist with members of the audience. Nevil Jr. took over from his father, and when he was not dabbling in wireless, he performed in shows alongside his own partner, a magician named David Devant. Together Maskelyne and Devant revealed to audiences the tricks deployed by mediums, with such aplomb that some Spiritualists believed they really did have psychic powers and merely pretended disbelief in a cynical drive to make profits.
Maskelyne did not trust Marconi. The Italian claimed to have performed amazing feats but provided little hard proof beyond the testimonials of such allies as Ambrose Fleming and Luigi Solari. The latest example was Solari’s glowing report in
Maskelyne read it with distaste, then delight. Suddenly he realized that the tapes he had collected while eavesdropping on Marconi’s transmissions included some of the messages Solari described. These tapes showed that Marconi’s system was more flawed than he was letting on.
Maskelyne decided to reveal his findings. In an article published by
The tapes, he wrote, showed that errors due to atmospheric distortions were common and that
