She set off for the stairs and soon was outside. “I was terribly self-conscious,” she wrote, “but the crowds surged past, and my disguise did not cause one man to turn his head. I suppose I must have had a certain amount of pluck. I was highly strung with excitement, and the adventure was amusing to me.” She waited at the entrance to the Chancery Lane station.
Soon Crippen arrived but without his mustache. He smiled and asked happily, “Do you recognize me?”
They made their way by subterranean railway to the Liverpool Street station, where eighteen platforms served a thousand trains a day. Crippen planned to catch a train to Harwich and there to book passage aboard one of the steamships that regularly sailed to Holland. They arrived at the station just after a Harwich train departed and now faced a three-hour wait for the next one, scheduled to leave at five o’clock.
Crippen suggested a bus ride, just for fun, and Ethel agreed. “Strange as it may seem,” she wrote, “I was now quite cheerful, and, indeed, rather exhilarated in spirits. It seemed to me that I had given the slip, in fine style, to all those people who had been prying upon my movements”—meaning the ladies of the guild. “I had gone in disguise past their very door in Albion House, and no longer would they be able to scan me up and down with their inquisitive eyes. That made me feel glad, and I had no thought whatever of any reason for escape except this flight from scandal.”
That evening, in Harwich, they boarded the night boat to Hoek van Holland, which sailed at nine o’clock. They reached Holland at five the next morning, Sunday, and had breakfast, then caught a seven o’clock train to Rotterdam, where they spent a few hours walking and seeing sights. At one point they took seats in an outdoor cafe, where Ethel realized how good her disguise really was. Two Dutch girls began flirting from afar, one remarking, “Oh, the pretty English boy!”
Soon afterward they boarded a train for Brussels. That afternoon they checked into a small inn, the Hotel des Ardennes, at 65 Rue de Brabant. Crippen identified himself in the hotel’s register as “John Robinson,” age fifty-five, and listed his occupation as “merchant.” At entry number 5,
The innkeepers noticed that the Robinsons carried only a single suitcase, measuring about twelve inches by twenty-four. They observed too that the boy spoke only in whispers.
LATER THAT SUNDAY Chief Inspector Dew went over Crippen’s statement and realized that in the cause of thoroughness he ought to meet with the doctor one more time. He planned a visit to Albion House the next day, Monday, July 11.
A LOS S IN MAYFAIR
MARCONI DID NOT TAKE BEATRICE back to London. He brought her instead to the Poldhu Hotel, adjacent to his wireless compound. She was pregnant and felt ill nearly every day.
Marconi was oblivious, distracted by his experiments and by his company’s financial troubles. The expenses of his transatlantic venture were mounting rapidly, as was pressure from his board and investors. Even so he began looking for a location to replace Poldhu and found one near Clifden in County Galway, Ireland. He envisioned a station that would produce 300,000 watts of power, four times that of his original Glace Bay station, with a horizontal antenna more than half a mile long stretched across the tops of eight two-hundred-foot masts. To fuel the boilers needed to power the station’s generators, he planned to use peat from a bog about two miles away and to build a small railway to deliver it to the station. Once erected, the condenser building would house eighteen hundred plates of galvanized iron, each five times the height of a man and suspended from the ceiling.
By this point he had invested his personal fortune in his quest. Another failure now would ruin not just his company but himself as well. He kept the situation a secret from Beatrice. She said, years later, “I was almost too young to realize the strain he was under during the first year of our marriage. In view of my condition he kept his increasingly pressing financial difficulties from me. He was dreadfully overworked yet he couldn’t allow himself to neglect his experiments.”
Beatrice grew weary of her new isolation and resolved to move to London. Thinking still that Marconi was rich, her mother, Lady Inchiquin, leased for her an expensive house in Mayfair. After moving in, Beatrice saw little of Marconi. The journey from Poldhu to London took eleven hours; the round trip consumed the better part of two workdays. It was time Marconi did not want to lose.
Some trips were unavoidable. In February Beatrice bore a daughter, Lucia. Marconi immediately headed for London to meet this newest member of his family. After a brief stay he left again for Poldhu.
The family doctor pronounced Lucia “a more than usually healthy baby,” but after several weeks the baby fell ill. Her body grew hot and she seemed to suffer abdominal pain. Her condition worsened rapidly. Beatrice, still weak from the ordeal of childbirth, was terrified. One night Lucia had convulsions, a consequence possibly of meningitis. Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning, a Friday, the baby died. There had not even been time to have her baptized.
Marconi came back to London to find Beatrice bedridden from grief and illness. He wrote to his own mother, “Our darling little baby was taken away from us suddenly on Friday morning.” Beatrice, he wrote, had received “a most awful shock and she is now very weak.”
He sought to arrange Lucia’s burial but found that cemeteries refused to accept her because she had not been baptized. Now he endured what Degna Marconi called “the ghastly experience of driving around London in a taxi, trying to find a cemetery that would bury his baby.” Eventually he found one, in west London.
Beatrice’s sister, Lilah, came to the house to tend to Beatrice, and Marconi again left for Poldhu.
MARCONI’S FINANCIAL TROUBLES worsened, and he at last revealed the true state of his financial affairs to Beatrice. She was startled but vowed henceforth to conserve money whenever she could.
Now Marconi fell ill. His malaria flared again and compelled him to return to London, to the Mayfair house, where he collapsed into bed and remained for three months. On April 3, 1906, an employee wrote to Fleming that Marconi’s “condition is unchanged, and the Doctor has now given strict instructions that Mr. Marconi must not be disturbed.”
During this time Beatrice learned something else about her husband—that he was a morbid, difficult patient.
He insisted on knowing the contents of every medicine and was impatient with the overly tactful manner of English doctors and nurses. At intervals he exploded, “They take me for an
He clipped funeral advertisements from newspapers and displayed them on a bedside table. Beatrice, grieving her lost daughter and anxious about her husband’s health, did not think this funny.
At one point she stepped out for a walk and to bring a new prescription to a nearby chemist’s shop. She returned to find Marconi standing on his head in the bedroom. She was convinced he had gone mad.
Once he was upright again, he explained that he had bitten his thermometer and broken it and swallowed some of the mercury. Standing on his head had seemed the most efficient means of getting the mercury out of his body.
HIS ILLNESS LINGERED through much of the summer and cost him time, during which his critics and competitors remained active. Nevil Maskelyne, his magic shows now lodged in a new location farther up Regent Street from Piccadilly, acquired the rights to new wireless technology from America and formed a company,
