VOYAGER
IT WAS NOVEMBER 23, 1910. Southampton. A woman identified in the passenger manifest as Miss Allen walked aboard a ship, the Majestic of the White Star Line. She was twenty-seven years old but could easily have been mistaken for a girl in late adolescence.
For the second time in four months she felt compelled to use a false name. Though this time the circumstances were very different, the motive was the same: escape from gossip and scrutiny. It had been a whirl, London, Brussels, Antwerp, Quebec, and in that time she had felt finer, more loved, and certainly freer than ever before in her life. But now she had to leave.
On the Majestic she tried to bend her mind away from what had occurred that morning in London. She distracted herself with the glories of the ship and getting herself settled for the voyage. In Camden Town, she knew, a bell had rung fifteen times to mark the moment. She had heard the sound before, at Hilldrop Crescent, when the weather was right, but that was back when she felt safe and the sound of the prison bell was merely the artifact of someone else’s misery, as meaningful as the distant bark of a neighbor’s dog.
After arriving in New York she traveled to Toronto and adopted the name Ethel Nelson. She took a job as a typist. But Canada proved alien ground. In 1916 she braved seas traversed by German submarines and returned to London, where, as a clerk in a furniture store a few blocks from New Scotland Yard, she met a man named Stanley Smith. They married and raised two children in the peaceful middle-class community of East Croydon. In time she and Stanley became grandparents, but soon afterward he died. He never learned her true past.
A few years before her own death she received a visitor who had discovered her secret. The visitor was a novelist using the pen name Ursula Bloom, who hoped to write a novel about Dr. Crippen and the North London Cellar Murder. Ethel agreed to meet with her but declined to talk about her past.
At one point, however, Bloom asked Ethel, if Dr. Crippen came back today, knowing all she knew, would she accept marriage if he asked?
Ethel’s gaze became intent—the same intensity that Chief Inspector Dew had found striking enough to include in his wanted circular.
Ethel’s answer came quickly.
NOTES
THE MYSTERIOUS PASSENGERS
Captain Kendall had: For details about Kendall’s background, see Croall, Fourteen Minutes, 22–25.
The Montrose was launched: For details about the Montrose, see Musk, Canadian Pacific, 59, 74.
“The Cabin accommodation”: Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Royal Mail Steamship Lines, 1906 Summer Sailing Timetable. Canadian Pacific Steamship Line Memorabilia. In Archives Canada: MG 28 III 23.
“A little better”: Ibid.
The manifest: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.
While on display: Read, Urban Democracy, 412.
“brilliant but disgusting”: Ibid., 490.
Shortly before: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.
“strange and unnatural”: Ibid., 2.
“I did not do anything”: Ibid., 2.
PART I: GHOSTS AND GUNFIRE
DISTRACTION
“street orderlies”: Macqueen-Pope, Goodbye Piccadilly, 100.
“diffusion of knowledge”: Bolles Collection. Thomas Allen, The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent (Vol. 4). Cowie and Strange, 1827, 363.
“the great head”: Hill, Letters, 50.
A young woman: Haynes, Psychical Research, 184.
Combs Rectory: Jolly, Lodge, 18.
“Whatever faults”: Lodge, Past Years, 29. Lodge learned later in life that during one phase of his career his children were, as he put it, “somewhat afraid of me.” One incident stood out. He came back late from work, tired and irritable. With his children in bed under strict instructions to keep quiet, he began marking a “thick batch” of examination papers. Suddenly, a stream of water poured onto his windowsill from the children’s room above. He became furious. “I rushed upstairs. They had just got back to bed, and said they had been watering a plant outside on their window-sill. I learned too late that it was one they had been trying to cultivate and were fond of. God forgive me, I flung it out of the window.” The pot smashed on the ground. Later, he heard quiet sobbing coming from the room. He regretted the incident forever afterward (Lodge, Past Years, 252).
“I have walked”: Ibid., 78.
“a sort of sacred place”: Ibid., 75.
“practicians”: For one reference to the term “practician,” see The Electrician, vol. 39, no. 7 (June 11, 1897), 1.
“inappropriate and repulsive”: Aitken, Syntony, 126.
