Thunderstruck

  He began to cut. Hair flurried around her. “I did not think twice about this loss of my locks,” she wrote. “It was all part of the adventure.” She put the hat back on and walked back and forth across the room, trying to get used to the alien feel of the clothing. “I was like a child,” she wrote, “and strutted up and down, and very soon felt quite at ease, although for a time I missed the habit of holding my skirt.”

  Crippen watched and smiled. “You will do famously,” he said. “No one will recognize you. You are a perfect boy.”

  She feared she would not be able to muster the courage to wear her disguise on the street. It felt so odd. The nape of her neck was cold. The collar chafed. The boots hurt. The sensations reported to her brain from all quarters were strange. It was hard to imagine men wearing these things day in, day out, and not going mad from constriction and abrasion.

  Crippen reassured her that she looked exactly like a sixteen-year-old boy. He instructed her to leave first, by the stairs, and to meet him at the Tube station at Chancery Lane, a dozen blocks east on High Holborn—the street along which, in the distant past, condemned men traveled on their way to be executed at Tyburn, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park. To enhance her costume, Ethel placed a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, “another novelty for me which I did not much appreciate.”

  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 café, 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, “De Naissance,” or place of birth, he wrote “Quebec,” and beside “De Domicile” wrote “Vienna.” He identified Ethel as “John Robinson, Junior,” and explained to the innkeeper’s wife, Louisa Delisse, that the boy was ill and that his mother had died two months earlier. They were traveling for pleasure, he said, and planned to visit Antwerp, The Hague, and Amsterdam.

  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 idiot!”

  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, Amalgamated Radio-Telegraph, to develop it into a competing wireless system. He recruited Marconi’s opponents to join him and claimed that his new apparatus allowed him to transmit messages 530 miles.

  Meanwhile the secretary of Lloyd’s of London, Henry Hozier, grew disenchanted with Marconi and his company. In a letter to Oliver Lodge, marked, “Private and Confidential,” dated May 11, 1906, Hozier wrote, “We find that the administration of the Marconi Company is so unsatisfactory, and so difficult to deal with, that we must take precautions to have some other system available for Lloyd’s business as soon as our present agreement with the Marconi Company comes to an end, and I should be very glad to have an opportunity of discussing this matter with either yourself, or Dr. Muirhead, or possibly your business manager.”

  Muirhead arranged to have a test station constructed on a field owned by his brother.

  But Lodge’s focus wavered. Mrs. Piper, the medium, returned to England with her daughters and stayed at his house, where he conducted a series of sittings. Impressed anew, he wrote a 153-page report on the experience for the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Once again Lodge found himself convinced of her gift and deeply distracted.

  Germany’s hostility to Marconi continued unabated, as British fears of German invasion deepened. In 1906, in response to Germany’s growing naval power, Britain launched the most powerful battleship ever built, the HMS Dreadnought. That year a widely read novel, The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Quex, fanned British anxiety and planted the fear that Germany might already have secreted spies throughout England. Commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth, the novel appeared first in serial form in his Daily Mail and described a future invasion in which German forces crushed all resistance and occupied London—until a heroic counterattack expelled them. Harmsworth sent men dressed as German soldiers into the streets wearing sandwich boards to promote each new installment. One witness described a line of men “in spiked helmets and Prussian-blue uniforms parading moodily down Oxford Street.”

  The book immediately became a bestseller in Britain, but German readers loved it too. The publisher of the German-language edition had chosen to omit the counterattack.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1908, Marconi was in America when he received word that Beatrice had given birth to another baby girl. Immediately he booked passage for England. During the voyage he happened to read a history of Venice, in which he spotted a name that he found appealing. The child became Degna.

  The birth did little to bridge the growing distance between Marconi and his wife. They fought with increasing frequency.

  AN INSPECTOR RETURNS

  AT ONE O’CLOCK MONDAY AFTERNOON, just as the sun emerged for the first time in a week, Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell set out for Albion House to have a second conversation with Dr. Crippen. Upon their arrival they learned disturbing news. Crippen’s associate, William Long, told them he had last seen the doctor on Saturday leaving the office with a suitcase. He showed the detectives a letter he had received from Crippen that day, in which the doctor had written, “Will you do me the very great favour of winding up as best you can my household affairs.” Crippen had enclosed enough money to cover the previous quarter’s rent for the house on Hilldrop Crescent. Long chose not to mention Crippen’s curious order of a boy’s suit.

  Dew and Mitchell secured a taximeter cab and sped to Hilldrop Crescent, through streets suffused with sunshine. The entrance to the crescent appeared as a blue-black tunnel of shade, pierced here and there by shards of golden light. The detectives were greeted by the French maid, Lecocq, who told them in a mix of French and English that Crippen and Le Neve had left and she did not expect them to return.

  Dew asked if he might come in and look around the house. Lecocq understood little of what he asked but led him inside all the same. Once in the house, the two men discovered William Long’s wife, Flora, hard at work packing up Belle’s clothing, of which mountains remained.

  The detectives searched again, this time more attentively. As before, they entered every room, paying special attention to the cellar. They found nothing to indicate the whereabouts of Belle Elmore, but Dew did find a five-chambered revolver, fully loaded. Mitchell found a box of cartridges and several targets made of cardboard.

  The detectives made arrangements to send Lecocq home the next day and returned to New Scotland Yard. That evening Dew sent a request to officers throughout London to interview cab drivers and movers as to whether any had removed boxes or packages from No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent since January 31. He composed detailed descriptions of Crippen and Le Neve and arranged to have flyers distributed to police at ports in England and abroad, asking them to keep an eye out for the couple but not to attempt an arrest.

  Though the case was growing more mysterious by the hour, Dew still was not convinced a crime had been committed.

  IN BRUSSELS THE “ROBINSONS” delighted in their new freedom. The hotel’s owner noticed that they left each day at about nine-thirty, returned by one o’clock, and remained in their room until four, at which point they left again. They returned by nine each evening, had dinner, then retired for the night.

  Ethel loved touring the city. They walked all over, “north and south, east and west, and in the country parts beyond,” she wrote. “Dr. Crippen showed no sign of nervousness or any desire to keep me indoors at the Hotel des Ardennes, where we put up. Never did he express a wish for me to avoid public places. Never did he evince a trace of anxiety about himself.”

  They visited palaces, museums, and galleries and spent hours in the Bois de la Cambre, where they walked and listened to a band and to the songs of birds. Ethel wrote, “It all seemed very beautiful, very peaceful, and they were happy days.”

  ON TUESDAY DEW ordered that a photograph of Crippen be circulated as well. He and Mitchell returned to Hilldrop Crescent and again searched the house—their third search thus far—and again found nothing. They made other inquiries in the surrounding neighborhood until well into the evening. Late that night as Dew tried to sleep, his thoughts kept returning to the house, in particular to the coal cellar. It “stuck in my mind,” he wrote. “Even in bed, what little I got of it during those hectic days, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering back to the cellar.”

  The next morning, Wednesday, July 13, another brilliant but cool day, Dew and Mitchell returned to Albion House, and there Dew confronted Crippen’s assistant, William Long. By now Dew had spoken to him twice, but each time had gotten the sense that Long was holding something back. Now Dew warned him to speak up or else.

  At last Long disclosed his shopping trip of Saturday morning.

  Dew returned to Scotland Yard and composed a new circular that included the possibility that Ethel Le Neve might be dressed in boy’s clothing.

  Next, acting on instinct, and for want of fresh leads to pursue, Dew proposed to Sergeant Mitchell that they search Crippen’s house yet again, their fourth visit, and this time really scour the cellar.

&nb
sp; Amid flickering candlelight, the detectives got down on their hands and knees and examined the floor brick by brick. The unusually cool temperatures outside made the chamber feel especially cold and dank. They saw nothing unusual. Dew found a small poker and used it to tap the bricks and probe the earthen gaps between them. He and Mitchell worked in silence, “too tired to say a word,” Dew wrote. The light shimmied; the poker clanged against brick.

  At one gap the poker drove downward with little resistance. One of the bricks moved. Dew pulled it up. Its neighbors now loosened. He pulled up several more.

  Mitchell went to the garden for a spade.

  THE MERMAID

  NOW AND THEN THE MARRIAGE between Beatrice and Marconi flared back to life, and in the fall of 1909 Beatrice discovered that once again she was pregnant. At the time she and little Degna were living in a house in Clifden, as remote and austere a place as Glace Bay and Poole. Perhaps she felt a need to escape, or simply wanted for once to see the look on her husband’s face when he first heard the news rather than wait for a reply by telegram, but now she plotted a surprise. She knew when his ship was due and traveled to Cork, where she managed to talk her way onto a tugboat scheduled to rendezvous with the ship. She planned to surprise Marconi with her presence and her exciting news.

  Marconi, meanwhile, was reveling in the voyage and the luxuries of the ship, and in the attention lavished upon him by his fellow first-class passengers, in particular Enrico Caruso, destined to become a friend. In future years, when circumstances allowed, Marconi would stand with Caruso offstage to ease the anxiety the great tenor felt before each performance. Marconi was particularly enthralled with the young women traveling with Caruso, a group of alluring and flirtatious actresses.