Inconvenient People (28 page)

She was then quizzed closely about the various solicitors she had used and dismissed over the years, and she recalled the order and the reasons perfectly.

One of the jurymen in the room stepped forward and asked Commissioner Barlow if the two women attendants could be asked to leave the room. After Mrs Moore and Esther Blake had left, the juryman explained that he had become concerned, ‘because I saw one of the ladies looking at her’.

‘They were not making any motion to me to teach me what to say,’ said Mrs Cumming, aware of this tired old allegation of ‘tutoring’. Ever proud of pedigree, she added: ‘They are in a rank in society above that.’

The grilling continued – about Robert Haynes, and why Mrs Cumming retained him as a solicitor when she had dismissed so many others. It is clear that Barlow believed Haynes was profiteering from Mrs Cumming’s predicament; but the old lady was unshakeable in her statements that Haynes had kept her fully updated on her income, expenditure and the market value of her various properties.

The room was growing gloomier and colder. ‘May I poke the fire? I am afraid it will go out,’ a juryman asked her.

‘If you please,’ she said.

‘There are no coals – may I ring for some?’

‘Yes, if you will take the trouble to ring.’

The servants’ bell was rung and George Clarke came in. ‘Some
coals, George.’ Clarke went away and came back with the coals and placed them on the fire, but Mrs Cumming grumbled that he had not brought a bellows: ‘The fire has got so very low.’

‘Where are your cats now?’ Barlow asked. ‘Are they upstairs in your bedroom, or in the kitchen?’

‘I suppose they are in the kitchen. I very seldom go into the kitchen.’

‘When did they cease to live upstairs?’

‘Sir, they never lived upstairs – never. Whoever told you that told you a gross falsity.’

‘Did they not live in your bedroom?’

‘They came up to have their meals and then they were sent down again.’

‘Do you not remember when the inventory was being taken of this house some moisture having come through the ceiling?’

‘Not from the cats.’

‘From something else?’

‘The servants can best account for that.’

‘Do you remember that evening when something came through the ceiling and you sent a servant up to look at it?’

Mrs Cumming did not reply. It is possible that the ‘moisture’ being referred to had been caused by her own physical infirmity. Mrs Cumming was alone with seventeen men, and may well have been feeling an agony of embarrassment as the questioning took this turn.

‘Did the cats not dwell in your bedroom night and day?’

‘No.’

Mrs Cumming then faced a series of detailed questions about various sums of money paid to her in connection with her Welsh property three years previously, and whenever she faltered over a precise date and sum, she was pressed repeatedly, as though she were on trial for her life. Her counsel did not intervene to protest at the questions raining down upon her. After minutes of persistent rapid-fire interrogation, she at last began to stumble in her answers. They appeared to have broken her at last and pierced through to a layer of confusion.

‘You do not remember, do you?’ coaxed Barlow, thinking he was being kind.

‘I do remember perfectly well,’ replied the old lady, ‘but I do not know that anyone has a right to ask me these questions, because I am
mistress of my own property and it is not a commonplace thing in the world to have your children to call you to account.’

A juryman piped up, ‘Do you think she understands the position we are in?’

Barlow explained to Mrs Cumming, ‘These gentlemen are under the order of the Lord Chancellor – they are summoned here.’

‘To see my competency to answer their questions.’

‘Your competency to take care of your property, or whether some person should not look after you and your property – take care of you and see that you are not imposed upon as to your health and property. That really is the object of these gentlemen.’

‘That I am not?’

‘They have not formed an opinion yet. I can do no more than suggest to you the propriety of answering the questions which are put to you. Your counsel, who are here, will check me if I do anything improper.’

A juryman said, ‘That was the reason why I asked the ladies to leave the room, that you might speak more freely.’

‘I am under no intimidation at all from them because they are intimate friends,’ was Mrs Cumming’s response.

‘Your courtesy is very proper,’ said another juryman.

‘Who has been in the habit of hiring your servants?’ asked Barlow.

‘Myself.’

‘Do you get characters [references] for them, for you seem to have been rather unlucky with your servants?’

‘I was very unlucky when Mr John Ince used to send me servants, very unlucky.’

‘When did he send you servants?’

‘Some years ago.’

‘Has he sent you any since I had the pleasure of seeing you at the Horns Tavern?’

‘He has sent them here to me without my knowing they were sent by him.’

‘You heard so afterwards?’

‘I did.’

‘If he sent them, he sent them for some purpose. But what makes you think the same from him more than from me?’ Barlow had arranged for one Louisa Baker to be employed at Gothic Villa, to keep an eye on things for the Commissioners in Lunacy.

‘Because I do not think you would have done such a dirty trick.’

‘Why do you think he would do a dirty trick?’

‘Because he is accustomed to do dirty tricks.’

‘I do not like to condemn a man without cause.’

‘I do not ask you to condemn him.’

‘Could you tell me one or two dirty tricks he has done?’

‘In taking Captain Cumming away from his own house. He got him there, and took his writing desk and overhauled all his papers when the man was not fit to be removed. He took his writing desk in a hackney coach.’

Barlow added, pointlessly, ‘There were hackney coaches in those days. They are abolished now . . . Is there anything else you have to say against Mr Ince?’

‘Nothing worth mentioning.’

‘But you have had other things against him?’

‘Yes, a good many other things.’

‘Will you allow me to judge of them? Could you tell me one or two more?’

She did not reply. So he went back to investigating Robert Haynes, and the fact that Haynes now lived in a better house than this one, which he had sold to Mrs Cumming. ‘Have you ever said that Mr Haynes is living in his present house on your money?’

‘No, but I have been told that others have said so. And, amongst others, Catherine Ince has told everyone about the neighbourhood that I am kept a prisoner, and that Mr Robert Haynes is living upon my property.’

Barlow moved on to the broken arrangement of 1846 and asked her why she had reneged, and she replied, ‘Because of course I would not consent to give up a whole loaf and take half.’

On several occasions Mrs Cumming had to correct errors of fact in Barlow’s questioning and assertions. He became confused about the order of Mrs Cumming’s peregrinations, mistaking her time in Maida Vale for her time in St John’s Wood. ‘I am in error, it was the other house,’ he admitted. ‘I am afraid I have misled you. I am given to error sometimes.’

‘Yes, but you are not called to account for it as I am,’ she said.

Barlow countered with, ‘Yes I am, and rather roughly sometimes.’

The conversation now turned to the night that the police arrived
at Herbert Villa in Maida Vale, and Mrs Cumming claimed that she had not screamed out of the window but that Rainey and Hickey had called the policemen, with whom they were on friendly terms, even allowing them to sleep at Herbert Villa.

‘Do you mean the policemen were sleeping at the house?’ asked the Commissioner.

‘Yes, the servants had them in every night.’

‘I do not want to doubt your word but what makes you think these policemen were sleeping in the house?’

‘I am certain of it. They were there frequently.’

‘Do you mean the same policemen that came in that night, or merely policemen generally?’

‘I cannot tell you that for I was up in my room and very ill.’

‘Did you not cry out at the window?’

‘I called out when the woman Mary Hickey, I think her name was, no . . . Mary Rainey . . .’

Her confusion did Mrs Cumming no favours and she soon backtracked on her accusation about the constables.

The cats slunk back into the conversation. Barlow asked, ‘Are the cats in your house now?’

‘No, not all of them.’

‘Did you take the cats to Brighton at all?’

‘Yes I did.’

‘We are told there were four or five.’

‘Ah yes, seven, or eight, or ten, I dare say you were told.’

Now the will – ‘Can you tell me when it was you made it?’

‘These things are so long ago, and never feeling in my own breast that anyone would have a right to call me to account . . .’

‘You are of a certain age – you cannot tell when it was made, and who made it.’

‘It was Robert Haynes.’

‘Did you ever sign that will?’

‘No, it was not signed.’

‘You don’t think it was signed?’

‘I don’t think it, I know it.’

Barlow established from Mrs Cumming that she had made the will while staying at Vauxhall with the Hutchinsons just after the Horns Tavern inquisition had finished. She had contracted bronchitis and
had believed she was going to die. Only Robert Haynes was in the room when she dictated the will to him, and in it she left a significant sum to her solicitor and to his wife, whom Mrs Cumming could barely have had time to get to know. Haynes had made no objection to so unusual a bequest. But Mrs Cumming never subsequently signed this will; in fact, she burned it.

Next came a testy exchange in which Barlow, in error, attempted to convince Mrs Cumming that her own father had included the Hoopers and the Inces in his will. When the old lady became increasingly vehement in her denials of this, Dr Caldwell stepped in: ‘I think, sir, she has been long enough under examination. I think this is somewhat confused.’

Mr Petersdorff, lawyer for the Inces and Hoopers, objected, ‘I do not think she is fatigued.’ The questioning continued and now turned to Mrs Cumming’s dramatic encounter with her daughter Catherine.

‘Did Mrs Ince come and see you at the Edgware Road?’ asked Barlow.

‘Yes. She pushed the servant almost downstairs to pounce upon me . . . Mrs Ince is very capable, I am sorry to say, of saying anything but the truth.’

‘I want to speak to you a little about Mrs Ince presently.’

‘The less the better, if you please.’

‘Do you remember how long she stayed that first time she came to Edgware Road?’

‘I could see her in the street, through the window of my drawing room, surrounded by policemen and a set of vagabonds round her, pointing to the house. That is very ladylike conduct . . . It was not a proper place for a person calling herself a gentlewoman to be surrounded by a parcel of policemen . . . She obtruded herself upon me and kicked up such a row that it made the house quite scandalous.’

Mrs Cumming knew she had overstated her case against Catherine in the past: ‘I do not say that she attempted to strangle me, though that is what it is said that I did say.’

‘What did you say? We will hear it from yourself as we may have been misled.’

‘I was very much frightened when she came into the room, throwing the door open, running up to me, putting her arms round my neck, after the statement I received that Ince and her were taking
proceedings against me in court. Now that is a very strange thing if you are taking proceedings against a person to come in a very cordial way.’

‘Why should you not put the best interpretation upon it, and suppose that it was an act of affection?’ asked the Commissioner.

‘Affection, sir?’

‘It is my duty not to set you against her, or her against you . . . What proceedings had she taken, beside the original commission?’

‘To get me into a madhouse, or to get my property . . . I never mentioned that she strangled me, or wanted to strangle me, but I said, and say again, it is a very strange way of behaving.’

Of Mrs Hooper, Barlow and the jury expressed the wish that there could be affection again: ‘Let us hope you will some day be reconciled,’ the Commissioner said.

‘Never, never . . .’

They didn’t like this – a family repudiated was unnatural. There could not possibly be good cause for it. ‘It’s never too late, you know,’ Barlow said, as though addressing a dim infant. ‘I want to exculpate your daughters.’ But he did not provide any proof of their innocence.

Similarly with the poisoning, Mrs Cumming now stated that she had not alleged a murder plot against her but the fact remained that a toxic substance had found its way into her household – Dr Barnes’s analysis had proved that that was so.

A juryman noticed that the old lady was becoming tired, and she replied, ‘Yes, I am very much fatigued.’

They started once more on the value of her Welsh property: ‘Do you know the annual amount of your property in Wales?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what it is now?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it now?’

‘The same as it was then. Do not think this an impertinent or short answer.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘They insinuate I have been squandering the money and the property, but if I had, how could I still have the same income from it?’

She refused to hand over to them the rent books that would prove what she said was correct, pointing out that if she made such
private financial information public, it could be alleged that she was ‘an imbecile’ and therefore unfit to undertake business transactions.

The Commissioner changed tack again. ‘Mr Ince, we understand, lost two of his children,’ said Barlow.

‘I do not know how many he has lost.’

‘Do you remember seeing one?’

‘I saw one of Mr Ince’s and one of Mr Hooper’s children.’

‘Was there anything peculiar about one of Mr Ince’s children?’

‘I never made any remarks.’

‘What did you say?’

‘When I saw the child I said it looked a very pretty corpse. That was the expression I made use of . . . And the other of Mr Ince’s children, I said it was very much emaciated, and so it was. It had suffered a great deal before his death.’