Lady of Ashes (47 page)

Pap’s old coat remnant and letter went into the fireplace.

Their departure day came quickly and Sam picked them up to go to Victoria station for a train to Dover, where they would board a ship bound for New York. From there they would take a train to Quincy, Massachusetts, to meet Sam’s father and be married in the church the family had attended for generations. After a short respite in Quincy, the trio would board another train to take them as far as St. Joseph, Missouri, before joining a chain of covered wagons bound for Colorado. Violet had no idea what a covered wagon looked like, but Sam assured her they offered good protection from the sun.

Once in Dover they boarded the ship, Sam carrying Violet’s undertaker’s bag and Susanna clutching the wicker cage holding Mrs. Softpaws. Susanna was already trying out the word “father” as often as possible. Violet watched amusement play across Sam’s face as he listened to “Father, I’ve never been on a ship before” and “Father, do you think the seas will be rough?” and “Do you think I’ll be able to let Mrs. Softpaws out soon, Father?”

Violet smiled, too. There was much the three of them had to look forward to in the strange new place called Colorado.

As the ship pulled away from the chalky white cliffs, most passengers stayed at the rail, waving back at the shore. Violet turned to face the ocean and what lay ahead, never once looking back at the past.

Embalming is a practice that dates back thousands of years, with plenty of documentation available on how it was practiced by the ancient Egyptians. Although its use in more modern societies is scattered, the technique of embalming by arterial injection was developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Some groups, like the Jewish people, have never practiced it. The Victorians generally viewed embalming as unseemly, since it meant filling a body with sometimes toxic fluids, then committing the body to the ground, where it should be decomposing naturally.

Interestingly, it was the U.S. Civil War that saw great advancements in the science of embalming. Because soldiers were frequently dying hundreds of miles away from their home state, it would take time for their bodies to be collected, identified, and shipped home via train. Railways began refusing bodies that hadn’t been embalmed because of the obvious putrefaction factor.

Initially, it was surgeons—called surgeon-embalmers—who performed this service. At the beginning of the war, surgeon-embalmers might charge up to one hundred dollars per embalming, although later this was reduced to fifty dollars for an officer and twenty-five dollars for an enlisted soldier. It didn’t take long before undertakers assumed these duties, since it was more in keeping with funereal duties.

The story I relate about Hutton and Williams, who were holding corpses hostage until their families paid for the men’s unrequested services, is true, although they were arrested in 1863, not in 1862 as I portray it in the story.

Undertakers had a variety of formulas they used for embalming, including alcohol, arsenic, bichloride of mercury, creosote, nitrate of potassium, turpentine, and zinc chloride. Arsenic was outlawed in embalming compounds in Europe in the 1840s, but was legal in the United States until the 1870s. Formaldehyde was not discovered until 1867, and its preservative qualities were not recognized until 1888.

Whatever an undertaker’s formula was, it was typically considered a trade secret and never shared with anyone. Other trade secrets included cosmetic formulas and techniques for positioning and propping the body. Even today, funeral directors hold close their funerary practices.

Charles Dickens’s book
Oliver Twist
did much to malign an already tarnished reputation for undertakers in England. Although many were quite scrupulous, there were others who promoted expensive funerals their customers could not afford, started bogus burial clubs, and used shoddy merchandise in place of promised quality funereal goods. In other words, nothing has changed! It was my intent to present this profession in the capable and caring manner in which I believe most undertakers approached it then and still do today.

By the way, popular folklore claims that phrases such as “saved by the bell,” “dead ringer,” and “graveyard shift” come from the Victorian era and its obsession with death. Not true: “Saved by the bell” comes from boxing, whereas the other two terms date from the twentieth century and have nothing whatsoever to do with funerals.

Although technically a stalemate with both forces withdrawing, the Battle of Hampton Roads (March 8–9, 1862) is significant as the first encounter between two ironclad ships, USS
Monitor
and CSS
Virginia
. Neither
Monitor
nor
Virginia
survived long after the battle, with
Monitor
lost in a storm and
Virginia
scuttled by her own crew when in danger of being captured by the Union navy.

The battle received worldwide attention, and as a result, Great Britain and France halted all further construction of wooden-hulled ships. A great example of an ironclad is HMS
Warrior,
built in 1860 and now at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in Hampshire, England.

The major diplomatic goal of the Confederate government during the Civil War was to gain the formal recognition of its independence from European nations, particularly Great Britain and France, both of which were officially neutral. In late 1861, the Confederate government sent James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana as diplomatic representatives to Britain aboard the mail steamer RMS
Trent,
hoping to at least gain financial assistance for their cause, if not diplomatic recognition.

On November 8, Captain Charles Wilkes of USS
San Jacinto,
a fifteen-gun war steamer, overtook
Trent
and ordered it to stop. After the British ship complied, Wilkes’s men boarded her and removed Mason and Slidell, who were placed under arrest as prisoners of war.
Trent
—which was a mail packet on its regular route—was permitted to continue its voyage. The capture of the Confederate diplomats precipitated one of the major diplomatic crises of the Civil War, known as the Trent Affair.

The immediate public reaction in the North was jubilation, but the British were just a bit hostile toward an action they considered to be a violation of their neutrality rights under international law. Lord Lyon, the British minister to the United States, was directed to demand an apology from the Lincoln administration for its violation of international law and to ensure the prompt release of Mason and Slidell to British custody, or else Britain would cut off diplomatic ties with the United States. Britain’s Atlantic fleet was put on alert and plans were made to send 8,000 troops to Canada.

A cooler head, in the form of Prince Albert, intervened even though by this point he was close to dying. He recommended that Queen Victoria send a dispatch including the hope that Wilkes had acted without the knowledge or approval of his superiors and that the United States had not intended to insult the British. Victoria did this, and it provided the United States a way of saving face in the situation, which was moving perilously close to war between the two parties. It is doubtful the Union would have survived a war on two fronts.

It is interesting to note that in reacting to the Trent Affair, the British had been solely interested in upholding their own honor on the international stage, and had no actual concern over aiding the Confederacy’s cause.

Discovering a Civil War incident that bore my own last name was just too remarkable and intriguing not to use.

The Clayton Tunnel Rail Crash on August 25, 1861, was a horrifying event in British history. Out of a total of 589 passengers, 23 people were killed in this wreck, 21 of them from the passenger car that the engine mounted. A further 176 were injured. A nine-day inquest following the crash revealed the cause to be simple human error: One signalman misunderstood the message of another, and thought the tunnel was clear for the next train. Although various charges of manslaughter were brought, in the end, none of the railway workers were actually convicted. However, an end result of the investigation was reform of the railways, to include a better time interval system for the trains, and to also regulate shorter shifts. One of the signalmen working that day had been on duty a continuous twenty-four hours. It is likely that Charles Dickens based his story “The Signal-Man” on the Clayton Tunnel rail crash, as many particulars are the same. Readers of the Christmas 1866 story would have well remembered the Clayton accident.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I’d like to point out to the reader that there was no outbreak of cholera in London in 1863, although there were multiple outbreaks of this disease between 1831 and 1854.

Queen Victoria (1837–1901) died at Osborne House on January 22, 1901, aged eighty-one, forty years after her husband’s death. She was taken to Frogmore Mausoleum, where she was laid to rest next to Albert.

Contrary to popular historical opinion, Victoria generally enjoyed good relationships with her children. Tradition holds that she was insanely jealous of Albert’s closeness to their eldest daughter, Vicky, but the volume of correspondence between the queen and her daughter proves their affection.

Victoria fled to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight immediately after Albert’s death rather than have Christmas at Windsor without her husband. She remained there for three months and returned for every Christmas and most anniversaries for the next forty years.

Within three days of his death, Victoria had ordered the building of a mausoleum on the grounds of nearby Frogmore House. The building was consecrated in December 1862 and Albert’s body was reinterred there, although it would be another nine years before the interior decoration was complete.

Victoria policed mourning within the royal household with great zeal. Royal servants had to wear black armbands for the eight years following Albert’s death, and she chastised her eldest daughter, Vicky, the wife of Kaiser Friedrich III, for not putting her five-month-old baby into mourning when the Kaiser’s grandmother died. Victoria herself became known as the Widow of Windsor, as she remained in mourning the rest of her life.

Sir William Jenner (1815–1898) was an English physician most famously known for having discovered the distinction between typhus (caused by a parasite) and typhoid fever (a bacterial disease). He attended Prince Albert, becoming first a physician extraordinary in 1861, then a physician-in-ordinary in 1862. Jenner was bluff, good-humored, kindhearted, and at times autocratic, and always spoke his mind, often with great wit. He had the booming voice of a military man and was noted at court for being an entertaining raconteur, a fact that also endeared him to the queen, as did his affable bedside manner, which she found calming. He was an old-school, establishment figure, an arch Tory, and as reactionary as the queen, who concurred with Jenner in his opposition to women’s training as doctors. Jenner insisted that the grieving queen should not be overtaxed in her widowhood, which bolstered her stubborn refusal to come out of seclusion for state occasions.

As physician-in-ordinary, Sir James Clark (1788–1870) was a trusted advisor to the royal family, although it was Jenner who properly diagnosed Albert. Clark was instrumental in the formation of the Royal College of Chemistry. He is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886) and his son, Henry Adams (1838–1918), were members of the brilliant Adams family of Massachusetts. Although Lincoln did not want him for the post of Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James and he had to struggle with his own innate distrust of the British, Adams was nevertheless a success in the job, doing much to stop Confederate commerce raiders from leaving British ports. He remained in Great Britain until 1868.

Henry worked as a journalist and as his father’s secretary in Great Britain before later becoming a historian and intellectual in his own right. Most famously, he published the classic work
The Education of Henry Adams
in 1907. Although he produced many scholarly writings on topics as wide-ranging as the second law of thermodynamics and the history of the United States, his legacy is tarnished by a variety of anti-Semitic remarks in many of his writings. Henry suffered a stroke in 1912, possibly brought on by the news of the sinking of the
Titanic,
for which he had purchased tickets for its return trip to England. He died in 1919.

Charles Francis Adams Jr. (1835–1915) was the only one of Charles Francis’s sons to volunteer during the war. He rose to the rank of brigadier general (brevet), led one of the first black regiments through Richmond after its fall in April 1865, and was a highly decorated soldier.

Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), served twice as prime minister, as well as holding a variety of offices in his lifetime. He was well known for his affairs with Lady Jersey, the Princess Dorothy de Lieven, and, finally, Lady Emily Cowper, the sister of Lord Melbourne, whom he eventually married after her husband’s death in 1839. Palmerston was indeed known as “Lord Cupid,” and even served as co-respondent in a divorce case when he was seventy-eight years old.

Popular as he was with most women, the same cannot be said for his association with Queen Victoria. The queen not only objected to his licentious behavior (he tried to seduce one of her ladies-in-waiting while a guest at Windsor Castle), but to his foreign policy. Palmerston believed in increasing Britain’s power in the world to include policies that sometimes weakened foreign governments. Victoria and Albert, however, wanted to preserve European royal families against revolutionary groups. The queen and her prime minister had an uneasy relationship.

Interestingly, Palmerston served as foreign secretary while Russell was prime minister, and vice versa.

John Russell, Earl Russell (1792–1878) was born into the highest echelons of the British aristocracy as the third son of the Duke of Bedford, and was then raised to the peerage in his own right as Earl Russell, an impressive accomplishment even among his peers.

He entered the House of Commons in 1813 and enjoyed a series of cabinet positions while leading the more reformist wing of the Whig party, including that of prime minister and foreign secretary. In the never-ending dance between the two men, Russell became prime minister once more after Palmerston’s death.

After the death of his eldest son, Russell raised his grandson, Bertrand Russell, who became a mathematician, philosopher, campaigner against nuclear weapons, and eventually the third Earl Russell.

Thomas Herbert (1793–1861), Vice-Admiral of the White, was a much-decorated officer in the Royal Navy. He served in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the First Anglo-Chinese War, then went on to serve as a Member of Parliament for Dartmouth. I have no idea if he was embalmed; more than likely not, since it was not customary at the time, but I wanted to provide the reader a glimpse into the embalming process. The good admiral very conveniently passed away in the time frame I needed to have someone rather famous die, someone to whom the prince consort might reasonably pay respects. However, I will note for the record that he died in August, while I have him dying in July.