Murder by Candlelight (15 page)

The woman did as she was bade. As she dressed, Feltham saw her slip something into her pocket.

“Stop, what have you got in your pocket?” He searched it and found, among other things, a pair of Cornelian ear-drops and two tickets for articles pawned in a Walworth pawnshop.

Greenacre gestured toward some boxes that stood packed and corded for traveling.

“It's a good job you've come [tonight],” he said to Feltham. “I should have been off to America [tomorrow].”

The prisoners were conveyed by coach to Paddington Green police station, where they were confined in separate cells. About half past twelve, the night sergeant, Michael Brown, found Greenacre lying on his back on the floor with a silk handkerchief “tied into a noose round his right foot, and the other part of the handkerchief tied round his neck.” He had apparently preferred a slow and painful death by strangulation to the ignominy of public trial and execution. When Sergeant Brown cut the handkerchief, Greenacre was “stiff” and “apparently dead.” Dr. Girdwood, however, revived him. “I don't thank you for what you have done,” Greenacre said afterwards. “I wish to die—damn the man that is afraid to die—I am not.”

News of the arrests spread swiftly, and when at noon the next day the prisoners were taken in a coach to Marylebone Police Court,
crowds of people lined the streets to see them pass. Greenacre, in a brown greatcoat, put on a brave front. Although he was in pain on account of his neck, he carried himself with much coolness, and it was observed that he steadily met the eyes of those who fixed him with their stares. His paramour and fellow prisoner, Sarah Gale, was more placid still and “seemed quite unconcerned at her situation.”

The prisoners were led into the police court and placed at the bar before the magistrates.

*
That is, had banns of marriage been published (“asked”) by a clergyman inquiring whether any of his flock knew cause or just impediment why Hannah Brown and James Greenacre should not be joined together in holy matrimony.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Peculiar Odor

No man truly knoweth himself but he groweth daily more contemptible in his own eyes.

—
Jeremy Taylor

M
any people have affected, and some few sages have perhaps genuinely felt, indifference at the prospect of their own deaths. But surely Carlyle spoke for the greater number of us when he said that it is a hard thing to die. Were it not, we should feel less interest than we do in the man who knows that the odds are a hundred to one he will be hanged in a fortnight. If the Crown proved its case, James Greenacre would find a halter around his neck before the roses bloomed. Few things bring out a man's character as effectually as the prospect of the hangman's knot. The death-grapple of Greenacre was no exception: it laid bare the truth of his nature and reproduced, in a compressed form, its peculiar moral odor.

He had been born, in 1785, into a family of farmers in Norfolk. Possibly through the agency of a generous stepfather, he had been able to set up, before he was twenty, as a greengrocer in London; in time, he had become the proprietor of a greengrocer's shop in the Kent Road. He had speculated as boldly in real estate and politics as he had in greengrocery. He was, at one time, master of more than a dozen properties in Southwark and Camberwell, and when he was not pushing his business interests south of the Thames he might be found in the White Lion in Wych Street, voicing radical opinions on the great public questions of the day. Such, indeed, was his reputation as a coffee-house politician that he was elected, in 1832, overseer of his parish, that of St. George the Martyr in Southwark.

But like many another man who would brazen his way into eminence, Greenacre courted fortune with borrowed money, and soon enough the bills came due. He attempted to recoup his losses by going into the tea trade, and his method of establishing himself in that market was, to say the least, ingenious. Drawing on the rhetorical skills he had refined in the White Lion, he composed a pamphlet warning his fellow citizens of the evils of spurious teas adulterated with the leaves of the sloe tree or blackthorn. Doubtless many customers were only too happy to purchase their tea from a merchant so devoted to the purity of his merchandise; but just as Greenacre's fortunes seemed likely to mend, the Excise officers seized a quantity of sloe leaves in his shop. A heavy fine was laid upon him “for this fraud upon the public and government.”

Unable to pay the fine, Greenacre fled to America, leaving behind him a mass of debts and three dead wives.
^*
In New York he
attempted to redeem his failures with a washing machine of his own invention. But although he obtained a patent for the device, the venture failed. He took to writing pamphlets in which he set forth his grievances against his persecutors, and he appealed to the citizens of the United States to come to the aid of an “injured Englishman” who had suffered unjustly at the hands of His Majesty's Excise. But the appeal went unanswered and, after being twice imprisoned in New York for libel, he returned to England, where he had been declared a bankrupt. In London he engaged in a new venture, peddling an “amalgamated candy” which, he claimed, had for its principal ingredient a potent herb he had discovered in America, a most effectual remedy for maladies of the throat and chest. At the same time, he continued his exertions as a pamphleteer, publishing an address in which he implored a “generous public” to help him “satisfy all his just debts, and re-establish himself in business again.” Oddly enough, this appeal, too, went unanswered.

With the failure of these projects, Greenacre determined on another path to ease and plenty: he would marry a woman of property. The untimely death of the first object of this speculative affection, Hannah Brown, did nothing to diminish his faith in the underlying soundness of his plan, and in January 1837 he placed the following advertisement in
The Times
:

Wanted
, a partner, who can command £300 to join the advertiser in a patent to bring forward a new-invented machine, of great public benefit, that is certain of realising an ample reward. Applications by letter only (post-paid), for J. G., at Mr. Bishop's, No. 1, Tudor-place, Tottenham Court-road.

At least one woman answered the notice. On February 4, two days after Hannah Brown's severed legs were found among the willows of Coldharbour Lane, Greenacre replied to the lady. Describing himself as a thirty-eight-year-old widower (in fact he was past
fifty), he told his correspondent that no man could “have a greater aversion than myself to advertising for a wife.” But circumstances had forced him to overcome his natural delicacy; he had in his possession an invention (the washing machine) of incalculable value; he wanted only “a female companion, with a small capital, one with whom a mutual and tender attachment might be formed, who would share with me in those advantageous pecuniary prospects which are now before me, and thereby secure the advantages of my own production.” Greenacre assured his prospective bride that a number of “scientific gentlemen of property” were “anxious to co-operate” with him in the washing-machine venture; but he shrank from so mercenary an arrangement. He wanted a “partner for life.” His propositions were of an “honourable nature,” and offered in a spirit of “sacred candour”; and yet, strange to say, the lady refused him.

*
The first of Greenacre's wives, a girl from Woolwich, died suddenly of what Greenacre called “a putrid sore throat.” He next married the daughter an Essex farmer; according to Greenacre, she “died of a brain fever brought on by exerting herself, I believe, riding on horseback, whilst on a visit at her own relations.” Fifteen months later he wed Miss Simmonds; she succumbed, by his account, to cholera in 1833, the year he fled to America. None of the deaths, it seems, excited suspicion at the time; but given Greenacre's subsequent history, one would like to know more about them.

CHAPTER NINE

Sarah Gale

She was sparing of the truth, loved equivocation and duplicity. . . .

—
D'Alton

A
new age was struggling to be born. It did not yet have a name, but the figure who was to give it one was about to make her debut on the world stage. This, however, is to anticipate, for in April 1837 she was a girl of seventeen living in seclusion in Kensington Palace. With the coming of the spring, she and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, resumed their walks in Kensington Gardens. They were followed, at a respectful distance, by a detective tasked with keeping an eye on an old man who had taken to bowing repeatedly to the young lady, and who had named his cottage in her honor.

Greenacre had but one hope of living to see the dawn of the Victorian age. He must convince if not the world, at any rate a jury
of his peers that the death of Hannah Brown was an accident—a dreadful one to be sure, but not the sort of thing that justified his being hanged by the neck at Newgate. In his initial examination in Marylebone Police Court, Greenacre offered the first of several accounts he was to give of the circumstances in which Mrs. Brown had paid her debt to eternity. He admitted at once that he knew her, had indeed engaged himself to marry her; but he had sought her hand only because he believed that she could “command at any time three or four hundred pounds.” On Christmas Eve he was cruelly undeceived. Mrs. Brown appeared on the doorstep of his house in Camberwell Place that afternoon, somewhat “the worse for liquor.” Over tea, he told her he had made “inquiry about her character, and had ascertained that she had been to Smith's tally-shop in Long Acre, and tried to procure silk gowns” in his name. Hannah conceded that she had very little savings; she seems in fact to have been living day to day, hand to mouth. Yet when Greenacre quite naturally expressed displeasure at the deception that she had practiced upon him, she “put on a feigned laugh” and coolly replied that he was as guilty as she. Had he not lied to her about the extent of his own property? The imaginary farm at Hudson's Bay? She “then began to sneer and laugh,” Greenacre said, “at the same time rocking herself backwards and forwards in her chair.”

This was too much for him; and while she was “on the swing” he impulsively put his foot to the chair. She fell backwards in it to the floor, and the back of her head came with “great violence” against a clump of wood which lay there. This “alarmed me very much,” Greenacre said, “and I went round the table and took her by the hand, and kept shaking her, but she appeared entirely gone.”

“I deliberated for a short time” and “unfortunately determined on putting her away” in order to “conceal her death.” “I thought it might be more safe that way than if I gave an alarm of what had occurred.” He did not seek help lest he “should be set down for a murderer”; to dispose of the body secretly was altogether the “safest and most prudent plan.”

Beside the slyness and duplicity of Greenacre, Jack Thurtell, with his naïve ingenuous strength, seems almost noble in his savagery, a Bronze Age brigand. Thurtell's crime—the prosecution of private revenge—has, for the greater part of human history, been held to be perfectly compatible with the strictest honor; and until the day before yesterday the morality of
la vendetta
prevailed in the wilder regions of Europe, and indeed still survives in the gangs of the American city. But the most hardened bandit would not dream of striking a woman, let alone a woman whom he had engaged himself to marry. Greenacre violated this unwritten law. And yet, ignoble though he was, he was not without gallantries of his own; and it is but just to record that he never wavered in his effort to exculpate Sarah Gale of complicity in the death of Mrs. Brown.

Of all the phantoms in Greenacre's little inferno, Sarah Gale is the most obscure. Little is known of her early history, other than that her maiden name was Farr, and that she came from Dorset. On coming up to London, she joined a theatrical troupe, performing under the stage name of Sarah Wiston; but her career as an actress did not prosper, and she fell into prostitution. A man connected with the legal profession kept her for a time; he, however, left her, and she stooped to marry a coachman named Gale, whose child she bore. When the coachman, too, abandoned her, she took Greenacre for a lover.