Murder by Candlelight (21 page)

“Courvoisier, his lordship has been obliged to come home in a
cab.
”

A short time later, Lord William summoned Courvoisier to his library and handed him two letters. “You are to take them to the mews for York to deliver by hand,” he said, “and you will bring back the dog with you.”

Courvoisier took the letters to the kitchen, and he and his friend Carr left the house by the basement door. When, a few minutes later, Courvoisier returned with the dog, he told Miss Mancer that “his lordship seemed angry when he first came in,” but “got quite good-tempered after.”

Lord William took the dog for a walk in Hyde Park; came back at half past six; and dined alone, “on plate,” in the dining room. (To have “no service of plate” was in those days thought a great meanness.) After dinner, Lord William retired to his library.

Mary Hannell, the cook, washed his lordship's dirty plate and afterwards went to the back yard to fetch cold meat for the servants' supper, bolting the door behind her on her return. She then left the house on a private errand of her own.

It was now near nine o'clock. York came in to take his lordship's dog back to its kennel; Courvoisier and Miss Mancer supped together in the kitchen. They talked of Mary Hannell's having handed in her notice; Courvoisier distinctly sympathized with her desire to get away. He regretted, he said, his own decision to enter Lord William's service, and he complained that he had suffered much ill usage in consequence of his master's senile daftness. He told Miss Mancer how, on a visit to Richmond in April, his lordship had been “very cross and peevish” and had changed his room three times at the inn. Miss Mancer said that there must have been a reason for his lordship's being out of sorts. Courvoisier replied that he had been put out of joint by the loss of a gold locket, one that contained a lock of his late wife's hair.

That Lord William was not a hero to his valet was hardly a revelation to Miss Mancer; Courvoisier had often been heard to mock and disparage his master. “Old Billy,” he once said, “was a rum old chap, and if
he
had his money, he would not remain long in England.” Miss Mancer told him that his lordship was not so rich as many people supposed—which was true. Lord William was a younger son, and, like many another younger son, he had been sacrificed to the exigencies of primogeniture, with the result that he was frequently embarrassed in his finances.

But Courvoisier was not persuaded. “Ah,” he said, “old Billy has money.”

Night had fallen when, about ten o'clock, Mary Hannell returned from her errand. Courvoisier let her in by the front door, which he afterwards locked, bolted, and chained. He then went out by the basement door to fetch some ale from a nearby public house. The servants drank of it together; Mary Hannell and Sarah Mancer would later say that they felt drowsy after having imbibed it.

Miss Mancer went upstairs and, passing the open door of the library, saw Lord William sitting in his chair, reading a book. The flickering light of the candle illuminated the person of her master, but as for his inward personality, and the curious influences that had molded it, these could be read only by the light of the imagination. Lord William was an aristocrat, the recipient of a training that brands the soul as distinctly as the tonsured head distinguishes the devoted monk or the jeweled button the promoted mandarin. The Russell grandeurs, the palaces and pedigrees, were a part of him, lived in him; nor were the Russell horrors—for there
were
horrors—less closely interwoven with the fibers of his being. The founder of the family's fortune, old Sir John Russell, was one of those bold, bad men who under the Tudors engorged themselves through the plunder of the monasteries. He and his heirs erected a great house on the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Woburn, close by the oak where the last abbot was hanged. Inferior, indeed, in splendor of descent to such houses as De Vere and Talbot, the Russells nevertheless went rapidly up the steps of the peerage, and by the eighteenth century they were invariably ranked among the “Brahmins of the
ton
.” But aristocracy, though it is a brilliant flower, yields a bitter fruit. The progress of the Russell magnificos in all the modes of silken selfishness, of gorgeous hauteur, may even now be traced in the canvases of Van Dyke and Kneller, Lely and Gainsborough. But the splendor, though real, was tainted; the blood and bowels of the old abbot were upon it.
^*

While his lordship read in the library, Sarah Mancer drew the curtains in his bedroom and lighted a fire in the hearth; she also lighted the rushlight on the night-table. Afterwards, she went up
to her own bedroom. Mary Hannell also retired, having left the kitchen fire burning: Courvoisier would need the coals to warm Lord William's bed. His lordship himself went into his bedroom around midnight, and after undressing got into his bed—a four-poster, with the curtains drawn on the side nearest the door. At some point, he began to snore.

*
Robert Hobbes, the last abbot of Woburn Abbey, was adjudged a traitor, and suffered the penalties of high treason, being hanged, drawn, and quartered.

CHAPTER THREE

A Devilish Pretty Mess

Chaos is come again.

—
Shakespeare

T
he next morning, Sarah Mancer woke, as she usually did, at half past six. Mary Hannell was still in bed when she left the room they shared and knocked on Courvoisier's door: the valet had a habit of oversleeping. Upon coming down the attic stairs, she saw the warming pan lying on the floor near the door to Lord William's bedroom. Courvoisier ought to have taken it down to the kitchen. He had once before left the pan on the landing, and Miss Mancer had pointed out to him that this “was not the proper place to leave it.”

On reaching the first floor, Miss Mancer looked into the library. His lordship's writing desk, she saw, was turned around. Four of the drawers were open, and various papers lay scattered about. A screwdriver rested on his lordship's writing chair, and his keys were
on the floor. Miss Mancer was not, however, alarmed, for Lord William had on previous occasions left the library in disarray. She passed into the drawing room, opened the shutters, and afterwards descended to the ground floor. There she was startled to find the door to the street fastened only by the latch—it was neither bolted nor chained, as it ought properly to have been. His lordship's blue cloak lay on the floor not far from the door, as did an opera glass, a gold pencil case, a tortoiseshell toothpick case, and a pair of his lordship's spectacles, tipped with silver, together with an assortment of utensils—a silver sugar-dredger, a silver caddy-spoon, the silver top of a salt-dredger, a little cayenne spoon, a silver dish-cover, and the cook's silver thimble.

It was only when Miss Mancer reached the dining room that she allowed mere consternation to give way to horrible imaginings. The drawers and cupboards had been opened and gone through; the candlesticks had been cast on the floor. She ran upstairs and, after telling Mary Hannell what she had seen, went to Courvoisier's door.

“Courvoisier,” she said, “do you know of any thing being the matter last night?”

“No,” he said, and opened the door. He was dressed in his usual attire, only he was not wearing his coat.

“Do you know what has been the matter last night?”

“No.”

“All your silver and things are about.”

Miss Mancer thought he looked pale and agitated as he came out of the room clutching his coat. She followed him downstairs. He took up the warming pan and carried it to the dining room, where he set it down. He then went to his pantry; here, too, the cupboard and drawers had been opened and gone through.

“My God,” he said, “some one has been robbing us.”

“For God's sake, let us go and see where his lordship is,” Miss Mancer said.

They went up to Lord William's bedroom. Courvoisier opened the shutters of a window that overlooked Norfolk Street; Miss Mancer went to the bed, which was obscured, on one side, by the curtains that hung from the canopy. When she came to the open side, she found his lordship in the bed, lying on his back; a towel covered his face.

“My lord, my lord,” Miss Mancer cried, and ran screaming out of the room. She went part way up the attic stairs, turned on her heel, and ran down the stairs and out into Norfolk Street. She rang the doorbell at Mr. Latham's house across the way, then crossed the street to Mr. Lloyd's. No sooner did she ring Mr. Lloyd's doorbell than Mr. Latham's butler (his name was Young) came into the street. His lordship, she told him, was murdered, and he should go for the police.

She went back into the house and into the dining room, where she found Courvoisier seated in a chair, writing something on a piece of paper.

“What the devil do you sit here for?” she asked. “Why don't you go out and send for a doctor?”

“I must write to Mr. Russell,” he said. William Russell, Lord William's youngest and only surviving son, lived in Belgravia.

York came into the house, followed by Young, Mr. Latham's butler, and together they went up to his lordship's bedroom. There was blood on the bolster, blood on the bedsheet, blood on the towel that covered his lordship's face. Dr. Elsgood, the surgeon, soon appeared; he removed the towel and drew down the bedclothes.

“It was very horrifying,” Young remembered. The dead man lay weltering in his own blood; his head was nearly severed from his body.