The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (24 page)

When I first came to Welbeck, now twenty-seven years ago, I was a mere boy, very ignorant of the ways of the world, and more ignorant still, if it were possible, of business habits and of the management of a great estate. I shudder to think what might have been my fate, and the sad fate of those dependent upon me, if Mr Turner and others, who guided my footsteps, had been different from what they proved themselves to be. It was in his power to make or mar the happiness and prosperity, not only of myself, but also of many of those who live in this district and who farm my land.

Turner was proving himself a worthy son to follow in his father’s footsteps. In fact, he had already scored a triumph by discovering the ruse by which the 5th Duke’s old overcoat had been acquired by the Druce party from its owner. On the death of the 5th Duke, most of his old clothes had been inherited by his trusty valet, John Harrington. When Harring-ton died, the clothes were divided between his children. On making inquiries, Turner had discovered that in the spring of 1906, a former abbey servant, Joseph Stubbings, had paid a call on Harrington’s daughter, Bertha Lambourn. Stubbings had been accompanied by an unidentified man and woman.
The woman had told Bertha that she collected curios, and had an umbrella once owned by the Duke of Marlborough. Would Bertha be so kind as to show her some items of the late duke’s clothing? After much pressing by the lady, Bertha had reluctantly brought out a shoe, a black coat and inverness cape
*
‘very much worn’, an old umbrella, a night-cap and a wig. The couple wanted to pay her for them, but Bertha refused. Taking the items, the woman expressed her thanks, and said they would be valuable additions to her collection. She gave Bertha some silver for the children’s money-box, and placed a sovereign on the mantelpiece. The trio then departed. According to Bertha’s description, the man who accompanied Stubbings was tall, well-built and broad-shouldered with short grey hair, a grey moustache, a fresh face and a brusque manner. The woman professed to be the man’s wife, but was very much younger than him, and although well-dressed with a seal-skin hat and plume, did not appear to Bertha to be a lady.

Turner was delighted with his uncovering of the subterfuge. ‘I fancy my information will checkmate the blackguards and make John Conquest look small, as I firmly believe from the description given of the man who secured the coat that he is the scoundrel who smuggled it away by a trick,’ he wrote triumphantly to the duke’s solicitor, Horseman Bailey. ‘And if you want some of the 5th Duke’s coats to wear in court, I shall forward sufficient tomorrow morning to allow each member of your firm to appear in one!’ He went on: ‘I have been on the track all day, and I feel I am quite qualified for a leading position in the detective force at Scotland Yard!’

Turner’s latest detective assignment for the 6th Duke, however, this December of 1907, was proving a much harder case for the estate manager-turned-amateur sleuth to crack. A key claim of the Druce camp had been that a large photo-graph of a clean-shaven man with whiskers – said to be a picture of Thomas Charles Druce, and to have been in George Hollamby’s family for over thirty years – was a photograph taken from a portrait of the 5th Duke, alleged to have hung in Welbeck Abbey, until destroyed by fire. During the court proceedings before the magistrate Plowden in early December 1907, Nurse Bayly had voiced the opinion that this portrait was in fact a photograph of Thomas Charles Druce in his younger years, before he grew a beard. The Cavendish-Bentinck family had always denied that any photograph of the reclusive 5th Duke existed; and the only officially acknowledged portraits of his Grace were paintings by the portraitists Joshua Dighton and Leslie Ward, together with busts by the sculptors Sir Edgar Boehm and Henry Richard Hope-Pinker. Both the Leslie Ward portrait and the busts had been commissioned posthumously. In addition, there existed a marble model of the 5th Duke’s left hand, based on a cast made upon his death, showing it to be one of remarkable fineness and delicacy.

In the run-up to the 1907 perjury trial, the 6th Duke had been anxious to acquire all the existing portraits of his pre-decessor. He had therefore instructed Turner to purchase any such portraits as he could find before they could be exploited by the other side. The Druce camp was desperate to do the same. The race to acquire portraits of the 5th Duke created a lively trade for art dealers, many of whom shuttled between
one side and the other, in a bid to drive up prices. The 6th Duke was also eager to track down any pictures commissioned by his predecessor, including the portraits of Adelaide Kemble by John Hayter. In particular, he had told Turner that it was imperative to find a series of paintings of Adelaide in an opera with the enigmatic title of
The Secret Marriage
. (Adelaide had performed in an English version of Domenico Cimarosa’s opera,
ll matrimonio segreto,
in 1842.) Strenuous efforts were therefore made to track down the
Secret Marriage
paintings, and when practically all of Hayter’s paintings of Adelaide were finally found, they were kept under lock and key in the abbey.

How, Turner wondered, was he to prove that the alleged photograph of the 5th Duke touted about by the Druce contingent never hung in Welbeck Abbey? Certainly, it was not listed in any of the detailed catalogues of the Welbeck collection that had been produced by successive curators. The position was complicated by the fact that the 5th Duke – in characteristically eccentric fashion – had taken it into his head to make a bonfire of a sizeable number of the abbey paintings in 1864. Richard Goulding, the librarian at Welbeck, had been assigned the task of investigating the burning, and had calculated that approximately eighty to a hundred pictures had been torched. Most of those that had been burned, Goulding told Turner, were much dilapidated, or appeared to have represented nude figures. He showed Turner a pencilled note made by Charles Taylor, the Welbeck curator at the time, in the margins of a catalogue of the collection, next to the entry for a painting called
Nude Figures Sleeping
:

May 30th 1864. My son John tells me that the Duke is burning pictures; I suppose it will be such as this – which was only fit to burn. It was more than I had power to do.

But Turner could see that it was going to be virtually impossible to prove that the portrait paraded by the Druce contingent was not one of those that had gone up in flames. There was no doubt that the 5th Duke detested being portrayed in visual form: in 1876 he had even dismissed three workmen who had dared send a caricature of him to a local newspaper. Sighing, Turner turned his attention to a much more exciting prospect – the promised visit to Welbeck, in the coming weeks, of the famous detective, Walter Dew, to further his investigations.

*

The object of Turner’s excited anticipation, meanwhile, had just received a telegram that sent him immediately to the Home Office. On 21 December 1907, Walter Dew was informed that the SS
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
had docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, and that Robert Caldwell had been arrested on disembarkation, at the request of the British authorities.

*
  
A form of sleeveless weatherproof overcoat.

‘Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite… Aye, and even in genteel families, in high families, in great families… and you have no idea… what games goes on!’

C
HARLES
D
ICKENS

Bleak House

Chief Inspector Dew’s triumph at engineering the arrest of Robert Caldwell on his arrival in America was short-lived. For the old man, ever-resourceful, managed to get himself released on $5000 bail, for reasons of ill health. And worse was to follow. On 14 February 1908, Caldwell’s daughter filed a petition asking that her father be declared a lunatic. On the same day, two doctors swore before the Commissioner of Deeds in the city of New York that Caldwell was insane. The doctors’ reports were hardly a ringing endorsement of Caldwell’s reliability as a witness. According to one, ‘Robert Caldwell gave a history of suffering from hallucinatory episodes and described hallucinations of fantastic and terrifying character.’ The doctor was, moreover, of the opinion that he was ‘suffering from paranoia, and had been so suffering
for the past year or more
’. ‘My father’, Caldwell’s daughter stated, ‘has always exhibited a marked
tendency to claim intimate and cordial relations with various prominent men, and to have knowledge of important facts regarding conspicuous trials or mysteries, which may have from time to time been given widespread notice in the public press.’ She added that, when her father first told her about his intimacy with the 5th Duke of Portland and his curing of the Duke’s diseased nose, she had thought him quite mad; but the fact that his story was corroborated by lawyers from England had convinced her that it was true.

The upshot was that far from being handed over to the British authorities for extradition and trial for perjury in England, Robert Caldwell languished in the sprawling, Gothic monolith of the Manhattan Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island, surrounded by the shrieks and groans of New York’s demented. Meanwhile, the legal wrangling continued over whether he was in a fit state to be deported to England. Dr William Mabon, the superintendent of the Manhattan State Hospital, was an alienist of note and a plain-speaking New Yorker who was not about to be bullied by the British Consu-lar authorities. ‘Our examination of the patient’, Mabon declared in his report, ‘reveals a man in advanced years, who shows evidence of senile changes, namely, arterial thickening, muscular weakness, and such physical condition as requires his nearly continuous confinement to bed.’ The patient made ‘statements regarding the Druce case which appear to have some foundation, but, reasoning on false grounds, he has apparently taken on a well-fixed delusional formation’. Mabon added – apparently without a hint of irony – that Caldwell also had ‘some defect in his grasp on recent historical events’.

Faced with the unattractive prospect of forcing the
extradition of a sick old man who might well expire on their watch and cause an embarrassing public scandal, the Home Office authorities – despite the strong protestations of Inspector Dew, Freshfields and the 6th Duke’s solicitors – were inclined to back down. There were also the not insignificant costs of a protracted legal battle to consider, which the Home Office was reluctant to incur.

Dew paced the leafy embankment fronting New Scotland Yard, grimacing with frustration. A bitter January wind cut through the oil-cloth cloak that he pulled tightly around his hunched shoulders. Ahead of him, the River Thames was in even greater tumult than usual, heaving with a mass of barges and packet boats that were busy ferrying stocks and supplies to the newly established stadium at White City, built to host that year’s Olympic Games. Dew glared at the river steamers that endlessly ferried thousands of London commuters to and from their daily business. The wretched old man, Caldwell, was a fraud – there was no doubt about it. Dew had just received a statement from a Mr Joseph Roulston, a fellow passenger on Caldwell’s voyage from New York to England on board the SS
Minnetonka
in 1907, when Caldwell was coming to England to give evidence in court. The statement related that Caldwell had spent much of that journey talking about his time in Londonderry. Dew had also interviewed the daughter of the late Captain Joyce, the army officer whom Caldwell claimed had cured him of a bulbous nose in India. She was adamant that her father had never set foot in India, and the records showed that Joyce had been in Gibraltar throughout the time of which Caldwell had spoken. And then there was Caldwell’s preposterous claim of having been consulted by
the then teenage surgeon-in-training, Sir Morell Mackenzie.

Dew shook his fist at a four-wheeled cab, which had carelessly splashed his blue serge suit with gutter water in passing. If the general public only knew how frustrating the detective business was, there would be none of this fascination with Sherlock Holmes and the like. But Dew was soon to have better success in his hunt for the conspirators. Another of the Druce party’s witnesses was about to fall into his net.

*

Thomas Warner Turner beamed with satisfaction as he read over the telegram that was handed to him by Horseman Bailey, the 6th Duke’s solicitor. He could hardly think of three words that would have given him greater pleasure. The telegram was from J. G. Littlechild, one of the private investigators tailing the Druce party on the Duke’s behalf. It read simply: ‘Woman just arrested.’ The terse words glossed over the high drama of what had happened on Friday, 17 January 1908, in the normally quiet suburban streets of Lavender Hill, south London. That morning, a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Miss Mary Robinson, the second key witness in the Druce case. She it was who had testified to being the duke’s amanuensis, or ‘outdoor secretary’, and to have seen Druce/the duke as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in a show of amateur theatricals. All that day, Detective Inspector Walter Dew had kept a close eye on the rented flat in Lavender Hill in which Miss Robinson and her companion, Miss O’Neill, had been staying. He was armed with his warrant. Finally, at 8 p.m., he and a fellow officer had forced their way into the property.