IV: — A MODEL FOR MR HOGARTH
On a Sunday, the 5th of February, 1733, there came toddling into that narrow passage of the Temple known as Tanfield Court an elderly lady by the name of Mrs Love. It was just after one o'clock of the afternoon. The giants of St Dunstan's behind her had only a minute before rapped out the hour with their clubs.
Mrs Love's business was at once charitable and social. She was going, by appointment made on the previous Friday night, to eat dinner with a frail old lady named Mrs Duncomb, who lived in chambers on the third floor of one of the buildings that had entry from the court. Mrs Duncomb was the widow of a law stationer of the City. She had been a widow for a good number of years. The deceased law stationer, if he had not left her rich, at least had left her in fairly comfortable circumstances. It was said about the environs that she had some property, and this fact, combined with the other that she was obviously nearing the end of life's journey, made her an object of melancholy interest to the womenkind of the neighbourhood.
Mrs Duncomb was looked after by a couple of servants. One of them, Betty Harrison, had been the old lady's companion for a lifetime. Mrs Duncomb, described as "old," was only sixty.[16] Her weakness and bodily condition seem to have made her appear much older. Betty, then, also described as "old," may have been of an age with her mistress, or even older. She was, at all events, not by much less frail. The other servant was a comparatively new addition to the establishment, a fresh little girl of about seventeen, Ann (or Nanny) Price by name.
Mrs Love climbed the three flights of stairs to the top landing. It surprised her, or disturbed her, but little that she found no signs of life on the various floors, because it was, as we have seen, a Sunday. The occupants of the chambers of the staircase, mostly gentlemen connected in one way or another with the law, would be, she knew abroad for the eating of their Sunday dinners, either at their favourite taverns or at commons in the Temple itself. What did rather disturb kindly Mrs Love was the fact that she found Mrs Duncomb's outer door closed—an unwonted fact—and it faintly surprised her that no odour of cooking greeted her nostrils.
Mrs Love knocked. There was no reply. She knocked, indeed, at intervals over a period of some fifteen minutes, still obtaining no response. The disturbed sense of something being wrong became stronger and stronger in the mind of Mrs Love.
On the night of the previous Friday she had been calling upon Mrs Duncomb, and she had found the old lady very weak, very nervous, and very low in spirits. It had not been a very cheerful visit all round, because the old maidservant, Betty Harrison, had also been far from well. There had been a good deal of talk between the old women of dying, a subject to which their minds had been very prone to revert. Besides Mrs Love there were two other visitors, but they too failed to cheer the old couple up. One of the visitors, a laundress of the Temple called Mrs Oliphant, had done her best, poohpoohing such melancholy talk, and attributing the low spirits in which the old women found themselves to the bleakness of the February weather, and promising them that they would find a new lease of life with the advent of spring. But Mrs Betty especially had been hard to console.
"My mistress," she had said to cheerful Mrs Oliphant, "will talk of dying. And she would have me die with her."
As she stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the cheerless third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love found small matter for comfort in her memory of the Friday evening. She remembered that old Mrs Duncomb had spoken complainingly of the lonesomeness which had come upon her floor by the vacation of the chambers opposite her on the landing. The tenant had gone a day or two before, leaving the rooms empty of furniture, and the key with a Mr Twysden.
Mrs. Love, turning to view the door opposite to that on which she had been rapping so long and so ineffectively, had a shuddery feeling that she was alone on the top of the world.
She remembered how she had left Mrs Duncomb on the Friday night. Mrs Oliphant had departed first, accompanied by the second visitor, one Sarah Malcolm, a charwoman who had worked for Mrs Duncomb up to the previous Christmas, and who had called in to see how her former employer was faring. An odd, silent sort of young woman this Sarah, good-looking in a hardfeatured sort of way, she had taken but a very small part in the conversation, but had sat staring rather sullenly into the fire by the side of Betty Harrison, or else casting a flickering glance about the room. Mrs Love, before following the other two women downstairs, had helped the ailing Betty to get Mrs Duncomb settled for the night. In the dim candle-light and the faint glow of the fire that scarce illumined the wainscoted room the high tester-bed of the old lady, with its curtains, had seemed like a shadowed catafalque, an illusion nothing lessened by the frail old figure under the bedclothing.
It came to the mind of Mrs Love that the illness manifesting itself in Betty on the Friday night had worsened. Nanny, she imagined, must have gone abroad on some errand. The old servant, she thought, was too ill to come to the door, and her voice would be too weak to convey an answer to the knocking. Mrs Love, not without a shudder for the chill feeling of that top landing, betook herself downstairs again to make what inquiry she might. It happened that she met one of her fellow-visitors of the Friday night, Mrs Oliphant.
Mrs Oliphant was sympathetic, but could not give any information. She had seen no member of the old lady's establishment that day. She could only advise Mrs Love to go upstairs again and knock louder.
This Mrs Love did, but again got no reply. She then evolved the theory that Betty had died during the night, and that Nanny, Mrs Duncomb being confined to bed, had gone to look for help, possibly from her sister, and to find a woman who would lay out the body of the old servant. With this in her mind Mrs Love descended the stairs once more, and went to look for another friend of Mrs Duncomb's, a Mrs Rhymer.
Mrs Rhymer was a friend of the old lady's of some thirty years' standing. She was, indeed, named as executrix in Mrs Duncomb's will. Mrs Love finding her and explaining the situation as she saw it, Mrs Rhymer at once returned with Mrs Love to Tanfield Court.
The two women ascended the stairs, and tried pushing the old lady's door. It refused to yield to their efforts. Then Mrs Love went to the staircase window that overlooked the court, and gazed around to see if there was anyone about who might help. Some distance away, at the door, we are told, "of my Lord Bishop of Bangor," was the third of Friday night's visitors to Mrs Duncomb, the charwoman named Sarah Malcolm. Mrs Love hailed her.
"Prithee, Sarah," begged Mrs Love, "go and fetch a smith to open Mrs Duncomb's door."
"I will go at all speed," Sarah assured her, with ready willingness, and off she sped. Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer waited some time. Sarah came back with Mrs Oliphant in tow, but had been unable to secure the services of a locksmith. This was probably due to the fact that it was a Sunday.
By now both Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer had become deeply apprehensive, and the former appealed to Mrs Oliphant. "I do believe they are all dead, and the smith is not come!" cried Mrs Love. "What shall we do, Mrs Oliphant?"
Mrs Oliphant, much younger than the others, seems to have been a woman of resource. She had from Mr Twysden, she said, the key of the vacant chambers opposite to Mrs Duncomb's. "Now let me see," she continued, "if I cannot get out of the back chamber window into the gutter, and so into Mrs Duncomb's apartment."
The other women urged her to try.[17] Mrs Oliphant set off, her heels echoing in the empty rooms. Presently the waiting women heard a pane snap, and they guessed that Mrs Oliphant had broken through Mrs Duncomb's casement to get at the handle. They heard, through the door, the noise of furniture being moved as she got through the window. Then came a shriek, the scuffle of feet. The outer door of Mrs Duncomb's chambers was flung open. Mrs Oliphant, ashen-faced, appeared on the landing. "God! Oh, gracious God!" she cried. "They're all murdered!"
II
All four women pressed into the chambers. All three of the women occupying them had been murdered. In the passage or lobby little Nanny Price lay in her bed in a welter of blood, her throat savagely cut. Her hair was loose and over her eyes, her clenched hands all bloodied about her throat. It was apparent that she had struggled desperately for life. Next door, in the dining-room, old Betty Harrison lay across the press-bed in which she usually slept. Being in the habit of keeping her gown on for warmth, as it was said, she was partially dressed. She had been strangled, it seemed, "with an apron-string or a pack-thread," for there was a deep crease about her neck and the bruised indentations as of knuckles. In her bedroom, also across her bed, lay the dead body of old Mrs Duncomb. There had been here also an attempt to strangle, an unnecessary attempt it appeared, for the crease about the neck was very faint. Frail as the old lady had been, the mere weight of the murderer's body, it was conjectured, had been enough to kill her.
These pathological details were established on the arrival later of Mr Bigg, the surgeon, fetched from the Rainbow Coffee-house near by by Fairlow, one of the Temple porters. But the four women could see enough for themselves, without the help of Mr Bigg, to understand how death had been dealt in all three cases. They could see quite clearly also for what motive the crime had been committed. A black strong-box, with papers scattered about it, lay beside Mrs Duncomb's bed, its lid forced open. It was in this box that the old lady had been accustomed to keep her money.
If any witness had been needed to say what the black box had contained there was Mrs Rhymer, executrix under the old lady's will. And if Mrs. Rhymer had been at any need to refresh her memory regarding the contents opportunity had been given her no farther back than the afternoon of the previous Thursday. On that day she had called upon Mrs Duncomb to take tea and to talk affairs. Three or four years before, with her rapidly increasing frailness, the old lady's memory had begun to fail. Mrs Rhymer acted for her as a sort of unofficial curator bonis, receiving her money and depositing it in the black box, of which she kept the key.
On the Thursday, old Betty and young Nanny being sent from the room, the old lady had told Mrs Rhymer that she needed some money—a guinea. Mrs Rhymer had gone through the solemn process of opening the black box, and, one must suppose—old ladies nearing their end being what they are—had been at need to tell over the contents of the box for the hundredth time, just to reassure Mrs Duncomb that she thoroughly understood the duties she had agreed to undertake as executrix
At the top of the box was a silver tankard. It had belonged to Mrs Duncomb's husband. In the tankard was a hundred pounds. Beside the tankard lay a bag containing guinea pieces to the number of twenty or so. This was the bag that Mrs Rhymer had carried over to the old lady's chair by the fire, in order to take from it the needed guinea.
There were some half-dozen packets of money in the box, each sealed with black wax and set aside for particular purposes after Mrs Duncomb's death. Other sums, greater in quantity than those contained in the packets, were earmarked in the same way. There was, for example, twenty guineas set aside for the old lady's burial, eighteen moidores to meet unforeseen contingencies, and in a green purse some thirty or forty shillings, which were to be distributed among poor people of Mrs Duncomb's acquaintance. The ritual of telling over the box contents, if something ghostly, had had its usual effect of comforting the old lady's mind. It consoled her to know that all arrangements were in order for her passing in genteel fashion to her long home, that all the decorums of respectable demise would be observed, and that "the greatest of these" would not be forgotten. The ritual over, the black box was closed and locked, and on her departure Mrs Rhymer had taken away the key as usual.
The motive for the crime, as said, was plain. The black box had been forced, and there was no sign of tankard, packets, green purse, or bag of guineas.
The horror and distress of the old lady's friends that Sunday afternoon may better be imagined than described. Loudest of the four, we are told, was Sarah Malcolm. It is also said that she was, however, the coolest, keen to point out the various methods by which the murderers (for the crime to her did not look like a single-handed effort) could have got into the chambers. She drew attention to the wideness of the kitchen chimney and to the weakness of the lock in the door to the vacant rooms on the other side of the landing. She also pointed out that, since the bolt of the spring-lock of the outer door to Mrs Duncomb's rooms had been engaged when they arrived, the miscreants could not have used that exit.
This last piece of deduction on Sarah's part, however, was made rather negligible by experiments presently carried out by the porter, Fairlow, with the aid of a piece of string. He showed that a person outside the shut door could quite easily pull the bolt to on the inside.
The news of the triple murder quickly spread, and it was not long before a crowd had collected in Tanfield Court, up the stairs to Mrs. Duncomb's landing, and round about the door of Mrs Duncomb's chambers. It did not disperse until the officers had made their investigations and the bodies of the three victims had been removed. And even then, one may be sure, there would still be a few of those odd sort of people hanging about who, in those times as in these, must linger on the scene of a crime long after the last drop of interest has evaporated.
III
Two further actors now come upon the scene. And for the proper grasping of events we must go back an hour or two in time to notice their activities.
They are a Mr Gehagan, a young Irish barrister, and a friend of his named Kerrel.[18] These young men occupy chambers on opposite sides of the same landing, the third floor, over the Alienation Office in Tanfield Court.
Mr Gehagan was one of Sarah Malcolm's employers. That Sunday morning at nine she had appeared in his rooms to do them up and to light the fire. While Gehagan was talking to Sarah he was joined by his friend Kerrel, who offered to stand him some tea. Sarah was given a shilling and sent out to buy tea. She returned and made the brew, then remained about the chambers until the horn blew, as was then the Temple custom, for commons. The two young men departed. After commons they walked for a while in the Temple Gardens, then returned to Tanfield Court.
By this time the crowd attracted by the murder was blocking up the court, and Gehagan asked what was the matter. He was told of the murder, and he remarked to Kerrel that the old lady had been their charwoman's acquaintance.
The two friends then made their way to a coffee-house in Covent Garden. There was some talk there of the murder, and the theory was advanced by some one that it could have been done only by some laundress who knew the chambers and how to get in and out of them. From Covent Garden, towards night, Gehagan and Kerrel went to a tavern in Essex Street, and there they stayed carousing until one o'clock in the morning, when they left for the Temple. They were not a little astonished on reaching their common landing to find Kerrel's door open, a fire burning in the grate of his room, and a candle on the table. By the fire, with a dark riding-hood about her head, was Sarah Malcolm. To Kerrel's natural question of what she was doing there at such an unearthly hour she muttered something about having things to collect. Kerrel then, reminding her that Mrs Duncomb had been her acquaintance, asked her if anyone had been "taken up" for the murder.
"That Mr Knight," Sarah replied, "who has chambers under her, has been absent two or three days. He is suspected."
"Well," said Kerrel, remembering the theory put forward in the coffee-house, and made suspicious by her presence at that strange hour, "nobody that was acquainted with Mrs Duncomb is wanted here until the murderer is discovered. Look out your things, therefore, and begone!"
Kerrel's suspicion thickened, and he asked his friend to run downstairs and call up the watch. Gehagan ran down, but found difficulty in opening the door below, and had to return. Kerrel himself went down then, and came back with two watchmen. They found Sarah in the bedroom at a chest of drawers, in which she was turning over some linen that she claimed to be hers. The now completely suspicious Kerrel went to his closet, and noticed that two or three waistcoats were missing from a portmanteau. He asked Sarah where they were; upon which Sarah, with an eye to the watchmen and to Gehagan, begged to be allowed to speak with him alone.
Kerrel refused, saying he could have no business with her that was secret.
Sarah then confessed that she had pawned the missing waistcoats for two guineas, and begged him not to be angry. Kerrel asked her why she had not asked him for money. He could readily forgive her for pawning the waistcoats, but, having heard her talk of Mrs Lydia Duncomb, he was afraid she was concerned with the murder. A pair of earrings were found in the drawers, and these Sarah claimed, putting them in her corsage. An odd-looking bundle in the closet then attracted Kerrel's attention, and he kicked it, and asked Sarah what it was. She said it was merely dirty linen wrapped up in an old gown. She did not wish it exposed. Kerrel made further search, and found that other things were missing. He told the watch to take the woman and hold her strictly.
Sarah was led away. Kerrel, now thoroughly roused, continued his search, and he found underneath his bed another bundle. He also came upon some bloodstained linen in another place, and in a close-stool a silver tankard, upon the handle of which was a lot of dried blood.
Kerrel's excitement passed to Gehagan, and the two of them went at speed downstairs yelling for the watch. After a little the two watchmen reappeared, but without Sarah. They had let her go, they said, because they had found nothing on her, and, besides, she had not been charged before a constable.
One here comes upon a recital by the watchmen which reveals the extraordinary slackness in dealing with suspect persons that characterized the guardians of the peace in London in those times. They had let the woman go, but she had come back. Her home was in Shoreditch, she said, and rather than walk all that way on a cold and boisterous night she had wanted to sit up in the watch-house. The watchmen refused to let her do this, but ordered her to "go about her business," advising her sternly at the same time to turn up again by ten o'clock in the morning. Sarah had given her word, and had gone away.
On hearing this story Kerrel became very angry, threatening the two watchmen, Hughes and Mastreter, with Newgate if they did not pick her up again immediately. Upon this the watchmen scurried off as quickly as their age and the cumbrous nature of their clothing would let them. They found Sarah in the company of two other watchmen at the gate of the Temple. Hughes, as a means of persuading her to go with them more easily, told her that Kerrel wanted to speak with her, and that he was not angry any longer. Presently, in Tanfield Court, they came on the two young men carrying the tankard and the bloodied linen. This time it was Gehagan who did the talking. He accused Sarah furiously, showing her the tankard. Sarah attempted to wipe the blood off the tankard handle with her apron. Gehagan stopped her.
Sarah said the tankard was her own. Her mother had given it her, and she had had it for five years. It was to get the tankard out of pawn that she had taken Kerrel's waistcoats, needing thirty shillings. The blood on the handle was due to her having pricked a finger.
With this began the series of lies Sarah Malcolm put up in her defence. She was hauled into the watchman's box and more thoroughly searched. A green silk purse containing twenty-one guineas was found in the bosom of her dress. This purse Sarah declared she had found in the street, and as an excuse for its cleanliness, unlikely with the streets as foul as they were at that age and time of year, said she had washed it. Both bundles of linen were bloodstained. There was some doubt as to the identity of the green purse. Mrs Rhymer, who, as we have seen, was likelier than anyone to recognize it, would not swear it was the green purse that had been in Mrs Duncomb's black box. There was, however, no doubt at all about the tankard. It had the initials "C. D." engraved upon it, and was at once identified as Mrs Duncomb's. The linen which Sarah had been handling in Mr Kerrel's drawer was said to be darned in a way recognizable as Mrs Duncomb's. It had lain beside the tankard and the money in the black box.
IV
There was, it will be seen, but very little doubt of Sarah Malcolm's guilt. According to the reports of her trial, however, she fought fiercely for her life, questioning the witnesses closely. Some of them, such as could remember small points against her, but who failed in recollection of the colour of her dress or of the exact number of the coins said to be lost, she vehemently denounced.
One of the Newgate turnkeys told how some of the missing money was discovered. Being brought from the Compter to Newgate, Sarah happened to see a room in which debtors were confined. She asked the turnkey, Roger Johnson, if she could be kept there. Johnson replied that it would cost her a guinea, but that from her appearance it did not look to him as if she could afford so much. Sarah seems to have bragged then, saying that if the charge was twice or thrice as much she could send for a friend who would pay it. Her attitude probably made the turnkey suspicious. At any rate, after Sarah had mixed for some time with the felons in the prison taproom, Johnson called her out and, lighting the way by use of a link, led her to an empty room.
"Child," he said, "there is reason to suspect that you are guilty of this murder, and therefore I have orders to search you." He had, he admitted, no such orders. He felt under her arms; whereupon she started and threw back her head. Johnson clapped his hand on her head and felt something hard. He pulled off her cap, and found a bag of money in her hair.
"I asked her," Johnson said in the witness-box, "how she came by it, and she said it was some of Mrs Duncomb's money. 'But, Mr Johnson,' says she, 'I'll make you a present of it if you will keep it to yourself, and let nobody know anything of the matter. The other things against me are nothing but circumstances, and I shall come well enough off. And therefore I only desire you to let me have threepence or sixpence a day till the sessions be over; then I shall be at liberty to shift for myself.'"
To the best of his knowledge, said this turnkey, having told the money over, there were twenty moidores, eighteen guineas, five broad pieces, a half-broad piece, five crowns, and two or three shillings. He thought there was also a twenty-five-shilling piece and some others, twenty-three-shilling pieces. He had sealed them up in the bag, and there they were (producing the bag in court).
The court asked how she said she had come by the money.
Johnson's answer was that she had said she took the money and the bag from Mrs Duncomb, and that she had begged him to keep it secret. "My dear," said this virtuous gaoler, "I would not secrete the money for the world.
"She told me, too," runs Johnson's recorded testimony, "that she had hired three men to swear the tankard was her grandmother's, but could not depend on them: that the name of one was William Denny, another was Smith, and I have forgot the third. After I had taken the money away she put a piece of mattress in her hair, that it might appear of the same bulk as before. Then I locked her up and sent to Mr Alstone, and told him the story. 'And,' says I, 'do you stand in a dark place to be witness of what she says, and I'll go and examine her again."'
Sarah interrupted: "I tied my handkerchief over my hair to hide the money, but Buck,[19] happening to see my hair fall down, he told Johnson; upon which Johnson came to see me and said, 'I find the cole's planted in your hair. Let me keep it for you and let Buck know nothing about it.' So I gave Johnson five broad pieces and twenty-two guineas, not gratis, but only to keep for me, for I expected it to be returned when sessions was over. As to the money, I never said I took it from Mrs Duncomb; but he asked me what they had to rap against me. I told him only a tankard. He asked me if it was Mrs Duncomb's, and I said yes."
The Court: "Johnson, were those her words: 'This is the money and bag that I took'?"
Johnson: "Yes, and she desired me to make away with the bag."
Johnson's evidence was confirmed in part by Alstone, another officer of the prison. He said he told Johnson to get the bag from the prisoner, as it might have something about it whereby it could be identified. Johnson called the girl, while Alstone watched from a dark corner. He saw Sarah give Johnson the bag, and heard her ask him to burn it. Alstone also deposed that Sarah told him (Alstone) part of the money found on her was Mrs Duncomb's.
There is no need here to enlarge upon the oddly slack and casual conditions of the prison life of the time as revealed in this evidence. It will be no news to anyone who has studied contemporary criminal history. There is a point, however, that may be considered here, and that is the familiarity it suggests on the part of Sarah with prison conditions and with the cant terms employed by criminals and the people handling them.
Sarah, though still in her earliest twenties,[20] was known already—if not in the Temple—to have a bad reputation. It is said that her closest friends were thieves of the worst sort. She was the daughter of an Englishman, at one time a public official in a small way in Dublin. Her father had come to London with his wife and daughter, but on the death of the mother had gone back to Ireland. He had left his daughter behind him, servant in an ale-house called the Black Horse.
Sarah was a fairly well-educated girl. At the ale-house, however, she formed an acquaintance with a woman named Mary Tracey, a dissolute character, and with two thieves called Alexander. Of these three disreputable people we shall be hearing presently, for Sarah tried to implicate them in this crime which she certainly committed alone. It is said that the Newgate officers recognized Sarah on her arrival. She had often been to the prison to visit an Irish thief, convicted for stealing the pack of a Scots pedlar.
It will be seen from Sarah's own defence how she tried to implicate Tracey and the two Alexanders:
"I freely own that my crimes deserve death; I own that I was accessory to the robbery, but I was innocent of the murder, and will give an account of the whole affair.
"I lived with Mrs Lydia Duncomb about three months before she was murdered. The robbery was contrived by Mary Tracey, who is now in confinement, and myself, my own vicious inclinations agreeing with hers. We likewise proposed to rob Mr Oakes in Thames Street. She came to me at my master's, Mr Kerrel's chambers, on the Sunday before the murder was committed; he not being then at home, we talked about robbing Mrs Duncomb. I told her I could not pretend to do it by myself, for I should be found out. 'No,' says she, 'there are the two Alexanders will help us.' Next day I had seventeen pounds sent me out of the country, which I left in Mr Kerrel's drawers. I met them all in Cheapside the following Friday, and we agreed on the next night, and so parted.
"Next day, being Saturday, I went between seven and eight in the evening to see Mrs Duncomb's maid, Elizabeth Harrison, who was very bad. I stayed a little while with her, and went down, and Mary Tracey and the two Alexanders came to me about ten o'clock, according to appointment."
On this statement the whole implication of Tracey and the Alexanders by Sarah stands or falls. It falls for the reason that the Temple porter had seen no stranger pass the gate that night, nobody but Templars going to their chambers. The one fact riddles the rest of Sarah's statement in defence, but, as it is somewhat of a masterpiece in lying invention, I shall continue to quote it. "Mary Tracey would have gone about the robbery just then, but I said it was too soon. Between ten and eleven she said, 'We can do it now.' I told her I would go and see, and so went upstairs, and they followed me. I met the young maid on the stairs with a blue mug; she was going for some milk to make a sack posset. She asked me who were those that came after me. I told her they were people going to Mr Knight's below. As soon as she was gone I said to Mary Tracey, 'Now do you and Tom Alexander go down. I know the door is ajar, because the old maid is ill, and can't get up to let the young maid in when she comes back.' Upon that, James Alexander, by my order, went in and hid himself under the bed; and as I was going down myself I met the young maid coming up again. She asked me if I spoke to Mrs Betty. I told her no; though I should have told her otherwise, but only that I was afraid she might say something to Mrs Betty about me, and Mrs Betty might tell her I had not been there, and so they might have a suspicion of me."
There is a possibility that this part of her confession, the tale of having met the young maid, Nanny, may be true.[21] And here may the truth of the murder be hidden away. Very likely it is, indeed, that Sarah encountered the girl going out with the blue mug for milk to make a sack posset, and she may have slipped in by the open door to hide under the bed until the moment was ripe for her terrible intention. On the other hand, if there is truth in the tale of her encountering the girl again as she returned with the milk—and her cunning in answering "no" to the maid's query if she had seen Mrs Betty has the real ring—other ways of getting an entry were open to her. We know that the lock of the vacant chambers opposite Mrs Duncomb's would have yielded to small manipulation. It is not at all unlikely that Sarah, having been charwoman to the old lady, and with the propensities picked up from her Shoreditch acquaintances, had made herself familiar with the locks on the landing. So that she may have waited her hour in the empty rooms, and have got into Mrs Duncomb's by the same method used by Mrs Oliphant after the murder. She may even have slipped back the spring-catch of the outer door. One account of the murder suggests that she may have asked Ann Price, on one pretext or other, to let her share her bed. It certainly was not beyond the callousness of Sarah Malcolm to have chosen this method, murdering the girl in her sleep, and then going on to finish off the two helpless old women.
The truth, as I have said, lies hidden in this extraordinarily mendacious confection. Liars of Sarah's quality are apt to base their fabrications on a structure, however slight, of truth. I continue with the confession, then, for what the reader may get out of it.
"I passed her [Nanny Price] and went down, and spoke with Tracey and Alexander, and then went to my master's chambers, and stirred up the fire. I stayed about a quarter of an hour, and when I came back I saw Tracey and Tom Alexander sitting on Mrs Duncomb's stairs, and I sat down with them. At twelve o'clock we heard some people walking, and by and by Mr Knight came home, went to his room, and shut the door. It was a very stormy night; there was hardly anybody stirring abroad, and the watchmen kept up close, except just when they cried the hour. At two o'clock another gentleman came, and called the watch to light his candle, upon which I went farther upstairs, and soon after this I heard Mrs Duncomb's door open; James Alexander came out, and said, 'Now is the time.' Then Mary Tracey and Thomas Alexander went in, but I stayed upon the stair to watch. I had told them where Mrs Duncomb's box stood. They came out between four and five, and one of them called to me softly, and said, 'Hip! How shall I shut the door?' Says I, ''Tis a spring-lock; pull it to, and it will be fast.' And so one of them did. They would have shared the money and goods upon the stairs, but I told them we had better go down; so we went under the arch by Fig-tree Court, where there was a lamp. I asked them how much they had got. They said they had found fifty guineas and some silver in the maid's purse, about one hundred pounds in the chest of drawers, besides the silver tankard and the money in the box and several other things; so that in all they had got to the value of about three hundred pounds in money and goods. They told me that they had been forced to gag the people. They gave me the tankard with what was in it and some linen for my share, and they had a silver spoon and a ring and the rest of the money among themselves. They advised me to be cunning and plant the money and goods underground, and not to be seen to be flush. Then we appointed to meet at Greenwich, but we did not go.[22]
"I was taken in the manner the witnesses have sworn, and carried to the watch-house, from whence I was sent to the Compter, and so to Newgate. I own that I said the tankard was mine, and that it was left me by my mother: several witnesses have swore what account I gave of the tankard being bloody; I had hurt my finger, and that was the occasion of it. I am sure of death, and therefore have no occasion to speak anything but the truth. When I was in the Compter I happened to see a young man[23] whom I knew, with a fetter on. I told him I was sorry to see him there, and I gave him a shilling, and called for half a quartern of rum to make him drink. I afterwards went into my room, and heard a voice call me, and perceived something poking behind the curtain. I was a little surprised, and looking to see what it was, I found a hole in the wall, through which the young man I had given the shilling to spoke to me, and asked me if I had sent for my friends. I told him no. He said he would do what he could for me, and so went away; and some time after he called to me again, and said, 'Here is a friend.'
"I looked through, and saw Will Gibbs come in. Says he, 'Who is there to swear against you?' I told him my two masters would be the chief witnesses. 'And what can they charge you with?' says he. I told him the tankard was the only thing, for there was nothing else that I thought could hurt me. 'Never fear, then,' says he; 'we'll do well enough. We will get them that will rap the tankard was your grandmother's, and that you was in Shoreditch the night the act was committed; and we'll have two men that shall shoot your masters. But,' said he, 'one of the witnesses is a woman, and she won't swear under four guineas; but the men will swear for two guineas apiece,' and he brought a woman and three men. I gave them ten guineas, and they promised to wait for me at the Bull Head in Broad Street. But when I called for them, when I was going before Sir Richard Brocas, they were not there. Then I found I should be sent to Newgate, and I was full of anxious thoughts; but a young man told me I had better go to the Whit than to the Compter.
"When I came to Newgate I had but eighteenpence in silver, besides the money in my hair, and I gave eighteenpence for my garnish. I was ordered to a high place in the gaol. Buck, as I said before, having seen my hair loose, told Johnson of it, and Johnson asked me if I had got any cole planted there. He searched and found the bag, and there was in it thirty-six moidores, eighteen guineas, five crown pieces, two half-crowns, two broad pieces of twenty-five shillings, four of twenty-three shillings, and one half-broad piece. He told me I must be cunning, and not to be seen to be flush of money. Says I, 'What would you advise me to do with it?' 'Why,' says he, 'you might have thrown it down the sink, or have burnt it, but give it to me, and I'll take care of it.' And so I gave it to him. Mr Alstone then brought me to the condemned hold and examined me. I denied all till I found he had heard of the money, and then I knew my life was gone. And therefore I confessed all that I knew. I gave him the same account of the robbers as I have given you. I told him I heard my masters were to be shot, and I desired him to send them word. I described Tracey and the two Alexanders, and when they were first taken they denied that they knew Mr Oakes, whom they and I had agreed to rob.
"All that I have now declared is fact, and I have no occasion to murder three persons on a false accusation; for I know I am a condemned woman. I know I must suffer an ignominious death which my crimes deserve, and I shall suffer willingly. I thank God He has given me time to repent, when I might have been snatched off in the midst of my crimes, and without having an opportunity of preparing myself for another world." There is a glibness and an occasional turn of phrase in this confession which suggests some touching up from the pen of a pamphleteer, but one may take it that it is, in substance, a fairly accurate report. In spite of the pleading which threads it that she should be regarded as accessory only in the robbery, the jury took something less than a quarter of an hour to come back with their verdict of "Guilty of murder." Sarah Malcolm was sentenced to death in due form.
V
Having regard to the period in which this confession was made, and considering the not too savoury reputations of Mary Tracey and the brothers Alexander, we can believe that those three may well have thought themselves lucky to escape from the mesh of lies Sarah tried to weave about them.[24] It was not to be doubted on all the evidence that she alone committed that cruel triple murder, and that she alone stole the money which was found hidden in her hair. The bulk of the stolen clothing was found in her possession, bloodstained. A white-handled case-knife, presumably that used to cut Nanny Price's throat, was seen on a table by the three women who, with Sarah herself, were first on the scene of the murder. It disappeared later, and it is to be surmised that Sarah Malcolm managed to get it out of the room unseen. But to the last moment possible Sarah tried to get her three friends involved with her. Say, which is not at all unlikely, that Tracey and the Alexanders may have first suggested the robbery to her, and her vindictive maneouvring may be understood.
It is said that when she heard that Tracey and the Alexanders had been taken she was highly pleased. She smiled, and said that she could now die happy, since the real murderers had been seized. Even when the three were brought face to face with her for identification she did not lack brazenness. "Ay," she said, "these are the persons who committed the murder." "You know this to be true," she said to Tracey. "See, Mary, what you have brought me to. It is through you and the two Alexanders that I am brought to this shame, and must die for it. You all promised me you would do no murder, but, to my great surprise, I found the contrary."
She was, you will perceive, a determined liar. Condemned, she behaved with no fortitude. "I am a dead woman!" she cried, when brought back to Newgate. She wept and prayed, lied still more, pretended illness, and had fits of hysteria. They put her in the old condemned hold with a constant guard over her, for fear that she would attempt suicide.
The idlers of the town crowded to the prison to see her, for in the time of his Blessed Majesty King George II Newgate, with the condemned hold and its content, composed one of the fashionable spectacles. Young Mr Hogarth, the painter, was one of those who found occasion to visit Newgate to view the notorious murderess. He even painted her portrait. It is said that Sarah dressed specially for him in a red dress, but that copy—one which belonged to Horace Walpole—which is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, shows her in a grey gown, with a white cap and apron. Seated to the left, she leans her folded hands on a table on which a rosary and a crucifix lie. Behind her is a dark grey wall, with a heavy grating over a dark door to the right. There are varied mezzotints of this picture by Hogarth himself still extant, and there is a pen-and-wash drawing of Sarah by Samuel Wale in the British Museum.
The stories regarding the last days in life of Sarah Malcolm would occupy more pages than this book can afford to spend on them. To the last she hoped for a reprieve. After the "dead warrant" had arrived, to account for a paroxysm of terror that seized her, she said that it was from shame at the idea that, instead of going to Tyburn, she was to be hanged in Fleet Street among all the people that knew her, she having just heard the news in chapel. This too was one of her lies. She had heard the news hours before. A turnkey, pointing out the lie to her, urged her to confess for the easing of her mind.
One account I have of the Tanfield Court murders speaks of the custom there was at this time of the bellman of St Sepulchre's appearing outside the gratings of the condemned hold just after midnight on the morning of executions.[25] This performance was provided for by bequest from one Robert Dove, or Dow, a merchant-tailor. Having rung his bell to draw the attention of the condemned (who, it may be gathered, were not supposed to be at all in want of sleep), the bellman recited these verses:
All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray; the hour is drawing near
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t'eternal flames be sent:
And when St 'Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o'clock![26]
A fellow-prisoner or a keeper bade Sarah Malcolm heed what the bellman said, urging her to take it to heart. Sarah said she did, and threw the bellman down a shilling with which to buy himself a pint of wine.
Sarah, as we have seen, was denied the honour of procession to Tyburn. Her sentence was that she was to be hanged in Fleet Street, opposite the Mitre Court, on the 7th of March, 1733. And hanged she was accordingly. She fainted in the tumbril, and took some time to recover. Her last words were exemplary in their piety, but in the face of her vindictive lying, unretracted to the last, it were hardly exemplary to repeat them.
She was buried in the churchyard of St Sepulchre's.
V: — ALMOST A LADY[27]
Born (probably illegitimately) in a fisherman's cottage, reared in a workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal duke, mistress of that duke, married to a baron, received at Court by three kings (though not much in the way of kings), accused of cozenage and tacitly of murder, died full of piety, 'cutting up' for close on L150,000—there, as it were in a nutshell, you have the life of Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres.
In the introduction to her exhaustive and accomplished biography of Sophie Dawes,[28] from which a part of the matter for this resume is drawn, Mme Violette Montagu, speaking of the period in which Sophie lived, says that "Paris, with its fabulous wealth and luxury, seems to have been looked upon as a sort of Mecca by handsome Englishwomen with ambition and, what is absolutely necessary if they wish to be really successful, plenty of brains."
It is because Sophie had plenty of brains of a sort, besides the attributes of good looks, health, and by much a disproportionate share of determination, and because, with all that she attained to, she died quite ostracized by the people with whom it had been her life's ambition to mix, and was thus in a sense a failure—it is because of these things that it is worth while going into details of her career, expanding the precis with which this chapter begins.
Among the women selected as subjects for this book Sophie Dawes as a personality wins 'hands down.' Whether she was a criminal or not is a question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she certainly was, and a good deal of a rogue. That modern American product the 'gold-digger' is what she herself would call a 'piker' compared with the subject of this chapter. The blonde bombshell, with her 'sugar daddy,' her alimony 'racket,' and the hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels money and goods from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology, 'knocked for a row of ash-cans' by Sophie Dawes. As, I think, you will presently see.
Sophie was born at St Helens, Isle of Wight—according to herself in 1792. There is controversy on the matter. Mme Montagu in her book says that some of Sophie's biographers put the date at 1790, or even 1785. But Mme Montagu herself reproduces the list of wearing apparel with which Sophie was furnished when she left the 'house of industry' (the workhouse). It is dated 1805. In those days children were not maintained in poor institutions to the mature ages of fifteen or twenty. They were supposed to be armed against life's troubles at twelve or even younger. Sophie, then, could hardly have been born before 1792, but is quite likely to have been born later.
The name of Sophie's father is given as "Daw." Like many another celebrity, as, for example, Walter Raleigh and Shakespeare, Sophie spelled her name variously, though ultimately she fixed on "Dawes." Richard, or Dickey, Daw was a fisherman for appearance sake and a smuggler for preference. The question of Sophie's legitimacy anses from the fact that her mother, Jane Callaway, was registered at death as "a spinster." Sophie was one of ten children. Dickey Daw drank his family into the poorhouse, an institution which sent Sophie to fend for herself in 1805, procuring her a place as servant at a farm on the island.
Service on a farm does not appear to have appealed to Sophie. She escaped to Portsmouth, where she found a job as hotel chambermaid. Tiring of that, she went to London and became a milliner's assistant. A little affair we hear, in which a mere water-carrier was an equal participant, lost Sophie her place. We next have word of her imitating Nell Gwynn, both in selling oranges to playgoers and in becoming an actress—not, however, at Old Drury, but at the other patent theatre, Covent Garden. Save that as a comedian she never took London by storm, and that she lacked Nell's unfailing good humour, Sophie in her career matches Nell in more than superficial particulars. Between selling oranges and appearing on the stage Sophie seems to have touched bottom for a time in poverty. But her charms as an actress captivated an officer by and by, and she was established as his mistress in a house at Turnham Green. Tiring of her after a time—Sophie, it is probable, became exigeant with increased comfort—her protector left her with an annuity of L50.
The annuity does not appear to have done Sophie much good. We next hear of her as servant-maid in a Piccadilly brothel, a lupanar much patronized by wealthy emigres from France, among whom was Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and later Prince de Conde, a man at that time of about fifty-four.
The Duc's attention was directed to the good looks of Sophie by a manservant of his. Mme Montagu says of Sophie at this time that "her face had already lost the first bloom of youth and innocence." Now, one wonders if that really was so, or if Mme Montagu is making a shot at a hazard. She describes Sophie a little earlier than this as having developed into a fine young woman, not exactly pretty or handsome, but she held her head gracefully, and her regular features were illumined by a pair of remarkably bright and intelligent eyes. She was tall and squarely built, with legs and arms which might have served as models for a statue of Hercules. Her muscular force was extraordinary. Her lips were rather thin, and she had an ugly habit of contracting them when she was angry. Her intelligence was above the average, and she had a good share of wit.
At the time when the Duc de Bourbon came upon her in the Piccadilly stew the girl was probably no more than eighteen. If one may judge her character from the events of her subsequent career there was an outstanding resiliency and a resoluteness as main ingredients of her make-up, qualities which would go a long way to obviating any marks that might otherwise have been left on her by the ups and downs of a mere five years in the world. If, moreover, Mme Montagu's description of her is a true one it is clear that Sophie's good looks were not of the sort to make an all-round appeal. The ways in which attractiveness goes, both in men and in women, are infinite in their variety. The reader may recall, in this respect, what was said in the introductory chapter about Kate Webster and the instance of the bewhiskered 'Fina of the Spanish tavern. And since a look of innocence and the bloom of youth may, and very often do, appear on the faces of individuals who are far from being innocent or even young, it may well be that Sophie in 1810, servant-maid in a brothel though she was, still kept a look of country freshness and health, unjaded enough to whet the dulled appetence of a bagnio-haunting old rip. The odds are, at all events, that Sophie was much less artificial in her charms than the practised ladies of complacency upon whom she attended. With her odd good looks she very likely had just that subacid leaven for which, in the alchemy of attraction, the Duc was in search.
The Duc, however, was not the only one to whom Sophie looked desirable. Two English peers had an eye on her—the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Kent. This is where the card affair comes in. The Duc either played whist with the two noblemen for sole rights in Sophie or, what is more likely, cut cards with them during a game. The Duc won. Whether his win may be regarded as lucky or not can be reckoned, according to the taste and fancy of the reader, from the sequelae of some twenty years.
II
With the placing of Sophie dans ses meubles by the Duc de Bourbon there began one of the most remarkable turns in her career. In 1811 he took a house for her in Gloucester Street, Queen's Square, with her mother as duenna, and arranged for the completion of her education.
As a light on her character hardly too much can be made of this stage in her development. It is more than likely that the teaching was begun at Sophie's own demand, and by the use she made of the opportunities given her you may measure the strength of her ambition. Here was no rich man's doxy lazily seeking a veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough patches of speech and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's child, workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set herself, with a wholehearted concentration which a Newnham 'swot' might envy, to master modern languages, with Greek, Latin, and music. At the end of three years she was a good linguist, could play and sing well enough to entertain and not bore the most intelligent in the company the Duc kept, and to pass in that company—the French emigre set in London—as a person of equal education. If, as it is said, Sophie, while she could read and write French faultlessly, never could speak it without an English accent, it is to be remembered that the flexibility of tongue and mind needed for native-sounding speech in French (or any other language) is so exceptional as to be practically non-existent among her compatriots to this day. The fault scarcely belittles her achievement. As well blame a one-legged man for hopping when trying to run. Consider the life Sophie had led, the sort of people with whom she had associated, and that temptation towards laissez-faire which conquers all but the rarest woman in the mode of life in which she was existing, and judge of the constancy of purpose that kept that little nose so steadfastly in Plutarch and Xenophon.
If in the year 1812 the Duc began to allow his little Sophie about L800 a year in francs as pin-money he was no more generous than Sophie deserved. The Duc was very rich, despite the fact that his father, the old Prince de Conde, was still alive, and so, of course, was enjoying the income from the family estates.
There is no room here to follow more than the barest outline of the Duc de Bourbon's history. Fully stated, it would be the history of France. He was a son of the Prince de Conde who collected that futile army beyond the borders of France in the royalist cause in the Revolution. Louis-Henri was wounded in the left arm while serving there, so badly wounded that the hand was practically useless. He came to England, where he lived until 1814, when he went back to France to make his unsuccessful attempt to raise the Vendee. Then he went to Spain.
At this time he intended breaking with Sophie, but when he got back to Paris in 1815 he found the lady waiting for him. It took Sophie some eighteen months to bring his Highness up to scratch again. During this time the Duc had another English fancy, a Miss Harris, whose reign in favour, however, did not withstand the manoeuvring of Sophie.
Sophie as a mistress in England was one thing, but Sophie unattached as a mistress in France was another. One wonders why the Duc should have been squeamish on this point. Perhaps it was that he thought it would look vulgar to take up a former mistress after so long. At all events, he was ready enough to resume the old relationship with Sophie, provided she could change her name by marriage. Sophie was nothing loth. The idea fell in with her plans. She let it get about that she was the natural daughter of the Duc, and soon had in tow one Adrien-Victor de Feucheres. He was an officer of the Royal Guard. Without enlarging on the all-round tawdriness of this contract it will suffice here to say that Sophie and Adrien were married in London in August of 1818, the Duc presenting the bride with a dowry of about L5600 in francs. Next year de Feucheres became a baron, and was made aide-de-camp to the Duc.
Incredible as it may seem, de Feucheres took four years to realize what was the real relationship between his wife and the Prince de Conde. The aide-de-camp and his wife had a suite of rooms in the Prince's favourite chateau at Chantilly, and the ambition which Sophie had foreseen would be furthered by the marriage was realized. She was received as La Baronne de Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy—up to a point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a violent temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is said, a leaning towards avaricious ways. At the end of four years the Baron de Feucheres woke up to the fact that Sophie was deceiving him. It does not appear, however, that he had seen through her main deception, because it was Sophie herself, we are told, who informed him he was a fool—that she was not the Prince's daughter, but his mistress.
Having waked up thus belatedly, or having been woken up by Sophie in her ungoverned ill-temper, de Feucheres acted with considerable dignity. He begged to resign his position as aide to the Prince, and returned his wife's dowry. The departure of Sophie's hitherto complacent husband rather embarrassed the Prince. He needed Sophie but felt he could not keep her unattached under his roof and he sent her away—but only for a few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly.
The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but without success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of Spain, an application which was granted at once. It took the poor man seven years to secure a judicial separation from his wife.
The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly—it happened in 1822—reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne de Feucheres was forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's energies from then on were concentrated on getting the ban removed. She explored all possible avenues of influence to this end, and, incidentally drove her old lover nearly frantic with her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff from the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day at the Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not be admitted.
This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of all Sophie's subsequent actions—this and her intention of feathering her own nest out of the estate of her protector. It explains why she worked so hard to have the Prince de Conde assume friendly relations with a family whose very name he hated: that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue to the mysterious death, eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last of the Condes, in circumstances which were made to pass as suicide, but which in unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to indicate murder.
III
Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to have been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true enough, but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial in his uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a later age in a man of his day and rank and country, just as it were obtuse to look for greatness in one so much at the mercy of circumstance. As far as bravery went he had shown himself a worthy descendant of "the Great Conde." But, surrounded by the vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had ever tried to rule a country, he, no more than his father, had the faintest chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no occupation, small wonder that in idleness he fell into the pursuit of satisfactions for his baser appetites. He would have been, there is good reason to believe, a happy man and a busy one in a camp. There is this to be said for him: that alone among the spineless crowd of royalists feebly waiting for the miracle which would restore their privilege he attempted a blow for the lost cause. But where in all that bed of disintegrating chalk was the flint from which he might have evoked a spark?
The great grief of the Prince's life was the loss of his son, the young Duc d'Enghien, shamefully destroyed by Bonaparte. It is possible that much of the Prince's inertia was due to this blow. He had married, at the early age of fourteen, Louise-Marie-Therese-Mathilde d'Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans and the Duchesse de Chartres, the bride being six years older than her husband. Such a marriage could not last. It merely sustained the honeymoon and the birth of that only son. The couple were apart in eighteen months, and after ten years they never even saw each other again. About the time when Sophie's husband found her out and departed the Princesse died. The Prince was advised to marry again, on the chance that an heir might be born to the large fortune he possessed. But Sophie by then had become a habit with the Prince—a bad one—and the old man was content to be left to his continual hunting, and not to bother over the fact that he was the last of his ancient line.
It may be easily believed that the Prince's disinclination to marry again contented Sophie very well. And the fact that he had no direct heir was one in which she saw possibilities advantageous to herself.
The Prince was then sixty-six years old. In the course of nature he was almost bound to predecease her. His wealth was enormous, and out of it Sophie wanted as much by bequest as she could get. She was much too shrewd, however, to imagine that, even if she did contrive to be made his sole heir, the influential families who had an eye upon the great possessions of the Prince, and who through relationship had some right to expect inheritance, would allow such a will to go uncontested. She therefore looked about among the Prince's connexions for some one who would accept coheirship with herself, and whose family would be strong enough in position to carry through probate on such terms, but at the same time would be grateful enough to her and venal enough to further her aim of being reinstated at Court. Her choice in this matter shows at once her political cunning, which would include knowledge of affairs, and her ability as a judge of character.
It should be remembered that, in spite of his title of Duc de Bourbon, Sophie's elderly protector was only distantly of that family. He was descended in direct line from the Princes de Conde, whose connexion with the royal house of France dated back to the sixteenth century. The other line of 'royal' ducs in the country was that of Orleans, offshoot of the royal house through Philippe, son of Louis XIII, and born in 1640. Sophie's protector, Louis-Henri-Joseph, Prince de Conde, having married Louise-Marie, daughter of the great-grandson of this Philippe, was thus the brother-in-law of that Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who in the Revolution was known as "Egalite." This was a man whom, for his political opinion and for his failure to stand by the King, Louis XVI, the Prince de Conde utterly detested in memory. As much, moreover, as he had hated the father did the Prince de Conde detest Egalite's son. But it was out of this man's family that Sophie selected, though ultimately, her coheir.
Before she arrived at this point, however, Sophie had been at pains to do some not very savoury manoeuvring.
By a dancer at the Opera, called Mimi, the Prince de Conde had an illegitimate daughter, whom he had caused to be educated and whom he had married to the Comte de Rully. The Comtesse de Rully and her husband had a suite at Chantilly. This was an arrangement which Sophie, as reigning Queen of Chantilly, did not like at all. While the Rully woman remained at Chantilly Sophie could not think that her sway over the Prince was quite as absolute as she wished. It took her six years of badgering her protector, from 1819 to 1825, to bring about the eviction.
But meantime (for Sophie's machinations must be taken as concurrent with events as they transpire) the Baronne de Feucheres had approached the son of Philippe-Egalite, suggesting that the last-born of his six children, the Duc d'Aumale, should have the Prince de Conde for godfather. If she could persuade her protector to this the Duc d'Orleans, in return, was to use his influence for her reinstatement at Court. And persuade the old man to this Sophie did, albeit after a great deal of badgering on her part and a great deal of grumbling on the part of the Prince.
The influence exerted at Court by the Duc d'Orleans does not seem to have been very effective. The King who had dismissed her the Court, Louis XVIII, died in 1824. His brother, the Comte d'Artois, ascended the throne as Charles X, and continued by politically foolish recourses, comparable in history to those of the English Stuarts, to alienate the people by attempting to regain that anachronistic absolute power which the Revolution had destroyed. He lasted a mere six years as king. The revolution of 1830 sent him into exile. But up to the last month or so of those six years he steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the Baronne de Feucheres—not that Sophie ever gave up manoeuvring and wheedling for a return to Court favour.
About 1826 Sophie had a secret proposition made to the King that she should try to persuade the Prince de Conde to adopt as his heir one of the brothers of the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the King's second son—or would his Majesty mind if a son of the Duc d'Orleans was adopted? The King did not care at all.
After that Sophie pinned her faith in the power possessed by the Duc d'Orleans. She was not ready to pursue the course whereby her return to Court might have been secured—namely, to abandon her equivocal position in the Prince de Conde's household, and thus her power over the Prince. She wanted first to make sure of her share of the fortune he would leave. She knew her power over the old man. Already she had persuaded him to buy and make over to her the estates of Saint-Leu and Boissy, as well as to make her legacies to the amount of a million francs. Much as she wanted to be received again at Court, she wanted more just as much as she could grab from the Prince's estate. To make her inheritance secure she needed the help of the Duc d'Orleans.
The Duc d'Orleans was nothing loth. He had the mind of a French bourgeois, and all the bourgeois itch for money. He knew that the Prince de Conde hated him, hated his politics, hated his very name. But during the seven years it took Sophie to bring the Prince to the point of signing the will she had in mind the son of Philippe-Egalite fawned like a huckster on his elderly and, in more senses than one, distant relative. The scheme was to have the Prince adopt the little Duc d'Aumale, already his godchild, as his heir.
The ways by which Sophie went about the job of persuading her old lover do not read pleasantly. She was a termagant. The Prince was stubborn. He hated the very idea of making a will—it made him think of death. He was old, ill, friendless. Sophie made his life a hell, but he had become dependent upon her. She ill-used him, subjecting him to physical violence, but yet he was afraid she might, as she often threatened, leave him. Her way of persuading him reached the point, it is on record, of putting a knife to his throat. Not once but several times his servants found him scratched and bruised. But the old man could not summon up the strength of mind to be quit of this succubine virago.
At last, on the 29th of August, 1829, Sophie's 'persuasions' succeeded. The Prince consented to sign the will, and did so the following morning. In its terms the Duc d'Aumale became residuary legatee, and 2,000,000 francs, free of death-duty, were bequeathed to the Prince's "faithful companion, Mme la baronne de Feucheres," together with the chateaux and estates of Saint-Leu-Taverny, Boissy, Enghien, Montmorency, and Mortefontaine, and the pavilion in the Palais-Bourbon, besides all the Prince's furniture, carriages, horses, and so on. Moreover, the estate and chateau of Ecouen was also given her, on condition that she allowed the latter to be used as an orphanage for the descendants of soldiers who had served with the Armies of Conde and La Vendee. The cost of running this establishment, however, was to be borne by the Duc d'Aumale.
It might be thought that Sophie, having got her way, would have turned to kindness in her treatment of her old lover. But no. All her mind was now concentrated on working, through the Duc d'Orleans, for being received again at Court. She ultimately succeeded in this. On the 7th of February, 1830, she appeared in the presence of the King, the Dauphin and Dauphine. In the business of preparing for this great day Chantilly and the Prince de Conde were greatly neglected. The beggar on horseback had to be about Paris.
But events were shaping in France at that time which were to be important to the royal family, to Sophie and her supporters of the house of Orleans, and fatal in consequence to the old man at Chantilly.
On the 27th of July revolution broke out in France. Charles X and his family had to seek shelter in England, and Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, became—not King of France, but "King of the French" by election. This consummation had not been achieved without intrigue on the part of Egalite's son. It was not an achievement calculated to abate the Prince de Conde's hatred for him. Rather did it inflame that hatred. In the matter of the famous will, moreover, as the King's son the little Duc d'Aumale would be now in no need of the provision made for him by his unwilling godfather, while members of the exiled royal family—notably the grandson of Charles, the Duc de Bordeaux, certainly cut out of the Prince's will by the intrigues of Sophie and family—were in want of assistance. This is a point to be remembered in the light of subsequent events.
IV
While she had been looking after herself Sophie Dawes had not been unmindful ofthe advancement of hangers-on of her own family. She had about her a nephew and a niece. The latter, supposed by some to have a closer relationship to Sophie than that of mere niece, she had contrived to marry off to a marquis. The Marquise de Chabannes de la Palice need not here concern us further. But notice must be taken of the nephew. A few million francs, provided by the Prince de Conde, had secured for this James Dawes the title of Baron de Flassans, from a domain also bestowed upon him by Sophie's elderly lover. De Flassans, with some minor post in the Prince's household, acted as his aunt's jackal.
If Sophie, after the election to kingship of Louis-Philippe, found it necessary to be in Paris a great deal to worship at the throne her nephew kept her well informed about the Prince de Conde's activities. The old man, it appeared, had suddenly developed the habit of writing letters. The Prince, then at the chateau of Saint-Leu expressed a desire to remove to Chantilly. He was behaving very oddly all round, was glad to have Sophie out of his sight, and seemed unwilling even to hear her name. The projected move to Chantilly, as a fact, was merely a blind to cover a flight out of Sophie's reach and influence. Rumour arose about Saint-Leu and in Paris that the Prince had made another will—one in which neither Sophie nor the Duc d'Aumale was mentioned. This was a move of which Sophie had been afraid. She saw to it that the Prince did not get away from Saint-Leu. Rumour and the Prince's conduct made Sophie very anxious. She tried to get him to make over to her in his lifetime those properties which he had left to her in his will, and it is probable enough that she would have forced this request but for the fact that, to raise the legal costs, the property of Saint-Leu would have had to be sold.
This was the position of affairs about the middle of August 1830. It was believed the Prince had already signed a will in favour of the exiled little Duc de Bordeaux, but that he had kept the act secret from his mistress.
On the morning of the 11th of the month the Prince was met outside his bedroom in his night attire. It was a young man called Obry who thus met the Prince. He was the old man's godchild. The old man's left eye was bleeding, and there was a scratch on his cheek as if made by a fingernail. To Obry the Prince attributed these wounds to the spite of the Baronne de Feucheres. Half an hour later he told his valet he had hit his head against a night-table. Later again in the day he gave another version still: he had fallen against the door to a secret staircase from his bedroom while letting the Baronne de Feucheres out, the secret staircase being in communication with Sophie's private apartments.
For the next ten days or so the Prince was engaged in contriving his flight from the gentle Sophie, a second plan which again was spoiled by Sophie's spies. There was something of a fete at Saint-Leu on the 26th, the Prince's saint's day. There was a quarrel between Sophie and the Prince on the morning of the 26th in the latter's bedroom. Sophie had then been back in Saint-Leu for three days. At midnight on the 26th the old man retired after playing a game or two at whist. He was to go on the 30th to Chantilly. He was accompanied to his bedroom by his surgeon and a valet, one Lecomte, and expressed a desire to be called at eight o'clock. Lecomte found a paper in the Prince's trousers and gave it to the old man, who placed it on the mantelshelf. Then the valet, as he said later, locked the door of the Prince's dressing-room, thus—except for the entrance from the secret staircase—locking the old man in his room.
The Prince's apartments were on the first floor of the chateau. His bedroom was approached through the dressing-room from the main corridor. Beyond the dressing-room was a passage, turning left from which was the bedroom, and to the right in which was an entrance to an anteroom. Facing the dressing-room door in this same passage was the entrance to the secret staircase already mentioned. The staircase gave access to the Baronne de Feucheres' apartments on the entrance floor. These, however, were not immediately under the Prince's rooms. An entresol intervened, and here the rooms were occupied by the Abbe Briant, a creature of Sophie's and her secretary, the Widow Lachassine, Sophie's lady's-maid, and a couple named Dupre. These last, also spies of Sophie's, had their room direcdy below the Prince's bedroom, and it is recorded that the floor was so thin that they could hear not only the old man's every movement, but anything he said.
Adjacent to the Prince's room, and on the same floor, were the rooms occupied by Lambot, the Prince's aide, and the valet Lecomte. Lambot was a lover of Sophie's, and had been the great go-between in her intrigues with the Orleans family over the will. Lecomte was in Sophie's pay. Close to Sophie's apartments on the entrance floor were the rooms occupied by her nephew and his wife, the de Flassans. It will be seen, therefore, that the wing containing the Prince's rooms was otherwise occupied almost completely by Sophie's creatures.
You have, then, the stage set for the tragedy which was about to ensue: midnight; the last of the Condes peaceably in his bedroom for the night, and locked in it (according to Lecomte). About him, on all sides, are the creatures of his not too scrupulous mistress. All these people, with the exception of the Baronne de Flassans, who sat up writing letters until two, retire about the same time.
And at eight o'clock next morning, there being no answer to Lecomte's knocking to arouse the Prince, the door is broken open at the orders of the Baronne de Feucheres. The Prince is discovered dead in his bedroom, suspended by the neck, by means of two of his own handkerchiefs knotted together, from the fastening of one of the French windows.
The fastening was only about two and a half feet off the floor. The handkerchief about the dead man's neck was loose enough to have permitted insertion of all the fingers of a hand between it and the neck. The second handkerchief was tied to the first, and its other end was knotted to the window-fastening, and the dead man's right cheek was pressed against the closed shutter. The knees were bent a little, the feet were on the floor. None of the usual indications of death by strangulation were present. The eyes were half closed. The face was pale but not livid. The mouth was almost closed. There was no protrusion of the tongue.
On the arrival of the civil functionaries, the Mayor of Saint-Leu and a Justice of the Peace from Enghien, the body was taken down and put on the bed. It was then found that the dead man's ankles were greatly bruised and his legs scratched. On the left side of the throat, at a point too low for it to have been done by the handkerchief, there was some stripping of the skin. A large red bruise was found between the Prince's shoulders.
The King, Louis-Philippe, heard about the death of the Prince de Conde at half-past eleven that same day. He immediately sent his High Chancellor, M. Pasquier, and his own aide-de-camp, M. de Rumigny, to inquire into the matter. It is not stretching things too far to say that the King's instructions to these gentlemen are revealed in phrases occurring in the letters they sent his Majesty that same evening. Both recommend that Drs. Marc and Marjolin should be sent to investigate the Prince's tragic death. But M. Pasquier mentions that "not a single document has been found, so a search has already been made." And M. de Rumigny thinks "it is important that nobody should be accused who is likely to benefit by the will." What document was expected to be discovered in the search? Why, a second will that would invalidate the first. Who was to benefit by the first will? Why, the little Duc d'Aumale and Dame Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres!
The post-mortem examination was made by the King's own physicians. During the examination the Prince's doctors, MM. Dubois and Gendrin, his personal secretary, and the faithful one among his body-servants, Manoury, were sent out of the room. The verdict was suicide. The Prince's own doctors maintained that suicide by the handkerchiefs from the window-fastening was impossible. Dr Dubois wrote his idea of how the death had occurred:
The Prince very likely was asleep in his bed. The murderers must have been given entrance to his bedroom—I have no wish to ask how or by whom. They then threw themselves on the Prince, gripped him firmly, and could easily pin him down on his bed; then the most desperate and dexterous of the murderers suffocated him as he was thus held firmly down; finally, in order to make it appear that he had committed suicide and to hinder any judicial investigations which might have discovered the identity of the assassins, they fastened a handkerchief about their victim's neck, and hung him up by the espagnolette of the window.
And that, at all hazards, is about the truth of the death of the Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde. There was some official display of rigour in investigation by the Procureur; there was much play with some mysterious papers found a good time after the first discovery half-burned in the fireplace of the Prince's bedroom; there was a lot put forward to support the idea of suicide; but the blunt truth of the affair is that the Prince de Conde was murdered, and that the murder was hushed up as much as possible. Not, however, with complete success. There were few in France who gave any countenance to the theory of suicide.
The Prince, it will be remembered, had a practically disabled left arm. It is said that he could not even remove his hat with his left hand. The knots in the handkerchiefs used to tie him to the espagnolette were both complicated and tightly made. Impossible for a one-handed man. His bed, which at the time of his retiring to it stood close to the alcove wall, was a good foot and a half away from that wall in the morning. Impossible feat also for this one-handed man. It was the Prince's habit to lie so much to one side of the bed that his servants had to prop the outside edge up with folded blankets. On the morning when his death was discovered it was seen that the edges still were high, while the centre was very much pressed down. There was, in fact, a hollow in the bed's middle such as might have been made by some one standing on it with shoes on. It is significant that the bedclothes were neatly turned down. If the Prince had got up on a sudden impulse to commit suicide he is hardly likely, being a prince, to have attempted remaking his bed. He must, moreover, since he could normally get from bed only by rolling on his side, have pressed out that heightened edge. Manoury, the valet who loved him, said that the bed in the morning looked more as if it had been SMOOTHED OUT than remade. This would tend to support the theory of Dr Dubois. The murderers, having suffocated the Prince, would be likely to try effacing the effects of his struggling by the former method rather than the latter.
But the important point of the affair, as far as this chapter on it is concerned, is the relation of Sophie Dawes with it on the conclusion of murder. How deeply was she implicated? Let us see how she acted on hearing that there was no reply to Lecomte's knocking, and let us examine her conduct from that moment on.
Note that the Baronne de Feucheres was the first person whom Lecomte and the Prince's surgeon apprised of the Prince's silence. She rushed out of her room and made for the Prince's, not by the secret staircase, but by the main one. She knew, however, that the door to the secret staircase from the Prince's room was not bolted that night. This knowledge was admitted for her later by the Prince's surgeon, M. Bonnie. She had gone up to the Prince's room by the main staircase in order to hide the fact, an action which gives a touch of theatricality to her exhibited concern about the Prince's silence.
The search for documents spoken of by M. Pasquier in his letter to the King had been carried out by Sophie in person, with the aid of her nephew de Flassans and the Abbe Briant. It was a thorough search, and a piece of indecorousness which she excused on the ground of being afraid the Prince's executors might find a will which made her the sole heir, to the exclusion of the Duc d'Aumale.
Regarding the 'accident' which had happened to the Prince on the 11th of August, she said it was explained by an earlier attempt on his part to do away with himself. She tried to deny that she had been at Saint-Leu at the time of the actual happening, when the fact was that she only left for Paris some hours later.
When, some time later, the Prince's faithful valet Manoury made mention of the fact that the Prince had wanted to put the width of the country between himself and his mistress, Sophie first tried to put the fear of Louis-Philippe into the man, then, finding he was not to be silenced that way, tried to buy him with a promise of employment.
It is beyond question that the Prince de Conde was murdered. He was murdered in a wing of the chateau in which he was hemmed in on all sides by Sophie's creatures. It is impossible that Sophie was not privy, at the least, to the deed. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that she was an actual participator in the murder.
She was a violent woman, as violent and passionate as she was determined. Not once but many times is it on record that she physically ill-used her elderly lover. There was one occasion, it is said, when the Prince suddenly came upon her in a very compromising position with a younger man in the park of one of his chateaux. Sophie, before the Prince could utter a protest, cut him across the face with her riding-whip, and finished up by thrashing him with his own cane.
Here you have the stuff, at any rate, of which your murderesses of the violent type are made. It is the metal out of which your Kate Websters, your Sarah Malcolms, your Meteyards and Brownriggs fashion themselves. It takes more than three years of scholastic self-discipline, such as Sophie Dawes in her ambition subjected herself to, to eradicate the inborn harridan. The very determination which was at the back of Sophie's efforts at self-education, that will to have her own way, would serve to heighten the sick rage with which she would discover that her carefully wrought plans of seven years had come to pieces. What was it that the Abbe Pelier de Lacroix had in "proof of the horrible assassination" of the Prince de Conde, but that he was prevented from placing before the lawyers in charge of the later investigation, if not the fact that the Prince had made a later will than the one by which Sophie inherited so greatly? The Abbe was the Prince's chaplain. He published a pamphlet declaring that the Prince had made a will leaving his entire fortune to the little Duc de Bordeaux, but that Sophie had stolen this later will. Who likelier to be a witness to such a will than the Prince's chaplain?
It needs no great feat of imagination to picture what the effect of such a discovery would be on a woman of Sophie's violent temper, or to conceive how little the matter of taking a life especially the life of a feeble old man she was used to bullying and mishandling—would be allowed to stand in the way of rescuing her large gains. Murder of the Prince was her only chance. It had taken her seven years to bring him to the point of signing that first will. He was seventy-four years of age, enfeebled, obstinate, and she knew of his plans to flee from her. Even supposing that she could prevent his flight, could she begin all over again to another seven years of bullying and wheedling—always with the prospect of the old man dying before she could get him to the point again of doing as she wished? The very existence of the second will was a menace. It only needed that the would-be heirs of the Prince should hear of it, and there would be a swoop on their part to rescue the testator from her clutches. In the balance against 2,000,000 francs and some halfdozen castles with their estates the only wonder is that any reasonable person, knowing the history of Sophie Dawes, should hesitate about the value she was likely to place on the old man's life.
The inquiry begun in September of 1830 into the circumstances surrounding the death of the Prince was cooked before it was dressed. The honest man into whose hands it was placed at first, a M. de la Hurpoie, proved himself too zealous. After a night visit from the Procureur he was retired into private life. After that the investigators were hand-picked. They concluded the investigation the following June, with the declaration that the Prince had committed suicide, a verdict which had its reward—in advancement for the judges.
In the winter of 1831-32 there was begun a lawsuit in which the Princes de Rohan brought action against Sophie and the Duc d'Aumale for the upsetting of the will under which the latter two had inherited the Prince de Conde's fortune. The grounds for the action were the undue influence exerted by Sophie. The Princes de Rohan lost.
Thus was Sophie twice 'legally' vindicated. But public opinion refused her any coat of whitewash. Never popular in France, she became less and less popular in the years that followed her legal triumphs. Having used her for his own ends, Louis-Philippe gradually shut off from her the light of his cod-like countenance.[29]
Sophie found little joy in her wide French possessions. She found herself without friends before whom she could play the great lady in her castles. She gradually got rid of her possessions, and returned to her native land. She bought an estate near Christchurch, in Hampshire, and took a house in Hyde Park Square, London. But she did not long enjoy those English homes. While being treated for dropsy in 1840 she died of angina. According to the famous surgeon who was at her bedside just before her demise, she died "game."
It may almost be said that she lived game. There must have been a fighting quality about Sophie to take her so far from such a bad start. Violent as she was of temper, greedy, unscrupulous, she seems yet to have had some instincts of kindness. The stories of her good deeds are rather swamped by those of her bad ones. She did try to do some good with the Prince's money round about Chantilly, took a definite and lasting interest in the alms-houses built there by "the Great Conde," and a request in her own will was to the effect that if she had ever done anything for the Orleans gang, the Prince de Conde's wishes regarding the use of the chateau of Ecouen as an orphanage might be fulfilled as a reward to her. The request never was fulfilled, but it does show that Sophie had some affinity in kindness to Nell Gwynn.
How much farther—or how much better—would Sophie Dawes have fared had her manners been less at the mercy of her temper? It is impossible to say. That she had some quality of greatness is beyond doubt. The resolution of character, the will to achieve, and even the viraginous temper might have carried her far had she been a man some thirty years earlier in the country of her greater activities. Under Napoleon, as a man, Sophie might have climbed high on the way to glory. As a woman, with those traits, there is almost tragic inevitability in the manner in which we find her ranged with what Dickens called "Glory's bastard brother"—Murder.