England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [5]
Only Mary knew the whole truth about what happened on that hot night in June. It is very likely that alcohol was involved. Alcohol killed more men than tuberculosis or smallpox and caused most accidental deaths. The gin sold in Ness was much cheaper and stronger than what is sold today, and a few pennies bought immediate oblivion. Nowadays, the majority of deaths from alcohol or other substance abuse occur in the first half of the month, after people have received their pay. More than 250 years ago, Henry was probably following a familiar pattern: he received his wages and drank them away.
It is possible that Henry killed himself in a fit of drunken despair. If he had simply knocked himself out on the way home from the pub or fought with another man, Mary would have had less reason to flee in shame. Nowadays, suicides peak in the months of May and early June, and it is unlikely the eighteenth century was different, although suicide was hardly ever recorded as the cause of death. Many more men committed suicide than women (and the women who did so were generally driven to it by extreme poverty or unwanted pregnancy). Ness was an alienating place, Henry's job was exhausting, life with his wife was difficult, and the sleepless nights with a new baby perhaps tipped him over the edge. Suicide was common, but it was considered a disgrace and a sin, and unless the local rector was particularly sympathetic, Henry would have been denied a funeral and a grave in the churchyard, incentive enough for Mary and Emma never to mention him.
Alternatively, Henry's death may have been the consequence of an argument. Exhausted and irritable after a day with the baby, Mary may have begun a bitter argument when her husband strolled in, squandered wages reeking on his breath. After a struggle, Henry might have fallen so violently that he died. There was no local police force or constable, so the law in Ness depended on the justice of the peace, presumably Lord Stanley at Hooton Hall. As the local landowner, he would have been most interested in protecting his property. In the eighteenth century, justice was dominated by the propertied classes, and an offense as trivial as stealing a handkerchief was punishable by hanging. Men such as Stanley dismissed fights between poor workers as the feuds of the lower classes. Death from a drunken fall was common enough, and without the medical science that exists today, the exact cause of death would have been impossible to determine.
Henry's death was one of the greatest mysteries in Emma's life. It seems most likely that he and Mary fought, but we will never know the truth about whether the cause of death was accident, suicide, ill health, or murder. Whatever the reason, the consequence was the same: Mary was a widow and Emma was fatherless. At the time, 80 percent of those accused of witchcraft were older women and widows. No longer controlled by their fathers and without husbands, they were objects of intense suspicion and hatred. A widow at twenty-two, Mrs. Lyon was not going to be popular.
Mary was a determined girl, but within fifteen years she was working for free as Emma's housekeeper. She remained submissive to her daughter's every desire until she died. Her devotion was self-sacrificing by any standard, but particularly when most children made their own way through life; moreover, mother and daughter were very distant in Emma's childhood and teenage years. Perhaps Mary's willingness to cater to Emma's every need and whim, like a servant rather than a mother, stemmed from guilt. In the eighteenth century, widows habitually bolstered their shaky respectability by wearing black dresses and veils, weeping over lockets of their spouse, and persistently recalling the days of their marriage in conversation, but nobody