Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [101]
“Still,” she told Mrs. Jackson, “notwithstanding the hard work [I] am indeed happy.”
She delighted in the little moments with Crippen. In her memoir she wrote, “He used to come with me to the coal cellar, scuttle in hand, and while he was shoveling up the coals I would lean up against the door holding a lighted candle and chatting with him.”
The house grew brighter and more welcoming, and the awful scent dissipated. Crippen helped whenever he could and every day held her, kissed her, talked with her. They were not yet married in the eyes of the law and could not be married until Belle’s death in America was duly certified, but they were as much husband and wife as could be.
“So time slipped along,” Ethel wrote, “—both of us extremely happy and contented, working each of us hard in different ways.”
THE LADIES WATCHED.
They saw Crippen leave with the typist and arrive with the typist. They saw them walking together. The typist wore furs that looked very much like Belle’s, but of course one could never be sure, as furs were hard to tell apart. They saw them together at the theater and at restaurants. One day Annie Stratton and Clara Martinetti ran into Crippen on New Oxford Street. “Whilst we were talking to him,” Mrs. Martinetti said, “he seemed anxious to get away, and after he left us I saw him joined by the typist, and both got into a bus.”
And the ladies learned a troubling fact: Only one French liner had been scheduled to sail for America on the day of Belle’s departure, a steamer called La Touraine.
The ship had never left port, however. It was under repair.
STRANGE NEWS, BUT THEN these were strange times. On May 6, 1910, at 11:45 P.M. King Edward VII died, casting the nation into mourning. For the first time in England’s history the directors of Ascot ruled that all in attendance must wear black, a moment known ever after as “Black Ascot” and familiar in future generations to anyone who saw My Fair Lady.
As if the world really were coming to an end, Halley’s comet appeared in the skies overhead, raising fears of a collision and prompting rumors of dire events yet to come.
A DUTY TO BE WICKED
MARCONI’S LONG VOYAGE OF EXPERIMENT aboard the Carlo Alberto ended on Halloween morning 1902, when the ship arrived at Nova Scotia. Marconi’s goal—his hope—was now to move beyond mere three-dot signals and send the first complete messages from England to North America. It was imperative that he succeed. Skepticism about his transmission to Newfoundland had continued to deepen. Success would not only counter the doubters but also ease growing worries among his board of directors about whether all this costly experimenting would ever yield a financial return.
By now Marconi had completed construction of the new stations at South Wellfleet and Poldhu, and on Table Head at Glace Bay, the most powerful of all. Each station had more or less the same design: four strong towers of cross-braced wood, each 210 feet tall, supporting an inverted pyramid of four hundred wires. Each station had a power house nearby, where steam engines drove generators to produce electricity, which then entered an array of transformers and condensers. At South Wellfleet the process yielded 30,000 watts of power, at Glace Bay 75,000. At South Wellfleet a thick glass porthole and soundproof door had to be installed between the sending room and the sparking apparatus to prevent injury to the operator’s eyes and ears.
Marconi began his new attempt the day after his arrival, coordinating each step with his operators at Poldhu through telegrams sent by conventional undersea cable. The first signals to arrive “were very weak and unintelligible,” according to Richard Vyvyan. But they did arrive. Heartened by the fact that Poldhu had been operating only at half power, Marconi ordered his engineers there to increase wattage to maximum, expecting it would resolve the problem. It didn’t. Now he heard nothing