Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [129]
Beatrice grew weary of her new isolation and resolved to move to London. Thinking still that Marconi was rich, her mother, Lady Inchiquin, leased for her an expensive house in Mayfair. After moving in, Beatrice saw little of Marconi. The journey from Poldhu to London took eleven hours; the round trip consumed the better part of two workdays. It was time Marconi did not want to lose.
Some trips were unavoidable. In February Beatrice bore a daughter, Lucia. Marconi immediately headed for London to meet this newest member of his family. After a brief stay he left again for Poldhu.
The family doctor pronounced Lucia “a more than usually healthy baby,” but after several weeks the baby fell ill. Her body grew hot and she seemed to suffer abdominal pain. Her condition worsened rapidly. Beatrice, still weak from the ordeal of childbirth, was terrified. One night Lucia had convulsions, a consequence possibly of meningitis. Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning, a Friday, the baby died. There had not even been time to have her baptized.
Marconi came back to London to find Beatrice bedridden from grief and illness. He wrote to his own mother, “Our darling little baby was taken away from us suddenly on Friday morning.” Beatrice, he wrote, had received “a most awful shock and she is now very weak.”
He sought to arrange Lucia’s burial but found that cemeteries refused to accept her because she had not been baptized. Now he endured what Degna Marconi called “the ghastly experience of driving around London in a taxi, trying to find a cemetery that would bury his baby.” Eventually he found one, in west London.
Beatrice’s sister, Lilah, came to the house to tend to Beatrice, and Marconi again left for Poldhu.
MARCONI’S FINANCIAL TROUBLES worsened, and he at last revealed the true state of his financial affairs to Beatrice. She was startled but vowed henceforth to conserve money whenever she could.
Now Marconi fell ill. His malaria flared again and compelled him to return to London, to the Mayfair house, where he collapsed into bed and remained for three months. On April 3, 1906, an employee wrote to Fleming that Marconi’s “condition is unchanged, and the Doctor has now given strict instructions that Mr. Marconi must not be disturbed.”
During this time Beatrice learned something else about her husband—that he was a morbid, difficult patient.
He insisted on knowing the contents of every medicine and was impatient with the overly tactful manner of English doctors and nurses. At intervals he exploded, “They take me for an idiot!”
He clipped funeral advertisements from newspapers and displayed them on a bedside table. Beatrice, grieving her lost daughter and anxious about her husband’s health, did not think this funny.
At one point she stepped out for a walk and to bring a new prescription to a nearby chemist’s shop. She returned to find Marconi standing on his head in the bedroom. She was convinced he had gone mad.
Once he was upright again, he explained that he had bitten his thermometer and broken it and swallowed some of the mercury. Standing on his head had seemed the most efficient means of getting the mercury out of his body.
HIS ILLNESS LINGERED through much of the summer and cost him time, during which his critics and competitors remained active. Nevil Maskelyne, his magic shows now lodged in a new location farther up Regent Street from Piccadilly, acquired the rights to new wireless technology from America and formed a company, Amalgamated Radio-Telegraph, to develop it into a competing wireless system. He recruited Marconi’s opponents to join him and claimed that his new apparatus allowed him to transmit messages 530 miles.
Meanwhile the secretary of Lloyd’s of London, Henry Hozier, grew disenchanted with Marconi and his company. In a letter to Oliver Lodge, marked,