Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [26]
It did not fit.
Upon examination it proved to be another left leg, causing speculation that a medical student had tossed it into the river as a prank. The case became known as the Whitehall Mystery and was never solved. When the police moved into their new headquarters, one of the departments they left behind at their previous address in Great Scotland Yard was their lost and found division, with 14,212 orphaned umbrellas.
Overall there was a lightening of the British spirit. If any one individual symbolized this change, it was the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, heir to the throne. In the spring of 1897 he was fifty-six years old and notorious for having an empire-sized appetite for fun, food, and women, the latter despite his thirty-four-year marriage to his wife, Alexandra. That the prince had had sexual dalliances with other women was considered a fact but not a topic for public conversation. Nor was his weight. He drank modestly but adored food. He loved pigeon pie and turtle soup and deer pudding and grouse, partridge, woodcock, and quail, and when the season allowed he consumed mounds of grilled oysters. No one called him fat to his face, for it hurt his feelings, but in private his friends referred to him with affection as “Tum Tum.” When not eating, he was smoking. Before breakfast the prince allowed himself a single small cigar and two cigarettes. Through the remainder of a typical day he smoked twenty cigarettes and a dozen more cigars the diameter of gun barrels.
The prince hated being alone and loved parties and clubs and, especially, going out with friends to the music halls of London. Here he had much company. By the late 1890s music halls with their variety acts had become the most popular form of entertainment in Britain and were fast shedding the seedy image they had acquired earlier in the Victorian era. The number of variety theaters within London multiplied rapidly until the city had five hundred, including such familiar names as Tivoli, Empire, Pavilion, Alhambra, and Gaiety. On any given night a typical variety bill would feature dozens of short acts, called “turns,” including comedy, acrobatics, ventriloquism, mind reading, and acts in which men pretended to be women, and women to be men.
Overseeing this changing empire was Queen Victoria. In 1896 she celebrated her seventy-seventh birthday. She had reigned for nearly sixty years, during which the empire had grown to be the biggest and most powerful ever known. Meanwhile she herself had grown frail. For over three decades she had lived in a state of perpetual mourning over the death in 1861 of her husband. Ever since then, the Widow of Windsor had worn only black satin. She kept a cast of his hand by her bedside, so that she could hold it when she needed comfort. Now her eyesight was failing, and she was plagued by periods of profound sleepiness. She had ruled so long and in such a benign, maternal way that it was hard to think forward to a future in which she did not exist. A man born in the year of her accession, 1837, would by 1897 be on the verge of old age. Yet queen or not, the laws of nature applied. Victoria would die and, given her health and age, probably soon.
As the end of the century approached, a question lay in the hearts of Britons throughout the empire’s eleven million square miles: Without Victoria, what would the world be like?
What would happen then?
THE SECRET BOX
IT IS TEMPTING TO IMAGINE the arrival of Marconi and his mother in London as something from a Dickens novel—the two entering a cold and alien realm, overpowered by the immensity and smoke and noise of the city—but in fact they stepped directly into the warm embrace of the Jameson family and into the center of a skein of blood and business connections that touched a good portion of the British Empire. They were met at Victoria Station by one of Marconi’s cousins, Henry Jameson Davis,