Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [61]
At length the visitor left. After Ethel and Nina cleaned up the remains of the tea, Nina went to Crippen and asked if what the guest had said was true—that he really was married.
Crippen said only, “It would take the lawyers all their time to find out.”
NINA BECAME ENGAGED, and as her wedding neared, she left her job at Drouet. Now Ethel became Crippen’s private secretary. She missed her sister. “With her departure I felt very lonely,” she recalled. “Dr. Crippen, too, was very lonely, and our friendship deepened almost inevitably. He used to come to see me at home. All this time his wife was shrouded in mystery.”
One day a woman came to the office. She was large and energetic and had hair that clearly was dyed an amber blond. She wore a lot of jewelry and a dress that must have been expensive but was more flamboyant and gaudy than anything Ethel herself would have considered tasteful.
“Her coming was of a somewhat stormy character. I was leaving the office for lunch when I saw a woman come out of the doctor’s room and bang the door behind her. She was obviously very angry about something.”
Ethel turned to another employee, William Long, and whispered, “Who is that?”
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “That’s Mrs. Crippen.”
“Oh,” she said, startled. “Is it?”
Ethel needed a moment or two to absorb this revelation. Here was Crippen, so kind and soft-spoken, small in every way—one inch shorter, in fact, than she herself—married to this thunderhead of silk and diamond.
“After that,” Ethel wrote, “I quickly realized Dr. Crippen’s reluctance to speak about his wife.”
AN EVEN STORMIER VISIT followed—a visit, Ethel wrote, “which might have ended tragically.”
Belle was again in a fury and burst into the office in a cyclone of cloth and abraded corset. “There were more angry words, and just before she left I saw the doctor suddenly fall off his chair.”
Belle roared out, slamming doors. Ethel ran to Crippen. “He was very ill, and I believed that he had taken poison. He told me that he could bear the ill-treatment of his wife no longer.”
She found brandy and deployed it to revive him. Afterward, she wrote, “we did our best to forget the painful incident.” But the violence of the encounter and Crippen’s expression of such deep unhappiness caused a fundamental change in their relationship. Ethel wrote, “I think it was this, more than anything else, which served to draw us closer together.”
SOON THE DROUET Institute also failed, helped along by a coroner’s inquest that identified one of Drouet’s cures—ear plasters—as a possible exacerbating factor in the death of a man whose ear infection spread to his brain with devastating consequences. Suddenly Drouet’s advertising disappeared from the city’s horse-drawn omnibuses. Though tolerance of patent medicine companies was beginning to wane, many companies continued to operate, and Crippen quickly found a new job as “Consulting Specialist” for the Aural Remedies Co., another firm that specialized in cures for deafness, though on his letterhead the only credential Crippen listed was, paradoxically, his degree in ophthalmology from New York.
The offices of Aural Remedies were in New Oxford Street, completed in 1847. It was a fitting location because the street had been built with the intent of eliminating one of the most crime-ridden parts of London, the Rookery, home previously to confidence men, pickpockets, and thieves. The construction cleared the neighborhood’s worst precincts and triggered a lasting reformation, so that now only high-priced frauds such as Aural Remedies could afford the rents. Crippen brought with him the expertise he had gained at Drouet. He also brought Ethel, as his secretary.
In one letter, probably typed by Ethel, Crippen wrote to a reluctant customer about a special offer. “This places within your reach the possibility of being speedily…cured, and I hardly need point out that I could scarcely make such an offer, were I not convinced of the efficacy of my Treatment.”
He proposed that the customer send him half the price quoted in an earlier