Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [74]
Crippen and Belle had opposite natures, Reinisch wrote. He found Crippen to be “extremely placid” and Belle “very high-spirited. Blonde, with a pretty face, of large, full, may I say of opulent figure.” She was, he wrote, “a good housewife, unlike many other English women. She cooked herself, quite excellently.” He noticed that despite the couple’s “good financial circumstances,” they had no servants.
Often Crippen and Belle recruited Reinisch and one of the other tenants for whist. “Mrs. Crippen could be extremely angry if she lost a halfpenny or a penny, and on the other hand extremely happy if she won a similar sum. The penny was not the most important thing here, but ambition. Merely so that his wife should not be angry, Dr. Crippen asked me…to play often intentionally badly, as he also often did, just to allow the mistress of the house to win and thus to make her happy.”
Overall, however, the couple struck Reinisch as being reasonably content. “The marriage, at least during my time there, was very harmonious,” he wrote. “I never once perceived any misunderstanding or bad feeling between the couple. I must mention that they lived a comparatively retiring life. It was only for this reason, so as not to be always alone together, that they took me into their household. I felt myself very much at home with this family, and never had the feeling that I was just an object to be made money out of, as was often the case elsewhere.”
It was the absence of children, Reinisch believed, that had compelled Mrs. Crippen to seek lodgers.
“As a ‘substitution’ for offspring someone was to be in the house who was trustworthy and sociable,” he wrote. “Thus the condition was made, on my being taken into the house, that I was not to go out every evening, but should rather stay in the house for the sake of the company…. It was not easy for me, as a young man who wished to enjoy himself in the big city, to agree to this. I had no need, however, to regret it, as the society of the two cultured people had only a good influence on me, and the frequent conversations beside the fire were very varied, stimulating and interesting.”
Another tenant, however, had a different perception of the Crippens and told Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison about a number of quarrels that always seemed one-sided, “Mrs. Crippen, excitable and irritable, chiding her husband; Crippen, pale, quiet, imperturbable.”
THOUGH THE PRESENCE of Reinisch and the other tenants might have eased Belle’s loneliness, it inserted extra tension into her relationship with Crippen. She made Crippen tend to their needs every day, and even on Sunday, which was Crippen’s one full day off from work. “He had to rise at six o’clock in the morning to clean the boarders’ boots, shovel up the coal, lay the breakfast, and help generally,” Adeline Harrison wrote. He had to make beds, wash dishes, and on Sundays help prepare the tenants’ midday dinner, all this without servants. “It was a trying time,” Harrison wrote, “and quite unnecessary exertion for both, as Crippen was earning well, and gave his wife an ample supply of money.” Belle used the income from the tenants to buy more clothing and jewelry.
In June 1906, after less than a year, Belle evicted the Germans. The work had become too much, a friend said, though it is possible too that the mounting fear of German spies influenced her decision. At nine-thirty on Saturday morning, June 23, Belle wrote, “As my sister is about to visit me, I regret exceedingly I shall want the house to ourselves, as I wish to do a great deal of entertaining and having Paying Guests in the house would interfere with my plans. I therefore hope you will find comfortable quarters elsewhere. Kindly do so