Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [89]
They were both in the office, Saturday being a workday, when Crippen remembered that he had forgotten to leave out food for his pets—the seven canaries, two cats, and bull terrier. He could not get away to feed them, but the prospect of leaving them so long without food troubled him.
Lest this problem destroy the evening and their first opportunity to go out together in public without fear of discovery, Ethel volunteered to go to Hilldrop Crescent and feed the animals. Crippen offered his keys. She left after lunch.
Ethel entered the house through the side door and found herself alone in the place for the first time. She had seen little of it so far, only the kitchen, the parlor, the bathroom, and of course Crippen’s bedroom. She made her way to the kitchen, where she found most of the pets. She went to the pantry, near the door to the coal cellar, to get some milk for the cats, but as she did so, one of the cats, a beautiful white Persian—Belle’s favorite—escaped and dashed upstairs. Ethel gave chase.
The cat led her throughout the house. “The faster I ran the faster went the cat,” she recalled. At last she cornered it and brought it back downstairs to the kitchen.
Her tour had taken her through rooms she had never seen before, giving her a new sense of what life had been like for Crippen—nothing “uncanny,” as she put it, just a sense of loneliness and what she termed a “strange untidiness.”
“Rich gowns lay about the bedrooms, creased and tumbled in disorder,” Ethel wrote. “Lengths of silk which had never been made into frocks were piled up, and on the pegs was a regular wardrobe, like part of a dressmaker’s show-room.” There were piles of clothes and “cheap stuff” that appeared never to have been worn or used. “I was struck,” she wrote, “by this extraordinary litter.” That Belle had left so much jewelry and clothing behind, even a number of gorgeous and expensive furs, seemed to Ethel a measure of how thoroughly her marriage to Crippen had failed. “I did not question the fact that she had walked straight out of the house, abandoning her old home life, and relinquishing everything it had contained.”
What did surprise Ethel was the decor, especially in light of Belle’s obvious attention to her own appearance. The house had been furnished “in a higgledy-piggledy way,” Ethel wrote. “There was scarcely anything which matched. The only thing in the house which I liked was the ebony piano. All the other things had been picked up at sales by the doctor and his wife, and were of the most miscellaneous description. There was a tremendous number of trumpery knickknacks, cheap vases, china dogs, and occasional tables. There were lots of pictures—small oil and water-colour paintings by unknown artists—with bows of velvet on them to add to their beauty.”
The air was stale, the rooms dark. Overall a sense of loneliness and gloom suffused the place. “From the first,” Ethel said, “I took a dislike to the house.”
THAT MONDAY CRIPPEN stopped in at the Martinettis’ flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. Clara asked, “What is all this about Belle? She has gone to America and you said nothing about it.”
“We were busy packing the whole night the cable came,” Crippen said.
Clara asked why Belle had not sent her a message; Crippen replied they had been too busy getting Belle ready for departure.
“Packing and crying?” Clara asked.
“No,” Crippen said, “we have got over all that.”
The next week he told Clara that he had received disturbing news from Belle, by telegram. She was ill, a pulmonary ailment. Nothing to worry about, but troubling all the same.
WITH EACH DAY that Belle did not return, Ethel Le Neve found her confidence growing. She began wearing the jewelry Crippen had given her and allowed herself to be seen with him on the street, at the theater, and at restaurants. Her landlady, Mrs. Jackson,