Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [91]
Crippen wore an evening coat, Ethel wore her new dress, and as a further touch, she pinned to her bodice the rising sun brooch that Belle had left behind. Men watched her and admired the way her dress set off her slender figure. The ladies of the guild watched too, but what most caught their attention was the brooch. They knew it well—it had been a favorite of Belle’s. Louise Smythson saw it. Clara Martinetti saw it, and later noted that the typist “wore it without any attempt at concealment.” Annie Stratton saw it, as did her husband, Eugene, who sang in blackface with Pony Moore’s minstrels. Lil Hawthorne, attending with her husband and manager John Nash, sat opposite Crippen and the typist, and they too noticed the brooch. John Nash said, “it impressed me.” Maud Burroughs saw it: “I know [Belle] was very particular whenever she went away to have all her jewelry, except what she took with her, placed in a safe deposit, and this is why it struck me as so strange that the typist was seen wearing a brooch of hers.”
The atmosphere shimmered with hostility. Crippen sat between Clara Martinetti and Ethel. The two women did not speak, but at one point their eyes met. Mrs. Martinetti nodded. She recalled that Ethel seemed “very quiet.” John Nash said, “I noticed that Crippen and the girl were drinking very freely of wine.”
Mrs. Louise Smythson approached Crippen and asked for Belle’s address in America and said how strange it was that Belle had not yet written, to anyone.
“She is away up the mountains in the wilds of California,” he said.
“Has she no settled address?”
“No,” Crippen said, but then offered to forward anything that Smythson wanted to send.
For the moment, Mrs. Smythson let the matter drop.
“AFTER THIS,” ETHEL WROTE, “I noticed that the members of the Music Hall Ladies Guild were showing marked curiosity in my movements.” Her sense of being spied upon and gossiped about became acute. She could not help but run into the ladies of the guild when she entered and left the building and walked the hall to Crippen’s office. Nothing was said directly, but much was communicated by glance and rigid cordiality, deadly for its iciness. “Often when I went along the street with Dr. Crippen,” she wrote, “I remarked people staring at me in a curious way.”
It made her uncomfortable. She wished the ladies could just accept the fact of her relationship with Crippen and be done with it.
But she had made the mistake of allowing the affair to become public: This was the England of Edward VII, but it was also the England that served as the setting for Howards End, to be published later that year, in which E. M. Forster plunged one of his heroines, Helen Schlegel, into an illicit pregnancy. He wrote, “The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights.”
On March 12 Crippen took a cab to Mrs. Jackson’s house on Constantine Road and thanked her for all she had done for his “little girl,” but now, he said, he was taking her away. They loaded all her things into a cab, then went to a nearby public house to celebrate. Even Mrs. Jackson’s husband came along, though he did not approve of Crippen and did not consider Le Neve’s recent behavior at all ladylike. Crippen bought champagne. They all drank.
Then Crippen took Ethel home.
“I DON’T BELIEVE IT”
MARCONI HAD EXPECTED SOME SKEPTICISM about his Newfoundland success, but he was dismayed to find himself now confronting a barrage of incredulous commentary.
“I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe it.” He said, “That letter ‘S’ with the three dots is a very simple one, but I have been fooled myself. Until the published reports are verified I shall doubt the