The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (20 page)

Rehearsals for our spoof interlude were hellish, because all the fun was held in reserve: “Over” Rowley did not roll over, except in a very half-hearted manner indeed, and “The Dramatic Maniac” kept his jumps less than manic. I had my lines by heart, of course, but I was always being caught out by Dan’s high spirits and general excitement. “What a lot of cows,” he said when he
first saw the farmhouse set. “We might as well be in the green room.”

“Are you ready at last, Dan?” Uncle was the stage manager and liked to keep good order, although he was the first to laugh at Dan’s remarks.

“No. I’m not ready. I’ve no particular reason for being anywhere. In fact I’m going somewhere else.”

“Come on, Dan. Play the game. We haven’t got time for the chaff.”

So then, with the galley pulls in our hands, we spent two afternoons learning the script as well as all the trimmings we devised as we went along. Uncle had written a nice set of verses for the murderer, when he is standing alone in front of the red barn, and I sang them out with gusto:

Dan was meant to come on at this point and say “Parten?” instead of “Pardon?” but he just stared down at the galleys.

“Go on,” I said, quite put out by the silence. “It’s your turn now.”

“I’m waiting for my cue.”

“Dan, I gave you your cue.”

“Whatever do you mean? My cue is—‘Lizzie says Marten, and then laughs wildly.’ ”

“I did laugh.” I turned to Uncle for support. “Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Dan. She laughed.”

“Was that a laugh? I thought she had the croup.” Then he turned the galley sheets over, and somehow managed to get entangled with them. “There’s something very wrong here. I seem
to be leaving the stage with a goose. Where did the goose come from?”

Uncle was always very patient, and went over to help him. “What page are you on?”

“Nine.”

“You’ve turned over three pages at once. There you are. Go on.” So then Dan recited Maria Marten’s last words. “I rue the day when he wooed me. Yes I do. I woo the day that he rued me. I was sitting on the step thinking of life—or was I sitting on life and thinking of the step?—with my usual flair in the following manner. Oh what is woman? Who is she? Is she imperative?” At some point in this monologue—which I am quite sure Dan could have continued forever—I was supposed to creep up behind him and, much to the delight of the gallery, strangle him with my bare hands. Then I had to drag him into the barn, bury his body beneath some straw, and turn to the audience with “It was all very restrained, wasn’t it?”

“You know,” Dan said, after he had finished the rehearsal, “I do think that scene is becoming very funny. I can see a lot of bounce in it.” And so it proved—except that, on one night, there was a little bit too much of the bounce. Dan was just finishing Maria’s soliloquy, having added some remarks about the new laws on marrying a deceased wife’s sister (he could find humor in anything), when I crept up behind him and began to put my hands around his throat. “Be philosophical about it,” he was saying to no one in particular. “Don’t give it another thought.” A child screamed somewhere in the gallery as I closed on him: the noise must have disturbed me, because I had my hands around his throat for far too long. He was too much of a professional to stop the scene but, when I dragged him to the barn, he really had gone limp on me. I could see that his face had turned gray beneath the makeup, and he hardly seemed to be breathing. Of course I still retained my presence of mind,
even with a thousand faces watching me, and I called out, “Come here, Mr. Marten. Something is very wrong with your girl.” Uncle was playing Dan’s father, and was already in his mourning dress for the final burial scene. So he ran out, carrying his black hat in his hand, and together we took Dan off the stage: the crowd thought it was all part of the fun, and began to laugh. The fiddler had the presence of mind to jump up and begin a musical interlude, while Uncle and I tried to revive Dan with smelling salts and brandy. Then “Over” Rowley and “The Dramatic Maniac” improvised with a series of jumps and somersaults. Dan came round at last, and gave me a look that I will never forget. “The last thing I felt,” he said, “were those big hands of yours. Whatever did you think you were doing?”

“I suppose I don’t know my own strength, Dan.”

“You can say that again.” He could see that I was about to burst into tears and so, weak though he was, he got me laughing with a remark about his “India-rubber neck.” Then he insisted on going back to the performance: he was, as I said, always the professional.

But I think he remained nervous of me, and never again did he involve me in any knock-about farceries. Uncle took my side, naturally, and blamed it all on my eagerness; he had become quite a favorite with me now, and sometimes I even allowed him to pat my hand or stroke my knee. He was never permitted any other familiarities but he called me his “little Lizzie,” and once took the liberty of addressing me as his “darling girl.”

“I am not your darling, Uncle, and I am not your girl.”

“Have a heart, Lizzie. Don’t play so innocent with me.”

“I am not playing. I am real.”

“If you say so, Lizzie, if you say so.”

Uncle did not live in diggings but had purchased a smart new villa in Brixton; Dan and I, with one or two of the others, would sometimes make up a tea party there. What fun we had in
those days, with Dan pretending to be overawed by Uncle’s signs of gentility. He would point at a silver teapot or a piece of lovely ebony furniture and ask us, in cockney slang, “Don’t it dumb yer?” Then our new resident turn, Pat “It’s All in the Patter” Patterson, would take up the business with a running commentary on the plush curtains, the ormolu clock, the paper flowers and everything else. Uncle always laughed when we spoofed his possessions but, as I was soon to discover, he kept his choicest items to himself.

I happened to be visiting him for tea one day, a few hours before a performance, when I realized that I was to be the only guest. “My dearest niece,” he said. “Come into the parlor.”

“Isn’t that a nursery rhyme, Uncle?”

“It may be, Lizzie, it may be. But come in nevertheless.” He pronounced the last word in a deep, rich voice like some lion comique. “Sit down and rest your pegs.” He filled me up with tea and cucumber sandwiches (I can never resist a nice bit of cucumber) and then, quite out of the blue, he asked me if I would like to know a secret.

“I love mysteries, Uncle. Is it a shocker?”

“Well, my dear, I believe it is. Come upstairs for a moment and we’ll see.” So I followed him up to the attic regions. “This is my dark room,” he whispered, tapping one door. “And here is the surprise!” He opened the door, and I barely had time to notice the extraordinary expression upon his face before he ushered me into what I took to be an office: there was a desk and chair in a corner but then, of all things, in the middle of the room was a camera with its cloth and tripod.

He was such a darling man I would have expected him to take up watercolors, or something of the kind. “Whatever do you want with this, Uncle?”

“That’s the secret, Lizzie.” I could smell spirits on his breath, now that he was close to me, and I supposed that he had
been taking a little something with his tea. “Can I count on you to keep mum?” I nodded, and drew my hand across my mouth like the old servant in
The Great Fire of London
. “These are some of my girls. Over here.” He went across to the desk, unlocked it, and took out some papers. At least they seemed to be papers but, when he handed them to me, I saw that they were photographs—photographs of women, half-naked or entirely nude, with whips and rods in their hands. “What do you think of them, Lizzie?” he asked me eagerly. I was too surprised to say anything at all. “It’s just my fun, Lizzie. You understand. I like a good beating now and again. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I know her.” I held up one of the photographs. “That’s the girl who used to assist the great Bolini. She used to be sawn in half.”

“That’s her, ducks. What a performer.” Of course I was horrified by Uncle’s dirty little secret, but I was determined not to show it. I think I even smiled. “And you know, dear, I have a favor to ask of you.” I shook my head, but he preferred not to notice and went over to the camera. “Would you oblige me with a pose plastique, Lizzie? Just a tableau?”

“I would rather be destroyed first,” I said, unconsciously repeating a line from
The Phantom Crew
. “It is very disgusting.”

“Come on, dear. There’s no need to play your games with me.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Oh, darling. Uncle knows all about precious Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.” I suppose he must have startled me, because I felt myself blushing. “That’s right. I’ve followed you, dearest, when you’ve put on your male duds and strolled down Limehouse way. Do you prefer to be a man, Lizzie, and attract the women?”

“It is nothing to you what I choose to do.”

“Oh dear, I quite forgot. And then there was that business with Little Victor.”

“What nonsense is this now?”

“I saw you and him in the Canteen that night. You gave him quite a kick, didn’t you, Lizzie? It just so happened to be the night that he fell down a flight of steps and left his mortal coil. Surely you remember that, Lizzie? You were so heartbroken at the time.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Uncle.”

“You don’t have to
say
anything, dear.” What could I do? Some foul-minded people might listen to his stories about me, and I was only a defenseless artiste. Half the men and women of London would already have branded me as shameless for doing the halls, and the rest would be happy to believe the worst. It was in my interest to keep Uncle sweet. So that is why, every Sunday afternoon, I would take a cab to Brixton and in his attic room administer a very sound beating to the dreadful man; I was rather rough with him, I admit, but he never seemed to mind. In fact every time I drew blood he would shout “Go on! Go on!” until I was quite exhausted. That is the penalty of my nature, you see, since I always do everything to the utmost of my ability. I am a professional. But I don’t think that Uncle’s heart was up to it: he was very friendly with the bottle and, being such a heavy man, he was bound to feel the strain.

About three months after he had persuaded me to wield the lash, he was taken poorly with palpitations. I remember the occasion well: he had come to our rehearsals of
The Mad Butcher, or What’s in This Sausage?
when he suddenly fell against the scenery. He was sweating and shaking so much that I urged Dan to call for a doctor but, by the time he arrived, it was too late. Uncle was gone to his reward, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that the last word he breathed was my name.

MR. GREATOREX
: So this is Elizabeth Cree. She stands here, according to the account you have just had the pleasure of hearing, as a much wronged and much maligned woman. She is an exemplary wife who has been charged with the foul crime of murder on the evidence of circumstance and gossip alone. You have been told that her unfortunate husband, John Cree, destroyed himself by eating arsenic powder. And why did he willingly embrace such a painful and protracted death? It seems that he was a Romanist who, according to his wife, was so afflicted by morbid piety that he believed he was condemned by God and watched by demons. Self-murder was his deliverance, although it might strike you as a trifle odd that he should thereby deliver himself to those same demons for eternity.

But let us leave religious speculation on one side for a moment, and contemplate the facts of the matter. Elizabeth Cree visited a druggist’s shop in Great Titchfield Street a few days before the death of her husband. “For the rats,” she said—although the maid of the house, Aveline Mortimer, has testified that the newly-built residence in New Cross harbored no vermin of any kind. Then her husband is found dead of arsenic poisoning. The coroner has already testified that the victim must have imbibed quantities of that substance for at least a week before his untimely and unfortunate demise. You may find this unusual in the suicide of a desperate man. And then we have the evidence of a fatal dose, on the evening of
October the 26th last year, when the maid has testified that she heard John Cree exclaiming to his wife, “You devil! You are the one!” Only a short while later, as he lay upon the Turkey carpet in his bedroom, Mrs. Cree ran into the street shouting “John has destroyed himself” and other such words. It may seem odd to you that she already knew that this was the intention and the act of her husband—more peculiar still that she realized he was dying of arsenic poisoning without having examined him—but, in any case, it was not until some minutes later that she was able to rouse Doctor Moore. It was he who pronounced John Cree dead, at which point Mrs. Cree fainted into the arms of her maid.

Let us consider Mr. Cree now. His wife has informed you that he was a morbid papist, but no other witness has given evidence to that effect. We are, in other words, supposed to rely upon the sole testimony of Mrs. Cree in order to account for her husband’s self-murder. The maid, who lived in the same house for some years, has denied each one of Mrs. Cree’s allegations. On the contrary, she tells us, Mr. Cree was a kind and liberal employer who gave no sign of any religious obsession at all. Once a week he attended the Catholic church of St. Mary of Sorrows in New Cross with his wife, but this was at Mrs. Cree’s urging; she had a great desire, according to the maid, to appear respectable. And since Mr. Cree’s temperament and state of mind are so important in this case—indeed it is the sole point of the prisoner’s defense—it will be appropriate to consider his life and character in a little more detail. His father was a hosier in Lancaster, but he came to London in the early 1860s to seek his fortune as a literary man. He wished to be a playwright, it seems, and so naturally he was inclined towards the world of the theater. He found employment as a reporter on the
Era
, a journal devoted to the stage, and it was in this capacity he met and eventually married the
woman who stands in the dock before you. Some time after this marriage John Cree’s father died of a gastric fever, and his only son came into a large fortune. This is the fortune, of course, which his wife has now inherited. He gave up his post on the
Era
and from that time forward devoted his life to literary pursuits of a more serious nature. He frequented the Reading Room of the British Museum, as you have heard, and continued writing his drama. He is also, from the notes found in his possession, supposed to have been compiling a record of the London poor. Is this the kind of man who would succumb to religious delusions, as his wife has stated? Or perhaps John Cree was some evil domestic tyrant, some Bluebeard, who promised a life of unendurable misery? But this is not the case. By all accounts he was a quiet and courteous man who had no reason to kill himself, and against whom his wife could have no possible complaint. He was not, to use a modern analogy, some kind of Limehouse Golem.