The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (17 page)

Dan came into the room while I was standing in front of the mirror and practicing some gestures. “Hello,” he said as if to a stranger. “Do I know you when you’re at home?”

“Of course you do.” I turned around and smiled at him, although I was perhaps a little embarrassed at what I had done. He was always quick, and he recognized me at once. “Good God,” he said. “This is a funny thing.” He carried on staring at me. “What a funny thing.”

“I could make it a scream, Dan. I could be Little Victor’s Daughter’s Older Brother.”

“A swell?”

“A shabby swell.”

I could see that he was contemplating the possibilities. There is always room in the halls for a good male impersonator and, somehow, I looked the part. “I suppose,” he said, “that it could be worked up. It could be quite a diversion.”

And so it proved. At first I went on as Little Victor’s Daughter’s Older Brother, but the name was too big for the bills and I settled for The Older Brother. The beaver hat was always a success when it came down over my eyes, and even fell off my head, but I decided to compromise with a nice little felt-top number without any brim; then I found myself a frock coat and some white trousers, before finishing off the mammoth ensemble with a high collar and big boots. I used to swagger on the stage like a leonine comique, and then somehow manage to have my hat knocked off by a gasman’s pole; that set them roaring because I started to quiver—literally
quiver
—with rage before very carefully taking the gasman’s cap and flinging it into the gutter. It was all mime, of course, and in the beginning Dan took me through the steps and gestures as if I were about to become a regular Grimaldi. But I was a good gagger, too, and after a while I developed my own masculine slanguage. “ ‘Arf a mo’, cocky” and “Will you just a wait a tic?”—uttered like they had never been uttered before—were two popular favorites: I sang them out just before I was about to run off the stage, and then I froze in the act of running with one leg stretched in the air behind me. The Older Brother was a terrible scamp, and was courting a fat old pastry cook who was supposed to have hidden a fortune somewhere. “She’s a fine figure of a woman is my Joan,” he would say. “It’s the dough that does it.” (Dough in those days was the latest morsel of lingo for baksheesh.) “Her hair’s another
thing altogether, and there are some who would say it’s a home for old spiders. But not me.” I had another piece of foolery. When the new regulations came in, I used to gag them by marching across the stage with a banner saying “Temporary Fire Curtain.” That always got them going and, while I had them in the mood, I would hit them with the latest of my ditties. I made a success out of “I’m a Married Man Myself” and “Any Excuse for a Booze,” but I always ended my masculine turn with a song which Uncle originally found for me. It was entitled “She Was One of the Early Birds and I Was One of the—” and there were many times when I would have to “oblige again” before they would let me go on to the next hall. Of course everything was timed perfectly in advance, and my turn lasted thirty minutes before I got into the brougham and went on to the next set of doors. One evening’s program would take me to the Britannia in Hoxton at a quarter past eight, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square by nine, the Winchester along the Southwark Bridge Road at ten, and rounding off with the Raglan in Theobald’s Road at eleven. It was a hard life in some ways, but I was earning seven guineas a week plus supper. The Older Brother had become a great draw, and within a very short time I had taught him how to be cocky and yet naive, knowing yet innocent. Everyone knew that I was also Little Victor’s Daughter, but that was the joy of it. I could be girl and boy, man and woman, without any shame. I felt somehow that I was above them all, and could change myself at will. That was why I perfected the art of running off the stage, five minutes before the end, and coming back as Little Victor’s Daughter while they stared at me in surprise. Uncle was acting as my dresser now, and had my feminine rags in his hand as I came off; he would always pat me on the you-know-what while I changed, but I pretended to ignore him. I recognized all his tricks by now, and I knew that I was equal to them. In any case I was preparing myself for that old pathetic number, “I Wonder
What It Feels Like to be Poor.” How the coppers rained down from the gods for that one! As I used to say, as I stood there as the lonely orphan, these were really “pennies from heaven.”

It must have been two or three months after the Older Brother was born that I had a sudden fancy of my own: it might be a piece of fun to take him out into the streets of London and see the other world. I had a room to myself in our diggings now, just next door to Doris, and after the show was over I would go back in my own clothes as if I were about to toast a slice of bread and retire. But then I would quietly dress myself as the Older Brother, wait until the lights were dimmed and the house was quiet, and then creep out of the back window by the staircase. Of course he never wore his stage clothes, which were a trifle too short and too shabby, and he had bought for himself a whole new set of duds. He was a scamp, as I said, and liked nothing better than to stroll through the night like a regular masher; he would cross the river down Southwark way and then wander by Whitechapel, Shadwell and Limehouse. He soon knew all the flash houses and the dens, but he never set foot in them: he had his fun by watching the filth of the town flowing along. The females of the street would whistle to him but he passed them by and, if the worst of them tried to touch him, he would grip their wrists with his big hands and thrust them away. He was not so rough with the game boys, because he knew that they lusted after him in a purer fashion: they were looking for their double, and who could reflect them better than the Older Brother? No one ever saw Lambeth Marsh Lizzie or Little Victor’s Daughter—she had gone away, and I liked to think of her sleeping peacefully somewhere. No. That is not precisely true. One man did see her. The Older Brother was walking through Old Jerusalem, just by the Limehouse church, when a Hebrew passed him by gaslight—they almost collided, since the Jew was walking with his eyes fixed upon the pavement. When he looked up, he saw
Lizzie beneath the male and recoiled. He muttered something like “Cabman” or “Cadmon” and, in that instant, she struck out and knocked him to the ground. Then she went on her way as a swell of the night with her frock coat and fancy waistcoat; she even made a point of tipping her hat to the ladies.

Doris caught me one night when I returned to the New Cut. She must have been drinking porter with Austin for longer than usual, because she was a little bit “round the houses.” “Lizzie, love,” she said. “Whatever are you wearing?”

I had to think fast, even though I guessed that she would remember nothing in the morning. “I’m rehearsing, Doris. I’ve got a new bit of business, dear, and I need the practice.”

“You look the spitting image of a dear old pal.” She kissed the collar of my frock coat. “A dear old pal. Long departed. Sing us a song, darling, do.” She was quite dazed with the drink, so I took her back to her room and gave her the refrain of “My Sweet Mother Looks After Me Still, Though I Long to Be with Her in Heaven.” How she loved that song. She recalled nothing the next morning, as I expected, but it really did not matter: three weeks later, the poor dear died of drink. She started sweating and trembling while we were sitting in Austin’s nice little parlor; by the time we got her to the Free Hospital down the Westminster Bridge Road, she was all but gone. Drink is a slow poison, so they say, but it can always strike quickly when the body is weakened. We buried her on the Friday afternoon, just before our matinée at the Britannia, and Dan gave a little speech by the graveside. He called her the “female Blondin” who aspired higher and higher. She never fell, he said: she was someone we all looked up to. It was a very nice oration, and we shed a few tears. Then we put her wire in the coffin, and cried some more. I shall never forget it. I was at my best that night, after the funeral, and the mirth of the Older Brother had them roaring. But, as I said to Dan at the time, we have to remain professionals.
That same night I dreamed that I was dragging a corpse behind me with a rope but, after all, what do dreams matter when we have the stage?

That is what I should have told Kennedy, the Great Mesmerist, who was on a bill with me two weeks later. “How is it done?” I had asked him, after I had seen him put several under the ’fluence. A fisherman had come down from the twopenny gallery and danced the fandango all over the place, while a coster and his donah were mesmerized into a clog dance which, being Londoners, they could not have known naturally. “Is it just a wheeze?”

“No. It’s a feat.” We were having a parcel of fish and chips on a licensed premises, not far from the hall in Bishopsgate, and he held up his glass so that he could look at me through it. We were in a snug little corner, where no one could see us, and I noticed a fire in his eyes—although I think now that it may just have been a reflection of the fire in the parlor.

“Go on, then,” I said. “Astonish me, Randolph.” He took from his pocket the flash gold watch which he used on the stage, and read the time before putting it back again. At that moment I saw the fire gleaming inside the dial. “Do that again.”

“Do what, ducks?”

“Let me see it burning.” So slowly he takes out the watch again, and holds it up to the firelight. I could not take my eyes from it, and all at once I remembered how my mother used to hold up a candle to light me to bed in our Lambeth Marsh lodgings. That was all I knew before I fell asleep. It seemed like sleep, at least, but when I opened my eyes the Great Kennedy was looking at me in horror. “What on earth is the matter?” was all I could think of saying.

“It couldn’t have been you, Lizzie.”

“What couldn’t have been me?”

“I don’t want to say.”

I was afraid for a moment of what I might have revealed. “Go on. Do tell a girl.”

“All those terrible things.”

Then I laughed out loud, and raised my glass. “Here’s to you, Randolph. Don’t you know when you’ve been spoofed?”

“You mean …”

“You never had me under at all.” He still looked at me doubtfully. “Can you think so badly of your Lambeth Lizzie?”

“No. Of course not. But you were that genuine.”

“That’s the game, you see. Keep them guessing.” We left it there but, afterwards, he never treated me quite the same.

MR. LISTER
: What is the evidence against Mrs. Cree, after all? She purchased some arsenic powder for rats. That is the sum of it. If that were grounds for the charge of murder, half the women of England would be standing in this place. The plain and certain truth is that the prosecution has failed to provide any convincing reason why Mrs. Cree should wish to kill her husband. He was a mild and studious man afflicted with some kind of brain disorder of an obsessive nature—reason enough for him to kill himself, as Mrs. Cree has suggested, but no reason at all for him to be murdered by his own wife. Had he been a good husband to her? Yes, he had. Had he provided for her? Yes indeed, and to suggest that she killed him for an inheritance is the plainest folly when we consider how comfortable her life had been. Was John Cree some kind of beast who tyrannized his wife? If he had been some fiend in human shape, why then there might have been a possible motive for such a crime. But in fact we have heard that he was, despite his mental infirmity, a kind and loving husband. There was no possible reason in the world why Mrs. Cree should wish to destroy him. Just look at her. Does she seem to you a monster incarnate, a veritable terror, as Mr. Greatorex has implied? On the contrary, I see all the womanly virtues in her face. I see loyalty, and chastity, and piety. Mr. Greatorex has made great play with the fact that she was once a performer in the halls, as if that were necessarily the mark of a bad character. But we have heard from several witnesses that she led an exemplary existence while employed upon the stage. And
of her life in New Cross, we have heard much praise from her neighbors for her wifely deportment. The maid, Mortimer, has said that she was a hardened woman—I wish to quote her exactly—but is that not often the way servants talk about their employers and especially, if I may say so, maids about their mistresses? Mrs. Cree has told us that on several occasions she had threatened this Mortimer with a possible removal from her duties and expulsion from the house. We may have taken a different view of the maid’s opinion after that. Certainly it would be enough to embitter that young woman against her employer. Now imagine the real scene within the Cree household, with this morbidly religious man being comforted and supported by his wife …

S
EPTEMBER
23, 1880: My dear wife still wishes to see Dan Leno in pantomime next week. The season begins earlier and earlier, but I presume that the citizens of London need some diversion from the horrors in their midst. How much more charming to see Bluebeard kill twenty women in his chamber than to think of it being performed upon the streets! I am not so urgently inclined to see Leno again. I am as fond of display as any man, but the thought of him dressed as a princess or fishwife disturbs me as much as it ever did. It is against nature and, for me, nature is all. I am a part of nature, like the frost on the grass or the tiger in the forest. I am not some mythological figure, as the newspaper reports continually suggest, or some exotic creature out of a Gothic novel; I am what I am, which is flesh and blood.

Who ever said that life was dull? I went back to the Ratcliffe Highway at dusk, having told my wife that I was dining with a friend in the City. In the cool of the evening I stood outside the shop of the clothes-seller, and watched a young woman lighting the lamps in the upstairs apartments; then, after a moment, I saw the shadow of a child crossing the window. Once more I knew that I was on hallowed ground, and I gave thanks on behalf of the shopman and his family. They were about to become patterns of eternity, and in their own wounds reflect the inflictions of recurrent time. To die on the same spot as the famous Marrs—and to die in the same fashion—why, it is a great testimony to the power of the city over men.