The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (18 page)

I had already devised a means of entering silently and invisibly;
I still stood on the opposite side of the street, and observed Gerrard come downstairs to his place of business. He picked up some coins, took a few items of cloth from the counter, and then began climbing the stairs. I hurried into the shop, and looked around for a place to conceal myself: there was another door beneath the stairs and, when I opened it, I realized from the odor that it led into an earth cellar. I love the smell of the underworld and, on an impulse, I smeared my face with some of the dirt that lined these dark walls; here I waited, the door shut, until I heard the sound of the shop being closed and bolted. I lingered a few minutes more in the seclusion of the cellar, but even there I could hear the murmur of voices in the rooms upstairs. Of course I could not come upon them at once, since in the consternation of that fatal moment a child or servant might escape, and I contemplated the means of taking them one by one. There were, as I guessed, some four or five above me. How had the Marrs been dispatched?

A young woman was singing “In Vauxhall Gardens” from that perennial favorite,
A Night in London
—I supposed it to be a servant girl or perhaps a daughter, and I came from my hiding place to savor the melody. There was a small wooden step-ladder by the side of the counter, and I knocked it to the floor; the sudden noise disturbed her song, and a few moments later I heard her foot upon the staircase. She grew more bold in the silence (although I could hardly restrain myself from bursting out in laughter) and descended the stairs. I was standing in the shadows just beside them and, when she came down into the shop, I took the mallet from my pocket and struck her down. She did not cry out—she did not even sigh—but, cradling her wounded body, I took my razor and cut her from ear to ear. It was hot business indeed, with the blood welling over the sleeves of my coat, and so I dragged her down into the earth cellar.

“Annie? Are you down below, Annie?”

It was Gerrard. I was tempted to reply in the voice of the servant, but I bit my tongue and said nothing. Slowly he came down the stairs, calling her name once more, until I reached out and took him with my razor. I had his head almost off his body before he made any noise, and then there was only a low moan as if he had always known what fate lay in wait for him. “That servant of yours was a bad girl,” I whispered to him. “She gave herself too willingly.” He seemed to look at me in wonder, and I patted his cheek with my hand. “You have missed nothing else,” I whispered again. “The play has just begun.”

I mounted the stairs, with the open razor in my hand—what a sight I must have made, all bathed in blood and with my face besmeared in dirt like an African tribesman. The child saw me first, and stared at me. “Do you have a baby brother?” I asked her very gently. Then the mother rushed towards me, and set up a screaming such as I had never heard before. It was necessary for me to stop that noise at once and so, in defiance of all right ceremony and proceeding, I moved for her with my mallet and clubbed her down. Then I looked towards the children, now cowering in the corner.

T
he brutal murder of the Gerrard family, by the hands of the Limehouse Golem, provoked the public to an even greater level of fury and exultation. As soon as the newspapers published the details of the “latest atrocity,” no one could talk of anything else. It was as if some primeval force had erupted in Limehouse, and there was an irrational but general fear that it would not stop there but would spread over the city and perhaps even the entire country. Some dark spirit had been released, or so it seemed, and certain religious leaders began to suggest that London itself—this vast urban creation which was the first of its kind upon the globe—was somehow responsible for the evil. Reverend Trussler, of the Holborn Baptist Church, compared the murders to the smoke of the London chimneys and denounced them as the necessary and inevitable results of modern existence. So why, then, should this taint not spread? Would it soon reach Manchester, and Birmingham, and Leeds? Other public leaders called for the detention of all prostitutes, ostensibly to save them from the activities of the Limehouse Golem; but such demands were part of a more general desire for some kind of ritual purification and cleansing. It was even suggested that the entire eastern portion of the city should be razed and estates of model dwellings erected in its place. The government of Mr. Gladstone considered the idea, but it was eventually rejected as both impractical and expensive. Where, in particular, would the former inhabitants of the East End be housed while their new city was being constructed? And if these people were in some
way responsible for the presence of the Golem, in the way that putrefying matter was thought to breed flies, they might simply spread the contagion if they were dispersed over the capital. The police themselves were not untouched by the feverish speculation, and even the detectives pursuing the case seemed to believe that they were on the trail of some genius or god of murder. They had not chosen to call him the Golem—that had been the invention of the
Morning Advertiser
—but now they used the term even in conversations among themselves. How, otherwise, could he have escaped detection for so long?

The sister of Gerrard, the clothes-seller, had been asleep in the attic story of the house during the course of the murders; she had taken laudanum for a toothache and had consequently heard nothing. It is not easy to imagine her horror when she first came upon the bodies of the slain but, even as she saw her brother and his family lying dead, she noticed one thing: nothing in the house or shop had been disturbed, not one item of furniture or domestic object had been moved from its place. (She could not have known that the stepladder, knocked over to arouse the servant’s attention, had been put back in its original spot.) Somehow it was as if the family had been murdered without the assistance of any outside agency—almost as if it had
murdered itself
under the power of some dominating impulse. So the panic spread throughout London.

It even touched those who were not generally moved by public sensations, and who even affected to despise them. The murders in Limehouse led indirectly to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, written by Oscar Wilde some eight years later, in which the opium dens and cheap theaters of that area play a large part in a somewhat melodramatic narrative. They also inspired the famous sequence of paintings by James McNeill Whistler, “Limehouse Nocturnes,” in which the brooding presence of the riverine streets is conveyed by viridian green, ultramarine, ivory
and black. Whistler also described them as “Harmonies upon a Theme,” although they were conceived in the most disharmonious fashion—he spent one evening sketching the vicinity but, with his dark cloak and “foreign” appearance, he was suspected of being the Golem and chased by a large crowd until he ran to the safety of the divisional police station where George Gissing had been questioned a few days before. Several plays were also written upon this murderous theme by hack writers, and were performed at the various “blood tubs” or “blood and thunder” playhouses where “shockers” were the customary entertainment. At the Effingham in Whitechapel, for example,
The Limehouse Demon
became a standard of the horror repertoire together with
The Death of Chatterton
and
The Skeleton Cabman
. Small cardboard characters of the victims of the Limehouse Golem were also constructed, penny plain and twopence colored, for use in booths and miniature theaters. It was in conditions such as these that Somerset Maugham and David Carreras, then young children, first became aware of their fascination for drama—and indeed Carreras himself in the 1920s wrote a play based upon the Limehouse killings entitled
No Man Knows My Name
.

And yet—in one of those coincidences that are so much part of this, or any, history—one theatrical figure of the 1880s was far more directly connected with the killing of the Gerrard family in Ratcliffe Highway. Gerrard had once been the “dresser” of Dan Leno (in fact Leno had given the man some of his old female costumes when he started his business), and the great comedian had actually visited the Gerrard family only three days before their deaths. On that inauspicious occasion he had given them an impromptu rehearsal of his new song, “The Boneless Wonder,” during which he pretended to be made entirely of India rubber.

S
EPTEMBER
25, 1880: Elizabeth and I attended the pantomime at the Oxford by the Tottenham Court Road. She insisted upon seeing Dan Leno play Sister Anne in
Bluebeard
but, as we stood by the entrance for a few minutes, I was delighted to hear everyone discussing my own little piece of business along the Ratcliffe Highway. Londoners love a good killing, on stage or off, and two of the wittier gentlemen were comparing the Limehouse Golem with Bluebeard himself. I was longing to approach them and introduce myself. “I am he,” I would have said, “I am the Golem. Here is my hand. You may shake it.” But I contented myself with a smile and a bow; they believed that they knew me, and bowed in return. Of course the commoner sort of people were also there—the mechanics and the small tradesmen went trooping up to the main hall, together with a few city clerks and their girls. Elizabeth asked me to purchase a book of words as we stood in the grand foyer. “Old habits die hard,” I said to her.

“But some things have changed, John. Do you see the frescoes? And all those flowers? We had nothing of the sort at the Washington or the Old Mo.”

“No more winkles and watercress, dear. Now it is chops and ale.”

The manager was at the door in a scarlet waistcoat; he was becoming agitated and waved his bejeweled hands in the air. “Please to take your seats. Sixpence the body of the ’all, ninepence the gallery which is more select.” So we went up to the gallery and, as soon as Elizabeth saw the stage, she gripped my
arm in her excitement; no doubt she could remember herself as the Older Brother or Little Victor’s Daughter. The gas flares may have gone, and the audience were now more clean and wholesome, but for a moment she breathed the atmosphere which she had once loved so much. She hardly had time to point out the grand piano and the harmonium, when the pantomime boys came on. Then Dan Leno made his entrance, running down to the edge of the stage just like the old days, and my wife joined in the screaming laughter when he announced himself to be “Sister Anne, the Woman Who Knows.” I laughed as loud as anyone, because I knew that there was a murder in the air.

I
t was not the first time that Dan Leno had taken on the role of Sister Anne, and in any case he had become accustomed to playing the dame. He was no longer the anxious but hopeful young comic whom Lambeth Marsh Lizzie had first met in 1864; now, sixteen years later, he was the established star of the halls who was billed as “The Funniest Man on Earth.” In many respects he had become public property: his activities were chronicled in the newspapers, his appearance was disseminated throughout the country in countless photographs, and his “funny female” impersonations were copied by the less successful comiques in a hundred low halls. He was well known as Dame Durden, as the Queen of Hearts in
Humpty Dumpty
, as the Baroness in
Babes in the Wood
, and as Widow Twankey in
Aladdin
; but his most famous, and ultimately most tragic, role was to be Mother Goose. Something then affected his mind, and he retired to a private asylum for a while—he never fully recovered, and there are some theatrical historians who claim that Mother Goose herself effectively destroyed him.

Sister Anne appeared for her main entrance in the middle of the first act; she was riding in a cart, which was pulled by two donkeys, and was dressed as a lady of the old school with towering wig and décolleté costume. It was not immediately clear why she was sitting in a donkey cart, but all was explained when a decrepit railway guard brought up the rear of the procession. The train had broken down, and she had been the only passenger.

“I say, missus, you
are
a swell.” This was the guard, speaking very loudly to be heard over the laughter of the audience.

“Do you think I look expensive enough?”

“Rather! You look like a walking vault.”

“Of course in
my
position I have to look wealthy.”

“That dress must have cost a lot of eggs.”

“I don’t care about that, but I do grudge having so many expensive things underneath I daren’t show.” At this point she raised herself gently from a sack of corn, and looked behind her with a puzzled expression.

“What, missus, ain’t yer nothing to sit down on?”

“It’s too bad. I have plenty to sit on, but nowhere nice to put it.”

The railway guard mopped his forehead until the laughter had subsided. “So are you coming out in a minute?”

“
Au contraire
, I’m coming out in a rash.”

It was broad humor, of the kind the audience loved, but when it was delivered by Leno it seemed to become the essence of comedy itself; he was so plain and yet so haughty, with such a grand air and such a pitiful sniffle, ebullient in defeat and absurd in victory. The plot of the pantomime, rewritten by a journalist on the
Glow-Worm
, consisted of Sister Anne trying recklessly to capture the attentions of Bluebeard—she refused to hear anything “untoward” about him, and was so desperate for a man that nothing would stop her. She was of a “coming on” disposition and believed, in the words of one of her famous songs, “I Don’t Think I Put Myself Forward Too Much.” She had even learned to play the harp to attract “Bluey,” but of course her fingers, her arms and her dress managed to get entangled in the strings so that she ended up wrestling with the instrument upon the floor. Then she did a clog dance to entice her man, only to be told by him that she was “as elegant as a steamroller.” But she
never gave up hope and was always explaining to her beautiful sister, Fatima, the arts of seduction. One of the scenes which most entertained the audience occurred in the second act, when Sister Anne is changing behind a very small screen. Fatima came onto the stage and asked her gently, for fear of offending her feelings, “Have you anything to do this evening, dear?”