Thunderstruck (22 page)

In closing, he offered a suggestion: “that the tolling of the bell after an execution should be stopped—there appears to be no reason for it and if it were stopped I think very few people in the neighborhood would be aware of anything unusual taking place.”

He was overruled. The bells had always rung. They would continue to ring. It was, after all, the law, and this was, after all, England.

B
ELLE DECORATED IN PINK.
She wore pink dresses. She wore pink underclothes, including a pink silk ribbed undervest. She bought pink pillows with pink tassels, walled rooms with pink fabric, and hung pink velvet bows off the frames of paintings. She loathed green. It was unlucky, she believed. On seeing green wallpaper in the drawing room of a friend’s home, she exclaimed, “Gee. You have got a hoo-doo here. Green paper! You’ll have bad luck as sure as fate. When I have a house I won’t have green in the house. It shall be pink right away through for luck.” By that standard, she would now be very lucky indeed.

She exhibited an odd mix of frugality and extravagance, according to her friend Adeline Harrison. “Mrs. Crippen was strictly economical in small matters in connection with their private home living,” Harrison wrote. “In fact, to such an extent did she carry it that it suggested parsimony. She would search out the cheapest shops for meat, and go to the Caledonian Market and buy cheap fowls. She was always trying to save the pence, but scattering the pounds.”

She spent most heavily on clothing and jewelry for herself. For the house, she bought knickknacks and gewgaws and odd pieces of furniture. Given her passion for bargains, she no doubt frequented the famous Friday market of “miscellanies” at the Metropolitan Cattle Market. At first “miscellanies” was meant to describe livestock other than cattle, hogs, and sheep, such as donkeys and goats, but over the years the term had come to include anything that could be sold, whether animate or inanimate. On Fridays, as Charles Booth discovered when his survey of London took him to the cattle market, “nearly everything is sold & nearly everything finds a purchaser.” Anyone browsing the stalls could find books, clothes, toys, locks, chains, rusty nails, and an array of worn and beaten wares that Booth described as “rubbish that one wd. think wd. not pay to move a yard.” Another writer observed in 1891 that the “buyers and sellers are as miscellaneous, ragged and rusty as the articles in which they deal.”

Belle adorned the house with ostrich feathers and in one room installed a pair of elephants’ feet, a not uncommon decoration in middle-class homes. Her friends noted with cheery malignance that while Belle paid a lot of attention to how she looked and dressed, her housekeeping was haphazard, with the result that the atmosphere within the house was close and musty. “Mrs. Crippen disliked fresh air and open windows,” Harrison wrote. “There was no regular house cleaning. It was done in spasms. The windows in all the rooms, including the basement, were rarely opened.” Despite the size of the house—its three floors plus basement—Belle refused to spend money on a maid, even though servants could be hired for wages that later generations would consider laughably low. To reduce the amount of housework, she simply closed the top-floor bedrooms and regulated access to the rest of the house. “They lived practically in the kitchen, which was generally in a state of dirt and disorder,” Harrison wrote. “The basement, owing to want of ventilation, smelt earthy and unpleasant. A strange ‘creepy’ feeling always came over me when I descended—it was so dark and dreary, although it was on a level with the back garden.”

Harrison recalled visiting the house on a day when the contradictions of Belle’s nature became strikingly evident. “I followed her into the kitchen one morning when she was busy. It was a warm, humid day, and the grimy windows were all tightly closed. On the dresser was a heterogeneous mass, consisting of dirty crockery, edibles, collars of the doctor’s, false curls of her own, hairpins, brushes, letters, a gold jeweled purse, and other articles.” In the kitchen the gas stove was brown with rust and stained from cooking. “The table was littered with packages, saucepans, dirty knives, plates, flat-irons, a washing basin, and a coffee pot.” And yet in the midst of this clutter, a white chiffon gown with silk flowers lay draped “carelessly” across a chair.

At the window, which was closed, stood one of Belle’s cats. “The little lady cat, who was a prisoner, was scratching wildly at a window in a vain attempt to attract the attention of a passing Don Juan.”

O
UTWARDLY, THE
C
RIPPENS
seemed to have an idyllic marriage. Neighbors in the houses on either side and in back reported often seeing the couple at work together in the garden, and that Belle often sang. One neighbor, Jane Harrison, who lived next door at No. 38, reported, “They always appeared on very affectionate terms and I never heard them quarrel or have a cross word.” On four occasions Harrison came over to help Belle prepare for parties, including one large affair that Belle hosted for the birthday of George Washington “Pony” Moore, manager of the blackface Moore and Burgess Christy Minstrels.

But those with a closer view saw a relationship that was not quite so idyllic. For one brief period Belle did try having a servant, a woman named Rhoda Ray. “Mr. and Mrs. Crippen were not altogether friendly to each other,” Ray said, “and they spoke very little together.” And a friend, John Burroughs, noticed that Belle could be “somewhat hasty” in her treatment of her husband. One change in how they configured their home appeared to cause no great concern among their friends, though within a few years it would take on great significance. For the first time in their marriage the Crippens occupied separate bedrooms.

What Belle’s friends and neighbors did not seem to grasp was that Belle was lonely. She stayed at the house most of the time, though she often left for lunch, typically departing at about one o’clock and returning about three. She found comfort in pets, and soon the house was full of mewing and chirping and, eventually, barking. She acquired two cats, one an elegant white Persian; she bought seven canaries and installed them in a large gilt cage, another common feature of homes in the neighborhood. Later she and Crippen acquired a bull terrier.

At one point soon after moving into the house, she decided to take in boarders and placed an advertisement in the
Daily Telegraph.
Soon three young German men took up residence in the top-floor bedrooms. One of them, Karl Reinisch, later recalled that Belle had wanted more than just income.

He told his story in a letter that is now in the possession of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, accessible only to police officers and invited guests:

The house had a “beautiful garden,” Reinisch wrote, and was situated on “a quiet, better street.” He considered himself lucky to have been accepted as a tenant. “It counted at that time as a certain distinction to obtain board and lodging in the house of Dr. Crippen,” he wrote. Crippen was “extremely quiet, gentlemanly, not only in thought but also in behaviour, not only towards his wife but also to me and everyone else. He idolized his wife, and sensed her every wish which he hastened to fulfill.” That first Christmas, 1905, offered an example. “Dr. Crippen wished to give his wife a big surprise, one that would make her very happy, namely a gramophone. These were then very costly. Mrs. Crippen, a good piano player, was as pleased as a child at this attentiveness, and Dr. Crippen was even happier at the joy of his wife. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to procure the gramophone.”

Crippen and Belle had opposite natures, Reinisch wrote. He found Crippen to be “extremely placid” and Belle “very high-spirited. Blonde, with a pretty face, of large, full, may I say of opulent figure.” She was, he wrote, “a good housewife, unlike many other English women. She cooked herself, quite excellently.” He noticed that despite the couple’s “good financial circumstances,” they had no servants.

Often Crippen and Belle recruited Reinisch and one of the other tenants for whist. “Mrs. Crippen could be extremely angry if she lost a halfpenny or a penny, and on the other hand extremely happy if she won a similar sum. The penny was not the most important thing here, but ambition. Merely so that his wife should not be angry, Dr. Crippen asked me…to play often intentionally badly, as he also often did, just to allow the mistress of the house to win and thus to make her happy.”

Overall, however, the couple struck Reinisch as being reasonably content. “The marriage, at least during my time there, was very harmonious,” he wrote. “I never once perceived any misunderstanding or bad feeling between the couple. I must mention that they lived a comparatively retiring life. It was only for this reason, so as not to be always alone together, that they took me into their household. I felt myself very much at home with this family, and never had the feeling that I was just an object to be made money out of, as was often the case elsewhere.”

It was the absence of children, Reinisch believed, that had compelled Mrs. Crippen to seek lodgers.

“As a ‘substitution’ for offspring someone was to be in the house who was trustworthy and sociable,” he wrote. “Thus the condition was made, on my being taken into the house, that I was not to go out every evening, but should rather stay in the house for the sake of the company…. It was not easy for me, as a young man who wished to enjoy himself in the big city, to agree to this. I had no need, however, to regret it, as the society of the two cultured people had only a good influence on me, and the frequent conversations beside the fire were very varied, stimulating and interesting.”

Another tenant, however, had a different perception of the Crippens and told Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison about a number of quarrels that always seemed one-sided, “Mrs. Crippen, excitable and irritable, chiding her husband; Crippen, pale, quiet, imperturbable.”

T
HOUGH THE PRESENCE
of Reinisch and the other tenants might have eased Belle’s loneliness, it inserted extra tension into her relationship with Crippen. She made Crippen tend to their needs every day, and even on Sunday, which was Crippen’s one full day off from work. “He had to rise at six o’clock in the morning to clean the boarders’ boots, shovel up the coal, lay the breakfast, and help generally,” Adeline Harrison wrote. He had to make beds, wash dishes, and on Sundays help prepare the tenants’ midday dinner, all this without servants. “It was a trying time,” Harrison wrote, “and quite unnecessary exertion for both, as Crippen was earning well, and gave his wife an ample supply of money.” Belle used the income from the tenants to buy more clothing and jewelry.

In June 1906, after less than a year, Belle evicted the Germans. The work had become too much, a friend said, though it is possible too that the mounting fear of German spies influenced her decision. At nine-thirty on Saturday morning, June 23, Belle wrote, “As my sister is about to visit me, I regret exceedingly I shall want the house to ourselves, as I wish to do a great deal of entertaining and having Paying Guests in the house would interfere with my plans. I therefore hope you will find comfortable quarters elsewhere. Kindly do so at your own convenience as I do not want to rush you off and want you to feel thoroughly at home while you remain with us. I hope you will honor me with your presence at my weekly Receptions while my sister visits me.”