Thunderstruck (40 page)

The new station encompassed two square miles. The four towers stood at its center. Next came a ring of twenty-four masts, each 180 feet tall, and beyond them another ring, consisting of forty-eight poles, each fifty feet tall. Over it all was draped an umbrella of wire with a diameter of 2,900 feet, comprising fifty-four miles of wire. Another fifty-four lay in ditches below.

Every day Marconi walked down the “corduroy” road of felled trees to the station compound and remained there for most of each day, while back at the house Beatrice confronted a situation wholly new to her experience. She possessed only limited domestic skills but nonetheless tried to help around the house, only to have Mrs. Vyvyan refuse her offers of assistance in a manner as cold as the weather outside. At first Beatrice kept her unhappiness from Marconi, but after days of enduring such behavior, she broke down and, weeping, told Marconi about all that had happened.

The news made Marconi furious. He was ready to charge out to the living room to confront the Vyvyans, but Beatrice stopped him. She knew how much Marconi depended on Vyvyan. She resolved to confront Mrs. Vyvyan herself.

Now it was Jane Vyvyan who burst into tears. She confessed that she had feared that Beatrice, as the daughter of a lord, would act superior and dominate the house or, worse, treat her as if she were a servant. Jane had hoped to assert her own superiority from the start.

Their talk cleansed the atmosphere. Almost immediately they became friends—and just in time.

W
HILE WORKING AT THE NEW
station under its great umbrella of wire, Marconi became convinced once more that transatlantic communication could succeed. He made arrangements to return to London, again aboard the
Campania,
for a summit with his board and to use the
Campania
’s wireless to test the reach of the new station.

Inexplicably, given how prone he was to jealousy, Marconi left Beatrice behind. She found little to occupy herself. Nova Scotia was a male realm, full of male pursuits, like ice hockey, hunting, and fishing. She found it dull.

In contrast, Richard Vyvyan gauged life in Nova Scotia as “on the whole quite pleasant.” Especially the fishing, which he described as “superlatively good.” Winter, he conceded, could be “trying at times,” but even then the landscape took on a frigid beauty. “The stillness of winter in the country in Canada is extraordinary, when there is no wind. All the birds have left, except a few crows, and although the tracks of countless rabbits are to be seen they themselves are invisible. Not a sound can be heard but one’s own breathing, beyond the occasional sharp crack of frost in a tree. The winter air is intensely exhilarating and the climate is wonderfully healthy.”

Beatrice did not agree. There was no place to walk, save for the barbed-wire grounds of the station, and there she felt imprisoned. She would have loved to bicycle, but there were no roads in the vicinity of sufficient quality to make bicycling possible. She was sad and lonely and became ill with jaundice, possibly the result of contracting a form of hepatitis. And, her daughter wrote, always there was that silence, “so intense it made Bea’s ears ring.”

Marconi did not return for three months.

D
URING THE VOYAGE
Marconi was the toast of the vessel. Though he spent most of his time in the
Campania
’s wireless cabin, he always emerged for meals, especially dinner, where he sat among the richest and loveliest passengers, in a milieu of unsurpassed elegance.

During the first half of the voyage transmissions from the new Glace Bay station reached the ship strong and clear. Daylight reception reached a maximum of eighteen hundred miles—a good result, though he had hoped the range would be far greater, given the station’s size and power.

In England he persuaded his directors to continue investing in his transatlantic quest. He volunteered his own fortune to the effort and sought new capital from investors in England and Italy.

At Poldhu he inaugurated a new series of experiments.

First he concentrated merely on trying to achieve communication between Poldhu and Nova Scotia. He tuned and adjusted the Poldhu receiver and via cable directed Richard Vyvyan to make other changes at Marconi Towers. At last, at nine o’clock one morning in June, the Poldhu station received readable messages—a major breakthrough for the simple fact that this transmission occurred when both stations were in daylight.

Resorting as always to trial and error, Marconi next tested different antenna configurations. He shut down segments of each to gauge the effect on reception. Again, endless variables came into play. He adjusted power and tried different wavelengths. He believed, as always, that the longer the wavelength, the farther waves would travel, though why this should be the case remained a mystery to him.

He began to see a pattern. An antenna consisting of a single wire stretched
horizontally
and close to the ground seemed to provide better reception and transmission than its vertical equivalent. He found too that direction mattered. A wire stretched along an east-west axis could send signals most effectively to a receiving wire erected along the same axis. These discoveries freed Marconi from the need to build taller and taller aerials and more complex umbrella arrays. In theory, a single wire or series of parallel wires stretched over a long distance would produce wavelengths longer than anything he had so far achieved.

He instructed Vyvyan at Nova Scotia to simulate that kind of directional antenna by disconnecting portions of the umbrella array, then learned that his hunch was correct. Transmission and reception improved.

He realized now that Poldhu was not merely obsolete—the site would have to be abandoned entirely and another location found that had enough land to allow him to stretch a horizontal antenna up to one mile long. The new Nova Scotia station too would have to be replaced and its power-generation equipment enlarged to produce ten times more power.

The expense would be staggering, but Marconi saw no other path.

H
E RETURNED TO
N
OVA
S
COTIA,
and to Beatrice. He was appalled at her condition. Her jaundice was jarringly apparent. He promised to take her back to England.

Beatrice assumed this would mean a return to London, and friends and family, and city life. It had been nearly half a year since she had seen a hansom cab or felt the rumble of a subterranean locomotive racing through the darkness under her feet.

But Marconi, her keeper, had a different plan in mind.

L
IBERATION

O
N
S
ATURDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1910,
Crippen left Hilldrop Crescent at his usual hour and went to his office at Albion House. At around ten he approached his assistant, William Long, and asked him to go to a nearby men’s shop, Charles Baker, and buy a few articles of clothing. Crippen gave him a list of things to acquire that included a brown suit cut for a boy, two collars, a tie, two shirts, a pair of suspenders, and a brown felt hat. He was to buy a pair of boots as well, from a shop on Tottenham Court Road. Crippen gave him the necessary money.

Ethel meanwhile took a taximeter cab to the home of her sister Nina and arrived there at about eleven. She asked the driver to wait.

Nina came to the door and exclaimed with delight at this surprise visit from her sister, but her joy quickly changed to concern. Ethel looked “rather troubled,” Nina said, and asked hurriedly if anyone else was at home. She was pale, agitated. When Nina stepped close to put her arms around her sister, she found that she was trembling.

Ethel said, “I had two detectives call to see me yesterday morning about quarter past eight, soon after Harvey had gone.”

(
Harvey
—not Peter. It raised the possibility that Peter was a name appended at Belle’s whim; that she had not only dressed Crippen but named him as well.)

Ethel said, “Belle Elmore’s friends don’t seem to think she is dead.” Her voice wavered. “Who am I?” she cried. “Everyone will think I am a bad woman of the streets.” She broke down. Nina tightened her embrace.

After a few moments Ethel calmed. “I can’t stop long with you,” she said, “but I could not go without coming and saying goodbye.”

This startled Nina. She asked where Ethel was going.

“I don’t know,” Ethel said. Crippen hadn’t told her. She promised that once settled she would send Nina her address.

But Nina could not understand
why
Ethel had to leave.

“What good is it for me to stop without means, and my character gone?” Ethel said.

And there was another reason, she said. Crippen had told her he wanted to find the person who had sent the cable about Belle’s death and, in so doing, perhaps locate his wife. Only by finding her, Ethel said, could he end this scrutiny by Scotland Yard. “For all I know she may not have gone to America at all,” Ethel told Nina, “she may still be in London and have got somebody across the water to send a bogus telegram informing of her death.” Ethel feared a conspiracy by Belle—that out of pure malice she might simply be hiding somewhere, waiting until Ethel and Crippen got married, and then, as Ethel put it, “confront us with bigamy.”

Ethel and Nina hugged again. Ethel said good-bye and stepped back into the taxi. She told the driver to head for Bloomsbury, to Albion House.

T
HAT MORNING AT
N
EW
Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Dew considered what to do next regarding the disappearance of Belle Elmore. It was tempting to do nothing, but he had been in the police department long enough to know that doing nothing could be ruinous to a man’s career. He did not suspect foul play but recognized the case could not be closed with confidence until Belle was found. The doctor’s advertisement would help, but something more was needed, if only to prove to Superintendent Froest that he had done all he could for the Nashes.

Dew composed a circular in which he described Belle Elmore and classified her as a missing person. He arranged to have it sent to every police division in London. It was a routine step, unlikely to bear fruit, but necessary all the same.

A
ROUND NOON
C
RIPPEN
and Ethel met in the work room of Yale Tooth, on the fourth floor of Albion House. Ethel’s spirits had improved. Her anger of the night before was gone, and having completed the sorrowful task of saying good-bye to her sister, she now found herself caught up in the daring of the moment.

Crippen showed her the suit of clothes that William Long had bought earlier that morning. “You will look a perfect boy in that,” Crippen said. He grinned. “Especially when you have cut off your hair.”

“Have I got to cut my hair?” she cried.

His delight increased. “Why, of course,” he said. “That is absolutely necessary.”

She wrote, “Honestly, I was more amused than anything. It seemed to me an adventure.”

She removed her clothes.

E
THEL’S BROTHER
, S
IDNEY,
planned to visit Hilldrop Crescent that same day. Ethel had made the invitation a few days earlier, before everything changed, but was unable to reach him to cancel his visit.

Now he walked up the ten steps to the front door at No. 39 and knocked. The French maid gave him a note from Ethel.

“Dear Sid,” it said, “Am sorry to disappoint you to day; have been called away. Will write you later. My love dear to you and all and kisses. From your loving Sis, Ethel.”

A
T
A
LBION
H
OUSE
Ethel stood before Crippen in a white shirt, suspenders, tie, vest, brown jacket and pants, and a new pair of boots. In trying on the pants she had split the seat, but she reconnected the seam with safety pins. “It was not a good fit,” she wrote. “It was ludicrous.” To complete the outfit she put on the brown felt hat.

She laughed “at the absurdity” of dressing up as a boy. “Dr. Crippen was just as gay as I was at this transformation. It seemed a merry joke to him.”

Crippen picked up a pair of scissors.

“Now for the hair,” he said.

He began to cut. Hair flurried around her. “I did not think twice about this loss of my locks,” she wrote. “It was all part of the adventure.” She put the hat back on and walked back and forth across the room, trying to get used to the alien feel of the clothing. “I was like a child,” she wrote, “and strutted up and down, and very soon felt quite at ease, although for a time I missed the habit of holding my skirt.”

Crippen watched and smiled. “You will do famously,” he said. “No one will recognize you. You are a perfect boy.”

She feared she would not be able to muster the courage to wear her disguise on the street. It felt so odd. The nape of her neck was cold. The collar chafed. The boots hurt. The sensations reported to her brain from all quarters were strange. It was hard to imagine men wearing these things day in, day out, and not going mad from constriction and abrasion.

Crippen reassured her that she looked exactly like a sixteen-year-old boy. He instructed her to leave first, by the stairs, and to meet him at the Tube station at Chancery Lane, a dozen blocks east on High Holborn—the street along which, in the distant past, condemned men traveled on their way to be executed at Tyburn, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park. To enhance her costume, Ethel placed a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, “another novelty for me which I did not much appreciate.”

She set off for the stairs and soon was outside. “I was terribly self-conscious,” she wrote, “but the crowds surged past, and my disguise did not cause one man to turn his head. I suppose I must have had a certain amount of pluck. I was highly strung with excitement, and the adventure was amusing to me.” She waited at the entrance to the Chancery Lane station.

Soon Crippen arrived but without his mustache. He smiled and asked happily, “Do you recognize me?”

They made their way by subterranean railway to the Liverpool Street station, where eighteen platforms served a thousand trains a day. Crippen planned to catch a train to Harwich and there to book passage aboard one of the steamships that regularly sailed to Holland. They arrived at the station just after a Harwich train departed and now faced a three-hour wait for the next one, scheduled to leave at five o’clock.

Crippen suggested a bus ride, just for fun, and Ethel agreed. “Strange as it may seem,” she wrote, “I was now quite cheerful, and, indeed, rather exhilarated in spirits. It seemed to me that I had given the slip, in fine style, to all those people who had been prying upon my movements”—meaning the ladies of the guild. “I had gone in disguise past their very door in Albion House, and no longer would they be able to scan me up and down with their inquisitive eyes. That made me feel glad, and I had no thought whatever of any reason for escape except this flight from scandal.”

That evening, in Harwich, they boarded the night boat to Hoek van Holland, which sailed at nine o’clock. They reached Holland at five the next morning, Sunday, and had breakfast, then caught a seven o’clock train to Rotterdam, where they spent a few hours walking and seeing sights. At one point they took seats in an outdoor café, where Ethel realized how good her disguise really was. Two Dutch girls began flirting from afar, one remarking, “Oh, the pretty English boy!”

Soon afterward they boarded a train for Brussels. That afternoon they checked into a small inn, the Hotel des Ardennes, at 65 Rue de Brabant. Crippen identified himself in the hotel’s register as “John Robinson,” age fifty-five, and listed his occupation as “merchant.” At entry number 5,
“De Naissance,”
or place of birth, he wrote “Quebec,” and beside
“De Domicile”
wrote “Vienna.” He identified Ethel as “John Robinson, Junior,” and explained to the innkeeper’s wife, Louisa Delisse, that the boy was ill and that his mother had died two months earlier. They were traveling for pleasure, he said, and planned to visit Antwerp, The Hague, and Amsterdam.