A Very British Murder (17 page)

Madeleine and L’Angelier (they called each other ‘Mimi’ and ‘Émile’) also had secret meetings during which their physical relationship progressed beyond the point – for a Victorian young lady – of no return. She took issue with the very real expectation that she should marry well. ‘It was expected that I would marry a man with money,’ she wrote to Émile, but ‘I take the man I love. I know that all my friends shall forsake me, but for that I don’t care.’

When Madeleine’s side of this correspondence emerged during the course of her trial, it caused a sensation. It showed that even a middle-class girl could want, indeed enjoy, sex. ‘I am now a wife, a wife in every sense of the word,’ she wrote to Émile on 27 June 1856, although they had not of course actually undergone a wedding ceremony. ‘I can never be the wife of another after our intimacy,’ she promised, reassuring herself that: ‘Our intimacy has not been criminal, as I am [his] wife before God, so it has been no sin our loving each other.’

However, Émile never married his Mimi. Over time she cooled towards him – something else that young ladies were not supposed to do – and tried to fob him off with various excuses. Her parents,
unaware of their daughter’s relationship, were putting pressure on her to marry, and she feared they might discover everything. Finally, Émile learned from a third party that Madeleine’s parents had arranged for her to marry someone else who was much more suitable, one of her father’s business associates.

It seems that Madeleine feared that her cast-off lover, hurt and angry, had the power to ruin her life by revealing all about their relationship. She certainly begged him not to, writing: ‘Émile, for God’s sake, do not send my letters to papa. It will be an open rupture. I will leave the house. I will die …’

In March 1857, they had several more assignations – tearful and tortured, one imagines – Madeleine inside her parents’ house and talking to Émile through the kitchen window. At one of them she gave him a cup of hot chocolate; afterwards he suffered from an upset stomach. Two days after their final meeting, he died.

It was the discovery of Madeleine’s letters at Émile’s lodging house that drew her to the attention of the police. They also found her name in a chemist’s ‘Poison Book’, which revealed that she had made two recent purchases of arsenic. The poison could have been intended, as Madeleine claimed, to kill rats, or else as a facial treatment. But it could also have been a way of ridding herself of a grave, and potentially life-wrecking, embarrassment.

Madeleine’s letters themselves were not read out during her trial, and now we see how a descending veil of decency began to obscure the true details of her actions: ‘All objectionable expressions, all gross and indelicate allusions were carefully and studiously omitted … that the feelings of the prisoner might not be overwhelmed by such a terrible publicity.’

And, despite the damage to her reputation, Madeleine Smith got off. She was a young, attractive, romantic figure, and aroused a great deal of sympathy. She simply didn’t look like a murderess. Reports of her behaviour in prison made her sound well brought up and innocent: she spent her time ‘in light reading, with occasional regrets at the want of a piano’. Even the phrenologist appointed to ‘read’ Madeleine’s character from the shape of her skull found her admirable, with a propensity for mathematics. ‘Owing to her strong affections and healthy temperament,’ he wrote, ‘she will make a treasure of a wife to a worthy husband.’ This was a sharp contrast to the conclusions reached on William Palmer. One suspects that these phrenologists tended to be influenced by the impression they had formed of the person before even feeling his or her head.

The young and attractive Madeleine Smith, whose guilt was ‘not proven’.

The Scottish jury voted the accusations against her ‘not proven’, the announcement was cheered in court and the world at large glowed with compassion for Madeleine. Among women, she became ‘quite a heroine’. The
Northern British Mail
claimed that her fellow females regarded her as:

a thoughtless but most interesting and warm-hearted young woman – one who in the simplicity of her heart, in her first love affair, abandoned herself to the man of her choice, with an amount of confiding love and outspoken artlessness of purpose, which, censure or regret as they may, they cannot regard without sympathy and admiration.

To many, it was all Émile’s fault, for seducing her.

The tradesmen of Glasgow even raised a subscription so that the now-glamorous Madeleine would have some money upon which to live. Newspapers bandied around the figure of £10,000. This was raised for the intriguing young girl who may or may not have killed Émile (the verdict of ‘not proven’ was quite as good as ‘not guilty’). Meanwhile, as Judith Flanders points out, Émile’s poor old mother, whose son was dead and who had been left with absolutely no means of support, was also given a gift by the public. She received just over £89.

It’s tempting to see Madeleine’s rebelliousness, her increasingly dangerous choices, as being motivated by boredom with a restrictive, unexciting, middle-class domestic life. The idea that nineteenth-century life was split into separate spheres of influence, public and private, male and female, the powerful and the powerless,
can easily be created with choice quotations from advice and etiquette manuals.

But in reality it disguised a more complicated picture. The Victorians defined ‘work’ as an activity that took place outside the home. Therefore, much of what Victorian women did in running houses and contributing to family businesses seemed invisible to the eyes of outsiders. Indeed, to appease the pride of their husbands, many women pretended to work less than they really did.

Even if it was often ignored, though, there was a powerful image in contemporary culture of the ideal female as calming, decorative, exerting a moral influence through virtue, rather than an active influence through the toil of her hands or brain. Madeleine Smith seemed unenthusiastic, or at least ambivalent, about this vision of her future – but it was an ideal that eventually saved her.

This story of a young girl hiding from the consequences of her crime behind the conventional view of Victorian womanhood seems almost too good to true, bringing out as it does all the clichés about nineteenth-century society. Historians of the period are at pains to point out that the supposed neuroses and anxieties about the body that make up such a significant part of our popular idea of Victorian middle-class life are merely a twentieth-century construct. For example, the celebrated myth that the Victorians thought piano legs immodest and covered them up in special fabric sleeves has long been exploded. Of course not every Victorian female teenager was virginal, nor was every married woman in comfortable circumstances kept happy and busy by domestic duties, church attendance and bringing up her children. Yet neither were they all seething with repression and passions unfulfilled. We still remember
women like Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith because they made contemporaries ask questions of themselves about what was womanly, and what was not.

FLORENCE BRAVO, THE
heroine of the so-called ‘Balham Mystery’ or ‘The Murder at The Priory’, was an even more intriguing character than Madeleine Smith. Young, rich and beautiful, Florence was also rather a poor picker when it came to men. Her first husband, Alexander Ricardo, whom she’d married at 19, gradually revealed himself to be a violent and unfaithful alcoholic. ‘I was very happy with him when we first met,’ Florence recalled, ‘but he gradually became more and more abusive – always attacking me and saying terrible things.’

The feisty Florence wouldn’t stand for this. In the teeth of opposition from her family, she left her husband, claiming ill health, and retreated to a hydro in Malvern to recuperate. The hydro Florence attended was run by Dr James Gully, a man with a magnetic personality. Then in his sixties, but vigorous and energetic, he worked hard on behalf of his female patients, whose problems were frequently emotional as much as physical. On Florence’s behalf, he now negotiated with her family for a financial settlement upon which she could live. Florence repaid his kindness by falling in love with him, and they embarked upon a physical relationship.

Florence now had the financial means to live a more exciting life within reach of London. She rented a new home, The Priory, a grand house in Balham, and persuaded Dr Gully to take a house
of his own nearby. But their affair petered out after Florence had a miscarriage.

The beautiful, rich and young Florence Bravo, who may have got away with poisoning her husband.

She wanted the respectability of being married once more, and again, in 1875, she chose badly. Charles Bravo was young, handsome and an ambitious barrister. However, it seems pretty clear that he married Florence merely for her money. Tensions arose almost immediately, because the ‘Married Women’s Property Act’ had just been passed (1870), which allowed Florence to insist upon maintaining control over her very considerable estate.

Charles, baulked of what he wanted, treated her with bullying and violence. Florence miscarried again, this time with Bravo’s child, and was terribly ill. Yet he insisted on sleeping with her and on having his rights as her husband and master.

One night in 1876, Florence’s horrible second husband retired to bed, having taken a drink of water from the glass always placed by his bed. When he called out a little later, he was discovered to be writhing in agony, vomiting and passing bloodied stools. He spent the next three days in this distressing condition. He’d been poisoned with antimony. Tasteless when dissolved in water, it causes failure of the kidneys and liver, leading to headaches, depression, violent retching and – in Charles’s case – death.

But it would be very hard to prove what had happened. The doctor who attended the dying man believed that someone had administered poison. ‘I was not satisfied then and I am not satisfied now,’ he said, during the trial; ‘someone in the house knew the truth.’ In this unhappy household, though, with its secrets, collusions and a cast of servants devoted to their mistress, no one broke ranks and told him. Florence herself was questioned in court, but there was not enough evidence to charge her with the crime. One intriguing fact did emerge, though: Dr Gully, Florence’s former lover, who still wished her well, had been meeting up with Florence’s lady companion, Mrs Cox, to pass on a strange medicine in a bottle marked ‘poison’.

The fullest study of the case, by James Ruddick, concludes that Florence was indeed guilty, and that she could not have acted alone. He proposes a female alliance, between Florence and her servant, Jane Cox, with Florence committing the actual deed of the poisoning and Jane covering up for a mistress.

There are several interesting possible explanations as to why Florence might have poisoned her husband with antimony. Some Victorian women used it, and similar drugs, as a crude method of birth control. In 1885, a woman called Adelaide Bartlett was accused of murdering her husband with chloroform. Not so, she said, she had simply used it to send him off to sleep, so that he wouldn’t have sex with her and make her pregnant again.