The Mourning Bells (28 page)

 

V
iolet hated trains, yet here she was at St. Pancras, ready to board one for Nottinghamshire. Around her were Sam, Susanna, Benjamin, piles of trunks, and the once-again displeased Mrs. Softpaws, who occasionally yowled from inside her wicker cage, which Susanna held by its leather handle. Susanna and Benjamin were leaving on a later train for Southampton and would then board a ship for America.

The trip to see Violet’s parents had done little for Susanna’s disposition. She seemed resentful that Violet had managed to solve the matter of the bell coffins on her own. Ever the polite girl, though, Susanna kept her thoughts to herself, but Violet knew her daughter like she knew herself. Susanna’s “Mother, you’ve done a wonderful thing” had no warmth in it.

Susanna still seemed to be pulling away from Benjamin, too. What was wrong with the girl? Maybe it was too much sea air in Brighton. Or perhaps it was the near-death experience she’d had in London. Violet had had no plans to ask her about it, for she preferred to think that Susanna was merely settling awkwardly into her marriage, and that her troubled thoughts would resolve themselves once she returned to the States. At least, that was Violet’s hope. She knew, though, that thoughts of Susanna would keep her up nights.

Perhaps, though, she owed it to both of them to say something before Susanna left. Tugging on Susanna’s elbow, she pulled her daughter—and the ever-protesting Mrs. Softpaws—a short distance away from Sam and Benjamin, whose heads were bent over a copy of the train schedule.

“My dear, are you quite all right?” she asked over the whistles, screeching, and clacking of the station.

“Of course, why would you ask?” Susanna’s fingers tightened around the handle of Mrs. Softpaws’s cage as she turned her face, avoiding Violet’s gaze.

“You’ve been out of sorts almost since you arrived in London. What troubles you? Does the London air not agree with you? Are you angry with me because you didn’t have as much involvement in my investigative matter?”

Susanna shook her head absently. “No, Mother, I love London and I realize I don’t have your talents.”

Violet put a hand out to her daughter’s cheek and gently pulled Susanna to face her. “Is there perhaps something of a more personal nature that bothers you?”

Susanna’s eyes glistened, but no tears spilled. “Perhaps. I don’t know. I’m just a little . . . disappointed, I suppose.”

Violet felt a rush of embarrassment. “Were you not happy staying with us? Was that why Benjamin rushed you off to Brighton? My apologies if we—”

“No, no, that’s not it. I was just hoping my life would be a bit more like yours . . .” Susanna’s voice trailed off as she glanced over at Sam.

Now Violet understood completely. “Susanna, you cannot expect your husband to be like your father. Benjamin is a good man in his own right and adores you. I know you will be very happy.”

Susanna swallowed and nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. You’ll come to Colorado soon, won’t you?” she said, smiling with a brightness that didn’t reach her eyes.

How could Violet possibly get away for a months-long journey to America? She and Sam would be in Nottinghamshire for weeks, there was the upcoming trip to Egypt, Harry was alone in the shop . . .

“Of course we will. Just as soon as we can. I can’t possibly let too much time pass without seeing you again.” Violet didn’t know how they would manage it, but she and Sam would have to make a trip soon to see their daughter, to be sure all was still well with her. Maybe they would even look into the type-writing machine there.

This seemed to cheer Susanna up. “Everyone in town will be so glad to see you again,” she said, her eyes now sharing the smile with her lips.

They rejoined Sam and Benjamin, who now had puzzled expressions on their faces. Susanna changed the subject before they could ask anything. “I can still hardly believe you are a coal mine owner, Father.”

Mrs. Softpaws added her assent in the form of a particularly plaintive meow. Hopefully the cat would settle down once the Tompkinses were underway.

Sam couldn’t help but puff his chest a bit. “Scaring up the financing was a bit of a struggle, wasn’t it? Like finding hen’s teeth. I suppose your mother’s investigation ironically led to getting the loan.”

“The investigation wasn’t possible without your information about Mr. Hayes, Sam,” Violet said.

“I certainly didn’t sense his perfidy the way you did. Nevertheless, two well-deserving criminals will get justice, and I will get my coal mine. With your mother there to encourage me, it will surely be successful. Although I suppose I’m lucky to still have her, since the moment I left her alone for a mere twenty-four hours, she immediately got herself into a peck of trouble.”

Violet smiled at Sam’s affectionate look. She still wasn’t sure about the wisdom of this coal mine, but was happy to accompany him to Nottinghamshire for the next couple of months while he oversaw the reopening of the colliery, especially since all was resolved in London.

Birdwell Trumpington had indeed collected an inheritance from a great-aunt. His undertaking shop was now open, and he had, unfortunately, played upon his employer’s murder to secure his own clientele, advertising ostentatiously that he was equipped to manage
all
sorts of deaths, implying that he had cared for Mr. Crugg’s body and not that he had scurried away from the shop like a rat down the gangplank of a ship afire. How long he would be able to exploit Crugg’s death, Violet wasn’t sure.

Harry, who had just become the father of a baby boy who promised to be as brawny as his father, had graciously said he would manage the shop alone while Violet was gone. He had been amazed at all Violet had uncovered from what started as the innocent witnessing of a body emerging from a coffin six weeks ago. Fortunately, his disappointment over not being able to capitalize on the safety coffin idea was more than compensated for by the arrival of his new son. More worrisome was that Mary Cooke was on her own now, although Violet didn’t think Hurst would press his suit in an inappropriate way while she was away. She hoped. She had also promised Mary that they would make that trip to Madame Tussauds when Violet returned to London.

Their train rumbled into the station. It would take Violet and Sam as far as Sheffield, where they would switch trains for Worksop, then take private transport for their final destination to what Violet hoped was a cozy hotel near the coalfield.

Violet was looking forward to the trip, if not necessarily the reason behind it. Who knew what delightful visits might lie ahead for her in Nottinghamshire, with its Sherwood Forest, limestone caves, and renowned lace factories? She had already reviewed a travel guide, which was safely tucked inside her reticule, and planned to visit every tourist site in the county while Sam proceeded with his business.

Perhaps she could set death aside for a while. Surely it wouldn’t follow her that far north.

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

Victorians had a propensity for abusing credit, which was readily available through shops and banks. For most of the nineteenth century, credit was a fairly informal institution, largely based on personal trust and a moral assessment of the debtor. In other words, credit was based on social position rather than financial stability. Naturally, this led to the upper class incurring excessive debt, but the middle class was not immune to the temptation to buy on credit, especially given the exploding offerings of clothing and furnishings made possible by the industrial factories manufacturing goods at an unprecedented rate.

Although many Victorians successfully managed their debts, still more found themselves stuck in a quagmire of unpaid bills. In 1839, over four thousand men were arrested for debt in London alone, and of these, over four hundred men remained in prison the rest of their lives. Frequently, a desperate debtor would go for help to a “financier,” giving him full control of his financial affairs in the trust that the financier would pull him out of debt. Many financiers, who lived in luxurious homes in upscale parts of London, had themselves been in bankruptcy court on more than one occasion—a fact that they often neglected to tell their clients. Usually, the financier took a hefty fee and the debtor’s properties were eventually auctioned off at ruinous prices.

The Debtors Act of 1869 consolidated the myriad of bankruptcy laws then in force in England. Most importantly, the new law abolished imprisonment for debt except in certain cases, such as when a debtor owed a debt to the Crown or a debtor had money but refused to pay a debt. It also reduced the penalty for obtaining credit under false pretenses or attempting to defraud creditors to a mere misdemeanor. The law was great for debtors but not so good for creditors, who no longer had prison as a threat to hold over a debtor’s head in order to collect monies owed.

By the mid-nineteenth century the volume of London’s dead was causing considerable public concern. In 1850, the idea of a great metropolitan cemetery, situated in the suburbs and large enough to contain all of London’s dead for centuries to come, was promoted. An interested group formed the London Necropolis Company (LNC) in order to pursue this concept.

Surrey, with its proximity to London and regular rail service, was selected, and two thousand acres of the town of Woking’s common land was purchased from the Earl of Onslow, who also provided the land for the original Royal Surrey County Hospital. Some five hundred acres were initially laid out for Brookwood Cemetery at the western end of this tract. The London Necropolis Railway, or LNR, was opened in November 1854 by the LNC—which hoped to gain a monopoly on London’s burial industry—to carry cadavers and mourners the twenty-three miles between London and Brookwood.

The necropolis station at Waterloo was demolished by enemy bombing during World War II and officially closed in 1941, thus ending the railway service between London and Brookwood. However, large numbers of Allied service personnel were buried in the military section of Brookwood, and 3,600 bodies of U.S. servicemen were later exhumed and shipped to the United States for reburial.

The LNC’s quest to gain control of the burial industry was not as successful as its promoters had hoped. While they had planned to carry between 10,000 and 50,000 bodies per year, in 1941, after eighty-seven years of operation, only slightly over 200,000 burials had been conducted in Brookwood Cemetery, equaling roughly 2,300 bodies per year.

In 1854, Brookwood was the largest cemetery in the world. Today, this is no longer true, but it remains the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom. The cemetery is still privately owned and operated, and is still open for burials. Approximately 235,000 people have been buried there.

Ironically, Dr. Robert Knox, one of the best customers of Burke and Hare—the infamous resurrectionist men of 1828—is buried at Brookwood.

The fear of being buried alive peaked during the cholera epidemics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Edgar Allan Poe was also interested in the topic, dealing with it in “Berenice” (1835), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), as well as addressing it very directly in “The Premature Burial,” published in 1844.

This general fear of premature burial led to the invention of many devices that could be incorporated into so-called safety coffins. Most consisted of some type of device for communication to the outside world such as a cord attached to a bell that the interred person could ring should he revive after the burial. Some designs included ladders, escape hatches, and even feeding tubes, but many forgot a method for providing air. A coffin has one to two hours of air in it, making it highly unlikely that, even if someone “awoke” from the dead, he could be unburied before suffocating.

In 1798, P. G. Pessler, a German priest, suggested that all coffins have a tube inserted from which a cord would run to the church bells. If an individual had been buried alive, he could draw attention to himself by ringing the bells. This idea led to the first designs of safety coffins equipped with signaling systems. Pastor Beck, a colleague of Pessler’s, suggested that coffins should have a small trumpet-like tube attached. Each day the local priest could check the state of putrefaction of the corpse by sniffing the progressively worsening odors emanating from the tube. If no odor was detected or the priest heard cries for help, the coffin could be dug up and the occupant rescued. Unfortunately, the problem with airless coffins was not addressed under his plan.

Dr. Adolf Gutsmuth of Germany was buried alive several times to demonstrate a safety coffin of his own design, and in 1822 he stayed underground for several hours and even ate a meal of soup, bratwurst, marzipan, sauerkraut, spaetzle, beer, and dessert, delivered to him through the coffin’s feeding tube.

The early decades of the nineteenth century also saw the use of “portable death chambers” in Germany. A small chamber, equipped with a bell for signaling and a window for viewing the body, was constructed over an empty grave. Graveyard watchmen would check each day for signs of life or decomposition in each of the chambers. If the bell was rung, the body could be exhumed, but if the watchman observed signs of putrefaction in the corpse, a door in the floor of the chamber could be opened and the body would drop down into the grave. A panel could then be slid in to cover the grave and the upper chamber removed and reused. Who said reduce-reuse-recycle is a twenty-first-century concept?

In 1829, Dr. Johann Gottfried Taberger designed an improved bell system, described in his book
Der Scheintod,
meaning “suspended animation.” This system had a housing around the bell aboveground that prevented it from ringing accidentally. The housing also prevented rainwater from running down the tube and a spread of netting prevented insects from entering the coffin. If the bell rang, the watchman needed to insert a second tube and pump air into the coffin with a bellows to allow the occupant to survive until the casket could be dug up.

Franz Vester’s 1868 burial case was an elaborate variation on earlier bell-and-cord systems. One of the problems with systems using cords tied to the body was that the natural processes of decay often caused the body to swell or shift position, causing accidental tension on the cords and bell ringing by perfectly dead bodies. Vester overcame this problem by adding a tube through which the face of the corpse could be viewed. If the buried person should awake, he could either ascend the tube by means of a supplied ladder or, if not physically strong enough to do that, ring a bell to hail the watchmen, who could check to see if the person had genuinely returned to life or if a mere movement of the corpse had rung the bell. The viewing tube could be removed and reused once death was confirmed.

As recently as 1995, a safety coffin was patented by Fabrizio Caselli. His updated design included an emergency alarm, an intercom system, a flashlight, a breathing apparatus, and both a heart monitor and stimulator. Safety coffins have come a long way since the relatively simple bell coffins of the Victorian era. However, there are no documented cases of anybody actually being saved by a safety coffin.

On a side note, it is urban myth that the phrase “saved by the bell” comes from the use of safety coffins in the Victorian era. It is a boxing reference: A losing fighter being counted out would be “saved” by the ringing of the bell to end the round.

Laudanum was a favorite tonic of the Victorians. Ironically, the term comes from the Latin verb
“laudare,”
meaning to praise. Although the word “laudanum” generally refers to any combination of opium and alcohol, these formulas could become quite complex. Various preparations might contain ingredients such as crushed pearls, saffron, musk, nutmeg, amber, mercury, hashish, chloroform, belladonna, or cayenne pepper; used in combination with whiskey, wine, or brandy. Although extremely addictive, the concoction was effective at relieving coughing, diarrhea, and pain—important qualities in a time when cholera and dysentery regularly visited communities.

However, the drug was eventually used for any sort of ailment, from colds to cardiac diseases to menstrual cramps to vague aches to insomnia, and was administered to both adults and children. Because it was treated for legal purposes as a medication—although a doctor’s prescription was not necessary to obtain it—and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, making it a great favorite among the working classes.

Suicide by laudanum was common in the mid-nineteenth century, as it was easy to obtain and easy to overdose on with just a few teaspoons. Accidental deaths were frequent, too.

Royal Surrey County Hospital, built in Farnham Road, Guildford, with advice from Florence Nightingale, was opened in 1866 near the University of Surrey and dedicated to the memory of Prince Albert. Today it is known as Farnham Road Hospital, and provides mental health services. The current Royal Surrey County Hospital is located on Egerton Road, about a mile away from its original Victorian location. The superintendent Nathan Blackwell and any descriptions of the hospital are all figments of my imagination. However, it was not uncommon for hospitals to exhume bodies from their own burial grounds for surgical practice. Excavations around Royal London Hospital appear to support old claims that the hospital’s school was almost entirely supplied by cadavers who had once been the hospital’s own patients.

As a small point of interest, Sarah Josepha Hale was the editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
(sometimes called
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book
), the magazine from which Violet gets her hair tips, from 1837 through 1877. She was the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Godey’s
became the most popular monthly journal of its day, despite its steep subscription price of three dollars per year. The magazine is best known for its hand-tinted fashion plates, which helped the publication become an arbiter of American taste. Hale held up Queen Victoria of Great Britain as a model of morality, intellect, and femininity, and the magazine regularly reported on royal activities in London. Hale used her editorial influence to popularize the putting up of Christmas trees, based on the royal family’s tradition, as well as to advocate for the establishment of a national Thanksgiving holiday. Edgar Allan Poe had his earliest short stories printed in the publication.