Trials of Passion (6 page)

Pressed by Christiana's lawyer, Charles Beard stated emphatically that he had never written any letters to Christiana. He hadn't known immediately about the first attempted poisoning of his wife because he had been out of town. Nor had he seen Christiana for some months after that time because he was travelling:

Mr
Lamb
– Why did you not tell her [Christiana] then that you had told your wife [about the letters]?

Witness –
I had never answered her correspondence, and when I saw her I told her that I must decline to have a continuation of our friendship which had existed hitherto. I thought that was sufficient.

Mr Lamb
– Say ‘intimacy' instead of ‘friendship'.

Witness
–You can put it as you like; I saw her twice about Christmas, once with her mother and once alone.

Mr Lamb
– Did you take any means to prevent letters being sent to you?

Witness
– I took no action in the matter to prevent letters being sent.

Whatever Christiana might have hoped, there would be no defence for her from Dr Charles Beard, nor any greater indication that the man she addressed as ‘Caro' or ‘dear boy' acknowledged any substantial part in what for her was a patently obsessive, but also a reciprocal, passion. Upright Victorian family man that he was or pretended to be, respectability and reputation came first for Beard, who certainly wouldn't put his name to potentially incriminating letters. Yet that aura of respectability is one that Christiana also apparently honours. She may finish her letter to Charles ‘... make a poor little thing happy, and fancy a long, long bacio [kiss] from ... ', but she then signs in another and secret name, ‘DOROTHEA'. In recounting her appearance at little Barker's inquest in her letter to him, she repeatedly stresses that she never mentioned ‘your name or La Sposa's'. ‘No, the rack shouldn't have torn your name from me, and the only reason I said September [as the time the first poison chocolates circulated] was, that you might see I had concealed nothing.'

Unconsciously (or consciously) tempting fate, she presses her honesty home, writing that when at the inquest the reporters' pens rushed to take down everything she uttered, these lines flew into her memory: ‘The chiel's amang them taking notes/ and faith he'll prent it.' They come from Robert Burns's ‘On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland'; translated, the full stanza reads:

If there is a hole in all your coats,

I advise you care for it:

A fellow is among you taking notes,

And faith he will print it.

The sentiment is one Burns often repeated: If you have anything to be ashamed of, beware: there's a scribbler in your midst who's taking notes. The truth will out and he'll make sure of it. Power should expect no free pass from the Muse.

Christiana, like so many reading Victorians, evidently knew her Burns; but in quoting him here to Charles Beard, was she expressing not only a worry that the interrogators at the inquest would find her out, but also a veiled threat to the man she patently considered her lover?

Their secret would out, and she might be the scribbler who – at once knowingly and unwittingly – revealed it.

4.
The Rumbles of History

Who was this woman who is evidently well read, who clearly enjoys writing and does so in a style not all that different from the sensation novels of her day? A woman who in her attempt to rid the world of the wife of the man she was in love with unleashed an elaborate plot of wholesale poisoning on a town in order to cover her tracks – a plot worthy of Wilkie Collins or Mary Braddon, who were themselves inevitably, like Christiana, also inspired by the press reports of their day?

In early July 1857, when she was in her twenties, Christiana would have been aware of one of the most sensational of the period's court cases, one mingling sex and poison, and eagerly followed by all the newspapers. Twenty-one-year-old Glaswegian Madeleine Smith, like Christiana the daughter of a well-known architect, was accused of poisoning a young Frenchman, Pierre Émile L'Angelier, who, as Madeleine's letters scandalously proved, had been her lover. ‘Our intimacy has not been criminal,' Madeleine wrote to Émile, in a letter of 30 April 1856 quoted in court, ‘as I am your wife before God, so it has been no sin our loving each other. No darling, I am your wife.' But Émile was only a struggling foreign clerk, one her father couldn't approve. When a better match presented itself and Émile made himself difficult to shed and wouldn't return her many telltale letters, it is likely that Madeleine administered a deadly dose of poison, having tried lesser doses unsuccessfully in the past.

In any event, on the night of 23 March 1857 L'Angelier was found dead and large amounts of arsenic were discovered in his stomach. He had a letter from Madeleine on him, bidding him to come to her side – though she claimed it was from the day before. In court, neither judge nor jury wanted to believe in her guilt, and since the evidence
was largely circumstantial, and hanging a terrible fate for a pretty, effervescent middle-class young lady, she was declared not guilty. ‘There is something so touching in the age, the sex and the social position of the accused,' the judge stated, summing up a widespread wish that Madeleine be innocent and womanhood saved.

During the trial, detailed scientific evidence was given by a professor of chemistry, Frederick Perry, that Christiana might have been impressed by. Dr Perry was only one of several chemical experts who in the course of the latter half of the century took the stand in court and whose evidence was widely quoted in newspaper reports. Indeed ever since 1836, when James Marsh had developed the first test for detecting arsenic in the stomach, science had grown increasingly prominent in the witness box. In his evidence Dr Perry talked, like one of the many readily available domestic handbooks on medicine and drugs, of the quantities of arsenic needed to kill a man, the number of grains in a drahm, the most efficient forms of administering the poison. The fact that cocoa or chocolate were substances in which a considerable dose might be conveyed without the taste being instantly detected was mentioned several times. The evidence also seemed to suggest that a solid medium would be more effective than a liquid one. Some of these sensational facts may well have lodged themselves in Christiana's mind, together with the ‘innocence' of the attractive young middle-class woman in the dock.

Christiana Edmunds was not quite the thirty-five-year-old initially described at the Brighton hearings. She was in fact forty-three, but the appearance of relative youth was important to the Dorothea she was posing as. Her true age would become significant at her trial.

She was born on 29 August 1829 in the growing Kentish coastal town of Margate to William Edmunds and his wife, Ann(e) Christiana Burn. Her mother was the daughter of a major; her father, the son of a carpenter, Thomas Edmunds, who had risen in society in the early 1800s to become the proprietor of the White Hart Hotel on Margate's up-and-coming Marine Parade. Thomas Edmunds was
also the surveyor who after the gales of 1808 oversaw the rebuilding of Margate Pier, foreseeing that it might become a promenade for fashionable visitors. William Edmunds, born about 1801, followed in his father's footsteps. For a brief period after his father's death in 1824, William looked after the family hotel with his elder sister Mary, who in 1815 had been subject to a libel suit for having rather brilliantly lampooned a man ominously called Boys – though there is no clear indication that this Boys bore any relation to the one Christiana later targeted with her poisoning. (This aunt of Christiana's, perhaps not altogether unlike her niece, ‘had a habit of writing offensive and annoying letters, not only to her friends but to persons to whom she was totally unacquainted'.)

William Edmunds became a surveyor and a principal architect in Margate's nineteenth-century efflorescence. In 1825, when the town's parishes had outgrown their churches, he won the Church Building Commissioners' competition to build Margate a new ‘Gothic Church at the time of Henry the Third – to contain two thousand sittings'. From the remaining evidence, Edmunds was not only a fine draftsman but an imaginative architect. The church may have ended up costing more than the Commissioners had bargained for, but it was grand in conception and ‘visible at a considerable distance from shore'. At the time of its consecration in 1829, which coincided with Christiana's birth, William Edmunds was at the height of his powers. His public buildings included the new Margate lighthouse, the offices of the important Pier and Harbour Company, known as the Droit House, and a lavish shopping precinct in the High Street called The Boulevard, locally known as ‘Levey's Bazaar'. The
Kentish Chronicle
of 18 August that year noted that Edmunds's Boulevard commanded ‘universal admiration ... It now takes the lead as.a promenade.'

His flurry of activity spread, together with his reputation. Over the next few years, he completed Trinity Church in Dover, a new work- house at Herne, extensions to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital – an establishment his youngest son would sadly have some connection with after his father's death – and a grand ornamental pavilion where
the city of Dover gave a resplendent dinner for the ageing Duke of Wellington.

In 1828, William Edmunds married Ann Christiana Burn, and the couple came to live in Margate's elegant Hawley Square with its handsome, tall Georgian brick edifices. Christiana was their first child, followed by a boy, called William after his father. Mary Burn followed in 1832 and a year later Louisa Agnes. Finally, in 1841, came Arthur Burn.

As Christiana grew, so her father's fortunes declined. Official surveyor to two of Margate's major civic enterprises – the Margate Pier and Harbour Company and the Margate Commissioners for Paving and Lighting – Edmunds was targeted during 1836–7, a moment of public discontent with the Companies, for mismanagement of funds. The deputy chairman of the Pier and Harbour Company committed suicide in 1836, augmenting the sense that general embezzlement was taking place. Though Edmunds himself was just about cleared in the furore of accusation, his salary was reduced first by one and then by the other company. The family grew poorer, and after 1839 he built no new edifices and disappeared from public view.

In 1842, when Christiana was entering her teens, the family house was sold. Soon after, William Edmunds's state of mind must have become a trial for his family and affected them in deep, if differing, ways. ‘He was very strange in his manner ... He raved about having millions of money, and attempted to knock down his medical man with a ruler.' So stated an aged Ann Christiana Edmunds at her daughter's trial, as she revealed the story of William Edmunds's shadowy afterlife in the most cursory, if sensational, terms. Her deposition formed the only defence that could be offered for Christiana – a defence of hereditary insanity. But madness in the family has many more ways of affecting its members than the Victorian understanding of heredity gives room for. William's wild behaviour, the content of his ravings, his wife and children's ways of coping with it, the shame of his confinement to an institution, the poverty this in turn brought on the family – all of this affected its members as much as any loose notion of heredity.

‘In 1843 my husband became insane and was sent to a private lunatic asylum at Southall, where he was confined till August 1844 ... He had to be confined in a strait jacket before going to the asylum. He had two attendants before he was sent there.' So stated Mrs Edmunds. Sydney Cornish Harrington of Datchworth, her son's brother-in-law, amplified this in the ‘memorial' or affidavit he produced to plead Christiana's pardon after her trial: William Edmunds in his manic state had talked of his ‘immense wealth and the vast number of cities that he had built' to his two listening attendants, before trying to overpower them. Only his wife, when called, could finally settle and command him.

Violent, William was described as a ‘dangerous lunatic' by the proprietor of the Southall Park Asylum to which he was sent. This was a small private establishment, family-run and, like many of its kind, once a handsome residence now converted to new use. It had been opened in 1838 by the reputed Sir William Charles Ellis (1780–1839), whose humane methods of caring for the mad had been inspired by the Quaker William Tuke's famous York Retreat.

Like many of the early-nineteenth-century mind doctors, Ellis believed that work and the discipline it provided were crucial to providing possible cures for those who suffered madness. He had brought these principles to his work as superintendent of the large Wakefield Asylum, from where he had been recruited to the giant Hanwell Asylum in Middlesex. Here he put in place what were then considered progressive ‘moral', by which were meant psychological treatment techniques. After political disagreements with the Middlesex magistrates, Ellis and his wife – ever a partner in his asylum management – left Hanwell and established the private Southall Park asylum in the vicinity. Advertised as a retreat suitable ‘for any Lady or Gentleman whose mental state may require a separation from their immediate friends and connexions', the asylum offered gardens and grounds for outdoor exercise and relaxation as well as horses, billiards, music, cheerful views and the sense of a home away from home.

By the time William Edmunds arrived at Southall Park, Ellis had
been dead for some four years and the premises were licensed to a Dr J. B. Steward, who testified at Christiana's trial. He described her father as being fond of good living, but not a hard drinker. The spur to his malady was, perhaps appropriately for an architect, ‘the loss of the sale of a house'. Acute mania characterized him on admission. He was ‘violent and restless', and ‘talked nonsense', insisting he was worth millions. William Edmunds, it was clear, had his idee fixe: he felt he had been cheated out of an elevated public position, one he couldn't live without. Eventually he became ‘paralyzed'. The ‘paralysis' Dr Steward mentions in his deposition is the catch-all classification of the later 1800s: ‘general paralysis of the insane'. Only in 1913 were its symptoms definitively linked to the ravages of tertiary syphilis. If William Edmunds did indeed have syphilis, this may also account for the ‘epilepsy' and ‘idiocy', or learning difficulties, that the youngest Edmunds, Arthur Burn, was said to suffer from, though there is no indication that Mrs Edmunds was affected.