The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Read online

  BY PETER ACKROYD

  fiction

  The Great Fire of London

  The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

  Hawksmoor

  Chatterton

  First Light

  English Music

  The House of Doctor Dee

  The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

  biography

  T.S. Eliot

  Dickens

  poetry

  The Diversions of Purley

  criticism

  Notes for a New Culture

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

  Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to

  historical events; to real people, living or dead; or to

  real locales are intended only to give the fiction a

  setting in historical reality. Other names,

  characters, places, and incidents are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their

  resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely

  coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ackroyd, Peter.

  The trial of Elizabeth Cree : a novel of the Limehouse murders /

  Peter Ackroyd.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR6051.C64T7 1995

  823′.914—dc20 94-37348

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81623-8

  Copyright © 1994 by Peter Ackroyd

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  ONE

  On the 6th April, 1881, a woman was hanged within the walls of Camberwell Prison. The ceremony was to be performed at eight o’clock, according to custom, and just after dawn the other prisoners began their ritual howling. The death bell of the prison chapel tolled as she was led from the condemned cell and joined a procession which included the governor, the prison chaplain, the prison doctor, the Roman Catholic priest, who had heard her confession the night before, her solicitor, and two witnesses appointed by the Home Office. The public executioner was waiting for them in a wooden shed across the yard where a gallows had been erected—only a few years before the woman could have been hanged beside the walls of Newgate Prison, to the delight of the vast crowd assembled there throughout the night, but the chance of such a great performance had been denied her by the progressive legislation of 1868. So she had to die in mid-Victorian privacy, in a wooden shed that smelled of the sweat of the workmen who had erected it two days earlier. The only tribute to sensationalism was her coffin, which had been strategically placed in the prison yard so that she might pass it on the way to her death.

  The Burial Office was read, and it was noticed that she participated in this with great fervor. The condemned are supposed to remain quite silent at this solemn time but she lifted her head and, staring through the little roof of glass at the foggy air beyond, begged loudly for the safety of her own soul. The customary incantation came to an end, and the hangman stood behind her as she climbed the wooden block; he was about to place the coarsely woven cloth over her, but she brushed it away with the motion of her head. Her hands had already been bound behind her back with leathern thongs, but there was no difficulty in interpreting the gesture. While she stared down at the official witnesses, the rope was placed around her neck (the executioner, knowing her precise size and weight, had measured the hemp exactly). She spoke only once before he pulled the lever and the wooden trapdoor opened beneath her. She said, “Here we are again!” Her eyes were still upon them as she fell. Her name was Elizabeth Cree. She was thirty-one years old.

  She had been wearing a white smock, or gown, at the moment of her deliverance. It had been the custom, during the days of public execution, for the dress of the dead to be torn apart and sold in pieces to the assembled crowd as mementos or magical talismans. But this had become an age of private possessiveness, and the white gown was taken from the body of the hanged woman with great reverence. Later that day it was handed to the governor of the prison, Mr. Stephens, who accepted it without a word from the female warder who carried it to his office. He did not need to inquire about the body itself; he had already agreed that it should be dispatched to the medical surgeon of Limehouse Division, who specialized in examining the brains of murderers for any signs of abnormality. As soon as the warder had closed the door behind her, Mr. Stephens folded the white gown very neatly and placed it in the Gladstone bag which he kept behind his desk. That night, in his small house on Hornsey Rise, he took it carefully from the bag; he lifted it above his head, and put it on. He was wearing nothing else and, with a sigh, he lay down upon the carpet in the gown of the hanged woman.

  TWO

  Who now remembers the story of the Limehouse Golem, or cares to be reminded of the history of that mythical creature? “Golem” is the medieval Jewish word for an artificial being, created by the magician or the rabbi; it literally means “thing without form,” and perhaps sprang from the same fears which surrounded the fifteenth-century concept of the “homunculus” which was supposed to have been given material shape in the laboratories of Hamburg and Moscow. It was an object of horror, sometimes said to be made of red clay or sand, and in the mid-eighteenth century it was associated with specters and succubi who have a taste for blood. The secret of how it came to be revived in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and how it aroused the same anxieties and horrors as its medieval counterpart, is to be found within the annals of London’s past.

  The first killing occurred on the 10th September, 1880, along Limehouse Reach: this, as
its name implies, was an ancient lane which led from a small thoroughfare of mean houses to a flight of stone steps just above the bank of the Thames. It had been used by porters over many centuries for convenient if somewhat cramped access to the cargo of smaller boats which anchored here, but the dock redevelopments of the 1830s had left it marooned on the edge of the mud banks. It reeked of dampness and old stone, but it also possessed a stranger and more fugitive odor which was aptly described by one of the residents of the neighborhood as that of “dead feet.” It was here, at first light on a September morning, that the body of Jane Quig was discovered. She had been left upon the old steps in three separate parts; her head was upon the upper step, with her torso arranged beneath it in some parody of the human form, while certain of her internal organs had been impaled upon a wooden post by the riverside. She had been a prostitute who had found her custom among the sailors of the area and, although she was only in her early twenties, had been known to her neighbors as “Old Salty.” Of course the popular opinion, inflamed by gruesome reports in the Daily News and Morning Advertiser, declared that a “fiend in human form” was at work—a supposition which was strengthened when, six nights later, another killing took place in the same area.

  The Jewish quarter of Limehouse comprised three streets beyond the Highway; it was known as “Old Jerusalem” both by those who inhabited it and those who lived beside it. There was a lodging house here, in Scofield Street, where an old scholar by the name of Solomon Weil resided; he had two rooms upon the top floor, filled with old volumes and manuscripts of Hasidic lore, from which he journeyed every weekday morning to the Reading Room of the British Museum; he always traveled there on foot, leaving his house at eight in the morning, and arriving at Great Russell Street by nine. On the morning of September the 17th, however, he did not leave his rooms. His downstairs neighbor, a clerk with the Commission on Sanitation and Metropolitan Improvements, was sufficiently alarmed to knock gently upon his door. There was no reply and, believing that Solomon Weil might have been taken ill, he boldly entered the room. “Well, this is a pretty business!” he exclaimed when he came upon a scene of indescribable confusion. But, as he soon discovered, it was not pretty at all. The old scholar had been mutilated in a most strange manner; his nose had been cut off and placed upon a small pewter plate, while his penis and testicles had been left upon the open page of a book which he must have been reading when he was so savagely disturbed. Or had the volume been left by the killer as some clue to his appetites? The severed penis was decorating a long entry on the golem, as the police detectives from “H” Division duly noted, and within a few hours this was the word being whispered throughout Old Jerusalem and its environs.

  The reality of this malevolent spirit was enhanced by the circumstances surrounding the murder in Limehouse two days later. Another female prostitute, Alice Stanton, was found lying against the small white pyramid in front of the church of St. Anne’s. Her neck had been broken, and her head unnaturally turned so that she seemed to be staring just beyond the church itself; her tongue had been cut out and placed within her vagina, while her body itself was mutilated in a manner reminiscent of the killing of Jane Quig nine days before. Upon the pyramid itself the word “golem” had been traced in the blood of the dead woman.

  By now the inhabitants of the entire East End of London were thoroughly alarmed and inflamed by the sequence of strange deaths. The daily newspapers reported every practice in which “The Golem” or “The Golem of Limehouse” engaged, while certain details were embellished, or on occasions invented, in order to ensure more notoriety for what were already gruesome accounts. Could it have been the journalist on the Morning Advertiser, for example, who decided that the “Golem” had been chased by an “irate crowd” only to be seen “fading away” into the wall of a bakery by Hayley Street? But perhaps that was not an instance of editorial license since, as soon as the report was published, several residents of Limehouse confirmed that they had been among the mob which had pursued the creature and watched it disappear. An old woman who lived by Limehouse Reach swore that she had seen a “transparent gentleman” moving swiftly by the waterside, while an unemployed tallow chandler told the world through the pages of the Gazette that he had seen a figure soaring into the air above Limehouse Basin. So the legend of the Golem was born, even before the final and most shocking act of murder. Four days after the killing of Alice Stanton by St. Anne’s, an entire family was found slaughtered in their house beside the Ratcliffe Highway.

  And what of the police throughout this affair? They had followed their customary procedures. They had set bloodhounds on the scent of the putative murderer; they had made detailed inquiries from door to door throughout Limehouse; the divisional surgeon was called on each occasion and minutely inspected the remains of the victims, while the post-mortem examinations at the police station itself were conducted with exemplary thoroughness. A number of suspects were closely questioned although, since the Golem had never really been glimpsed in human form, the evidence against them was at best circumstantial. No one was charged, therefore, and “H” Division became the target of much injurious newspaper criticism. There was even a limerick published in the Illustrated Sun which attacked the senior officer in the case:

  Chief Inspector Kildare

  Couldn’t catch a tame bear,

  He told ’em

  He would find the Golem

  But he’s ended up with thin air.

  THREE

  All extracts from the trial of Elizabeth Cree, for the murder of her husband, are taken from the full reports in the Illustrated Police News Law Courts and Weekly Record from the 4th to the 12th of February, 1881.

  MR. GREATOREX: Did you purchase arsenic powder from Hanway’s in Great Titchfield Street on the morning of October the 23rd of last year?

  ELIZABETH CREE: Yes, sir. I did.

  MR. GREATOREX: Why did you do so, Mrs. Cree?

  ELIZABETH CREE: There was a rat in the basement.

  MR. GREATOREX: There was a rat in the basement?

  ELIZABETH CREE: Yes, sir. A rat.

  MR. GREATOREX: Surely there were establishments in the New Cross area where arsenic powder could be procured. Why did you travel to Great Titchfield Street?

  ELIZABETH CREE: I had a mind to visit a friend who lived in that neighborhood.

  MR. GREATOREX: And did you?

  ELIZABETH CREE: She was not at home, sir.

  MR. GREATOREX: So you came back to New Cross with your arsenic powder, but without having visited your friend. Is that not so?

  ELIZABETH CREE: It is, sir.

  MR. GREATOREX: And what happened to the rat?

  ELIZABETH CREE: Oh, he’s dead, sir. (Laughter.)

  MR. GREATOREX: You killed it?

  ELIZABETH CREE: Yes, sir.

  MR. GREATOREX: So now let us return to that other and more serious fatality. Your husband became ill soon after your visit to Great Titchfield Street, I believe.

  ELIZABETH CREE: He has always suffered with his stomach, sir. Ever since we first met.

  MR. GREATOREX: And when was that, precisely?

  ELIZABETH CREE: We met when I was very young.

  MR. GREATOREX: Am I correct in supposing that you were then known as “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie”?

  ELIZABETH CREE: That was once my name, sir.

  FOUR

  I was my mother’s only child, and always an unloved one. Perhaps she had wanted a son to provide for her, but I cannot be sure of that. No, she wanted no one. God forgive her, I think she would have destroyed me if she had possessed the strength. I was the bitter fruit of her womb, the outward sign of her inward corruption, the token of her lust and the symbol of her fall. My father was dead, she used to tell me, having been terribly maimed in the Kentish mines; she performed his last moments for me, pretending to cradle his head in her arms. But he was not dead. I discovered, from a letter she kept hidden beneath the mattress of the bed we shared, that he had left her. He was not her husband but
some masher, some fancy man who had got her in the family way. I was the family, and I was the one forced to bear her shame. Sometimes she knelt through the night, calling upon Jesus and all the saints to preserve her from hell: she will be frying there tonight, if there is any justice beyond the grave. Well, let her burn.

  Our lodgings were in Peter Street, Lambeth Marsh, and we earned our keep by sewing the sailing cloths for the fishermen by the horse ferry; it was exceedingly difficult work, and even my leather gloves could not keep the cloth and the needle from chafing my hands. Look at them now, so worn and so raw. When I put them against my face, I can feel the ridges upon them like cart tracks. Big hands, my mother used to say. No female should have big hands. And none, I thought, should have so big a mouth as yours. How she prayed and moaned while we worked, repeating all the bunkum she had learned from the Reverend Style who kept a chapel on the Lambeth High Road. One moment it was “God pardon me for my sins!” and then it was “How I am exalted!” She used to take me with her to that chapel; all I can remember is the tapping of the rain on its roof as we sang from the Wesley Hymnal. And then it was back to the sewing. When we had finished mending one of the sailcloths we would take it down to the horse ferry. Once I tried to carry it upon my head, but she slapped me and said that it was common. Of course she knew what it was to be common; a reformed whore is a whore still. And who but a whore would have a child without husband? The fishermen knew me as “Little Lizzie” and meant me no harm, but there were gentlemen who whispered things to me by the waterside and made me smile. I knew such words as the worst teachers in the world had imparted to me, and at night I would speak them into my pillow.

  Our two rooms were bare enough, except for the pages of the Bible which she had pasted to the walls. There was hardly an inch of paper to be made out between them, and from my earliest childhood I could see nothing but words. I even taught myself to read from them, and I still have by heart the passages which I learned in those days: “And he took all the fat that was upon the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and their fat, and Moses burned it upon the altar.” There was another I recall: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” I recited them in the morning and in the night; I saw them as soon as I rose from my bed, and gazed at them before I closed my eyes in sleep.