Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (13 page)

The affair went the full cycle of devotion, renunciation, outbursts of jealousy (mostly on Chantrelle’s part), recriminations and reconciliation. They both played it as Grand Opera. As early as October 1867, for instance, ten months before marriage, Lizzie could write: `My Darling Eugene, as it would make me very unhappy should our arrangement be continued I therefore release you from all your engagements tome….’

And he would reply in the full flow of melodrama: `My house is always open to you whenever you choose to come, but I will NEVER enter yours again…’

How different, she must have felt, from the timid passions and staid boyish emotions of her friends’ respectable and clerkly suitors. Yet, at the same time and in the right place, Eugene could show tenderness enough: `Why do you want to die, you foolish little puss; there are many happy days in store for you yet….’

The affair had to come to a point, and, whether by design or not, there was one sure way of bringing it there: Lizzie became pregnant. This gave her the opportunity for a splurge of emotion, fully revealing both of her confusion and of her fidelity to the part written for her.

`My darling Eugene,

I scarcely know how I managed to pass last night. I try to think that you are right and know better than me, but still I expected you would come. Never mind what Papa says. I know that they wanted to get you a carpet for the bedroom because they were going to give us a bed and wardrobe which is bought. But I don’t see what more is wanted. But what is the use of speaking about what is not to be. The only thing I can do is to go away as it is evident I cannot stay and have a baby at home….’

It is quite true what Mamma says that when you give yourself to a man he loses all respect for you. But I do not say so of you Eugene…’ (One may ask, what then is she saying? How stands,Mamma’s conventional wisdom about loss of respect?) … `I do not complain the thing is done and I am ruined for life. The only thing for me is to go to the street and shorten my life. I never thought, but it is useless speaking….’

And she ends by saying that she will get her brother John to call on Chantrelle on his way home -‘it will be the last time I will ever trouble you…

But of course it wasn’t. Now, while it would be cruel and invidious to question the sincerity and the note of despair in this letter, it is hard not to read it also as the work of a poseuse; Lizzie cannot wholly hide her enjoyment of her plight. She had found herself bang in the middle of a stock melodrama, and had no doubt whatsoever of how her part should be played.

The next step was a secret marriage. On 10 May, in Chantrelle’s rooms in George Street, Eugene and Lizzie plighted their troth, exchanging notes in which they accepted each other as husband and wife; a sufficient ceremony to make them legally wed according to Scots Law. By August they had prevailed, and were publicly married. Her parents did not like it - how should they? - but, with their daughter seven months pregnant, opposition was pointless; it was a question simply of avoiding disgrace. Relations between mother and daughter never wholly recovered. `I visited my daughter occasionally throughout the period of her married life, and she and the children called on me sometimes, but not as frequently as I visited them’, she was to testify in a tone of undisguised frostiness. Lizzie had come near to disgracing them once, had indeed to some extent done so, for it cannot be imagined that Mrs Dyer did not lose face because of the short interval between her daughter’s marriage and the birth of her first grandchild. Accordingly it was to be an article of the first order with the family that Lizzie should be prevented from any course of action that would incur further odious publicity. This stony-faced attitude contributed to intermittent misery, and probably to her death.

The marriage was turbulent from the start, and, on the face of it, unhappy. The qualification is necessary, for enough evidence as to the characters of both Chantrelle and Lizzie exists to suggest that both liked to live in an atmosphere of high drama; and that the turbulence kept boredom at bay, and might indeed be said to be their natural element. This is something that should be borne in mind. Neither was fit for a calm. They could exist in an atmosphere that would reduce others to despair. We should not therefore be overquick to assume Lizzie’s misery. The marriage was always exciting; both were actors; and there is some evidence that a degree of tenderness and affection persisted, even if it was only displayed or experienced from time to time.

Difficulties were obvious straightaway, and they were not all felt by Lizzie. Chantrelle after all had probably not bargained on marriage. It was something he had been forced into. In a sense Lizzie had outwitted him. With even the best will in the world - and that was lacking - it is difficult for a bachelor in his middle thirties to adapt to marriage with a seventeen year old girl. He was - there can be no doubt about it - paying for his little bit of fun. For three years before his marriage, he had shared his apartment with a young man called Driggs, who may have been an ex-pupil. In time Driggs’ family, mother and sisters, came to lodge there too. Not unnaturally Lizzie objected to this arrangement. She made scenes and the Driggses were successfully expelled. This victory of Lizzie’s was expensive for her husband, who now had to defray the growing costs of the whole establishment. There is no reason to suppose that he experienced a corresponding or compensatory increase in his income; he maintained indeed that the Driggses were worth £250 a year to him. Throughout the ten years of his married life, Chantrelle was dogged by financial worries, thickening as the years passed, until at last he reached a point of desperation. Only those who have never experienced them can be blind to the demoralising effects of debt and pecuniary embarrassment. Chantrelle did not react intelligently or admirably to these difficulties, but the tenor of his behaviour is not hard to understand, and was by no means unusual.

They lived throughout their married life in George Street, a central but hardly fashionable address, other areas of the New Town, and the spreading suburbs of Morningside, Grange and Inverleith being more in demand. Their accommodation was adequate but hardly spacious, a double flat occupying the top two floors of 81 a. It consisted of a kitchen, dining room, parlour and classroom (for Chantrelle gave some lessons at home) on the lower floor, and two bedrooms in the attic. Since there were eventually three children as well as a resident maid, the accommodation was only just sufficient. (The maid slept in the kitchen, or in an annexe to it, though at times she slept across the bottom of Lizzie’s bed.) By 1877 Chantrelle and his wife no longer shared a bedroom, he sleeping in the front room, also called the nursery, with the two boys Eugene (also known as Jack) and Louis.

Chantrelle was not by temperament a family man, though he was fond of the children. He was not much in the house, except when teaching, and took few of his meals with the family. He usually taught at home from nine to ten in the morning, and again sometimes in the evening from seven to nine-thirty. He had another pupil who came some afternoons from two to three, and two young ladies who came on Saturday mornings from twelve to one. Since he also taught at Leith High School, and perhaps privately at other addresses, he had, even at the end, (for these times were given by Mary Byrne, the maid with them in the last year) a sufficiently full teaching load. He can hardly be accused of not working to support his family. Yet Lizzie complained that his teaching was falling off.

That could have been true, for his habits had become increasingly dissipated. By the mid seventies he was certainly drinking excessively. The maid computed that he would get through a bottle of whisky a day, and added that she had also seen him drink wine. Since he regularly had a glass of whisky brought up with his early morning cup of tea, there can be little doubt that he had come to depend on alcohol. (The maid’s estimate ignores anything that he drank out of the house, of course, and he was a regular habitue of the local hotels. On New Year’s Day 1878, for instance, the day Lizzie took ill, he spent the afternoon in the Hanover Hotel round the corner from one o’clock till a quarter past four.) There is indeed good reason to suppose that he had drifted into the dangerous, though not hopeless, condition of the man who relies on alcohol to keep him going, who can hardly conceive life without it, and who does not observe how his faculties are distorted, and his moral judgement impaired, by the very drug on which he depends.

Drink wasn’t his only dissipation. He was well known as a frequenter of the brothels situated in Clyde Street, a narrow insalubrious lane to the north of George Street. In 1876 when Lizzie approached a private detective with the request that he report on her husband’s movements, she was assured that that was hardly necessary, as the detective himself had seen him in a brothel. At Chantrelle’s trial the Crown called one Barbara Kay, who proudly described herself as the keeper of a brothel, but her evidence was dispensed with, the point being already accepted. Later, legends were to grow about this. Sir Henry Littlejohn, Surgeon of Police, told the criminologist W.N.Roughead, that it was Chantrelle’s practice to take a loaded pistol with him to the brothels, `which he would playfully discharge to the terror of his entertainers’. Presumably only a good customer could get away with such conduct. No doubt there was a good deal of unsavoury evidence, as was shown by the Defence’s readiness to accept the fact and skate over its implications as quickly as possible. Chantrelle’s Counsel was to try to excuse his conduct in this, and other respects, in which he fell short of the standards to be expected from a father of a family, by reminding the jury of Chantrelle’s nationality. It was not to be expected that a Frenchman would behave as morally as a Scot.

Worse even than this immorality was his violence. Some of it was certainly no more than violence of language - exservant after ex-servant reported that he called his wife frightful names, many of them too awful to bear repetition. The least offensive were `bitch’ and `whore’. He did not however always stop at words. Not only did he frequently threaten to kill her (with poison, in the use of which he boasted of his ability to outsmart the professors), but he struck her on a number of occasions. Such rows were common in the early years of their marriage, a holiday at Portobello in 1871 being particularly memorable … Lizzie wrote to her mother:

`I might have been sleeping for an hour or more when I was awakened by several severe blows. I got one on the side of my head which knocked me stupid. When I came to myself I could not move my face, and this morning I find my jaw bone out of its place my mouth inside skinned and festering and my face all swollen. The servants who sleep in the next room heard it all, besides the woman to whom the house belongs. They heard him say that he would make mincemeat of me … well mamma if you do not want me to be murdered outright you must see that all I can do is leave him at once. All I hope is that he may go away too. As to getting anything from him impossible. But surely where life is concerned you would never hesitate … I am sorry to trouble you but if he murders me you might have been sorry not to have heard from me….’

An ingenuous and surely unexceptional conclusion.

Her next letter repeated that, `the threats are something fearful’ but, oddly, went on at once to complain that, `it is very dull here’. That letter was intercepted by her uncle James Cullen, who sent it on to the girl’s mother with a scribbled postscript saying, `I opened it in case of urgency’. Clearly however he found nothing urgent in the frightful threats. A few days later Lizzie wrote again, this time to recount a scene so alarming that the.maids had gone out in search of a policeman. They had returned with two officers, but Lizzie had persuaded them to go away. `I should not have been afraid of three, but he could have fought the two easily’, a curious reason, especially as she went on to say, `Christina heard him say that he would murder me and the children’.

None of these pictures of life chez Chantrelle roused Mrs Dyer to action. Possibly she was indifferent to her daughter’s fate; possibly she was averse to the scandal that a separation would attract; most probably she was fully aware of Lizzie’s love of self-dramatisation. Chantrelle himself was to stress this element in her character in his first declaration to the magistrates on 8 January, 1878:

`There was a great deal of affection between my late wife and myself, but she was sometimes funny; for instance, when I was going out to teach at Leith High School she would tell me she was going to drown herself. This happened several times, and I would say “Nonsense, my dear, what would you do that for?” One Saturday, when she played the same game, I was so annoyed that I said to her, “Go ahead and do it.”’

She did not obey, and it seems likely that Mrs Dyer received her fears of being murdered with something of the same scept. icism. That did not mean that she abated her dislike and distrust of her son-in-law; merely that she chose not to be over-concerned by fears that she thought exaggerated and, in a sense, self-indulgent. All the same, on several occasions during her marriage, Lizzie did run away from her husband and take refuge with her mother. But the breach never lasted long. For one thing, as Chantrelle maintained, `she could not be there long without a big fight’.

Although these fears might be exaggerated, they were not wholly vain. Independent evidence of Chantrelle’s violence exists. Two servants saw Lizzie struck and Chantrelle was certainly fond of brandishing his pistols, which he kept loaded. (He liked to fire at the parlour or schoolroom wall, also.) On their last summer holiday at Portobello in August 1877, there was an accident involving their eldest child, Eugene, an accident that was to take on a gloomy significance. Moreover, the previous year, Chantrelle’s behaviour to Lizzie and their servant once became so alarming that the two women sallied out into George Street in the middle of the night to fetch a policeman. Sergeant Robert Brass recounted the incident in the following terms: