The Napoleon of Crime (14 page)

The crime was never solved, but Worth refused to have anything more to do with the Russian, whom he had long mistrusted. Sesicovitch returned to America and opened a drinking parlor beneath Booth’s Theatre in New York. Two years later, in April 1878, under the alias Dugan, Sesicovitch was arrested for forgery in Cincinnati. He was identified by Robert Pinkerton when Pinkerton was informed that “
the first and second fingers of [his] left hand are off at the second joint, and that a little piece of the thumb of the left hand is missing,” the consequence of an earlier accident. “I have no doubt that [Dugan] and Carlo Sesicovitch, alias ‘Charles Gandy,’ alias ‘William Wallace,’ alias ‘Howard Adams,’ alias ‘John Hoare’ are identical.” The man who probably killed Lydia Chapman eventually died in prison, but that was little comfort to her husband. It was not until 1881 that Chapman, still mourning his lovely moll, was finally released from the Turkish jail, having “
served his full sentence,” a man broken in health and spirit.

The drawn-out Turkish saga and Lydia’s death had exhausted Worth and seriously reduced his finances. To make matters worse, the original partnership of Little Adam, Piano Charley, and pretty Kitty had finally disintegrated for good. Worth had never forsaken Charley Bullard or declined to provide the “loans” he demanded with ever increasing frequency, but the pianist’s temper had soured and his taste for unnecessary risk-taking had grown. To Worth’s further annoyance, Bullard was still on friendly terms with Max Shinburn, the haughty safecracker. Some said Worth’s fury had been ignited by the Baron’s attentions to his beloved Kitty. Shinburn’s advances got nowhere, but anyone who looked at her, indeed anything that disturbed Worth’s regulated universe, provoked his ire.

While Worth was still trying to sort out the Turkish affair, Bullard went on one of his boozy jaunts and idiotically wound up in New York. “
With Raymond’s cool, calculating brain no longer there to guide him, Bullard became reckless and fell into the hands of the police,” wrote Sophie Lyons. Piano Charley was promptly identified, arrested, tried for the Boylston Bank robbery of 1869, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment at the state penitentiary in Concord, Massachusetts.

Kitty, already estranged from her rapscallion, bigamous husband, bored with life in London, promptly headed to New York herself, despite Worth’s entreaties, taking both daughters and, for old times’ sake, the paintings, mirrors, mahogany tables, and crystal ware that had once adorned the American Bar in Paris. In New York she pawned some of the jewelry lavished on her by Worth, sent the girls to expensive schools, and opened a boarding house for fashionable gentlemen, where her social talents and striking looks soon attracted an appreciative clientele. Like many gentlewomen in reduced circumstances, she hired herself out as a ladies’ companion, while waiting for an opportunity to scale the next rung up the ladder to fortune and fame.

Worth was devastated by Kitty’s defection. So far, he had managed to keep an iron control on every aspect of his life, but the one thing he desired most had now slipped from his grasp. He remained obsessed with Kitty, not least because her two daughters were almost certainly his. In her memoirs the indefatigable Sophie Lyons, who was plainly a little jealous of Kitty, is as categorical on this point as she is on most matters pertaining to Worth’s emotional state.
“ ‘How’s Kate?’ would be his first question whenever we met in London. He would eagerly ask about her health, how she looked, and how were the two children, which we all knew were Raymond’s.” The elderly burglar Eddie Guerin agreed, describing how Worth talked constantly of “
an old sweetheart of whom he remained passionately fond to the end of his days,” and whose loss was “a canker continually eating at his heart.”

Worth begged Kitty to return to London and marry him, but she declined. “
Had this woman become Raymond’s wife I am confident that the whole course of his life would have been changed, and that the world would have something to remember him for besides an unbroken record of crime,” Lyons opined, with a hypocritical piety characteristic of the age. This was probably nonsense, since Kitty surely knew all about Worth’s criminal enterprises, and while she never actively took part, she seems to have made no effort to reform him. But on one aspect of the strange relationship between Adam Worth and Kitty Flynn, Lyons was surely right: “
He never forgot the winsome Irish barmaid who had won his heart.” She had loved him, too, but she had chafed under his control, refusing to ornament the gilded frame he had fashioned for her. As blithe and reckless as Worth was intense and calculating, Kitty had provided a vital counterpoint in his life, yet she fluttered out of it as gaily as she had wandered in.

They corresponded amicably and met often in the ensuing years. In time Kitty would repay him for helping to set her on the crooked path to upward mobility, but the love affair between Adam Worth and Kitty Flynn was over, at least in fact.

TEN

A Great Lady Holds a Reception

I
n the spring of 1876 Worth, like anyone else who bothered to open a newspaper, read of the mounting excitement surrounding the auction of Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire.

The painting had a galvanic effect on the English public, providing a small historical window into the Victorian soul. Gainsborough was all the rage, following an exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy earlier in the year which had drawn thousands of visitors, including Henry James, who lauded the painter’s “
natural refinement,” “charm of facility,” and “softness of style.” Just as the Georgians had once expatiated, breathlessly, on Georgiana’s looks and character, so the Victorians now lavished praise on the Gainsborough portrait that had so perfectly encapsulated those qualities, while they looked back on the details of her extraordinary life. Georgiana was a towering figure of her time; her charms, her behavior, and even her failings might have been tailor-made for Victorian tastes. Considerable energy was expended on a discussion of whether the duchess was, or was not, the most perfect of the Georgian belles, and numerous worthy judges from the past were cited one way or the other.

Exactly one century earlier, in 1776,
The Morning Post
had held a competition to find the most attractive female of the age: Georgiana was awarded “
15/20 for Beauty, 17/20 for Figure, 13/20 for Elegance, 11/20 for Wit, 5/20 for Grace, 3/20 for Expression, 10/20 for Sense, 9/20 for Sensibility and 16/20 for Principles.” Fanny Burney thought her “
very handsome”; Horace Walpole celebrated “
her youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty.” The actress and royal mistress Mary Robinson, being an expert in such matters, noted her “
early disposition to coquetry.” Georgiana’s mother called her “
one of the most showy girls I ever saw.”

The usually mordant satirist Peter Pindar was positively sweaty when offering his “Petition to Time in Favour of the Duchess of Devonshire,” possibly the worst of many very bad poems dedicated to the fair duchess:

Hurt not the form that all admire—
Oh, never with white hairs her temple sprinkle—
Oh, sacred be her cheek, her lip, her bloom
And do not, in a lovely dimple’s room
,
Place a hard mortifying wrinkle
.

This goes on for several more ghastly verses.

Her allure is more pithily described by an Irish drunk who, after an encounter with the duchess, remarked wistfully, “
I could light my pipe at her eyes.”

Some Victorian commentators recalled the more scandalous aspects of Georgiana’s reputation, for which there was equally ample evidence. Like her great-great-great-grandniece, Diana, Princess of Wales, the duchess had been idolized into an emblem of her time, a symbol of fashion, beauty, and sexuality.

Like Princess Diana’s, Georgiana’s sartorial tastes had set the trend for her peers. Enormous hats festooned with ostrich feathers were in, for example, and her every characteristic, whether intended or otherwise, was aped or criticized by society. She could hardly blow her nose before it was turned into a fashion statement. “
The slaves of fashion, rather than not resemble her in something, would gnaw their fans and imitate tricks for which a boarding school girl would have been reproved, stick out their chins and affect to be short-breathed,” an observer from the older generation noted. To add to her accomplishments, the duchess wrote reasonable fiction, better letters, and poetry that was translated into several languages. No less a judge than Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired her verses, rather to his own surprise:

Oh Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure
,
Whence learned you this heroic measure?

Even by the louche standards of the day, Georgiana’s social life was raunchy in the extreme. The hard-living duchess, a determined but hopelessly inexpert gambler, was addicted to the card game faro (at which she lost several fortunes) and thought nothing of drinking and carousing with her companions until dawn, night after night. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who captured the antics of the Devonshire House set in his
School for Scandal
, recalled one particularly unsuccessful evening at the card table when “
he had handed the Duchess into her carriage when she was literally sobbing at her losses.” Her “early disposition to coquetry,” meanwhile, gradually developed into a full-fledged, if only partially deserved, reputation for sexual immorality.

The whiff of scandal sprang from two sources. The first was Georgiana’s somewhat overenergetic canvassing on behalf of her friend, the Whig politician Charles James Fox, during the bitterly contested Westminster election of 1784. She at once became infamous for trading kisses for votes among the London electorate, behavior which outraged her more straitlaced contemporaries, who regarded kissing common butchers as clear evidence of nymphomania. “
When people of rank descend below themselves and mingle with the vulgar for mean and dirty purposes, they give up their claim to respect,” sniffed one critic. Another account claimed she was spending up to £600 a day in the Whig interest and getting fairly plastered in the process by “
drinking daily since the poll commenced, two pots of purl, a pint of Geneva and a gallon of porter.”

Georgiana’s sex life was a matter of consuming public interest and avid speculation. She was the “
irresistible queen of ton” and “
the most brilliant of the gay throng.” The Duke of Devonshire, however, seems to have been one of the few people not wholly smitten by his wife’s charms, and his philandering was legendary. His mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, eventually moved in with the duke and duchess at Chatsworth, the vast ducal seat in Derbyshire. In an odd foreshadowing of Adam Worth’s unorthodox domestic arrangements with Kitty Flynn and Piano Charley, Georgiana and the woman who shared her husband’s bed remained the best of friends.

The Devonshires’
ménage à trois
with Lady Elizabeth Foster was a notorious scandal. The women took turns bearing the duke’s children: Georgiana had three, including an heir, while Lady Elizabeth produced two and, after Georgiana’s death, became Duchess of Devonshire. Perhaps to show that adultery was a two-way street, but more likely out of boredom and depression, Georgiana also took a lover, the prickly Charles Grey, later Prime Minister. She seems to have felt a deep passion for Grey, but the affair ended in disaster. She became pregnant and the duke, in a towering, hypocritical rage, banished her from Chatsworth. She gave birth to Grey’s son in Europe, at about the same time that Gainsborough’s great portrait of her vanished, to reappear decades later, as legless as she had often been in life, above Mrs. Maginnis’s fireplace.

By the end of her remarkable life, Georgiana had lost most of her hair, all her money, her girlish figure, and the sight of one eye, but her pride was intact. In a sharp note she warned posterity: “
Before you condemn me, remember that at seventeen I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess.” She died of an abscess on the liver on March 30, 1806, at the age of forty-eight, in Devonshire House, Piccadilly, the scene of her greatest social and political triumphs. When the Prince of Wales heard of her death, he observed sadly: “
Then the best-natured and best-bred woman in England is gone.” The “empress of fashion,” who had electrified every red-blooded man in Georgian England, and sent the scuttlebutt hurtling around the nation like no other, now had a similar effect on their Victorian descendants thanks to the reappearance of the Gainsborough portrait which came nearest to capturing her singular élan.

The Victorians’ rediscovered enthusiasm for Georgiana was principally, if covertly, sexual: the chocolate-box coquetry of Gainsborough’s portrait, when considered in conjunction with her racy reputation, was just the thing to send a delicious testosterone jolt through the average buttoned-down Victorian male. While they might appear repressed in sexual matters, a function of the fashion for strict outward probity, the Victorians were anything but frigid and knew a sex goddess when they saw one. “
The beauty of the subject created a furor,” reported one observer, and in several instances the
Duchess
provided an opportunity for some distinctly torrid praise, neatly disguised as art criticism. “
Her protean beauty becomes a reality to us,” one wrote. “We see the mercurial temperament that made her, in truth, the beauty of a hundred moods.” Over the next half century, Gainsborough’s
Duchess
would become an icon of femininity, a sex symbol, a fashion statement, and one of the most instantly recognizable images in the world. Reproduced time after time on cheap biscuit tins and expensive china, in parlor prints, cigarette cards, books, and marble busts, she could be admired, read, smoked, nibbled, or simply swallowed whole.

When Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
was displayed at Christie’s early in May 1876, it prompted, in almost equal measure, genuinely artistic admiration, titillation, and blistering controversy. Some claimed it was a fake. The painter John Millais insisted that Gainsborough had never laid eyes on it, let alone painted it. “
Artists and connoisseurs who should be entitled to a hearing, boldly impugned its genuineness.” Some argued that “
the handling appeared to be less light and airy than is usual with the painter.” Others found that “
in the voluptuousness of the figure and the extreme redness of the lips Gainsborough’s characteristic refinement seemed to be wanting.” Another critic suggested that it was “
originally a sketch by Romney … made into a finished picture by a man whom Wynn Ellis kept to look after his pictures”—possibly a veiled reference to Bentley, who was also a restorer and minor artist. Yet another faction insisted that “
the head was painted by [Sir Thomas] Lawrence, and the accessories of dress etc. filled in by an artist of forgotten name.”