The Butler Didn't Do It
BAL?E, SUSAN
The Butler Didn't Do It A Victorian Murder, Solved. BY SUSAN BALEE In Emily Eden's popular 1859 novel The Semi-Detached House, old Mrs. Hopkinson observes, "I like a good murder that can't be...
...that is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it...
...This should have been clear to her when she confessed her affair with Gully so he would hear it from her before he heard it from someone else...
...A policeman's entrance into the home to investigate a murder was seen as an invasion of the family's rights, which is why, probably, there are so many inept and ill-at-ease detectives in nineteenth-century fiction...
...In 1868, he capitulated, but he could not fulfill himself with the usual round of aristocratic pursuits—hunting, fishing, riding— and soon he turned to other women and alcohol...
...Bravo's murder occurred soon after legislation broadened the rights of women and the lower classes...
...Within a week, the police knew Bravo's death had not been a suicide (as they originally thought, and as one of the key suspects insisted), but a murder...
...Gully was the murderer— nevertheless acknowledged that Bravo's death was "one of the most mysterious poisoning cases ever recorded...
...Facing the scorn of their peers, Gully eliminated the evidence, performing an illegal abortion on his lover...
...Gully beside her...
...Jane Cox, Florence's housekeeper and companion...
...The Reverend Francis Paget, writing in 1868, observed that sensation novelists were providing would-be murderers with a how-to manual: "For the benefit of students in the science of Toxicology...
...It is a testament to his charisma that Florence fell so completely in love with the genial old physician...
...Braddon, Oscar Wilde, and Victorian culture...
...When the operation went wrong, and Florence nearly died, Cox nursed her day in and day out...
...no one has ever solved the puzzle of Bravo's murder...
...her ex-lover, the aged Dr...
...Florence wasn't too sure she really wanted to marry this kindly substitute father, but she was certainly enjoying the sex with him...
...Collins's The Woman in White and Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret were blockbuster bestsellers when they appeared in the early 1860s...
...As fate would have it, the hosts returned for an umbrella, at which point "they heard the unmistakable sounds of sexual activity...
...Instead, Death at the Priory reads like a first-rate murder mystery whose key points are bolstered by the author's deep knowledge of the Victorian era...
...Ruddick examined the full reports of the investigating officers, the forensic reports of the physicians involved in the case, and the complete statements of all the witnesses...
...Indeed, by the time of Charles Bravo's murder, there had been so many high profile murder trials, celebrity criminals, and bestselling novels about killers disguised as respectable citizens that it began to be difficult to tell the facts from the fiction, the cause from the effect: Did highly publicized murder trials breed the novels, or did the novels breed the crimes...
...The only person who knew was Mrs...
...But Florence didn't have that kind of patience...
...Ruddick's proof is compelling, but he doesn't give it away immediately...
...Prompted perhaps by Smith's glamour (as well as the omnipresent British francophobia), the jury returned a verdict of Not Proven, and Madeleine Smith walked free...
...All of this, and more, came out in the coroner's inquest, but the case against any one suspect could not be proved, in part because Florence Bravo and Mrs...
...Cox had been greatly strengthened...
...Not anymore...
...Madeleine Smith, in the midst of a torrid affair with a French shipping clerk, suddenly met someone suitable to marry...
...Cox, who had once worked for the Bravos and could therefore make introductions...
...Bravo insisted on control of the household finances, firing servants to save money and urging Florence to give up her horses and garden...
...He was a dark, handsome, dashing young man with distinguished and wealthy parents (his father was a Liberal MI...
...In February 1857, according to chemists' accounts, Madeleine Smith bought arsenic and her hapless lover Emile began to suffer from the gastric attacks that ultimately killed him...
...Meanwhile, readers crossed class boundaries, and the working classes and aristocrats were as united in their love of these books as they were united in their penchant for real-life murder trials...
...Had Florence not craved acceptance by her social peers, she might have lived out her days quietly at the Priory, a widow staring down scandal until time and her good behavior could succeed in recouping her respectability, just as they ultimately do for Mrs...
...she couldn't bear life without a man, without the propriety marriage conferred on a woman...
...Unfortunately for her, Robert Campbell told his daughter that it was "morally offensive" for a wife to leave her husband and that he would not permit her to stay...
...Best of all, he hadn't bothered to change his will, and Florence inherited forty thousand pounds, a fabulous fortune at that time...
...So, for instance, the case of Madeleine Smith, the daughter of a wealthy Glasgow architect, who was tried in 1857 for poisoning her lover...
...Cox acknowledge that the operation had actually been an abortion...
...That solace ended when Florence realized she was pregnant...
...Florence Ricardo was now banned from respectable society, with only her fellow outcast, Dr...
...The Balham Mystery, as it has been known for well over a century, has been the subject of numerous books and even a BBC television mini-series, but A writer in Philadelphia, Susan Balée is the author of articles on Wilkie Collins, M.E...
...The wealthy widow bought a mansion in South London called the Priory...
...Florence recuperated so well that she precipitated the first great scandal of her life: She seduced her doctor...
...He had asked Florence if she would marry him when his wife died...
...Not only were both married (Gully's wife was in her eighties and confined in a mental asylum) but both were well-known society figures...
...Florence became hysterical and a compromise was reached: Florence would go to the Hydro, an aristocratic sanatorium run by the eminent Dr...
...At nineteen, Florence Campbell caught sight of her first husband, a twenty-two-year-old grenadier, Alexander Ricardo...
...When she remonstrated, Bravo took out his anger in the bedroom...
...Poor old Dr...
...Florence Bravo wasn't so lucky, or perhaps she just didn't have Madeleine Smith's chutzpah...
...The problem for the bumbling local police was not a dearth of suspects, but an abundance, including Bravo's unhappy wife, Florence Ricardo Bravo...
...Ruddick's Death at the Priory is a marvelous read, revealing a world where respectability sometimes covered a variety of disreputable secrets...
...Ricardo had been operated on for a tumor...
...Cox stood by her mistress...
...As Ruddick rightly notes, "No man of Charles Bravo's background would consider marrying a woman who had just confessed to aborting a pregnancy during an adulterous affair with a sixty-seven-year-old man unless he was chiefly interested in her money...
...Every new murder that cried out from the newspaper pages validated sensation novels and helped to create more of them...
...It's no wonder that Clarke could not solve the Bravo case when all the principals were so resolutely shut against him—nor is it surprising that an amateur detective from a higher class, James Ruddick, could do so over one hundred years later when the descendants of these same people gave him access to their private documents...
...Just before Christmas in 1870, Florence Ricardo left her husband and returned to her parents' house...
...Never had such a lovely, young, and well-born prisoner stood in the witness box...
...James Gully...
...James Gully, to recover her nerves...
...By the time of the inquest in the summer of 1857, the dock at Edinburgh was overrun with gawkers...
...Hopkinson was echoing the sentiments of her Victorian readers, who had an insatiable appetite for murder in novels, newspapers, plays, and street hawkers' broadsheets...
...Not surprisingly, the husband and wife began to fight, and Ricardo's verbal abuse ultimately became physical...
...worse still, the servants had heard everything "and the gossip marched through London with the speed of an epidemic...
...If their liaison became known, they would be judged mercilessly and their reputations destroyed...
...Cox supported each other— and in part because the servants banded together against the local police inspector...
...By consummating their relationship, both Florence and Gully took an enormous risk...
...James Gully, a kind and empathetic man who listed Gladstone, Disraeli, Dickens, and Darwin among his patients, was nevertheless a small, pale, bald man in his sixties...
...Only later, at the coroner's inquest for Charles Bravo's death, did Mrs...
...So she entered the orbit of Charles Bravo, a rising young barrister, with the help of Mrs...
...When they entered the room they found Florence lying on the sofa, Dr...
...One of the most famous Victorian murders that couldn't be found out was that of Charles Bravo, a thirty-year-old barrister who died after his intestines were burned to shreds by a corrosive poison in April 1876...
...Perhaps the best known is Sergeant Cuff, the hapless policeman assigned to the case in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, a novel based on the 1860 Road Murder, when upper-class Constance Kent was cleared of charges that she had murdered her younger stepbrother and then, five years later, confessed to the crime...
...They married in 1864 and Florence immediately began badgering Ricardo to give up the military, settle down in style, and produce a brood of children...
...In the Kent case, the real-life Inspector Whicher suspected her but was overridden...
...Certainly, many commentators at the time thought the latter...
...Cox (whom the barrister had informed she would soon be dismissed...
...This scandal could not be weathered, for it would be the end of Gully's career and Florence would have to emigrate...
...Bravo was talented and handsome, and Florence was so taken with the respectability he represented that she was willing to overlook the troubling aspects of her suitor, not least among them the fact that he was well known for his "greed and penury...
...Though never officially charged with her husband's death, Florence Bravo drank herself to death in 1878...
...To quell the rumors, Cox informed the servants that Mrs...
...Only when Florence agreed to make a will benefiting him in the event of her death and leasing him the Priory in her lifetime did Bravo consent to take her hand...
...Homicide, as Richard Altick wrote in Victorian Studies in Scarlet, "became institutionalized as a popular entertainment, a spectator sport...
...And as for her husband's murderer—ah, well, for that, you'll have to read the book...
...Florence had been ostensibly "entertaining" her doctor friend in the drawing room while her hosts were out for a walk...
...Catherick in Collins's The Woman in White...
...Unlike Madeleine Smith, she could not leave the scandal of her past behind her...
...The owners of the house were disgusted and outraged...
...When Florence invoked her right to keep her fortune (the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 prevented husbands from assuming their wives' assets), Bravo nearly called the wedding off...
...Alas, her lover, who had saved the many letters she had written him crowing about their sexual escapades, decided to blackmail her...
...At least, until the day they were caught in flagrante, at the home of friends Florence was visiting in Surrey...
...Hopkinson observes, "I like a good murder that can't be found out...
...The young husband, married less than six months, died in his wife's mansion in Balham, south London...
...When each of her two pregnancies with him ended in a serious miscarriage that undermined her health, he made it clear that he would keep trying until they produced a son...
...At this point, the relationship between Florence and Gully was effectively over, but that of Florence and Mrs...
...The marriage was ill-omened from the start, and it quickly mushroomed into something insupportable...
...there'd be no remaining in England after she'd borne the doctor an illegitimate child...
...Most important, he tracked down the descendants of all the principal suspects, discovering documentary evidence in New Zealand and Jamaica that provides enough evidence to expose the real killer—evidence that none of the investigators had in 1876...
...the housekeeper and Florence's companion, Mrs...
...It occurred after the explosion of sensational fiction by such writers as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon had moved the locus of crime from Gothic castles to the bosom of the Victorian family...
...Gully followed Florence to London at her request, buying a house five minutes' walk from the Priory...
...And then—quelle chance—Alexander Ricardo drank himself to death in April 1871...
...In The Moonstone, Cuff is fired for his presumption...
...his mother a society beauty...
...He ingested antimony, a poison colorless and tasteless in water, from his bedside water jug, but no one knows who put it there...
...Even Agatha Christie—who hypothesized that old Dr...
...At first, Florence Ricardo must have thought she'd escaped without punishment: She'd taken a lover, and no one was the wiser...
...and the couple's former coachman, George Griffiths, whom Bravo had recently fired for a minor infraction...
...Indeed, the wealth of the Bravo household kept Chief Inspector Clarke at arm's length...
...Gully, to solace her...
...James Ruddick, the author of an earlier true-crime book, Lord Lucan: What Really Happened, has solved the mystery by going beyond the published record of the coroner's inquest (all that other commentators have ever had to go on) and gaining access to the primary sources...
...Many scholars think Lady Audley's Secret derived from this case...
...the most approved methods for poisoning have been set forth with medical and surgical minuteness...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 21
