Chapter 3
Three Wives
T he British Museum Reading Room in late November is a cathedral of the intellect, a great domed space where the silence is so complete that the scratch of a pencil sounds like a bone breaking.
I had secured a desk near the eastern windows, where the grey light fell across the green leather surface in a manner that was adequate for reading if not for sustained comfort, and I was surrounded by the tools of my trade: ledgers, parish records, newspaper files, bound volumes of The Times stretching back a decade, and the meticulous handwritten notes that represented three days of continuous digging.
Three days. That was what it had taken to assemble the complete history of Cecilia Margaret Blackwood, née Blackwell, and the three men she had married and buried.
Three days of archives and records and the patient, methodical accumulation of details that most people would have considered too trivial to notice.
But details, in my experience, were the bricks from which cases were built, and I had learned long ago that the difference between a solved case and an unsolved one was usually a matter of noticing the right detail at the right time.
The files before me represented, I was increasingly convinced, the right details. I had arranged them chronologically, three columns side by side, one for each husband, and the parallel structure of the three lives was as stark as it was disturbing.
Arthur Geoffrey Pendleton, Sixth Viscount Pendleton.
Born 1838, the second son of the Fifth Viscount, a man who had not expected to inherit and who had been shaped by that expectation into a mild, pleasant, somewhat passive individual.
The elder brother had died of consumption in 1868, catapulting Arthur into the viscountcy and a set of responsibilities for which he was temperamentally unsuited.
He had a weak heart, diagnosed angina pectoris, for which he took digitalis and was advised to avoid excitement and exertion.
He owned Pendleton Hall in Hampshire, twenty-four hundred acres of productive farmland, and a London townhouse on Mount Street.
His income was modest for a viscount, approximately three thousand two hundred pounds per annum, and his investments, accumulated cautiously over a decade, amounted to some eight thousand pounds.
He was, by all accounts, a lonely man, isolated by his title and his invalidism, and grateful for the attentions of the young woman who had been introduced to him at a ball in the spring of 1880.
Cecilia Blackwell was twenty-one when she married Arthur Pendleton.
She was beautiful, which the newspaper accounts of the wedding emphasised with the breathless repetition that society journals reserve for the subject of aristocratic marriages, and she was described as accomplished, charming, and possessed of a dignity beyond her years.
The marriage was celebrated at St. George's, Hanover Square, in June of 1880, and the accounts describe a lovely ceremony attended by a considerable gathering of the quality.
The bride wore white satin. The groom appeared nervous but happy.
The marriage settlement was negotiated by Sir William Hartwell, who also represented the groom, and who arranged for the disposition of the Pendleton estate in the event of the Viscount's death, providing a life interest in the Hampshire property to the widow and leaving the personal estate, including investments and personal property, to her absolutely.
Arthur Pendleton died on the fourteenth of March 1882, one year and nine months after the wedding.
His physician, a Dr. Percival of Basingstoke, attributed the death to acute cardiac failure secondary to chronic angina pectoris.
The death certificate was signed without incident.
The body was buried at the Pendleton family church in Hampshire.
The inquest, held the following day, lasted less than an hour and returned a verdict of death by natural causes.
I had obtained, through the courtesy of the Hampshire coroner's office, copies of the inquest testimony.
The servants who had attended the Viscount in his final months spoke with one voice: he had been failing for some time, his episodes of breathlessness and chest pain becoming more frequent and more severe, and his wife had nursed him with a devotion that was extraordinary even by the standards of wifely duty.
She had prepared his evening cordial herself every night, a family recipe, she said, that her mother had sworn by.
The cordial appeared to soothe him, and the servants attributed the small mercies of his final months to his wife's ministrations.
Mrs. Pendleton had been present at the death, holding her husband's hand.
Her grief was described as the most moving the household had ever witnessed.
The cordial. I had underlined this detail in my notes.
A wife who prepares her husband's evening drink herself, every night, insisting on a family recipe, is a wife who has an opportunity that most poisoners would envy.
If Arthur Pendleton's heart was weak, and it was, a cardiac stimulant administered in his nightly cordial could have accelerated his decline with a precision that would be indistinguishable from the natural progression of his disease.
Digitalis, derived from foxglove, was a known cardiac stimulant.
In small doses, it was therapeutic. In larger doses, particularly in a patient with pre-existing cardiac weakness, it could provoke the kind of acute episode that had killed Arthur Pendleton.
But I had no evidence. The cordial bottles had been disposed of.
The apothecary from whom the digitalis might have been purchased, if it had been purchased, was unknown.
Dr. Percival's notes described the progression of Pendleton's angina in terms that were consistent with natural decline, even if the pace of that decline was, upon close examination, somewhat unusual.
I had shown the notes to a physician friend, Dr. Marsham, who practised at Charing Cross Hospital and who owed me several favours, and he had examined them with the furrowed brow of a man who was being asked to entertain a possibility he found distasteful.
"The progression is rapid," Marsham had said, "but not impossible. Angina is an unpredictable condition. Some patients decline quickly, others linger for years. Without a post-mortem, it's impossible to say whether the pace of decline was natural or accelerated."
"If it were accelerated? What might cause such acceleration?"
Marsham had looked at me with the particular expression of a physician who recognises that a detective is asking him to provide medical evidence for a theory that the detective is not yet prepared to articulate.
"Cardiac stimulants. Exertion. Emotional distress.
There are any number of factors that could exacerbate a pre-existing cardiac condition. "
"Digitalis?"
"Digitalis, yes. In sufficient quantity, and in a patient with compromised cardiac function, it could provoke an acute episode. But, Aldric, I must ask you what you are implying."
"I am not implying anything. I am asking questions."
"You are asking questions that lead in a specific direction."
I had not answered him. Marsham was a good man and a competent physician, but he was also a cautious one, and the direction in which my questions led was one that no prudent man wished to go.
Henry Aldous Ravenscroft. Born 1834, the son of a Manchester cotton merchant who had built a modest fortune into a considerable one through a combination of commercial acumen and a willingness to exploit the misfortunes of his competitors.
Henry had inherited the business in 1860 and had expanded it aggressively, acquiring textile mills, railway investments, and property across the north of England.
By the time of his marriage to Cecilia Pendleton in April of 1883, he was worth in excess of a hundred and twenty thousand pounds, a fortune that placed him among the wealthiest men in England who did not possess a title.
The Ravenscroft marriage had been, by all accounts, a transaction.
Henry wanted social elevation. Cecilia wanted money.
The settlement was generous: Henry settled fifty thousand pounds on his wife upon marriage, with the remainder to follow upon his death.
The couple divided their time between Henry's townhouse in Manchester and a hunting lodge on a six-hundred-acre estate in Cheshire, where Henry indulged his passion for riding.
The newspaper accounts of the marriage were less enthusiastic than those that had greeted the Pendleton wedding.
The society journals noted the disparity in rank with the delicate tactlessness that characterised their approach to such matters, and several commentators observed that the new Mrs. Ravenscroft was "a woman of considerable beauty and ambition, who has exchanged an ancient title for a modern fortune.
" The implication was clear, and it was unflattering, but Cecilia Ravenscroft appeared not to notice or not to care, and she conducted herself in Manchester society with the gracious efficiency of a woman who understood that social acceptance was earned through performance rather than birth.
Henry Ravenscroft died on the seventeenth of March 1885, one year and eleven months after the wedding.
He had been riding alone on the grounds of his Cheshire estate at approximately half past six in the morning, a habit he maintained regardless of weather, when his horse was apparently startled by a wire strung across the bridle path at approximately neck height.
The horse reared, Ravenscroft was thrown, and he landed on his neck.
He was found by a gamekeeper at seven o'clock, unconscious, and he died within the hour without regaining consciousness.