Cuckold: The Murder of Edwin Bartlett

Copyright 2022

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66784-674-3 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-66784-675-0 (eBook)

That’s all very well but you’re overlooking one thing.

—Inspector Clouseau, The Pink Panther

Contents

PREFACE

DEVIANCE

PROLOGUE

CLUB AND COUNTRY

BACHELOR

PUBESCENCE

HOME

THE JOB

JUST AMONG FRIENDS

ISOLATION

DOGS

STATUS

SYNDROMES

BIGAMY

MOTHER

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

MATCHY MATCHY

REVELATION

A MATCH MADE SOMEWHERE

PAYDIRT

MARRY IN HASTE…

ESTABLISHING AN ALIBI

WOMEN’S PRE-LIB

BACKFIRED

THE IN-LAWS

NICE GIRLS DON’T

FATHER

SQUARE PEG

WHEN IN ENGLAND

ALIBI

REPENT AT LEISURE

CUCKOLDED

BROTHER-IN-LAW

DEATH

ELOPEMENT

BABY OF THE FAMILY

I AM WOMAN

HONEYMOON

RECONCILIATION

WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM?

ASKING FOR IT

PREJUDICE

CONFESSION

PAIN

SCHEME

CROSSROADS

ADELAIDE

SERMON

GEORGE

LESSONS

MORE SERMON

THERE’S SOMEONE ELSE

WHERE IS HE?

MAKING AN OFFER

THE FALL

NO GOING BACK

OUT IN THE OPEN

THE KISS

ANYTHING FOR YOU

VANQUISHED

THE EVENTUALITY

THE EYES HAVE IT

HEAVENLY CREATURES

AROUSAL

TO DIE FOR

DECISION

POISON

CHLOROFORM

DEATH WISH

CAREGIVER

SINS OF THE SONS

STAY OF EXECUTION

TURNABOUT

ARMED

LULL

THE LAST DAY

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

EXECUTION

FATHERLY WORRY

PLAY-ACTING

POST MORTEM

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

BACK TO GOD

PRODIGAL

INVESTIGATION

UNDER ARREST

COUNSELS

TECHNICALITY

HOW DUNNIT?

JURY

THE JUDICIARY

FAIRNESS

EPILOGUE

DELIBERATION

THE UNFAIRNESS OF IT ALL

THE CUCKOLD CONTRADICTION

BLAME

UPSHOT

PREFACE

If he’s lucky, a masochist might find a sadist to abuse him, a sadist might find a masochist to abuse, but a cuckold has no such solution; he is defeated before he even starts. He only wants a woman who wants someone else so there can be no happy ending. Of course, a man can be cuckolded against his will when his wife fraternizes with another, and the victimized spouse can either put up with it, leave, kill the other, kill her, or kill both—and there endeth the story. But if...he WANTS to be cuckolded…that is a different story. With the true case herein such a desire became a farce, then a tragedy and, later still, a mystery. That’s the story of the man who confused everyone, even himself—Edwin Bartlett.

DEVIANCE

Bartlett crept along the hall as slowly as necessary to be silent and stopped by the closed lounge door to listen. He could hear the low murmur of a quiet conversation from inside, too quiet to discern whether it was a man’s or woman’s voice; those within obviously didn’t want what they were saying to be heard. After a few steadying moments he bent down to the keyhole but could see nothing through it. That was odd, they must have hung something over it from inside. Was that deliberate he wondered? Were they preventing any view of themselves or was it just a fortuitous result of hanging a hat or something on the knob? He felt frustrated; he really wanted to see what they were doing but the covered hole suggested it wasn’t for his eyes. He retreated silently to the kitchen and thought for a moment. Dare he look from outside? He went out through the back door and walked by the side of the house in the failing light. Ivy leaves brushed against him as he reached the corner to look along the wall toward the lounge window. It was still too light outside. He would be seen, he thought, and couldn’t have that, so he went back in the kitchen, sat down at the bare wooden table and waited, watching as dusk slowly turned to dark. After a while of wondering whether or not to have a drink, he returned to the ivied corner to see if he could safely remain hidden by the new darkness. The problem was the gravel—it crunched easily, and if they were doing anything interesting in the lounge, they were probably on heightened alert to any unwanted sound from anywhere. He was shaking with excitement which got more intense as he made his way along the wall, staying close to the foliage, the clinging ivy. There was at least a dim light coming, almost flickering, from the window so the outside darkness might keep him from being seen. As he moved closer and could gradually see inside, the piano came into view, then the carpet pattern, and finally the chair leg by the fire. He was now standing on soil so he knew that he couldn’t be heard and all he had to do was make sure he wasn’t seen. He put his face to the wall by the window and inched forward very slowly, wishing he didn’t have a nose, until George’s oily hair came into view, then his ear. The man was looking downward toward his feet, but Adelaide couldn’t be seen. Moving further forward caused George’s shoulder, then his lapel to appear, finally his leg, then Adelaide’s shoulder. She was sitting at his feet, leaning on his trousered leg looking at the fire, her hand moving back and forth on his knee lovingly it seemed; it was the only movement in a scene that suggested warm togetherness, even consummate, domestic bliss. Bartlett was almost fainting with excitement, his heart beating like he’d never known. His wife looked so peaceful and submissive. George looked so masterful and worshipped while he—Bartlett—stooping for a better view, felt cold but beautifully emasculated—it was the greatest feeling in the world to him. He wanted George to bend and have his mouth come down on hers. As George turned a little and almost looked toward the window, Bartlett darted backward and hugged the wall but after a minute looked back in to see Adelaide adjust her position as if about to rise. Bartlett walked back to the kitchen and retired to bed with a new invigoration. What a great moment.

PROLOGUE

In the early hours of January the first 1886, Edwin James Bartlett died in his bed while being attended to by the only other person present, his wife Adelaide. An autopsy concluded that the victim died from the massive ingestion of chloroform found in his stomach. Since administering this amount of volatile poison to himself, without any evidence that he did so, seemed implausible to investigators, his wife was brought to trial where an all-male jury, heeding the eloquent defense—led by the prominent, and very expensive, barrister Edward Clarke—acquitted her after which she disappeared into the unknown, leaving an endless number of observers to comment on the puzzling saga for the next century and longer. While extensive speculation about the forensic evidence surrounding the notorious death has been ongoing for over a hundred years without any real solution, the answer is more likely to lie with the personalities of the three main participants who came together, as is usually the case with these tales, in a perfect storm of unlikely circumstances. The many books and treatments on the strange Bartlett case—often referred to as the Pimlico Mystery—revolve around Adelaide, the inscrutable, pretty, boyish French woman at the center of the scandalous case. Making up the rest of the cast are a collection of flaky personages: her husband Edwin with his peculiar hypochondria, moribund reflections and sexual fetishes; a young Reverend George Dyson, passionately in love with Adelaide to the point of self-sacrificial foolishness; Doctor Leach, nervous, hectic, martyring himself to science with his risky swallowing experiments; and a bitter father-in-law resented by Adelaide and, with feelings mutual, failing to convince his son about a prescience of doom with such a woman. Adelaide, for most observers, is the pivotal character around which this story turns, while the rest of the players are the backdrop, mere symptoms of her fatal karma, inevitable victims of an undercurrent of feminine wiles and deviousness. She was and remains Gallicly intriguing, impossible to read, reminding us of Joan of Arc, with a stoic strength coming from somewhere, vouchsafed to a point—where unlike Joan—she escaped the fires of punishment and walked away unscathed by the flames of justice like a phoenix flying into eternity leaving many to ponder her enigma.

This book, while based on the known facts, differs from that perspective and lays the blame elsewhere.

CLUB AND COUNTRY

He felt secure at his club, at least for a while. No women were allowed on the premises so all activities such as drinking, smoking, playing cards or talking sport and business were things he could easily engage without his bachelorhood being too obtrusive as it might have been at other social functions such as balls, fetes, and church gatherings where perspicacious ladies could pick up personal nuances beyond the senses of the materially-oriented males. The club was a typical chauvinistic hell-hole of smoke, beer odors, mild uncouthness, and talk of money, politics, prejudices, and allusions to sex. It wasn’t really working class. There was no sawdust on the floor, no drunken fights, no spitting, cadging or threadbare clothing, but there was no old money either; nothing had been inherited and whoever had anything had made it by the sweat of their own hard work. Any prevailing hierarchy in the place was based solely on money and with it the club’s prohibitive cost of membership. There were no titles bandied around, no real gentlemen, and none of the type who talked nasally as a result of their moneyed higher education in exclusive public schools; working class accents had been retained as well as working class tastes. There was no hint of aristocratic correctness either, only the size of one’s wallet mattered and money alone—rather than blood color—had impelled the members to these better days. While the club’s initial cost to join filtered out the typical clientele of the free pubs open to all, its members had no taste for pretentiousness, the place was uncarpeted, the furniture inelegant and lacking in taste, heavy as it was rather than fine, such as the thick round tables standing on cabriole legs of plain cast iron, surrounded by chairs that lacked upholstery and needed no great level of care in their treatment. The men Bartlett sat with had for the most part retained their working-class manners but their professional and commercial accomplishments held them to a value system bespeaking that nothing should be given away free; the unspoken but unanimous gospel was if you wanted something you should work for it. There was a tacit kind of class system, pervasive in its conviction and conversation, in a milieu of meritocratic nouveau riche where lack of success of those below didn’t fit, and toffee-nosed upper classes in the social tier above were looked down on in a brusque inverted snobbery. The men made jokes that coursed with a slight sense of superiority, about the class of people they’d emerged from; poorer people whose constant gripes about their own failure as well as complaints about the injustice of the undeserving landed class were all ridiculed. It was a place redolent of self-made success, where complainants and whiners, who would be dismissed in much later years as losers would never fit. The jokes passed around were sometimes chauvinistic about the idiosyncrasies of females, at whom they guffawed as if they had that subject all worked out. While Bartlett allowed their view on money and its acquisition, he often wondered what their married worlds were really like as distinct from the impressions they gave in these all-male circles where prodigious carnal appetites were implied—and not susceptible to contradiction by the unadmitted wives ensconced modestly at home. Unlike Bartlett, most of those present had taken the obligatory walk down the aisle and had typical little nineteenth-century women largely confined to the house, restricted to household and children duties, tea with lady friends, chaperoned social functions like church, and as was expected, dutifully fitting into the preferred view the husbands had of themselves. But while being objectified in club conversation, the ladies were bequeathed a feminine dignity that would go extinct with liberation a century later when a different kind of respect, a masculine respect, or at least respect using male criteria, would be demanded. For now, ladies would largely be excluded from commerce and totally excluded from the vote, giving the last word to their husbands, attending to their needs and only conducting themselves in a manner fitting the ironclad norms of the fraternal social mold everywhere in evidence. None of this protocol was actually written down, it was just assumed that the female oyster was smaller than the male one as a consequence of the workable roles of family dynamics—the woman in the home tending to its duties, the man abroad in the wider world winning the sustenance. As a result, good wives of the time only involved themselves with domestic affairs and roamed only as far as the ruling gender approved; for the most part, it seemed, without complaint or frustration.

In this nineteenth-century, sex wasn’t discussed except by men as an incidental but inevitable side theme to the imbibing, club gambling sessions with the odd risqué quip, while when outside the smoke-filled drinking parlors, men shifted up a gear and conducted themselves with Victorian propriety, which included far more respect for the weaker sex than would later be the case, while their wives were often just grateful to have been taken off the single shelf. Rescued from the dreaded spinsterhood, women inevitably only learned—in sexual terms—what they experienced with their one sexual partner in their particular house and bedroom microcosm. The womenfolk would have given their altar vows as virgins with little idea of what was supposed to happen next when the formal, public ceremony gave way to the private bed chamber, charged as it was with perturbing expectations and fumbling awkwardness. Ironically, it was a society still headed, symbolically at least, by an almighty queen who would sit on the throne of England for sixty odd years like an omnipotent goddess, an out-of-reach fountainhead presiding over her eternal empire, which always had the sun on it somewhere, but going by her proclamations she was clearly as ill-informed in sexual affairs as her female subjects. Victoria’s instruction manual on the hidden, undiscussed, but necessary activity amounted to one line—lie back and think of England. In other words, the act wasn’t something meant to be enjoyed or enlarged upon—more like having to go to a funeral or some other put-up-withness. Any other attitude to such a disgusting necessity would unavoidably include shame; a woman who actually enjoyed sex might be described as wanton, so she would never admit to liking such a thing even if she felt it, in fact she herself might think there was something wrong with her had her mind strayed toward the attractiveness of the activity.

A woman given to truly enjoying the thing might have developed a shiftiness in her eye expression that could include suggestiveness, spotted by the roaming eyes of males and maybe begrudged by females not so fortunately endowed. Floating somewhere in the background of the subject there was of course the very taboo aspect of homosexuality, which women were thought to be unacquainted with, while men sometimes came across it, particularly in the upper classes who sent their sons to private boarding schools for months on end. There inevitably boys became sexually aware at an age when they’d be sleeping in all-male dormitories, and their first inept but curious gropings were not with girls—so the strong, first-time, cellular memory of sex was impinged with boy images rather than female ones that could not necessarily be erased later by left-brain admonitions or prohibitive convention. What else could be expected but homosexual tendencies? However, society would stipulate implicitly or otherwise that men should become heterosexual pillars of society, proliferating and doing the necessary only with women. Many victims of their earliest exposure, unable to eradicate or ignore their first anti-social inculcations of sex with other males fled to the empire on missionary work or joined the military, unable to concentrate strongly enough on the opposite sex, incapable of overcoming their private attractions and thus shamed into leaving. Colonialism wasn’t only prompted by conquest but by attempts to hide in faraway places, free from the close-knit, prying strictures of home. However most men could pull the marriage thing off, get an uninitiated lady into a monogamous contract, tell her what to do when they were alone, in a way the man understood it, and present a united front to the world, with the lady going along with it all, none the wiser as to what was normal. She would only know of things that her man did with her, not necessarily what most people did, not necessarily what was going on in the house next door, and she would see no need to discuss her husband’s sexual eccentricities because to her they were not eccentric; they were how things were done. As far as she was concerned what they were doing was the same as everyone else—there was nothing to talk about. Oblivious as she was, even a loveless bed or some other oddity was as natural to her as the sunrise, since she lacked any external frames of reference, and would surely assume that whatever was happening with her and her husband was the same as what was going on in all the other unexamined households near and far. She didn’t talk about sex with her female associates who kept as silent on the subject as she did, and for the same reason— embarrassment—but had the ladies been drawn out they might have told their own strange story about what their spouse did and didn’t do. With things like general gossip, food, clothing, children, in-laws and various household problems there was already enough to talk about without straying into uncomfortable, private unmentionables.

The Empress herself, the exalted head of the nation’s womanhood, demonstrated that she was as uninformed as anyone out there in her great unwashed empire—on the confidential activity. As just one example of her lack of acquaintance with the subject of sex in general and homosexuality in particular was that she had spurned an act of parliament outlawing lesbianism, not because she was a broad-minded, nineteenth-century liberal vanguard ahead of her time, but because, she said, there was no such thing, so what was the point of a law outlawing something that didn’t exist! She added that the idea of a woman being sexually attracted to another woman was impossible and too absurd to consider let alone have it formalized in the laws of the land. Misinformation in the culture was only surpassed by no information at all—a problem, if that’s what it was—to be cured eventually, at the anything-goes millennium end, by too much information when a tide of profitable pornography and sexual liberation would inundate a new world, and anyone resisting it would be condemned as hateful and narrow minded—similar to the way broad-mindedness had been condemned previously.

BACHELOR

In Victorian times, sex was still like the sewer system—there, necessary, out of view, and not examined too closely by most, but it made no sense to condemn it, unless it was in the wrong place, yet there was usually no need to go too deeply into it either since its features might prove unsavory. Whatever happened in the various bedrooms could be misrepresented if only by the insinuations and assumptions banded about in the ribaldry of the men’s club where the subject of sex inevitably came up and where intimations and inferences abounded among the sly smiles and winks that suggested whatever men wanted to imply was going on between them and their voiceless womenfolk in absentia. Naturally if there were no children in the marriage, the validity of the latter was open to question, but any enquiry on such anomalies could be deflected with talk of the poor wife being barren or their just not wanting to bring children into a cruel world to be punished. It was all easily handled—all except Bartlett’s problem that is; he was still single. So what was his story? What knowing, au-fait, dismissive reply could he come up with to deflect the truth about himself? He had long since run out of excuses for his bachelorhood because there was no apparent reason for it; he had no noticeable shortcomings, so it began to be assumed that his unmarried status must be his fault; he had to have an undisclosed trait, publicly unrevealed to the raucous throng of drinkers, and from time to time the subject would be broached when facetious wags probed mockingly but pointedly about his single life. His financial success made him capable of providing for a family, and in such a penurious age this fact stood out as a major asset and qualification for marriage. It wasn’t an era when women approached men about possible relationships as it would be a century later, but this didn’t stop fathers from mentioning the subject of eligibility to possible suitors for their desperate daughters, in a way that could be taken as a serious suggestion or faffed off as a joke if the propositioned one didn’t bite.

Hints in this vein were being aimed toward Bartlett ever more frequently these days, not always unfortunately in confidential encounters in the corridor but quite often when he least expected them, at the most awkward moments, at the card table for instance from which there was no convenient escape. He’d be just about to make his whist play when someone like William Langham-Fyfe would segue the subject of the poverty-stricken masses—at that moment under discussion—into his still-single daughter needing to be taken off his hands matrimonially and financially, and wouldn’t Bartlett like to solve his problem? It was asked whimsically with a lascivious grin, behind Fyfe’s handle-bar moustache and devilish mien, but Bartlett knew that the casual, passing remark was in fact a serious suggestion on a serious subject at a time when who a woman would marry was—certainly to her—a crucial, make-or-break, life-determining issue; it demanded a response and pricked the ears of other card players present as they’d heard the question posed before without a satisfactory answer. These hints aimed at Bartlett were beginning to feel to him like attacks. Being a bachelor wasn’t uncommon; it was often a choice made by those who preferred less responsibility than would be the case if they were hitched and obligated with the pressure of children and in-laws. However, with Bartlett the single status seemed to carry an extra shading that he had become conscious of and that had been sensed by his colleagues in a way that conveyed his air of unease on the matter. His secret reasons for not settling down were embarrassing—at least to him—and that was the problem, a small insecurity had been sensed by his drinking partners who of course dug humorously for more information at which point he would try to adopt a dismissive posture to cover, what for him, felt like, not a badge of masculine freedom but frailty. Oh she can do better than me, Bill, in any case I wouldn’t want you as a father-in-law, you have too much pull. If anything went wrong you’d sue me out of my estate. Fyfe replied immediately. Well you gave the opposite answer to Bottomley last week when he proposed his young Anne for you and you said he wasn’t batting in your league, so which is it, too good for you or not good enough? It was clear that Fyfe had thought about the issue and been ready with a rebuttal. Bartlett colored and the moment became a bit tense with him forgetting where he was up to in the card game and unable to come back with any quick rejoinder. Fyfe backed off and let the matter drop, asking to be reminded about the trump suit, but Bartlett knew he’d understood and while not pressing the point would probably raise the question of Bartlett’s lack of a wife to others in his absence. Bartlett was failing to maintain his flippancy; he needed a different tack to avoid the scurrilous label of homosexuality, which although inapplicable in his case still made its dawning presence felt in the oafish diagnoses of simple males.

PUBESCENCE

Bartlett was typical in some ways. When he was about thirteen he, like other males his age, found himself running into a hormonal firewall of feeling where his body started to demand something other than food and drink, and within him stirred a psycho-physical trauma that couldn’t be ignored. He didn’t know what they were but his hormones began to race, his voice broke, hair began to appear in different places and the neighborhood between his legs changed to the point where it became unrecognizable. It wasn’t necessarily an unpleasant change but the new feeling forced him to dwell on its expression; the disquiet in his loins were aimed psychologically for some reason that he hadn’t yet figured out, at nearby girls, who he’d previously spurned as unathletic and uninteresting, but now had suddenly become the stimulus of visions of them that accompanied his desires. The two aspects of both physical feeling and pictured females came together in his mind like a great explosion that, for some instinctive reason, he couldn’t discuss with his mother—that notion was somehow obscene. Even his father, like the rest of the family, was altogether on a different plane to this traumatic sexual one, and the idea of bringing up the subject at home made him feel a bit nauseous. Whatever this sex thing was all about, it did not include blood kith and kin—there was a line of division drawn deeply in that area that somehow he knew needed no discussion. All his previous problems like cuts and tummy aches could have been told to his mother but not this one, and his sense of isolation in this newly-aroused world was only alleviated to any degree when other boys brought up the subject furtively, and discussed it in hushed and secretive tones. Toys and other trivialities of childhood were set aside and Bartlett like other lads around him entered this fresh but very real universe on which views could only be vented with fellow sufferers, away from the family microcosm where such a topic seemed taboo. Sex was a different paradigm, impossible to ignore and one which would preoccupy Bartlett from thereon out—even to death. His participation in this deranging, uncharted obsession consisted of not much interaction with females—they were merely the raison d’etre of this new world—but only of unrealized fantasies, fantasies that took on an unfocussed form such as wanting to see more of a girl’s legs, or his being bombarded by images of their faces coming into view in his electrified mind, which wandered aimlessly through visions of females prompted by the feelings that had taken him over. Any relief he felt was brought about by the women doing certain things in his imagination—things he couldn’t believe they would actually do. How would they respond to what he wanted if he suggested it to them; were they already thinking about it, or would they get annoyed? Of course they would; they went to church on Sunday and never spoke even remotely about anything alluding to the activities that now filled his mind; despite his thoughts being beyond his control what he felt was that his soul was now sullied.

For his imaginative purposes virtually any female would do—young, old, fat, thin, pretty, ugly, just as long as it was female it would fill the need. Even Mrs. Bornhurst next door who he could watch through his bedroom window while she was out in her garden clipping roses that, unlike her, were in full bloom, but momentarily she became the nearest and dearest of his desires. She had three grown kids so must know something about the subject, he thought, because even he knew by then more or less how children came about, but at that instant the neighbor looked as if she was actually interested in clipping stems. Was that really what she was thinking about? Surely someone who looked like her, with her exaggerated curves and feminine ways of moving, couldn’t possibly be that enraptured with some stupid twigs. Would she have the secret desire to do bad things to him and keep him prisoner in her attic—that scenario brought him to a distasteful climax that he immediately felt ashamed about—but would she? He watched her returning to her house examining the cut flowers not knowing that she’d just taken part at least abstractedly in her dramatic physical conquest of the boy next door, though to his disappointment her expression remained bland rather than contemptuous—in the way that he craved. When he met her in the street a few days later, as well as blushing, he’d stammered out an answer to her smiling question about his new job at the grocery store. There wasn’t a hint in her demeanor of the sexual domination he longed for; she looked kindly but quizzically at him as if his twitching body language didn’t quite fit the innocuous exchange. What would she have done if he had knelt at her feet, as he wanted to do? It was all so embarrassing. He felt like a stranger in a land which previously—before this so-called puberty—seemed unquestioned and normal to him but now it was as if his body was burning from inside and every female he met—apart from his mother—had taken on a new, highly-charged identity. Where was God in all this; did He approve or not? This new, sexual world was at odds with all these Sunday admonishments about sin. Did the pious congregation know nothing about the ordeal he was going through, and how had Jesus dealt with erections? Edwin hadn’t asked for all this aggravation so why did he feel that it was all his own fault? To his knowledge, he hadn’t sinned, so why was he being punished and driven to distraction by the earthquake of desire going on within? If he hadn’t sinned, why did he feel guilty? Guilt was his new religion. His previous crashing through life like a dog happily chasing balls had now given way to long periods of reflection, as he tried to assimilate his feelings that nobody else voiced in the everyday world where the new alien feelings didn’t seem to fit. Was this what they meant by the work of the Devil? It felt as if the Devil was winning the tussle for his soul since he had to conclude that only the Devil would sympathize with him in his incongruous infatuations that could only be described as asocial. If nobody he knew in his society discussed or brought up