The April-October romantics lived for a while in Norfolk, Virginia. But Florence’s dark angel soon put a stop to that and, through difficulties concerning James Maybrick’s business, shuttled them off to a suburb of Liverpool, England, a city where almost anything unpleasant is liable to happen.
The unpleasantness soon set in. James, reverting to caddishness, started going merrily to hell with the belles and race horses of Liverpool. And Florence, a young mother though still quite “unawakened,” started herself to toy with the idea of the Primrose Path or, as the Victorians called it, “going her own way.” It is even reported that she went her own way into a London hotel bedroom with an anonymous gentleman, but at this far date it would be rancorous to cast stones — particularly when one remembers James.
For James was going from bad to worse and from worse to worst. Eventually he reached a peak of Victorian depravity from which there was no going back and little going forward. He took to drugs. Not exclusively, however, to the conventional cocaine or the hackneyed hashish. James was too exotic for that. He favored the heavy metals. And his pet pick-me-up was arsenic. With increasing frequency he began to patronize the Liverpool chemist shop of a Mr. James Heaton where he would replenish his stock of liquor arsenicalis — an arsenic solution which he imbibed sometimes as often as five times a day. He found it just the thing for that morning-after queasiness.
Oddly enough, while Mr. Maybrick was guzzling arsenic to repair the ravages of his dissipations, Florence had decided that arsenic was just what she needed as a skin lotion to repair the facial ravages caused by her unhappy married life. To obtain this unusual cosmetic, she is reputed to have soaked arsenic out of flypapers (the old-fashioned sort), a rather messy procedure at which she was unfortunately observed by one of the maids, a certain Alice Yapp, who eventually became as loquacious on the subject as her name might indicate. Why Mrs. Maybrick needed to endure the sufferings of soaking flypapers pour être belle (to make herself beautiful) is a mystery since, at a later date, enough professionally prepared arsenic was found in the house to poison a whole Panzer Division.
The Maybricks were distinctly an arsenic-conscious family.
In May, 1889, James, a gay dog to the end, went to the Wirrall Races, got wet and returned home next morning feeling very sick to the stomach. For religious reasons and for the sake of the two young children, the Maybricks had manfully tried to gloss over the shortcomings of their marriage and were still living in technical harmony. James was put to bed, visited by a doctor and, in due course, provided with a day nurse and a night nurse, Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery. Florence, however, guided by a stern sense of duty, was not willing to leave her ailing husband to the care of strangers. She herself was a frequent visitor to the sick room. According to the nurses, she was too frequent a visitor. While James went on feeling sicker and sicker to the stomach, she would try to tempt him with little delicacies of her own contriving, much to the disgust of the dietetic Nurse Callery. Also she developed a nervous habit of shuffling bottles and medicaments around on the patient’s bedtable. Her sick room manner was later described as “both suspicious and surreptitious.” And she does seem to have behaved in a rather silly fashion. One of the silliest things she seemed to have done was to bring together a bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice and a punch of some white powder, believed by many to have been arsenic.
It is hardly startling that, in spite of the ministration of Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery, in spite of his wife’s tender solitude, James Maybrick did not improve. On May 11, 1889, he finally passed away.
Since he had shown symptoms suggesting irritant poisoning, officious busybodies insisted upon an autopsy, and arsenic was found — not surprisingly, perhaps — in his body. Actually, the amount discovered was merely one tenth of a grain, a dose not sufficient to kill a normal respectable citizen, let alone James. But people feeling the way they do about arsenic in stomachs, Mrs. Maybrick was arrested and charged with the murder of her husband. Immediately all the silly things she had done around the bedside came to light. Alice Yapp remembered the flypapers. And, before long, the anonymous gentleman and the London hotel bedrooms were dusted off too.
To make matters worse — a sorry fact due perhaps less to bad luck than bad management — Mrs. Maybrick began to discover that nobody liked her. Her husband’s two brothers had never been able to abide her. Now they acted in a most highhanded and spiteful manner, whisking off her children and branding her even before she was accused. Also, Alice Yapp, her fellow servant, Mrs. Briggs, Nurse Gore and Nurse Callery showed the most unfriendly symptoms. They had nothing to say in Mrs. Maybrick’s favor and seemed to take savage delight in bringing out evidence to her discredit.
Later, when she was brought to trial, the English public didn’t like her either. There was something about her.
Perhaps her American blood had a little to do with it. In the Golden Jubilee years of Victoria, American women were frowned upon in England. Perhaps they dressed better, looked smarter and managed to be more amusing than their stolider English sisters. Even the most impeccable Victorian male was not above rolling an appreciative eye at them, so long as they stayed out of trouble. But once they were in the soup, the men were as ready as the women to trace the scarlet A blazing forth beneath the chic American camisoles.
As if this weren’t bad luck enough, Mrs. Maybrick had bad luck with her jury and terrible luck with one aspect of her defense.
The jury, consisting mostly of simple-natured men, were not the type accustomed to think for themselves on nice points of law. Their professions, perhaps, speak for them. There were three plumbers (three of them!), two farmers, one miller, one wood-turner, one provision dealer, one grocer, one iron-monger, one house-painter, and one baker.
In preparing her defense against this literal-minded group of her peers, Mrs. Maybrick was advised not to bring forward any evidence as to the true character, the immortality, the dissipation, the general caddishness of her husband. Sentimentalists have held this as a virtue in Florence Maybrick that she adhered so rigidly to the principles of de mortuis nil nisi bonum (say nothing bad about the dead). Actually, it was the smart, but not smart enough, idea of her solicitors that the less James was discredited, the less apparent motive there would seem for his wife’s having wanted to murder him.
In consequence of this blunder in psychology, Mrs. Maybrick faced trial as an American hussy who had mistreated and deceived a perfectly good English husband, a man, as far as the jury knew, without a blemish on his character. To add to her troubles, her star witness, Mr. James Heaton, the chemist from whom Mr. Maybrick had so constantly purchased his swig of liquor arsenicalis, was so sick when he came to court that his vital evidence was all but inaudible. Even the brilliant rhetoric of her attorney, Charles Russell, later Lord Chief Justice Russell, could not soar above these obstacles.
And, as a final disaster, Mrs. Maybrick was not merely facing trial, she was facing Mr. Justice Stephen on the bench. In the light of his future career, which ended one year later in the madhouse, Mr. Justice Stephen was a little more than even the most callous of murderesses deserved. This one illustrious personage was already losing grip on his sanity before the trial started; all he needed to complete the process was Florence Maybrick. From the beginning he liked her no better than anyone else had. As the trial limped along with no one exactly knowing who did what, his dislike for her swelled within him until it reached almost psychopathic proportions. This manifested itself finally, in his summing up, as a two-day harangue of impassioned malignity and misogyny. In one of the most biased speeches ever to come from the English bench, he referred to poor Mrs. Maybrick as “that horrible woman” and branded her as the epitome of all that was vile. Startling even the prosecution, he vindictively maneuvered the Valentine’s Meat Juice and a certain bottle of glycerine around until he left no loophole for the unlucky woman’s innocence.