Mrs. Warren's Daughter — Chapter X, The Shillito Case, Part 1

THE SHILLITO CASE

In the autumn of 1905, increase among women of the idea of full citizenship made rapid strides.

There was a feeling in the air that Balfour must soon resign or go to the country, that a Liberal Ministry would succeed to power, and that being Liberal it could scarcely, in reason or with any logic, refuse to enlarge the franchise to the advantage of the female half of the community.

These idealizers of the Liberal Party, which had really definitely ceased to be Liberal in 1894, had a rude awakening.

Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst dared to act as if they were men, and asked Sir Edward Grey at his Manchester meeting in October, 1905, if a Liberal Administration would give Votes to Women, should it be placed in power at the next Election.

Answer they had none, from the platform;

but the male audience rose in their hundreds, struck these audacious hussies in the face, scratched and slapped them (this was the rôle of the boys), and hustled them out into the street, bleeding and dishevelled.

Here for attempting to explain the causes of their expulsion they were arrested by the police, and the following morning were sent to prison, having declined to pay the fines illegally imposed on them.

This incident made a great impression on the newspaper-reading public, because at that time the Press boycott on the Woman Suffrage movement had not set in.

It gave David much to think about, and he found Honoria Fraser and several of his men and women friends had joined the Woman Suffrage movement and were determined that the new Liberal Government should not shirk the issue; an issue on which many members of Parliament had been returned as acquiescent in the principle.

On that account they had received the whole-hearted support of many, women owing allegiance to the Liberal Party.

At first of course the new Government was too busy in allotting the loaves and fishes of Office and in handing out the peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Governorships, private secretaryships, and promotions among the civil servants which had--not to put too fine a point on it--been purchased by large and small contributions to the Party Chest.

[Such a procedure seems to be inseparable from our present Party system.

In this respect the Conservatives are no better than the Liberals; and it is always possible that in a different way the Labour Party when It comes into power will be similarly inclined to reward those who have furnished the sinews of war.

The House of Commons in the last Act which revised the conditions of elections of members of Parliament was careful to leave open many avenues along which Money might attain to the heart of things.

] But at length all such matters were settled, and the Cabinet was free to face the steady demand of the women leaders of the Suffrage movement; a demand that at any rate _some_ measure of enfranchisement should be granted to the women of the British Isles without delay.

We all know how this demand was received by the leading men of the Liberal Party and by the more prominent Liberals among their supporters in the House; with evasions, silences, sneers, angry refusals, hasty promises given to-day (when Ministers were frightened) and broken to-morrow; with a whole series of discreditable tongue-in-the-cheek tricks of Parliamentary procedure; till at last the onlooker must have wondered at and felt grateful for our British phlegm; surprised that so little actual harm was done (except to the bodies of the Suffragists), that no Home Secretary or Police Inspector or magistrate, no flippant talker-out of would-be-serious Franchise Bills was assassinated, trounced, tarred and feathered, kidnapped, nose-tweaked, or even mud-bespattered.

(I am reproducing here the growing comprehension of the problem as it shaped in Vivie's mind, under the hat and waistcoat of David Williams.

) Honoria, faithful to her old resolve, continued to devote the greater part of the Two Thousand a year she had set aside for the Woman's Cause to financing the new Suffrage movement; and incidentally she brought grist to David's mill by recommending him as Counsel to many women in distress, arrested Suffragists.

In 1906, 1907 and 1908 he made himself increasingly famous by his pleadings in court on behalf of women who with dauntless courage and at the cost of much bodily pain and even at the risk of death had forcibly called attention to this grave defect in the British polity, the withholding of the ordinary rights of tax-paying citizens from adult women.

Where the Suffragist was poor he asked no fee, or a small fee was paid by some Suffragist Association.

But he gained much renown over his advocacy; he became quite a well-known personality outside as well as inside the Law Courts and Police-stations by 1908. His pleadings were sometimes so moving, so passionate that--_teste_ Mrs. Pankhurst--"burly policemen in court had tears trickling down their faces" as he described the courage, the flawless private lives, the selfless devotion to a noble cause of these women agitating for the rights of their sex--rich and poor, old and young.

Juries flinched from the verdict which some bitter-faced judge enjoined; magistrates swerved from executing the secret orders of the Home Office; policemen--again--for they are most of them decent fellows--resigned their positions in the Force, sooner than carry out the draconian policy of the Home Secretary.

But of course concurrently he lost many a friend and friendship in the Inns of Court.

There were even growls that he should be disbarred--after this espousal of the Suffrage cause had been made manifest for three years.

He might have been, but that he had other compeers, below and above his abilities and position; advocates like Lord Robert Brinsley, the famous son of the Marquis of Wiltshire.

If Williams was to be disbarred, why they would have to take the same course with a Brinsley who also defended women law-breakers, fighting for their constitutional rights.

And of course such a procedure as _that_ was unthinkable.

Yet where a Brinsley sailed unhampered, undangered over these troubled waters, poor David often came near to crashing on the rocks.

"To hear the fellow talk," said one angry K. C.

in the Library at the Inner Temple, "you'd think he was a woman himself!"

"Egad" said his brother K. C.

--yes, he really _did_ say "Egad," the oath still lingers in the Inns of Court--"Egad, he looks like one.

No hair on his face and I'll lay he doesn't shave."

There were of course other briefs he held, for payment or for love of justice; young women who had killed their babies (as to these he was far from sentimental; he only defended where the woman had any claim to sympathy or mitigation of the unreal death sentence);

breach of promise actions where the woman had been grossly wronged;

affiliation cases in high life--or the nearest to high life that makes a claim on the man for his fatherhood.

He was a deadly prosecutor in cases where women had been robbed by their male trustees, or injured in any other way wherein, in those days, the woman was at a disadvantage and the marriage laws were unjust.

One way and another, with the zealous aid and business-like care of his interests by his clerk, Albert Adams, David must have earned between 1906 and the autumn of 1908, an average Three hundred a year.

As he paid Adams £150 a year and allowed him certain perquisites, and lived within his own fixed income (from his annuity and investments) of £290 a year, this meant a profit of about £500. This was raised at a leap to £1,500 by the fees and the special gift he received for defending Lady Shillito.

The "Shillito Case," an indictment for murder, was tried at the winter assize of the North-eastern Circuit, January or February, 1909. I dare say you have forgotten all about it now: Lady Shillito changed her name, married again (eventually), and was lost in the crowd--she may even, eleven years afterwards, be reading this novel at the riper age of forty and be startled out of her well-fed apathy by the revival of acute memories.

There have been not a few similar cases before and since of comparatively young, beautiful women murdering their elderly, objectionable husbands in a clever cattish way, and of course getting off through lack of evidence or with a short term of imprisonment.

(They were always treated in prison far more tenderly than were Suffragettes, and the average wardress adored them and obtained for them many little alleviations of their lot before the Home Secretary gave way and released them.

) Nowadays the War and the pressing necessities of life, the coal famine, the milk famine, the railway strikes have robbed such cases of all or nearly all their interest.

I could quite believe that women in similar circumstances continue to murder their elderly husbands, and the doctors and coroners and relations on "his" side tacitly agree not to raise a fuss in the presence of much graver subjects of apprehension.

I can also understand why these beautiful-women-elderly-husband cases scarcely starred our Island story prior to the 'fifties of the last century.

It was only when chemical analysis had approached its present standard of perfection that the presence of the more subtle poisons could be detected in the stomach and intestines, and that the young and beautiful wife could be charged with and found guilty of the deed by the damning evidence of an analytical chemist.

It was Rossiter who secured for David the conduct of Lady Shillito's defence.

Arbella[1] Shillito was his second cousin, a Rossiter by birth, and would fain have married Michael herself, only that he was not at that time thinking of marriage, and when his thoughts turned that way--the very day after, as it were--he met Linda Bennet and her thousands a year.

But he retained a half humorous liking for this handsome young woman.

[Footnote 1: An old Northumbrian variant of Arabella.

] Arbella, disappointed over Michael--though she was a mere slip of a girl at the time--next decided that she must marry money.

When she was twenty-one she met Grimthorpe Shillito, an immensely rich man of Newcastle-on-Tyne, whose foundries poured out big guns and many other things made of iron and steel combined with acids and brains.

Grimthorpe was a curious-looking person, even at forty; in appearance a mixture of Julius Caesar, several unpleasant-featured Doges of Venice, and Voltaire in middle age.

His looks were not entirely his fault and doubtless acquired for him, in his moral character, a worse definition than he deserved.

He had travelled much in his pursuit of metallurgy and chemistry; at forty he saw rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth.

What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life?

He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical men of his cynical period.

He arrived therefore at the decision that he would marry some young and buxom creature of decent birth and fit in appearance to be a peeress, and decided on Arbella Rossiter.

After a gulp or two and several _moues_ behind his back, she accepted him.

A brilliant marriage ceremony followed, conducted by a Bishop and an Archdeacon.

And then Arbella was carried off to live in a Bluebeard's Castle he possessed on the Northumbrian coast.

In the three years following her marriage she gave him two boys, with which he was content, especially as his own health began to fail a little just then.

At the end of four years of marriage with this cynical, Italianate tyrant, Arbella got very sick of him and thought more and more tenderly of a certain subaltern in the Cavalry whom she had once declined to marry on £500 a year.

This subaltern had returned from the South African war, a Colonel and still extremely good-looking.

They had met again at a garden party and fallen once more deeply in love.

If only her tiresome old Borgia would die--was the thought that came too often into the mind of Arbella, now entering the "thirties" of life, and with the least possible misgiving of her Colonel's constancy if she became presently "_un peu trop mûre_."

She noticed at this time that Grimthorpe Shillito went on several occasions to London to consult a specialist.

He complained of indigestion, was rather thin, and balder than ever, and difficult to please in his food and appetite.

This was her opportunity.

She would have said, had she been convicted, that he had driven her to it by his cruelties: that's as may be.

--She consulted the family doctor who attended to the household of Bluebeard's Castle; suggested that Sir Grimthorpe (they had just knighted him) might be the better for a strychnine tonic;

she had read somewhere that strychnine did wonders for middle-aged men who had led rather a rackety life in their early manhood.

The family doctor who disliked her and suspected her, as you or I wouldn't have done, but doctors think of everything, feigned to agree; and supplied her with little phials of _aqua distillata_ flavoured with quinine.

He himself was puzzled over Sir Grimthorpe's condition but was a little offended at not being personally consulted.

The fact was that Sir G. had a very poor opinion of his abilities in diagnosis and being naturally secretive and generally cussed, preferred consulting a London specialist.

He wasn't then Sir Grimthorpe, the specialist wasn't very certain that it _was_ cancer on the liver, and amid his multitude of consulters did not, unless aroused, remember very clearly the case of a Mr. Shillito from somewhere up in the North.

But Shillito pondered gravely over the specialist's carefully guarded phrases about "growths, possibly malign, but at the same time--difficult to be sure quite so soon--perhaps harmless, might of course be merely severe suppressed jaundice."

When the pains began--he hated the idea of operations, and knew that any operation on the liver only at best staved off the dread, inevitable end for a year or a few months--When the pains began, he had grown utterly tired of life; so he compounded a subtle poison--he was a great chemist and had--only his wife knew not of this--a cabinet which contained a variety of mineral, vegetable, and acid poisons; and kept the draught in a secret locker in his bedroom.

Meantime Arbella, who after all was human, was tortured at the sight of his tortures.

She felt she must end it, or her nerves would give way.

She trebled, she quintupled the dose of _aqua distillata_ embittered with quinine.

One night when the night nurse was sleeping ("resting her eyes," she called it) the wretched man stole from his bed to the night nursery and kissed both his boys.

He then swiftly took the phial from its hiding place and drank the contents and died in one ghastly minute.

When the night nurse awoke he was crisped in a horrible _rigor_.

On the night table was the phial with the remains of the draught.

She had noticed in the last day or two Lady Shillito fussing a good deal about the sick man, pressing on him doses of a colourless medicine.

_What if she had stolen in while the nurse was asleep and placed a finally fatal draught by the bedside?

_ From that she proceeded to argue (when she had leisure to think it out) that she _hadn't_ been to sleep, had merely been resting her eyes.

And she was now sure that whilst she had closed those orbs she had heard--as indeed she had, only it was Sir Grimthorpe himself--some one stealing into the room.

She communicated her suspicions to the doctor.

The latter knew his patient had not died of anything he had prescribed, but concluded that Lady Shillito, wishing to be through with the business, had prepared a fulminating dose obtained elsewhere; and insisted on autopsy with a colleague, to whom he more than hinted his suspicions.

Together they found the strychnine they were looking for--not very much, but the proportion that was combined by Shillito with less traceable drugs to make the death process more rapid--and quite overlooked the signs of cancer in the liver.

The outcome was that Lady Shillito at the inquest found herself "in a very unpleasant position" and was placed under arrest, and later charged with the murder of her husband.

Believing herself guilty she summoned all her resolution to her aid, admitted nothing, appealed to Michael Rossiter and others for advice.

Thus David was drawn into the business.

[But this doesn't sound very credible, you will say.

"If the husband felt he could not face the agony of death by cancer, why didn't he leave a note saying so, and every one would have understood and been quite 'nice' about it?"

I really can't say.

Perhaps he wished to leave trouble for her behind him; perhaps he divined the reason why she thought a day nurse unnecessary, and insisted on giving him his day medicines with her own fair hands.

Perhaps he hoped for an open verdict.

Perhaps he wasn't quite right in his mind.

I have told you the story as I remember it and my memory is not perfect.

Personally I've always been a bit sorry for Grimthorpe.

It is quite possible that all those hints as to his "queerness" were invented by his wife to excuse herself.

I only know that Science benefited greatly from his researches, and that he bequeathed some priceless collections to both branches of the British Museum.

Some one once told me he had a heart somewhere and had loved intensely a sister much younger than himself and had only begun to be "queer" and secretive and bald after her premature death.

I think also that in the last year of his life he was greatly embittered at not getting the expected peerage; after the trouble and disagreeableness he had gone through to obtain heirs for this distinction this poor little attempt at immortality which it is in the power of a Prime Minister to bestow.

] The Grand Jury returned a true bill against Lady Shillito.

David had been studying the case from the morrow of the inquest, that is as soon as Rossiter had learnt of the coming trouble.

The latter though he regarded Cousin Arbella as a rather amusing minx, an interesting type in modern psychology (though really her type is as old as--say--the Hallstadt period) had no wish to see her convicted of murder.

Furthermore he was getting so increasingly interested in this clever David Williams that he would have liked to make his fortune by helping him to a sensational success as a pleader, to one of those cases which if successfully conducted mark out a path to the Bench.

So he insisted that David Williams be briefed for the defence, and well fee'ed, in order that he might be able to devote all his time to the investigation of the mystery.

David had an uphill task.

He went down to the North in November, 1908, conferred with Lady Shillito's solicitors, and at great length with the curiously calm, ironly-resolved Lady Shillito herself.

The evidence was too much against her for him to prevent her being committed for trial and lodged in reasonably comfortable quarters in Newcastle jail, or for the Grand Jury to find no true bill of indictment.

But between these stages in the process and the actual trial for murder in February, 1909, David worked hard and accumulated conclusive evidence (with Rossiter's help) to prove his client's innocence of the deed of which she believed herself guilty.

To punish her as she deserved he allowed her to think herself guilty till his defence of her began.

The prospect of a death on the gallows did not perturb Lady Shillito in the least.

She was perfectly certain that if found guilty her beauty and station in life would avail to have the death penalty commuted to a term of imprisonment which she would spend in the Infirmary.

Still, that would ruin her life pretty conclusively.

She would issue from prison a broken woman, whom in spite of her wealth--if she retained any--no impossibly-faithful Colonel would marry at the age of forty-five or fifty.

So she followed the opening hours of the trial with a dry mouth.

With the help of Rossiter and of many and minute researches David got on the track of the consultation in Harley Street, the warning given of the possible cancer.

He found in Sir Grimthorpe's laboratory sufficient strychnine to kill an army.

He was privately informed by the family doctor (who didn't want to press matters to a tragedy) that although he fully believed Arbella capable of the deed, she certainly had--so far as the doctor's prescriptions were concerned--obtained nothing from him which could have killed her husband, even if she had centupled the dose.

Lady Shillito appeared in the dock dressed as much as possible like Mary, Queen of Scots on her trial; and was attended by a hospital nurse with restoratives and carminatives.

The Jury retired for a quarter of an hour only, and returned a verdict of _Not Guilty_.

The Court was rent with applause, and the Judge commented very severely on such a breach of decorum, apparently unknown to him in previous annals of our courts of justice.

Lady Shillito fainted and the nurse fussed, and the Judge in his private room sent for Mr. Williams and complimented him handsomely on his magnificent conduct of the case.

"Of course she _meant_ to poison him; but I quite agree with the Jury, she didn't. He saved her the trouble.

Now I suppose she'll marry again.

Well!

I pity her next husband.

Come and have lunch with me."