Read Online Murder by Candlelight by Michael Knox Beran - Free Book Online

with me with great resolution, and actually got me undermost. While, however, I was in this situation, I tookout my penknife and cut his throat, and in so doing I broke the blade of my knife. The blood rushed from him in quantities, and some got down my throat and nearly choked me: at last when his strength failed him by the loss of blood, I got up.” But although Weare’s throat was cut “about the jugular vein,” the wound did “not stop his singing out.” Thurtell then “jammed the pistol” into Weare’s head. “I saw him turn round; then I knew I had done him. Joe, you ought to have been with me. . . . Those damned pistols are like spits; they are of no use.”

    * Carlyle alluded to an anecdote told of Dante: how in the streets of Verona he was pointed out with the words “ Eccovi l’ uom ch’ e stàto all’ inferno .” (“See, there is the man that was in hell.”)
    â€  Silver coins (crowns, half-crowns, florins, shillings, and pennies) were sharply distinguished from the guineas (sovereign guineas, half-sovereign guineas, and half-guineas), machine-struck gold coins minted in the United Kingdom as late as 1814. Neither the gold nor the silver in any of the coins was wholly pure: the guineas were said to be eleven-twelfths pure gold, and the silver coins thirty-seven parts pure silver and three parts alloy.
    â€¡ Thurtell would later deny that this was true: “Weare was a very little man; and to think it possible that such a person could get the better of me, is all nonsense.”

CHAPTER TEN
    The Party in the Parlour
    this sore night
hath trifled former knowings.
    â€” Shakespeare
    I n the parlor the three men drank brandy and supped on pork. Thurtell himself, “hot from slaughtering,” had no appetite and complained of feeling unwell. After dinner, Probert went into the kitchen for a bottle of rum, and Thurtell, in the good humor that comes of a warm liver, drew Weare’s watch and chain from his waistcoat pocket. He urged Probert to put the chain around Mrs. Probert’s neck; but this Probert declined to do. Thurtell then contrived an elaborate fiction, telling Mrs. Probert that the chain had once belonged to “a little Quakeress, a sweetheart of mine atNorwich.” But “as I have turned her up,” he said, “I must beg of you to keep it for my sake.” *
    Mrs. Probert at first refused the gift, saying that it would be awkward for Mr. Thurtell to have a watch without a chain. But Thurtell persisted, and at last she allowed him to draw the chain around her neck. She received it, Hunt remembered, “very cordially,” and “promised never to part with it.”
    The incident would shock England almost as much as the murder itself. That the man whose hands had shortly before done such bloody work should now put them, insinuatingly, caressingly, around the neck of his friend’s wife, a woman whose sister he had once professed to love, a woman who was herself to come to a ghastly end—it savored, in its mixture of malignant eroticism and heartless frivolity, of a depravity foreign to the English character, or so Englishmen liked to suppose.
    Having enchained Mrs. Probert, Thurtell was careful to pop the watch itself back into his pocket. But the revels were not yet ended. “You think me a good singer, Betsy,” Probert said to his wife, “but you must hear my friend Mr. Hunt.” Hunt was, indeed, reluctant to sing; but the company pressed him to “tip them a stave,” and he acquiesced.

    The weird levity of the party in the parlor was for De Quincey the illustration of a psychological fact. In his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth ,” he explained that episodes of intense horror are commonly followed by restorations of ordinary life that reveal, as nothing else, the true blackness of what went before. Like Viking princes after the slaughter-hell