Armadale Read Online Free

of Audley Court. He marries and ennobles her.But there is a secret in Lucy’s past. A husband returns; she murderously pushes him down a well. Tracked down by a resourceful private detective (whom she attempts to kill by arson) Lady Audley is finally unmasked as the uxoricidal bigamist she is. She goes mad, and dies. In Joseph Le Fanu’s intricately plotted
Uncle Silas
(1864), the horrific French governess Madame de la Rougierre specializes in killing her sleeping victims (a spiked hammer figures in the bloody climax). Wilkie Collins had himself complicated the stereotype with his sexually ambiguous Marian Halcombe – the resolute and ‘manly’ young governess who takes and vanquishes Count Fosco (winning his corrupt Italianate heart in the process).
    This was fiction. Real life (as reflected in the newspapers) was dominated by another sexually ambiguous image – that of the domestic poisoner: the woman (bound by oath to love, honour, cherish and obey) who slips packets of arsenic into her unsuspecting husband’s food and drink. ‘There is probably no form of guilt’, the
Annual Register
wrote in 1862, ‘that strikes the mind of society with a deeper sense of disgust than that of secret poisoning’. 10 Poisoning by women, it principally meant. There was an epidemic of such crimes in the middle of the nineteenth century, as Mary Hartman records in
Victorian Murderesses
. 11 And there was the ineradicable suspicion (bolstered by the acquittal of clearly guilty women like Madeleine Smith in 1857) that innumerable other cases were never detected by the authorities.
    There had been a whole series of highly publicized spousal poisonings in the 1850s. Sarah Chesham in 1851 (the year in which
Armadale
is set) was tried for no fewer than three murders before the law caught up with her. On being sentenced to hang she betrayed no emotion to watching eyes and ‘walked with a firm step from the dock’ to execution – a fate she met with equal impassivity. Constance Wilson, another career poisoner who was executed in 1862, was similarly inscrutable. She heard her sentence with ‘an air of callous indifference’ and was hanged at Newgate on 20 October 1862, before a crowd of 20,000 onlookers. What, most of them must have wondered, motivated this fiend in woman’s shape? Many of those 20,000 spectators must have brought the same question to
Armadale
a few months later. Collins set out to give them an answer in his depiction of Lydia Gwilt, a mass poisoner seen from the inside. 12
    As Collins portrays her (and as she portrays herself in her journal) Miss Gwilt is an enigmatic figure. Her career has to be assembled from indirect (and occasionally deceptive) comments in the narrative, corroborated against James Bashwood’s detective testimony (but even he,indefatigable though he is, cannot penetrate all her mysteries). It seems that Lydia Gwilt (strange name) came from nowhere. The first record we have is of her being the foster-child of Mrs Oldershaw (Mother Jezebel), in the early days when she and her apothecary husband sold potions from a horse and cart. The Oldershaws claim – wholly unconvincingly – to be Lydia’s uncle and aunt. Until the age of eight Lydia was supported by payments, which then mysteriously stopped. She may be the daughter of a count, or a streetwalker, or both. She has a magnificent head of red hair (as Richard Altick reminds us, this colour of hair was profoundly disturbing to Victorians, see Book the Third, Chapter X, note 3). At twelve, Lydia catches the eye of rich young Jane Blanchard, who captiously decides she wants the flame-haired child as her maid. In the easygoing and morally lax Thorpe-Ambrose household Lydia is ‘petted and made a plaything’. In an ingenious but unconvincing turn of plot, the pre-pubescent Lydia (‘barely twelve years old’) is persuaded by the most amoral of the novel’s Allan Armadales