Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 34

depravity, liable to no wild and furious outbursts of passion, imagining mischief secretly in the deep of his (sic) heart.

Could this be Wainewright, never fully recovered from his great torments? He may well have stepped over that “brink of insanity” of which he wrote. Nevertheless, he went on to tell positively of his recovery from illness.

Two excellent secondary agents, a kind and skilful Physician and a most delicately-affectionate (though young and fragile) Nurse brought me at length out of those dead black waters, nearly exhausted with so sore a struggle.

The nurse may have been his wife-to-be, Eliza, whose step-father, in one of the coincidences in the Wainewright story, was to die in the very barracks in Fermoy in which Wainewright had idled away his very brief military career.

He had not returned to Linden House after resigning his commission; perhaps the ignominy of doing so would have been too great and he would not have had so much of his highly-prized independence.

Instead he had taken lodgings in a boarding house run by a Mrs Frances Abercromby and her three young daughters at Mortlake, not far from Chiswick. It was a fateful day when Wainewright entered their lives. Two were to die suddenly and painfully.

Mrs Abercromby had married twice. Born Frances Weller, in Claygate, Surrey, she wedded in 1794 a widower named Cooper Ward. She was only 20, so had to have the consent of her father,

THE FATAL CUP

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