Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 6

funeral feathers, four porters on foot in black silk dresses and eight pages bearing truncheons?

There were other coffins he was to follow after Fuseli’s – in humbler and much stranger circumstances; those of his uncle, George Griffiths, his mother-in-law and finally his sister-in-law, Helen Phoebe Frances Abercromby.

The three had died in agony. The deaths of all of them had benefited him. He and his wife Eliza had tried, and failed, to defraud eight London insurance companies to pay off enormous debts.

But what had finally brought him to judgement was an audacious swindle on the Bank of England, for which he had narrowly escaped the hangman and was now leading to a lifetime of exile in this land he was later to call a “moral sepulchre”.

His story is one of reckless spending, of talent squandered, of privilege abused and of greed unsated.

But was he the killer that everyone has made him out to be?

THE FATAL CUP

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