Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 60

on a scale almost unthinkable today - and the supplies of even the staples of life could not be guaranteed for very much longer.

The only person in the household who had any was Mrs Abercromby. She had been left a small sum and some rental income by her late husband, but this was pitifully little. However, poor as she was, she made a will on August 13th 1829, leaving everything she had to her eldest daughter Eliza, wife, as the document says, of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - he who would have persuaded her not only to make the will but to make him the sole executor. It was witnessed by Sarah Handcocks, who was to see her die within the week.

She, Helen and Madalina watched the course of the sudden illness that killed Mrs Abercromby in her mid-fifties. Sarah was to claim much later that if followed a path of vomiting, violent convulsions, then death, much like Uncle George’s the previous year.

In the 1894 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, where Wainewright’s life is chronicled - to some extent inaccurately - by Thomas Seccombe, there is a suggestion that Mrs Abercromby had objected to Wainewright’s plans to insure Helen’s life for suspicious purposes and that this had dramatically shortened her own. To die within seven days of making a will, where none had existed before, should have raised the alarm, but her death went unremarked. As to her relatively young age, the average life expectancy at the time was in the mid-thirties, but this figure is heavily skewed due to the huge incidence of infant mortality in the 19th century.

THE FATAL CUP

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