Sarah Mancer had knocked at the valet’s door before going downstairs, as was her custom to announce the break of day in that narrow house where each knew the other’s hours. A few minutes later, she flew back up the stairs almost at a run. Below, the drawers were pulled open, articles displaced, a bundle cast aside; the street door was no longer properly secured. She had come to awaken a man. She found him fully dressed.
This was but one circumstance among others, later preserved in the records of the trial: François Benjamin Courvoisier was ordinarily much slower at his toilet. At the time, she had little cause to dwell upon this irregularity. When a house appears to have been visited by housebreakers, one does not begin by suspecting the very person from whom one seeks succour. The valet went down with her. Their master must be alerted.
Lord William Russell occupied his bedchamber on the second floor. Courvoisier moved toward the windows; Sarah approached the bed. The stain she discovered upon the pillow rendered superfluous the usual precautions with which an elderly gentleman is roused from slumber. Lord William lay dead, his throat cut from ear to ear. Sarah rushed out to raise the alarm. On the 6th of May, 1840, in Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, the house which only hours earlier had observed its quiet, customary routine was suddenly overrun with strangers.
Yet it was in no way a palace. Two rooms to each floor, staircases traversed from dawn to dusk by the maids, a kitchen in the basement, a pantry used by the valet: within this circumscribed space, the existence of an aristocrat was divided between a library, a table, and a bed. Russell would go to his club, return for dinner, read, then ring the bell to be helped into bed. He had been a widower for many years. One may belong to an illustrious family and yet have, as sole witnesses to one’s final days, only those souls charged with bringing one’s coffee.
Courvoisier, a young Swiss, had entered his service only recently. He already knew enough of the household ways to grumble of them to his fellow servants; enough, too, to know where his master kept those valuables he held most dear. In the records of the inquest, common discontents take on vast proportions after the fact: a forgotten command, an errand ill-performed, an irritated master. It would be wrong to transform every domestic vexation into a harbinger of murder. Thousands of servants endured scoldings without slaying a soul. What transpired here demands more than the mere portrait of a difficult master.
On the preceding evening, Russell had returned from his club in a hackney carriage, a message intended for his coachman having failed to reach him. Dinner had proceeded as usual. The two women of the house, Sarah and the cook Mary Hannell, had retired, leaving Courvoisier at hand for the final duties of the evening. The entrances had been bolted. Later, the master had rung. This sequence of trivial acts, which would have interested no one had the night concluded like any other, became the first ground of enquiry for those in search of an assassin.
The doors had to be examined one by one. The street entrance, the lower door through which someone had gone out for beer, the passage opening onto the valet’s pantry. Courvoisier pointed to marks upon a door: the thieves, he suggested, had entered there. An explanation stood ready-made, bearing the singular virtue of assigning the havoc to an absent hand. The police were not persuaded. The house certainly told the tale of a burglary; it told it, however, with an over-meticulous application that aroused their suspicions.
In a garment rolled into a bundle, diverse articles had been gathered together, their very variety seeming calculated to represent a thief’s plunder. Among them were trifles that an intruder could easily have slipped into a pocket, without burdening himself with such wrapping. Elsewhere, open drawers had lost scarcely anything of their contents. None of this, taken alone, pointed to any specific hand. Yet it was reasonable to ask why the supposed marauders had taken the pains to display precisely what they had neglected to carry away.
Search was then made for what was genuinely missing. A bank-note, a watch, trinkets, money: the inventory of absences imposed its rigorous precision upon the spectacle of ransack. The valet’s effects were examined, without initially yielding the desired proof. He remained under surveillance. The distinction is of consequence: a police conviction may well outstrip its demonstration, and the investigators would have erred had they mistaken their own embarrassment for confirmation. They needed to discover something more than the suspicious demeanour of a foreign servant and his trembling before the corpse.
On the 8th of May, the search descended to the floorboards. Behind the skirting boards of the pantry occupied by Courvoisier there appeared rings, coins, and presently other objects which the household recognized. The missing bank-note lay hidden there as well. The search continued after the valet’s arrest: on the 13th of May, a watch was discovered in a hiding-place contrived near the sink, beneath the lead lining. What had seemed abandoned by housebreakers had never quitted the premises. The objects were merely waiting for someone to unseal what still divided them from their rightful owners.
In the silence we may imagine enveloping this discovery, the weight of suspicion altered. A cache situated in the valet’s customary domain bore an entirely different meaning from a jewel dropped at random in a corridor. Several finds answered one another, and the theatrical staging of a break-in was now forced to account for the singular prudence of thieves who could murder, ransack, and then leave their plunder behind a baseboard.
Courvoisier, now remanded in custody, had to prepare his defence. A subscription among foreign domestic servants contributed to his legal aid: those who assisted him were not possessed of the knowledge that subsequent weeks would bring to light. They might well have feared that an English household was being too hastily cleansed of its crime through the condemnation of the Swiss who served within it. Their action deserves to retain its original dignity. To stand by an accused man is not to profess knowledge of his deeds; it is to insist that they be proven before his life is forfeit.
In June, the trial drew that fashionable society which is ever pleased to find its own kin among the spectator lists. The deceased’s name alone was enough to pack the courtroom. Yet the decisive stroke arrived from a far less distinguished quarter: a French hotel in Leicester Place, kept by a Madame Piolaine. Certain pieces of plate had been deposited there. They were recognized as having belonged to Lord William Russell, and their discovery, occurring in the very midst of the trial, lent an entirely new substance to the valet’s earlier machinations.
The revelation shattered his defence. According to the early chronicles of the affair, Courvoisier then confessed his guilt to his counsel. One may readily appreciate the dilemma that opened before them: an admission imparted by a prisoner does not extinguish his right to be defended, but neither does it permit his counsel lightly to cast the blame upon innocent persons to save him. The conduct of his barrister, Charles Phillips, was to become a matter of fierce public controversy. The defence had just discovered that their client had concealed from them the essential truth.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty against Courvoisier. Confessions were subsequently made public, in which he ascribed the murder to the terror of losing his place and his character after his thefts had been discovered. These statements offer an explanation; they do not, for all that, grant us unhindered passage into the mind of the man who framed them. Felons, too, construct their own narratives. The young man was executed before Newgate on the 6th of July, 1840. Printed broadsheets offered the populace his likeness, his dying speech, his repentance, and even the pious sentiments it was proper for the reader to entertain.
Sarah Mancer, for her part, remains tethered to the affair by a far briefer passage: a door at which she knocks, stairs descended, then ascended, and at last the edge of a bed. One might recount the entire investigation by tracing the watch and the plate; one would miss, however, what it had cost to give the very first utterance to the catastrophe. Before London had an assassin to gaze upon and broadsides to purchase, a housemaid had been obliged to step out of a room where her master would never answer her again, and find someone who would consent to go inside.