The Black-Eyed Woman From Goldhanger: A Review of 'The White Cottage Mystery'

[Erik Narramore]

Here is a review by Tom Rogers of Margery Allingham's 1927 novel, The White Cottage Mystery, with some creative fiction at the end:

I post this book review here due to Allingham's connection to the location – she lived in Darcy at one point – also due to some of the parallels between the fictional narrative and the tragedy that occurred at White House Farm, and finally because I love the old posts of the user 'Campion' on here, and Allingham was of course the creator of that famous literary and TV character.

A lot of people dislike Margery Allingham's early work, but I think this novel is a marvellous, atmospheric, quintessentially English set-piece from the 1920s.  The descriptive writing is first-class and the novel involves a simple but clever story that can be read quickly.  Margery Allingham was, of course, one of the Golden Age 'Queens of Crime' and this novel faithfully adheres to Knox's Decalogue, with a proper twist at the end, which I enjoyed but won't mention here (except by allusion), so as not to spoil it for anybody who has not read it.

The setting is Kent.  The author refers to Brandesdon, but there is no such place in that county and I fancy the actual location would be Belvedere.  The victim, who lives in a grey house, "Dene", a property next door, is found shot dead in the dining room of White Cottage.  In typical Agatha Christie style (she was clearly an influence on Allingham), we end up with 10 suspects.  Due to an unusual twist of circumstances, Inspector Challoner – nicknamed the Greyhound [notice the white-grey theme?] - is called in to investigate and, via a pursuit to France, he ends up reasoning his way through all the suspects.

I love old books in general, with their queer and politically incorrect phraseology that calls back to a more innocent time: Allingham treats us to words and phrases such as 'lank', 'cripple', 'the Argentine' (in reference to the country), 'gorge rising', 'pon', 'Kentish', 'psha!', 'by and by', 'loth', 'fey', 'faugh!'  Like a John Buchan novel, it's a treasure-trove of words.  I also like the call back to a past England in which guns are used openly and innocently and the only complaint about them is the noise they make; policemen are friendly and helpful, and even gentlemanly towards suspects; everybody is proper mannered (albeit this is a middle-class novel); Italians are excitable and official Frenchmen are subtle and coy; international borders have meaning and embody serious implications and heady questions of law; and, foreigners are foreigners but are treated with impeccable courtesy and vice versa.

I also rather admire a lady author who has the stones to say this, albeit through a fictional male character:

"...most women, while being strictly moral according to their own codes, very often had no sense of the law at all." [p106].

Here are some similarities between the White House Farm shootings and the fictional gunshot murder in this novel:

The crime is committed at 'White Cottage'.

The gun used in the shooting is left at the scene.

Ballistics are crucial to the case.

Something important is taken from the immediate scene by somebody present at the shooting.

People have secrets and are hiding things.

There is a very obvious suspect who turns out to be probably innocent.

There is an ambiguously-worded will and possible inheritance motive.

The crime scene is manipulated before the investigation begins.  The body is moved.

The case is not actually solved, as such, but the person the detective suspects in the end is somebody who is physically weak and the type you would least expect to have done it.

A major character is called Jerry.

Now I will offer some differences from the White House Farm case:

White Cottage is meant to be in Kent.  (I believe that, now, the location is a suburban part of Greater London, whereas back in the 1920s, it was a rural/village scene).

The victim is a nasty man, a blackmailer and maniacal sadist, albeit highly-intelligent.  He is hated by everybody, and all the suspects admit to this frankly.

The gun report is heard by everyone in the vicinity.

The attending doctor and the police are very sharp and competent.

Everyone accepts that the crime was not premeditated (though it may well have been 'long-meditated', in the words of Inspector Challoner).

The family who move in after the case is resolved (or not) re-name the house and have it repainted in distemper.

Another observation that represents both a similarity and a difference is the way in which the cases are 'solved' by, respectively, the fictional Inspector Challoner, and the actual detective, Taff Jones.  Both refused to point the finger at any individual and instead relied on their own detective instincts, sharp observations, powers of logic and deduction, and a bit of common sense.  They bring these together to figure it all out, and there is no mention of any forensic or scientific methods.  They don't need such.  In contrast, Mike Ainsley and Stan Jones began with a definite suspicion about a specific individual and sought to prove this suspicion as accurate using forensic science.  This represents two fundamentally different approaches.  One is, simply, classical detective work, in which the investigator relies on himself and uses his brain.  The other is a hypothesis that is tested in the laboratory and either falsified or not, and then tested again in the courts.

In the case of Inspector Challoner (and Margery Allingham), he has no choice really, because the only major forensic technique available in the 1920s that can be considered reliable is fingerprinting (though in fairness, there were some other interesting methods available, though they would not have been terribly relevant to this story).  Jeremy Bamber's conviction, in contrast, rests partly on science.

I did make a guess quite early on of who the culprit must be, and I was close, but I must admit I was caught out by the twist.  One thing I did manage to pick up on was an underlying theme of moral Manicheanism and innocence.  One way the author expresses this is through colour metaphor.  White Cottage.  A grey house next door, implying a house less favoured.  The name of that house, "Dene", means wooded valley, which again seems to be figurative for being regarded as down and subterranean, in some sense murky and in disfavour.  Inspector Challoner, the Greyhound.  Much is made of the fact Challoner has white hair.  Challoner's counterpart in France is amusingly called Monsieur le Gris and has a "grey vandyke beard".  An Italian suspect pursued to France has the first name Latte.  Two of the characters who fall under the most suspicion are black-eyed.  There is a character ob-scenae named Jack Grey.

Challoner's nickname, Greyhound, implies a relentless, determined search for truth, and eventually he believes he finds it, but he can't quite bring himself to exact justice.  One factor in this is that a key witness in the case is a child of five years.  A young child is, by nature, beyond (beneath) reason.  Can a child even lie or tell the truth in any conscious sense?  Can a child be held responsible and accountable?  Perhaps one reason many religious myths have a 'purified' child or infant tableau at their centre is the amorality of the child, who can neither be blamed nor praised meaningfully and in essence becomes an automaton for adult agency.

Another question the novel raises is the moral relativism of some criminal acts, due to special circumstances.  To an extent, even the law recognises this in that there are special defences to murder that can lower the charge to one of lesser culpability.  If an individual is being blackmailed to a life-damaging extent, can this victim be justified in killing the blackmailer where he considers there is no sensible alternative course of action?  If a person who is, in actuality, evil, is damaging and victimising you or your own children, can murder ever be a morally-defensible reaction?  I am reminded here slightly of the famous solution of the Agatha Christie classic, Murder on the Orient Express, except that was revenge by multiple participants, and while what happened could perhaps be seen as understandable, it could not be seen as condonable as there was no true ethical or moral dilemma for the people involved.  Not all of them had even been victimised by the murder victim.  The White Cottage case is different and, arguably, does throw up a dilemma.  My inclination in answer to such questions is to say absolutely not, murder can never be condoned, not under any circumstances; but, I don't have a definite answer because I appreciate that circumstances vary greatly.  Even Colin Caffell, an equanimous man, admits frankly in his book that he could have killed June.

There were previous tragedies at White House Farm and nearby, involving the Page family and as I reflected on that, I drew inspiration from a dialogue on pages 21 and 22 of Allingham's novel between Inspector Challoner (nicknamed 'W.T.') and one of the suspects, Ethal Phillips:

'You come from the Essex coast, don't you? he said. 'Colchester way?'

It was now her turn to be surprised, and her small dark eyes flickered.

'Yes', she said at last, her tone sullen and begrudging. 'I was born at Goldhanger near there.  My folks lived there for lifetimes.'

'So I thought', said W.T. 'Do you want to know how I told?'

'No', said she.

'That's how I told', said W.T., and smiled to himself with pardonable pleasure.

The result is below: it is what you might call a work of meta-fiction.  It's my first effort.  It might be a good idea for me to re-write it in the first person, as a diary, but for now this will do.  If you have read the novel, you will understand why I have taken a special interest in the character Ethal Phillips.  If you haven't read the novel, you should.

The Black-Eyed Woman From Goldhanger
A short recollection
by Tom Rogers

Florence stood barefoot at the edge of the tidal flats and breathed in the salt air.  She was right out in the estuary, where the marshes met the open water, and though everything was deadly still and not a sound could be heard, she could feel the veins of the country behind her, and all its secrets pounded through her heart.  She dearly wanted to go back, to try again, but the Lord had commanded her forward – out into the cold water, if necessary.  Into the sea, if she must.  What else could she do?

She threw the bottle into the drink.

Then she turned and tramped back across the soft mud towards home.

It was midnight by the time she reached the White House, and it was entirely black against the swaying trees, except for a small yellow gas lamp from the kitchen that the maid had left on for her.  As she reached the door, the dogs heard and rushed out to greet her, but she could not see her mother.  Lizzy, as Florence called her mother, would usually shout out from the kitchen that supper was in the oven.  Instead, she entered a cold kitchen.  Of course, Lizzy had been dead these seven years.

"Father!", Florence shouted hopefully down the hall for Benjamin Page, suddenly desperately wanting him to answer.  And she heard him shout back.

"Florence, tha' you?"

Florence went to her father in the drawing room.

"You could have brought me something, a hot water bottle, my girl.  I'm chilling up again."

"I went for a walk."

"A walk?  Where?  Why?"

"To think."

The old man was sick.  His face was mottled and splintered by blisters.  His beard and brow were soaked with sweat, and his pale eyes searched out Florence in the dark, though she was over him.

"You gave me tha' bottle earlier.  I think it made me more sick."

"It should help, father."

"But the doctor..."

"The doctor, Dr. James, he was here, yesterday, you remember?"

"Braddock?"

"Braddock, I sent him to Darcy".

"Where is he?"

"They had to go on up to Colchester, to find a specialist..."

"To town?  Why?"

"You're very sick."

"Yes, very sick.  I am."

Florence looked down on him blackly.  She had been here before.  These seven years her mother had been gone.  It had been easy then, it was somehow not as easy now, but she steeled herself.

The Pages of Goldhanger had been servants and labourers to previous families on the land, going back perhaps hundreds of years to aristocracy and royalty, but when the White House was built around 1820, the Henry Smith Trustees granted the tenancy to Benjamin Page, Snr., a carpenter and labourer who worked for local tenant farmers called Speakman.  Benjamin Snr. in turn had a son, also Benjamin, who married an attractive woman from a local farming clan, the Seabrooks - in fact, it had been a shotgun marriage and Florence, their first child, had almost been born a bastard.

Now a young woman of 26, Florence Page was a soft, willowy creature, thin and pale and her eyes black; she took to dressing in white satin gowns and walking around barefooted, which made her appear ghostly.  On turning of age, she had been sent to lodge with Uncle Orbell at cottages on his farm near Goldhanger, so as to learn the trade of seamstress, which her mother thought was an important grounding for her.  The Pages had not yet acclimatised to social status and the idea of their children as ladies and gentleman and expected instead that each child would pursue a craft or living.  They were also Methodists, who took to God in that dry, literal, sombre way in which the Bible was authority and must be read.  Benjamin, the father, brought this into the home and expected daily prayers and Bible readings and strict and proper behaviour from his children, else they would get the strap.  Frank, the son, was beaten the most, but Florence was beaten too, and on many occasions, she would turn pleading to Lizzy as she watched, only for her mother to look back at her with a thin, grim smile.  Anger and a bent for self-destruction built up inside of Florence.

Lizzy was still more religious than her husband and dotted the house with cherry wood plaques containing Bible quotations made by her carpenter father-in-law decades before, adding some of her own that she had knitted.  She insisted that her daughter remain chaste and godly:

"God works in the light, but the Devil works at all hours", was one of her favoured warnings to the children as they grew towards adulthood and began to take an interest in the opposite sex.

Florence's misery was salved only temporarily when she met the man who would become her one and only love, a labourer who worked the land for the Pages.  He was strong-backed and broad-shouldered, with a heavy mane of blond hair that reached down to his shoulders and framed a bright, pink complexion that was masculine but also seemed charmingly effeminate.

"Can I come and see you out on the plough?", she had bravely ventured one morning.

He gave her a toothy smile, seemingly innocent and knowing all at once.  His cotton shirt was smeared with dirt and pig's apple, but she knew she loved him.

When Lizzy discovered their relationship, she summoned Florence to a family conference, with Benjamin meekly in tow.  The three of them sat at the kitchen table.  Benjamin admonished her:

"The boy is a good worker, I will have him on my farm, but I will not have him with my daughter."

"Why father?"

"He is just wrong for you."

Lizzy chipped in: "He does not come from a godly family."

The boy proved it one day. As he lay with Florence in the summer heat, they rushed behind stacks of hay and made love in the open among the dandelion and cowslips.  The abortion was performed far away in London, where wagging tongues could not know and the Pages could maintain their rigidly proper reputation.  Having suffered through what can only be described as a brutal operation, Florence was informed she would be sterile, unable to bear children.  Florence decided that amidst this sin, she loved Joshua more than ever, and their sins together deepened their bond.  As they stared into each other's eyes among the haystacks, they had resolved to marry, but Joshua knew she was now barren and, as if to reinforce her parents' point about him, he disappeared.

Life continued.  For a while, Benjamin prospered in business.  As a local man of affairs, he was respected, but it was his forward-thinking endeavours as a farmer that really caught the attention and admiration of his peers.  Benjamin enjoyed the challenge of bringing experimental techniques into his farm.  One year he had used arsenic as a pesticide.  Florence had helped in the kitchen and come across a bottle of arsenic in the washroom behind the scullery.  She secreted it away and hid it among her things.  Then in the early hours of one summer morning, determined to do away with herself and end her misery, she took it, only a sip, but enough she wagered to throw her into sleep and kill her.

At first, it seemed to Dr James that young Florence was under the burden of a distemper.  There was no other explanation.  Florence had sipped the poison from a cup, so the bottle remained hidden under the cast iron bed, unsurmised.  Florence had dreamt of being woken, then realised to her dismay that she was not in some Other-World but in the bedroom of the White House.

"Florence, Florence...."

Florence stirred in and out of wakefulness, but having seen her daughter prescribed the necessary medicine, Lizzy now ushered the medical man away.  She had seen the Devil's hand and was eager to remonstrate with her daughter.  It was obvious there was a wickedness at work, and she leaned into Florence and whispered her favourite admonishment:

"God works in the light, but the Devil works at all hours."

This was an archly hint that Lizzy knew about the bottle and it wormed into Florence's subconscious that she, Florence, was somehow on the side of the Devil.  Her mother had decided.  Florence had to decide too.  She recovered over the ensuing days, but she knew that as long as Lizzy was alive, she was trapped in her miserable shell.  She resolved to poison her mother.  There is little else to say.  It was simply this: Florence had taken more of the arsenic pesticide and left it in Lizzy's coffee.  As a venture, it was risky and not guaranteed, but Lizzy indeed died, and Florence's dead black eyes showed a hint of nothing as Lizzy fell sick and suffered in front of her.  Yet, in its way, killing Lizzy was an act of mercy.  It was not the same as the primal rage that surfaced two years later, when she did in Uncle Orbell.  Lizzy's mind had been captured and she had been taken over by her religious zeal, destroying herself and Florence in the process, but Orbell Page was a horrid, cruel man and got his deserts.

Orbell corrupted Benjamin.  After Lizzy's death, Benjamin fell into depression, but fought it and staggered on as a man of affairs.  Still, the man of the house would spend long periods, sometimes weeks day after day, sleeping until 10 or 11 in the morning, then simply drinking whisky or brandy in the lounge or kitchen. Under this drunk, the farm fell into decay and decline, and the Trustees were unhappy to note that the entire produce of a season had gone to rot.  Florence gave up her seamstresssing apprenticeship and tried her best to fill the gap.  She paid the wages and took on a supervisor.  She got stuck in and milked cows, picked crops and reshoed the dray horse.  She went to market on odd days.  All of this while her father carried himself around as a feckless drunk.

At some point in September of 1887, Florence sought help from her uncle, Orbell Page, who was tenant of his own farm, Gardeners Farm, out of Goldhanger.  A crucial fact to introduce at this point is that Orbell had been adopted into the Page family.  He was not Benjamin's natural brother, and Florence had approached him only reluctantly, as he was perceived as quite selfish and arrogant, and her experience living on his land when she apprenticed with a seamstress had been unpleasant.  At first, Orbell defied expectations.  With the aim, he averred, of rallying round his brother, he moved out of Gardeners Farm and set up in one of the workers' cottages just down the road from the White House.  However, Orbell's true nature soon enough came to the surface. Instead of seeking to help his brother, Orbell carried on rather selfishly and sought to exploit the situation, taking every opportunity to encourage his struggling brother to drink and do other sinful things, such as play cards and gamble in Colchester. Orbell also brought seedy magazines from London for Benjamin to look at.

Benjamin's state worsened.  Orbell would often turn up in the farm kitchen and in front of Florence, shout down the hall to her father:

"Comin' up to town, Benny?"

She would then watch as her sad father, drunk, stinking and dressed raggedly, staggered through the kitchen in front of her and into the arms of his brother, who then escorted him to his waiting trap.  For Florence, Orbell was another last straw.  My notes record that on 10th. October 1887, Orbell Page was found dead in the bedroom of a cottage where he was staying a mile from the White House.  He had been felled by his own hand, with a single gunshot.  A string was tied to his right foot, which in turn was attached to the trigger of the gun itself.  As one of Britain's leading experts in gunshot crime scenes, I was consulted.  At that time, I was practising out of rooms in Edinburgh, having taken up in business with a fellow physician who specialised in matters of the mind that complemented my own expertise. This professional gentleman had become quite an expert in the field of criminal madness, but that is an aside.  Such was the unusual nature of the inquiry, that I was asked by the Essex Constabulary to attend immediately.  When I arrived at the White House, I saw that the body had already been taken away and I only had photographs to rely on.  There were detectives from the Metropolitan Police present, though this was in the middle of rural north Essex.

As the pathologist, I had suspicions, which can be briefly summed up as follows:

(i). Orbell Page was an unusually short man, both in manner and in stature.  Photographs of Orbell's body, measurements of the body itself, the trigger string (still intact) and the weapon, and an examination of the bedroom, satisfied me that he would not have been able to easily fire the fatal shot this way.  This means that suicide was improbable and at the very least, he must have had assistance, or more likely, was murdered.

(ii). Orbell's right shoulder was photographed underneath a small bed stand to the left of the main bed.  The police in attendance swore that they had not moved the body prior to photographing it.

(iii). A blue Bible was found by Orbell's body, covered in blood prints.  There were also blood marks on Orbell's right foot where the trigger string had been attached.  Orbell could not have left this blood there and it cannot be explained by spatter.

(iv). I carried out a post-mortem of Orbell's body, which revealed one gunshot wound to the throat.  A ballistics expert advised that the absence of powder markings around the wound and the absence of blood on the muzzle suggested that the gun had not been held to Orbell's throat.  While not in itself conclusive, this point adds to the weight of evidence against suicide.

(v). In the presence of myself and detectives, Florence repeatedly expressed the most scandalous contempt and slander for the dead man and her surviving father.  They were sons of the Devil.  All men were demons, she said, but these men in particular were doing the Devil's work, reading filth, gambling, playing cards and drinking.

(vi). Florence was very strange to look at and be around.  She had an almost ephemeral sense about her.  At times, she shuffled around the White House in a white gown staring blankly ahead and not acknowledging us.  I suspected some sort of psychopathy and considered referring her to my partner in practice for a further opinion, but circumstances prevented this.

I put my thoughts in a memo to an Inspector of Essex Constabulary, and efforts were made to question Florence, but she remained silent or rambled about Devils and such like, and there was nothing firm to pin on her as a suspect.  Consideration was given to detaining her as a lunatic, but her father, Benjamin, objected most forcefully, and despite his own lack of lucidity, these representations were given credence and the case withered.  The result was a verdict of temporary insanity of Orbell Page from the jury at the Inquest.

Now we return to the original narrative.  It is the dead of winter 1891, shortly before the New Year.  Under his daughter's dark stare, Benjamin Page was laid out on a mahogany chaise, dying in agony.  Florence had killed two people already and it would shortly be three.  To summarise: she had poisoned her mother, Elizabeth, ten years before.  The coroner said this was an accident.  Then her uncle, Orbell Page: she staged his death ingeniously as a suicide.  And as she had done away with her mother, she was now killing her own father, again with poison.  They would put that down to suicide too, the farm would be sold, and she would then disappear with her share of the inheritance.  But she would be taking no chances.  The police had been suspicious about Orbell's death, and in a sense, she would have to leave this Earth herself.  She had already selected her identity: she would become Ethal, a nurse.  Ethal Phillips.  She had selected the name Phillips at random, Ethal was an Irish name of a friend from childhood.  She liked that name.

Note:

The reader will forgive this interruption to a most entertaining story.

I found this Report among Mr Crowther's things, after searching his house.  It is, I repeat, most entertaining, certainly imaginative, even somewhat literary and dramatic, and even moderately accurate in places.  The circumstances of why I have been searching among Mr Crowther's effects will be obvious to Mr Crowther, though he will never know about it or even guess the truth: that I have been looking into him, just as he has been looking into me.  What I did not know is that Mr Crowther was the pathologist in attendance at the scene of Orbell Page's suicide – or more properly, murder, as dear old Uncle Orbell died by my hand.  I had always wondered how this Crowther knew about my past 'endeavours', and now the mystery has been cleared up.

Officially, all those cases were solved, the paperwork was in order and sealed, no-one will look behind any of it.  But there is one mystery that will never be solved: the disappearance of Florence Page.  That is sealed in the memories of myself and Mr Crowther, and shortly I will be taking steps to ensure my past is forever sealed.  There will always be whispers and questions, just as there will always be voices and whispers inside the head of Florence Page as she busies herself in the enjoyable guise of a stern elderly nurse, sometimes looking wantonly towards the medicine shelf in moments of frustration with her new charges.  It is pleasing to know that this frustration can now be relieved: Florence had done God's work and now she has another assignment from God.  This man, Mr Crowther, is Satan, and the world must finally be rid of him.

My testament,
Ethal Phillips, aka Florence Page