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On April 4, 1878, after a millpond crossing from Le Havre, Georgina ran into the hall at Tavistock House to find boxes and chests of her own belongings done up in stout cord and standing over them a man who introduced himself as Mr. Bell. Harry had taken legal possession of the house, and Mr. Bell, as he explained in his phlegmatic way, was there to see fair play. Had he any knowledge of this luggage? Georgina asked, bewildered. Why, yes, he had helped pack and secure it. That was his job, to be a bailiff. But what was in it? Stuff—in the technical phrase, goods and chattels. Meanwhile, Bell added with a heavy significance, she would find the French gentleman in the cellars. At which point, Menier emerged, cobwebbed and flustered. With him was a heavily pregnant woman, the mistress Lise Grey had mentioned in her letter. Voices were raised, sneers and jibes exchanged. The young woman, Olive Nicholls, laughed in Georgina’s face. “You won’t be here long,” she taunted.

Georgina ran frantically from room to room. Menier’s dogs had fouled every corner and up and down the uncarpeted stairs. The floors were unswept and the mirrors filthy with grime. Even at a cursory glance, much that she had left on display six months ago was now missing. She ran down to the cellars and found an Ali Baba’s cave of portable objects, some in chests and cartons, some yet to be wrapped. Menier, meanwhile, had hastily found his coat and summoned a cab. The truth at last dawned on Georgina. She had caught the Frenchman on the very morning and in the very hour he intended to decamp. Though she appealed to Bell to help stop her own property from going out the front door, the only suggestion he could come up with was to send for the solicitor involved in the matter, Mr. Neal.

Neal was acting for Jeavons, Harry’s Liverpool solicitors. He, too, had only a modest grasp of what was going on, though he did produce a signed agreement made between Harry and Anarcharsis Menier. The Frenchman had been given a fortnight to quit the property and permission to take goods to the value of £178.1.1 in payment of wages owing to him by Georgina. She was incandescent with rage. Menier was never even on a wage! To sums owed, then. But, she cried, Neal did not understand. Menier owed her money. And then a strange and sinister thing happened. Neal recounted to Georgina how he had “sucked in the following tales, which he gravely informed me were compromising, if they got bruited about: I had put poison bottles about the house in various corners, which the babies sucked, died, and were buried in the garden. I got one thousand pounds for each baby—no questions asked. Menier had the most compromising letters from me proposing all sorts of dreadful things.”

For Neal to know this—particularly about the provenance of the children—was to have been told by Harry. It makes an unusual picture. Neal could not prevent Georgina from occupying the house, though he could and did insist that Bell remain on the premises. But he felt it his duty to warn her that Harry intended to get her out. When she taxed him with why he had made these other accusations to her, he was perfectly frank and straightforward. They were not his accusations but Menier’s. He had advised Harry it would be better to let Menier take goods at his own valuation rather than risk exposing Mrs. Weldon to such damaging revelations. He told her this with all the pointedness he could muster. What he was trying to say was that Harry had bought the Frenchman off. But Georgina did not understand this at all. Neal was to join a long line of men flattened by Georgina’s typhoon energy. If Menier had fled with her goods, he was a thief! He must be sought out and destroyed! The solicitor was dismissed from her presence, and Georgina loosed herself on London like a hound from hell.

The first thing to do was put a spoke in Olive Nicholls’s wheels. Her parents lived in Cambridge and Georgina cabled them: “Come at once. Your daughter is dying.” Mr. Nicholls and his wife arrived only two hours after receiving the telegram, having had the train journey and the dash from Liverpool Street to prepare themselves for a deathbed farewell. They met instead a short and plump woman with retribution written on her brow. “I told them, morally their daughter was dead anyway,” she comments offhandedly. So much for the imprudent Olive, who had dared to sauce her in her own home. The enraged Mr. Nicholls went away, looking for the man who had despoiled his daughter.

By midnight Georgina had tracked Menier down to a hotel room in Golden Square. Accompanied by P.C. 50 and a detective from Vine Street named Uriah Cooke, she lay in wait for his return. If it had been true once that she had flirted her nakedness before Anarcharsis, her portrait of him as she saw him now is a masterpiece of invective:

“I remember his filthy appearance, the dirt, his nails in perpetual mourning, the three hairs at either side of his upper lip, his hook nose with two dirty holes which seemed like tunnels at the other end of which you could see his brains, two huge eyes hidden behind perpetual spectacles—someone told me he slept in them—teeth like mediaeval battlements steeped in ink . . .”

When toward midnight he came back to his hotel to find his room filled with the posse drawn up by Georgina, she at once stepped forward, pointed with arm outstretched, and declared in ringing tones, “Detective, I give this man in custody for the theft of these things.”

Menier replied in excitable English with a stage French accent, “Yes and I give this woman in charge for murder, for the murder of little children.” Little sheeldren.

Cooke, who had previously established to his own satisfaction that some at least of the goods were Georgina’s property—that is, as distinct from Harry’s; otherwise how could she bring a charge of theft in her own name?—arrested Menier and, hiring a four-horse coach, had them all driven back to Vine Street. Whoever was duty sergeant that night could tell a hawk from a handsaw and promptly rerouted the carriage to Hunter Street, where he correctly surmised the lady might be known to his colleagues there.

Shouting, reviling each other in French, dragging up the bitterest accusations, the child murderer and the thief gave the Hunter Street officers something to think about. It was really no contest—Georgina was a lady and Menier a scruffy foreigner. In the small hours of the morning, and after volleys of bitter French had been exchanged—grédin! putain! crapaud! tasse de merde!—Menier was charged. Barely had the ink dried on the charge sheet when, on being searched, a letter signed by Harry was found on the accused, constituting him “a proper person in charge” of Tavistock House. Menier danced on the floor in delight. His triumph was short-lived. The desk sergeant had him sent down to the cells anyway, to appear next day at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Georgina went home believing she had won a great battle. The faithful Villiers had prepared her a bed in the middle of all the squalor, and though Bell was still up and about, she was back in occupation.

On the following morning, Menier was put up before Mr. Justice Flowers, the very same magistrate who had found against him in the child custody case. Flowers was approaching seventy and looking forward to an honored retirement from the Bow Street court after twenty-two years of distinguished service. Georgina found him grave and courteous. To her delight he remanded the prisoner in custody for a week but tempered this—wisely and humanely—by passing the papers in the case to the Treasury Solicitor, with a view that he should represent the plaintiff’s interest. Frederick Flowers had heard enough to realize, like the Hunter Street officers, that there might be more to this than met the eye.

Neal was present at the hearing and was, of course, relieved that not too much had come out in open court. But the prisoner, of whom he had an opinion quite as low as Georgina’s, seemed to him a tricky cove, and when it came to trial, Menier would undoubtedly repeat his accusation of child murder, already heard by half a dozen people. As for Mrs. Weldon herself, he could not see how even the Treasury Solicitor could save her from an absolute passion to say more than the law required. Of Menier’s potential testimony she wrote:

He forgets I kill little children, that Freddie’s death had preoccupied me; that I was a lunatic; that I was a forger; that I was looking to poison him; that I had him arrested from jealousy of Olive Nicholls and because he would not sleep with me; that I appeared stark naked in front of strangers; that I scandalised Paris; that the police chief made me leave; that I had a nervous breakdown if he slept with his wife; that I was demented, a maniac, and riddled with debts.

If she spoke even half these whirling words aloud, Neal was right to be alarmed. The Treasury Solicitor was not an individual, but a government department. Whoever was briefed to appear for Mrs. Weldon would need a clear head and a certain degree of brutality if he was to hold her in check and keep back the most damaging of her self-incriminations. Chief of these was the fate of the orphan Freddie. The truth was that Freddie (the orphan whom Rosie Strube’s letter, quoted earlier, mentions as having “a very bad stomachach”) had died in Tavistock House at some time since 1875, after Harry left. No death certificate was ever issued, and although Georgina never fully confessed to burying him in the garden, that was almost certainly where he lay. He could have died of any of half a dozen causes, of which the least likely was brutal murder, and his burial under the mulberry tree could be put down to panic and ineptitude.

Neal never asked her what had happened. His main purpose was trying to contain the story so that it did not come out in court. In this, coming from someone acting for the other party in possible divorce proceedings, he shows a rare compassion. Georgina describes him as “simple-minded,” but he seems to have been a kindly and intelligent man. Something really terrible had happened out in the garden one night, enough to have Georgina committed, if not for lunacy, then for a full criminal trial. If Neal chose to hunt down what happened to Freddie, finding witnesses and corroborating statements, Harry could certainly secure the divorce he wanted, but his wife might find herself behind bars. Georgina owed Harry’s solicitor more than she ever realized.

All the same, Neal knew more than he was letting on. The vacillating Louisa Treherne had been brought to the moment of decision. She and her son Dal had at last expressed their complete agreement with Harry’s plan to bring in the doctors. To these three, it was more than ordinarily vexing that in only twelve or fourteen hours since her return, Georgina had succeeded in dragging the whole sorry mess out into the open. Harry understood his solicitor’s advice only too well: let this grubby Frenchman take what he wanted, so long as he cleared off, went back to France, and kept his mouth shut. The stupid man had not even done this properly: some of the goods stolen—jewels, watches, a christening mug—were Georgina’s private property and not for Harry to dispose of as he wished. In short, she was free to bring an action against Menier in her own name. Meanwhile, in his remand cell the prisoner had called for pen and paper and was preparing a lengthy rebuttal of the charges. He alerted his brother Eugène, who set off from Paris to help him, pausing only to heap abuse on Angele.

In Argeuil, Marie and Victoria had packed up shop, and finding the plans to move the children to Gisors to be so much hot air (though Georgina had painted a glorious word picture of them traveling through the Fôret de Lyons like medieval troubadours), sent them by train to Paris. Angele was horrified.