THE DAY FOLLOWING his interview with Mrs Clark, Duncan Cameron paid a call on Detective Chief Inspector Cox at Scotland Yard, whom he presented with the embroidered handkerchief found at the crime scene and provided a succinct account of his theory of the case. ‘All very well and good,’ commented Cox in a patronizing tone, ‘but I maintain this was a case of suicide, not murder.’
‘I defer to your judgement,’ said Cameron, ‘as you are free to investigate the matter further if you choose,’ aware that the suspect, whom he was certain had committed the crime, had fled the country. Cameron next called on his client, Lady Cranbrook, and her husband at their mansion on Palace Green. After exchanging the customary pleasantries, Cameron delivered his devastating findings with as much tact and gentleness as he was able: that their son had indeed been murdered and by someone no one had suspected in the police investigation or the coroner’s inquest. A poor young woman in Maidenhead by whom he’d fathered a bastard son, whom he had abandoned as soon as he was engaged to marry the wealthy Miss Henderson. After assuring Lady Cranbrook, who was prostrate with tears, that neither a police investigation nor prosecution of the young woman was likely, and that as a consequence the matter would remain strictly confidential, he bid them good day, patting the substantial cheque in his breast pocket.
In the aftermath of the coroner’s inquest, James Gully, curiously, chose to remain at Orwell Lodge, his cottage in Balham. His professional reputation, however, was damaged beyond repair by his merciless cross-examination during the inquest about his scandalous relationship with Cecilia and by the lingering question of his possible guilt in the murder, both of which received extensive coverage in all of the leading newspapers. With the death of his partner, Dr Wilson, his once-thriving practice of the water cure at the hydro in Malvern declined precipitously, though some faithful adherents remained to the end. And so Gully grew old in his cottage, his once brilliant reputation in tatters, his heart broken, the once vigorous outdoorsman frail and alone, attended by his spinster sisters until he died quietly at the age of 75. He never spoke to Cecilia again.
For a time she remained sequestered with her mother and father at Buscot Park, having dismissed the staff and sold most of the furnishings at The Priory by the time of the coroner’s inquest. Her prized collection of artworks was sold at auction some months later at Bonham’s in London. As her father was deathly ill, and her mother and siblings would have nothing to do with her, Cecilia adopted the assumed name ‘Wilson’ and purchased a seaside cottage at Southsea, in Hampshire, where she moved in the autumn of 1872, some seven months after Charles Cranbrook’s death. Her large fortune still intact, she employed a cook, two maids, a gardener and coachman and spent her days alone, except for the servants, drinking copious amounts of brandy and sherry as she gazed forlornly from her bay window at the ships plying the slate water of the Solent. Cecilia continued this solitary existence, increasingly dependent on alcohol, for another eighteen months, until in the summer of 1874 she received an unannounced visit from an uncle, her mother’s Scottish brother, who found her in a drunken stupor, consuming a bottle of brandy a day. Unwilling to heed her uncle’s advice to summon a doctor, she was fated to die, perversely, in precisely the same fashion as her first husband, vomiting dark red blood caused by the haematemesis that destroyed the lining of her stomach. Dead at the age of thirty-two, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Under her will, she made generous bequests to Jane Clark’s son and daughter and to a granddaughter of James Gully and left the residue of her vast estate in trust to her brothers and sister’s descendants.
Mrs Jane Clark, about whose role in the poisoning speculation continued to swirl long after the inquest, bid her sister and niece in Birmingham farewell and, accompanied by her two children, booked passage on a steamer to the West Indies in the autumn of 1872. Arriving at Kingston, Jamaica before Christmas, they proceeded to St. Ann’s Bay on the north shore of the island and to Content, one of the largest coffee plantations in the colony, the home of Mrs Margaret Clark, her late husband’s aunt. Within two years of their arrival, Margaret Clark died, bequeathing the plantation and her entire estate to her niece Jane, as she and her late husband had no children of their own. That she stood to inherit this large estate had been explained to Jane Clark in a letter she received from her aunt a year before Charles Cranbrook’s murder, another of her secrets that certainly would have deflected suspicion from her had she revealed it to the police or coroner’s inquest. Hence she raised her family in luxury on Content, returning near the end of her life to England, where she died and was buried in Lewisham, a village south of London, presumably in peace, at the ripe old age of ninety.
The whereabouts of Jenny Blackthorn and Little Davy remained unknown, though it may be safely surmised that they were generously supported by a familial benefactor.