Among the papers that the police found on the writing desk in 35 Cave Road on 17 July 1895 was a letter written by Emily Coombes to her husband. It was composed on Sunday 7 July, the older Robert Coombes’s fifty-first birthday and the day before Emily’s death.
Although Coombes had left home as recently as 4 July, the postal services were so swift that Emily had already sent him a parcel and received a note in return. She probably sent the parcel to Gravesend, in Kent, where his ship stopped on its passage out of the Thames. She had addressed her latest letter to the pier in New York at which the France would dock more than two weeks later. It was not read out in any of the court hearings because it had no direct bearing on the case, but it had probably been read by Robert, who wrote his own letters at the same desk in the ten days after his mother’s death. When the Coombes boys were charged with murder the letter was copied for the West Ham magistrates’ court and retained in its files. The transcriber could not make out all of Emily’s last written words, and many of the allusions are in any case unclear: it was a hurried note, an instalment in a conversation. Yet the letter casts some light on the younger Robert Coombes’s story – not so much on the mystery of why he killed his mother as on the mystery of how he might recover from having done so.
My Darling Husband,
I received your welcome letter from ? and pleased you received the things safe. Robert I do miss you. Emily was down and was not doing anything and no money for rent. I don’t know what they will do. I gave her the coat I could not help doing so – young Robert did not like to see her crying not like some one told me – never mind Robert don’t go away by thinking there is some one comes to your house far from it. I am quite surprised at you – after all these years and the nice little home you have got it takes keeping up also your boys are not the same – they can eat more than you can but my love you don’t look at that. Well did you find your ? I wish you all the love and Good wishes and long life on your birthday and only wish you had been home for it – never mind. I trust you will soon xxxx. I have not seen anything of your mother or Annie. I am writeing to Mrs Cooper – going there this week if she at home. Robert I have sent you the paper mind and will send next Sunday also for you – not quite so bad never mind write untill you get the next one. I can just see you having a fine lark. Well dear the boys sends there love to you and hopes you are well & longing to have you home again also myself and accept true love from me.
From your, ever True and Faithfull Wife
EH Coombes
Emily and her husband had evidently quarrelled just before he left for New York. He had voiced a suspicion that she had ‘some one’ secretly come to the house in his absence – a lover, maybe, since Emily seems at pains in the letter to insist on her fidelity; or a debt collector or impoverished friend, given how she justifies her expenditure. Robert and Nattie, in that close-quartered house, had probably heard their father accuse their mother of promiscuity or profligacy. In the letter Emily is flustered, defensive, upset. She tells her husband how much she and the boys miss him, though he has been gone for just three nights, and reminds him what she has to put up with – the demands of his sister-in-law, the appetites of his sons, the responsibility for his ‘nice little home’. As if to calm herself, she repeats the phrase ‘never mind’ after each burst of indignation or worry. She mentions that she has sent him a paper with news ‘not quite so bad’ as the last one. That Sunday’s newspapers reported that American beef slaughtered at Deptford, the chief cargo of the National Line, was still selling poorly but was fetching slightly more than it had in the previous week – meat sales, particularly of American beef, had been badly hit by the drought.
The letter evokes something of the atmosphere of agitation and strain in 35 Cave Road on the weekend of the beating and the murder. Emily was a highly strung woman, and she seems to have been wound tighter still by her argument with her husband and his departure for America. That Sunday was hazy with heat – the temperature rose to 80 degrees in the shade – and she faced a long summer alone with her restless, hungry boys. She does not allude in the letter to her fury with Nattie for stealing food, nor to her thrashing of him. Perhaps all that unfolded later in the day.
For though her letter is threaded with anxiety, Emily emerges from it also as the tender wife and mother whom her friends described. She is warm, sympathetic, alert to the unhappiness of others. She tells her husband that she has impulsively given his sister-in-law a coat that weekend, presumably to sell or pawn, and that Robert was distressed to see his aunt upset. She insists on her eldest son’s sensitivity – his capacity to care – as she had insisted to the attendance officer that he was suffering at school. Whatever cruelties and confusions Emily Coombes may have inflicted on Robert, she also loved him. She believed that he was a boy who could feel sorrow as others did.