In November 1928 Crowley had met the woman who would become not only the new Scarlet Woman but his second wife; this was Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar (“Marie”), a Nicaraguan. She claimed to practise voodoo, and Crowley liked to think of her as “The High Priestess of Voodoo.” She also said she had raised the Devil when younger, and in Paris (without Crowley) she attempted to do this again in a ritual with Yorke and Israel Regardie. This involved her dancing, with a burning fire in an otherwise dark room and a heavy use of Abramelin incense, while all three chanted a mantra. Both men felt a strong presence of some kind, and in Yorke's case, by the end “I was on the verge of some sort of hysteria. My muscles were rigid, jaws champing and face working”; “I sensed a Being, Presence, or Force… something alive and apart from myself, with an atmosphere or will power stronger than mine and alien to me.”
Crowley was refused leave to stay in France in 1929 and returned to England, marrying Maria (partly to overcome immigration difficulties) in Leipzig on 16 August 1929: this was reported in the Times (“ALEISTER CROWLEY MARRIED. CEREMONY IN LEIPZIG AFTER BEING BANNED FROM FRANCE”) as the wedding of “Mr. Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, the English mystic writer…”. The marriage certificate describes him as an author, living at Georgian House, Bury Street. They lived for a few months in Kent, but Crowley had already met her nineteen-year-old replacement Hanni Jaeger (Anu) in Germany before they even moved into apartment 89, Park Mansions, Knightsbridge (SLOane 8534) in the summer of 1930. Crowley seems to have discovered the address through Colonel Carter, who had been living at apartment 8 in 1929.
Park Mansions is a large, ornate red-brick edifice in Knightsbridge, at the corner by Hyde Park where Knightsbridge itself – the road – meets Brompton Road, not far from Harvey Nichols (and Harrods a little further along). The building now houses Burberry, its huge wooden front doors now replaced with plate glass (and that same Knightsbridge/Brompton spur now houses Mr. Chow's, and a spectacular sculpture of a rhino hoist in a sling, along with jewellers and sports-car dealers). In Crowley's day it had tailors, an embroiderer, a gown shop and a “court furrier”.
While they were here Crowley employed a cleaner from Mrs Stuart's Domestic Agency and “Servants Registry Office” at 550-552 Fulham Road (FULham 2123, with the rather nice telegram address “Royalize”). Karl Germer1 was now largely supporting Crowley, and he queried why Crowley and Maria couldn't clean their own flat. Crowley was incensed, writing back “Your letter of June 20th is, I think, the most nauseating thing I have ever read… in your second paragraph you are even more psychopathic.” Lecturing Germer on dirt, disorder, slaves, and kings, he had to insist a few days later that “a properly educated person expects a bath to be clean.”
Knightsbridge was never Crowley's territory in the way that Piccadilly was, and although Harrods was just down the road he never patronised it to the extent that he patronised Fortnum's, which was much more his shop. He did, however, have some dealings a few years later with a small eccentric church just behind it on Basil Street. This was The Sanctuary, at number 23, run by a “Bishop James” (an irregularly ordained ‘Wandering Bishop’ 2) who belonged to the so-called ‘Old Catholic Church’: his small congregation included several wealthy women and he was known as “The Bishop of Harrods”. Crowley attended a number of times in the second half of 1937, noting the similarities between James's teaching and his own, and seems to have wondered if it might be ripe for takeover. Long gone, the setting of this church is thought to have been one of the inspirations for Ngaio Marsh's 1936 thriller Death in Ecstasy.
Maria, meanwhile, was volatile and paranoid and believed Crowley was trying to poison her. He was in fact buying arsenic and strychnine from a chemist in St.James's Street called Pope Roach (he would have known it from his Jermyn Street days) but they were used as tonics in small doses, and popular with the Victorians.
Maria drank – shades of Rose – and Crowley was quite dispassionate about dumping her (“I gave you a great chance in life, and you threw it away. Tant pis!”). Her later life was a sad business: she lodged for a while at 7 Buckland Crescent, Swiss Cottage (from where she wrote “AC is died for me, he have not a drop of honneur”), then at Lower Marsh, Waterloo, and then at the Wandsworth “casual ward” for homeless women, the former workhouse at Swaffield Road. Finally she ended up in what was then the great London lunatic asylum at Colney Hatch.
Crowley saw a parallel with Rose, noting that when one Scarlet Woman goes to the “Bug House”, another one comes along. He wrote in his diary “Hear Marie is in Colney Hatch”, wondering a few days later if it was a case of mistaken identity (he later alleged the real Maria had died in an earthquake in Managua). As he wrote, lots of loonies (with moon symbol) thought they were his wife or mistress. Annotating this in 1950, Yorke noted that in fact she was still there; she died in Colney Hatch, forgotten, in 1955.
Yorke appealed to Crowley to treat her decently and at least let her know how things stood, but he was uninterested in visiting. Among her symptoms was a belief that she was related to the British Royal family, and that she was married to the Beast 666. When Yorke visited her he showed the psychiatric staff Crowley's calling card, and managed to clear up a misunderstanding she must have found intensely frustrating. She really was married to the Beast 666.