In 1990, when Christine’s private papers were donated to the Tate Archive, a member of her family (her father’s grandson, it would seem) wrote that Sickert’s ” ‘intentions’ to leave it all to the Angus Trust was completely bogus! Not a penny came our way.”
In a letter to them about ten days after the burial, Sickert describes the sad affair as a grand occasion. The “entire village” showed up and he greeted each one at the cemetery gate. His dear late wife was buried “just under a little wood which was our favorite walk.” It had a “lovely view of the whole valley.” As soon as the earth settled, Sickert planned on buying a slab of marble or granite and having it carved with her name and dates. He never did. For seventy years, her green marble headstone was carved with her name and “made in Dieppe,” “but not,” according to Angus, “the dates he promised.” They were finally added by her family.
Marie Franchise Hinfray, the daughter of the family that bought Mai-son Mouton from Sickert, was kind enough to give me a tour of the former gendarmerie where Sickert lived, and Christine died. It is now occupied by the Hinfrays, who are undertakers. Madame Hinfray said that when her parents bought the house from Walter Sickert, the walls were painted in very somber shades, all “dark and unhappy with low ceilings.” It was filled with abandoned paintings, and when the outhouse or latrine was dug up, workmen discovered rusted pieces of a small-caliber six-shot revolver dating back to the turn of the century. It was not the sort of gun used by the gendarmes.
Madame Hinfray showed me the revolver. It had been soldered back together and painted black, and she was very proud of it. She showed me the master bedroom and said that Sickert used to keep the curtains open to the dark street and build such big fires that the neighbors could see in. Madame Hinfray sleeps there now, and the generous space is filled with plants and pretty colors. I had her take me upstairs last, to the room where Christine died, a former jail cell with a small wood-burning stove.
I stood there alone looking around, listening. I knew that had Sickert been downstairs, or out in the yard or garage, he could not have heard Christine call him if the stove needed stoking or she wanted a glass of water or was hungry. He didn’t need to hear her because she probably couldn’t make a sound. She probably did not wake up very often, or if she did, she dozed. Morphine would have kept her floating in painless slumber.
There is no record of the entire village gathering at Christine’s funeral. It seems most of the crowd was Sickert’s people, as Ellen used to call them, and Christine’s father was there. He later recalled being “shocked” by Sickert’s “sangfroid,” or complete indifference. It was raining when I visited the old graveyard surrounded by a brick wall. Christine’s modest headstone was hard to find. I saw no “little wood” or “favorite walk,” and from where I stood, there was no “lovely view of the whole valley.”
The day of Christine’s funeral was blustery and cold, and the procession was late. Sickert did not pour her ashes into her grave. He dug his hands inside the urn and flung them into the wind, which blew them onto the coats and into the faces of his friends.
MY TEAM
Without the help of many people and archival and academic resources, I could not have conducted this investigation nor written the account of it.
There would be no story of Walter Sickert – no resolution to the vicious crimes he committed under the alias of Jack the Ripper – had history not been preserved in a way that really is no longer possible because of the rapidly vanishing arts of letter-writing and diary-keeping. I could not have followed Sickert’s century-old tracks had I not been aided by tenacious and courageous experts.
I am indebted to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine – especially co-directors Dr. Paul Ferrara and Dr. Marcella Fierro and forensic scientists Lisa Schiermeier, Chuck Pruitt, and Wally Forst; The Bode Technology Group; Sickert curator and researcher Vada Hart; art historian and Sickert expert Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins; paper historian and forensic paper expert Peter Bower; letterer Sally Bower; paper conservator Anne Kennett; FBI profiler and law enforcement instructor Edward Sulzbach; Assistant New York District Attorney Linda Fairstein; rare documents and antiquarian book researcher Joe Jameson.