The rain had been falling over Canterbury since breakfast, turning the cathedral close a soft silver and darkening the ancient flint of the city walls. Jemima Hartford sat beside the window of her little study, a newspaper spread across her desk, while her younger sister Bella occupied the more comfortable chair by the fire.
Bella was reading aloud.
“‘A romance of death! Two lovers, unable to endure the cruelties of the world, have chosen to leave it together, their bodies discovered beneath the trees where they had spent their last happy hours.’”
She lowered the paper.
“Good heavens, Jemima. Do journalists have no shame?”
Jemima looked up from the register she had been examining.
“They had a great deal of imagination, Bella. Whether they always possessed good judgement is another matter.”
“Romance! A man shoots a young woman in the head and then kills himself, and they call it romance.”
“That,” said Jemima, “is precisely why I want to examine the case.”
Bella laid the newspaper aside and leaned forward. She had been visiting her sister in Canterbury for three days, ostensibly to discuss a forthcoming theatrical engagement. In practice, as Jemima knew perfectly well, Bella had become fascinated by the papers scattered across the study.
In June 1893, Hermann Stoer, a young Londoner with literary ambitions, and a German woman known as Elizabeth Stoer had been found dead in Cockering Wood, west of Canterbury. The newspapers had first suggested a double suicide. The inquest, however, had reached a different conclusion.
Jemima passed her sister the burial register.
“Read the entries for yourself.”
Bella bent over the page.
“Hermann Stoer, twenty-five. Elizabeth Stoer, twenty-two. Both buried on the fourteenth of June. And the abode?”
“‘Found dead in the woods, Milton.’”
Bella’s expression softened.
“Not a home, not a family address. Just the place where they were found.”
“It is a small detail,” Jemima said, “but it reminds us how easily a person becomes an entry in a register. I should like to know who Elizabeth was before she became that entry.”
“And so should I.”
Bella rose, crossed to the desk and drew the newspaper towards her.
“Then let us begin with the evidence rather than the poetry.”
The first account described the couple’s walks through the countryside, their bouquets of wild roses, and the black crape tied about their belongings. Hermann’s verses had been found near the bodies. The journalist had interpreted every detail as evidence of a tragic devotion.
Bella read the poem in silence.
“It’s beautifully arranged,” she admitted at last. “The flowers, the hats, the verses. One can almost see how a reporter might turn it into a tableau for the stage.”
“Yet the arrangement tells us nothing about whether Elizabeth wished to die at that moment,” Jemima replied. “We must not mistake theatrical effect for proof.”
She opened the inquest report from the Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, dated 17 June 1893.
“This is more useful. The surgeon, Thomas Sutton, considered it improbable that Elizabeth had shot herself. The jury found that Hermann died by suicide while of unsound mind, and that Elizabeth died from a gunshot wound inflicted by her husband.”
Bella sat very still.
“Then whatever Hermann wrote about their shared decision, he killed her.”
“That is the conclusion supported by the inquest.”
“And yet he called himself no murderer.”
“He wanted the world to accept his own explanation.”
Jemima tapped the letter to Hermann’s brother Oscar. In it, Hermann described Elizabeth as the missing part of himself. He wrote of their intention to die together, of their hatred of the world’s selfishness, and of his belief that they had found in one another a completeness denied them elsewhere.
Bella looked troubled.
“He seems to have made their deaths into the final act of a play in which he had written every line.”
“That is an astute observation,” said Jemima. “But we should be cautious about judging his entire character from his final letters. We can say that he had contemplated suicide for some time, that he felt bitterly rejected by the literary world, and that he came to regard death as a solution. We cannot diagnose him from the papers.”
“And his father?”
“His brother testified that their father had been confined in a German asylum for fourteen years. It is relevant to the family history, but it does not prove Hermann suffered from the same condition.”
Bella gave a small sigh.
“Still, the romantic story looks rather different when one reads the evidence.”
“It does.”
Jemima gathered the reports into a neat pile.
“Now we must discover whether we can give Elizabeth back her name.”
For several days, the sisters pursued the German connection.
It was slow work. Names appeared in different forms; records were transcribed inconsistently; places that sounded far apart on an English map proved to lie within the same broad region of western Germany. The sisters had no magical access to the records of every parish and registry. They had only the surviving documents, the newspapers and the patience to compare them.
At last, Jemima laid three papers side by side.
“The first is the landlady’s account. She remembered letters addressed to Elizabeth Neuber at Bochum, in Germany. The second is Hermann’s letter to Oscar, which names Elizabeth’s uncle as Mr Rustemeyer of Barmen. The third is a family record I found in our earlier searches.”
Bella examined it.
“Clara Elisabeth Neuber. Born in Düsseldorf on the tenth of June, 1871.”
“Exactly.”
“And Elizabeth was twenty-two when she died.”
“Yes. Hermann wrote that they died on the ninth of June, the day before her birthday. If that date is correct, Clara’s birth date fits precisely.”
Bella read the record again.
“Her middle name was Elisabeth. Her surname was Neuber. The age is right. The birthday is right. And then there is Rustemeyer.”
Jemima nodded.
“We also found a marriage record for Eduard Neuber and Sophia Rustemeyer in Soest in 1861. If Clara was their daughter, and if the Rustemeyer named by Hermann was related to Sophia, the pieces would fit together.”
“Could he have been Sophia’s brother?”
“He could. But we have not proved it.”
Bella looked disappointed.
“You are determined not to let us have a proper ending.”
“I am determined not to invent one.”
Jemima took a clean sheet of paper and wrote:
Clara Elisabeth Neuber — probable identification of Elizabeth Stoer; not conclusively established.
Bella watched her.
“You really believe she was Clara?”
“I believe the combined evidence makes her our strongest candidate. The name, age, birthday and family connection are too suggestive to ignore. But we have not found a document naming Clara as Hermann’s companion, nor have we established the precise relationship between Sophia Rustemeyer and the uncle in Barmen.”
“Then we may have found her, but we cannot say we have proved it.”
“Precisely.”
Bella sat back.
“I think I prefer that to pretending certainty. A false answer would be an insult to her.”
Jemima smiled.
“You are becoming a very good investigator.”
“I should hope so. I have spent my life distinguishing a convincing performance from a convincing truth.”
Hermann’s letter had stated that Elizabeth’s uncle would probably come to England and asked Oscar to assist him. He advised his brother to make enquiries through the German consul in London. The uncle, he said, was a pleasant, good-hearted gentleman from Barmen.
Bella searched the newspaper reports again.
“I can find the reference in the Whitstable Times, but nowhere else have we seen his name reported.”
“Nor have we found evidence that he actually came to Canterbury,” Jemima replied.
“Wouldn’t the newspapers have mentioned him if he had attended the inquest?”
“Possibly. But we cannot conclude that he never came merely because we have found no report of it. The inquest records themselves have not come to light, and the police papers may no longer survive.”
Bella sighed.
“It is an irritating sort of mystery. Every answer opens another door, and behind it there is another locked door.”
“That is the nature of historical research.”
“Then perhaps we should stop trying to find the uncle and ask what the letter tells us about Elizabeth.”
Jemima looked at her with interest.
“Go on.”
“She was living with her mother in Germany. Her mother was worried about her attachment to Hermann. Elizabeth knew it. She concealed his letters and arranged to collect correspondence from the post office at Bochum, where her mother would be less likely to inspect it.”
Jemima nodded slowly.
“The letters support that.”
“And in May 1893, Elizabeth told her mother that Hermann was dangerously ill. She obtained permission to travel to England, though her real intention was to join him in their plan to die together.”
“According to the correspondence reproduced at the inquest, yes.”
Bella’s face had grown solemn.
“Her mother must have been frightened of losing her daughter to this man, without understanding quite how dangerous the situation had become. She may have thought Hermann was merely unhappy, or that marriage would settle him. She could not have known what Elizabeth had promised him.”
“We must not claim to know what the mother understood,” Jemima said gently. “But we can see that she was concerned, and that Elizabeth deliberately circumvented her.”
Bella turned towards the window.
“And then she lost her daughter anyway.”
For a moment neither sister spoke.
The rain had stopped. Beyond the rooftops, the cathedral rose above the city, its towers pale against the clearing sky.
Jemima produced a cutting about W. Gavazzi King, the journalist from Leeds to whom Hermann had entrusted the key to his iron box and the remains of his literary work.
Bella read the account of King’s public letter.
“He says he received correspondence from people all over the country. He promises to make an announcement about the publication of Hermann’s writings. And then?”
“We have found no accessible publication, nor a clear announcement that the works appeared in print.”
“Perhaps he never published them.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps a small private edition existed, or the manuscripts were never prepared for publication. We cannot know.”
Bella gave a mischievous smile.
“You don’t entirely trust him, do you?”
“I have no evidence that he acted dishonestly. But he certainly placed himself at the centre of the story.”
“And later became a political agent, a prominent Druid and a man involved in the cinema industry. A varied life, to say the least.”
“Indeed.”
Bella folded the cutting.
“Still, he is not our principal concern. Hermann wanted recognition for his writing, but Elizabeth was not a character in his tragedy. She was a person who had a mother, a family and a life before she met him.”
Jemima looked at her sister with quiet approval.
“That is the conclusion I hoped we would reach.”
Bella read it through before speaking.
“You have written that Elizabeth was probably Clara Elisabeth Neuber.”
“Yes.”
“And that the Rustemeyer connection makes the identification persuasive, but not conclusive.”
“Yes.”
“And that Hermann killed her, whatever he believed about their shared destiny.”
“The inquest supports that conclusion.”
Bella laid the pages down.
“Then I agree. We should close the case, but not pretend we have answered everything.”
Jemima drew the final sheet towards her.
“What shall we write?”
Bella considered for a moment.
“That we have found enough to understand the tragedy, even if we cannot prove every detail of Elizabeth’s identity. That the newspapers called it a romance, but the evidence reveals something far sadder. That Hermann’s letters explain his own view of events, but do not excuse what he did to Elizabeth.”
Jemima wrote as her sister spoke.
“And that we leave the remaining questions open for another day.”
“Exactly.”
When she had finished, Jemima placed the papers in a folder marked Cockering Wood, 1893.
The case was not solved in every particular. They had no certain proof that Clara Elisabeth Neuber was Elizabeth Stoer. They had not found Mr Rustemeyer of Barmen, nor discovered what became of Hermann’s manuscripts. The original police and inquest papers might never be recovered.
Yet they had learned something important.
The dead couple had been presented to the world as tragic lovers, their final act transformed into a romantic spectacle. But beneath the poetry lay a young woman who had travelled from Germany, concealing her intentions from a worried mother, and a man whose despair had hardened into a conviction that death was the only meaningful escape.
Jemima closed the folder.
“Shall we leave them in peace, Bella?”
Bella rose and came to stand beside her.
“Yes. For now.”
She rested a hand on the folder.
“And if we ever discover another record, we shall open it again.”
Jemima smiled.
“That is what an honest investigator must do.”
Outside, the bells of Canterbury Cathedral began to ring. Their sound drifted over the rooftops and into the quiet room, where the sisters sat together, satisfied that they had taken the story as far as the evidence would allow.
Not to a perfect solution, but to a truer understanding.
And for Jemima Hartford and Bella Mead, that was enough.