Free Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders by Allan Massie Page A

which was, of course the Established Church and an Anglican community. It is hard now to feel much interest in this rather technical debate, especially since the charge of bigamy seems unimportant compared to murder. It was thought to be important in his trial, for reasons which will emerge later. Moreover the wedding suggests something of his character. Bennison combined strong sexual impulses with moral principles, or, if that is putting it rather strongly, with a powerful sense of respectability. He couldn’t seduce a girl; he had to marry her.
    He soon left Mary at home and came to Scotland. It was stated at his trial that he could `assign no reason for coming here but for want of employment’; it is difficult to see why he should have been expected to do so, since this reason was obviously valid enough. Ireland before the famine was overpopulated. There is no evidence that he intended his separation from his new wife to be lasting. The plan may have been that she should follow him to Scotland when he had established himself, a common enough course in such circumstances. If so, his susceptibility soon raised an obstacle, for he had not been long in Scotland when he met and married a Paisley girl called jean Hamilton in December 1839.
    Married now to Jean, his thoughts reverted to Mary. Perhaps he saw no reason why he should not live as a sultan; there were also Biblical precedents for polygamy. Perhaps however he was simply confused. Almost certainly he did not achieve the insouciance of a Captain Macheath singing `how happy could I be with either, were ‘tother dear charmer away’. At any rate he returned to Ireland and persuaded Mary to come to Scotland with him. Perhaps she insisted on accompanying him, against his will; we have no means of telling. However that might be, his absence, according to jean Hamilton’s sister, Helen, who was to be the agent ofhis eventual downfall, `caused considerable uneasiness to his wife, owing to staying away longer than the time spoken of’.
    He brought Mary back and established her in Airdrie. If he intended to alternate between the two women, his determination was not put to the test, for Mary died and was buried in Airdrie in an unnamed grave. (That was probably meanness rather than duplicity, for Bennison was to show himself recurrently and unpleasantly mean.) Later there were to be suggestions that he was responsible for her death. No evidence exists to support this charge. He continued to deny it right up to the end. The least we can do is credit his word, for he had eventually motive to confess rather than to continue to deny. However, Mary’s death can hardly have failed to make him realise that death can offer a satisfactory solution to matrimonial complications.
    He felt constrained to wear mourning for Mary, though no one in Paisley knew of her existence, let alone her death, and he would have avoided any possible awkwardness if he had not drawn this attention on himself. Moreover, on his return to jean, he took with him a bundle of female clothes and told his wife that the mourning was for his sister, whose clothes these were. On being asked why he had not brought her to Paisley, he replied that he had been anxious to get her to her destination, which was an old master’s in Airdrie. It was as if he, deliberately invited suspicion.
    There was one nasty moment when he was accosted in chapel in Paisley by a little man who said,
    `I think I know you.’ `Do you?’
    `Was it not you that buried your wife recently in Airdrie?’ Bennison was quick to assure him that he was mistaken. He must be thinking of somebody else. The incident stuck however in Helen Glass’s memory and she reported it at the trial. She also `thought that her sister has the impression on her mind that the clothes which Bennison had brought were the clothes of another wife’.
    Nevertheless jean appeared to accept his story. Even when they visited Ireland and she met his sister, still alive, and