“You have made a murderess of me”

The expression “You have made a murderess of me” becomes a defining point of pain and misunderstanding between Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Ash. First heard during a séance, it stays with Ash as a daily accusation; LaMotte later explains that she meant Blanche Glover’s terrible end, not the accusation Ash thought he heard. Its force lies in that delay: the words persist, while their intended meaning remains unknown to the person they address.

The séance and its immediate meaning

At Mrs Lees’s séance, LaMotte cried out that Ash had made her a murderess. Ash recalls the sentence as terrible and says that he hears it daily. The utterance appears alongside another message, “There is no child,” which came through the medium. Ash cannot decide whether that message was cunning, involuntary, or genuine telepathy, and the uncertainty deepens the distress of the scene rather than resolving it.

LaMotte’s words also operate as an accusation that cannot be withdrawn. Ash remembers them as something said and therefore impossible to unsay. At the séance, he believed she was speaking as Gretchen might address Faust. The phrase thus takes on a meaning shaped by Ash’s own assumptions about their relationship, before LaMotte’s later account supplies a different referent.

LaMotte’s later explanation

In her letter, LaMotte clarifies that she was speaking of Blanche Glover, whose death continued to torment her. She recalls that Ash was angry, and says that he tore away the coverings from her spiritual wounds. She was then physically and mentally unwell, and describes her response as arising from both suffering and a cold, momentary malice: she saw that Ash had misunderstood and let him continue to think of the accusation in the way he had construed it.

LaMotte links the outburst to the unequal burdens she believes women bear. She compares it to a woman in childbirth crying against the person she sees as the author of her misfortune, while the man may experience passion without a lasting reminder or catastrophe. Looking back as an older woman, she says she is calmer; the explanation does not erase the original anger, but shows how it was entangled with illness, grief, love, and resentment.

A phrase suspended between letters

The expression’s meaning reaches Ash only through a letter LaMotte writes when he is very ill. She addresses him as someone who will never read it, as with so many of her other letters, and describes communication as having passed beyond possibility. The letter becomes a delayed witness: it corrects Ash’s understanding for the reader, but cannot correct it for him.

That gap makes the phrase more than a single dramatic utterance. It records how an emotionally charged statement can be preserved while its intended meaning is lost to its recipient. LaMotte’s account holds accusation and explanation together, leaving the reader with both the harm Ash remembers and the grief about Blanche that LaMotte says she was expressing.