Elizabeth Is Missing, page 10
“Had you used to hear anybody in the kitchen?”
“I heard people sometimes blowing the fire, and passing in and out.”
“When did you drink all your water?”
“I drank all that about half an hour before I got out of the room.”
Mr. Davy cannot have had access to Elizabeth’s statement to Fielding, in which she had said that her water was all gone on the Friday. It was about this point that he shrugged and sat down. He still had a card or two up his sleeve.
Sitting in the gallery or crowded about the dock, the eager spectators stirred and took breath. Gawen Nash was in the gallery, along with others of the Goldsmiths’ Company. He was a little discontented in his mind about some of the details that Elizabeth revealed, but his mind was divided. He had other things to think about. All the Goldsmiths’ men were distracted. There was to be a great feast at Goldsmiths’ Hall that day. Gawen Nash was the most distracted of all. He was butler to the company, and had on his mind the care of perhaps three or four thousand pounds’ worth of plate. He listened to Elizabeth Canning’s evidence with half his mind, sometimes less. At eleven o’clock he could linger no longer. He went away about his business.
The assistant of the Goldsmiths’ Company asked him how the trial was going.
“Oh,” said Nash, telling over the plate, “I think it impossible that the gypsy can be convicted on such an incredible story.”
Mr. Nash reported nothing about the evidence of Virtue Hall, because he did not stay to hear it. What he would have done if he had was a matter for speculation later. Mr. Nash thought he would have spoken up on the gypsy’s behalf. Others were not so sure.
Mr. Nash was the only one who did not stay to hear Virtue. All the rest of the close-packed sitters in the gallery and standers on the floor hung on her every word.
“Then Mary Squires took a knife out of the dresser drawer in the kitchen and ripped the lace of her stays, and pulled them off, and hung them on the back of a chair in the kitchen, and pushed her up into the room, and said: ‘Damn you, go up there, then, if you please.’”
John Hague the goldsmith, sitting in the gallery, could not believe his ears. It was not the gypsy’s strange mixture of the conventions of courtesy and profanity that startled him. It was the effrontery of Virtue Hall. His mind went back to her protestations of innocence at Enfield. He seemed to hear her once more answering Elizabeth’s accusation boldly: “God forgive you, madam, I never saw you in this house in my life.” Seeing such seeming innocence in her, and now to hear her swearing such a thing as he thought to be as false as the gospel is true, Hague was stricken dumb with astonishment. He sat in the gallery and gaped.
“Then,” continued the undisturbed witness, “the man that had come in with the gypsy’s son took the cap off E. Canning’s head and went out a’ doors with it; the gypsy man John Squires took the stays off the chair and went out with them.”
The witness was confused, and the prosecutor probed at her story a bit: how could the man take the cap off Elizabeth’s head after she had been sequestered in the loft?
“Where was E. Canning when the two men took away her things?”
“She was then up in the room,” replied Virtue.
This did not improve matters; Virtue had told Fielding that the unknown had gone off with the cap while Elizabeth was still in the kitchen. The prosecutor finally let it alone; no use cross-examining his own witness.
“I was there,” continued Virtue, “a quarter of a year in all, if not more; I was there the whole time E. Canning was there; but I never saw her once after she was put up in that room. I was the first that missed her; I asked the gypsy woman once whether that girl was gone. She answered; ‘What is that to you? You have no business with it’; but I durst not go to see if she was gone; if I had, very likely they would have served me so.”
The gypsy woman was mumbling and mowing worse than ever. Now she addressed a question to the world in general:
“What day was it that the young woman was robbed?”
The court answered her: “She says on the morning of the 2nd of January.”
“I return thanks for telling me,” said the old woman dramatically, “for I am as innocent as the child unborn.”
Mrs. Wells was glowering at her former lodger. She jerked her thumb at the old gypsy.
“How long were these people in my house in all, from first to last?” she asked Virtue Hall.
“They were there,” said Virtue, “six or seven weeks in all; they had been there about a fortnight before the young woman was brought in.”
Mrs. Wells said nothing.
Mr. Davy asked Virtue one question:
“Did you ever see this cap or bedgown before?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Virtue.
Now the Crown put Mrs. Canning on the stand to tell of her daughter’s return on the night before King Charles’s Martyrdom.
“I went into a fit directly; my daughter is subject to fits; there was a garret ceiling fell in upon her head, which first occasioned them; and at times, when anybody speaks hastily to her, or at any surprise, she is very liable to fall in one; she has sometimes continued in one seven or eight hours, sometimes three or four; she is not sensible during the time she is in one, no more than a new-born babe.”
Her testimony flowed on in spate: she revived, she said, in time to hear Elizabeth telling Mrs. Woodward and Mr. Wintlebury that she had been in the Hertfordshire road, and “When she came into her warm bed, she was very sick, and had no free passage through her for stool or urine, till she was supplied with glysters, for seven days after she came home, but what was forced by half a cupful at a time.”
Davy shied away from this topic. No cross-examination.
The apothecary was there to confirm Elizabeth’s symptoms. A knot of her friends were there, too, to give her a good character and account for the Enfield raid: Mr. Wintlebury, Mr. Adamson, Mr. Scarrat, Mr. Lyon, Mr. Rossiter.
Mr. Wintlebury and Mr. Scarrat had been with Elizabeth before Alderman Chitty, and Mr. Rossiter had been with her at Justice Tyshmaker’s. They now said that the account she had given just now, here in the Sessions House, was in all respects the same as those two previous accounts.
Mr. Adamson gave himself the leading role among the avengers of Elizabeth:
“I, seeing the room before she was brought in, thought she was capable of giving some account of it. I returned to meet her and asked her about it; she described the room with some hay in it, an odd sort of an empty room. I went with her to the house, and carried her out of the chaise into the kitchen, and set her on the dresser, and ordered all the people to be brought to her, to see if she knew any of them, she was then very weak. I took her in my arms like a child.”
The crowd looked at the injured girl, thin and small, and their hearts went out to her. They thought the next step ought to be the conviction of her persecutors.
Even more emphatically, the unruly mob hanging about the Sessions House yard thought so too. They took some very practical steps to that end.
Wells’s relatives, and one or two of her neighbours, were ready to testify on her behalf. They presented themselves at the Sessions House door, subpœnas in hand.
They never got across the threshold. They pushed and battered their way through the surging crowd until they got to the right-hand stair, but they got no nearer the witness-stand. The constable at the door kept them out. Fortune Natus never forgot him, a tallish man pitted with smallpox, who turned some of Wells’s witnesses out of the Sessions House yard.
Wells’s daughter Elizabeth fared the worst. She was standing on the step with her half-brother John Howit when someone in the mob recognized her and raised the outcry: “Mother Wells’s daughter!”
The temper of the crowd was dangerous. They rushed the girl. It made a story afterwards:
“Somebody knowed me to be Mother Wells’s daughter, and they pushed me back and would not let me come in; they frightened me very much, and I went back again, and up two or three pair of stairs in a house in the Old Bailey and heard the mob cry out: ‘Mother Wells’s daughter!”
“We had like to have been knocked on the head,” John Howit would add, “them that had got subpœnas and them that had not.”
The mob was knocking the wrong people on the head. They should have turned their attention to an uncouth trio in countryfied neckcloths. These three came in unmolested, and soon were succeeding one another on the stand. John Gibbons was sworn first:
“I live at Abbotsbury, six miles from Dorchester; I am master of the house called the Old Ship; on the 1st of January 1753 the prisoner Squires came into the house; there was George her son and Lucy her daughter with her, as she called them; she came with handkerchiefs, lawns, muslins, and checks to sell about town; she stayed there from the 1st to the 9th day of the month, and lay at my house.”
Mr. Davy smiled blandly; this was a staggerer for the prosecution: Mary Squires could not be guilty of robbing Elizabeth Canning on January 2 if she spent January 2 at the Old Ship in Abbotsbury.
Nevertheless Mr. Stow attacked the salient point, the date:
“By what do you recollect the day?”
“There came an exciseman to officiate there for one John Ward that was sick, and I put the day of the month down when he came; the excise office is kept at my house; the man that came was Andrew Wicks, or Wick.”
Next came William Clarke. He looked at the old gypsy, and then at her daughter Lucy, standing close to the dock in the press. She was a pleasanter sight than her old crone of a mother, neatly dressed in white camblet, with a capuchin hood framing her dark, pretty face. The countryman’s eyes rested on her for a moment, and then he capably gave his evidence:
“I live at Abbotsbury, and have for seven years; I remember seeing the gypsy there; the last time I saw her was on the 10th of January last; I met with them on the road; we went some way together; we parted at Crudeway-foot, four miles from Abbotsbury and three from Dorchester.”
“Had you ever seen her before?” asked Mr. Davy.
“I saw her, and her son and daughter, three years ago come March, at Abbotsbury; they come with handkerchiefs, lawns, and muslins to sell. I saw the landlord’s wife at the Ship buy some aprons of them the last time they were there.”
Counsel for the Crown rose to cross-examine this assured young man. If the jury believed him, the gypsy would get off.
“How came you to take particular notice of the day?”
“By keeping my other accounts; I carried goods out with me the same day to Portersham.”
“Have you your book with you?” demanded the prosecutor.
“No, I have not,” Clarke admitted; “but,” he added defiantly, “I cannot forget the day, because I do not go so often.”
“Which way were they going?”
“They were making for London; they talked so.”
“Did they give you any account to what place they were bound next?”
“They did not,” replied Clarke; and added, to bring the lawyer back to the point: “They lodged at this man’s house at Abbotsbury.”
“Did you see them there?” asked the prosecutor, taking his cue neatly.
“I did, on the 1st of January; I commonly go there of an evening, to have a pot of liquor.”
Now counsel for the Crown brought up a question that was to be asked over and over again before the case ended:
“Do you remember when you kept Christmas Day?”
“I do not.”
“Can you give any account of new style or old?”
There were probably not many in the courtroom who could. The reform of the calendar had been in effect less than a year amid a welter of confusion and a double system of dates to plague the lawyer at the bar and the witness on the stand.
“No, I cannot; but,” Clarke burst out passionately, “if I was to die for the woman, I’ll speak the truth.”
“What are you?”
“I am a housekeeper, and have been in business about six years; I am a cordwainer.”
The shoemaker’s evidence was confirmed by another Dorset man.
“I live at Coombe,” said Thomas Greville, “three miles from Salisbury; I keep a public-house there, at the sign of the Lamb. I saw Mary Squires at my house on the 14th of January.”
“Who was with her there?”
“There was her sister and her brother, as she said; they sold handkerchiefs, lawns, and such things.”
“How long did she stay at Coombe?”
“They stopped there but one night.”
“What January,” cross-examined Mr. Stow, “do you mean?”
“I mean last January, five weeks ago last Sunday.”
“How came you to take such particular notice of it?”
“There came a carpenter at my house,” explained the landlord of the Lamb; “he had spent the biggest part of his money. It being Sunday night, I would have him go about his business, and put him out of the house two or three times, and after that he went over the way to another house and pawned his axe.”
This memory of the prodigal behaviour of the carpenter fixed the day to be a Sunday clearly enough. How it fixed the month to be January Greville did not state, and the prosecutor did not ask. Instead, he put a rebuttal witness on the stand.
“I sell fish and oysters,” said John Inifer, “about Waltham Cross and Theobalds. I know the prisoner Squires very well by sight. The last time I saw her before now was at the time she was taken up at Susannah Wells’s house; before that I have seen her several times every day up and down.”
“Are you very certain of that?”
“I am, that I saw her three weeks before; that she walked into people’s houses, pretending to tell fortunes. She told me mine once.”
“Did you see any goods she had to sell?”
“No, I did not; I always saw her by herself. I saw a young man in blue-gray when she was taken up, and two young women, all taken in the house of Wells.”
This ended Mary Squires’s defence, and the rebuttal thereto. Since it was a felony case, Mr. Davy was not allowed to argue for his client.
Wells had no lawyer. One Talmash of Red Lion Street had sued out the subpœnas for the witnesses that the mob had chevied off the steps; but her cause was so very unpopular that he did not care to be concerned in it further.
Now the court asked the old bawd what she had to offer in her defence. Mother Wells looked about at the hostile faces. Where were her witnesses? The thing looked hopeless.
“As to my character,” she said, giving up, “it is but an indifferent one; I had an unfortunate husband who was hanged.”
In the galleries the spectators from Enfield nodded. They knew how Wells came to be hanged. The late butcher had brought his shady career to an untimely end by butchering one sheep too many. It was somebody else’s sheep.
“I never,” added the widow Wells, “saw the young woman till they came to take us up; and as to Squires, I never saw her above a week and a day before we were taken up.”
That was useless, and she knew it. The jury was not long in reaching the popular verdict:
Squires, guilty.
Wells, guilty.
The mob howled its approval. The two old women were hustled away through the backward passage into Newgate.
The verdict against the gypsy made the Abbotsbury men, legally, liars. Witnesses on the losing side of an Old Bailey case were likely to be penalized for their bad judgment in choosing sides.
“My Lord,” said the leading counsel for the Crown, “I move that the three witnesses from Abbotsbury should stand indicted for perjury, in giving false evidence.”
His colleague disagreed.
“’Tis not clear to me,” he said thoughtfully, “that they merit any such imputation.”
“No more it is to me,” agreed Mr. Justice Gundry from the bench. He was himself a Dorset man, and had already formed a design to write down into Dorsetshire and inquire about the gypsy alibi.
The same idea was in the mind of Sir Crisp Gascoyne as the honourable judges rose. In stately procession they passed from the Sessions House in their billowing gowns and their full-bottomed wigs, each plying his nosegay, the better to repel the noxious vapours of the gaol fever. First and stateliest, with his gold chain about his neck, walked Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Knight, Lord Mayor of London.
[ #2 ]
The verdict of the jury put new zeal into the defenders of Elizabeth. They put out another reward for the apprehension of
“JOHN SQUIRES, well known by the Name of GEORGE SQUIRES, in Blackman-street, Newington Butts, Norwood, and in the Towns and Villages thereabouts.
N.B. The said Squires is about five Feet ten Inches high, walks upright, is well made, of a dark, tawny gypsey Complexion, about the Age of Thirty, generally wears a dark Horseman’s Great Coat, knapped, with large inside Pockets; under that a blue Coat, a scarlet Waistcoat, with Glass black Buttons, and black Buttonholes, and a dark-brown Bob Wig.”
But this unaccountable gypsy man was more afraid of the duns of his creditors than he was of a capital charge and ten pounds on his head. The former drove him from his own house and caused him to lurk at Enfield Wash. The latter could not keep him from showing himself in London.
True, he had made off when Justice Tyshmaker discharged him. He had made for Dorset, and there he had marshalled the three alibi witnesses. With them he had returned boldly to London. He had stayed away from the Old Bailey; but about Blackman Street, on the Surrey side of the river, he felt at home, and did not hesitate to show himself.
Some informer spied him and ran across the river to Bow Street to lay an information. Justice Fielding issued a warrant, and that very evening a posse armed with firearms sallied forth to take the gypsy fellow. They thundered on the door in Blackman Street, in the name of the law. When the door was opened, no George Squires was to be found, though they searched the house. They combed several other gypsy kens in Kennington Lane and another in Lambeth Marsh, and finally concluded that he must have slipped away in disguise.
They never did catch him. When next he appeared, he appeared of his own free will.
[ #3 ]
“I heard people sometimes blowing the fire, and passing in and out.”
“When did you drink all your water?”
“I drank all that about half an hour before I got out of the room.”
Mr. Davy cannot have had access to Elizabeth’s statement to Fielding, in which she had said that her water was all gone on the Friday. It was about this point that he shrugged and sat down. He still had a card or two up his sleeve.
Sitting in the gallery or crowded about the dock, the eager spectators stirred and took breath. Gawen Nash was in the gallery, along with others of the Goldsmiths’ Company. He was a little discontented in his mind about some of the details that Elizabeth revealed, but his mind was divided. He had other things to think about. All the Goldsmiths’ men were distracted. There was to be a great feast at Goldsmiths’ Hall that day. Gawen Nash was the most distracted of all. He was butler to the company, and had on his mind the care of perhaps three or four thousand pounds’ worth of plate. He listened to Elizabeth Canning’s evidence with half his mind, sometimes less. At eleven o’clock he could linger no longer. He went away about his business.
The assistant of the Goldsmiths’ Company asked him how the trial was going.
“Oh,” said Nash, telling over the plate, “I think it impossible that the gypsy can be convicted on such an incredible story.”
Mr. Nash reported nothing about the evidence of Virtue Hall, because he did not stay to hear it. What he would have done if he had was a matter for speculation later. Mr. Nash thought he would have spoken up on the gypsy’s behalf. Others were not so sure.
Mr. Nash was the only one who did not stay to hear Virtue. All the rest of the close-packed sitters in the gallery and standers on the floor hung on her every word.
“Then Mary Squires took a knife out of the dresser drawer in the kitchen and ripped the lace of her stays, and pulled them off, and hung them on the back of a chair in the kitchen, and pushed her up into the room, and said: ‘Damn you, go up there, then, if you please.’”
John Hague the goldsmith, sitting in the gallery, could not believe his ears. It was not the gypsy’s strange mixture of the conventions of courtesy and profanity that startled him. It was the effrontery of Virtue Hall. His mind went back to her protestations of innocence at Enfield. He seemed to hear her once more answering Elizabeth’s accusation boldly: “God forgive you, madam, I never saw you in this house in my life.” Seeing such seeming innocence in her, and now to hear her swearing such a thing as he thought to be as false as the gospel is true, Hague was stricken dumb with astonishment. He sat in the gallery and gaped.
“Then,” continued the undisturbed witness, “the man that had come in with the gypsy’s son took the cap off E. Canning’s head and went out a’ doors with it; the gypsy man John Squires took the stays off the chair and went out with them.”
The witness was confused, and the prosecutor probed at her story a bit: how could the man take the cap off Elizabeth’s head after she had been sequestered in the loft?
“Where was E. Canning when the two men took away her things?”
“She was then up in the room,” replied Virtue.
This did not improve matters; Virtue had told Fielding that the unknown had gone off with the cap while Elizabeth was still in the kitchen. The prosecutor finally let it alone; no use cross-examining his own witness.
“I was there,” continued Virtue, “a quarter of a year in all, if not more; I was there the whole time E. Canning was there; but I never saw her once after she was put up in that room. I was the first that missed her; I asked the gypsy woman once whether that girl was gone. She answered; ‘What is that to you? You have no business with it’; but I durst not go to see if she was gone; if I had, very likely they would have served me so.”
The gypsy woman was mumbling and mowing worse than ever. Now she addressed a question to the world in general:
“What day was it that the young woman was robbed?”
The court answered her: “She says on the morning of the 2nd of January.”
“I return thanks for telling me,” said the old woman dramatically, “for I am as innocent as the child unborn.”
Mrs. Wells was glowering at her former lodger. She jerked her thumb at the old gypsy.
“How long were these people in my house in all, from first to last?” she asked Virtue Hall.
“They were there,” said Virtue, “six or seven weeks in all; they had been there about a fortnight before the young woman was brought in.”
Mrs. Wells said nothing.
Mr. Davy asked Virtue one question:
“Did you ever see this cap or bedgown before?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Virtue.
Now the Crown put Mrs. Canning on the stand to tell of her daughter’s return on the night before King Charles’s Martyrdom.
“I went into a fit directly; my daughter is subject to fits; there was a garret ceiling fell in upon her head, which first occasioned them; and at times, when anybody speaks hastily to her, or at any surprise, she is very liable to fall in one; she has sometimes continued in one seven or eight hours, sometimes three or four; she is not sensible during the time she is in one, no more than a new-born babe.”
Her testimony flowed on in spate: she revived, she said, in time to hear Elizabeth telling Mrs. Woodward and Mr. Wintlebury that she had been in the Hertfordshire road, and “When she came into her warm bed, she was very sick, and had no free passage through her for stool or urine, till she was supplied with glysters, for seven days after she came home, but what was forced by half a cupful at a time.”
Davy shied away from this topic. No cross-examination.
The apothecary was there to confirm Elizabeth’s symptoms. A knot of her friends were there, too, to give her a good character and account for the Enfield raid: Mr. Wintlebury, Mr. Adamson, Mr. Scarrat, Mr. Lyon, Mr. Rossiter.
Mr. Wintlebury and Mr. Scarrat had been with Elizabeth before Alderman Chitty, and Mr. Rossiter had been with her at Justice Tyshmaker’s. They now said that the account she had given just now, here in the Sessions House, was in all respects the same as those two previous accounts.
Mr. Adamson gave himself the leading role among the avengers of Elizabeth:
“I, seeing the room before she was brought in, thought she was capable of giving some account of it. I returned to meet her and asked her about it; she described the room with some hay in it, an odd sort of an empty room. I went with her to the house, and carried her out of the chaise into the kitchen, and set her on the dresser, and ordered all the people to be brought to her, to see if she knew any of them, she was then very weak. I took her in my arms like a child.”
The crowd looked at the injured girl, thin and small, and their hearts went out to her. They thought the next step ought to be the conviction of her persecutors.
Even more emphatically, the unruly mob hanging about the Sessions House yard thought so too. They took some very practical steps to that end.
Wells’s relatives, and one or two of her neighbours, were ready to testify on her behalf. They presented themselves at the Sessions House door, subpœnas in hand.
They never got across the threshold. They pushed and battered their way through the surging crowd until they got to the right-hand stair, but they got no nearer the witness-stand. The constable at the door kept them out. Fortune Natus never forgot him, a tallish man pitted with smallpox, who turned some of Wells’s witnesses out of the Sessions House yard.
Wells’s daughter Elizabeth fared the worst. She was standing on the step with her half-brother John Howit when someone in the mob recognized her and raised the outcry: “Mother Wells’s daughter!”
The temper of the crowd was dangerous. They rushed the girl. It made a story afterwards:
“Somebody knowed me to be Mother Wells’s daughter, and they pushed me back and would not let me come in; they frightened me very much, and I went back again, and up two or three pair of stairs in a house in the Old Bailey and heard the mob cry out: ‘Mother Wells’s daughter!”
“We had like to have been knocked on the head,” John Howit would add, “them that had got subpœnas and them that had not.”
The mob was knocking the wrong people on the head. They should have turned their attention to an uncouth trio in countryfied neckcloths. These three came in unmolested, and soon were succeeding one another on the stand. John Gibbons was sworn first:
“I live at Abbotsbury, six miles from Dorchester; I am master of the house called the Old Ship; on the 1st of January 1753 the prisoner Squires came into the house; there was George her son and Lucy her daughter with her, as she called them; she came with handkerchiefs, lawns, muslins, and checks to sell about town; she stayed there from the 1st to the 9th day of the month, and lay at my house.”
Mr. Davy smiled blandly; this was a staggerer for the prosecution: Mary Squires could not be guilty of robbing Elizabeth Canning on January 2 if she spent January 2 at the Old Ship in Abbotsbury.
Nevertheless Mr. Stow attacked the salient point, the date:
“By what do you recollect the day?”
“There came an exciseman to officiate there for one John Ward that was sick, and I put the day of the month down when he came; the excise office is kept at my house; the man that came was Andrew Wicks, or Wick.”
Next came William Clarke. He looked at the old gypsy, and then at her daughter Lucy, standing close to the dock in the press. She was a pleasanter sight than her old crone of a mother, neatly dressed in white camblet, with a capuchin hood framing her dark, pretty face. The countryman’s eyes rested on her for a moment, and then he capably gave his evidence:
“I live at Abbotsbury, and have for seven years; I remember seeing the gypsy there; the last time I saw her was on the 10th of January last; I met with them on the road; we went some way together; we parted at Crudeway-foot, four miles from Abbotsbury and three from Dorchester.”
“Had you ever seen her before?” asked Mr. Davy.
“I saw her, and her son and daughter, three years ago come March, at Abbotsbury; they come with handkerchiefs, lawns, and muslins to sell. I saw the landlord’s wife at the Ship buy some aprons of them the last time they were there.”
Counsel for the Crown rose to cross-examine this assured young man. If the jury believed him, the gypsy would get off.
“How came you to take particular notice of the day?”
“By keeping my other accounts; I carried goods out with me the same day to Portersham.”
“Have you your book with you?” demanded the prosecutor.
“No, I have not,” Clarke admitted; “but,” he added defiantly, “I cannot forget the day, because I do not go so often.”
“Which way were they going?”
“They were making for London; they talked so.”
“Did they give you any account to what place they were bound next?”
“They did not,” replied Clarke; and added, to bring the lawyer back to the point: “They lodged at this man’s house at Abbotsbury.”
“Did you see them there?” asked the prosecutor, taking his cue neatly.
“I did, on the 1st of January; I commonly go there of an evening, to have a pot of liquor.”
Now counsel for the Crown brought up a question that was to be asked over and over again before the case ended:
“Do you remember when you kept Christmas Day?”
“I do not.”
“Can you give any account of new style or old?”
There were probably not many in the courtroom who could. The reform of the calendar had been in effect less than a year amid a welter of confusion and a double system of dates to plague the lawyer at the bar and the witness on the stand.
“No, I cannot; but,” Clarke burst out passionately, “if I was to die for the woman, I’ll speak the truth.”
“What are you?”
“I am a housekeeper, and have been in business about six years; I am a cordwainer.”
The shoemaker’s evidence was confirmed by another Dorset man.
“I live at Coombe,” said Thomas Greville, “three miles from Salisbury; I keep a public-house there, at the sign of the Lamb. I saw Mary Squires at my house on the 14th of January.”
“Who was with her there?”
“There was her sister and her brother, as she said; they sold handkerchiefs, lawns, and such things.”
“How long did she stay at Coombe?”
“They stopped there but one night.”
“What January,” cross-examined Mr. Stow, “do you mean?”
“I mean last January, five weeks ago last Sunday.”
“How came you to take such particular notice of it?”
“There came a carpenter at my house,” explained the landlord of the Lamb; “he had spent the biggest part of his money. It being Sunday night, I would have him go about his business, and put him out of the house two or three times, and after that he went over the way to another house and pawned his axe.”
This memory of the prodigal behaviour of the carpenter fixed the day to be a Sunday clearly enough. How it fixed the month to be January Greville did not state, and the prosecutor did not ask. Instead, he put a rebuttal witness on the stand.
“I sell fish and oysters,” said John Inifer, “about Waltham Cross and Theobalds. I know the prisoner Squires very well by sight. The last time I saw her before now was at the time she was taken up at Susannah Wells’s house; before that I have seen her several times every day up and down.”
“Are you very certain of that?”
“I am, that I saw her three weeks before; that she walked into people’s houses, pretending to tell fortunes. She told me mine once.”
“Did you see any goods she had to sell?”
“No, I did not; I always saw her by herself. I saw a young man in blue-gray when she was taken up, and two young women, all taken in the house of Wells.”
This ended Mary Squires’s defence, and the rebuttal thereto. Since it was a felony case, Mr. Davy was not allowed to argue for his client.
Wells had no lawyer. One Talmash of Red Lion Street had sued out the subpœnas for the witnesses that the mob had chevied off the steps; but her cause was so very unpopular that he did not care to be concerned in it further.
Now the court asked the old bawd what she had to offer in her defence. Mother Wells looked about at the hostile faces. Where were her witnesses? The thing looked hopeless.
“As to my character,” she said, giving up, “it is but an indifferent one; I had an unfortunate husband who was hanged.”
In the galleries the spectators from Enfield nodded. They knew how Wells came to be hanged. The late butcher had brought his shady career to an untimely end by butchering one sheep too many. It was somebody else’s sheep.
“I never,” added the widow Wells, “saw the young woman till they came to take us up; and as to Squires, I never saw her above a week and a day before we were taken up.”
That was useless, and she knew it. The jury was not long in reaching the popular verdict:
Squires, guilty.
Wells, guilty.
The mob howled its approval. The two old women were hustled away through the backward passage into Newgate.
The verdict against the gypsy made the Abbotsbury men, legally, liars. Witnesses on the losing side of an Old Bailey case were likely to be penalized for their bad judgment in choosing sides.
“My Lord,” said the leading counsel for the Crown, “I move that the three witnesses from Abbotsbury should stand indicted for perjury, in giving false evidence.”
His colleague disagreed.
“’Tis not clear to me,” he said thoughtfully, “that they merit any such imputation.”
“No more it is to me,” agreed Mr. Justice Gundry from the bench. He was himself a Dorset man, and had already formed a design to write down into Dorsetshire and inquire about the gypsy alibi.
The same idea was in the mind of Sir Crisp Gascoyne as the honourable judges rose. In stately procession they passed from the Sessions House in their billowing gowns and their full-bottomed wigs, each plying his nosegay, the better to repel the noxious vapours of the gaol fever. First and stateliest, with his gold chain about his neck, walked Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Knight, Lord Mayor of London.
[ #2 ]
The verdict of the jury put new zeal into the defenders of Elizabeth. They put out another reward for the apprehension of
“JOHN SQUIRES, well known by the Name of GEORGE SQUIRES, in Blackman-street, Newington Butts, Norwood, and in the Towns and Villages thereabouts.
N.B. The said Squires is about five Feet ten Inches high, walks upright, is well made, of a dark, tawny gypsey Complexion, about the Age of Thirty, generally wears a dark Horseman’s Great Coat, knapped, with large inside Pockets; under that a blue Coat, a scarlet Waistcoat, with Glass black Buttons, and black Buttonholes, and a dark-brown Bob Wig.”
But this unaccountable gypsy man was more afraid of the duns of his creditors than he was of a capital charge and ten pounds on his head. The former drove him from his own house and caused him to lurk at Enfield Wash. The latter could not keep him from showing himself in London.
True, he had made off when Justice Tyshmaker discharged him. He had made for Dorset, and there he had marshalled the three alibi witnesses. With them he had returned boldly to London. He had stayed away from the Old Bailey; but about Blackman Street, on the Surrey side of the river, he felt at home, and did not hesitate to show himself.
Some informer spied him and ran across the river to Bow Street to lay an information. Justice Fielding issued a warrant, and that very evening a posse armed with firearms sallied forth to take the gypsy fellow. They thundered on the door in Blackman Street, in the name of the law. When the door was opened, no George Squires was to be found, though they searched the house. They combed several other gypsy kens in Kennington Lane and another in Lambeth Marsh, and finally concluded that he must have slipped away in disguise.
They never did catch him. When next he appeared, he appeared of his own free will.
[ #3 ]
