by Argyle, Ray
“And you’re not afraid, Molly?” Leonard asked. “Afraid of what you’ve told us? Afraid of what I might do?”
“I’m going to die soon, so it doesn’t matter. You should put it in the paper. Nobody’s going to do anything to a crazy old woman with one foot in the grave.”
“You’re not that close to the grave,” Leonard answered. He wanted to know how Molly could have poisoned her daughter.
“What dd Rosannah say when she ate the jam?” Leonard asked.
“Just that it had a sharp taste.”
“You didn’t try to stop her?”
“It was too late then, even if I wanted to.”
“So you didn’t want to. Were you sorry for what you’d done.”
“At first, I was. Then I decided it was really God’s doing. That made me feel better.
“And there was no more of the banshee’s wailing. So I went to sleep.”
A feeling of loathing was beginning to take hold of Leonard. Not just loathing at what he was hearing, or of Molly, but loathing of himself, of everybody, but most of all of what had happened in that Vandeleur farm house twenty-one years ago.
Leonard stumbled up the stairwell from the Asylum, Scarth at his heels. He hardly heard Scarth’s blabbering about how Molly had just vouched for his innocence.
“I knew it,” Scarth said, “I knew she’d clear me, that’s why I came with you. I kept my part of the bargain. Now you’ve got to keep yours. I’m leaving town today. You promised not to put the police onto me.”
The words trailed off as Scarf hurried away, leaving Leonard staring into the haze of a dying afternoon. The air smelled of rain. It was too late to return to the office; he may as well go home. He walked the half block to the corner without noticing that a streetcar had stopped, taken on two women carrying umbrellas, and headed downtown. He waited for the next car. He tried to clear his head and think about what he was going to do.
Leonard waited outside the Asylum for so long it seemed as if time was standing still. Another streetcar car came by after twenty minutes. He dropped in his nickel and took a seat. His remembrance of past experiences had suddenly been overtaken by this new information. He gazed out the widows without seeing the buildings he was passing or the people on the sidewalks, hurrying home from their shifts. The conductor called out Parliament Street but Leonard was thinking only of the terrible consequences of Molly’s delirium. The streetcar was turning around at the Don River Station before he realized he’d passed his stop. When he finally got off it was getting dark and the wind had stepped up. Rain that had been falling was turning to sleet as the temperature dropped.
By now, he had begun to put things in their proper perspective. He was terribly let down and once out of the streetcar he began to cry. Leonard was sorrowful that his long quest for truth had taken him where it had. His daughter Lenora had grown up without a father; he was nowhere around when she would have needed him most. Molly Leppard’s life had unfolded as a journey of deprivation and tragedy. She was going to die alone and unmourned. Rosannah never had a chance and Cook had been marked in childhood for a lifetime of trouble.
Some of these things had nothing to do with Leonard but some of them were his fault. If he hadn’t been so pig-headed he and Rosannah might have been married and most of this would never have happened. From the time of that trouble at the Globe, he’d felt overwhelmed. He had finally gotten his life under control after joining the Evening Telegram. He’d fought and won Kathleen’s freedom and then he’d married her, and they were happy together.
Now he had answers to questions that had haunted him since the trial. Molly’s attempt to control Bridget’s testimony had been driven by fear her daughter might accuse her of murder, rather than by, as he’d thought, the shame of Rosannah’s rape. He now saw Scarth Tackaberry as a pathetic and naïve figure who feared the suspicion his testimony would draw. Finally, his admiration for Cook Teets swept over him like torrents of rain. Cook had to have suspected Molly yet he had never spoken a word against her. His love for Rosannah had prevented him from accusing a mother of destroying her own child.
By the time Leonard reached the third floor landing and stood at the door of his flat, he realized he was not yet ready to tell Kathleen what he had learned. He needed to better understand how he felt and what he was going to do about it.
Kathleen was crimping the pastry of an apple pie she was about to put in the oven. “It’ll be ready by the time you’ve had your dinner,” she told him.
“I’m really not hungry,” Leonard said. “I’m too tired to eat. I’ll just pour a little whisky and rest awhile.”
After two drinks, Leonard was feeling groggy. Kathleen sat across from him, darning a pair of socks. He saw her look at him strangely.
“Did you visit Molly?”
“I don’t feel up to talking about it. I’m going to bed.”
The effects of the whisky lulled Leonard to sleep. He awakened sometime after midnight. He’d dreamt of dancing with Rosannah at a party in the Vandeleur school. She twirled away from him and he lost sight of her among the other dancers. It was the first time he’d dreamt of her since he’d met Kathleen. Rosannah would always be in his life.
Leonard had been convinced he would know what to do once he found out who had killed Rosannah. Now he was not so sure. He could divulge Molly’s secret to Telegram readers, revealing Cook Teets as the innocent victim of a heartless justice system. The public would eagerly embrace the story of a man who had refused to implicate the mother of the girl he’d married, and had gambled with his own life and lost. Everyone would praise Leonard’s enterprise in ferreting out such a dramatic story. But he dreaded the thought of indicting the mother of the girl he’d loved. Would exposing Molly deliver justice to a dead man? What could you do for someone who was dead? And if he published the story, would that help him overcome the sense of worthlessness that still dragged at his heels? He’d have to decide those things tomorrow. After a long time, he drifted back to sleep.
Chapter 38
LEONARD’S CHOICE
April 21, 1904
The piercing light of a clear spring morning roused Leonard Babington with a start. He turned on his side to reach for Kathleen, realized she was not there, and saw by the bedside clock that it was after seven and the alarm had not rung. It was then he remembered all that had happened: the fire, his visit with Molly Leppard, and her confession. He had to get up and get going. He found Kathleen washing up dishes left unattended from last night.
“I wanted you to have a little extra sleep,” Kathleen said when she saw Leonard. “You tossed and turned all night.”
“I should be on my way by now. But there’s something we need to talk about before I leave.”
Leonard washed and shaved quickly, dressed, and in ten minutes was ready for the fried ham and boiled egg that Kathleen had prepared. He cracked open his egg, dipped toast into the yolk, and swallowed a mouthful of tea. As he ate he told Kathleen how Scarth Tackaberry had turned up in Toronto after jumping bail, how he had confronted him at the Colonial Rooms, and then made him to go with him to the Asylum.
When Leonard got to the part about how Rosannah had died from eating jam poisoned with strychnine, Kathleen stopped him to ask if Molly said Scarth had done it.
“It wasn’t Scarth,” Leonard answered. “Molly said he had nothing to do with it. She admitted it was she who had killed Rosannah. Talked about visions and voices, all about a wailing banshee, and how she was told she could wash away Rosannah’s sins by sinning against her. Some crazy religious delusion. And the wails of the banshee – she’d forgotten it was Halloween, hadn’t realized that what she heard was just kids making a noise.
“It’s clear to me now. She straight out confessed to me. So do I keep quiet, or do I reveal the truth? My choice is to publish. It’s only fair to Rosannah and Cook Teets. People have to know a mistake was made.”
Kathleen poured Leonard more tea and refilled her own cup. “How do you know wha
t Molly says is true? Maybe she’s just hallucinating, acting out some lunatic fantasy. And you say you let Scarth go on his way? So you’ve lost your only witness.”
“I don’t need a witness, Kate. This is the second time Molly’s confessed. I’d known about it for years. I just never could believe it. I always suspected Scarth of doing it.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Rosannah had a brother, name of James. He was married to a girl called Jennie Wonch. I never told you, but a story Jennie told the police about Molly having confessed to her is in the files of the Owen Sound Advertiser. Nobody ever paid any attention to it. I never believed the story myself until I heard it confirmed by Molly yesterday.”
“And you really think you need to put this in the Telegram?”
“I’ve no choice. I know she’s told the truth. A newspaperman has to let out the truth, or he betrays everything he stands for. People have to know when the system goes wrong. How else are we going to stop the same mistake from happening again?”
“But think of what this will do to Molly.”
“That’s what’s bothered me. She would never have confessed if the fire hadn’t terrified her. I don’t want to add to her pain, but I doubt she’ll ever know her truth’s been told. The police are not going to do anything. As Molly says, no one will care about a crazy old woman who’s not got long to live.”
The editorial department was at its peak of activity when Leonard arrived, a little before nine o’clock. Reporters hurried in and out, stories fell from their typewriters, and calls for copy boys rose above the din. Leonard’s deputy, Roland Cooper, a recent recruit from Fleet Street’s London Transcript, gave him a run-down of the day’s main stories: more reports on the Great Fire; a debate on evolution at the Jarvis Street Baptist Church; arguments at Council over renewing the contract of the city’s welfare officer (Goldwin Smith having decided he could no longer pay the man’s salary); along with the usual collection of cases from the police blotter.
“I’ve something else for the one o’clock edition,” Leonard said. “I’ve been working on it for awhile. We’ll make it the top story on page five, first thing after the want ads. You can handle the desk while I write.”
Turning his back, Leonard swung into a chair behind a vacant typewriter on the rim of the copy desk. He put in a sheet of paper and caught his breath. What he was about to write would bring to an end twenty years of pain and frustration. Yet it would not be a long story. And he knew just the headline he wanted on it:
ACT OF INJUSTICE AN INNOCENT MAN HAS HANGED LAST EXECUTION IN OWEN SOUND WAS A LEGAL MURDER
It is twenty years since the last execution took place in Owen Sound. At that time, Cook Teets, a blind man, who resided in the village of Vandeleur, Grey County, charged with poisoning his wife, the former Rosannah Leppard, was tried and convicted on purely circumstantial evidence and hanged for the crime.
The execution of Teets was an act of injustice, carried out on the orders of Justice Department officials who disregarded the jury’s appeal for clemency and ignored public petitions for commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment.
Information has come into possession of The Evening Telegram, in the form of a confession by the mother of the victim, that Cook Teets was innocent of the crime with which he was charged, and that she herself was the murderer of her daughter. The confession was delivered yesterday to a representative of this newspaper by Molly Leppard, sixty-seven years of age, who has been for a number of years a patient at the Toronto Insane Asylum.
In her confession, Mrs. Leppard explained that she was in a religious trance when she laced a quantity of crabapple jam with strychnine and gave it to her daughter with bread. She laboured under the awful belief that Rossannah, reared a Roman Catholic, had sinned by marrying Teets, a Protestant. The marriage took place in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto in 1883, a scant six weeks before the victim’s death. Having since recovered much of her sanity, Mrs. Leppard explained to our representative, who has pursued the case since its inception, that she heard voices and had visions of demons from whom she received instructions that she could save Rosannah only by committing an even greater sin, viz., the murder of her own daughter.
The case warrants further investigation in that it sheds light both on the failure of the judicial system to protect the innocent among the accused, and on the prevalence of religious delusion among the inmates of our asylums.
Leonard paused in his typing. Those are the essential facts, enough to raise a few eyebrows. He’d write more stories in the days ahead, giving added details of Rosannah’s life and how Cook was unjustly punished. He marked up the copy for the typesetters, rolled the pages together, and slipped them into the pneumatic tube to be carried to the composing floor. He shivered and felt his heart race as he thought of what he’d done. Dear Rosannah, I am sorry to have to tell the world of your mother’s crime. Many crimes go unpunished but the punishment for what Molly did has been visited on all of us – on Cook through his wrongful hanging, on Molly by being thrust into a demented state, on myself for the doubts and despair I’ve suffered, but most of all on you, dear Rosannah, for it is you who have paid with your life.
Leonard was jarred from his introspection by the realization that his editor, Black Jack Robinson, was standing over him. He looked up to see Robinson pawing through the pile of carbon sheets beside his typewriter.
“Cooper tells me you’ve something big you’ve been keeping to yourself,” Robinson said. “I’m curious – can I have a look at your blacks?”
Robinson stood, swaying slightly, his ample stomach protruding around the confines of his belt as he read Leonard’s story. He wheezed and harrumphed as he went from page to page, his eyebrows permanently lifted as if to hold his eyes wide open as he absorbed their content.
“You’ve sent this to the composing room?”
“Yes, a few minutes ago.”
“Send down a note to call it back.”
“Whatever for?”
“The Evening Telegram can’t publish this. How do we know this isn’t a figment of the woman’s imagination? Her family could sue us. And the authorities. What will they think of these reckless charges of injustice? What will the doctors at the Asylum say? Mr. Robertson is away, or I’d have him look at this. In his absence, I have to decide. Let’s take some time to think about this.”
Leonard was stunned by his editor’s reaction. He had never given a thought to the possibility the paper would not wish to run the story. He saw years of frustration coming to a peak – printing Molly’s confession had become the most important thing in his life. He was gripped by a sudden rage that swept from his gut into his head, like a swarm of hornets bursting from a nest that’s been disturbed.
“God damn it, that does it,” he told Black Jack, as he stood up. “If the Evening Telegram doesn’t want me, I can always go and see Joe Atkinson at the Star. Maybe I’ll find somebody with a conscience.” He pushed away his chair, reached for his coat, and headed toward the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” Robinson called. He caught up to Leonard at the revolving door that marked the building’s Bay Street entrance, and followed him outside. “I don’t understand why you’re so touchy. It’s my job to keep this newspaper out of court and you’re not making it any easier.”
Robinson’s admission surprised Leonard. He didn’t think his editor should behave as if he were a lawyer; his job was to bring the truth to readers. He now felt even more angry, but still ready to try to explain the meaning of Molly’s confession. The two paced the sidewalk while Leonard went over the history of Rosannah Leppard’s murder. He left nothing out, not even the fact he’d been in love with her, that at the beginning he had been sure of Cook’s guilt, and about his own contribution to the public prejudice against Teets.
“I’ve considered the case from all angles and it’s clear Cook didn’t do it,” Leonard said. “That leaves Molly. I know her confession seems weird but it’s true. She
’s in no position to retract it, and the Telegram need have no fear in publishing it.”
“Mr. Babington, it’s all very well for you to say that. I don’t doubt your sincerity, but you have a personal interest in this. You have to consider the paper’s position. We have to think of the attitude of the authorities.”
“My God, Mr. Robinson what do you think the proprietor has been doing all his life? That was his whole intention in starting the Telegram – to hold the authorities to account. Would you have us abandon his principles?”
Black Jack paused before answering. Leonard hoped he might be looking for a way to settle their argument. “You put things in a difficult light, Mr. Babington. You’re absolutely sure of your facts?” Leonard nodded. “All right, you don’t leave us much choice – we’ll go with your story. Now, let’s get back to work. We’ve a paper to get out.”
An hour later, Leonard stood beside the presses as the one o’clock edition sprang to life. Black Jack had alerted the circulation manager that something big was up and newsboys were standing in line for their copies. They made their way out of the burned out core of the city shouting “Innocent man hanged, read all about it!” A queue formed at the corner of Bay and King Streets where stockbrokers and office clerks vied with one another to pay their penny to read of this latest sensation.
When a bundle of papers came up to the editorial department, copy boys distributed them among the staff. Every man turned to page five to see Leonard’s story. The room fell silent while they read, the quiet interrupted only by occasional gasps of disbelief or quiet curses of admiration for Leonard’s ingenuity in ferreting out such an amazing scoop.
“This’ll have the opposition curling their toes tonight,” said Major Anthes, the church reporter.
Owen Staples slapped Leonard on the back and shook his hand, smiling conspiratorially.
Reporters asked Leonard how he’d secured the confession and how long it had taken. “About twenty years, if you want the truth,” he told them. He heard their congratulatory remarks but he did not, fortunately, pick up what was being said at the far end of the office.