cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears. . . .
* Thurtell said that he had once been “upon terms of intimacy with a Quaker’s family at Norwich,” and had privately paid his addresses to the daughter. The Quaker, however, was informed that his daughter’s suitor “was a profligate bad character” and forbade him the house.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Devil’s Grammar of Debauchery
the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling
—Milton
At midnight, Mrs. Probert rose from the table; her husband, however, called for another bottle of rum.
“I suppose you will make a drunken bout of it,” she said to him. “I shan’t disturb you.”
“Yes,” Thurtell said, “you may expect to see your Billy come up to bed drunk enough.”
Mrs. Probert went upstairs.
“We may as well look and see if there is any chaunt [marking] about the money,” Thurtell said. They examined Weare’s five-pound notes and found no marks. Thurtell then took out Weare’s note-case. It contained a shooting license and a few loose memoranda, but no money. Thurtell next produced Weare’s silk purse. In it were three sovereigns and some silver. They burned the purse upon the hearth together with the papers, and Thurtell divided the money.
“That’s your share of the blunt,” he said as he gave his mates six pounds apiece. He kept eleven pounds for himself, justifying the larger sum as compensation for the expense to which he had gone in renting the gig and purchasing the pistols.
“This is a bad look out,” Probert said as he took his share. “This is hardly worth coming down for, Jack.”
“It cannot be helped,” Thurtell said. “I thought, Bill, we should have had a hundred or two at the least, but we must now make the best of it we can. This watch you must recollect, Bill, will fetch twenty or thirty pounds.”
“Very true,” Probert said, “and the gun, if it is good for any thing, will fetch ten pounds. Go, Hunt, and fetch the gun, and all the other things, and let’s see what they are worth.”
Hunt went to the stable and brought back the gun, a small box, and a carpetbag.
Probert took up the gun. “This is one of Manton’s make,” he said. “It will bring at least ten pounds.” He then laid hold of the box. “This is the backgammon board you were speaking of, Jack.”
“Yes,” Thurtell said. “That is the board to pick up a flat with.”
“Come, Jack, let’s open the bag, there may be some money in that.”
Thurtell took a knife and cut open the bag. In it were the clothes and traveling things Weare had brought down with him, together with his shooting gear, his loaded dice, and his false cards.*
Perhaps no writer of his generation was more sensitive of the hellish breaches in existence than De Quincey, or more skilled in making their horror palpable to the reader. His account of his separation from the waif Ann, lost in the “mighty labyrinths of London,” or of the woman who upon reaching a remote city encountered the evil footman, of a pale and bloodless complexion, whom she had dreamt she would find there, are overlaid with a horror more affecting than anything in the overt terror-poetry of the age. His lamentation for his friend Charles Lloyd, the mad poet, is one of the minor masterpieces so often met with in his writings. Lloyd “told me that his situation internally was always this—it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him.” Once, when the fit was on him, he burst suddenly into tears on hearing the innocent voices of his own children laughing, and of one especially who was a favorite; and he “told me that sometimes, when this little child took his hand and led him passively about the garden, he had a feeling that prompted him (however weak and foolish it seemed) to call upon this child for protection; and that it seemed to him as if he might still escape, could he but surround himself only with children.”
De Quincey was a pensioner of Morpheus, but although the dark light of opium is on his highest inspirations, it was not the only source of his genius. As much as the other Romantic prophets, he believed that sympathetic insight is a more efficient instrument in the search for truth than reason and analytical intelligence; and he advised his reader “never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.” In his most perceptive moments, he was, it has been said, a psychological Champollion, whose feeling for the cross-weaving of beauty and horror in life enabled him to read more deeply (or, as he would have said, more “hieroglyphically”) than others in the Rosetta-Stone mystery of our being, written first to last, he said, in “the great alphabet of Nature.”
The same sensitivity enabled De Quincey to fathom more deeply than any of his contemporaries the soul of the murderer, that type and figure of the diabolic in ordinary life. If we are to understand the murderer, he said, our “sympathy must be with him,” by which “of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand him,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.” This faculty of sympathetic perception would eventually bear fruit in the most penetrating of his murder essays, in which he showed how certain killers, craving an intoxication they could experience in no other way, murdered over and over again precisely in order to intensify an existence which would otherwise have seemed to them insipid.
Mrs. Probert, unable to sleep, went to the top of the stairs and, leaning over the railing, heard a sound like that of papers being rustled on a table and burnt in a fire. The conversation was all in whispers. It seemed to her that the men were trying on clothes. “I think that would fit you very well,” she heard someone say in a low voice. Another said “We’ll tell the boy there was a hare thrown on the cushion.”
After they divided the spoils, Thurtell said that they must go and fetch the body and put it in the pond near the cottage.
Probert objected. “You shall not put it in the pond,” he said. “It may ruin us.”
Thurtell said it would lie there only for a short time, until he could arrange to dispose of it more effectually. But he found the corpse ponderous and returned to the cottage. “He is too heavy,” he said. “Will you go along with me, Probert? I’ll put the bridle on my horse and fetch him.”
Mrs. Probert heard a door open and went to the window. It was, she remembered, a “very fine moonlight night.” Two shadowy forms were going toward the stable. A moment later, one of them led out a horse.
They brought the body back by way of the garden gate. Thurtell led the horse; Probert held the sack to keep it from falling off. Every murder re-enacts the eternal mystery of evil; and like the first transgression in paradise, the re-enactment gains in power if there is a woman in it, a garden, and a snake or two. Mrs. Probert “heard something dragged, as it seemed, very heavily.” She went to the window and saw them taking the sack through the garden to the pond. She lost sight of them; but after an interval she heard “a hollow noise, like a heap of stones being thrown into a pit.”+
* Hunt suspected that Thurtell and Probert misled him concerning the amount of money found on Weare’s body in order that they might divide a larger sum between themselves. It is very likely that they did “well it” at Hunt’s expense; but no proof of the deception has survived.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Deeper Abyss
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than in the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. . . .
—Shakespeare
A little after six o’clock the next morning, John Harrington, a laboring man, and his partner were at work in Gill’s Hill Lane, engaged in widening the road. Two men passed by them, a tall one and a short one. They went down the lane and stopped not far from a maple tree. Harrington watched as they
“grabbled in the hedge.”
When they came back up the lane, the tall man spoke to Harrington’s partner. “Are you going to widen this lane?” he asked.
“Yes, as wide as we can.”
“I was nearly capsized here last night.”
“I hope you were not hurt.”
“Oh, no, we were not thrown out.”
The two men went on their way, and Harrington and his partner resumed their work. When, afterwards, Harrington went over to the place where the men had grabbled, he found a hole in the hedge and a quantity of blood. Something in the cart-rut caught his eye. It was a knife. It had two blades, one of which was broken, and it was covered with blood.
When Mr. Nicholls of Battlers Green came up the lane, Harrington showed him the knife. They searched among the brambles, and Harrington found a pistol. There was clotted gore on it, in which some hairs had become stuck.
Susan the cook was on her way to the kitchen to get breakfast ready when she met Thurtell and Hunt coming up the steps from the garden. Their boots were dirty.
After breakfast, the roan gray was harnessed to the gig, and Probert brought out Weare’s carpetbag, backgammon box, and gun. Thurtell said he would come down the next day to dispose of the body for good. He and Hunt drove off, and Probert went for a walk with his dog, intent on retrieving the knife and pistol. But the presence of Harrington and his partner, who were still at work on the road, disconcerted him. He wished them good morning and said it was a good job they were doing, before he turned around and went back to the cottage.
Thurtell got out of the gig in Oxford Street, fearful lest he should meet Upson, the Bow Street officer who had a warrant against him for defrauding the County Fire Office. He made his way by back streets to the Coach and Horses. Hunt drove on to his lodgings in King Street, Golden Square, where he hid Thurtell’s greatcoat under the bed, for although it had been copiously sponged, it was still “a great deal stained with blood.” He then returned the horse and gig and walked to Conduit Street, where he met Thurtell. Together they went to an ironmonger’s in Warwick Street to purchase a spade. Afterwards, they dined in the Coach and Horses; Hunt, in high spirits, told the company that he and Jack had been netting game, and had left Probert holding the bag. “We Turpin lads,” he said, “can do the trick.”*
On Sunday morning, Thurtell and Hunt drove back to Probert’s cottage. Hunt took out the spade and threw it over the hedge to conceal it. When Probert came out, Hunt asked him whether there was a room in which he could change his clothes. Probert showed him to a room upstairs, and a little later Hunt came down dressed in a black coat and waistcoat. Thurtell smiled and told Hunt that he looked very smart, quite like a Turpin. He then jested that Probert “would never do for a Turpin.”
Probert and Thurtell went down to the garden and the pond. Thurtell asked whether the body had risen. Probert said no—it would lie there for a month. When they returned to the house, they found a neighbor, Mr. Heward, at the door. He was on his way to Mr. Nicholls’s farm at Battlers Green; there was a rumor afoot that something had happened in Gill’s Hill Lane the other night. Probert went down with him to Battlers Green.
* Dick Turpin, poacher, thief, highwayman, and murderer, was hanged on the gallows at Knavesmire, York, in April 1739.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Turpin Lads
It had been good for that man if he had not been born.
Matthew 26:24
They were now doomed; the deed could not be undone. When Probert returned from Battlers Green, he took Hunt into the garden and told him of Mr. Nicholls’s saying to him that a gun had been fired in Gill’s Hill Lane on Friday night. Another farmer said he had heard pistol shots, while still another heard groans and a man crying out “O John, for God’s sake, spare me. . . .” Such was his fright, Probert said, that his hand began to tremble, and he was afraid he would drop the glass of gin-and-water Mr. Nicholls had given him; but he concealed his agitation and asked Mr. Nicholls what time the shots had been heard.
“About eight o’clock.”
“I suppose some of your friends wanted to frighten you, sir.”
When Thurtell came into the garden, Probert repeated the story.
“Then I’m baked,” Thurtell said.
“I’m afraid it’s a bad job,” Probert continued, “for Nicholls seems to know all about it. I am very sorry it ever happened here. I’m afraid it will be my ruin.”
“Never mind,” Thurtell said, “they can do nothing with you.”
“The body must be immediately taken up from my pond, John.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do—when they are all gone to bed, you and I’ll take and bury him.”
Probert shook his head, saying it would be “bad if they buried him in the garden.”
“I’ll bury him where you nor no one else can find him.”
“Probert,” Hunt said, “they can do nothing with you, or me either, because neither of us was at the murder.”
They dined in Probert’s cottage and afterwards played whist; but the game ended when Thurtell threw up his cards, saying they ran cross. He sat up late with Hunt, and when the house was quiet they went out to dig the grave. They began to shovel the dirt with the spade, but the work was hard, and the barking of the dogs unnerved them. It seemed to them that someone was lurking nearby, observing.
The next morning—it was Monday, October 27—Jack showed Probert the grave he had begun to dig. He confessed that he had second thoughts about the wisdom of burying the body, and was inclined instead to take it away and dispose of it elsewhere. He might, for instance, take it to Manchester Buildings, and when the opportunity arose throw it into the Thames. If the corpse should float on the river, it would, he reasoned, be so changed as to be unrecognizable.
Probert expressed a fear that the boy Addis had seen too much. Thurtell said he would take him to London on the pretext of finding him a “place”—a job—there. He and Joe would then come back to Radlett and take the body away. “That,” he said, “will be the better for you altogether.”
The boy Addis was duly taken to London, and in the evening Thurtell and Hunt, who had shaved off his whiskers, returned to the cottage for the last time. Probert was in a frenzy. There were ominous reports in the neighborhood, and he wanted to abandon the cottage altogether.
When supper was finished, Thurtell and Probert went out, leaving Hunt to entertain Mrs. Probert. They drew the sack from the pond and took out the body. After they cut away the clothes, they left the body naked on the greensward and went to fetch Hunt. When they had put the body back into the sack, they dragged it to the garden gate and put it into the gig. Thurtell and Hunt climbed in and drove off; Probert burned the clothes and scattered the remnants about the hedges.
On the same night that Thurtell and Hunt threw Weare’s body into the brook at Elstree, Sir Walter Scott was at Abbotsford, his estate near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, looking forward to the feast he and Lady Scott were to give their tenants and retainers on the morrow, in thanksgiving for the harvest.
Sir Walter was fifty-two in October 1823. In two decades of literary toil, he had changed the face of Gothic romance. Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe had set their romances in imaginary Italies; Scott wrote about places he knew intimately. As a young lawyer he had ridden out to the wilder districts of the Scottish Borders, hoping “to pick up some of the ancient riding ballads” which were said to be still preserved in those remote regions. Saul, seeking asses, found a kingdom; Scott, hunting up old songs in shepherds’ huts, found the materials for a literary empire. In his “raids,” as he called them, into the unfrequented recesses of the Borders, he gathered up a rich plunder of minstrelsy and balladry, myth and folklore, the forgotten music of a people. In 1802, at thirty-one, he brought out his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which contained the first fruits of his excursions into Auld Scotland. Three years later, in 1805, he published a verse romance, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based loosely on Border legen
ds of a pernicious goblin; in 1814 came the first of his prose-romances, Waverley.
The interest of a romance, Scott said, “turns upon marvelous or uncommon incidents.” The trick lay in making what is marvelous and uncommon credible to the reader. Scott’s closeness to the sources of his material gave his tales of the marvelous a plausibility unrivaled by the other romancers of the age and made him famous. For it was an age hungry for credible romance. Life was everywhere becoming less musical and more mechanical, and Scott’s fantasies filled the vacuum of ennui that opened up, in respectable English households, between dinner and tea-time.
He supplied, too, just the right touch of erotic horror in his books. His picture of Lucy Ashton, in The Bride of Lammermoor, crouching, on her wedding night, in torn and bloody night-clothes, anticipates the gore and lewdness of the Hollywood horror movie; but in deference to the taste of the age, Scott was less explicit, in carnal and country matters, than the artists of our own unlaced days are apt to be. The Bride of Lammermoor is probably Scott’s most effective Gothic romance; but like all his work, it is prosey and artificially heightened. His image of Lucy as an “exulting demoniac,” gibbering in a “wild paroxysm of insanity,” paints not half so lurid a picture in the mind as the loin of pork in Probert’s cottage.
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