Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  The same inquest witnesses were dragged in but there were a few new faces. There was a doctor sent down by the London Home Office (that’s like our Justice Department, I think). Templer continued to represent Lee and continued making a lousy job of it. Reporters also recorded in a special edition of the Torquay papers that Colonel Brownlow turned up and sat on the top bench to see his former servant get a further dose of justice. Isadore Carter, a well known Torquay lawyer and a close friend of Miss Keyse, took on the prosecution case. He had been seen in the early morning of the day of the murder, poking around the smoking ruins of the Glen.

  That doctor from the Home Office gave a lot of muzzy evidence about bloodstains but he was a disappointment to the prosecution. What I think hurt Lee the most was Lizzie’s reappearance on the final day of the hearings. This time Lee got to be present during her evidence. She was still not dressed in mourning clothes for her mistress. Lee stared at her steadily the whole time but apparently she never looked towards him. The papers set down what happened word for word. Lizzie said in evidence, “I had conversation with John Lee. We were talking and reading in the kitchen. I said, ‘I suppose Miss Keyse won’t give you a character?’ He said if she wouldn’t give him a character he would level the place to ashes to the ground. I said, ‘Don’t burn me with it’.”

  Lee apparently waved to speak at that point but was ignored. Lizzie went on, “When Gasking called Lee to help shift the body he had to call him several times because he did not want to go near. He said once that he would set fire to the house and go to the top of Walls Hill and watch it burn.”

  The papers say Lee scribbled notes and passed them to Templer, who in turn tried weakly to speak up for him but they let Lizzie churn on.

  “He called her ‘the old woman’, he did,” she said. Carter asked when Lee talked about burning the Glen down.

  “Two months ago,” Lizzie continued. “He said once about murder. He said two should never be concerned in a murder because one—”Templer objected again and this time she halted, only shrugging when she was asked if she had more to say.

  “Why have you not told all this before?”

  “I tried to screen him,” she muttered.

  “Were you woken or called by anyone that Saturday morning?”

  “No. I am certain there was no sound of anything but the wind of the storm. I lay awake for a minute before I noticed the smell of burning.”

  “And when you found the place on fire did you think of anything that Lee had said occur to your mind?”

  “Not then but afterwards it did.” Then she bent forward in the witness box and began to cry silently. That was that, it must have hit Lee real hard. The papers say he just sat and stared at her.

  That prosecutor, Mr Carter, seemed in control of the court room compared to the unsteady Templer. It seems he had been a buddy of Miss Keyse and was real keen on getting Lee hung. He told the court he thought Miss Keyse went to bed on the fatal night then was roused by something and came downstairs and was attacked by an evil person who smashed her head with two terrible blows then cut her throat. Then he pointed to Lee and said that the man who did this to the poor lady sits before you there.

  Lee wasn’t just giving his sister the stink-eye for saying bad things about him. I think she really destroyed him at that moment. Seems like he totally gave up after he realized she had fixed on making him take the blame for it all.

  Spool Three

  Found Drowned

  Torquay, November 1884

  —Oh, it’s hard now to untangle all those trials I went through. I was like a rock washed by a bitter sea. At times it didn’t seem to be me there surrounded by all those faces. The real John Lee had escaped to another place.

  There was such relief to get back to the cells. I’d lie on my bed, listening to the carriages going down Market Street and farther off the fog horn sounding at the harbor. Life would be a-calling me. I’d listen to the hawkers cry out from the arches of the market next door. “Shoe black, shoe black, papers, papers, chestnuts, penny a score, russets fine, russets, be in time, be in time.” I can still seem to hear those voices. It’s just like where I am now in this bedroom. The real world moves on outside, all uncaring, going about its business, while a soul struggles for breath.

  Doctor Kaiser: There was no appeal or way of telling your side?

  —Templer came to my cell with his usual false friendliness, spilling out weak promises, saying that I would have my day in court and all would be set right. I’d stopped believing in it by then. No-one had asked me how it all happened from start to finish. Templer told me I was to go to Exeter Prison to appear at the January Assizes at Exeter Castle. It was to be a capital case, he said, I didn’t realize what that meant at the time. He seemed stranger then than ever, always twisting his head about as if he imagined someone was listening to him. It was he who told me about Mary Ann Fey, how after her being missing for weeks after the death of her sister until she herself was found dead, washed up on Portland across the bay. That piece of news seemed like another doom-heavy stone being piled up on me. The poor mazy finch, in a way she was just one more person cursed by that Harrington.

  All Dead Now

  I’ve seen on the Discovery Channel about what it’s like deep on the ocean floor. It snows white stuff there perpetually. That white crud is made up of bits of dead fish, silica, fragments of tsunami victims, filaments of every sort of thing dropped into the sea. It all rains down forever in the deepest sea to form a vast layer of ooze on the ocean bottom. Seven Mile Fair in Caledonia was a bit like that oozy ocean bed. Admission was $2. You could get most anything cheap: chickens, cowboy hats, mall ninja gear, T shirts with ‘Bitch, I’m from Milwaukee!’ printed on them. It was kind of a flea mart and swap meet combined. I went there a while back. A smell of Mexican food hung over the place from the burrito stands. I went there looking for inspiration, stuff the dead have abandoned: grimy VHS video boxes, old melted Avon lipstick, 1950s Air Force surplus jackets. It seems as if I had forgotten for a moment how dangerous it is to pick around in those junk fields. There was a dude with a rusty pick up who had spread his goods out on a tarp. He was offering compilations of black- and- white risqué photos from the Twenties and Thirties of the last century. I stopped to look closer.

  “All them gals are dead now, man, all dead I guess,” he said. It wasn’t much of a sales pitch. Maybe he said it out of some weird gallantry, a protectiveness to the heavy-thighed beauties posing and arching on his pics. What he said did perversely attract me. I wanted to look into their faces and possess them. I wanted them gals to tell me what it’s all about. They’d faced up to the mystery and they did not look unhappy. Did they still live somehow? I’m a transcendence hound sniffing after survival beyond the grave. I even bought a few photos off the guy without haggling, I wanted to hold on to their dead faces. I had a thought then—maybe I would take a pitch next to those minorities guys selling counterfeit schlock, MBA jerseys and Nike shoes. I thought I could dump that old cardboard container and the Webster and its boxes of wires and throw the whole lot back into the flow of discarded objects. Flip them back into the Sargasso and free myself. Let someone else deal with Lee’s crud. It’s good to let a thought out even if you don’t actually act on it. By some weird connection I had the idea of contacting a medium while driving back from Seven Mile Fair. Yeah, a psychic medium. I didn’t know why I had never thought of it before. I thought that it would be a new angle on the things that were bugging me. It didn’t take long to find one, just saw the listings on Yelp and picked the nearest from the directory. She was called Mulvina Schott. She called herself by the tag line of ‘The Happy Medium’. I got her on the phone after a few tries. She had a nice voice.

  “What do you want from a medium?” she asked.

  “I want to find a way to live with those that have passed,” I replied.

  She said she used psychometry and asked me to bring an object she could read. I thought at first I’d bring one of those r
ed and yellow wire recorder boxes then I had a better idea.

  Spool Three

  The sentence

  Exeter Assizes, February 1885

  —Judge Manisty put on his black cap. He had seemed a kindly old cove until he did that. All through the trial he asked me questions in a mild tone. Then he ended by saying something altogether more dreadful. He called out my name, John—Henry—Lee, and said that the sentence of the court was that I would be taken hence to the prison where I was last confined. And then he went on about how I’d be taken to a place of execution and hanged by the neck ’til dead. What a crinkle-crankle road had taken me to that pass. The old sprout then wished that the Lord have mercy on my soul. Ah, my soul, what was that? Ma would say, “the eyes be the window of the zaul”.

  I fixed on not showing I was frit, I was going to outstare the whole lot of ’em. That’s why after the old todger had squawked out the death sentence. I leaned on the rails of the box and said to him that the reason I was so calm was because I trusted in the Lord who knew I was innocent. There was something about what I said that upset the judge. He gave a bit of a speech after the sentence and kept saying “I am surprised to see you so calm” but he went on to say that he had no doubt about my guilt. No one else had much doubt either it seems. That’s why I could hardly pay attention to the whole nonsense.

  Doctor Kaiser: You thought your innocence would be proven in some way before it was too late?

  —I didn’t really have thoughts like that. I don’t think you have them as a young ’un. Only feelings. You live with jumbled-up feelings. The whole trial went past like a dream. They’d let me stew in Exeter all Kirzmas and New Year then they dragged me out for the rattling speedy affair. It took two days—a Monday and a Tuesday—with summing up and sentence by Wednesday lunchtime. There was a tremendous congregation to see all come to pass. There was Hacker the coroner on the front benches, stroking his pointy beard, coming to see his work all capped off. Indeed there were many familiar faces in that court room. Poor Ma was there in black, toiling though the crowds, arguing at the gate to be let in. That beadle Whitehead, the brother, came to see justice done and I saw Colonel Brownlow and his ’andsum Cuban wife. Katie didn’t attend, thank heaven. It would have been so hard for her to have to listen to our letters being read out again in public. They say tickets for entry were hard to get and much money was made by the court staff. They struggled to move me at all such was the crush and the great crowds waiting to see me. They sent a big old Black Maria drawn by four horses as a trick and the crowds followed that while I came in to court with Governor Cowtan by the back door in a hansom. We were so close to the streets on that journey I could sniff the free air for a moment. How it had rained, but it didn’t put off the crowds, all promenading in their Sunday-gone-to-meeting clothes to see me condemned.

  Those things that were once part of my life were shown again: shirt, trousers, socks, weeding knife, oil can and that damned axe. Much was again made of those things. They were passed hand to hand and held up for all to see. The witnesses they kept in a back part and I did not see them until they stepped out to play their parts. I was kept cooped in a holding cell below the dock then rising up suddenly like a jack-in-the-box into that sea of faces and the legal men in their white wigs. What a great crowd of witnesses was gathered about to see justice done, while the press men scratched away on their pads.

  What a tayjisness it seemed. I was sick of the whole thing and wanted it done with. The story was the same, told thrice now. The same things brought up: blood blacker than ink, oil fumes, smoke-stained secrets, the old knife and the notched hatchet dragged out again and passed around. The same witnesses: the custom men, postman Richards, Dr Stevenson mumbling into his great beard, the Necks and that peddle-backed Gaskin. Chilcote who would not accept hatchet or knife was replaced by his little rival, the terrier, Dr Steele. The same opinions were trotted out but not attacked by my defense. I now had that young strapper Charles Templer, brother to soapy Reggie. A busy fool, he had come to see me on the Saturday before the trial saying that his brother had been taken ill and had to be replaced. I asked how ill he was and he told me he had gone to a place in Surrey in order to improve his health. I wondered what had ailed him? You had to be mortal sick to be sent to Surrey. I wondered what soapy Reggie had caught by his black doings.

  Doctor Kaiser: Let me understand. Your defense lawyer got sick?

  —Ess, I told you he was taken to a whatsit, a santarium.

  Doctor Kaiser: What was wrong with him?

  —I never knew. He alles seemed strange. Skin damp as a fish and he had the shakes something proper. Templer’s brother was little better at the legal work than him. He had a breezy air born of nothing. He was vulishly keen and his only advice to me was not to say anything. He said we would get me off alright. By “we” he meant he and St Aubyn the same bearded, waxy-faced legal who had supposedly proved me guilty in my first sentence in the Brownlow case and who now had changed places and was acting this time for my defense.

  Doctor Kaiser: Your representation certainly seems very strange. You say that the man defending you had prosecuted you in the past?

  —You’re beginning to understand, doctor what a world of trouble I was in. St Aubyn was high gentry in Cornwall, they said, and a parliament man. I well remembered him as the cause of me getting a long sentence at my first appearance in court. Maybe it was then that I first began to find a strange peace settling on me, I thought I’d just let it all happen as God willed. They say that the witnesses had travelled up on a special train together all prodded along by Sergeant Nott. Lizzie was among them. She was now seven months on, walking with a straddle gait. She had that air of knowing a secret that all women with child seem to have. She held a life within her that would go on beyond her. The lawyers kept saying that she was “unsaint”. I had no idea what they were talking about until Charles Templer explained that it was French legal talk for being with child. It was then that I gave my only instruction to my defense lawyers. I asked that Lizzie should not be questioned in court about the babby she was carrying.

  Lizzie stepped up as the chief witness, repeating her stories about my supposed threats. Richards followed her and also gave damning evidence about those careless words I told him in October. Sergeant Nott spent two hours on the stand detailing the evidence against me in every particular. In all of this there were no questions from St Aubyn. When I asked about this he answered that I should wait for his defense speech.

  Defense? I had none for my case was in the hands of my enemies. There were some who could have saved me but they were not present. I kept looking around the court to see if Harrington was there or maybe out somewhere in that pressing crowd waiting for tickets under the arches in the Rougemont courtyard. Harrington’s shadow had dogged me for so long it was strange that he was no longer there. After all, he was the only person who really knew what I was about. Now I felt dazed and dozy. I would sometimes look up to see my mother’s black outline in the court gallery, aware of her eyes on me. I had taken from her example my cool scorn for all this vulishness. The press thought I was mad. Templer showed me a piece from the paper which said something about me having strange eyes like the ones you get in madhouses. Templer and St Aubyn certainly spoke to me as if I was an idiot, a gawking vul. Ma was what they called a scryer, she could read what moved on the surface of water and she understood dreams. That was not madness. That court was all a dream to me, a dream foretold. Those arrangements that bundled me along could be seen in that prophecy from the Ladywell so long ago. My name was always going to be on the lips of all in the country. No longer John Lee but ‘Babbacombe Lee’, forever. That was why I seemed so strange to them.

  At the end of it all St Aubyn, once my enemy, now my so-called defender rose, adjusted his gown, and turned his great blind face to the jury and tried to block some of the bad things they had heaped against me. I barely listened I must confess, although I was angry when he dragged Lizzie’s name into it
and said more about her than I wanted to hear. I had told him to leave Lizzie out of it. He went on that there was doubt and when there was doubt the jury should not convict. Well, I could see on the faces of those Exeter rascals that they had no doubts at all. The old crabbit Judge Manisty came back from an adjournment to make his summing up. He cast his mild eye over me then stamped all over my defense saying that it was very far-fetched, very far-fetched indeed. He told the jury to weigh the facts—I could see how weighed up they were on their fat faces. I was led downstairs to the cupboard cell under the court. I heard the hum of a hundred conversations, the drumming of feet and scraping of chairs as the court cleared. Then silence and my breathing, guts rumbling, my brain a-scurrying. I lived in a new sort of time, an enemy time where hope was crushed out and nothing moved to a betterment. The account says that the jury was out for half an hour but for me it could have been half a day. Then came the thudding of returning feet, a key turned in the lock and I went up the steep steps into the noise of the crowd, knowing already what was going be said and done.