Blackberry and Wild Rose

by Sonia Velton

  The people in the court rose as the judge walked in. Black-robed and stern, he was wearing a wig bigger than anyone else’s. He took his place under the pointing sword and looked out to the jury before him, seated around a large table draped in green cloth as if they might be about to play cards.

  There was murmuring and nodding as the clerk scurried between the judge and the jury foreman. The rustling from the gallery above and behind me grew less, then stopped altogether, as a door at the opposite end of the courtroom opened.

  Bisby Lambert and John Barnstaple were led out of a passage connecting the Old Bailey to Newgate. They followed the clerk to the dock. The clerk nodded to Bisby and he mounted the wooden steps to a raised platform in front of the judge and jury. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of him. Newgate had stripped the fat from his body and the color from his cheeks. He stood proudly in the dock, but the drag of his chains hunched him like an old man. A sounding board supported by a wooden structure hung over his head. Something about its sparse timber frame made it appear as if he already stood under the Tyburn Tree. The clerk tilted a mirror, mounted opposite the dock, so that the sunlight flooding in from the floor-to-ceiling windows at either side of the judge was reflected into his face. Illuminating the features of the accused is meant to shed light on the truth, allowing judge and jury to see every facial expression the prisoner makes as the evidence unfolds. It made Bisby squint as he pulled at his chains, trying to shield his eyes.

  The clerk asked him to state his name.

  “Bisby Lambert.”

  His voice was amplified strangely by the sounding board, as if he was a ventriloquist projecting his voice onto an image of himself.

  The clerk read the charges: “One, that you did assemble together with others in the night armed with pistols and cutlasses; two, that you did enter into the dwelling house of Mr. Elias Thorel, master weaver, and did put his household in fear of their lives; three, that you did feloniously and maliciously cut and destroy a quantity of fine brocaded silk from Mr. Thorel’s loom. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty.” Bisby’s voice had a rough edge to it, a shadow of something behind his words that I had not heard before.

  “Do you have a lawyer?” asked the clerk.

  “No.” He spoke the word with some of his old strength, then paused for a moment. “I will let the truth speak for me.” The journeymen ranged around the gallery broke into whoops and cheers.

  The clerk called for order and the judge stared sternly at them as if they were errant children. “So be it, then,” he said.

  Next came John Barnstaple, sauntering into the dock to hear the same charges read against him. His plea of not guilty was almost incredulous, as if he had never heard such nonsense in his life. The judge nodded. “It is now for Mr. Thorel to make his case,” he said.

  Elias leaped to his feet, straightening his waistcoat and running a hand over his newly trimmed beard before he took his place in front of the judge and jury.

  “My lord, good gentlemen of the jury,” he said, with a bow to each. “You have heard the charges. That night, a great crime was committed against me and against right-thinking men everywhere. A crime that the King, in his wisdom, has deemed punishable by death. And rightly so. What—I beg you to consider—would happen to our country if the working man were allowed to run riot without censure, as these men did that night? What if journeymen were allowed to form organizations purely to force change to their working conditions on their masters?”

  A couple of the jurymen started to nod. Above and around me the gallery felt like a malevolent presence, a black cloud threatening thunder.

  “I will tell you,” said Elias. “Anarchy, that is what. The kind of anarchy that spilled like sewage through the streets of London toward my home. Gentlemen, my silk is my life. To cut the silk from my looms is to cut the heart from my chest. The law has deemed silk cutting so serious that it is a hanging offense.” Elias raised his finger and pointed it deliberately toward Bisby and Barnstaple. “These two men were arrested in my garret with my silk lying cut at their feet. Each claims not to have cut the silk and it is for you, gentlemen, to determine whether this can possibly be true.”

  There is optimism at the start of a trial, a sense that there is still hope. The charges sounded alien in my ears as I looked upon a man whose integrity I had experienced in the most visceral of ways. I did not fear for him then. I believed in the truth, in the rule of law and in the absolute certainty of justice.

  The clerk called Bisby back into the dock. As he went up the steps, he started to cough, and once he had started, he couldn’t stop.

  36

  Sara

  Jail fever.

  That was what all the coughing and spluttering was about. The judge reached for his nosegay and clutched it to his face so that he could breathe its protective scent, rather than the contamination from the court below. Everyone else had to make do with breathing into their sleeves.

  It was hardly surprising. He was so altered that, had I seen him on a street corner, I would have tossed him a ha’penny and not given him a second thought. I pulled my baby closer, worried that those foul vapors might float up to the gallery. In the seats below, I saw Madam turn her face toward the sound of Bisby’s racking cough, almost reluctantly as if she feared what she might see. Her own skin seemed to blanch in sympathy. Stricken by each other now, when once they had been enchanted.

  The court was a somber place, as if we were all halfway to the gallows already. Black curtains were ruched over the top of huge windows to each side of the judge’s chair, staring blankly down to the jury below. What chance did the working man stand before these men? They were merchants, constables, and surgeons. What did they know of empty bellies and the sting of an icy floor on shoeless feet? I saw one catch the master’s eye and nod a fleeting acknowledgment. Had they laughed together in a coffee shop somewhere? It hardly mattered. They looked at Elias Thorel and saw themselves reflected. The master puffed and preened, readying himself to speak, but he had already told them all they needed to know by the cut of his jacket and the elegant curl of his fine horsehair wig.

  Bisby’s breathing returned to normal. The judge reappeared from behind his bunch of lavender.

  “What is your business?” asked Thorel.

  “Why ask?” replied Bisby. “I have worked for you since I was a boy.”

  Laughter rippled through the gallery. Someone balled up a piece of paper and threw it down into the court below with a jeer.

  “To assist the court, Mr. Lambert,” intervened the judge, “please state your business.”

  “Journeyman silk weaver, my lord.”

  The judge sat back in his chair and nodded at Thorel, who stepped forward again and said, “Mr. Lambert, look upon the other prisoner.”

  Bisby dropped his gaze to John Barnstaple sitting below him. Newgate had been kinder to him. His eyes were still bright as they regarded Bisby in the dock. No doubt a shilling in the right pocket had seen to that.

  “Is this man known to you?”

  “Yes. I shared lodgings with him in one of the weavers’ cottages next to Buttermilk Alley and we both worked our looms there in the garret.”

  “And you were part of the same combination, were you not?” stated Elias.

  The judge removed his spectacles from his nose. “Combination, Mr. Thorel?”

  “Yes, my lord. It is the name for the illegal groups the journeymen formed. It is my case that both the prisoners were part of such a group.”

  The judge nodded. “Answer the question, Mr. Lambert.”

  “I was not part of any combination, my lord. I’ll own that they exist, and one even met sometimes at Buttermilk Alley, but I wanted no part of it.”

  “Did you not sympathize with the weavers’ plight?” asked Thorel, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  “Of cour
se, but Barnstaple is a plain weaver and I weave figured silk. Each branch of the industry formed its own combination. But even if their combination had all been figured silk weavers, I would not have joined them. I supported other ways to protect the journeymen’s wages, like an Act of Parliament to set the piece rate for the silk.” There were boos and mocking jeers from the gallery. Bisby ignored them. “I never condoned or encouraged violence. Never.”

  “Violence? So you admit that the combinations are violent?”

  “Too right we are,” shouted someone from the back of the gallery.

  “They met at your lodgings,” persisted Thorel. “Surely you knew what they were about.”

  Bisby shifted in the dock. His chains made a dull clanking sound, as if he were a ghostly apparition. “I told you,” he said, “I wanted no part of it.”

  Thorel gave him a sly smile. “But you were part of it, Mr. Lambert, weren’t you? How else do you explain that the King’s men found you up in my garret with a roll of cut silk at your feet?”

  “Perhaps,” interjected the judge, “you should take the court through exactly what happened on the night of …” he rustled his papers until the clerk whispered in his ear, “… ah, yes, the twenty-first night of February, 1769?”

  The eve of my daughter’s birth. The night that gave her life but could mean the end of her father’s. The baby began to cry, a persistent wail that earned me hard stares and tuts. I scooped her up and carried her away.

  Esther

  “I had been at ten Spital Square,” began Bisby.

  “Tell the court what you were doing there,” insisted Elias. He wanted the jury to be fully aware of his patronage.

  Bisby nodded, happy to acknowledge his master’s benevolence. “Mr. Thorel had been allowing me to use his drawloom to weave a figured silk. When it was finished, I was hoping to use it to apply to the Weavers’ Company to become a master. With Mr. Thorel’s support.”

  “Why not use one of the silks you were weaving at Buttermilk Alley?” asked the judge.

  “My master piece had to be a work of great technical skill. There are so many mercers buying silk imported from abroad that demand for really complex figured silk has dropped. I was having trouble finding a commission that would show the necessary level of weaving skill. Mr. Thorel suggested that I weave the right kind of silk in my own time. He was sure that once the silk was finished, he would have no difficulty selling it. He let me use his spare drawloom.”

  “‘Spare drawloom’? You mean the loom in my home that my family has used for generations?” It was almost as if Elias had forgotten he was in a courtroom. The way he rounded on Bisby was as if he had accosted him in a tavern, drunk on ale and bravado. “And I commissioned the design for this silk myself, didn’t I, Mr. Lambert?”

  “You did, sir.”

  “And I bought the silk thread?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I allowed you into my home?” There was the faintest break in Elias’ voice, perceptible only to those who knew him.

  But Bisby noticed it. I was certain that it was the hurt in Elias’ voice rather than the question that muted him. He just nodded, never taking his eyes from Elias’.

  “You must say yes or no,” said the judge.

  “Yes. Mr. Thorel did allow me into his home.”

  “And I was going to pay the fee to the Weavers’ Company for you, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, but you would also then have had a fine figured silk to sell, woven for you for nothing. That was the agreement we had.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Elias. “That was our agreement, but you betrayed me, didn’t you?”

  I tensed, bracing against the humiliation that was to follow. My jabot seemed to stick to my neck and I felt apprehension prickle under my arms. Did Elias want revenge so much that he was prepared to parade my misdemeanors before a courtroom of people?

  “That afternoon, when I came to see how you were getting on, I saw that you had not finished your master piece. In fact, you had made hardly any progress at all, had you?”

  If words are weapons, then silence is defense. Bisby said nothing, building a wall of words unsaid.

  “We argued about that, didn’t we?” Elias insisted.

  It was a risk. Bisby might easily have shamed me, decided that in the moral balance his reputation would weigh more than mine. He could have told the court that there was more to this argument than simply the misbehavior of an idle journeyman. But he left the accusation unchallenged.

  “Words were exchanged, and I told you to leave my house, did I not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell the court what happened after that,” said the judge.

  “When I returned to Buttermilk Alley, Barnstaple was talking to a few of the journeyman weavers there. They had weapons. I asked one of the weavers what was going on and he said he’d spent all day at the Eight Bells waiting for Mr. Thorel to pay his contribution to the combination. He’d been given a week, you see, to pay. Now that the week had run out, the men wanted to take matters into their own hands.”

  “Take matters into their own hands? What do you mean by that?” asked the judge.

  Bisby looked uncomfortable. He glanced at Barnstaple, who was staring fixedly ahead of him, seemingly more interested in the splendor of the court than anything Bisby had to say. Bisby took a deep breath and went on: “I’d been trying to contain them for months, but that night the weavers were like a pot boiling over. More and more appeared. Word spread around Spitalfields that Thorel’s time was up and he hadn’t paid. It was like a fire catching hold and, all the while, Barnstaple was fanning the flames.”

  A slow smile spread over Barnstaple’s face, but he didn’t shift his gaze from the middle distance. Elias stepped toward Bisby and said, “But where were you, Mr. Lambert, when all this was happening? Right in the middle of it, I presume.”

  “But that’s where I lived.” The protest strained his voice and he started to cough again. The court seemed to shrink back. “How could I leave? I had been turned out of Spital Square and it was snowing outside. I had no choice.”

  The judge took his spectacles from his nose and rubbed at his forehead. Once he had replaced them, he peered at Bisby and said, “Yes, Mr. Lambert, the court is clear on that, but it does not explain how you came to be back at Spital Square in the thick of the riot.”

  Bisby nodded, as if acknowledging that he would have to say more. “It was because of the Thorels’ lady’s maid. She appeared at Buttermilk Alley, tearful and panting, as if she had run all the way there. Buttermilk Alley was no place for a woman then. There were pistols and cutlasses on the table. She seemed shocked by what was going on. I was worried about her. It was clear she was with child. She became agitated, as if she was having some sort of turn, and rushed outside. I followed her out in time to see her faint. She’d have fallen right onto the freezing street, if I hadn’t caught her.”

  “Quite the hero, then, Mr. Lambert,” drawled Elias. Some of the jurors smirked and exchanged glances. Distaste curdled in my stomach. As if it were not enough that Bisby stood there in chains, Elias had to ridicule him as well.

  “It was what anyone would have done,” said Bisby, evenly.

  “Perhaps,” said Elias, “if indeed that’s what you did. But you still have not told us how you went from saving ladies in fainting fits to standing in my garret with a cutlass in your hand.”

  “The girl needed help. I could see that her baby was coming even though she told me it was too early. Mrs. Thorel is a kind and God-fearing woman. I knew she would not turn her back on her maid at such a time.”

  “So you took her back to Spital Square?” said the judge.

  “Yes, my lord. I walked with her as far as the entrance to the square and then she left me and stumbled toward the Thorels’ house. Someone must have seen her approaching, as the scullery maid rushed o
ut and took her in. That’s when I should have left, and I wish to God that I had. Journeymen had already gathered in the square and lit a bonfire. There were chairs and all sorts being burned, looted from houses along the way. Windows were being smashed. Even honest folk who had nothing to do with the weavers’ plight were in fear that night. I could see that matters were out of hand and I wanted no part of it, but then I spotted my nephew, Ives, on Barnstaple’s shoulders near the fire. He had a pistol in his hand and was waving it about as if it were a flag. Who in their right mind would give a flintlock to a child? Ives tried to fire it into the sky, but it misfired. Good God, when I saw him peer into the barrel, I thought he was going to blow his own head off. I ran over and pulled it away from his face.”

  “Would you describe the men as riotous in disposition?” asked the judge.

  “Very, my lord.”

  “But even then, you did not leave?”

  “How could I leave any child alone among a riot, let alone my own flesh and blood? My sister died of consumption not two years past. The only thing she ever asked of me was to look after her boy. Barnstaple had some kind of hold over Ives, I don’t know why. It was as if Ives wanted to impress him, so I begged Barnstaple to send the boy home, thinking Ives would listen to him, but he refused. Then I saw someone smash a window at ten Spital Square. For a moment I clean forgot the boy as I was more worried about Mrs. Thorel. I thought she might need my help and so, when the rioters forced the shutters, I ran in after them.”

  So, he had gone into the house looking for me. A hundred times I had asked myself what had possessed him to run in there like that. Now I knew. He was trying to protect me. I should have been pleased to hear it, but instead I felt as though I had withered in my seat. He was in prison because of me, as surely as if I had gone out that night and dragged him into Spital Square myself. I could hardly bear to hear more, but I forced my attention back to Bisby.