I nodded. ‘But I can’t say that,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell them, or they will think I harmed her, and I did not. I couldn’t harm her.’
He breathed in, and out, and he was quiet for a bit and I thought he was thinking of something else to say. For the first time, I raised my head and looked at him, just a very quick glance, and he was studying my face so carefully, frowning, looking sad, as if I had disappointed him terribly and he was trying to find a way to say it.
‘Don’t tell them, then,’ he said. ‘Just say very little, and, if you need me to talk to them in your place, I will.’
I hated it, I hated the lies. Mr Verrall had asked me if I had hurt her, and I said I hadn’t, and he said he believed me, although I could see in his face that he wasn’t sure. I asked him the same question and he said he hadn’t, and I didn’t know whether I believed him or not because there she was, dead, and if she had done it herself or if someone else had done it the fact was that she was dead in the chapel and the town would think badly of us all, and the name of the chapel would be dragged into the mud and the chapel might have to close for good, and then the town would end up at the Gates of Hell and it would be our fault for not defending it against the Enemies of the Cross.
He said she had done it herself, because she was sad and unhappy, and sometimes people did that when they thought they had no other means of escaping from their troubles. But I knew that wasn’t true. I held my tongue because she wasn’t there to tell him herself, and perhaps I had been wrong, but she hadn’t been sad and unhappy, she had been afraid. Which might be the same as troubled, but I wasn’t sure. Perhaps people hurt themselves when they were afraid, and troubled; I didn’t know.
‘I wish it would stop,’ I said. ‘I wish they would all go away and leave us be.’
‘I know, son. I wish that too. We just have to get through it as best we can.’
The reverend had said the same thing. He said we just had to hold on for a little while and defend the chapel, and all would be well in the end, for the Lord was on our side and the Lord would prevail.
‘You know I have to ask you this,’ Father said.
‘What? Ask me what?’
He didn’t say anything for a minute and I thought that he couldn’t find the right words, and then I thought perhaps he felt ashamed of me or that he thought me a fool after all. Then he put his hand on my knee again.
‘Did you do it, son? Was it you that put the child in her?’
The odd thing was that I hadn’t even thought of this. And then straight away I remembered what Emma had said to me in the field, almost exactly the same thing, ‘Did you do it?’, and I’d thought that she was asking if I’d killed her, and all the time she probably hadn’t been asking that at all. She knew me, she knew I wouldn’t harm anyone, or anything, I couldn’t. So she wasn’t asking if I had killed Harriet at all, she was asking if I had put her in the family way. That was what she thought.
Frances Williams
Twenty-one girls in attendance today. A small boy called Peter Voakes fell down in the playground this morning and cut his head quite badly. It was an accident and none of the other boys was to blame. I examined the girls this morning and there has been a great improvement in reading generally. I shall be sorry to lose Lizzie Finch, as she has worked hard in helping the less able girls with their reading. Alice Harvey was absent. The excuse given was ‘indisposition’.
The boys’ room is still as full as it ever was, leaving me in no doubt that the girls are being kept away because of me. I cannot allow this to continue, but I do not know what is to be done to mend it. I hope that once the inquest is complete, and some man has been arrested and charged for Harriet’s death, all will return to normal. If that does not happen, I shall have to leave Bromley and find employment in a fresh town.
I sought permission from Mr Campling to close the girls’ room an hour early, to allow me to attend Harriet’s funeral. He snorted, and waited, perhaps for me to withdraw my request. I stared him full in the face. Damn the man, he would not see me cry. I looked down on him, resolute. Despite his violence to the boys and the shouting, he did not intimidate me, not ever.
‘Very well,’ he said, at last. ‘But the girls will be examined again at the end of the month, and I shall be taking into consideration the disruption caused by all this … this … matter.’
‘The girls have been considerably distressed by it,’ I told him. ‘Miss Monckton spent a good deal of time with them, especially the younger ones. They admired her very much.’
‘That is as may be,’ he said, ‘but the business of the school is to learn, and the girls need a moral and spiritual education more than they ever did.’
He walked off towards the boys’ entrance. Bandy-legged, funny little sort he was. In any other man I should have thought him somewhat to be pitied, but he was a good teacher, and, even if I believed his method to be rather brutal, I could not discount his forbearance in keeping me on.
The girls were noticeably quieter in the afternoon, for which I was grateful. The younger ones had been crying; one of them would start and then they’d all be off, weeping and wailing. I had to get Lizzie to take them outside to practise drills. They don’t do drills very well, they are too young, but it gave them some fresh air and something to concentrate on. The older girls didn’t quite know how to behave. They were wary, expecting a reaction from me, and I found this troubling. And I was trying to be as normal as possible, keeping my voice light, remembering to smile when such a thing was required; but my eyes were on the clock above the mantel, the slow tick tick as the afternoon dragged on into the gloom.
At half-past two, I dismissed them. They left quietly, remembering my instruction not to disturb the lesson continuing next door. Lizzie helped me to tidy the books away and thus was I able to lock the door at a quarter to three, and make my way up to the church.
There was already quite a gathering. Harriet’s mother, Mary Ann supporting her; Clara Churcher was there. Sweeting and his wife, and his eldest two daughters; the Milsteads, all of them, including Emma, who was holding her youngest sister by the hand. Reverend George Verrall, waiting stiffly in the porch with the vicar beside him, the latter in his cassock, the former in that curious robe he wears to preach in the Market Place, black silk, moving in the breeze. Behind them, Sarah Verrall, the reverend’s wife, and the younger two of their three sons. The reverend’s sister was with them, holding both the boys by the hands. All of them looked very smart and clean, and solemn. The eldest boy, Robert, was still away. Harriet had told me he had been sent for a preparatory visit to a dissenting academy in Highbury, the same one the reverend had attended.
I went to stand with Clara. She gave me a brief smile, and looked to the lychgate, where the coffin was borne through the parting crowds by Harriet’s brother, and her brother-in-law, and by Tom Churcher, and by three of the chapel deacons.
Tom looked very ill. His face was white beneath his dark beard; he looked as if he had neither eaten nor slept for a week. As the coffin approached I heard some women weeping; some of them crossed themselves. The men removed their hats and stood with their heads bowed. But beyond them, those few, far more of them were looking, whispering and judging us, those of us who stood and loved her.
I felt for Tom. He stooped to accommodate the other pallbearers, who were much shorter than he; but even so, he would not lift his head and look at anyone. Not even Emma Milstead. She had not taken her eyes from his face, and her look was difficult to discern.
We all followed the coffin inside. The church was, perhaps, a quarter full, and cold, and full of echoes. Clara, sitting next to me, took my arm and squeezed it.
The vicar gave the welcome, and then allowed Verrall to continue. I had never been to a Congregational funeral, still less one taking place within the restrictions of the parish church, but after a short while I stopped paying attention to the words anyway. I felt sick with it; being here, in this vast, cold building with statues staring down at us from every corne
r. I would not sing. I would not pray. I would sit here and count the minutes until this would be over, and I could pay my respects to her mother and go home and cry.
Reverend George Verrall
The Reverend Mr Newell, whom I have always privately despised, allowed me to conduct the funeral service according to our ways and means, remaining within the restrictions of the Anglican rituals as dictated by the Book of Common Prayer. Nevertheless, being in the parish church made me uncomfortable. The family wanted it; a compromise, of sorts. I should be grateful for Harriet’s sake that her mother at least allowed me to officiate. We could have held the service in the chapel, and conducted the coffin here for an interment. But to parade her through the streets, under the circumstances, felt imprudent.
The shame of it, of course, was that even with the situation as it was, we should have at least half-filled the chapel with mourners. Here it felt but a few, a paltry number, the family gathered in the first two pews and the rest of them scattered in the vast space so as to make it appear fuller, and in fact doing the precise opposite.
‘… happy are those who die in the Lord …’
That there should be so very few present! I would have said that Harriet was a popular girl, that she was well-liked; but here was the evidence of it. Just a small number of people here to remember her, and that number included my wife and two of my sons, and my sister, who to my knowledge had spoken to Harriet but once or twice.
‘… he will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it …’
And of all of them perhaps I should be mourning Harriet the most. I knew her better than anyone here: her mother, her sister; that sour-faced old maid Miss Williams; even Tom Churcher.
Harriet on her knees before me
you repent, do you?
do you?
the curls of hair at the nape of her neck
the bruise on her throat
‘… into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your servant …’
She never once thanked me for my attentions to her, as I recall. Never said that what I did to her was good.
not like the others
Phoebe said it was good
and Anna
Had she done so, perhaps I would have been content with her, and perhaps everything would have been different. But she spoiled it, spoiled everything.
Newell pronounced his rituals over the coffin as I looked on. In the congregation, Harriet’s sister wept.
Thomas Churcher
I thought to unravel it. That would be my salvation. The Lord had left me, I knew that for a fact, for I was sure I felt something before and I did not feel it now; the same with her. When she was in the room, there was something – a thrum in the air, like a bee in a garden, you cannot see it but you knew it was there and you knew when it had gone. Harriet had gone, and she had taken my faith with her.
My life was fine, before.
It was fine.
I always tried to be holy. I always tried to do the right thing. But sometimes Satan caught me out.
This church was not my church. This church was dry and cold, and even though I knew the voice of Mr Verrall, closing my eyes and pretending I was in the chapel did not help. The chapel was tainted and Mr Verrall was tainted and all of it, all of it felt broken and dirty and destroyed because of what had happened to Harriet. The whole town was cracking and twisting and falling into shreds, all because of her.
The coffin at the front looked too small.
And yet it had felt heavy, on my shoulder, as if weighted with rocks and not with the body I had once held against me. That time I lifted her and she was easy to lift, light, her arms around my neck, laughing and saying she was afraid I would drop her, and saying no, no, put me down and yet holding herself tightly and tucking her head under my chin. Why did it take six of us to carry her into the church, each of us burdened with the weight? It did not make sense. None of it.
I felt the warmth of someone’s eyes upon me, and I glanced to my right, and she was looking at me. Emma.
I didn’t love Emma, first off. I started walking out with her after Harriet left for London, because Joe told me I should, so I walked her home from chapel, first of all with all of them, all the Milsteads, and then later she would hang back and wait for me to pack up the music and the books, and she would walk back with me. It was nothing, just a friendship. But after some time if you had asked me, of all the girls in the town, I should have said I liked her the best. That was why one Sunday I told her I should like to come and visit her father.
She smiled at this, for she knew what I meant.
‘Would you like that, Emma?’ I asked.
‘Not this week,’ she said, lifting her chin. ‘I should like to think about it for a while.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
I almost flew home, so happy was I. It had taken hard courage to ask her even that question; how I should then summon up the further courage required to ask her father for her hand in marriage, I have no idea. But even that small thing – not this week – felt like a good thing, then, and not a dismissal. Or perhaps was playing with me, making me wait for her answer.
Of course, I did not get to ask her father the week after, because something happened. Something put my feelings for Emma in the shade, and that something was Harriet Monckton.
Frances Williams
Harriet was to be buried at the back of the churchyard, next to the place where her father had been interred some years before. There was no headstone for the father, and I doubted there would be one for Harriet. I expect none of the family could afford to have one made, although perhaps the chapel might put together some funds to help.
I doubted they would. She would be forgotten, in a very short while, by all except a very few of us: her mother, her sister; Clara, Tom, and I. And perhaps even Tom would be able to put his thoughts of Harriet aside, and make a life with Emma Milstead.
That night, how he came to my door, asking for Harriet. And at that time I was not even worried about her. She had gone to post a letter, and perhaps she had gone for a stroll, for it was a fine evening.
So, he came to my door. I forced myself to remember it. We had all been talking with Clara, laughing and joking. I was tired, and I felt ill. And Tom at the door.
‘Harriet is not here, Tom. She has gone to post a letter.’
He had wanted to come in and wait for her. Why did he want to do that? He must surely have known that I had no desire to sit there with him, waiting for Harriet to come back.
Perhaps he wished me to vouch for him? Perhaps because he knew Harriet was dead. Perhaps because he had followed her, and murdered her, and he wished me to provide him with some sort of defence.
He was stooping, now, lowering the coffin on a rope. Stephen Monckton had the other side of it, frowning at the effort. The coffin jerked, and disappeared from view. I felt myself overcome, a shuddering breath taking me almost by surprise.
Tom stepped back, stumbled a little on the turned earth, then stood with his chin on his chest, bare-headed. His dark curls moved in the breeze, as Verrall said something about the Resurrection. He looked up into the cloudy sky and then down into the grave. It is all an act, a show, a sham. Nobody says what they really think, or what they really mean. There is no honesty to it, no objective proof.
Verrall said something and the mourners began to disperse. Almost immediately I heard a woman laugh, perhaps at the relief of it, but I looked around none the less. Susannah Garn was there, all smiles, her hand tucked under the arm of Joseph Milstead, Emma’s elder brother. Tom Churcher’s best friend.
Something made me stay. I watched them all walking away. I could see the edge of the grave, the black space into which Harriet had been lowered. I forced myself to go closer, to stand at the edge.
I did not want to leave her here, all alone.
‘I’m
sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry I got things so wrong. I hope you know how much I loved you.’
There were no flowers in her grave, just a scattering of mud across the bare wood. A simple coffin, barely hammered together. The cheapest wood, the roughest nails, in a grave barely deep enough to cover her. All expense had been spared when it came to the funeral of the girl I loved.
Some movement caught my eye. To my right, half concealed by an ancient fir tree, a man was turning to leave. I recognised him from the cut of his coat, the length of his hair, curling over his collar under his black topper. It was Richard Field.
I hurried to catch up with him, lifting my skirts and tripping between the gravestones. ‘Mr Field! A moment, please!’
He stopped. Behind us, the sound of the gravedigger shovelling earth on to the coffin.
‘Miss Williams,’ he said, turning to me and lifting his hat. His eyes and his nose were pink. He had been weeping, and he did not want me to see.
‘Why did you not attend at church?’
‘Ah, but I did. I was right at the very back. Out of the way. I did pay my respects to her mother, briefly.’
‘I am sure your presence was a great comfort to her, Mr Field.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
I could not quite bring myself to smile. ‘Harriet would have been happy that you were here, I am sure.’
I fancied I saw tears start in his eyes once more, and he went to turn away from me. ‘At least you and I were present, Miss Williams. The two of us who cared for her the best.’
I followed him down the path towards the High Street, but his pace was too rapid for me to keep up. I thought of Harriet’s journal, of the descriptions in it I had seen of Richard, of his vitality and his energy, and how little resemblance they bore to the older man I saw walking away from me then. We had so much in common and yet much to separate us. What had he thought of me? What had Harriet told him of me? I wondered at it, what she might have said to him.
The Murder of Harriet Monckton Page 17