Perhaps prudently, Mr. Baldwin, the lawyer, saved the defence of the sisters for what he conceded to be their inevitable trial in the superior court.
Committed for Trial at the Leeds Assizes
The prisoners were again taken back to Clitheroe in a conveyance, and then on to Preston on the train to be delivered to the gaol, only this time it was going to be at least two months before they saw another courtroom.
Grace gazed wanly from the conveyance as they left Bolton-by-Bowland, trying not to look back at her weeping mother, who was leaning all her weight on the equally miserable John.
Less than a year had passed since Grace had been living in Bolton-by-Bowland and had given birth to James, so she was well-known to the town and it to her. She had been sad and even desperate at times when she lived there, first when she discovered that she was pregnant yet again, and then when she began to fear that there would be nowhere to go but the workhouse for her and the baby. Indeed, it seemed then that nothing could be worse. But there she was, back in Bolton-by-Bowland, again in misery, again pregnant, and this time on trial for her life.
When their mother had arrived exhausted by her hasty journey from home, both sisters clung to her sobbing. Sadly, though, her own uncontrolled sobs offered Grace and Isabella little comfort. John had tried to put on a brave face, with his news that the King-Wilkinson’s had helped him to find a lawyer in Clitheroe. Mr. Baldwin, the lawyer, had been calming too, with his matter-of-fact style and his reassurances that the legal process might be slow but it would be fair.
If Grace had been a spiteful woman, which she was not, she might have been disgusted by the people of Bolton-by-Bowland who scurried to fill the courthouse. Where had they been last year when she had needed their help? They knew she had been cruelly used and abandoned, and many of them had their suspicions as to who was the father of young James, but they did little or nothing to help her and the baby.
Isabella’s emotions were all over the place. If she’d been free to say what she liked, she would have shouted at the villagers who were pushing and shoving to get seats in the courtroom that she’d heard there were dancing bears in the circus, and shouldn’t they be off to see them, not wasting their time on two women who never did anyone any harm. Mr. Baldwin, however, had told her in stern tones to quit talking, especially to policemen, and she had been affected as much by his concerned manner as she was by his words. He had told her and Grace that the police knew her story about Elizabeth Dockrah and John Stables was untrue and she would only make things worse by saying anything more.
It was late when they arrived back at the Preston gaol, and, of course, too late for supper. The cells were cold, the walls damp, and while Isabella’s cell was close enough to hear Grace’s disconsolate moans, she was too far from her to offer any comfort.
Painful Recollection
The Preston Gaol was imposing and grey, draughty, noisy, and frightening. It looked like a rather squat Crusader fortress, and resolutely offered no comfort to those incarcerated within. The thick stone walls made echo chambers of the dreary cells. The routines of prisoner life, with the colourless but not odourless food and the menial tasks, only intensified feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Grace’s pregnancy made her weary and nauseous, and the gravity of her situation simply terrified her. She was in a dreadful state of grief mixed with shock. She had been living a modest but very happy dream as the pregnant new wife of a respectable farmer, with five children to look after and one “little secret” whom she thought out of harm’s way back in Ulverston. Now she was living a nightmare — her first-born child dead, her husband shocked by her lie, and her beloved sister Isabella caught up with her in a murder trial.
Many days passed before Grace found herself capable of useful thought. Her mind kept going over and over recent events, re-experiencing the shock and horror of discovering Thomas dead, seeing the faces of John and then her mother in the courtroom, hearing the words of condemnation from the magistrates. Her mind just seemed to keep going over and over every detail of the terrible day that Thomas had died, and of the subsequent hearings, in the hope that it could somehow find a way to save her sister and herself.
Slowly her tumbling thoughts began to shape themselves into a chronicle — the increasingly tragic story of her adult life. Starting with the discovery of her first pregnancy, poor little Tom, and the still cruelly painful recollection of how the man who was his father reacted to the news, she sadly considered the number of times she had tried to construct a decent life for herself and how each time it had all gone wrong.
Grace still felt a little surge of pride at how she had responded to the birth of Thomas. Determined to make a life for the two of them, she had quickly made arrangements to put him into care so that she could go into the countryside to work and try to find an employer who might take them both.
But for all Grace’s effort and initiative, all that had come her way in the country, apart from hard, rough work, was another feckless man and another baby in her womb. When she first realized that she was pregnant and abandoned again, she had cried bitter tears. Later, when she heard the distressing news that Jane Gordon had put Thomas in the Ulverston Workhouse, she could only think that without the work as hired girl she had found at Meanley Farm she and James might soon be joining him.
In prison, memories of John made him seem like a knight of old, a man in shining armour who arrived to save her from disaster. First he gave her a job that allowed James to live with her, then when she again fell pregnant he quickly married her and made her a respectable woman. In marrying her, John had made it clear that for him baby James was simply part of her difficult past, and now he was welcome to be part of the Isherwood family’s future.
There really hadn’t been time in the hurried preparations for the wedding, just after Christmas and all, to tell him about Tom. She had been planning to tell him when the time was right, if ever it was, but convinced herself that Tom would be best left with her parents now that they had taken him in again.
Life was so busy at Meanley that thinking about Tom was something Grace had routinely put aside for another day. The prospect of his arrival at the farm with Isabella filled her with dread. Having grown to love John Isherwood, she now feared losing that love on account of her not having told him about Tom.
So sad. Tom himself had been at no risk of betraying her secret. He didn’t call her “ma” or expect from her a loving embrace — he didn’t even recognize her. When he and Isabella arrived at the station he was much more interested in the trains than in the people who met him.
Of course, he’d last seen Grace when he was just a few months old, and he had been through a lot of substitute mothers since then. Tom knew Isabella best, she had been around in his home in Dalton and had travelled with him all that way. Meanley Farm was simply a wonderful new place to him, with lots of kids and animals and even a baby to pet.
The week Tom and Isabella posed as caregiver and charge had been a nightmare for Grace. Whispered conversations and high tension between the sisters, Isabella insisting she wanted to get back home to find a new job, and Grace desperate to send Tom back with her or put him somewhere out of sight.
Time and again she had tried anxiously to imagine what John would say if she told him about Tom. He certainly was a kind and gentle man, and he wanted a woman around the house. And he seemed past grieving for Jane. But she had already surprised him with her new pregnancy, and before marrying her he had questioned her very closely about who might be the father of little James. To confess to him now that there was another child and another man back in Cumbria was too frightening to contemplate.
Putting little Tom into the Clitheroe workhouse had seemed her best alternative. She was able to justify the idea to herself by thinking that he was used to workhouse life, having already spent time in the Ulverston workhouse, and that Clitheroe was close enough to go and retrieve him if her situation ever changed.
In Grace’s fear-fil
led reckoning, if John found out about her deception it could be the workhouse not only for Tom, but for herself, James, and likely their unborn baby, so sending Tom to the workhouse seemed no crueller than the alternative.
Standing just inside the big door of the workhouse waiting for the matron had felt strangely reassuring to Grace. The rhythm of the institution, with washing and cooking and cleaning going on throughout the building, made it feel as if life was going on.
The workhouse administrator, Mrs. Lofthouse, seemed to have no moral objection to having a two-year-old left in their care. The problem, as she had explained patiently to the sisters, was that they had no proof that Tom had been living in the county, and without that proof he could not be admitted. The rules were clear.
On the other side of the door again, the four of them had made a pathetic little tableau. There they were, standing lost and confused at the top of the walk, framed by gnarled and stunted trees: two young women, one with a babe in arms, and a two-year-old, who, tragically, nobody wanted.
Whenever Grace got to this point in her thoughts she retreated from the noisy chill of the prison around her into a bleak, silent stillness. At those times her mind seemed as empty as her eyes, but, sadly, it wasn’t. She kept trying desperately to understand how it had happened that by the end of that day little Thomas, rejected first by his mother and then by officialdom, had ended up dead.
Isabella Incarcerated
Isabella was frightened, confused, and chilled to the bone inside the dank prison walls. What had started out as a happy mission to deliver her toddling nephew Tom to his mother so that he could share her new life, had ended up instead in a dark prison cell. As well, she now had a hurtful, racking cough that kept her, and the other women on her corridor, awake in the dark and so tired in the light.
Isabella had really liked little Tom, a self-sufficient two-year-old with a ready smile and the ability to entertain himself for hours with the simplest things — a leaf or a twig or a piece of string. The Gardner family had felt the humiliation of his birth keenly, especially with Jane having already added to their family’s burden with her illegitimate baby. Some of the local gossips had suggested to her mother, even in her hearing, that Isabella would surely be next. But she prided herself in the fact that she knew better than to blame little Tom for what the neighbours might say about her and her sisters.
Once Grace got married, it seemed that the problem of raising Tom was solved. None of the Gardners imagined that Grace had not told her new husband John about little Tom. She had always seemed so forthright, and he had accepted James, hadn’t he? If he was willing to accept one transgression, why not two? Besides, he had a brood of five of his own for Grace to take on, plus the one on the way, so what difference would one more littl’un make?
Isabella still didn’t really understand why Grace had not just told John about Thomas and been done with it. She saw how John looked at her sister, eyes all soft and warm, and she could see for herself how appealing Grace’s soft manner and easy smile would be to a man.
Sometimes she wished that she was more like Grace, pretty and pliant, instead of being so quick and sharp. Her cousin George had often teased her about her manner, warning her that boys would not want to go out walking with a girl with a sharp tongue. Unless she got out of prison soon, Isabella feared that she was getting so weak and thin that no boy was going to give her a second glance anyway.
Ever since they first met with the barrister that John had brought to them in the prison in Bolton-by-Bowland, Isabella had known that it was going to fall to her to save herself and Grace from the noose. Since they had arrived in Preston, Grace had barely said a word. When they saw each other during meals or chores, Grace just stared at her with a hopeless expression, clutching her stomach and crying silently.
Grace’s weakness strengthened Isabella’s resolve. “I am going to explain what happened and everyone will listen and understand,” Isabella promised her sister.
A Prison like a Fortress
In Slaidburn there is a charming tradition, at the end of each May, of choosing a May Queen and her court from amongst the children of Slaidburn and Dunsop Bridge. After a brief service at Saint Andrews Church, the queen and her entourage, and any other young people present, set off to see the squire, King-Wilkinson, who gives out coins to the eager children. The year that we were there my youngest son, Nicholas, received a pound from the hand of the squire. I am sure Margaret Isherwood would have been pleased to know of her great-grandson’s participation in the ritual.
Having enjoyed the maypole celebrations, Nicholas, William, and I went on a field trip to look at the Preston Gaol. Since it was the end of May, our timing was right — I was hoping to be able to get some idea of what it had been like to be locked up in there, awaiting trial in the heat of the summer in 1885.
By car you can make the drive from Hark to Bounty in Slaidburn to the prison in Preston in about three quarters of an hour, if you don’t get lost on the ring road heading into town. It would take longer from Bolton-by-Bowland.
The prison is still in operation, and the former governor’s house is now a museum. The prison dates to 1845 and was built in what is described as the Victorian radial style. An aerial view shows the prison buildings fanning out like a misshapen star with points of unequal length from a central hub. Old photographs reveal a series of large cell blocks of blackened brick with small barred windows. In the photographs everything looks cold and wet.
Petty thieves, drunks, prostitutes, and the mentally unstable would have made up the bulk of the inmates of the women’s wing of the prison in 1885. Female inmates tended to be rowdy, using rude language and raucous singing to maintain their spirits and undermine the authority of their gaolers.
Grace and Isabella had not been “gently reared,” but they had come from a stable family home in Dalton-in-Furness and they certainly would have found the other inmates loud and frightening. But even in gaol female sympathies can be stirred, and Grace and Isabella were probably taken under the wing of some of the more toughened inmates and shown how best to get by. Grace’s pregnancy would have heightened any desire to protect her, and she was likely given less-demanding chores and some assistance at mealtimes.
Visitors would have been terribly upsetting, reminding them of where they had come from and who they had betrayed. It was probably a relief when the frequency of visits diminished as John and Mrs. Gardner had to tend to the farm and the children back in Slaidburn.
Regardless of any help or privilege, the time in the prison must have been horrifying for the sisters. By day they had to work at menial but exhausting tasks like cleaning or laundering, and at night they were surely kept awake by the ravings and the nightmares of others, if not their own.
John’s Plight
John Isherwood was hurt, shamed, and frightened. One moment he had been a hard-working, contented, and respected farmer with a new wife, a healthy family, and a baby on the way. The next he had become the husband of an accused murderess, feeling broken-hearted, deceived, and horrified. Perhaps worst of all, he had no idea of what he could do to save his wife and his family’s reputation.
Grace Gardner had entered John’s life just when it had become impossibly hard; his beloved Jane had died, leaving him with five young children to raise on his own, as well as a farm to run. Matthew and Maggie were doing the best they could, but they were still just children and he needed adult help and company.
John had felt himself fortunate to learn that a young woman with a newborn was looking for a situation, and he sought Grace out where she was staying in Bolton-by-Bowland. Their deal was quickly sealed: Grace would work as hired girl and do her best to watch the children and tend the home, while John would provide a safe, warm place for her and her babe to live. He felt sorry for the agreeable young woman, left alone and pregnant by some lout, and resolved to keep anything like that from happening to his Maggie.
And John was grateful to Grace. Despite her difficult positio
n she was not just sweet and pretty, she also threw herself into looking after his motherless brood and helping him run the farm. Grace’s own gratitude was mixed with relief that she didn’t have to return to Cumbria with another bastard and no prospects. With both involved so anxious, patient, and forgiving, it was no surprise to anyone that Grace was pregnant again by year’s end, even with her James only six months old. John and Grace’s January wedding was witnessed by Jane’s brother, Tom, which seemed a good omen for at least as happy as possible a continuation of the life John had once planned with Jane.
And for almost five blissful months, John and Grace Isherwood and their family of six children seemed to be settled and even prospering. Maggie, Matthew, and John were back to attending the Quaker school in Newton, while Dick, Tom, and baby James got on with growing up … until the day his new sister-in-law arrived at Meanley with little Thomas.
The days surrounding the death of Thomas were a blur to John. First of all, he couldn’t make any sense of Grace and Isabella’s explanation of why they had gone out again after coming home on Saturday night. Then there was a policeman at the door, with evidence that the child Isabella had brought to Meanley had been found dead.
And only then had he been told that Thomas was Grace’s own child.
The speed and authority of the Coroner’s Inquest and the Magistrate’s Proceedings left John even more shocked and bereft. Not only did he have to find a barrister and someone to help look after his children, he had to make the long journey to visit the weeping women in goal and try to keep their spirits up.
He couldn’t believe that Grace and Isabella had killed the baby. But the case against them looked strong. He felt so hurt that Grace had lied to him. Yes, he would have been angry, and he wasn’t sure he would have been willing to add yet another mouth to his house
The Slaidburn Angel Page 9