My Turn to Wonder
While still busily fulfilling the requirements of my day job, and trying to meet the needs of my far-flung family, I was much preoccupied with what really happened that day in Slaidburn.
Like the Highams, I had constructed a chronology of events from the newspaper reports and information we had gleaned from various sources in the hope that by looking at all of those events in sequence something new would be revealed.
Then it was my turn. After long hours puzzling over what I knew of the events that took place in May 1885, I sat up one night with a thought bubble over my own head. It related to the two places in the reports on the crime where it says that John Isherwood was seen with the two women walking home, presumably from the area of the bridge, at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. on Saturday night. Suddenly I wondered if John was implicated after all in the cover up of the murder. Maybe they had needed his strength to carry the toddler’s body down to its rather inaccessible hiding place. Grace and Isabella were described as being of similar slight stature and a two-and-a-half-year-old child can be heavy, especially if he is “dead weight.”
Rereading the testimony, it seemed to me that the child was dead when the sisters arrived home at 5:00 p.m., since they had not entered the farmhouse with him. Instead, Isabella had whisked the child off across the fields in her arms.
In her testimony, Maggie said she never saw the child “alive” again after the morning, despite the fact that she was there when they got home and saw Isabella head off across the fields. I wonder if there was something subconscious reflected in her choice of words or if she was just responding in kind to a lawyer’s question.
I was beginning to fear that my genes were more involved in the crime than I had at first thought. Maybe John had helped the sisters hide the body.
My sister Penny had a slightly different theory. She felt that my concern about John’s strength being need to place the body didn’t fit with what had happened earlier. In her words:
Isabella trucked off across the field at 5 ish. Is she just going to drop the kid in the field and wait until later. I want to believe that perhaps JGI wanted to know what was going on and they snapped and told him and he wanted to walk to the site. Or, they could be creating an alibi by walking as a trio down the public road with not a care in the world. The farmer and his wife who found the baby were doing that. You would think that people who worked so hard would want to sit at home in the evening, but they probably didn’t have comfy furniture. You notice that there is no problem leaving Margaret in charge back at the farm.
For his part, David felt that since the place where John met the sisters was nearly back at Meanley, he had simply become concerned because of the hour and had gone looking for them. His theory on why Grace and Isabella returned through Slaidburn was that they wanted to provide an explanation for John as to why they were not returning with Thomas, such as meeting a woman in Slaidburn who took him. But that leaves us with a couple of troublesome hours.
Upon further reflection, I think that David had a good point. Grace and Isabella needed some sort of explanation as to what they had done with the child since Margaret had seen them come home with him.
I do still wonder, though, what the sisters told John when they met him in the dark on that disastrous day.
Looking for Isabella
As our dossier of documents grew, and the story of the crime and their lives began to have shape, the sisters, Grace and Isabella, became more and more real to me. Thanks to Rita Hirst’s research and the stories that I half-remember being told by my grandmother, I had begun to have a fair picture of what happened next for Grace, but I still had no idea what kind of life the teenaged Isabella went on to have.
Although she’d been in service before she was fourteen, it seemed most likely that Isabella had gone back to her father’s home in Dalton-in-Furness after the trial. But, somewhat strangely, she hadn’t returned to Dalton from Leeds with her mother immediately after the trial, because we know the sisters journeyed back together to be hooted at by the crowd at the railway station in Clitheroe.
Eighteen years old, marked as a villain, where could she go, what could she do, how would she be treated? I began to feel worried about Isabella’s welfare, even though I knew her fate had so long ago been resolved.
Somehow, it felt unlikely that she shared the comparatively good fortune of her sister. There was no loving husband and gaggle of children waiting for Isabella to get out of prison. Her mother and father back in Cumbria were the best she could do and it was likely that they felt she and Grace had brought shame on the family.
One of my notions was that she had ended up in the workhouse, perhaps even the one from which little Thomas had at first been retrieved. She and the witness Dorothy Dockery could have become fellow inmates, struggling to find a way to get out and have a chance at a better life.
Pursuing the Ulverston workhouse idea, I located the workhouse on the 1891 census, and found Dorothy Dockery still an inmate there. She was then thirty-one years old, still single, and with the occupation of domestic servant. The child she had with her in the Workhouse in 1885 was no longer an inmate. Instead, she was registered alongside her own illegitimate child, a boy named James, who was one-year-old. Born into the workhouse, I hate to imagine what life had in store for little James Dockery.
In Thomas Hardy’s novels, character determines fate, and I wondered if Isabella’s quick intelligence and capability, especially when compared to her sister’s uncomplicated charm, tended to isolate her. Grace appears to have been very warm and maternal. People responded to her, males especially. Isabella, on the other hand, was a bright but sharp adolescent, and might have been rather more uncomfortable to be around.
The 1901 census added further to my curiosity about Isabella’s fate. In the still-growing family of Grace and John Isherwood in Haslingden, there were now two additional daughters: Elizabeth Isabel, and, somewhat surprisingly, a second called Isabella.
Grace’s mother’s name was Isabella, an obvious source of daughter’s names, yet somehow I felt that in this particular case it was not her mother but her sister whom Grace was seeking to memorialize. These particular echoes of Isabella seemed to speak of a deeper sense of gratitude, or perhaps guilt.
Isabella shared Grace’s burdens and her secrets. She might have even killed for Grace in a misplaced act of sisterhood. Only the two of them knew what had really happened during that ride in the trap. From the names of her children, I felt that Grace was determined to acknowledge Isabella’s importance to her.
But was there a further meaning to Grace’s daughter’s names? Where was Isabella in 1901, six years after their trial? What was happening in her life?
Had Isabella found someone to marry her after all? Had the chill of the prison weakened her health? Was she living out her life as a spinster with a stain of shame, or could she already be dead?
The 1901 census seemed to contain no record of an Isabella Gardner of the correct age and place of birth. Finding out if she had married was a more difficult task.
As usual, Cathryn helped me, putting Isabella’s first name and place of birth in the 1901 census in the hope that we might find her under a married name. There were a couple of possibilities, but long hours searching through the old books of marriage entries in the Public Records Office failed to confirm them.
I became increasingly preoccupied with “looking for Isabella,” as I privately styled my sad search through old records. And I began to wonder if I would ever know her true fate.
A Careful Reading of the Reporting at the Time
The main library in Leeds is a fine old building in the centre of town. My husband and I first went there to try to find additional newspaper reports of the trial of the sisters, and I went there again later to learn more about the distinguished career of Edward Tindal Atkinson.
Logic suggested that the Yorkshire Post of 1885 would have covered the trial and, hunting through the microfiche, we confirmed that t
he Leeds Assizes received regular and thorough coverage from the Post’s correspondents. More interesting was the fact that the story had even made it into the Times of London, in a somewhat abbreviated but very informative and well-written synopsis published on August 5, 1885.
Careful reading of each of the newspapers — the Preston Guardian, the Yorkshire Post, and the Times — yielded little snippets of additional information, as did the rereading of the Guardian’s coverage of the inquest and the Magistrate’s Hearing.
Worrying away at the details of what had happened on that May day, each rereading seemed to add a tiny piece or two to the puzzle.
For example, I noticed that at the Magistrate’s Hearing the man from the co-op said that he had put the groceries on the floor in the trap. Having just come from poring over photos and drawings of types of trap used in the 1880s, I was struck by that information. There was not much space on the floor of a trap, and with the feet of two grown women and a bundle of groceries, I realized that the floor space was much more crowded than I had previously imagined.
For me, the lack of space on the trap floor made the accidental suffocation story much less likely, especially since the child could have been in a partial sitting position in his nest of rugs on the floor of the trap. Presented with the same information, however, my husband immediately offered quite a different theory: “What if the co-op man, knowing the outcome and fearful that he might be accused of putting the groceries on top of the blanket-wrapped child, simply lied?”
In the Times story I noticed that it said Thomas spent one month in the workhouse, a fact I had never seen before. If he only spent August in the workhouse, he must have been cared for by his grandparents from September to May. The doctor saw little Tom at his grandparent’s home when he was there attending Mrs. Gardner in April, so it was probably a combination of Grace’s marriage and Mrs. Gardner’s illness that caused them to send Isabella on her fatal errand.
I also noticed in the Times report of Isabella’s statement in court that it was she who determined that the child was dead and she who put it in the stream. I wonder how she could tell with certainty that the child was dead.
NORTH-EASTERN CIRCUIT
At Leeds, yesterday, before Mr. Justice Wills, Grace Isherwood, 26, married, and Isabella Gardner, 18, single, servant, were charged with the wilful murder of Thomas Gardner at Slaidburn on the 16 of May last. Mr. Lawrence Gane, Q.C. and Mr. Manisty prosecuted on behalf of the Treasury, both prisoners, being defended by Mr. E. Tindal Atkinson. The deceased was, according to the theory of the prosecution, the illegitimate child of the elder prisoner, and was born on the 15th of December, 1882. The prisoners were sisters, and lived formerly at Dalton-in-Furness. The child had been put out to nurse, and several letters were read showing a deep attachment to it on the part of its mother. From the time of its birth until August, 1884, it had been nursed by various people. On August 3, 1884, it had been received into the Ulverston Workhouse, where it remained until September of the same year. In June, 1884, the elder sister, who was then unmarried and called Grace Gardner, gave birth to another child. In September she became housekeeper to a Mr. Isherwood, farmer at Meanley, having with her the child born the previous June. On the 3d of January, 1885, the elder prisoner was married to Isherwood. Upon the 9th of May, 1885, Isabella Gardner brought the deceased to her sister’s house at Meanley, and upon inquiries being made of the prisoners with respect to the child the elder prisoner said that it was the child of a woman called Dockeray. Evidence was given for the prosecution to show that this story was untrue. The child remained in the house until the 16th of May, when the prisoners set out in a trap, taking both the children with them, and saying that they were going to take the eldest child to its mother. They proceeded to the workhouse at Clitheroe, and there saw the matron, and the elder prisoner stated she was a widow with two children, the elder of which she was desirous of leaving at the workhouse as she could not afford to keep it. The matron declined to take it in without an order, and the two prisoners left in the trap with the children and returned to Meanley. Isabella Gardner did not go into the house, but remained outside with something in her arms. She soon afterward started off in the direction of Slaidburn, and was followed by her sister. At about 7 p.m. on the 17th of May the child was found dead in a pool in Easington Beck, a place about two miles from Meanley. The medical evidence tended to show that death had been caused by drowning, but the medical man who gave this opinion stated in cross examination that it was often difficult to say in such cases whether death had been caused by drowning or by suffocation previously to immersion. At the rise of the prosecution the prisoner Isabella Gardner made a statement to the following effect: “Mr. Isherwood was always kind to Grace, but she never dared to tell him about the child. We agreed we would take it to Clitheroe and put it in the workhouse there. When we got to the workhouse we found we could not get it in. We then had to bring it back. We wrapped it in some rugs and laid it at the bottom of the trap on some rushes, and started for Meanley. On arriving there I found the child was dead. We were afraid to take it into the house, and we arranged that I should go up the road with the body of the child, and that Grace should come out as soon as she possibly could. She afterward met me at the Dunnow bridge. We walked from there down Easington-lane to Langcliffe Cross-bridge, and we agreed to put the dead body in the river so that some one might find it. I got over the wall and Grace handed the child’s body over, and I put it in the river.” The learned Judge, in summing up, made special reference to the medical testimony as to the cause of death and as to undigested food found in the child’s stomach. The jury retired to consider their verdict, and on returning into court after an absence of three-quarters of an hour found both prisoners Not guilty. A disposition to applaud the verdict was promptly suppressed.
— Times, August 5, 1885
In addition to the obvious reasons for not wanting to be the victim in a murder case, most especially the disconcerting fact that you are now dead, there is the problem that sometimes those involved in the proceedings thoughtlessly malign you.
Thomas Gardner was a little boy. He wore petticoats because little boys wore such clothes in 1885. Yet despite having a name and having a gender, when he wasn’t referred to simply as “the child,” the reporter for the Times called Thomas “it.”
Not only did the reporter call him it, but his erstwhile loving aunt referred to Tom in her statement variously as “the child,” “it,” and “the dead body.”
Thomas wasn’t allowed to be very real to anyone in that courtroom. His clothing played a brief role, as did his caregivers. But as the legal process played out we learned the matron at Clitheroe workhouse had “declined to take it in without an order,” and his last breath was reduced to a debate between suffocation and drowning.
Not a person, just an “it.”
Respectable Employment for the Gardner Girls
Jane Gardner still mourned her son, thinking of him secretly as little Sykes. He would be almost ten now, and she was convinced that he would have been a charming handsome boy like his father, although not as feckless. She had just heard of the death of Grace’s baby Joseph, and she felt guilty that she had somehow, by starting their brood of illegitimate boys, led them all into a cycle of misery and loss.
Here at Kents Bank, Jane had found a congenial position, not far from her home in Dalton-in-Furness and with daily opportunity to care for children. She loved this kind of work, and the gradual stiffening in her fingers had made fine dressmaking just too difficult to continue.
At last she was out of her parents’ home and on her own. She had not thought she would end up a spinster, working as a nurse with the children of others, but it was far better than the workhouse, or the doss-house to which her father had often told her she was destined.
When occasion permitted, she tried to go visit Isabella at the seaside. Thanks to the efforts of her aunt Sarah, Isabella now had a position as the servant for an elderly brother and sister
. It was fairly light work, just looking after two people, but Isabella was increasingly frail and she sometimes had to make a valiant effort to keep her employers from seeing how weak she really was. Fortunately, their cousin was a serving girl for a family nearby and she would come over to help out when Isabella felt too ill. Thank goodness for family.
Sitting on the pier in the fresh air, Isabella and Jane were often quiet in each other’s company. No longer was Isabella the chatterbox she once had been. When they did converse, much of their talk was rueful reflection on the past. This was not the future that either of them had hoped for.
Jane felt the sadness of being childless and a spinster ever more acutely, while Isabella mourned her own lost dream of finding romance with someone like Mr. Atkinson’s young assistant. While she knew in her heart that he would never have settled for the likes of her, she did like to pretend that the sole impediment had been how they met, not who they were.
Both Jane and Isabella talked fondly of Grace and John. Somehow, Grace had escaped the consequences of their birth, her easy ways, even the death of Thomas, and she and John were building a new life for themselves in Haslingden. While they found her stepdaughter Maggie a bit of a minx, the boys seemed agreeable and helpful enough. Despite the loss of little Joseph, she had young William to mother, and it looked as if she might finally be shaking off the shadow cast on her health by the gaol. Isabella so wished she could do that as well.
Isabella continued to speak optimistically about finally losing her cough, but Jane had seen the blood in her handkerchief, and in private conversations the rest of the family had concluded that Isabella was steadily weakening with consumption. Illness had given her an ethereal pallor that made her dark looks more beautiful than she had ever been. Ironically, though neither would ever know, at this stage in her life Isabella looked the epitome of the pale romantic heroine that was the femme idéale of Charles Morley, the young man who now worked as a full partner in Atkinson’s chambers.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 19