by Peter McAra
‘What’s this I hear about you plotting with the labourers to cheat me, girl?’
‘Oh, sir, I surely didn’t.’ She tried to master her fear, slow her thudding heart. She would give a better account of herself if she could calm her disquiet. In all her time in the Great House, she had not been in this room since the morning Sir John had summoned her from the kitchen all those years before. Even his children knew it was out of bounds to all but a hand-picked few. The instinctive fear of the lowly for their masters had been woven through Eliza’s bloodlines for perhaps a hundred generations. She had sat face to face and alone with the viscount perhaps twice, even though she had taken her place in the schoolroom hundreds of times.
‘But sir. The folks are sore troubled by the happenings at Tolpuddle. They came to ask me about their wages, and I — ’
‘So it’s you, girl! Inciting the villagers to strike against me. Me! Who’s treated you more kindly than my own children! The infernal ingratitude. It was I who caused you to share lessons with Louisa and Harry. I did it because I had word you were a cut above your class in native intelligence.’ His face reddened as he spoke. ‘You! You learn to read and cipher through my benevolence, then use my generosity against me. That you, of all people, would pitch your wits against me!’
‘No sir, I wouldn’t. I’ve never said aught against you, sir.’ She wrung her sweating hands. She saw the viscount’s face relax its sternness, the colour fade in his neck. She watched him force his mouth into the false smile she had seen when she was first led into this castle-like room years before. He sat upright on the chaise longue and held out his hands.
‘Come here, girl. Sit beside me. Tell me truthfully you wouldn’t plot against a poor sick old man.’
She moved towards him, more timidly as she came within his reach. Suddenly his smile contorted. His hand darted between her legs and gripped the flesh high on her bare thigh. In a frightened reflex, she jumped backwards, choking a scream. The chaise longue pitched onto its side and spilled him onto the floor like a sack of wheat sliding off a dray. He roared like a wounded lion, then painfully raised himself to a sitting position on the carpet, legs splayed, eyes flared with rage, mouth wide, panting. Then he lunged at Eliza again. Her body, frozen with horror, snapped alive. She jumped away from the hand that reached under her smock.
The old man was up to no good. Now he likely sought to have his way with her, taking advantage of the way the tables had suddenly been turned against her. Like as not, he expected her to become submissive, dumb as he exploited his opportunity. Likely, the sight of her bare legs had triggered his male lust. She ran to the closed library door, opened it, and fled along the hall, down the unfamiliar stairs, and out into the garden via the kitchen doorway. Panting, blinking away tears of fright, she made for a secluded arbour. She would compose herself, plan her next move.
She sat thus for some minutes, catching her breath. Then, as she made to step outside the arbour, Tobias Pollock, the overseer, slid across the entrance to block her escape.
‘Here’s the wench, lads,’ she heard him sneer. ‘Ain’t that a treat?’ The two constables appeared from behind a hedge. They pinned Eliza’s arms and threw her on to the cart which had carried her to the stables the night before. As she clutched its side rail for support, one of them slipped a chained shackle round her wrist and fastened the other end to the rail. A whip cracked and the cart lurched forward. The shackle wrenched her wrist so violently she thought it had snapped. She fell to the floor of the cart, eyes stinging, as the horse galloped away from the dairy and turned onto the road to the village.
The prisoners, four men and two women, had been brought to the cells the afternoon before the trial. Eliza and her female companion were separated from the men by bars, but the two small rooms, their walls of rough-hewn sandstone stained with mossy rivulets from the leaks in the ceiling, shared views of each other. There was a pile of straw for beds on the stone floor, a wooden pail for a privy. At nightfall, all the prisoners were fed a bowl of gruel and given a pail of water for drinking. The two women sharing the cell divided the straw between them.
The other woman was perhaps thirty, although a hard life rather than the mere passage of time might have incised the lines on her face. For all that, she had a handsome figure, tall, slim-waisted, and erect. The once fine clothes she wore, more befitting a lady than a felon, had become tattered with neglect, their lace and gathers frayed. From the swathe of hair piled on her head long blonde wisps hung down, matted from lack of washing. From time to time she ran her fingers backwards past her ears in an instinctive gesture of grooming, ineffectually tucking the wayward strands of hair out of sight. Her pale blue eyes glowed from her well proportioned face. They looked out on the world direct and open, as if to say this is who I am and I’ll not bow the knee to anyone. As a lackey came to remove the lantern for the night, she turned to Eliza.
‘I’m called Susannah West. And thee?’
‘Eliza Downing.’
‘And what’s thee here for then, dearie?’
‘For being female, I suppose,’ Eliza said.
‘You mean a man tried for to have his way with you, and you didn’t give in?’
‘Yes.’
‘A gentleman, I’ll warrant.’ Susannah’s sneer was theatrical.
‘The viscount,’ Eliza said.
‘Men! Damn them all to hell!’ Susannah shouted. ‘The gentry are the worst. Poor folks doesn’t have no rights at all.’ She spat. ‘Justice! It’s made for the rich to have their way with the poor. God knows, but England is rotten; rotten to the very core.’
Susannah was working up a spleen. Eliza settled herself in a corner, padding the wall and floor with handfuls of straw, and sat knees drawn up, her arms folded over them for warmth.
‘A body should die rather than have to live in England,’ Susannah continued. ‘I near murdered a man, or so he says. Would that I’d succeeded. I’m sure to get transported to Botany Bay. And I’ll love it. Love it, you hear! Away from the gentry and the constables and the snivelling working class. For ever.’ Eliza could not hold back a sob.
‘You poor mite. How old are ye?’ Susannah asked.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Shame! And plucked from your family forever, while you’re yet a maid. Don’t cry, love. You’ll be well off where you’re going. The poor hasn’t got no chance in England.’ She paused, ran her fingers past her ears, again tidying imaginary strands of hair. Eliza hoped Susannah would not return to her tirade. Her words would not give Eliza the comfort she sorely needed. But the older woman continued.
‘See how those poor men from Tolpuddle was treated. Cruel! For standing up against the gentry. The gentry, they grabs everything off the land. They squeezes the poor till they gets their last drop of blood from them, I tells you. You’re well rid of them. England’s no place for a poor maid. Not a beauty the likes of you, dearie.’ Her voice died.
Sitting in the dark, Eliza tried to remember her companion’s face. She could recall only the mop of straw-coloured hair, the bitterness that showed in the jut of her jaw, her habit of running her fingers past her ears.
‘Tell me your troubles, dearie.’ Susannah’s voice gave away an unexpected softness.
‘What began it, I don’t know,’ Eliza said, recalling the evening visit from the frightened Rufus. The poor ignorant man, in looking out for his little family, had innocently given some enemy a weapon against Eliza. Many times, she had tried to see a connection between Louisa’s open hatred of her and the recent events. Of course, Rufus’s act of tapping a stick on the wall of her cottage to rouse her had been the very signal to create the illusion of conspiracy. Had Louisa arranged for her to be watched?
‘The people in our village are kindly folk,’ Eliza continued. She would think more about the notion of Louisa’s spying later. ‘They work hard. Would never cross Sir John. But the troubles in the county, at Tolpuddle, they seemed to strike deep.’ Susannah’s words had inspired her. She felt again
the injustice visited on the men who had spoken out. Something inside her burned to be heard. Listening to Susannah had unleashed it.
‘Living on seven shillings a week, and a family to feed; that would be cruel. It was like…taking food away from a caged rabbit.’ She could let loose her hate of the injustice now sweeping the land. ‘And the men who spoke out against it; brave men not caring for themselves, only for the poor in their village — transported. I’d have spoken out too. The people in our village need me to speak out for them. I’ve had schooling, you see. I’ve read of wrongs done, and brave deeds, and courage.’ The tears that had been welling in her chest now dried up. ‘I’ll not sit by and see the weak bullied by the strong.’
Eliza wondered at her own words. Many a time she had seen old Harriet, the ogre from the dairy, sneak up behind a milkmaid struggling with a yoke, and kick one of the heavy pails of milk as the woman tried to balance her load. Then if the milkmaid spilt a drop of milk, Harriet would shriek at her and punish her with the backbreaking task of filling the animals’ drinking troughs with buckets of water hauled from the well. Eliza had boiled inwardly at the injustice of it, but never taken Harriet to task. She knew well enough what such forwardness would cost. Now she saw this persecution, any persecution, with a new clarity. To accept it was to nourish it.
‘Well said, Eliza my dear.’ Susannah had read her thoughts. ‘What woman wants a life of drudgery? Or to be married to a poor man, be his slave and bear his children till you drops into the grave?’ Eliza had seen the lives of her aunts, uncles, neighbours, her childhood friends, woven into the drab cloth that was the rural England of the day. Each life was a thread of homespun wool, held tightly in the fabric of society by the other threads woven round it. A girl child might work as a housemaid or a milkmaid, or live in her parents’ house tending her younger siblings. Marriage to a village lad, perhaps illuminated by a brief flash of romance, prefaced a life of child-bearing, drudgery, bare subsistence that stunted body, mind and soul.
The memory of her childhood pact with Harry flashed before Eliza again. She curled her fingers into the palm of her hand as she had a thousand times before, and remembered the prick of the needle, the stickiness of the blood that had supposedly bonded her hand, her life, to his. Over the years since Harry had left for Oxford, she had schooled herself to channel her passion away from the self-pity which would have eaten away her soul if she let it. Now her childish dreams of marriage had blown away like autumn leaves in a gale. How pathetically naïve had each of them been when he’d taken her hand and pricked it to draw blood. For days afterwards, she’d pictured herself in a beautiful dress, riding beside her husband in a gleaming carriage, perhaps as they travelled to some royal event in faraway London.
Harry had never replied to the letter she wrote him; a letter in which she’d aimed to convey her love without having it read like the pages of a tacky romantic novel. Very likely, Harry was now become the latest hero of the ton, filling his days, and more likely nights, wallowing in the excesses foisted on him by society maidens who lusted for his body. Even years before, Eliza had fancied his body as perfect. Now, if Susannah were right, Eliza would be left to carve herself a life in that desert land beyond the seas, Botany Bay. What would the life of a convict maid be like? Would she be forever bound to reap and sow and bind and mow, as the old song had it? It was beyond the bounds of reason that there would be a man in that Godforsaken place who would love her for herself — her scholarly knowledge, her love of learning?
Once more, as she had done so many times before, Eliza shifted her focus to the present. In every generation there must be one human spirit forged of such steel that it could stand against lifelong abrasion by the stultifying social order. A man or woman endowed with such a gift might well be consigned to the outskirts of society. In olden times, such women had been burned as witches. Eliza had been born with the wit to act out a special role in her community. Now she must go where her destiny led.
‘Thank you, Susannah. I was in sore need of kindness,’ she murmured in the dark.
CHAPTER 12
The courthouse was a melancholy building, built of grey sandstone which had weathered to give it a forlorn, neglected look. It was as if the stones had become steeped in the misery which had flowed round them over the years. It stood alone in the middle of a treeless field, seemingly ostracised by other buildings, and even the trees which clustered round other nearby buildings.
‘You are accused of inciting a rebellion, and causing bodily harm to one John De Havilland, Viscount. How plead you?’ The judge seemed to look beyond Eliza as she stood in the dock. His gaze floated out of the window to the fields and the trees. His wig hung down like blinkers on a horse. His voice, like his coldly focused eyes, seemed to address no one in the courtroom. Eliza turned to him from the dock.
‘Sir. I didn’t do those things — none of them. I’ve had schooling. I learned to read and cipher, and folks who can’t read come to me to ask about things. Things to do with numbers. Because how else can they understand them, as didn’t have schooling themselves?’ Although the judge’s first reaction was to silence the accused because a young woman would likely not have the wit to plead, her earnest face distracted him. Then, as she spoke, her sincerity glowed from her eyes. His friend De Havilland’s advice had been correct. She was indeed very pretty. He decided to let her continue for the moment.
‘And sir, in our village, there’s folks who’s sore troubled by the doings at Tolpuddle.’
‘Enough! The accused will make her plea.’
‘Sir, I didn’t do those things — inciting a rebellion and such — ’
‘For the last time, how does the accused plead?’
‘Sir, I didn’t do — ’
‘Enough. I will assume the accused pleads not guilty.’ The judge appeared to be struggling to control his temper. His neck had gone red with the effort. He looked down at a bewigged man who sat below the bench. ‘Mr Prosecutor?’
‘Thank you, sir.’ The man rose, ruffling papers on the table. Eliza looked down at him from the dock. She saw that he was extremely short. If she had been put beside him, she would have stood half a head taller. He glared at her, then threw out his chest, and seemed to stand on tiptoe. He cleared his throat.
‘If it please your Lordship, the prosecution will show that the accused is clearly guilty as charged. Indeed, Milud, the charges will be seen as putting the most lenient possible complexion on the chain of unhappy and indeed seditious behaviours perpetrated by the accused. Your Honour, the prosecution is of the opinion that but for the mercy of the English system of justice, the accused should be facing a much more serious charge, the penalty for which is death by — ’
‘The Prosecutor will proceed with the evidence,’ the judge interjected. ‘The bench does not require a treatise on the glories of British justice, Mr Prosecutor.’
‘Yes, Milud. If the court please, I will call the first witness.’
Eliza turned as she heard a commotion behind the door at the back of the courtroom. The door opened. For a moment, she saw a group of people clustered round the door, looking into the courtroom. One of them was a man in a tall hat. For a moment, she struggled to remember who he was. Then she recognised him as the viscount’s lawyer; the strange man who had once sat at the back of the schoolroom at the Great House and watched her at her lessons. What was his name? Ah, yes — Mr Obadiah Shaw. A second later she saw Louisa, looking up into the lawyer’s cadaverous face and whispering to him.
As the door closed, Louisa aimed a gloating look at Eliza. After another moment of scuffling and scraping behind the closed door, it reopened to admit a scrawny little man, dressed in peasant’s clothes and aged perhaps thirty, with the facial expression of a cornered rat. Accompanied by an usher, he scurried his way to the dock, received instruction on the taking of the oath, and placed his hand on the Bible.
‘I, Amos Blunt, rat catcher to the viscount, do solemnly swear by Almighty God to tell the whole t
ruth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’ He had been well coached, Eliza noted.
‘Now, sir.’ The prosecutor addressed the rat catcher. Amos Blunt beamed at this unaccustomed respect from someone who mingled with the gentry. ‘Do you know the accused?’
‘Yes, sir. That be Eliza Downing. Daughter to Silas Downing. Afore he died, he were a hopeless — ’
‘Thank you, sir. Please just answer the questions.’ The prosecutor cleared his throat. ‘Now, sir. Did you see the accused acting suspiciously on the night of the thirteenth of — ’
‘You are leading the witness, Mr Prosecutor,’ the judge snapped. ‘Withdraw.’ The prosecutor flinched.
‘Yes, sir. I withdraw.’ He cleared his throat once more. Positioning his gaze midway between the judge and Blunt, began again.
‘Did you see the accused on the night of the thirteenth of May?’ the prosecutor asked Blunt.
‘Yes, sir.’ Blunt had learned to remember his place before this array of gentry.
‘And what o’clock would that have been, in your estimation?’
‘Oh, sir, it would have been a couple of hours afore midnight. I were walking home from the inn, and I thought to myself, this little wench is up to no — ’
‘The witness will confine himself to answering the question,’ the judge interjected with a shade more venom than had flavoured his previous directive. The prosecutor flashed a smile of apology at the judge and continued.
‘Sir, please tell the court in your own words what you saw that night.’ Blunt sat and allowed his face to relax into a thin smile.
‘Well, sir. It were the tapping as caught my attention.’
‘Tapping?’
‘Yes, Sir. I hears a tapping on the wall of, er, the accused’s cottage. And I decides to take a look-see. But it were a chilly night, so I thought I might freeze if I couldn’t find a ways to keep warm. So I — ’