The Price of Murder

by Bruce Alexander

  I know not why, but just at that moment I happened to glance over at Clarissa, and noticed that she was sending me a message. Emphatically was she shaking her head in the negative. I noted that neither of the Hooker women could see her in the place she had chosen. Answering with a single affirmative nod, I resolved to discuss the entire matter of Elizabeth’s abduction with Clarissa at the earliest opportunity.

  “Then, as you said, you were in a dazed state, not quite fully conscious, yet still moving your feet and stumbling along between the two men. And you were moving in a northerly direction. Is that correct?”

  “All of it, yes.”

  “How long do you reckon you were going in that way?”

  “Well, that’s not easy to say, is it?”

  “Perhaps we can work it out. For instance, you must soon have passed out of Covent Garden and onto the surrounding streets. Think back. Do you remember walking upon the streets?”

  She gave the matter some thought. “Yes, oh yes, we walked some ways upon the street.”

  “You say ‘some ways,’ by which you must also mean some time. Did you hear church bells chiming the hour? St. Paul’s, I believe, strikes every quarter hour. Did you hear it strike once? twice? three times?” Again, she concentrated, pulling a suitably fierce face.

  Then, nodding, smiling. “Why yes,” said she, “I believe I heard it strike three times.”

  “Good! Then that means that, even considering that there are no straight streets in London, if you had been proceeding in a general northerly direction, you would have been somewhere between Holborn and Clerkenwell— that is, with at least a half hour’s walking time. Is that correct?”

  “Well, I suppose so.”

  “But now, what I would know from you is how you managed to travel so far in such a state and cause no notice among those you met along the way? Though it was after dark, it was not late. The area north of Covent Garden is one of the most populous in the city. You must have passed dozens along the way. Even Clerkenwell and Holborn have many afoot that time of the evening. What must it have been? Somewhere round eight, would you say? And here are two young men conveying a girl of your years between them. She is disoriented—dazed, by her own admission—so that she can hardly walk. Would you not challenge them? Would you not raise the hue and cry?”

  He had hit home. He had upset her. He had penetrated the bravado that had heretofore supported her so well. Her lower lip began to tremble as her eyes began to tear. She was about to lose that edge of containment that had sustained her and made it possible to resist him thus far. Yet she found it in her to strike back.

  “How should I know why no one stopped those two and challenged them?” she cried out, holding back the tears. “Ask them, all those people who paraded by me and did nothing to help.”

  “But of course you ask the impossi—”

  “Wait! Wait!” She shouted it out, interrupting, insisting, attempting to regain control. “Now I remember. There was a man who stopped us and asked to know what was wrong with me. I didn’t get much of a look at him, for I was in that half-conscious way, but I had the idea that he was a watchman or a constable.”

  “Oh? And do you recall how your condition was explained?”

  “Certainly I do. They said I was drunk.” At that she forced a laugh.

  Her mother came to her defense: “Ne’er a drop of the devil’s drink has ever touched Elizabeth’s lips,” said she.

  “And never will!” her daughter declared.

  “Admirable,” said Sir John. “But let us get back to that constable, or whatever he might have been. Did he give his name?”

  “No, he did not.”

  Then did a loud, insistent knocking come upon the door. Who could that be? I hurried to open it, and I had barely accomplished that when the door flew out of my hand, and, for a moment, I found myself pushed against the wall.

  That moment was just enough to admit three men I recognized from the silversmith’s shop in Chandos Street. They were Mr. Turbott, the proprietor; Mr. Tarkington, the journeyman; and the apprentice who was in his last year, named Joe; these were the three I saw pouring silver at the back of Turbott’s shop. They rushed forward as if to rescue Elizabeth.

  “Who is here?” shouted Sir John as he jumped to his feet, ready to do battle, if need be.

  Mr. Turbott gave him little attention but rushed to Elizabeth’s side that he might comfort her. It should not be necessary to quote him here, for the words he used were not particularly well chosen. I will say, however, that watching them together gave me a good idea of just who the father of the child growing within her might be. Nevertheless, he managed, after some moments, to tear himself away and identified himself to Sir John as “Elizabeth’s employer.”

  “And, I assume,” said Sir John, “that having just heard of her return, you rushed here from your shop to learn as much as you can of all this. Is that correct?”

  “Quite right,” said he.

  “Well, I, sir, am Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Court, and I am conducting this investigation. I have no intention of going back over what we have heard from her already. It would be unnecessary for me, and, no doubt, quite painful for her.”

  “Oh, no doubt you’re right.”

  “I will, however, briefly summarize what has already been established.”

  And this he proceeded to do in his impressive and inimitable fashion. None but Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice himself, could even begin to approach Sir John’s powers of summary. His, I do honestly believe, was the more logical mind. When he had concluded with that, he made an offer to Mr. Turbott.

  “Sir,” said he, “I shall allow you and those who have come with you to remain and hear the rest of this sad tale. But I do so only on the condition that all three of you will keep silent and allow me and only me to conduct the interrogation. There will be no additions, interruptions, or comments. Do you agree to this?”

  “Oh, certainly! And without reservation. I speak for myself and my employees,” said the silversmith.

  “All right then, I believe that Mistress Hooker was about to tell us that she was taken to a house in . . . Would you say Holborn or Clerkenwell?”

  “I think that Clerkenwell is the more likely,” said she.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I’ve visited there once or twice on errands for Mr. Turbott.” She turned to him and offered him a smile. “And I was less dazed than before. I took note of my surroundings, you see, and it was all quite familiar—the fields and that.”

  “I understand,” said Sir John.

  “But there was a house at a crossroads—I can’t say where any better than that—and that turned out to be the place we were headed.”

  “And what did it look like? What was its appearance?”

  “Its appearance was ordinary. It was just a house.”

  “Come now. You can do better than that, surely. Was it a house of one story or two? Had it been painted? What color had it? What of the yard—large or small? Please, Elizabeth, you must make a blind man see that house.”

  Quite inappropriately, she giggled at that last request of his. Yet she soon brought herself under control and gave a fair description of the place. It was, she said, a house of two stories and a garret. (“How well I remember that garret!”) One would not call it a house in good condition, for it was unpainted—or if indeed the house had once been painted, any trace of color had long ago disappeared from it. There were trees in the yard, though none of them of any real size, and a great pile of leaves, left over from last autumn. And one final detail: As she had declared earlier, it was a house at a crossroads; there was another, a proper farm house, at the opposite corner. It was well built and well maintained—all that the house she described was not.

  (So fixed was my attention upon Sir John and Elizabeth that I had not noticed until she began her description that Clarissa was taking down all that was said by her with paper and pencil. This was somethi
ng new.)

  “Now,” said Sir John to Elizabeth, “you have given a fair and complete description of the place to which you were taken, but I note that much of it, perhaps most, could only have been noted by you from a distance. You seemed to have known in advance to which house you were headed.”

  “Well, I didn’t!” said she rather hotly. “Whilst I was prisoner in that house I had much opportunity to study the details that you eagerly sought. But for that matter, my two captors talked of it in such a way that I knew we were close.”

  “Saying . . . what?”

  “Oh, they wondered what sort of price I might fetch. The one called Dick seemed to doubt whether I would be taken at all, kept insisting that I was not pretty enough, nor was my bosom sufficient.”

  “All right. I’ll accept that,” said Sir John. “Let’s get on with it, shall we. You entered this old house in the company of the two men, and then what?”

  “We went round the back and entered through the kitchen. I remember they knocked upon the door and said who they were. Bobby and Dick, they said, and the door was opened to us. Waiting for us there in the kitchen were three people—a man about forty, a young girl who was fair pretty, and a woman with the ugliest face I did ever see. It was her, the ugly one, that the two men who brought me bowed and scraped to. She looked me over proper, pinched my arm and my bosom and just all over. And finally she says to me, ‘What about it, dearie? Will you join us?’ Which I took to mean, will you follow the Devil’s path? And then—”

  At this point, Mr. Tarkington, unable to contain himself further, interrupted, calling to his chief, the silversmith Turbott: “Sir, that sounds like Mother Jeffers’s house to me—from the look of the house, the way she describes the old harridan herself.”

  “You’ve been there?” Turbott demanded.

  “A time or two.”

  “What about it, Elizabeth?” cried Turbott. “Was that the woman’s name?”

  “I . . . I think so. Yes, perhaps it was. When I said no and declared I would have no part of her life she slapped my face, took my dress from me, and said I should be thrown into the garret. Then did the two men say, ‘Yes, Mother Jeffers.’ That was it! Mother Jeffers!”

  The room then fell into complete turmoil. Mrs. Hooker was shouting out in praise of her daughter for resisting the Devil and his minions. Mr. Tarkington shouted, “Well, let’s go out and get the old witch.” Joe the apprentice urged that they bring a rope. And Mr. Turbott cried, “Let’s see if some of those people out in the hall might wish to come along.” But Sir John, alone of them all, resisted these calls for swift justice and sought to restore some order.

  “Listen to me,” said he who could outshout them all. “I warned you, gentlemen, that you must leave if you did not keep silent—and you agreed to my terms. Now you have violated your side of the agreement, so I must ask you to leave this room most immediate.”

  “Oh, we shall leave right enough,” called out Mr. Turbott, “and we shall head for Clerkenwell. You may command in this room, sir, but once outside it, we shall command, as you will see.”

  “I put you on warning, sir, that all who defy the law will be punished severely, and that includes yourself. I will not allow rule by mob in my precincts.”

  The difficulty—as Sir John well knew—was that he could not confidently speak of “my precincts,” for, truth to tell, though there was no strict division of territories, as a matter of custom, it would generally have fallen to Mr. Saunders Welch, as magistrate of Holborn to deal with this matter; Clerkenwell, after all, was near to Holborn. All this and more we discussed once we had returned from that memorable visit. Yet as we four—Elizabeth, Clarissa, Sir John, and I—rocked back and forth along the way to the house at the four corners in Clerkenwell, we spoke little amongst ourselves. The reason for this, of course, was the presence of Elizabeth, whom we had come to regard in a different light from before. No longer a hapless victim, she now seemed to be hiding more than she had disclosed, altering facts to suit her, and generally providing unreliable information. There was but a brief period at the beginning of our journey when we, the Bow Street contingent, felt free to speak our minds, and that was when Mrs. Hooker was preparing Elizabeth for the trip as we awaited the putative victim in the hackney coach. ’Twas then that Clarissa opened the discussion with a confession.

  “Never, I believe, have I been so mistaken about a person,” said she, “as I have been about my old friend Elizabeth.”

  “Oh?” said Sir John. “Mistaken in what way?”

  “In every way. I thought her dull and commonplace, unimaginative and without ambition—oh, specially without any sort of intellectual ambition.”

  “And now what do you think of her?” I asked. “You were signaling something to me from across the room of her consistency.”

  “Oh yes, that! Yes, of course, it proves my point.”

  “What do you mean by saying that it proves your point?” asked Sir John.

  “Simple enough,” said she. “You remember when she claimed to have been beaten about the head by one of the two who had abducted her? She said she was in a daze for quite some time afterward.”

  “Yes, naturally I remember.”

  “Well, the midwife—what was her name? Goody Moss, I believe—she wanted me to stand close and observe all that she did. It was all most interesting.”

  “Yes?” said I. “Go on.”

  “Oh, of course. I was also near enough that I might look down upon her head, and I can assure you that there was no sign that she had been beaten in the way that she said.”

  “No scabs? No scars?”

  “Nothing of the kind. In truth, her hair had been washed, so that indeed I would have seen such, had there been anything to see.”

  “Interesting, yes, very interesting indeed.”

  “And another thing—though I hesitate even to mention it. I went with the midwife to the door, so that she might explain all that she had done and seen. And what she whispered to me was the most remarkable thing of all. She said that Elizabeth was pregnant. I don’t think I could ever have supposed such a thing of her.”

  “She told us the same,” said Sir John. “And I—”

  “Caution, sir,” said I. “They are on their way now.”

  Mother and daughter approached the hackney, but only the daughter entered the door, which I held for them. Sir John inquired of the mother if she were not also coming. She declared that she was not.

  “’Twould be worth my immortal soul to step inside such a place,” said she with a great shudder. “I think it a great shame that Elizabeth should have to return.” Then did she depart.

  Then, only minutes later, the caravan pulled out of Dawson’s Alley. It was a rather strange array, which moved forth on the way to Clerkenwell. There were two coaches—our own hackney and another, which I understood Mr. Turbott rented more or less regularly from a nearby stable. In a trailing line were five or six on ponies and nags that had been rented or borrowed for the occasion.

  As we traveled, Sir John took the opportunity to question Elizabeth further. There was not much left for her to tell. For, once she was locked in the garret, she stayed there, a prisoner, for over a week. She had naught but a pile of straw to sleep upon and a thin blanket to keep her warm. She was fed thin gruel and water once a day and visited by the one she now called Mother Jeffers. Elizabeth was asked by her again each day if she would join their company, and each day she refused. This continued so until the night before, when she at last managed to loose the window that overlooked the great pile of leaves in the yard. Then, waiting till all was silent within the house, she perched upon the window sill and leapt down into the leaves. With only the blanket to wrap round her and her shift beneath it, she started south and found her way home to her mother’s place in Dawson’s Alley.

  “How many do you reckon were in the house?” Sir John asked.

  “Well,” said she, “I saw four, but there were probably a couple more.”

&nbs
p; “So, six in all? And how did they divide between men and women?”

  “Probably four women and two men. Something like that.” She seemed curiously indifferent of a sudden.

  “But you could only identify four?”

  “If that.”

  Sir John accepted that and put no more questions to her. And in no more than a few minutes’ time she was asleep in the corner of the seat. It seemed to me strange that she could sleep so peacefully as we bounced about so wildly. Clarissa evidently wished to resume our conversation regarding Elizabeth. Sir John must have sensed this, for when she began to address him, he shook his head in the negative and put a finger to his lips, thus calling for quiet. With that gesture, he communicated his suspicion that her sound sleep was feigned.

  After near half an hour of backtracking and wending our way in a general northerly direction, we came to open country and picked up our pace. It was then but a short time on a swift road that we drew to a halt behind Mr. Turbott’s coach. I threw open the door and hopped down to the road at about the same moment Mr. Tarkington descended from his perch next to the driver. He opened the door like a proper footman and out came a whole squad of men. Those trailing on horses rode up. As all formed round him, Turbott raised his voice so loud that I wondered, could he not be heard inside the house just ahead.

  “We know not what awaits us there”—pointing ahead as if aiming at a target—“so I must ask, how many of you have weapons with you?”

  In response, a number of hands shot up—and in those hands were deadly weapons of every sort, pistols, knives, and fowling pieces. Turbott himself brandished a ceremonial sword of some sort.

  “Good God, Jeremy,” said Sir John, “this is as bad as I feared. Help me down from here, and I shall accompany you. We cannot allow these men to attack this house on such flimsy evidence.”

  I did as he asked, whilst Turbott divided his men into two groups—those with and those without weapons. He then gave his troop of irregulars a proper harangue. And, as he did this, Sir John began muttering something in my direction, which I could not quite understand. At first, I thought it a prayer; yet potentially calamitous as was the situation, it did not seem to me that prayer was called for. But then did the magistrate explain.