Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

  Is it conceivable that Jessie should leave her there and hurry round the corner to a liquor shop; should go and return by way of the long, bare garden just under Mr Fleming’s window, on a light summer’s evening with a good many people still about?—we know that the Stewart household next door, for example, were only just going to bed. If she needed spirits to bolster her flagging energy—well, she had lived in the house, she would know of Mr John Fleming’s decanters in the ground-floor parlour. But it is nonsense of course; no imaginable need could have been great enough or urgent enough to have driven her to quit the house—with her dreadful task only half finished and the old man in his room upstairs.

  Jess M’Pherson was attacked before Jessie went out for the mutchkin—or while she was out for it—or after she came back. But it couldn’t have been after Jessie came back; and if it had been earlier, she would never have gone. There is only one alternative. It was done while she was out, and her statement is true.

  What it has taken all these pages to consider, Lord Deas digested in a flash. After the breathless hush in which the reading of the statement had been heard, a murmur of excitement broke out. It was immediately interrupted by the judge.

  ‘Jessie M’Lachlan.’ She stood there calm and still, hopefully expectant, looking up at him through her veil. ‘According to the evidence led before us, the position in which you now stand is this …’ And, coldly and clearly, he went through it once again. Respectable family—one time servant in the Fleming household—good husband, who freely gave her the use of his wages, thirty shillings a week (whittled down to eighteen, as we know, but the judge did not remark that). What she did with the money he could not imagine—she had only herself and her child to keep (and her husband for half the week, but that wasn’t mentioned either. His lordship’s salary, by the way, would be something over £3,500 a year. Jessie’s money works out at under £50). She was not in good health, true, but had her habits and conduct been what they ought, she should not have had much difficulty in maintaining herself and the child on that account—especially as she often got presents of money from her brother. But whatever she did with it, at the time of the murder she was very much in want of more and was in debt to Jess M’Pherson, her most intimate friend, a friend always kind and affectionate to wards her, who trusted her, whose last thought it would be that her life might be in danger at Jessie’s hands. In that state of matters she went to the house on that Friday, and she would have no difficulty in producing some plausible excuse for sleeping with her friend all night. ‘It is now stated upon your own confession that you did remain there all night. In the course of that night, probably when she was asleep, you did attack her with that cleaver we saw here, or some other deadly instrument, and did disable her; and though she apparently recovered to some extent from the first blow, you did repeat the blows till you made on her body all the numerous wounds spoken to by the medical witnesses, the result of which was her death. Whether you did that in bed or in the kitchen—whether partly in the one or partly in the other—whether, after you had disabled her in bed when she was asleep, she had so far recovered as to struggle into the kitchen and there you continued your bloody work and dragged her body back to that room after she was disabled in the kitchen—all these particulars we do not know. But we know this, if we go by the evidence that has been adduced, that upon that night you did most barbarously and most cruelly murder that unsuspecting woman, who believed you up to that hour to be the best friend she had in the world.…’

  She had had the privilege of as attentive and intelligent a jury as his lordship had ever seen in the box, her case had been investigated with all possible care and presented by the ablest imaginable counsel, and at the end of it all she had been found guilty by a unanimous verdict ‘with which I entirely concur’. She had chosen to put in a defence to the effect that a gentleman whose character up to this time had been quite unstained was the murderer, and now had repeated that statement with all the details to which they had just listened—

  For the second time in all those long, long days, Jessie spoke. ‘Well, my lord—’

  But she was hushed immediately, and immediately was silent.

  ‘I sit here,’ said Lord Deas, ‘primarily to do my duty in the trial and conviction of those who are guilty.’ But he sat there also to protect the innocent; and it was his imperative duty to say now that there was not upon his mind a shadow of suspicion that the old gentleman had anything whatever to do with the murder. If anything were wanting to show the danger to the lives and liberties of the people of Scotland, if the statements of prisoners were listened to who were capable of committing such crimes as Jessie had committed—of giving such statements the least credibility, then he thought the example they had just heard would be quite sufficient to satisfy them of that danger. He had been counsel on both sides in such cases, it had been his misfortune to sit upon trial in many such cases, and ‘I am bound to say that I never knew an instance in which the statements made by prisoners after conviction were anything else than in their substance falsehoods. Your statement does not convey to my mind the slightest impression—it conveys to my mind the impression of a tissue of as wicked falsehoods as any to which I have ever listened.’ Indeed, if anything were a-wanting to satisfy the public mind of Mr Fleming’s innocence, the judge thought that this most incredible statement was just the thing to do it. Be that as it may, he must go upon the evidence and the verdict.… And so …

  The prison wardress gave her a sharp tap on the back. She stood. Lord Death picked up the black triangle of cloth and held it above his head.

  And so to the sentence.

  ‘That you be removed from the bar to the prison of Glasgow, therein to be detained and fed upon bread and water only, until the eleventh day of October next, and upon that day, between the hours of eight and ten o’clock of the forenoon, to be taken from the said prison to the common place of execution in the burgh of Glasgow and there by the hands of the common executioner to be hanged upon the gibbet till you be dead; and ordains your body to be thereafter buried within the precincts of the said prison; and ordains your moveable goods and gear to be escheat and inbrought for Her Majesty’s use.

  ‘Which is pronounced for doom.’

  He added, as the custom is: ‘And may God Almighty have mercy on your soul.’

  You could hardly hear her voice, but she whispered out into the terrible silence of the stunned court: ‘Mercy! Aye, He’ll hae mercy, for I’m innocent.’

  1 See plan, page 31.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The public outcry was loud and long and largely in favour of the condemned woman, only the Glasgow Herald wholeheartedly triumphing. Crowds milled round the newspaper offices, as the days and weeks went by it was reported that several people had become insane through brooding over the wrongs of Mrs M’Lachlan, and that doctors were treating cases of extreme nervous irritability from the same cause. The steps of the house in Sandyford Place were being whittled down by the chisels of the morbid collecting souvenirs. The first consideration to come under fire from the Flemingite faction was the authenticity of the now famous statement, and Jessie’s agents were obliged to publish a long letter setting out the exact conditions under which it had been made—Mr Wilson got into a bit of a tangle about exactly what she had said to him in that first interview, which must have made him wish that he had written it down at the time as she had suggested. In every street little knots of people were to be seen in eager discussion, every lamp-post had someone under it, holding up the latest edition to the light, not able to wait till he got home to read it. Old Fleming and Jessie were saints or sinners according to the bias of the speaker, the judge and jury were deified or execrated in special articles, leaders and innumerable letters in the papers. ‘Vindex’, ‘Sigma’, ‘One who Balances Probabilities’ and dozens more seized up their pens; ‘Candidus’, ‘Microscope’, ‘A Sympathising Sister’, wrote off in reply. ‘A Lady who Admires Disinterested Truth Wherever it is to be Fo
und’ sent a pound for Mrs M’Lachlan, small factories and businesses got up little subscriptions, a few pounds here, a few shillings there. ‘A Poor Servant Girl’ from a small hamlet in the remote country sent a shilling out of her wages of fifty shillings a year, ‘for Jessy M’Lachlan, who has the sympathy of allmost the whole community here.’ ‘A Working Man’ wrote that any poor person could be accused of murder; if you had a hundred and eighty pounds in the bank you had nothing to fear. ‘An Inquirer’ wondered if steps had been taken to ascertain whether Jess M’Pherson had been pregnant; there was a good letter asking why old Fleming, who had been famous for his curiosity and inquisitiveness, should suddenly have become exactly the reverse when the servant ‘disappeared’, and another very good one remarking upon the judge’s assertion that he had never known the statement of a convicted prisoner to be true: what had this to do, the letter most pertinently asked, with the case of Jessie M’Lachlan?—the laws of chance hardly entered into the matter; if the judge had heard a hundred false statements it did not make the hundred and first any less or more likely to be false or true. A lady archly styling herself ‘Mis-rule’ was tremendously ironical. The judge was a stupid old man, of course, trial by jury antiquated and out of date, and the only way of ascertaining truth was to hoot at a man and call him names, etcetera, etcetera. ‘Precaution’ wrote ‘A Hint about Servants’—let this case be a lesson to the gentry now that they had had a glimpse of what went on below-stairs. Not all servants, she conceded, were untrustworthy, but masters and mistresses should be untiring in checking over their property and locking doors and windows at night, especially those in the basements—no respectable servant could take exception: the more honest, the more they would welcome it. Did not this case show what perils might arise from the continued existence of ‘previous servants whose own abodes formed receptacles for plunder’. Above all, no member of the household who remained alone in the house with a servant could be really safe. To this ‘A Domestic Servant’ replied with a touching and dignified, indeed a magnificent, letter. She quoted the reply of a mother to her child, who had asked the difference between itself and a servant, ‘My dear, you know the difference between china and earthenware.’ That was the way the domestic servant was looked upon: no more than a machine to do the drudgery. Even the poor prisoner in jail had rules whereby he might now and again see those he loved, but servants were forbidden to have their friends to visit them, must live in solitude except on their rare days off. A servant might be honest or dishonest, true: so might anyone. (She did not dwell on the disparity in temptation.) As to the danger to the gentry of remaining in the house alone with a servant, let her assure ‘Precaution’ that here the boot was indeed upon the other foot. ‘Oblivio’ wrote ‘a word anent forgetfulness,’ and a humble joiner contributed a very temperate and delicate letter saying what in fact could well be true—that no woman, or no woman of Jessie’s temperament, would have left poor dead Jess lying there stripped to the waist; her instinct would have been to pull down the clothes and cover her nakedness.

  The old gentleman, meanwhile, was reported to be cosily residing at Inellan, a favourite watering place but perhaps rather comfortably deserted at this season—we are now in late September—reading the reports with the greatest interest and apparently highly satisfied with his own part in it all. The Reverend Aikman had called round and had another of his chats: perhaps he thought the old gentleman might append his name to the growing roll of those petitioning for a reconsideration of the verdict—that really would have been something. If he did, however, he was disappointed. Mr Fleming only shook his head over ‘the depravity of the human heart’, though rather in reference, apparently, to the things Jessie had suggested against himself than as to the crime of which she now stood convicted. (His organ, the Herald, had drawn pointed attention to the recent case of one, Mary Tinney, who had tried to lay the blame for a murder to which she later confessed upon her own mother.) Informed of the probability of a great number of signatures for the petition, he told Mr Aikman that he wished and earnestly prayed that the Lord would gie Jessie time that a’ might be cleared up, or that she might be led to make a confession to clear him.

  The petition was, in fact, enormously subscribed to. It had been resolved upon at a crowded meeting held on the Friday after the trial ended and a memorial was sent to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, begging him to delay execution until further enquiry should be made. Jessie’s agents also sent a memorial, setting out legal grounds for a respite of sentence, and eventually a stay of execution was granted until November 1—with a warning to ‘the convict’ that this was only for purposes of further investigation, and if that investigation did not bear out her statement there was no hope for her. So Jessie was sure of an additional couple of weeks at least before she was hanged in Jail Square.

  Meanwhile a private enquiry had begun on the instructions of the Lord Advocate for Scotland, presided over by Sir Archibald Alison, Sheriff of Lanarkshire—Sir Archibald, a lawyer of wide experience and the deepest integrity, was to prove one of Mrs M’Lachlan’s stoutest champions. ‘I had become convinced,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘of the woman’s innocence.’ But there was a general expression of opinion that an investigation by none but officials already connected with the case wouldn’t satisfy the public mind, and an outsider was called in, Mr George Young, Sheriff of Haddington. His powers as Commissioner were rather limited; he couldn’t compel anyone to attend nor did his witnesses testify under oath—but anyone who chose to might volunteer and he did examine a large amount of evidence from sixty-nine witnesses (there were seventy-six at the trial), his reports being forwarded to the Home Secretary. The proceedings were held behind closed doors, no one else being present but the ubiquitous Jno. Gemmel, Procurator-Fiscal, and Mrs M’Lachlan’s solicitor, Mr Dixon. The organisation of the whole thing was in the hands of Jno. Gemmel—a somewhat Gilbertian state of affairs, Mr Roughead suggests, since the official instigator of the recent prosecution seemed hardly the ideal person to be now enquiring into his own conduct.

  The evidence elicited under these circumstances has been embodied elsewhere in different parts of this book. As has been said before, it did nothing to discredit the condemned woman’s story; in many instances it bore it out to a remarkable degree, and it threw up one fact of quite startling significance—the-testimony of Miss M’Intyre that at soon after eleven that night Jess M’Pherson was heard moaning. (No one then or since seems to have given much consideration to this point or to have taken the time factor into consideration; yet there it sits, solid fact and, to the author at least, conclusive. Either Jess was attacked and left, still alive and noisily moaning, while her assailant popped round the corner for a drop of something, or she was attacked while Jessie was innocently out. You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

  But, alas!—having taken it you are thrown straightway back into confusion.

  With so much agitation going on, the enquiry under Mr Young not yet started and the postponed execution date less than three weeks away, Mr Dixon got permission to interview his client in the condemned cell. There were persistent rumours that old Mr Fleming had been seen—by the mysterious gentleman who did or did not tell Mr Ritchie, who in turn did or did not tell Mr Sheridan Knowles—at the front door of No. 17 in the early hours of the morning of the murder. Mr Dixon wished to confirm with Jessie that this might have been possible; it would naturally go a long way in support of her story.

  He found her, he subsequently related, in a highly overwrought condition, inclined to hysteria, divided between easy laughter and easy tears. She seemed to want to talk about anything but her statement. However, that was what he was there for. He pressed her to answer: did she think the rumour could be true?

  To this Jessie replied that she was quite sure it wasn’t true; and what was more, she added, they needn’t trouble themselves hunting round to confirm it, because it couldn’t be true.

  Mr Dixon was naturally somewhat taken a
back. Had she any reason for saying that it couldn’t be true?

  She evaded the question, she went off again into irrelevances—she didn’t think much of the portraits in the pamphlet account of the trial. (They are certainly very unflattering.) He brought her back to the subject, however, and persisted. ‘Well, then, where was the old man at this time?’

  She didn’t say anything for a moment; and then she looked into his face and said: ‘I may just as weel tell ye—the auld man wasna’ there at a’.’

  ‘Wasn’t there?’ said Mr Dixon. ‘What do you mean?’

  What she meant, said Jessie, was that she hadn’t seen Mr Fleming at all that night.

  Poor Mr Dixon! ‘Do you mean to tell me that he wasn’t there, that he wasn’t sitting in the armchair when you went down to the kitchen—?’

  ‘I didna’ go “down” to the kitchen at a’,’ said Jessie. ‘I didna’ go by the front door.’

  ‘Not by the front door? Then how did you go in?’

  ‘I went by the back way.’ And, she added, she hadn’t been upstairs at all that night.

  But … ‘Do you meant to say it wasn’t the old man who sent you out for the whisky?’

  ‘I was not out for whisky at a’.’