The Wench is Dead
Page 18
Ye Gods!!
The blood was running cold through Morse’s limbs as he remembered the man who had identified the body of Joanna Franks; the man who had been physically incapable (as it seemed!) of raising his eyes to look into the faces of the prisoners; the man who had held his hands to his own face as he wept and turned his back on the men arraigned before the court. Why did he do these things, Morse? Because the boatmen might just have recognized him. For they had seen him, albeit fleetingly, in the dawn, as ‘he had made to get further on his way with all speed’. Donald Favant! – or Don Favant, as he would certainly have seen himself.
Morse wrote out those letters D-O-N-F-A-V-A-N-T along the bottom margin of the Oxford Times; and then, below them, the name of which they were the staggering anagram: the name of F T DONAVAN – the greatest man in all the world.
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Endnotes
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1 A ‘fly’ boat travels round the clock, with a double crew, working shifts, with horses exchanged at regular intervals along the canals.
2 Many of the facts in the account used here are taken from the Court Registers of the Oxford Assizes, 1860, and from the verbatim transcript of those parts of the trial reported in Jackson’s Oxford Journal, April 1860 (passim).
3 Burke was a criminal who had been executed some thirty years earlier for smothering his victims and then selling their bodies for medical dissection.
4 Travels and Talks in the Antipodes, Samuel Carter (Farthinghill Press, Nottingham, 1886).