The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  The remarkable thing to John, who has never been on a plantation before, is how many blacks there are, and how little notice they take of the two white men walking through the open front gardens of the plantation. Billy actually physically moves one out of his way when he starts walking again, and the slave (a young male, perhaps thirteen or fourteen) just changes direction and continues, like a stream of water making its way around a rock. It’s like Billy and John are invisible but still physical presences to these blacks.

  Billy has reached the veranda of the plantation house, and he knocks loudly on the door of the house. A black woman answers, and she certainly sees him because she steps back for a moment as if a wild animal has appeared at her door. Billy speaks to her, but John is too far away from them to hear what is said. The slave woman grows agitated, shaking her head and beginning to raise her voice, and she is almost screaming when a man appears from inside the house and speaks to her: a small, neat, dark-haired man with a small circle of cloth on his head. A Jew, thinks Williams. A Jew out here in the jungle.

  Billy speaks to the Jew, and his voice is raised more than the voices of the others and has some anger in it, and the Jew seems to bow before him and says something in response, and then Billy goes with the Jew into the house.

  The slaves continue to flow around the house but continue to ignore him, so John feels emboldened and decides to investigate this strange scene further.

  He skips out from behind the tree and into the area directly in front of the house, which is organized like a little front garden, though John is barely aware of the neatly trimmed lawn and precise, almost English flower beds, filled with exotic plants with strange sharpnesses from which the gardens of Sussex and Kent would recoil in horror. The steps up the veranda creak slightly as he climbs them, but only slightly—the wood is new and freshly painted, and up close the house has the same quality of freshness. There is a window on either side of the door, and John crouches to peek through the corner of one of these, but cannot see anything inside: the shutters are open, but thick muslin curtains are hanging in the window to keep out the daytime heat.

  John makes his way along the veranda to the edge of the house, passing two more curtained windows as he does so. There is no sound from within the house. As he turns the corner to follow the veranda around the corner, his dream once again separates itself from reality, and in this new fantasy he spies a beautiful dark-haired woman in a long, white cotton dress sleeping in a hammock, three enchanting puppies curled up beneath her. The dream-Williams catches his breath as soft music begins to play, and he walks toward the sleeping girl as if in a trance. The puppies smile at him as they wake up, and he leans over her to see her open her eyes and gently open her mouth, revealing soft white teeth and a red velvet tongue.

  “Kiss me, John,” says the dream girl. “Kiss me, and then . . .”

  John Williams wakes up, and shivers. A noise has disturbed him: a creak (a key?), the sound of wood (the bottom of a door?) on stone (the floor of his cell?).

  He sits up on the wooden bench that has been his bed the past few nights. It is completely dark in the cell. All he can hear now is the sound of his own breathing, and from one of the neighboring cells the distant, muffled sound of a man moaning.

  No. Something else. A low, steady dry-as-bones breath, in and out, in and out. From inside his cell.

  “Atkins?” The name of the warder sounds cracked and dry on his lips, barely a word at all. His eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and his ears are beginning to locate the source of the low breath. There, in the corner, to the right of the barred window. A tall, thin shape, two legs popping out from beneath a long, dark coat.

  By nature a man of positive dispensation, Williams is not immediately afraid. So much has happened to him of late, so much of it unexpected and unpleasant, that this latest episode does not even seem particularly puzzling. Indeed, his first reaction is one of derision.

  “Fuck off, whoever you are,” he says to the shape. “And tell Atkins not to let any Tom, Dick or Harry into my fucking cell.” His voice has a southern English lilt for he is, indeed, an English fiend, not an Irish one.

  “Is that any way to greet a drinking partner?” says the tall shape in a whistling, breathless voice, and suddenly Williams is, actually, very much afraid.

  “Billy?”

  The tall figure does not move from its position against the wall, but Williams has to suppress the image in his head of it looming over him as the room contracts. The figure says nothing else, so Williams fills the silence before it overwhelms him.

  “Billy? How did you . . . ?”

  “The jailer,” says the figure, its voice still dry and expressionless. “He is only thinking of feeding his family.”

  “The door is still open?” John asks.

  “The door is still open,” answers the figure.

  Williams looks at the door, and looks back to the shape in the corner. From outside comes the sound of moaning again.

  “Why are you here, Billy?” asks Williams, in barely a whisper. He keeps an eye on the door, already planning a desperate rush to get outside and to freedom, perhaps down to the dock and onto a ship, away from London, away from the magistrates and constables and . . .

  The figure peels away from the wall and limps softly toward the bench. It passes through the beam of sickly light which makes its way in from the lamp outside, and for a moment Williams thinks this is an old, old man in the cell with him, worn out and decrepit. But then the tall figure sits down on the bench, and Williams sees that, no, it is his friend, Billy Ablass, come to pay him a visit. Perhaps he is even here to rescue him.

  Friend? Is he really a friend, John?

  The voice in his head is a warning one, and sounds like his mother. It scares him profoundly and he realizes that no, indeed, Billy Ablass has never been a friend. A shipmate, yes. A drinking partner, indeed. But never one to share confidences and intimacies. Since their return to London on the Roxburgh Castle, they have seen each other barely a half dozen times, most of them in the last few weeks. Williams finds himself wondering if Billy Ablass has any friends at all, and cannot recall a single one.

  Then why is he here, John Williams? Why does he appear now, out of the blue?

  Billy looks at Williams now, turning his face away from the light outside, and the cheerful hail-fellow-well-met spirit within John Williams runs screaming away from that glance, leaving behind it a dull sense of horror. There is no fellowship in that look, no humanity at all. There is nothing behind the eyes, only an implacable look of determination in the face.

  Run, John! Run now!

  And he does stand, all thinking spent, his instincts taking over in the face of this vision of death. He stands and takes two or three steps to the door, but he is too slow. Billy sticks out a foot, and Williams tumbles to the floor. Before he can rise, Billy is upon him, grabbing him by the hair and pulling him up onto his knees. Billy’s hand grips Williams’s hair while he fumbles for something in his coat, and then there is an explosion of pain in the back of his neck, and John Williams feels only one thing more.

  That comes some time later, when the world falls back into focus for a moment, the light from the courtyard flickers back on, and then Williams feels all at once, in a rush, the leather around his neck, the stool falling away beneath his feet, and the crack of his neck snapping as his weight pulls down onto the belt which hangs him. The door to the cell opens and closes, and John Williams is left alone, perhaps to dream.

  YEAR’S END 1811

  The year ends with a procession.

  The gentlemen of the press have been diligent. In thundering editorials and deathless prose, they have demanded justice and have bemoaned incompetence. They have gnashed their teeth and shaken their inky fists, and their clarion call has been read and shared and hugely applauded. People pour out onto the Highway as morning dawns. Even men desperate for bread and money are willing to forgo a day clamoring for work on the dock to get their share of
the righteous mob.

  John Williams was found dead in his cell in Coldbath Fields three days previously. The verdict is suicide, and at a stroke Williams’s guilt is confirmed, even as anger grows that he has escaped London’s formal justice (the eternal damnation visited upon his soul by his act of self-immolation is a forgotten detail amid the clamor for reparation).

  Williams had exited the stage just as the Shadwell magistrates were hardening in their conviction that he was the murderer—indeed, that he might be the only murderer, despite all evidence to the contrary. They had interviewed him for a second time on Christmas Eve, along with a small host of bystanders, witnesses, and victims who could do nothing (even if they had wanted to, and most did not) to halt the runaway assumption that John Williams was the Monster of the Highway. John Turner, who had escaped the King’s Arms with his life, said he recognized him as a regular at the inn (but added that he could not place him at the murder scene). A woman who for the previous three years had washed Williams’s clothes when he was not at sea testified that she’d washed blood out of two of Williams’s shirts in the very recent past (she was not asked how often she’d washed blood out of his shirts before the recent past). Two men who’d lodged with Williams testified that he’d returned home late on the night of the murder of the Williamsons, and had asked them to “put the light out.”

  And then there was the maul, the fearsome ugly instrument of the deaths visited upon the Marrs. It had been traced to the Pear Tree boardinghouse through the good offices of magistrate Capper and his interview of the Pear Tree’s landlord, Mr. Vermilloe. And the Pear Tree was where John Williams habitually boarded when he was not at sea.

  On the strength of these statements, Williams had been remanded again to Coldbath Fields.

  London was learning all about the prisoner, and it liked what it saw: a sailor (an Irish sailor, more’s the point—Williams’s habit of lying about his Irishness has now caught up with him) with a dubious past and a raffish air; ripped clothes; suspicious behavior; violence; blood. The genteel readers in the West End and out beyond Southwark and Clerkenwell shivered with delicious delight at the prospect of such a violent, ruthless individual dwelling under the same sky as them, little imagining that dubious pasts, torn clothes, and blood were part and parcel of life as it was lived in Wapping.

  The Christmas Day edition of The Times carried the story, but it was overtaken in enthusiasm by the London Chronicle, which held its grubby ears closer to the rhythm of the London streets, and which stole The Times’s thunder with a crashing editorial of its own, arguing that London’s policing was too important to be left to the dilettantes and bureaucrats who currently held the magistracies, and that police needed to become “inquisitorial and intermeddling” if crime was to be reduced (Charles Horton, had he been reading the newspaper and not sailing down the Thames toward Sheerness, would have approved).

  The ordinary people agreed with the Chronicle’s leader writer. In Shadwell itself, on Christmas Day, a private association for the “mutual protection” of locals was formed, consisting of two companies of eighteen men each, armed with cutlasses and pistols, to patrol the local streets. The magistrates might have their man, went the local thinking, but the magistrates had been found wanting again and again. The locals were past leaving the safety of their families to ineffective dullards elevated beyond their capacity.

  Despite this, everyone felt that London’s panic and fright had changed register, and had turned into a type of fascination. Here’s the likely culprit, said the newspapers and magistrates. We’ve got him. Sleep easier in your beds. The bogeyman is under lock and key.

  And still the Shadwell magistrates interviewed and cajoled, focusing more and more of their efforts onto Williams. On the 27th of December, they assembled for another inquisitorial round. Messrs. Story, Capper, and Markland reassumed their positions behind the bench on the raised dais, and a crowd of gawpers pushed their way inside to sit in the rows before the three magistrates, some back for the third day in a row, others frantic to see the face of the Irish Monster, this Williams who was already creeping into the tales mothers told their children to shut them up. The crowd waited impatiently for the arrival of the prisoner, building itself up in delighted anticipation of imminent outrage and hair rending.

  But the prisoner never arrived. A policeman came instead to hand the magistrates a note, explaining that Williams had been found dead that morning, hanging by his neck from a bar in his cell, quite cold, quite dead. Quite guilty. Of this there was no longer any doubt.

  After the initial shock, the magistrates did not let the inconvenience of the accused’s absence deflect them from their pursuit of justice. All through the day of the 27th they continued to interview people, adding more and more bricks to the folly of “evidence” they had constructed around John Williams. His landlady, Mrs. Vermilloe, already a star of the story and a regular feature of the newspapers’ coverage, returned to the stand for a third time. She appeared shaken and disturbed by the news of his suicide. Her story changed once she heard of his death, becoming more and more elaborate, and not to Williams’s advantage. Other witnesses added to the developing picture of a ne’er-do-well, a drunkard, a violent rake and ribald. By the end of the morning, the magistrates and the crowd in their office were convinced beyond any human doubt that Williams had done the deeds, perhaps alone, perhaps in league with others. But probably, or preferably, alone.

  At lunchtime a note was sent to the Home Office to this effect.

  The investigation began to be wound down. There were still unanswered questions and loose ends: a man from Marlborough who had been arrested, and a local man called Ablass (known by the locals as Long Billy) who had been seen with Williams on the night of the Williamson murders and who was brought in for questioning on 28 December. But alibis were offered by these suspects, and these alibis were accepted with no further investigation by the Shadwell magistrates. They had their man, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Further interviews continued on the 29th. Difficult questions were avoided—constables Hope and Hewitt in particular were fretful over what Ablass might tell the magistrates about the source of their tip-off about Williams, but the magistrates took the man’s alibi at face value. While all those involved in the investigation busied themselves with its conclusion, a new idea was growing in the newspapers and on the street: how would Shadwell, Wapping, and London itself have its revenge on the monstrous creature who had killed the Marrs and the Williamsons? Had he not cheated death and justice by taking his own life? His soul was already in forfeit; how would the souls of the killed (and the appetites of the vengeful living) be vitiated?

  On New Year’s Eve, London found out.

  John Harriott awakes in his own little bedroom. He is alone. His head aches. It is 31 December. Outside, preparations are being made for a final immolation of the Irish Monster.

  His wife, Elizabeth, has slept these last two nights in a separate room, breaking an unspoken pact between them that they would never be one of those old couples who gravitated to their own rooms once the surviving children were grown. They had shared a comfortable, warm bed for decades.

  But she had been cold toward him since his return from his so-called “investigative expedition,” which has made her unspeakably angry (her anger masking her very real concern for the health of his old bones). She has returned majestically to her years-old conviction that the mad old fool should have given up all this nonsense years ago. They had eaten a silent supper on the night of his return, the servants whispering in the hallway outside. She had retired early and pointedly to her own room, leaving him to the fire, his chair and his thoughts. And a bottle of brandy.

  Toward midnight, there had been a knocking at the door, and his manservant had grumbled downstairs to open it, letting in an inebriated and noisome Horton. Harriott had received the constable and had listened to the tale he had to tell, but as if it were being told in a distant room by people he no longer cared about. The
fire was warm, the brandy in his head was soothing, and here was this Horton again, this ludicrously passionate man with his bizarre notions and mysterious undertakings.

  Horton raved that Shadwell had got this whole thing the wrong way around. That the evidence of the Zong and the discoveries in Sheerness proved there was more to this than was apparent, that this John Williams was at best only a part of the crime, at worst a complete innocent. They must write to the Home Office immediately, now, without delay, with all that they had learned. Harriott thought only of his sleeping wife (probably not sleeping anymore thanks to Horton’s ravings), his sons, and the thin gray line of ocean that separated England from France. He thought about going to bed.

  “Horton,” he said, looking into the fire. “You have been drinking, have you not?”

  “Sir?” said Horton, standing in front of the fire with his hat in his hands, rocking slightly from side to side.

  “I said, you have been drinking?”

  “Mr. Harriott, I . . . I . . .”

  “Drinking is a ridiculous vice in a man your age. It occurs to me how little I know of your personal circumstances, Horton. Where you go. Who you see. What you do. You are a man of great mystery, it occurs to me.”

  “Mr. Harriott, the letter . . .”

  “Horton, listen to me. The Home Office is not interested in receiving a letter from me. I have tried, Lord knows, to establish some direction in this ridiculous affair, but at every turn I have been rebuffed. I have been mocked, ignored, chastised, and disciplined. I have been spoken to in ways I have not experienced since I was a cabin boy off Newfoundland. I have had enough, Horton. Quite enough.”

  “But, sir, your duty . . .”

  “Do NOT!” shouted Harriott, and rising from his chair he moved to stand immediately in front of his constable, “do NOT presume to tell me my duty, Horton. My duty to my King, my country, and my fellow men is and always has been as clear to me as the fact that holding my hand in a fire will burn it. That duty has indeed often felt like holding my hand to a fire. I have struggled and fought and been defeated and have been victorious for my duty, sir. But these murders did not happen on the river, sir. They did not even happen in Wapping. They are Shadwell’s duty, sir, and always have been. And Shadwell has reached a conclusion. It is to Shadwell we defer at this time, and I shall be writing no letters, intercepting no lines of inquiry, and interfering NO FURTHER.”