“Is it so!” cried my venerable friend. “Here is no liar, but one trying to speak the truth. Bozzy, we must save this girl!”
I stared. The evidence, that had shaken my faith in the girl, had spoken quite otherwise to him. It had spoken with such clear moral force and conviction that it stirred his great bulk, and brought it next morning into the court-room of the Old Bailey.
He cleared his way through the press like a bailiff, with jerks of his sturdy oak staff. We were in time to hear the defence begin. The crowd murmured in sympathy as Bet’s sad story was repeated by her friends as they had heard it from her on that Monday in January. All her natural functions were suspended, related the apothecary in sepulchral tones, the whole time of her imprisonment; she was very faint and weak, and the black-and-blue marks never went off for a month afterwards. My venerable friend shook his head from side to side, and clicked his tongue.
Burning glances of sympathy were levelled at the abused girl where she sat impassive in the dock as the story was told. They changed to looks of triumph as the defence brought aces out of their sleeves—a witness who had seen the girl led past his turnpike, in tears, by a pair of ruffians; three persons who had seen the bedraggled creature returning in the misty evening.
Dr. Johnson, seated on a bench with his chin on his staff, frowned and shook his head.
“How can this help?” he muttered. “The girl swore she was dragged off in a fit. Now we find she walked by the turnpike. Where is truth to be found?”
The defence rested.
It was three o’clock the next morning when I knocked up my friend.
“The girl is cast!” I told him. “She will be transported.”
“Cast!” exclaimed my friend. “What this girl has been, I know not; but she is no perjurer.”
A double knock announced a later walker than I. Again it was John Wintlebury and Robert Scarrat.
“You must help us!” cried the hartshorn-rasper. “Can you give us no hope?”
“Only this, that the girl is innocent,” replied my friend. “I will do what I can. Where is the girl?”
“Alack,” exclaimed the volatile Scarrat, “in New-gate.”
“Then we must have her out.”
That was easier said than done, but Johnson managed it. Scarrat carried the request. Meanwhile, off went the black boy Francis to the White Horse. He came back with a note:
“She says she will come, if only to laugh.
Ma: Squires”
The old gipsy woman herself was not far behind. Next to arrive was Mother Wells. She came supported by the carpenter son. My friend received his curious callers with solemn dignity, and offered them cakes and port. The wrinkled old bawd guzzled hers with coarse greed.
It was still dark night when a sedan-chair turned into Johnson’s Court. It was attended by two turnkeys and followed by our friends, once again supporting between them the highstrung matron. All three tenderly extracted from the chair the stocky person of Elizabeth Canning, and so she was assisted up the stair.
Dr. Johnson took her hand.
“Do not be afraid, my dear.”
“I am not afraid,” said Bet Canning.
She looked levelly at the hideous old gipsy hag, then at the bawd. The latter wiped a drool of port off her chin. Dr. Johnson handed the girl to a chair, her friends found places, and a hush fell as everyone in the room looked toward my learned friend.
“My dear,” said Dr. Johnson, addressing himself to the girl, “there are those who think you are lying. I do not think you are lying.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The gipsy beldame, a mere huddle of rags except for her bright black eyes, snorted.
“But, my dear,” my friend continued quietly, “there is much that is dark, much that you have not been able to tell us.”
“I have told,” said Bet Canning clearly, “all that I know.”
“We must look further, then. There is one in this cause,” said Dr. Johnson, “who seemed a knowledgeable man.”
I leaned forward.
“Who?”
“The cunning man,” replied my learned friend solemnly. “He knew where Elizabeth was, and he wrote it down, scribble, scribble, scribble along. He was right. I would have consulted him myself, but he is not to be found. There is no conjurer in the Old Bailey.”
“I saw him there myself,” cried Mrs. Canning. “He had his wig over his face; and when he lighted up the candles, he frighted me, and I could not stay for more.”
“Well, well, he is gone away from thence, he is no longer to be consulted. We must make do without him.”
He produced a leather case, which being opened revealed a gleaming polished disc of some black substance.
“This,” said Dr. Johnson solemnly, “is the famous Black Stone of Dr. Dee the alchemist. I had it of Mr. Walpole against this night’s purpose. Into it,” he lowered his sonorous voice another pitch, “the alchemist used to call his spirits, and they revealed the truth to him.”
Nobody spoke.
Dr. Johnson extinguished the candles, all but one, which gleamed fitfully on the table, accentuating rather than piercing the darkness. For a moment there was dead silence.
“Before the spirits speak,” said Dr. Johnson, “has no one a word to tell us?”
I heard somebody gasp. The old gipsy was shaking and muttering to herself, it might have been a charm or an incantation. Mrs. Canning was crying again, in long shuddering gasps, and the hartshorn-rasper was twitching where he sat. Only the stolid inn-keeper and the cynical old bawd preserved an unbroken calm.
Elizabeth Canning’s gaze caught and hung on the gleaming speculum. Her plain face was white as paper.
“Pray, my girl,” said Dr. Johnson gently, “look into the magick stone of Dr. Dee, and tell us what you see.”
“I see nothing,” she faltered.
“You will see the truth,” said my friend. “Look well, and tell us what you see.”
The girl stared into the polished surface, scarcely seeming to breathe. Her eyes contracted to pinpoints. She sat rigid.
“It is the night of January I,” breathed my friend in the silence. “Do you see Elizabeth Canning?”
“I see her.”
The voice was tight-and high, and seemed to come from a long way off.
“I see Elizabeth Canning. She is walking between two men, and weeping. It is a road, with water in it. Now they turn into a house, there is an old woman there.”
“Swarthy and black?”
“No, grey and wrinkled. She takes away her clothes, and puts her into a room.”
“Without any furniture?
“No,” replied the trance-like voice. “No, it is the best bedroom. The door opens, and the man comes in. Now Elizabeth can see his face. It is he. It is the same man who wanted Elizabeth to do the bad thing, always and always he was at her elbow saying it to her, and she would not. Now he is here to do it, and Elizabeth cannot help herself.”
In a violent shudder the dreaming voice died away. For a moment there was silence in the room.
“Here,” muttered Wintlebury finally, “you must stop this, sir, you’ve bewitched the girl to her hurt. Who knows what she’ll say?”
“She’ll say the truth,” said Dr. Johnson sharply. “Be silent, sir, and listen.”
He spoke soothingly to the rigid girl.
“It is the eve of King Charles’s Martyrdom. Do you see Elizabeth Canning?”
“I see her.”
“Where is she?”
“She is in the loft. The wicked man has left her behind, they have taken away her clothes, she cannot eat for shame. Because she would not do the bad thing with other men, they have beaten her and thrust her into the loft. She wants to go home, but she does not know where home is. She has forgotten her name. She has forgotten everything. She is very wretched.”
Again the level voice died away.
“And then?”
The polished disc gleamed in the candlelight.
“But the grate?” I struck in.
“A saw across the fireplace,” said a quiet voice in my ear. It was the young carpenter. “My cross-cut saw.”
“She runs away home. They ask where she has been for four weeks; but she has forgotten. Only it seems to her that she was somewhere hungry and cold, and she has been somehow harmed, the ugly-face woman must have done it, and her cloathes are gone; so she tells them as best she can what must have happened, and they believe her, and are very angry. Even the man who did the bad thing to her, he is angry too, and wants the gipsy hanged. Elizabeth has forgotten what he did to her; she thinks he is her friend.”
“The man,” Dr. Johnson leaned forward gently, “who was the man?”
“That’s enough of this flummery,” came an angry voice. “Can’t you see that the girl is mad?”
A rough hand struck aside the magick speculum of Dr. Dee. Elizabeth Canning looked up into an out-thrust face, somehow distorted in the flickering light of the candle from below, and recoiled with scream after scream of terror. Then the candle flame was struck out, and footsteps clattered on the stair.
“Let him go,” said Dr. Johnson. “Mr. John Wintlebury is not the first to enforce his desires on a virtuous serving-wench, and I fear there’s no law to touch him.”
“I’ll touch him,” cried the hartshorn-rasper violently. “I’ll—I’ll rasp him!”
He held the shuddering girl tight against his shoulder. He touched her pale hair.
“She’s not mad, sir?” he pleaded.
“Not the least in the world,” replied my friend, “yet hers is a strange affliction. The learned call it the catalepsy. One so afflicted may preach, or prophesy, or fast without hunger, or cut his flesh with knives, and not feel it; or fall unconscious and lie as the dead; or believe the body’s functions to be pretermitted; or they may upon great suffering or shame forget who they are, and wander homeless until they remember. It was Mr. John Wintlebury’s good luck that the wronged girl forgot him and the wrong he did her, and even herself, for very shame.”
“And my bad luck,” croaked the gipsy crone, “for the story that came from her disturbed mind put me into jeopardy of my life.”
“You were never in jeopardy, being what you are,” returned Dr. Johnson.
“What are you?” I burst out uncontrollably.
“A customs spy,” replied the old witch, “and a good one, young man. Who’d ever suspect the old gipsy beggar when she came nosing about the barns? I knew every smugglers’ lay on that coast. O no, me Lord Treasurer wouldn’t have let the old gipsy woman hang. ’Twas but a few nights lying hard in gaol; he could not move openly in the matter, for fear of betraying me and mine to the smugglers. In the end me Lord Mayor had his orders, and I was enlarged.”
“And Mother Wells?” I touched flint and steel to the candle.
“It all happened,” my friend replied, “of course, in her house of assignation; it was she who beat the girl when she would not go the way of the house.”
I advanced the candle toward the old bawd’s corner. The lees of her port were there in the glass, but the old woman was gone.
“Upon her,” remarked Dr. Johnson, “justice has been done. You will remember that, although Mary Squires was pardoned, Susannah Wells has been branded on the hand for her part in the work.”
Elizabeth Canning’s sobs had died away, and she lay in a sleep like death against the hartshorn-rasper’s shoulder.
“When she awakes,” he asked, “will she remember?”
“I cannot say,” replied my learned friend. “Perhaps she will remember everything. If not, you must tell her, gently, over and over, until the two times join into one in her mind and she no longer has those agonizing moments of trying to remember, like the time in the loft, or in the dock when she struggled to remember the young carpenter.”
He pulled aside the heavy curtains and let in the dawn.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I will wait upon the Secretary of State.”
The sun was up as the sleepy turnkeys rouzed to help lift the unconscious girl back into the sedan-chair. My benevolent friend followed it with his eyes to the mouth of the court.
“The issue of this night’s sitting,” he remarked with a half-smile, “has exceeded expectation. I reasoned that someone close to the girl knew where she was, else why the cunning man with the muffled face, who must write his predictions? Clearly his face and his voice were known. I brought her friends together, and produced a conjuration of my own. I hoped that superstition would affright one of them, and even that the girl might take courage and ‘see’ in the speculum what perhaps she had been frighted from telling. I never guessed that so strange is the mind in a catalepsy that it will see truly, as it were in a sleep, what it has forgotten in waking.”
[The disappearance of Elizabeth Canning from her aunt’s house in London in 1753 was a nine-days’ wonder which was not solved in her time. To make a story of it, I advanced the date to bring it under Boswell’s eye, and supplied an invented solution which came to me one night in sleep. Working it up along those lines, I soon came to see that my subconscious had hit upon the actual and only possible solution of the bizarre affair. The whole story will be found in my Elizabeth Is Missing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1945). There the curious reader may find how the matter actually came out (without the intervention of Dr. Johnson) and what kind of a happy ending Elizabeth Canning actually met with, and where.]
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lillian de la Torre (1902–1993) was born in New York City. She received a bachelor’s degree from the College of New Rochelle and master’s degrees from Columbia University and Radcliffe College, and she taught in the English department at Colorado College for twenty-seven years. De la Torre wrote numerous books; short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; reviews for the New York Times Book Review; poetry; and plays, including one produced for Alfred Hitchcock’s television series. In her first book, Elizabeth Is Missing (1945), she refuted twelve theories on the disappearance of a maidservant near the Tower of London in 1753, and then offered her own answer. Her series of historical detective stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell comprise her most popular fiction. De la Torre served as the 1979 president of the Mystery Writers of America.
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Copyright © 1981 by Lillian de la Torre
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
ISBN 978-1-5040-4454-7
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The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson Page 24