‘Yes, Douglas, I would have sullied this good name for what it is worth to save a man from going to the gallows.’
He stared at her in silence; then he shook his head slowly as he said, ‘There must be more in it than that, Bridget.’
‘What are you inferring?’
‘I don’t rightly know; I’m asking you. Taking the liberty of a friend, I’m asking you.’
She turned slightly away from him as he spoke, and so he couldn’t see the expression on her face when she said, ‘I’ve told you before, my father had an interest in him, and I took it from there. I realised that he was intelligent, and under other circumstances he could have made something of himself. And my interest in him deepened when I found he was attending night classes.’ She glanced towards him now. ‘He used to go to the Unitarian evening school, and the Minister there, who was a friend of my father’s, spoke highly of him as a young man: he knew he was supporting his mother who, from what I understood, was a difficult woman, and at the same time, trying to keep his brother out of mischief.’ She paused now, then, looking straight into Douglas’s face, she said, ‘I admired him.’
Douglas looked hard at this young woman whom he could now call his friend, and could also add he was more than fond of, and he guessed that her admiration for one of her workmen had gone deeper than just interest. These things happened. There was Charlotte Cox. She was never spoken of now. She was a distant relation, second cousin once removed type, and she had been put beyond the pale, buried while still alive, you could say, because she had run off with the baker who had catered for her sister’s wedding. And there had been a Bishop at that wedding, a confirmed High Church one. The Cox family had groaned and groaned for years in the agony of this disgrace. Charlotte was now the mother of three children and she herself had grown round and comely in her happy isolation.
Taking Bridget’s hand, he moved it gently and his eyes gazed softly at her as he said,
‘The heart is blind:
It gropes for a hand,
Not any hand
But one whose touch is kind,
Dove soft;
It matters not the face
For the valleys and the mountains of the bones
Are just a case.
The heart is blind
While searching for love.’
Her eyelids were blinking rapidly, and her lips were tightly compressed and it was a moment or so before she spoke when, her voice trembling slightly, she said, ‘You are a very good man, Douglas, and I thank you for your understanding. I feel you are a unique person.’
‘Odd, more like.’
‘Never. What you are is a very human human being.’
However, when he said in a completely changed tone, one that had a brisk businesslike note to it, ‘But I must say again, Bridget, I think it’s unwise of you to attend the court tomorrow. Especially…well, under the circumstances,’ she withdrew her hand from his and replied as briskly, ‘Douglas. Nothing…nothing could keep me away from that court tomorrow, for, apart from his wife, I think I must be the only friend he has. And over the past weeks in that prison he has changed. I had thought he would fight, even be aggressive in his own defence, but on the two occasions I have seen him he has appeared already to have accepted the worst. On my last visit I pleaded with him to tell them why he wanted to see his brother, why he had threatened him; and, you know, he just continued to look at me for some time, and then he said, “What has to be will be, miss.” He’s so changed: the Joe I knew would never have answered like that. That dreadful place has had a nulling effect on him.’
At this point the drawing-room door opened and Victoria appeared, and Bridget said in some surprise, ‘I didn’t hear the carriage.’
‘I didn’t come in the carriage, I brought the trap.’
Bridget had risen and as she walked towards Victoria to greet her she said in almost disbelief, ‘You brought the trap on your own?’
‘Yes, Bridget, on my own,’ and the slight terseness in her voice was even more evident when, looking at Douglas, she remarked, ‘You here again?’
Douglas gave a slight laugh as he countered, ‘Well, if you recognise I’m here again, it must have been one of the times when you, too, were here again. And I wasn’t aware that Bridget’s house was out of bounds.’
Bridget glanced from one to the other. There was evidently a feeling of animosity between them, which surprised her. She had imagined that when Victoria took up her abode in that house she would find an ally in Douglas. But apparently not.
‘Well, I’ll be off. See you in the court in the morning, Bridget.’
‘Yes, Douglas.’
He gave Victoria no farewell, and when the door closed on him she sat down on the couch and began to arrange her wide taffeta skirt to each side of her knees, her eyes following her hands as she said, ‘You see a lot of him, don’t you? He can make a nuisance of himself.’
Such a statement would normally have brought forth a corresponding retort from Bridget, but she, already pondering on the relationship between her cousin and Douglas, decided that Victoria must have become jealous of him. She was likely seeing him as a usurper of the position she herself had held in her affection.
She looked more closely at her. There was a petulant expression on her face, more so than she had ever seen before. When she was young she would go into what her father used laughingly to call the pet. “She’s in the pet,” he would say. But as Victoria grew into womanhood such occasions seemed to have become fewer and fewer, when she had gone “in the pet”.
But she was definitely in the pet now, and it came over in her tone as she said, ‘Why must you appear at that trial? You’ll get your name up. Mr Filmore said as much. Engaging the best advocate that was to be got from London for the man. It isn’t as if he was a relative or anything like that.’
‘What’s come over you, Victoria? You used to like Joe; at least you appeared to. On the few times you would deign to enter the blacking factory you always remarked on what a pleasant fellow he was.’
‘Yes, I might have, but nevertheless he was a common workman.’
Bridget seemed to jump a step backwards from the daintily dressed figure on the couch and she exclaimed harshly, ‘And you, don’t let us forget, were living well, and dressing well, on the sweat of that common workman and many others like him!’ And it was with difficulty she stopped herself from adding, ‘You are only living well and dressing well now from the same source.’ But she had seen Victoria’s head droop and her hand go to her mouth and cover it with a handkerchief as the tears ran down her cheeks, and so she stepped towards her again, saying gently now, ‘What is it? What is really the matter? I…I thought you were so happy.’
When Victoria’s shoulders began to shake Bridget quickly sat down beside her and, taking her hand, coaxed her, ‘What is it, dear? What’s the matter?’
‘I’m…I’m going to have…’ The words trailed away under Victoria’s breath and Bridget said, ‘What? What did you say?’
Victoria now lifted her head, dried her eyes, then muttered, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see. Well now, is…is that something to cry about?’
There was silence for a moment; then Victoria, biting on the hem of her handkerchief, murmured, ‘Lionel isn’t pleased.’
‘Why isn’t he pleased? I should have thought he would have been over the moon to…well, perhaps have an heir. What about his father?’
Victoria turned her head away now and looked down the long room towards the ray of sunlight streaming in through the high windows. And her voice still a mutter, she said, ‘He laughed.’ Then swinging round quickly towards Bridget again, she almost shouted the words: ‘He laughed, Bridget. He laughed so loudly and so long that Lionel had to yell at him…Mr Filmore is very crude, Bridget. There…there are times when I’m not happy, Bridget. You see, the staff is…well, they’re different from…from what our girls were like. The cook doesn’t like me going into the kitch
en. And…and the house isn’t as clean as it should be. I spoke to Douglas about it and asked what he thought I should do, and you know what he said to me?’
Bridget made a small shaking movement with her head and waited. ‘He said I had got what I wanted and I had come into it with my eyes open. I used to like Douglas, but he’s changed. And he fights with Lionel. They nearly came to fisticuffs recently. Yes, yes, they did.’ She nodded vigorously at Bridget’s startled look, then went on, ‘Douglas called Lionel a leech. Mind you, it was after Lionel had been away for three days in Edinburgh. He was being interviewed for some position to run an estate up in the Highlands, and Douglas accused him of having taken the trip to Edinburgh for a gaming session and said he couldn’t manage our own little stint, that’s what he called the farm, a stint, so how could he have had the nerve to put in for the post of managing a Scottish estate. It was awful; I ran out of the room. And, you know, it’s so unfair of Douglas because Lionel is so good. They’re very short of money but he’s promised me that every quarter I shall have enough money to meet the ordinary household bills. Of course, I understand I’ve got to watch out for extravagance from the kitchen, because they order much more than they need. And he left it to me. I know it’s going to be difficult, but I must do it. And I’ve told him I can manage with half of my dress allowance.’
‘You’ll not; you’ll use your dress allowance. If you can manage on half of it then that’s all I shall give you.’
‘Oh Bridget, please don’t you start and be awkward. I know it’s good of you to continue giving me the allowance, but if I can manage on half…’
‘If you can manage on half that’s all you’re going to get.’ Bridget sprang up from the couch; then, pointing down to the face that had now taken on a look of indignation, she ordered, ‘Say no more! Two hundred and fifty it will be from now on.’
‘You’re cruel, that’s what you are.’ Victoria was standing now, her hands nervously buttoning and unbuttoning her tight-fitting grey alpaca coat; they then went to her hair and she began to thrust in a stray curl under the brim of her hat as she repeated, ‘You are, you are; there is a cruel streak in you. You’ve shown it with regard to Lionel ever since the beginning, you have. Yes, you have. It’s true what he says about you.’
‘And what does he say about me?’ The words were flat.
‘Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters any more, because you have changed towards me, all because I love Lionel…Frustration and jealousy, that’s what he said. Yes, he did; and I think he was right because there you are being talked about: going visiting that murderer in prison, and spending all that money to try and prove he’s innocent, when everybody knows he’s not, everybody but you. You’re getting yourself talked about. Do you hear? Yes, you are.’
There was a note of restrained anger in Bridget’s voice as she said, ‘This is no longer your home, Victoria, and I would advise you to go back now to the one you have chosen; and when you get there, repeat to your husband exactly what you have said to me, and see what his reaction is. But do not forget to emphasise that I am cutting your allowance.’
‘Yes. Yes, I will. As soon as he comes back from London next week, that is the first thing I will greet him with. And I will tell him how right he has been in his estimation of you.’
She was already on her way to the door when Bridget said, ‘Do that, dear, do that; and as I said, I’d like you to come back and tell me of his reaction.’
Victoria stopped for a moment and stared back at the once beloved cousin, before flouncing out of the room, leaving Bridget standing gripping the back of a chair as if she were about to lift it from the floor. And being a very human individual, the thought crossed her mind that for two pins she would follow her cousin and really give her something that she could carry back to her new home…the truth of the situation. However, be it for two pins or two hundred, she knew she couldn’t do it.
Eleven
It wasn’t the first time she had been in the Guildhall. The previous visit, she recalled, had taken place when she was about sixteen. Her father had, at that time, been friends with the then Lord Mayor of Newcastle and he was to meet him in the Guildhall, either to attend a meeting, or following on a meeting; she wasn’t quite sure, she only remembered that in the Guildhall she had been horrified by the sight of the courtroom, the details of which the Lord Mayor had so proudly pointed out.
Facing the bench where the judge would sit, but quite some distance from it, and extending into the middle of the courtroom, was a sort of high and square wooden box, made to look fearsome by being topped by pointed iron railings which curved inwards, thus making sure that the prisoner would not attempt to climb out. If found guilty, the prisoner would seem immediately to disappear for he would be hustled from the bottom straight down steps leading to the quayside from where, in earlier years if he were to be deported, he would straight away be put on a ship, nowadays into the Black Maria that would take him perhaps to Durham jail, there to serve out his sentence. This form of departure ensured that he had no contact with the public seated in rows to the right of him and among whom might have been his relatives, wife, mother or children.
The witnesses were held in a room that went off a large hall that was part of the courtroom. Here, too, she recalled there was a gruesome contraption. It was really a window sill, quite narrow, but just able to accommodate three prisoners standing tightly side by side, but hemmed in by an iron gate.
She could recall the feeling of dismay she had experienced when realising that human beings could treat each other in such a barbaric fashion, no matter what they had done. Today that word was inadequate to express the great deep feeling of sickness and apprehension that was enveloping her as she sat amongst the crowd of people thronging the benches.
She could see Joe’s head and shoulders and she was willing him to look in her direction, but he was gazing straight ahead at the red-robed and white-wigged figure sitting on the elevated bench.
The well of the court, too, seemed to be swarming with people, among whom she could see Andrew Kemp, his son Richard, and Mr Norman Beale, the advocate who had been commissioned to defend Joe. His opposite number, the prosecutor, was a Mr Pearson. Then there was Judge Hodgson. At the far side of the room and pressed tightly together were the twelve most important people present, the jury.
So far in the proceedings, she felt that if it had been a race, the prosecutor would already have been far ahead of the advocate, for Mr Beale’s words and manner seemed not to be as convincing as the prosecutor’s, which were already carrying the conviction of guilt.
‘You reiterate that you did not kill your brother, but your own words damn you.’
There was an appeal from the advocate, and on it the judge warned the prosecuting counsel to desist from making statements and to return to questioning.
So the prosecutor now said, ‘Am I right in thinking your mother was telling the truth when she said that, on the night in question, the night your brother died, you did use words to that effect—’ and now the prosecutor leant forward, picked up a piece of paper from his desk and read, ‘“I’ll swing for you one of these days.” I ask you, was she speaking the truth?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Speak up, please.’
‘Yes, sir. She was speaking the truth. But I had said that to him dozens of times over the…’
‘Yes, we have heard you make that statement already. Now will you tell the court why you said those words at that particular time. What was the reason?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Your memory seems to be particularly vague. You’ve already said you cannot remember where you went when you left Brook’s Wood on that particular night. I fear that if you hadn’t been recognised by Mr Filmore you would have denied ever being in the wood. And no doubt you have likely forgotten where you hid the knife.’
Before Mr Beale could again object, Joe’s voice rang through the court: ‘I had no knife. I’ve told you. I
had no knife. I never carried a knife. Never,’ and the prosecutor, giving a slight shrug towards the jury, said, ‘No more questions,’ and sat down.
Mr Beale then stood up to question Joe; and as Bridget listened to his smooth, quiet questioning, she cried within herself. ‘That isn’t the way to do it: that will never impress the jury,’ for the man was talking as if he were having a pleasant conversation with someone instead of trying to save him from the gallows.
He was saying, ‘You got your brother out of many scrapes, did you not?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Am I right in thinking there is a young man in an asylum now, put there because he set Farmer Brook’s haystack on fire? But is it not true that it was your brother who egged him on to do this, in fact, supplied him with the oil and matches?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And is it not true that one Andrew Davison served a term of six months’ imprisonment because stolen property was found in his outhouse, whereas the real perpetrator of this crime was your brother who, when he knew the police were looking for the stolen property, placed it in this man’s yard?’
There was a slight pause before Joe said, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is it not also true that these are just two instances of your brother’s pilfering, and that over the years, you have had to support him by your own work because he could not maintain any employment for longer than a very short time?’
Again there was a pause before Joe said, ‘Yes, sir.’
Bridget closed her eyes for a moment. To her, this seemed to be the wrong form of questioning altogether. It would be what the prosecutor might ask, then come back like a shot of a gun, saying, ‘So, you had had enough, so you killed him?’
Then almost as if the report of a shot from a gun had brought her head mounting up, she heard the advocate saying, ‘Is it true that you are not the father of the child your wife gave birth to some weeks ago, but that she was already pregnant with the child for some months when, out of the goodness of your heart, to save her shame, you married her? And…’
The Black Candle Page 15
