Beatrice was silent for a long moment, looking down at the body on the table in front of her, and then across at the other corpse. Its skin was greenish and no longer bloated, but beginning to sag around its sternum. Then she said, ‘Do you think I might borrow your equipment, Mr Pott, and try a test for myself?’
‘You, madam?’
‘Please, Mr Pott, call me Beatrice. Or Widow Scarlet, if you still wish to be formal. But, yes, me. I’m not only Clement Bannister’s daughter, I’m his heiress. He passed on to me all of his chemical knowledge, all of his inspiration, and all of his enthusiasm to relieve the world’s sickness. He was the first person to devise a cure for tenesmus, using frankincense, and I helped him to mix it, when I was only eight years old.’
‘Bannister’s Bowel Balsam!’ said Percivall Pott. ‘I do believe my father used to take it. My goodness!’
He smiled, and then he said, ‘Why don’t you come back this afternoon, Beatrice? I shall be otherwise engaged in the operating theatre, and so you may have this whole mortuary to yourself. David will be here to assist you if you need anything – but please, feel free to use any equipment that you require. It’s a pleasure and an honour to have met you.’
Beatrice left, but as she reached the mortuary doors she heard Percivall Pott repeating, ‘Bannister’s Bowel Balsam. My goodness.’
*
Before she returned to Bart’s that afternoon, Beatrice went to No. 4 Bow Street to see Jonas Rook. The chimpanzee-like doorman knew who she was now, and bowed when she came in.
She could see Jonas Rook through the half-open door of his office, talking to two lawyers. When he looked up and saw her outside, he excused himself immediately and came out to greet her.
‘My dear Widow Scarlet. I do hope that you’re recovering from that hideous experience.’
Beatrice nodded. She was still very sore, and she had a dull ache in the small of her back, but she didn’t yet know herself how she felt about what had happened at Leda Sheridan’s. For the time being, all she wanted to do was concentrate on how the seven girls had died, and whether George Hazzard and Leda Sheridan could successfully be prosecuted for killing them.
Jonas Rook said, ‘All three will be sent for trial and are held in custody – George Hazzard and Mrs Sheridan and that apothecary, Godfrey Minchin. I’m in the early stages now of preparing the case against them, and if the grand jury approves a true bill I’m hoping we’ll be able to bring them up before a judge and jury before the end of the month.’
‘That’s good news,’ said Beatrice. ‘Mr Pott has not yet been able to determine the cause of death, so I’m going to the mortuary this afternoon to make some tests myself, and see if we can’t prove beyond any doubt that they were responsible. But there is one important thing I have to ask you – can you make sure that Godfrey Michin’s apothecary at the Foundery is sealed off as soon as possible, and that nobody is allowed access to it?’
‘Of course. I’ll make sure that it’s done immediately. The general warrant still applies.’
‘Thank you,’ said Beatrice. ‘I strongly suspect he might have been involved in preparing poisons for George Hazzard, and if so his equipment could still bear incriminating traces of it. I don’t want anybody to have the opportunity to wash out all of his flasks and destroy any evidence against him.’
‘You’re a remarkable woman, Widow Scarlet. There’s one thing I have to ask you: What is your present address? I will need to contact you from time to time before the trial, and I assume that you will not be returning to Maidenhead Court.’
‘For the time being, Florence and I are sharing rooms with Mrs Vickery at Black Horse Yard, by Spittle Market. Where we will go to after that, I haven’t yet had time to consider. Perhaps to Birmingham, to stay with my cousin.’
‘Black Horse Yard?’ said Jonas Rook. ‘Forgive me for saying so, but that’s a den of iniquity if ever there was one.’
Beatrice couldn’t help smiling. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘but there’s honour among thieves, and mercy among prostitutes.’
*
She returned to the mortuary at three o’clock, before it began to grow dark. Percivall Pott’s assistant, David, lit the oil lamp for her, and asked her if there was anything she needed.
‘Alcohol, please, as well as tartaric acid and lime, and ether. And I will require you to bring out the remains of at least three of the young girls.’
David blinked at her. ‘What exactly do you have in mind, Widow Scarlet, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘It’s a test my father once used, after some parish children were poisoned by eating yew seeds on a walk through Finsbury Fields. I don’t know how successful it will be, but Mr Pott seems to have exhausted every other possibility.’
Three dark blue aprons were hanging up by the workbench, and Beatrice took one down and tied it on. Although there was no evidence to support her idea, and no witnesses had yet come forward, she was working on the assumption that George Hazzard had almost immediately taken the seven girls from his factory to Leda Sheridan’s brothel. There, they had been poisoned so that they could be seen raped in their death throes in front of an audience. She was sure that the other five girls would have been poisoned in the same way, if Jonas Rook and his officers hadn’t intervened.
David wheeled out three bodies, one of which was Jane Webb’s. Although they had been kept in a cold store, and preserved with ethanol, they were now in an advanced state of decomposition. Beatrice had prepared for that and brought a handkerchief with her, soaked in Violet’s lavender perfume.
She sliced two-inch samples of flesh from the thighs of each of them, laid them on a metal dish and took them over to the workbench. There, while David watched, she dissolved them, in three separate flasks, in alcohol and tartaric acid. Once she had done that, she precipitated the fatty and resinous matter in water and heated it.
She had thought to herself: What poison does George Hazzard have available to him in the greatest quantity, and legitimately, but which no surgeon-apothecary has yet been able to trace? And then she had thought of Katharine, and all the lice in her hair, and how the lice had all been cleared by wrapping her head in tobacco leaves. Head lice were notoriously resistant to all kinds of treatments, such as rosemary and mistletoe and even mercury, but they had been effectively killed by the juices in tobacco.
She knew now that Godfrey Minchin was involved in preparing young girls for Leda Sheridan’s necrophiliac performances, and it seemed highly likely that George Hazzard could have employed him to distil liquid from tobacco leaves. Tobacco juice was a very fragile plant alkaloid, but if she could manage to extract it from the seven girls’ tissues, and if its residue could also be found in Godfrey’s apothecary, Jonas Rook would be well on the way to having all the evidence he needed.
If she could find no traces of tobacco juices, of course, and if the jury were prepared to believe that the seven girls had summoned up Satan, and that Satan had ultimately killed them, then the three accused would go free. Not only that, the Reverend Parsons and Ida Smollett would be able to continue the holy work of St Mary Magdalene’s Refuge, rescuing young girls from prostitution and delivering them unto God.
She thought of Jane Webb, delirious on ether fumes, staring at her wide-eyed and saying, ‘P’raps I could start all over again, and go back to being a virgin, of sorts.’
While she was heating the precipitate over the oil lamp’s flame, she suddenly found it hard not to cry.
46
Over the next three weeks the weather grew increasingly bitter, and on the day that George Hazzard and Leda Sheridan and Godfrey Minchin were brought up before the Old Bailey, the skies were charcoal-grey and it was sleeting. The courtroom had three tall windows, but it was so dark outside that all of the lamps had to be lit.
The public benches were crowded, and when the defendants were brought out, there was a rustling of paper and a murmuring of voices that sounded like the sea coming in. From where she was sitting in the witness
box, Beatrice thought that three of them looked exhausted and ghastly. They had spent three weeks in Newgate Prison, after all, and although they had probably been given preferential treatment, their confinement showed on their faces. They stood together in the dock round-shouldered and sullen, and even when George Hazzard’s lawyer John Bellflower came prancing across the courtroom to speak to him, he showed no sign that he had heard what he said, or cared.
Apart from stale sweat and tobacco and wig powder, the Old Bailey smelled strongly of aromatic herbs. Beatrice knew that pot-pourris were arranged around the courtroom to prevent the spread of typhus, or gaol fever, which defendants sometimes brought in with them from Newgate. Some years ago, a prisoner had infected more than sixty people with typhus, including two judges and the Lord Mayor, and they had all died.
After a few minutes, the clerk called out, ‘All rise!’ and the judge swept in. Beneath his long wig his nose was as sharp as a pickaxe and his eyes were hollow and his lips were tightly pursed. Jonas leaned over to Beatrice and whispered, ‘Robert Stokely, High Court judge. Not very happy it’s him. He and George Hazzard both belong to White’s.’
Beatrice said nothing. Her heart was beating fast. She was the principal witness, and in a few minutes she would have to stand up and give her evidence in front of everybody in this crowded courtroom – not only the hollow-eyed judge but the twelve jurors who were sprawling in their stalls on the right-hand side of the dock chatting to each other, and the public, and all of the clerks and lawyers and shorthand writers who were waiting with their pens poised.
The judge looked across at the dock and said, ‘Mr Hazzard, Mr Minchin, Mrs Sheridan. A grand jury has approved a true bill accusing the three of you of manslaughter, in that you deliberately administered a poisonous substance to seven young women from St Mary Magdalene’s Refuge for Refractory Females, leading to the deaths of all seven of them. You are further accused of concealing their remains in order to avoid prosecution. How does each of you plead?’
George Hazzard cleared his throat and said, ‘I plead not guilty, your honour! Not guilty! This charge is completely without foundation and has been brought with malicious intent by Mrs Beatrice Scarlet, for reasons that are totally beyond me. She seems to harbour venomous ill-will against me, and has concocted evidence which I am certain this court will dismiss as both ludicrous and far-fetched.’
Leda Sheridan simply sniffed and said, ‘Not guilty.’
Godfrey Minchin said, ‘Me too. Not guilty, I mean. I had nothing to do with any of this.’
‘Widow Scarlet?’ said the clerk.
Beatrice stood up. Speaking as clearly as she could, she described how she had visited George Hazzard’s tobacco factory looking for Jane Webb and the other girls. She told the jury how she had discovered that the pentagram was drawn in paint, and not in blood, and how she had analyzed the goat’s hair. She went on to relate how she and James had visited Leda Sheridan’s brothel, and how she had witnessed Grace being beheaded.
Inattentive at first, the jury were now sitting up and listening intently. There were gasps and murmurs from the public gallery when she described how Grace had been killed. When she explained how she had returned to Leda Sheridan’s with Violet, and how she had been raped, several women in the audience stood up and left.
Beatrice concluded by saying, ‘I have no doubt at all that Mr Hazzard and Mrs Sheridan were jointly responsible for abducting those seven girls, and that they were lethally poisoned for the sexual entertainment of a paying audience. I also have no doubt that the Reverend Parsons and Mrs Ida Smollett were both complicit in their abduction and their subsequent murders, and even if they are not standing in front of your honour in this courtroom today, they will surely be judged by God.’
After she had sat down, the courtroom was silent. After a few moments, though, John Bellflower stood up in his wig and his gown, and turned to the jury with a smile on his face as if Beatrice had just told a long and elaborate joke.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, I commend you for your patience in listening to the Widow Scarlet’s bizarre inventions. However, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that my client Mr Hazzard had any hand in the passing of these seven unfortunate young women. He took them from St Mary Magdalene’s Refuge in order to give them respectable employment in his tobacco factory. He has financially supported St Mary Magdalene’s for many years, and he has rescued countless girls from a life of vice and moral degradation.
‘In this particular case, however, the girls performed a ritual which led to them being possessed by the Devil, and becoming a coven of witches. They drew a satanic device on the wall of their dormitory, and they sacrificed a goat. They then demanded that Mr Hazzard take them to Mrs Sheridan’s establishment, so that they could pursue their preferred profession of prostitution.’
Jonas Rook stood up and said, ‘If that’s true, Mr Bellflower, why did Mr Hazzard claim that they had disappeared without trace?’
‘Because he was mortally ashamed that he had failed them, sir,’ John Bellflower replied. ‘He didn’t wish to admit that for the first time he had been unable to keep them on the path of moral rectitude.’
‘So he took them to Mrs Sheridan’s brothel? Is this true, Mrs Sheridan?’
‘It is, yes,’ said Leda Sheridan. ‘But I strongly object to your description of my house as a brothel. I run a highly respectable establishment for the entertainment of highly respectable members of London’s society.’
There was laughter and hoots of derision from the public gallery, until Judge Stavely banged his gavel and snapped, ‘Silence!’
‘Very well, Mr Bellflower,’ said Jonas Rook. ‘But how did all seven of these girls come to pass away? Can you explain that? And why were they covertly interred in the garden of Mr Hazzard’s factory? Why were they given no civil or Christian ceremony, nor public notification?’
‘At the time, sir, their passing was a mystery,’ said John Bellflower. ‘Neither Mr Hazzard nor Mrs Sheridan could explain why they had died. They had been expected one evening to perform in one of Mrs Sheridan’s entertainments, but a few minutes before they could appear they were discovered in the ante-room, with all life extinct. Mr Hazzard decided that it would be more discreet if they were taken to Hackney and buried without any ado.’
‘You mean that he was concerned that he and Mrs Sheridan might be unjustly accused of having murdered them? And their highly respectable guests might be implicated in a scandal?’
John Bellflower shrugged in his gown like a large crow settling on a fence. ‘Exactly. Look at today’s proceedings. Utterly without foundation. But – listen! We made a careful study of the post-mortem findings produced by the surgeon at St Bartholomew’s, Mr Percivall Pott, and from these I am gratified to say that we have finally discovered the cause of death.’
‘Really?’ said Jonas Rook. ‘Mr Pott concluded that the girls had most likely been poisoned, did he not, but at the same time he admitted that he had been unable to isolate what particular poison it was.’
‘Aha! Yes! But he does report that he found a substantial level of arsenic in the girls’ bodies – perhaps more than could be explained by their use of cosmetic creams or their ingestion of the usual proprietary tonics to prevent venereal diseases or menstrual disorders. I suggest that this arsenic almost certainly killed them, but I agree that we have to ask ourselves where did it come from, this arsenic, and how did it enter their bloodstreams?’
He turned around again, and now he pointed to a red-nosed man sitting at the end of his bench. ‘Allow me to introduce my witness, Doctor Josiah Saunders of the Royal College of Physicians. Doctor Saunders, perhaps you would be good enough to enlighten the court as to your remarkable findings.’
Dr Saunders rose to his feet, and bowed to the judge, and then to the jury. He spoke in a tremulous voice, and Judge Stavely had to ask him twice to speak up, especially as the public gallery was growing restless again.
‘When Mr Bellflower showed me the post
-mortem findings from Mr Pott, I was reminded of a case late last year, when I was summoned to Limehouse, where a five-year-old boy was gravely ill. I first took his sickness to be croup. He exhibited all the usual symptoms of croup – wracked with pain and unable to swallow, and within a very few hours he was dead. The following evening his two younger siblings also died.’
‘Can you get to the point, doctor?’ asked Judge Stavely. ‘We don’t have all day and we have many other cases to consider. And can you speak a little louder?’
‘Beg your pardon, your honour. What concerned me about the death of these children was that although the family was living in extremely cramped conditions, cheek-by-jowl with their neighbours, nobody else in that terrace of houses was affected. I examined the water supply and the general sanitation, and there was nothing there to suggest that there was anything injurious to health.
‘The only distinctive feature of their house was the wallpaper in the children’s bedroom. It was that bright emerald-coloured wallpaper which is known, I believe, as German Green. What gives it such an intense colour is the arsenic used in its printing ink, and it has been suggested for some time now that it can poison those who have decorated their houses with it. Not everybody, necessarily – healthy adults seem to be immune. But children and the elderly, and anybody who is suffering from any kind of debilitation.’
‘You are seriously trying to say that these seven girls were killed by wallpaper?’ asked Jonas Rook.
‘I believe it to be irrefutable,’ said John Bellflower. ‘The ante-room at Mrs Sheridan’s in which they were found to be deceased is decorated with an arsenical paper produced by William Windle and Company, and which has been associated with several other sudden deaths since its first production. It seems to me that those girls were difficult and almost impossibly demanding in their behaviour, and that Mr Hazzard and Mrs Sheridan did everything they possibly could to accommodate them. But what they did not do was kill them. This was natural death by wallpaper, and I trust the jury will agree with me.’
The Coven Page 36
