The Murder of Harriet Monckton

by Elizabeth Haynes

  And then, that day, it stunned me. Perhaps something similar happened to St Paul on the Damascus road, although I saw no blinding light. The minister was looking at me. I raised my head and I said, ‘Sir, I have been a believer and saved from a very young age. I believe the Holy Spirit is calling me to the ministry.’

  And with those words I fell into a kind of glorious faint, and when I came to myself the minister and all the deacons were kneeling over my body and hands were all over me, and someone was singing Alleluia.

  I resolved myself that I would enrol at Highbury College and nowhere else. There was, however, the small matter of the fees. I applied for scholarships and honoraria, to no avail. I prayed and prayed for guidance, suspecting it to be personal vanity that drew me to that particular establishment; and yet my resolution to study there did not diminish. This continued for two years, whilst I laboured as a lay preacher at the Lutheran chapel and several others, and visited the Caney household occasionally to continue my conversations with Sarah.

  Finally, in the spring of 1825, the solution to both problems presented itself, and I asked John Caney for permission to marry his daughter, and he accepted.

  It began somewhere, I suppose, in the way all matters of the faith do. It might be considered unconventional, and I daresay many of my peers would believe it to be sinful, but I earnestly believed that what happened to me was something given to me by the Lord. A gift, if you will, in the manner of the gifts of prophecy and of tongues, and interpretation: my gift was that of preaching the Word, and it was fuelled by physical exertion, and, eventually, a very specific activity.

  But I must not get ahead of myself; for the way the gift revealed itself to me was very gradual, or else I should have thought it foolish, or an attack by Satan himself.

  After our marriage I remained at the house in Chelsea. John Caney, recognising my own straitened circumstances, conferred upon me an annual income which was more than sufficient to keep Sarah in the manner to which she was accustomed, and also, finally, to permit me to enrol at Highbury College and commence my studies for the ministry, with his full support. To this end, I took rooms at the college and returned to Chelsea some weekends.

  I suppose it is fair to say I enjoyed the student life to its fullest. I had become close friends with a Welshman named Richard Jones, a man whose religious fervour was matched only by his abhorrence for drink. It was he who set me upon a path of abstinence. As well as Richard, I enjoyed the company of brothers called Charles and Henry Drewitt, from Marlow in Buckinghamshire. We four became fast friends, and on the weekends we stayed at the college we spent the days preaching in town, or discussing theology long into the night. You may determine from this information that my habits at the time were very pious.

  And yet something happened to set me upon a course of what some might regard as moral duplicity. Or moral duality, perhaps, is a better way of describing it. It was as if, in one very minor aspect of my life, I had discovered a quite separate path from that traditionally followed by those training for the ministry.

  The college employed servants to tend to our baser needs whilst we concentrated upon our studies. Each wing of bedrooms was in the charge of a manservant, who sent away our laundry, replaced our linens, and set the fires in our rooms each day. Since we spent most of the day attending lectures, or prayer meetings, or Bible study, we naturally came to the conclusion that the manservant performed these tasks alone.

  It was only one day, when I found myself indisposed with a bad head cold, and remained in bed, that I discovered the truth. The wing might well have been managed by Mr Wilkins, but he had at his disposal an army of women who performed all the menial tasks. Having spent the night tossing and turning, I pushed a note under Richard’s door, asking him to forward my apologies to the tutor for my failure to attend classes that day, and that I would pay my dues on the morrow. (The regulations at the time stated that a failure to attend any class would result in a fine of twopence, that was to be payable along with a detailed explanation as to the nature of the absence, on returning to class.) That task done, I fell into a fitful sleep, accompanied by the sorts of dreams one only experiences when suffering from a high fever.

  At some late hour of the morning I awoke in my bed, my nightclothes damp with perspiration. I sat up, and was shocked to see a young female with my chamber pot in her hand, a cloth over it. She was staring at me. I thought I might still be dreaming, and asked her if she was real.

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, I thought you was unwell.’

  ‘I am unwell,’ I replied. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Betsy, sir.’

  ‘What are you doing in my room?’

  ‘Cleaning it, sir.’

  ‘Where is Mr Wilkins?’

  Something in her face hardened. Perhaps she thought I was going to report her for some misdemeanour. ‘In the scullery, sir, I expect. Shall I fetch him for you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She made a half-hearted curtsey and made to leave the room.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you. Do you visit every day?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I thought of my room, how I regularly left it in disarray, with my undergarments placed over the chair, thinking that only Mr Wilkins should ever see or touch them. The thought of Betsy taking them away, laundering them and bringing them back again made something very strange stir within me.

  ‘Always my room?’

  ‘I’ve never taken nothing, sir.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply that. I am missing nothing at all. I was only curious.’

  ‘Yours, and all the others on this floor, sir.’

  ‘You do it, and not Mr Wilkins?’

  ‘He checks to see I’ve done it proper, sir.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘You do a most excellent job, Betsy.’ And I smiled at her, and coughed.

  ‘You’re not well, sir.’

  ‘Indeed I am not.’

  ‘Shall I fetch you some water, sir?’

  All the sirring was beginning to grate upon my poor fevered brain. She disappeared and returned some minutes later with a glass, and an earthenware jug. By then I had almost drifted off to sleep again, and the chink of the jug against the glass startled me back to wakefulness.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I should be most obliged if you would not mention this to Mr Wilkins,’ she said. ‘I should have left your room untended, once I realised you was in it.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  She nodded, and left, closing the door softly behind her.

  I liked her. You might assume from this tale of our encounter that I took advantage of her. That at some point I began to make excuses to absent myself from classes, or to return early and unexpectedly in the hope of catching Betsy in the privacy of my rooms.

  It was not a deliberate thing, I will say that. Purely by chance, having collected a parcel one morning from the porter’s lodge and returned to my room to leave it there, I intercepted Betsy. She was coming out of the Drewitts’ room. She saw me and stopped dead, and then calmed herself, because it was me.

  No words passed between us. I approached her. She did not move; she did not back away. I put Sarah’s parcel on the table in the hallway. Still she watched me, uncertain. I put out a hand towards her, and she stepped forward. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of her body. Her eyes were entirely focused upon mine; I felt her hand touch me intimately. I flinched at it and she removed her hand, but then I did not move further, and after a moment she tried again.

  She would have found that my body had responded to her of its own volition. You understand my meaning, of course. Her eyes flicked behind me to the door of my bedroom and back to my face. I nodded. In my head, I was thinking, no I cannot do this, I will not do it, at the very same moment as I was walking into my room and my hand was closing the door behind us. I unbuttoned my breeches. She lay upon the bed and lifted her skirts around her waist. Her legs were creamy
white, and bare, and at the top of them a thick dark pad of hair.

  You may well raise your eyebrows. What is the point of confessing, if I do not tell you the details? Do not pretend to be shocked. You know how these things are.

  The sight of her, the servant girl, raised me up to a strength I had never yet encountered. I felt a surge of supreme power, enlightenment, that felt every bit as wonderful and glorious as the moment of my own conversion, and greater still than the moment of my calling.

  So, yes. I fucked her. There is no better word to describe it, for all your sensibilities. She welcomed me into her body and into her arms, and she kissed me upon my mouth, and curled her fingers into my hair with a passion. She wrapped her legs around my back, and held me inside her after I had finished. I did not move until I weakened and my body slipped away from hers, and then, coming to a sudden awareness, I stood up and turned from her, dressing myself quickly.

  When I looked back at her, she was standing, her skirts once again decorously to the floor. She was straightening the bedclothes swiftly and expertly. A mere moment later it would have been impossible to tell that we had disturbed them.

  She spoke not a word to me. She left the room, and closed the door quietly behind her. When I went out into the corridor, she was nowhere to be seen.

  You may have expected, afterwards, that I should be soused with guilt, with a horror at what I had done. But in fact I felt thrilled by it, warmed, energised. Blessed. It was so very close to the sensation I received in church, receiving the grace of the Holy Spirit, that in a very short time my mind formed a fixed association between the two conditions, and saw them as one and the same.

  A sin? Yes, I am no fool. I know now, as I knew then, that what I had done amounted to adultery. Yes, that is my confession, Rose, in a nutshell. But there is more to come.

  My friends noticed a change in me. I did less carousing with them; I spent longer in private prayer. Jones asked me many times what had happened, and he came very quickly to his own conclusion: that I had been touched by the Holy Spirit. I did not put him straight – yes, I can almost hear you say it, Rose, because I was ashamed. But at the time I kept my counsel because, as I have said, the two experiences felt very similar; who was to say that he was not telling the absolute truth? For the more I contemplated, the more I prayed, the conclusion I came to was just that. Betsy had been sent by God, to draw me closer to Him. Betsy had not been sent to tempt me; she had been sent to me as a form of relief. I could clear my head, and see the glory of God and His intentions for me and for his people, only if this basest form of my physical need had been relieved.

  After that first encounter, we met often. I would leave her a note, slipped inside my pillowcase, arranging to meet her at night, in some back street of the town, or at the park gates at an appointed hour. I could not continue to miss classes, and at the weekends I would often travel back to town and spend them with Sarah in Chelsea.

  So, on a Friday evening I would spend inside my wife, having the previous night fucked Betsy against a wall.

  And my spiritual life thrived on it.

  At the end of my second term at the college, a terrible tragedy befell our family. Sarah’s mother fell seriously ill, and, shortly after her, the two younger girls. John Caney, who had been at Chelsea with us, returned to Yorkshire to comfort them, and fell sick himself. He died first. Sarah wanted to go too, but I prevented her; it was too dangerous. A week later, her youngest sister succumbed to death, and then her mother, and finally her last remaining sister. Sarah wailed that she had gone from being part of a good family to being all alone in a matter of just a few short weeks. I reassured her, of course, that she was not alone. She had me.

  She suffered greatly with the loss of them, and retreated to her room for some weeks, often not even getting up. I stayed with her for a while, sending letters of apology to the college, but eventually I had to return, for fear of losing my place. I wrote to Sarah every day, but her replies to me were brief. She was feeling a little recovered; then she relapsed. She had received a visitor; then she found herself in the depths of darkness once more. She never once requested that I should return to comfort her; in fact, when I suggested that I should be back at the weekend to tend to her, she wrote and asked that I should stay at the college and use the time to further my studies. She was relying on me, she said. I was all she had.

  It was at that time that I struck upon the idea of asking my sister Ruth to stay, ostensibly to keep Sarah company until my studies were completed and I could return home. In fact, Ruth never left. I should like to say that they became firm friends, but in fact Sarah treated Ruth as one might a companion. Ruth did not seem to mind.

  I met with Betsy with decreasing frequency, for she had been assigned to another lodging, and so it was harder for us to arrange our meetings. The result of this was that my spiritual life deteriorated. I found it difficult to pray; my sermons lacked fluency, and inspiration. I resorted to self-abuse, but this made no difference to my spiritual wellbeing, and I quickly tired of it.

  Between Betsy and my first ministry in Bromley, there came first Anna, then Charlotte, then there was Hester, and then it was Phoebe.

  Anna was the daughter of the postmistress in town, who flirted with the young men of the college as if she was on a personal mission to lead them into sin. One summer evening I found the porter’s lodge was locked shut, and so I went out to purchase a postage stamp, to send a letter to Sarah. Anna was alone in the shop. She followed me out.

  ‘Does she miss you very much, your wife?’

  We walked side by side for a little while.

  ‘She does.’

  ‘What does she think of you, being away from home so much?’

  ‘You should ask her,’ I said.

  We walked up the hill, so fast that I became breathless with the exertion of it. She matched me step for step, and the thoughts that filled my head were all concerned with the strength of her body, and how that would manifest itself in the carnal act.

  In the end she followed me into an alleyway in a part of town I had seldom visited, behind a public house. I went in, and asked for a room, and handed over a shilling. Anna was beside me all the while, watching and listening. I went up the stairs after the landlord, who showed me a room bare of all except a bed and a chair. No sign of Anna. I thought I had wasted a shilling, but a few minutes later there came a tap at the door; when I opened it, she stood there shyly.

  ‘I thought you meant to be rid of me,’ she said, a little sadness in her voice that increased my ardour more than anything she had yet done.

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘I mean to fuck some sense into you. If you do not desire that, then please leave immediately and do not trouble me again.’

  She did not answer. Instead she came into the room and I closed the door behind her. She took off her dress and unfastened her stays, while I unbuttoned my trousers. I thought she would lie on the bed and present herself to me as Betsy had done so many times, but rather she came to me and unbuttoned my coat and my waistcoat, pulled them off me, and my trousers too.

  Anna was the first, then, that I saw completely naked. There was an even deeper spirituality to this encounter, because of it. I felt like Adam to her Eve, before the Fall. We had no shame, either of us; even still with the evening sun setting through the small window, the breeze blowing the loose curtain and sighing over our heated skin like a balm. She pushed me gently on to the bed and straddled me, and so my member was lost inside her body, melted into her and we became one flesh.

  Anna was very different from Betsy, and as unlike Sarah as anything it was possible to imagine. If Sarah was chaste, and Betsy was pure, Anna was full of Holy Fire. Our fucking was fierce, and prolonged; every time I thought I should spend, she stopped and allowed my ardour to subside, before resuming and taking me to a spiritual plane higher than the last, until I thought I should die with it. When, finally, I thrust inside her and reached my peak, I saw God and the angels beside him
, singing His praises and worshipping Him in Glory.

  Afterwards, she wiped herself on her skirts, and said I was a trickster.

  ‘How am I a trickster?’ I asked. I was barely awake, still floating on a glorious cloud somewhere above the earth.

  ‘You made me believe you didn’t like me,’ she pouted, and then laughed.

  I did not answer. Let her think what she would. I had her, and I knew I could have her again, and at any time of my choosing. Liking her did not come into it.

  I fucked her many times after that, often several times a week. My sermons were written quickly and were much praised for their fluency and zeal. My prayers during the prayer meeting were well received. The minister told me I might well graduate from the college with the highest of honours, now that I had finally taken my studies seriously and was clearly devoting so much time to my spiritual well-being.

  I agreed with him.

  Once you have sinned, my dear Rose, it is easier to keep sinning than to turn back. Such is the very nature of it, and the problem. There is a choice to be made at every moment: to turn back, or to press on. And in pressing on, one must deny the sin in some way. One must find a way to justify it. And the devil is very clever at revealing to you that way, whilst keeping himself hidden in the shadows.

  One Sunday at the end of term, I was invited to Berkshire to hear Henry Drewitt preach. He was destined for this parish, as his father had previously held it, and the parishioners had a subscription to help pay his college fees. Charles, meanwhile, had set his heart upon missionary work.

  I had asked Sarah to accompany me, but she was still not quite herself, and so I found myself in the care of Charlotte Swift, a young woman of a gentle disposition, who had taken it upon herself to ensure I was not left without a guide and companion. She was gentle, but there was something keen about her, some warmth. After my previous encounters, I felt I was developing a sense of awareness of those women with whom I could seek spiritual succour. I would get a certain tightening in my chest; that feeling that something was about to happen, some circumstance that would carry me inevitably into a sexual encounter.