Havoc, in Its Third Year

by Ronan Bennett

  The constable came in. Doliffe and Brigge were fellow governors but their greeting was stiff with strained politeness.

  “We have not seen enough of you these three months past, Mr. Brigge,” Doliffe said. “It is almost as if you had banished yourself into exile.”

  There was good nature in the constable’s tone, but it was counterfeit. He was a man of peevish temper and little moment, one who imagined himself unjustly disparaged by all, including the coroner. His imaginings had made him close and reserved, and quick to discover insults where none was intended.

  “I live remote from the rest of you,” Brigge answered, deploying the same false lightness. “I do apologize.”

  The constable made a little forced laugh. Brigge closed his eyes in gratitude for the fire. The heat began to warm the backs of his legs and creep up through his buttocks. The winter had been hard and he had ridden little. His thighs were sore and the lower part of his back stiff. The thick smells of damp wool and wet horse and wet leather rose to his nostrils.

  He was about to ask of Katherine Shay and the business of the dead child, but Doliffe put in first, “I understand you were stopped by the watch.”

  “Their manner was most zealous,” Brigge said.

  “They are required to be zealous,” Doliffe answered with a thin smile.

  “You have not been to town for some space of time and may therefore be unaware of the difficulties we face. In spite of our labors, the people are grown wild and loose in their morals and occupy themselves in broils and disturbances. We have seen rioting and disorder in our streets. Only last market day some women of the baser sort attacked the corn merchants and overturned their carts. A great deal of grain was stolen.”

  “Corn is scarce,” Brigge said, “and dear.”

  “And then there are the vagrants,” Doliffe continued, “swarms of them, threatening to beggar us all. Only a few hours ago a desperate band came and threatened to fire the town before they were driven off by the watch.” Brigge thought of Exley and the squatters at the vagrant camp. “I have to tell you, Mr. Brigge,” Doliffe went on, “that the neighbors are frightened out of their wits. Already some of the better sort have left. They say we tax them but do not protect them. I wonder: are they wrong? Can we say we have done right by our best inhabitants?”

  The constable peered at Brigge in expectation of a response.

  “I am sure there is in this, as in all things, room for improvement,” the coroner said eventually.

  “Indeed,” Doliffe said; then added, as though in afterthought, “You should know, Mr. Brigge, that your absence from our meetings has given rise to some comment.”

  “I hope the reasons for my absence have not been misunderstood. As you know, my wife is with child and her pregnancy has been difficult.”

  The constable made some broad sounds to convey sympathy. “Some men attract speculation, it is inherent in them,” he said. “One man goes about his business completely unremarked while his brother attaches every kind of rumor for doing no more than the same—it cannot be avoided. Some murmur that you have become disaffected with the rigorous and scrutinous work we do here.”

  “They have no reason to harbor such thoughts,” Brigge said. “I have always been, and will always remain, the Master’s faithful follower.”

  “What the governors, and many of the better sort of townspeople too, begin to doubt—forgive me if I speak freely, Mr. Brigge—is your continued devotion to the great project on which we are embarked. Unfortunately, the addiction to sin and delinquency remains as general as ever it was. We thought to cure it by charity. We must now accept that our remedy was insufficient. If we are to save the town, we must be unsparing in the execution of justice. We must be a sore scourge and sharp whip of evildoers, wherever we find them.”

  The refrain of the times, the foot of the song that all now sang. Brigge knew the words; every man knew them. How honest men lived in fear and their labors went unrewarded while thieves and rogues prospered. How pity and charity had enervated the poor. Sin in all its forms lurked in the imagination: theft, fornication, drunkenness, murder, rape, the immutable disorders of the poor, the multiple threats to life, property, chastity and good religion.

  “But I am keeping you from your business, Mr. Coroner,” Doliffe said. “You will not find the matter difficult. The woman’s guilt is very apparent and will be easily proved.”

  Brigge thanked the constable curtly for his observations.

  “I shall wait for you in the sessions hall,” Doliffe said through pursed lips. “The jurymen and witnesses are ready.”

  Brigge stayed by the fire though the heat had begun to scorch the backs of his thighs. He remembered as a child his mother scolding him for standing so close to the hearth, saying he would catch fire and burn like a torch, like the saints and martyrs of the holy church. Rapt by the flames, he ignor her. Eventually, his mother lost patience and snatched him away. She held him fast by his thin wrists and beat him once or twice with light strokes. “What would have happened to you,” she chided him, “had I not taken you from the fire?” She shook her son for an answer. “Would you have the flames consume you?” He had no answer then, and none now. He looked down at the firedogs and tongs and stretched out a hand toward the flames and wondered at the glory of immolation. He recalled the embrace of his mother’s arms, his head pulled to her breast. Brigge had always had a sense of the abyss.

  He roused himself from his brooding. The witnesses and jurors were waiting, and so was Katherine Shay, who had mu dered her child.

  Three

  THE SESSIONS HALL HAD THE BIT TER FRIGIDIT Y OF BARE STONE walls in a perpetual winter. The Master and governors had executed much justice here, examined and corrected a multitude of delinquents. Some they punished severely; others they showed compassion. Katherine Shay would be among the punished. Murdering mothers could have no mercy. That was the law.

  The coroner looked over the prisoner. She flickered momentarily but faced him without sign of fear. There was no beauty in the Irishwoman, but there was an obvious if jaded carnality. Her body, no longer young, was strong-shouldered and full enough in the breast and hips. Her hair, all loose about the ears, was dark with some red in it, and her long face had been grimed and blushed by the sun and wind. Her clothes had once great color—red and green and orange-tawny—but now were faded and smelt of human stains; she appeared used. A perfect barn whore, a hedge whore, the very image of a sinner. A knowing sinner. An undone and lascivious sinner. To the men who were gathered to witness her destruction, it was a concoction to excite their imaginations. And among the women there was a spleen against her, a particular contempt for the unrestraint written into her body and bearing.

  Adam set about the preparation of his parchments and pens but little escaped the boy’s notice, and he was especially vigilant of the things between men and women. He noted the momentary hesitation in the coroner as Brigge took in the woman and perceived the lusts lurking within her and responded to them, fleetingly, ineluctably. Adam had coral lips and a cold eye.

  At one end of the long oak bench was a bundle of soiled kersey cloth. Inside would be the infant’s body. Brigge’s fears resurfaced. He could not escape the thought that the coincidence of this life snuffed out and the imminence of Elizabeth’s delivery had a meaning intended for him, that this life and the life of his unborn child were connected in a symmetry. Under his breath he prayed to the mother of God to intercede for his wife.

  Good Mary, Christ’s mother,

  Mary mild, of thee I mean.

  You bore my Lord, you bore my brother,

  You bore a lovely child and clean.

  “Sir?”

  Virgin before childbirth,

  Virgin in childbirth,

  Virgin after childbirth.

  Fount of mercy,

  Mother of orphans,

  Consolation of the desolate …

  “Mr. Brigge?”

  The voice was Adam’s.

  “W
ill you not begin the inquisition?”

  The coroner dragged himself out of his thoughts. They were waiting, all of them. The jurors and the witnesses, impatient to hear the story of this sinner and wretch, of the child conceived in the sinful enjoyment of her woman’s wantonness and murdered in the shame of it. The women searchers of Shay’s body, good and sufficient matrons with their stiff, reproving necks and their milky fingers. Doliffe, prim and thin-lipped. Scaife, slavering and foaming like a run-out horse, unable to take his eyes from the Irishwoman. The more Brigge felt their expectation, the less his appetite for the work at hand. He felt suddenly weary. His clothes were still damp. His thighs and back ached. He shifted forward, straightening his shoulders to ease the discomfort.

  He turned to the prisoner. She was unsteady on her feet, having exhausted her natural strength in childbirth, Brigge assumed. He motioned to the constable’s man to bring up a little plain matted chair. The Irishwoman took the opportunity to sit. She gave no sign of gratitude.

  “What is your name?” the coroner asked.

  The Irishwoman said nothing. The scratch of Adam’s pen was the only sound in the hall. Brigge repeated the question and asked if she understood what was asked of her. She gave no answer and looked away with an air of boredom. Brigge put the question again, making his voice round and frank to convey the power he had over her.

  She said at last, “My name is none of your business.”

  Her accent was unfamiliar and outlandish. The jurymen inclined their heads to consult each other and, as comprehension seeped in, a slow murmur went up.

  “I am Mr. John Brigge,” the coroner said when he had worked through her words. “I am coroner in these wapentakes and a governor of this town. You must answer me. Is your name Katherine Shay?”

  “If you say it is, then it is.”

  “Never mind what I say—”

  “I do not mind what you say.”

  Brigge had come across defiance before in prisoners, though not often and then usually only after heads had been fuddled with drink: clear heads apprehended terror clearly. But as he studied Katherine Shay, the coroner saw something more than contumacy. He saw she had a perfect understanding of what was required of her, that she play her part. It was no more than was required of any prisoner. The thief, the murderer, the robber—all who go on trial and offer up lie after blatant lie to save their lives are playing their part. The magistrate has as much need of their des perate inventions, their evasions and despairing bluster as he does of the prison, the stocks, the whip, the pillory and the gibbet. A lie acknowledges the law the liar has broken; it is pleasing to the magistrate’s ear. Katherine Shay knew what was required of her and withheld it. Prideful, brazen and uncontrite, Scaife had said of her, and for once Brigge could not fault the fool.

  “Be careful how you answer me,” he said slowly and deliberately. “These proceedings are to determine the truth of this charge of murder. If the jurors find that you have murdered your child, an indictment will be returned against you and you will be kept in safe custody to await the next assizes. Do you understand me? Your life depends on what is proved here tonight.”

  “I know the truth of the matter and so does our Father in heaven-that is enough for me.”

  “But not enough for this inquisition,” Brigge said sharply, “to which you owe obedience.”

  “I owe nothing to this inquisition or to you,” she said with a careless shrug.

  Her words echoed in far corners of the hall as whispering interpreters went to work, repeating and amplifying her provocations.

  Perhaps encouraged by the repetition of her defiance, she launched into vaporing and ranting: “I say I owe nothing to any court or any pretended power or magistrate put over me,” she shouted. “I say I owe obedience to no one on this earth.”

  The sessions hall erupted in outrage. Some jeered, some hawked and spat on the ground. Brigge shouted at the prisoner to be quiet, but she would not be shut up. This was defiance as Brigge had not heard it before. Incendiary notions are not uncommon among the ignorant sort of people, but they are generally whispered behind the backs of the hand. Perhaps the woman’s mind had been deranged in childbirth. He signaled to Doliffe who came up and bent to his ear.

  “Fetch the bridle if you please, Mr. Doliffe,” the coroner said.

  The constable received his instruction with an expression of earnest approval and went off with a quick step.

  The Irishwoman continued to rail and taunt while those in the hall jibed and derided her. Brigge no longer heard what was said. He took the bundle of dirty cloth and began to open it. As he did so, the Irishwoman began to falter and her tormentors too began to fall silent.

  THE INFANT HAD not been washed and the coarse kersey stuck in places. The coroner picked it carefully away to reveal what appeared to be a full-formed male child. He had known it would be a boy, as his own child would be. Since conception, Elizabeth’s right breast had grown bigger than the left, her right pulse quicker, right eye brighter; her urine had a reddish tinge. In her womb was a son and here was a son. To Brigge’s providential mind, the symmetry was undeniable.

  The prisoner was quiet now, a wary look in her eye. The coroner came up to her and raised the bundle to her eyes. The tumult from the hall had subsided; the silence was complete and expectant.

  “Is this your child?” he asked quietly.

  The Irishwoman said nothing.

  “Surely you who have so much to say on magistracy and obedience can answer a simple question: is this your child?”

  Katherine Shay turned her face aside. Brigge gazed down at the tiny body in his arms and became lost in the contemplation of it. The long trunk and helpless short legs; the wrinkled, unfilled bottom; the cord, gray, viscose, obscene and wilted, hanging from the empty belly. There seemed too much skin for the body; only the hands and feet appeared full. These were quite livid. The little finger of the left hand was crooked as though caught in a deliberate gesture of the utmost delicacy. The fine black hair was plastered forward to the skull with dried dark blood and other filth. Brigge could not bring himself to look at the eyes. In the brief life the child had known (minutes? hours?) what had those eyes seen? A mother lying in her bed, blood between her legs, breast rising with hard breaths, eyes fixed on the ceiling. And, determining what was to be done, propping herself up, weak and giddy but with strength enough to wrench the bolster from behind her shoulders. Did Katherine Shay hold the child? Did she kiss him and cry before she covered the mouth and nose? What expression had the child seen on his mother’s face then, before the bolster came down?

  “Look at this,” the coroner said, holding out the dead infant to its mother. “Have you no pity?”

  “Who are you to talk of pity?” the Irishwoman snapped back. “You whip and prison and hang—and you talk to me of pity?”

  “These punishments we inflict are prescribed by law and ordained by God.”

  “When Jesus sent his apostles into the world, did he order them to whip the backs of the poor and stretch their necks in nooses?”

  “Enough!” Brigge shouted. “None of this has anything to do with your crime!”

  “Be harmless as doves, that is what Jesus said!”

  The coroner could have struck her; he was light-headed with rage.

  “Who are you to talk of doves?” he said coldly.

  He turned and motioned to Doliffe, who came forward with the bridle. A cage for the head, a stone in weight, black-painted hoops of iron in the shape of a helmet. Brigge looked at the protrusion of spiked metal attached to the inner part of one of the lower bands, the bit that would stop Shay’s tongue. He had seen women retch and vomit when the bit was forced into their mouths and the bridle locked in place. He had seen smashed teeth and broken jaws and gashed lips and gums.

  The coroner nodded and Doliffe and Scaife set about their work. The prisoner swore at them, in English and in her own language, calling them dogs, rogues and hypocrites. Scaife pinioned her arms while
Doliffe took hold of her hair and pulled forward until she was on her knees. Shay fought and screamed, but the men overwhelmed her and soon she was wailing pitifully. Brigge replaced the dead baby on the bench. When he turned back to Shay, the bridle and bit were in place. There was blood on her mouth.

  “Breathe through your nose and try to be calm,” Brigge told her, “else you will choke and die.”

  THE CORONER CALLED for water to clean the infant. Inviting the jurymen to come forward to view the body, he lifted the right hand to the candlelight to show them there were nails on the fingers. There was no obvious wound or observable bruise. He searched the skull with his fingertips and announced that to his judgment it appeared unbroken.

  He next took informations from the matrons and midwives who said on their oaths that the Irishwoman known as Katherine Shay had used very vile provoking language when the constable brought her to them and had offered them violence and threatened to crack their heads. By the constable’s order they subdued her and examined her body and found the breasts were hard and tender and, when squeezed, produced the milk that comes in the first days after birth. By these intimate signs and others they had when they examined her further in her privy parts, they were certain she had recently given birth.

  As to the dead infant, the child was whole and fair-seeming, and, to their thinking, had not come before its time. It was their belief that Katherine Shay had by some means murdered the child—though by what means did not appear to them—and, no women having been called to assist her at her delivery, her intention must have been to conceal the birth and wickedly do away with the baby.

  The coroner asked if Shay had, in their hearing, confessed or said anything that might be taken as an admission of guilt. They conceded she had not, though from their pauses and the looks they gave, it was clear they wished their answers might have been otherwise.