Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Coming up to Myers, Z had the feeling that there was something the law clerk would have liked to have told him, something he would have gladly shared, to lighten the burden bearing heavily on the slightness of his frame, envisaged by his shoulders, stooped as they were, which appeared to carry a mighty but invisible weight upon them. Yet the wrinkling of his forehead indicated there was something else, some other mysterious reason why he couldn’t freely speak. That there was trouble, Z had no doubt. Trouble was in the air. Z could feel it, taste it, smell it – it had absorbed through his skin and into his lungs like a toxic mould, too fine to see, but easy enough to ingest – though that venomous taste might also have been caused by a persistent image which had intruded into Z’s imagination; that of a shadowy figure with a waxen face swinging, limp, at the end of some carefully knotted rope made out of jute, hemp or sisal (the actual construction of the hangman’s noose was something he had made a note to find out about).

  Myers was in a hurry – he didn’t want to get into a long conversation, but there was something he needed to tell him. It was about Geoghegan – Geoghegan, the barrister with the silver tongue who had courageously defended the Dynamitards; Geoghegan, the hero of the oppressed; Geoghegan the saviour of the underdog – Geoghegan, Geoghegan, Geoghegan – what happened to Geoghegan? Myers lifted an imaginary bottle and put it to his mouth as his lips took on an ironic twist.

  So who would present the defence? Couldn’t there be a postponement?

  There would be no postponement. The defence was to be presented by a man named McIntyre with Geoghegan’s limited assistance.

  And who was this man named McIntyre?

  Oh, a very good barrister by repute. Also in Geoghegan’s chambers. They say he’s a fine commercial lawyer.

  A fine commercial lawyer? Has he ever tried a criminal case?

  Myers’s face looks pained. There’s no reply. Z thinks that Myers wants to say something more but feels he can’t. Not yet, anyway. Why does Z suspect this? He’s not sure. Perhaps it’s a look, something in his eye, a movement of the hand, a curious tilt of his head. How does one account for intuition?

  So there it was in a nutshell – but from what kind of nut? A commercial lawyer brought in at the last minute to defend a poverty-stricken Jew accused of murder while the people’s champion of misplaced justice bows out due to a marinated liver. There must be something in that, Z thought – something sublimely metaphorical. Poetry could always be found in the grotty grime of life; how else had his people survived for so long, he asked himself.

  Z had wangled a seat in the area reserved for ‘the gentlemen of the press’. Actually, Mordecai had wangled it for him. Wangling was something Mordecai was good at, even though one wouldn’t have thought so by looking at him. Mordecai had many connections in small and mostly unimportant circles. If you wanted a select piece of kosher meat, Mordecai was your man. Getting a seat in the press box at an important trial, Z thought, was probably out of Mordecai’s league, but apparently it wasn’t. Perhaps there was a Jewish link somewhere in the courthouse, a minor civil servant who might have exchanged small favours with him. That’s how Mordecai’s world was constructed – a favour here, a kindness there; it was the petty cash of the newspaper trade, even for one as miniscule as the Record.

  He was seated between a dandified man from the Times and a boyish chap (who could easily have been a short haired girl in trousers) sketching the trial for London Illustrated. The man from the Times smelled equally of cologne and brandy; the boy from London Illustrated reeked of turpentine and charcoal.

  It was the aura of the place that struck him. Z had never been in court before, let alone the likes of the Old Bailey, with its Bastille walls of dark granite and its awesome rooms of mahogany and leather. The boisterous anarchy of the corridors vanished once inside the hallowed chambers of the law. Settled in the public galleries, as the mighty doors had shut cutting off all and sundry from the world outside, a sacred space was created where everything great and small was under the discipline of protocol, precedent and the elliptical pathway of the planets.

  And suddenly Z found himself in a different world, one which he neither understood nor appreciated. It was a world more akin to the stage than real life, except here fantasy and reality were merged in a brew that would end in a conclusion about someone’s death and someone else’s existence. Roles would be played out, speeches would be made and in the end twelve men would pass judgement upon some unfortunate nonentity who would find himself either dangling from a rope or free to go on his merry way as if it were all a bad dream and he had finally awoken. It was, therefore, theatre with the direst consequence. So all the pomp and circumstance, the granite, the mahogany, the finest leathers – they were all part of the production which enabled this particular kind of performance to be taken seriously by those who would otherwise smash the place up, ripping it apart, stone by stone as had been done not so many years before by ordinary people on the other side of the channel.

  The reverent hush, therefore, that occurred when the clock struck ten and Mr Justice James Fitzjames Stephen entered the room dressed in his finest horsehair wig and his blood bright scarlet robe trimmed with the fur of a skinned ermine, proceeded by a series of dignitaries including the Lord Mayor and the London sheriff – this hush, was it not similar to the one that took place before the raising of the playhouse curtain? Could not this procession have been seen as similar to the parade of actors who came on stage prior to a medieval pageant? That there was power in these vestments of authority, Z could not deny. But looking at them with his metaphorical eye, nurtured on the visions of the ghetto, he could only see the farce – even though underneath lurked the dark face of tragedy. And he wondered if monkeys had been dressed in ermine and scarlet and bestowed with horse-hair wigs, whether they would have been given the dignity of court like those who trouped in that day with countenances so grave and solemn.

  The architecture of the trial chamber was of a curious design, Z thought. The spectators, the jurors and onlookers, on one side of the room faced the attorneys, the defence and prosecution, seated at the other. Against the third wall was the judge, seated magisterially at his dais, facing the prisoner, at the other extreme, standing lonely at the dock. Four sides facing one another: the observers, the attorneys, the prisoner and the judge. Each side was separated from the other; each had its boundaries, each had its purpose. It was a formulaic show, Z thought – one designed for ritual; devised to create a sense of awe and reverence. And in that it well succeeded. For all the rough and boisterous banter in the halls ended abruptly when the processions of wigs and robes trooped through leaving in its wake a raptured silence.

  The boy from the Illustrated was sketching furiously, for all he was worth, splashing out frantically with his pen. He had set up a contraption, rather like a collapsible easel that sat neatly on his lap with little built-in perches for his various ink containers. The position of the easel made it easy for Z to glance at the work and as he watched the lad construct the cast of characters that surrounded them, he realised how different a vision the young man had of the people he sketched than Z, himself, was verbally drawing in his head.

  The quick sketch of the judge, for example, Z felt, was barely recognisable save that both the drawing and the man were clean shaven. He had managed to get the general shape of the head but missed all the details of significance – the straggles of hair jutting wildly from beneath the wig; the thickness of the lips, the slackness of the jowls, the heaviness of the chin, the lethargy in the eyes behind the smudgy, oval-shaped glasses.

  The lawyers were slightly better drawn he felt. Geoghegan, with his drooping moustache expressed little more than tired exhaustion. McIntyre, his replacement, had a quiet biblical look of studied patience. The sketches of the prosecutors weren’t bad at all. He had captured the bland, look of Sims – expressing well that tedious feel of the lifelong civil servant. Queen’s Counsel Pola
nd, however, was the best of the lot, he thought. The lad had somehow managed to capture the strange lines of his magnificent nose, with the wire spectacles clinging precariously to the brim, his angular features and the rough cut of his beard, all of which together gave him the appearance of a stern headmaster at a school for rowdy children.

  But it was the prisoner, the accused, standing behind the glass partition at the dock that he missed entirely, Z felt. There was hardly anything about it recognizable to the figure Z had captured in his eye as soon as the young man had ascended the platform which rose above the court room like a pillory from which the accused looked down, powerlessly, onto the forces which would soon control his destiny. The lad from London Illustrated could hardly get close to the sense of the accused, to the tragedy, to the terror and so he just made a few lines and blotted in some ink around the profile as if a black cloud of gloom had somehow descended into the courtroom to hover over the prisoner’s head. But what he missed was that look of boyish innocence – for whether or not Lipski was guilty of a most horrendous murder, he exuded a sense of honest bemusement. And the lad doing the drawing missed that entirely – he missed the freshness of the face and the gentleness of the eyes and the overall expression of quiet wonder, like that of a young man caught up in a strangely persistent nightmare, waiting patiently for it to end so he could get on with his life and do whatever it was that God had fated.

  CHAPTER 12

  GENTLEMEN OF THE jury, look upon the prisoner and harken to his charge. He stands indicted by the name of Israel Lipski, that Israel Lipski on or about the 28th day of June, 1887, in St George’s in the East, in the County of Middlesex, unlawfully murdered Miriam Angel. Upon this indictment he had been arraigned, and upon his arraignment he hath pleaded not guilty. Your charge, therefore is to inquire whether he be guilty….

  Z glanced over to see what the brandy soused gentleman from the Times was writing. He was, it seemed, taking down in shorthand the words of the judge as the prisoner stood and the jury listened in rapt and reverent silence. But what did that leave out? Here was the paper of record, the newspaper which informed public opinion and disseminated information throughout the British Empire, around the globe – and what was their man doing? He was simply taking shorthand notes that amounted to an edited transcript.

  But what about everything else? What about the things that really mattered? What about the things unsaid? What about the fact that the jurors were never questioned, that their names were simply announced by the clerk and no one asked if they had a relationship to the victim or the accused? Well, probably they didn’t, Z thought, but certainly they could have heard about the case. Perhaps they had already formed an opinion or had a personal prejudice that would get in the way of a proper judgement. Maybe they knew the investigating police detective or one of the other witnesses. Or, perhaps they hated refugees, especially immigrant Jews, and thought they should all be hung no matter what. But maybe they were all decent, clear-thinking, unbiased men, sound-hearted and true. Maybe they were, but no one asked so no one knew.

  Z studied the men seated in the jury box. They were shadowy figures all dressed in dark and muted clothing; their faces were blurry, indistinct. They seemed to him an amorphous mass. It was as if they formed a single organism all its own with one ear and one brain. And this amorphous mass, this organism, could never be seen or understood by the man from the Times as he meticulously took down the words, the words, the words that droned forth, practiced many times over with only the names that were changed to fill in the blanks.

  It was Mr Poland who opened the case for the prosecution. Harry was his name. Mr Harry Poland with a very important ‘QC’ appended. And Z thought, how ironic, how ironic indeed, that Poland should be prosecuting a man called Israel who had come to England seeking refuge from that same benighted nation. But Poland, QC, was more than a name, he was a loyal servant of the State – the State in the form of the Queen, who, herself, at that very time, was still in black and still in mourning, as she had been for the last twenty-five years of her rule. But the Empire that the Queen represented and thus that Harry Poland, QC, served, was more than a person and more than the state: it was an idea. And within that idea of Empire, Victoria was not Queen but Empress. It was as much the Empire that Harry Poland, QC, served as he did Queen and country. This realisation which Z found both fascinating and horrifying, was promulgated by another Israel – though that Israel was of Sephardic roots and thus had the required D, apostrophe, with the suffix ‘i’ (meaning ‘of the Israeli people’ – though as it became Anglicised the apostrophe was lost, leaving only the Christianised form, ‘Disraeli’).

  It was Poland who opened the case in his slow, ponderous, methodical manner. Lanky frame, features chiselled out of granite, expressionless eyes peering over the wire frame of his spectacles, he was the very image of a modern, major prosecutor (as William Schwenck Gilbert, himself trained as a lawyer, might have said).

  The man from the Times took down his words in summary fashion, thankful for Poland’s unhurried delivery which allowed him to make adjustments to his pen. Because of the manner in which he had positioned himself, it was quite easy for Z to see what he wrote.

  So what were the significant points the man from the Times thought worthy to mention? These were the ideas that Poland stressed:

  1. That the prisoner entered the deceased’s room for some purpose, locked the door on the inside, and being discovered by the deceased he battered her with his fist and then administered the nitric acid to her. When finding that she was dead, he took a portion of the acid himself but the quantity he took was not sufficient to kill him.

  2. That it was clear the prisoner could not have gone into the deceased’s room with the door locked on the inside for any proper purpose.

  3. That the prosecution was not suggesting the prisoner bought the nitric acid for the purpose of administering it to the deceased, but having it in his pocket at the time, he used it.

  4. That the statement made by Lipski to the police, accusing two others of the murder, was most improbable and with reference to the sovereign he had claimed to have given them, it was the very same morning that the prisoner had asked the landlady to lend him five shillings and she had refused.

  Z jotted down these points himself, and as Poland finished his languid speech in the direction of the jury box, without passion, without any sense of human feeling whatsoever (he could have been speaking to statues made of salt), Z considered the essence of the case which the prosecution was to present and thought to himself that it was rather flimsy. Point 1 indicated that the prosecution had not decided on a motive. Point 2 depended on the door actually having been locked from the inside – a fact the defence was bound to question. Point 3 suggested that this was simply a crime of opportunity on Lipski’s part without any rhyme or reason. And Point 4 challenged Lipski’s statement on no other basis than it seeming to be improbable. And, again, the improbability depended on the door having been locked from the inside. (The point about the sovereign didn’t make sense to him at all since Lipski might well have needed the sovereign plus five shillings more to purchase his supplies.)

  The first witness to be called was Sergeant Bitten who produced a series of drawings – diagrams of the Angels’ room, the house and the surrounding neighbourhood. Bitten confirmed that 16 Batty Street had three storeys and that the ground floor was composed of two rooms – a bedroom and a kitchen, which faced the back. There was a passage running alongside the rooms that led to the yard without going into either of the rooms. A short staircase of nine or ten stairs led up to the first floor which, again, consisted of two rooms. Then there was another short staircase which lead to the top floor which was composed of one room only. Bitten testified that the height of the first floor window from the pavement was twelve feet and that after close examination no marks were found on it, indicating that there was no evidence that anyone had used that route as a means
of escape – further confirmed by a workman in the house opposite number 16 giving evidence that he had seen nothing unusual.

  Z watched in fascination. The detailed sketches, diagrams, measurements – what did they mean? What did they prove? Had they codified and analysed everything about the house so they could present a dispassionate and scientific investigation? Or was this a tried and true way to lead the jury step by step in the direction the prosecution wanted? Was this a method of determining truth or was it a way of selectively choosing facts to bolster their hypothesis?

  It’s what came next that made Z wonder where the prosecution was trying to lead the jury – what idea they wanted to implant. And looking over at the scribbling reporter next to him (Z fortunately knew shorthand himself), he saw that man from the Times had picked up on the significance by the way he had underlined the following questions and their response:

  Did you go up the staircase leading from the first floor to the second floor?

  Yes.

  It is a fact, is it not, that there is a small window through which you could look on to this bedstead from the staircase outside?

  Yes. Commanding a full view of the bed.

  A muslin curtain was there?

  Yes, but it is a very thin muslin, so you had just the same view.

  Thin muslin you say?

  Very fine muslin.

  Did you see it?

  I saw through the muslin.

  You could see through the muslin, and get, as you have said, a full view of the bed?

  Yes.

  And of any one who was lying on it?

  Yes.

  So, thought Z, it wasn’t true that the prosecution was avoiding the issue of motive. They were planting a seed – and a vile one, at that. Glancing over at Myers, who was sitting with the defence, he saw him cringe, as McIntyre stood to cross-examine and simply asked about the specific times the diagrams were constructed. Nothing to question the implicit accusation of lust that the prosecution so blatantly suggested. Nothing about how anyone could live in an East End house, with hardly an inch of privacy, constantly stepping over people in various states of dress. How on earth did the prosecution expect to get away with such blatant innuendo? And then looking at the man from the Times, he realised it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. For this wasn’t the boring details of how many steps led upstairs or the exact distance the window was from the ground – this had to do with a fantasy that his readers could secretly relish, something to get their pulses racing fast enough so they could be bothered to read on and maybe even buy the paper again tomorrow (being the Times, of course, nothing more than a titillating suggestion could be broached. But those fine men who prided themselves on reading the Newspaper of Record, those fine men, one and all, would love to have secretly stood on the darkened stairs and furtively gazed through a muslin curtain to salivate over the half clothed body of a woman, Z suspected, no matter if she were fat, pregnant and unattractive. It was the idea itself that they would find exciting, because they had nothing else to bother their addled minds about. The fact that a poor man in a crowded house, half starved, working night and day simply to survive would probably have neither the time, inclination nor desire to take a few precious moments to leer through a dirty widow at a sleeping woman (especially since he could see all the sleeping women he wanted to see through open doors) never entered their minds because they assumed everyone lower in their rigid hierarchy had baser morals than they had, themselves, even though, most likely, the opposite was true, Z felt.