The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  I pressed my hands into the bench. ‘You told him?’

  He laughed. ‘Why do you think I allowed you back, knowing where you’ve been?’

  Nausea. A vinegar wave from gut to mouth. My mind swung. I had to shake my head to make myself pay attention.

  ‘. . . take the child.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those are the conditions on which you have been allowed back.’ He swivelled his head to her. ‘On which Marguerite will be allowed to stay . . .’

  I scraped up a laugh. ‘She asked me back.’

  Still she would not look at me.

  ‘I’ve asked my man of affairs to find a house,’ he continued. ‘It will be . . . discreet. You’ll be given a character. A lifetime annuity. Do you know what that means? Enough to set you up somewhere, pay for its upkeep. More than you’d need in a lifetime. Afterwards, you’ll stay there. She’ll come back.’

  ‘You’re asking . . . ?’

  ‘You’ll take the child and raise it.’

  I looked at him. How the world bends to the will of some men. I remembered what Sal had said, on my last day at the School-house: ‘You better not be thinking about going back. To her? How what she do you any different to what massa do any of the rest of us? I don’t care what she wants. Couldn’t be any good. You know it, too. Don’t just go running. Don’t do it.’

  I turned to her. ‘You want me to take it?’

  I wanted her to look at me and tell me she was sorry. But she twisted her face and slid her palms up and down on her skirts, and said nothing.

  ‘And do what with it?’

  Benham shrugged. ‘What do you mean, gel? Whatever you want. It’ll be nothing to do with us.’

  Every part of me was screaming against it.

  Knowing where you’ve been.

  When I looked up, he’d gone to stand behind her at the sofa, and it was as if I stared at a high blue wall behind which stood the pair of them. I felt a pang, a terrible hunger. I felt soiled. Knowing where you’ve been. I shook my head. ‘Now you both want me to wash away your sins.’

  He worked a smile onto his mouth but it did not go there willingly and she kept gulping and gulping, and I turned blindly, straight into a little table. One of the room’s numberless crystal vases dropped, and shattered.

  When we were alone again in her room, she broke apart, too, like a bundle of firewood. She took my hands. ‘Do not worry about the vase,’ she said. She brought her face close, raised a hand to my cheek. ‘I am sorry, Frances. He said he would divorce me. I had no choice. Oh, I hate him.’

  I felt a lurch of anger; it flipped inside me like a tail. ‘It’s the Garden of Eden, then,’ I said. ‘It is Paradise Lost. You will be the fallen angel.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘And then you’ll have to join me in the streets.’

  Words kept tumbling out of her like stones. ‘Do not be so cruel.’

  ‘You are singing a different tune. Yesterday –’

  ‘Yesterday was madness talking.’

  ‘It could only have been madness. What else could it have been?’ I raised my voice.

  A bow of silence, pulled tight. She swings back and forth on this, same as with everything else, I thought.

  She let her hand drop. ‘Will you do it?’

  Before I could answer, before I could know, there came a knock at the door. Linux pushed past me when I answered it. She looked ill herself, her face pebbled by the scars. She must know something of what it’s like, I thought then, for the mere act of showing your face to the world to make you feel shrunken, and small.

  She had a tray in her hands, a single glass. ‘Mrs Benham,’ she said, ‘the parlour has been swept now. You’re not to worry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘If you are not well –’

  ‘You are mistaken, Mrs Linux.’

  ‘I’ve brought you water.’ She swayed. I stood by the mantel, breathing hard, and she flicked her eyes over me too. ‘You do seem fevered. I can’t see why the master won’t just send for Dr Fawkes.’

  Madame rose from her chair and held her shawl tight around her and made her voice sharp. ‘Mrs Linux. I do not want your help or your presence.’

  ‘No.’ She blinked, scuttled forward, set down the tray. ‘No. No. Very well.’

  I heard her shoes clacking away down the hall after she closed the door and wished I could follow her.

  Rain shook like a gourd, rattled at the windows. It was damp, again, and grew colder and colder. That night she woke weeping. Bursts of memory, and remorse. ‘What have I brought on myself?’ She drank more and more laudanum, licked constantly at her dry lips. Her skin felt warm. I drank too. It went back in easy as water. That is a thirst that never goes away. Opium rowed me across black oceans, back to the guinea grass and the cottonwood and the coach-house. I saw the lines of people, waiting. I saw myself, holding a little blade. I saw blood.

  As she slept, I lit a candle and went to the shelves and took out her books, one after another, and tried to read, but the fog in my head wouldn’t let me. The glass was fogged, too, with rain and cold. I sat beside her. Time was moving away from us as it does for everything, but now it was ticking towards life as well as death.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Benham’s agent came the next morning, and sat for hours with him in the library and, after he’d left, Benham told us both that the man had secured the lease on a cottage on the coast near Cornwall. Isolated enough. They could now start to put it about that he wanted peace and quiet, and would go there to finish his Encyclopaedia away from the noise. Madame would go with him, to convalesce, for it was no secret she’d been unwell. They’d take no servants but me. He’d stay to see the thing done.

  I let myself picture it.

  ‘How many rooms?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How many bedrooms?’

  ‘One. I think.’

  ‘Where would I sleep?’

  He turned back to his desk, opened the cat’s head and took a pinch of snuff. ‘How would I know, girl? There’ll be something ‒ a kitchen, I’m sure.’

  Something splintered in me. I felt the sharp pain of it in my head, blinding. I blinked. I laughed. The whole time she’d sat without speaking. Now she looked up.

  ‘What?’ he said. His eyes slithered to her.

  I kept mine on him. ‘What about the infant?’

  ‘Would be yours, to do with as you will.’

  Her rooms spread measureless. Time did too. Grey dust over everything, twirling in the air. She wouldn’t let Pru in to clean. For a time, she neither spoke nor looked at me. I sat on the bed, she at the desk. Miles between us.

  I watched her twist her hair to ropes, jerk out of her chair. A marionette. The drug. Her husband’s demands. Her own confusion. Thin as a fly-leaf, with that terrible energy wicking through her.

  ‘One of the mercies of my marriage has been to discover that I would never want his children. Now he tells me I must not want this one. But it is as if –’ she stopped ‘‒ as if this baby has come with some trick that shows me how to want it.’

  Her words went through me, my own pain so large that I hardly had room for hers.

  ‘If my scandals stay quiet, he does not care. But the minute he decides that I am an embarrassment . . . again, he requires me to contain myself in my own rooms. Let things blow away. Or ‒ how do you say? ‒ blow over. He spies on me so he can know what measures to take, when. If I must go somewhere, during that time, then he sets Lady Catherine as guard dog and gaoler . . .’

  I thought back to that first day, on the steps. ‘And you oblige him.’

  ‘And I oblige him! What choice do I have? He only agrees I may go out and about again eventually because otherwise the talk would be worse.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘When he asked you to . . . watch me . . . did you think he might be looking for evidence, to have me sent away?’ A laugh. ‘It would never be the asylum, not with him. Too prosaic. Too public. He would never want it known that his own wife had
sunk so low.’

  I held my tongue. She had no idea how low he’d sunk. The truth about George Benham would have broken her, then. I could not tell her.

  ‘But this,’ she continued. ‘There would be no way to hide it. If I have a black child in the wake of a divorce – everyone will see his shame.’ She looked up at me, her face green as a pear. ‘Yet if he divorces me, he knows he could not control whether I had it or not. And could not be sure that I would not. Therefore, a new marriage pact: he will let me stay, but I must give it away to you. Then give you away.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, then, leave. Have it. Why not?’

  She gazed about her. The same four walls they’d always been. The same trap. And she had dragged me back into it. Hurt sometimes puts a person in a hurting mood, and I spoke harsh words, then, which I bitterly regret. But if we could make peace with the dead there’d be no cause to mourn them. I told her she was too selfish to have a child, that she was a coward, that she had brought everything on herself.

  Her eyes grew dark. Nothing would calm her. She took more and more laudanum, asking me to forgive her. ‘What am I going to do?’ she cried. Her body clutched itself, and she went still. I was worried, thinking this might be another of her spells. Her mind travelling someplace else. Her voice grew so thin I had to strain to hear her. Did I remember, she asked, how we’d talked about what she’d take with her if she could leave? I told her we both knew she would never leave. ‘You’re a pendulum,’ I said. Then she started trembling, and said she wanted sleep.

  Through the rest of that day he came in and out of her rooms, to tell her all the things she would and wouldn’t do. She was to host a soirée, plan it for the night before they left: ‘Make a big show of your glowing health, play up the restoration of your spirits. Invite the cuckold-maker. Oh, yes. Invite him. Show everyone there’s nothing wrong here. Give them Marvellous Meg.’ She would be happy, she would shine. Oh, she’d better shine.

  A few days later there was a soirée. But there was to be no cottage. And no baby. Only murder. And blood, so much blood.

  ROBERT MEEK, sworn

  I am a constable. On 27 January 1826 at approximately two o’clock in the morning I was called to Levenhall, the town residence of Mr George Benham. I was shown upstairs to the library by the housekeeper. I examined the landing minutely, and found copious marks of blood there, as well as on the floor in the library. I entered the library and discovered the body of Mr George Benham. I was then taken to Mrs Benham’s bedchamber, where there were also marks of blood present, on the floor outside the door, and on the carpet inside. Mrs Benham’s body was discovered in her bed. There was a large quantity of blood also in the centre of the bed. The carpet appeared wet as if attempts had been made to wash it to get out the blood. The prisoner was found asleep beside Mrs Benham’s body. I was present when she was woken by the housekeeper and heard her say, ‘I can’t remember, I can’t remember.’ She said it over and over and appeared to be in a state of some distress, after which she refused to say any more.

  I was told Mr and Mrs Benham had been hosting Mr Feelon and various members of a planning committee of the Anti-Slavery Society, formed by Mrs Benham to organize a debate which had taken place earlier that day at the Royal Society of Science.

  I later retrieved a knife from a cabinet inside the bedchamber, which appeared to have been wiped clean, containing not a trace of blood on it. There were cold ashes in the grate. I was handed other items by the housekeeper: a receipt for arsenic made out in the name of the prisoner; a jar which had been found beside the prisoner’s pallet, in the maids’ bedroom upstairs, which appeared to contain a human foetus.

  I found a book in the cabinet also. Paradise Lost, written by Mr John Milton. I produce the jar, the knife, the book, &c. I took the prisoner to the watch-house that morning before she was transported to Newgate. She said not a word, neither at the watch-house, nor the whole time she was being transported.

  The Old Bailey

  7 April 1826

  Chapter Forty

  Here we are, then.

  Jessop, prosecuting. Stout, thin-lipped, the kind of face that would look solemn at his own wedding. I shiver. The room so vast, so crowded with the heat and smells of all those bodies, yet cushioned quiet by all the marble and velvet and brass. The sword hanging above the judge’s head. The light coming spit-clear and yellow through the arched windows. Jessop swings towards the jurors, who stare like cats. He wags his jowls. He’s told them about the School-house, and they’ve pretended shock, though gaming and whoring are the vices that feed off men like them, which is why there are a hundred prostitutes in London for every wife. He’s shown them the jar, the foetus. He’s reminded them that I was woken in my mistress’s bed, that I had blood on my hands when I was woken, yet claim I can’t remember how it got there.

  ‘You will hear from Mrs Linux, the housekeeper at Levenhall. She’ll speak to the prisoner’s character –’

  You leap to your feet. ‘My Lord, need I remind my friend that my client’s character is not to be entered into? He should know better.’

  Jessop grins – small white teeth buried in his fleshy cheeks, like sugar cubes in a bun – and saunters down one end of the barristers’ table. ‘Of course, My Lord, of course. The rule hasn’t shifted for many years, though I see the custom of hesitating to interrupt one’s opening is wobbling on its feet.’

  The judge chuckles and Jessop spins on his heel as if even his gown is smirking, flying up around his shins. ‘The only words the prisoner spoke that night regarding the whole dreadful affair were, “I can’t remember.” How convenient. It would be a first in my experience ‒ indeed, it would be a first in English law ‒ were it to be so easy for a murderess to reach safe harbour simply by scrubbing clean her own devious mind.’ He snaps the lapels of his black gown across his chest. ‘There’s the evidence, gentlemen. I daresay it needs only half of it to make the case. The prisoner was a woman from a god-forsaken place, but Mr Benham took her in anyway, gave her safe harbour. She was turned out for thieving, but she crawled back, bent on revenge, and murdered him, and his wife.

  ‘It’s never to be entered into lightly ‒ condemning a prisoner to death ‒ but if the case is proved, that will be your duty. And, though it be melancholy, you must do it. Each Englishman’s house is his castle, gentlemen. Do your duty, so we may be safe in ours.’

  The prisoner knows nothing of the case against her until after her trial starts. You’ve already told me that you’ll be forced to try to cross Jessop’s bridges as he’s building them, and that it will be a scramble to keep up. It’s not fair, of course, but there’s very little that’s fair about Old Bailey justice.

  He calls his first witness. Dr Wilkes, the house surgeon at Westminster Hospital. Swollen chest, short legs. A bullish chin that slops over his neck-cloth. He gives me a fleeting look, turns quickly away. I’m here to be gawped at but no one can brave the sight of me for long, it seems. Turning to the jury, he tells them he’s done over twenty autopsies, gives it all the slow weight of a sentence he’ll no doubt have engraved on his tomb. I’ve opened more bodies than that, but it’s prudent to keep that to myself, of course. At about four o’clock that morning, he says, he was called to Levenhall, where he examined the bodies. Mr Benham had sustained deep gashes to the upper and middle chest, and Mrs Benham the same.

  He instructed the bodies to be taken to the hospital where he conducted the examinations himself, recording the cause of death in both cases as exsanguination.

  ‘Later that day, the constable handed me a butchering knife, which he said had been recovered from a cabinet in the bedchamber. It was the same knife produced in evidence and shown to me here. I matched the blade directly to both victims’ wounds.’

  ‘Did you note anything else?’

  He hesitates. ‘Mrs Benham had recently been with child. There were clear signs. Enlargement of the uterus, general flaccidity, oedema of the bladder. A large corpus luteum in one of the ovaries. An
apothecary’s jar containing a human foetus had also been delivered to me at the hospital, and I concluded that it was in fact the product of that pregnancy, and about eighteen weeks’ gestation.’

  Silence follows those words. A single cough comes from high in the gallery. Pews gleam through clouds of smoke. Jessop lifts the jar. ‘Is this the . . . ?’

  You leap to your feet. ‘My Lord! This is outrageous. What is the meaning of bringing that here?’

  Jessop turns to the judge. ‘I believe that’s a matter for legal argument, M’Lord.’

  ‘Which my friend knows full well is not permitted to me. But as a matter of law, since there isn’t a single word about this on the indictment, it can have no place here. Nor, as a matter of law, can a foetus be murdered. That . . . thing is inadmissible.’

  The judge shakes his head. ‘Mr Pettigrew, you aren’t alone in finding it macabre. Mr Jessop?’

  ‘M’Lord?’

  ‘You’d better land quickly on the point of it or I’ll have it removed. We don’t all have the iron stomachs of medical men.’

  ‘Very well, M’Lord. Dr Wilkes, were you able to reach any conclusions about how the foetus had been removed from the womb?’

  He looks at me. ‘It couldn’t have been born alive, but that’s not to say it couldn’t also have fallen victim to whatever caused its mother’s death. By God’s hand or by a savage one.’

  Jessop grimaces. ‘Thank you, Dr Wilkes.’

  All heads turn as you rise to your feet again. Your question comes quick and sharp. ‘You say it could not have been born alive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor can you say how it came to be still-born?’

  ‘Only by speculating.’

  ‘I see. My Lord, I have no further questions.’

  I give you a hard look. Is that all? I’d hoped you’d start with some clever card, some trick hidden beneath your black gown. Isn’t that a lawyer’s merchandise? How else will you save me? Now I feel a sprinkle of cold doubt. You shuffle through your papers as Dr Wilkes elbows out of the stand, glaring at me again as he goes. Even the judge is squinting at you. Backsides shift. Time moves as slowly as the smoke. The air is thick with noise and heat again, the buzz of discontented whispers from the gallery. This is not the meat they came for.