The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  I have to press my tongue hard against my teeth, so I won’t cry out.

  But there’s no time to dwell on it. Linux is next. The sight of her is like a fist to the gut. The same feeling I had that morning, hearing her cry out, ‘Murder!’

  She keeps her head straight, refusing to look at me. Buttoned ankle to neck all in black, a white collar around her throat. But once she’s in the stand she’s hemmed in by all that wood, which gives her no choice but to face me. Accuser and accused. Her scars are red today, fat as ticks swelling with blood. She slaps her hand atop the black Bible and swears to tell nothing but the truth, so help her God. On her lips, it’s more command than oath. She straightens her shoulders and the room goes quiet. Dread digs into me. Now it will really start. I slow my breaths, lean over the railing. If there’s anything here that can help me, I need to find it. Any small crumb.

  She says it’s a mystery to her, why Benham let me stay after I came back, as well as being his own fatal mistake.

  ‘I used to find her with the master, you know, cooped in his library alone. They would always fall silent, when I entered. Such is the way with those women, isn’t it? They learn to set themselves as traps for their masters before they even come up to their knees. She had some hold over both of them. After she came back, the mistress kept herself in bed, claiming her head was bad, though now I know it must have been her condition . . . The prisoner wouldn’t come away from the door, nor would she let anyone in. The mistress seemed agitated. I believe she was terrified of her!’

  You shoot up out of your seat. ‘My Lord. I object most strongly. I’m sure I don’t need to state it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Mr Pettigrew. Mrs Linux, you must give evidence of fact. What did you see with your own two eyes?’

  ‘I saw the mistress was afraid, sir! But when I went to the master about what was happening, he said only that the pair of them were to be left alone. That was the day of their soirée.’

  ‘Can you tell us what happened on the night of the soirée?’

  ‘Charles came down to the kitchen to say the prisoner was causing a commotion, so I went up. I was just in time to see her threaten Mrs Benham. She went very close to her and shouted, “This is death.”’

  ‘“This is death.” You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. She said it twice. And some of the ladies were so overcome they had to withdraw to the smaller parlour, so I told Charles to take her up to the attic, where she couldn’t cause any further trouble. We should have sent for the constable straight away, of course. I wish we had. But we still had to see to the guests. We were a long time seeing everybody out, making the house secure. And when I went to speak to the master, he said we weren’t to send for anyone, that he’d spoken with the prisoner himself.’

  She sucks in a breath. ‘Just after midnight, I went upstairs to make sure the front door was on the latch. I saw . . . her . . . crossing the landing above, up on the third storey, walking towards Madame’s bedchamber. It was dark. I saw only the shape of her. But she seemed distressed. She cried out. Though I could not hear what she said.’

  ‘You’re sure of the time?’

  ‘The guests had all left by ten, the master and mistress had gone up soon after. I checked the clock at that time, and I checked it again when I saw her. I called out to her, but got no answer. Well, it was so very like those other times when I’d caught her wandering around up there at night . . . that it ate at me. I asked Mr Casterwick what he thought we should do. “Go up,” he said, “and speak to the master again.” I decided I would, just to make sure. I went up. And that’s when I saw blood –’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Spots of it on the stairs. On the landing just – just outside the library. I –’

  She stops, blows into a white kerchief, says she wishes she didn’t have to speak of it.

  ‘Yes,’ says Jessop. ‘Yes.’ He puts one hand on his hip, making a bat wing of his gown. All the patience of a terrier at a rat hole. ‘Take your time,’ he says gently. ‘Some things are beyond description, Mrs Linux. Nevertheless, such things are the business of the Old Bailey.’

  She gives out a sob. There’s a terrible quiet, only the whispery shuffling high in the gallery. They, too, smell blood. This is what they came for.

  ‘I went in. It . . . it was the smell that stopped me. The kind you can feel, sticking to you. I felt my way to the mantel, lit one of the candles there that had guttered out. And saw it. Blood!’ she wails. ‘The whole floor a black sea, and my poor master lost upon it!

  ‘I ‒ For a moment, I couldn’t think what to do. Then I fell to my knees. It was all I could think. I prayed over him for the longest time. I said the Lord’s Prayer. A few times, I can’t remember how many. I had to breathe in that ‒ that smell all the while. I went out to the passage and knelt there. I ‒ cast up my accounts. The constable later found the . . . found the mess.’

  She makes a show of putting herself together, patting her bodice.

  ‘I went up to the mistress’s room, thinking I had to summon her. I let myself in. You might have thought it was the master and mistress both in there asleep, at first. Bedcovers pulled neat as sails, and –’ she lifts a hand to her cheek ‘‒ there was the same smell there. That terrible smell. Oh, I knew then it would be something I didn’t want to see. I put the covers back ‒ and that was when I saw the prisoner and the mistress. The bed covered in blood. That’s when I saw the mistress was dead.

  ‘Then I screamed, and that brought Mr Casterwick, who sent for Charles. Charles went to fetch the watch, and it was all such a dreadful shock I didn’t mark the time then. That’s when we woke the prisoner. We did not want to wake her before the constable came.’

  ‘How was she when you woke her?’

  ‘She wouldn’t wake, not at first. I had to pour water over her, from the pitcher. When she sat up, I saw her hands were covered in blood. The constable asked her what had happened and she said, “I can’t remember.” That’s all she would say. She just kept repeating it.’

  She tells them she later found the jar and the receipt for arsenic under my pallet and handed those items over to the constable when he came back down. The constable found the knife in Madame’s cabinet, beside the laudanum bottles, and her copy of Paradise Lost. It had been wiped clean and laid there beside the bottle and the book with the care a surgeon might take, putting away his instruments.

  ‘Surgeon or butcher.’ She seems to spit the words straight at me.

  Oh, I know only too well. It’s butchery when there’s no need to keep the animal alive.

  ‘Apart from the blood, there was nothing out of place. As if the room must have been tidied. Another odd thing, sir. You see, the mistress had come below that night, just before their guests left. She came down to the kitchen, and – oh ‒ she was wringing her hands, her voice so thin and soft you could hardly hear her. She wanted to thank us, to tell us the evening had gone well, and not a one of us was to be downhearted about what had happened. She came round each of us in turn. I’ll never forget it. I remember her hands when she clasped mine, so small, so cold. Trembling. She’s upset about what happened, I thought. But now I know she must have been frightened. She must have been terrified.’

  Those words sink me into a terrible black mood. The thought that Madame could have been afraid. Of me? It pushes my head down.

  When I look up, you’re on your feet. You couldn’t be more different from Jessop. He took the floor like an actor, all eyebrows, teeth and hands, the better to see him up in the gallery, his gown more up and down than a whore’s nightdress. Yours is planted firmly on your shoulders. For a moment, all you do is frown at your papers, as if studying them. Thinking. It’s a seeping silence, after all of Jessop’s bluster, and Linux’s sobbing. The room goes quiet too.

  Silence can be a chisel. Perhaps you’re making her wait in the hopes that you can use it in that fashion on her.

  You look up. ‘If I understand you correctly, you went straight from your mas
ter’s dead body to your mistress’s bedchamber.’

  She purses her lips. ‘Is there a question, Mr Pettigrew?’

  ‘You were awake, moving through the house. You were in the library, then the bedchamber. Is it possible that, in order to cover your own tracks, you now seek to lay my client’s on top?’

  ‘You’re as addled as your client if you truly believe all that. But I suspect it’s more a case of her paying you by the word.’ She laughs. ‘I am not the one who made threats, and who was found covered in blood.’

  ‘Blood that could have been transferred onto my client while she lay beside her mistress.’

  ‘A likely story, sir. Her mistress massacred right next to her and she never woke up?’

  There’s no answer for that, of course, so you’re forced to switch paths. I could tell you there’s no shaking Linux off. In any event, she isn’t the one who had blood on her hands, and no story to account for what she’d done. Nor has anyone come to bear witness against her. No one will ever see her as the monster, if the choice is between me and her.

  ‘Here is another puzzle. Such a savage killing. Then tidying up. How would that have been done? Why tidy the bedchamber and not the library? I am having some difficulty with all of this.’

  ‘You seem to be having difficulty with many things. Sir.’

  I hear snorts, laughter in the gallery. My stomach sinks. How is it a laughing matter? Would they all be so entertained if I was swinging in front of them? I look around the room. All these people who’ll go home tonight to suppers and families, I suspect they would. I dig my nails deeper into the railing.

  You flick the tails of your wig behind your neck. ‘It was you who said there was nothing out of place in Madame’s bedchamber.’

  ‘There was a dead body in that room.’

  ‘Yes, but those were your words, Mrs Linux. I am quoting you. Nothing out of place. The room tidied up.’

  ‘Perhaps you should ask your client,’ she says, giving the jurors a sharp look. ‘I am not an expert in murder.’

  ‘There we agree, Mrs Linux. However, it’s your speculation about this murder that points the finger at my client.’

  ‘I believe it’s for the jurors to say where the finger points.’

  ‘But you believed it was the prisoner who had done this dreadful thing?’

  ‘It’s His Majesty’s government that says so.’

  ‘Doesn’t His Majesty say so because that is what you told His Majesty’s constable?’

  ‘There had been a murder. Two murders! And the master – the master . . .’ She breaks off into a sob, raises her kerchief. ‘So, when I found poison among her possessions, and when I found that . . . thing, I reported them. Naturally.’

  ‘Thinking that, since my client had purchased arsenic, she must have been planning to stab someone to death?’

  She hesitates.

  ‘Mrs Linux. Why would a woman who’d gone to the trouble of buying and hiding poison stab her victims to death? And this receipt for arsenic you claim to have found, why, it’s like Cobbett’s red herring, leading the hounds away from the hare! Isn’t it a fact that arsenic is used frequently by quality ladies for their complexions? Had Mrs Benham had receipts for arsenic from Mr Jones before? Careful now – I will call him here if need be.’

  ‘Your client threatened them, that very night. She cannot lie her way out of it now. Twenty people heard her. All the master’s guests.’

  ‘You say she lost her temper, flew into a rage, killed one, got upstairs, killed the other, and then in an instant fell into such a deep sleep you had to pour water over her to wake her? How would that have been done?’

  ‘That is a question she should be asking her own conscience.’

  She stands, and stares. The silence always feels heavy in court. It is a room full of words, perhaps that’s why. They echo even when none are being spoken. Words are all your trade, you lawyers. You spoon them in, or knife them in. Flatter, cajole. Dripping with malice or kindness, depending on your purpose. Tricks. Hooks. You nod at her and glance down at your brief. Gentle your voice. ‘You see, Mrs Linux . . . there were reasonable explanations . . . yet you and Constable Meek went haring about after the prejudicial ones, ruling out all others without any further enquiry.’

  She turns to me. And there’s such hatred on her face. She and I are the same. The thought twists like a serpent. She and I are the same. Equal in our devotion. Equal in our anger, too.

  You wait, but still she says nothing. ‘Don’t you know your speculation could hang my client, Mrs Linux?’ you say quietly. ‘Don’t you care?’

  She tucks her lips in.

  ‘You say there’d been a disturbance in the drawing room, during the soirée?’

  She breathes out. ‘Yes. The prisoner making threats.’

  ‘Did anyone hear a commotion upstairs after your master and mistress went up for the night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘But that was not unusual. We could not hear the upper rooms from so far downstairs. We were in the kitchen, the stove going, the noises of the clearing, and cleaning.’

  ‘You did not see the prisoner commit these terrible murders?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor did anyone else?’

  ‘No one has said so.’

  ‘How did you and the prisoner get on?’

  Her jaw twitches. ‘We got on with things.’

  ‘There was animosity between you?’

  Another hesitation. ‘No more than the usual. I ran that house, sir, and the servants in it. It would have been impossible, then, for them to be happy with me all the time, or me with them.’

  She blinks.

  ‘What kind of master was Mr Benham?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘It is the business of this court.’

  ‘A good master, a fair one.’

  ‘You felt the prisoner was a threat to the household, you tried to warn the master, you wanted her turned out.’

  She makes her eyes small. ‘I wasn’t wrong . . .’

  ‘On one occasion you burned her hand, with the kettle ‒’

  ‘That was an accident! What has she said?’ She whips her head around to me again. ‘What has she said? That was the night she attacked one of Mr Benham’s guests at dinner. Mr John Langton. The one who’d brought her here, given her to Mr Benham. I took her down to the kitchen. She’d disgraced the master by what she’d done. I expected her to be turned out then, though she wasn’t. They took pity on her, always, and look how she repaid them. When I tried to make her go upstairs, she rushed at me, nails flying, she was trying to claw at me, and I had the kettle still in my hands. I had yet to make the teas for after dinner. That’s how it happened, and that is God’s truth. Is she trying to blame me for it? You can say what you like but I saw who she was. I saw her exactly. And I was not wrong.’

  ‘Did her race count against her, too, so far as you were concerned?’

  ‘It was her deeds that counted against her, not her skin.’

  ‘You bullied her.’

  ‘No. I did not.’

  ‘You bullied her. You harassed her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You set your mind against her from the start. Dark in complexion, dark in nature. Was that what you thought?’

  ‘No.’

  You stare at each other, only the soft sounds of the courtroom between you.

  The silence really is a marvel, here. So different from the gaol. There, the constant shouts and cries and squealing hammer and hammer at you until you spark and bend, like an iron nail, and can never feel straight again. Newgate’s noise is a pig-yard noise. Now it’s all this silence that seems loud.

  Her chest is heaving, and yours a mirror to it. The floor heaves too, like the floor of a ship.

  I look at the judge, squirming on his bench.

  He glances up at the clock.

  ‘Perhaps, Mr Pettigrew, this is a convenient moment.�
�

  Chapter Forty-One

  Of all the time-keepers in that courtroom, it’s the judge’s stomach that will most often have its way. Either that or his bladder.

  Lunch.

  While the judge goes for his marrow soup, or whatever they’re serving up in the judges’ dining room today, the turnkeys allow you and Tomkin, the lawyer instructing you on my behalf, a few moments with me. You both stand facing me. It’s a dark, nasty little corridor, no gleaming wood, no green velvet. Just cold grey walls, grimy flagstones underfoot, and the smell of prisoners. Feet and fear. The thought sinks into me that this is where I may belong for the rest of my life, if Jessop succeeds in shortening it. The kind of place deemed fit for creatures like me. Prisoners. Murderers.

  The pair of you puzzle at me, like schoolboys working on the same sum. My head echoes with your words from our first meeting: Give me something to help you with.

  You tap your papers against your chin. Shake your head. ‘Let’s start with the foetus ‒’

  ‘Why? It’s nothing but a distraction. You said it yourself.’

  ‘What I say to them and what I say to you are two different matters.’

  Tomkin coughs into his hand. ‘He holds your brief, Miss Langton, you must take him into your confidence.’

  ‘Jessop’s painting a picture of you,’ you interject. ‘It’s an old trick. Getting the jurors to look at something the judge is going to tell them to forget. It’s prejudicial nonsense, and shouldn’t have been allowed. No point leaping about with objections. Makes the jurors think you can’t confront the facts, and they never give a toss for lawyerly tricks. But if you don’t explain it, they’ll think the worst, that you’re a –’