The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  Baby-killer. The word claws at me. A pulse of panic.

  ‘I’ve defended only one other black, Miss Langton. One. In that case, the judge decided the prisoner didn’t have the intellect required to understand the nature of the oath. Though he spoke three languages! Do you see? That . . . thing would never have been allowed, in any other case, but in this one ‒’

  You stop, as if something has just occurred to you. ‘Have you been baptized?’

  ‘How would that help?’

  ‘You can tell them you’re a Christian, at least . . .’

  My hands crimp into fists. ‘I know they’ll all think I’m brutish enough to have killed my mistress. But I did not.’

  ‘What about the possibility that you did?’

  My heart rocks like a ship.

  ‘We could argue it that way, you know. You’ve been enslaved all your life, you were brought here, given away. It would have been inhuman not to fight back in those circumstances. Might not get you acquitted. But I could argue for transportation.’

  ‘No.’

  I think back to how she looked, when I found her, guarding that small silent clotted thing.

  I promised, I know. Forgive me.

  I draw in a breath, and face the two of you. ‘It was not her husband’s baby. She . . . and Mr Cambridge –’

  You look at each other in surprise.

  ‘She didn’t want anyone to know. I kept it because she wanted to bury it when she was well.’

  ‘She was unwell?’

  ‘That’s the reason I went back. She wrote to me and asked me to.’ I tell you about coming back, how frightened she’d been.

  ‘Frightened? Of what?’

  Of her husband, of what he might do, of her own narrowing choices. I tell you about finding her that day, inconsolable. I say that she’d seemed, even before her loss, to have sunk into a well of grief. Tomkin looks surprised, as if wondering how such a thing could ever be considered a loss. I tell you what Benham had proposed. But then I trail off, knowing I’ll be wiser to leave certain doors shut.

  I tell you how I loved her. How I tried to help her. I don’t tell you about my harsh words. I don’t tell you that the thing she was frightened of might have been me. When I finish, I’m shaking. I try to hide it by flexing my hands in front of me.

  ‘I loved her,’ I say again, because it seems the most important thing to say.

  You look at me steadily. ‘You loved her. That doesn’t change my advice. Even had it been mutual, it is more likely to harm than help your case.’ You glance down the hallway, lower your voice. ‘What happened afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘After you found her, as you’ve described?’

  I pause. Caution. Careful. Do not say too much.

  ‘She went to her soirée. Mr Benham required it.’

  ‘And then?’

  My mind races. It’s my own self I’m trying to outrun. When I reach inside, there’s nothing. That trick, somewhere between remembering and forgetting – and the only refuge I have left.

  Give me something I can save your neck with.

  I can’t remember.

  From the end of the hallway, a clang of metal. The turnkeys. No time left. You turn to Tomkin. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That we can’t do much with any of that.’

  ‘No. But –’ You stop. ‘Something struck me when I was cross-examining the housekeeper. How would it have been done? To kill one, then the other, and to be in such a deep sleep immediately afterwards? She took an excess of laudanum. Might there be something in that? What if we find a medical man who can make a defence out of it?’

  Tomkin looks at me. ‘I know a doctor in Cheapside. Used him last week on something else. He might have knowledge of such matters. But where do you go with this?’

  ‘If we can get a doctor willing to swear to it, couldn’t we argue that she couldn’t have had the capacity to form an intention, not in that state? Therefore, the indictment, at least for murder, must fail?’

  ‘Lack of malice? Well. This is a first, I think, Mr Pettigrew. Unprecedented, so far as I know –’

  ‘No.’ You both flicker at me in surprise. ‘It makes me look guilty,’ I say.

  Tomkin shakes his head. ‘Miss Langton. It is a defence.’

  In the end, having no other, I had no choice.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The judge comes back. Jessop calls his remaining witnesses to say their piece.

  First, Constable Meek gives his testimony about the blood on my hands, saying I tried to clean myself on the bedclothes: ‘I knew it wasn’t hers, sir, because she had no wounds herself, save some bruises at her neck, no doubt made by one of the victims trying to defend themselves.’ They all look at me when he says that. The pounding in my chest works its way to my throat. No matter how I swallow and swallow I can’t swallow it down.

  Next comes Mr Casterwick, turning his hat this way and that while he speaks. ‘I tried to stay out of matters that were none of my concern. However, it was quite apparent in those latter days that the prisoner was behaving queerly. She’d stop in the middle of doing something and then be quite unable to remember what she was about. Once I came upon her in the garden, near the pond. She said she’d come out in search of an infant, that a child had been lost. There was no infant at Levenhall. I wondered if I hadn’t caught her in her cups, truth be told. Once she was left downstairs, in the kitchen, after everyone else retired. I found her at the table, head resting on the wood, and her hand moved, as if writing something. Only she had no pen. And when I went close to her, she said, “Oh! My head. Such an ache in it, we’ll have to open it.”

  ‘I regret now that I did not tell Mrs Linux. I felt sorry for the girl, you see, and she begged me not to. Mrs Linux suspected that she was stealing her mistress’s medicaments.’

  Finally, it’s Charles’s moment. He says that when he managed to get me upstairs on that dreadful night, I jittered on my sleeping pallet like a loose wheel and he could see mischief upon me, that he should have seen then that I would ‘come off’ and, if he had, he would never have left me, and his master and mistress never would have been killed. To everyone’s shock, not least his own, he begins to cry.

  The afternoon wears smooth. All this makeweight evidence, tipping the scales against me. Slowly, slowly. But none of it has helped to fill that gap. The light stretches thin, glints off the sword above the judge and the mirror above me in the prisoner’s dock. An old gaol-bird told me it’s put there so judge and jurors can better see the prisoner’s face. English justice. The mirror and the sword. First, they force you to face yourself, then they force you to face death. Fear gnaws deep in my guts. I long to run. To flee. How could anyone bear to stand still for so long and hear what other people have to say about them? But the prisoner is forced to watch, to listen. And I know that, if I move a muscle, the keys will push me to the floor, drag me away.

  And then, at last, with the light nearly gone, the judge smacks his bench, making the white edges of his papers curl up like fingers, and says he’s surprised that we’ve reached the end of the day before the end of this trial. ‘I’ll give you one more day.’ But, in the light of his crowded docket, the pair of you had better come prepared to finish on Monday.

  And there ends the first day.

  Because it’s Friday, I face two days in Newgate before we come back. They stretch ahead of me. Minutes will flick lazy as dogs in sun, hours will gallop. The clock’s either as orderly as a multiplication table or as unruly as a fart. But this whole rigmarole should take longer than it takes to clean windows, shouldn’t it? Why should you beg permission to take your time fighting for a woman’s life? Nevertheless, we must set our clocks by the judge, for he’s the sun who rises and sets over the Old Bailey. And he says it’s taking too long.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Monday morning. The second day. After I’m brought in, you lean over the prisoner’s dock, bounce on your toes. I try to still my hand
s, to quiet the clanking of my shackles.

  ‘I have a surprise,’ you say. A small grin. There’s no time to say more than that, for the judge is coming in.

  I’d welcome a surprise. The events of last Friday, and the week-end at Newgate, have worn me out. There was a riot last night: a group of the old girls hacking at the cell with stones chipped out of the wall. It’s how they say goodbye to the stone jug when they’ve been sentenced to the hulks. Transportation is a fate worse than the gibbet, some say. Though I’d welcome it now. It’s no wonder they behave so in there, for a corset drawn too tight is bound to split, and even more so if you squirm against it. Newgate’s that sort of corset. They squeeze us from there to the Old Bailey to the Dead Man’s Walk to the gallows. Like they’re making sausages. The thought makes me clutch at my own stomach, and I’m taken aback for a moment to feel silk there. I look down. A new dress. I’d almost forgotten. One of the good-doers brought it on Saturday. Something for court. You can’t wear that rough thing you had on yesterday. They’ll convict you on the strength of that alone. I do feel the power of this new dress. A kind of dignity coming back. A greater confidence. Held up by that, and your promise of good news, I hold my skirts, and lean forward so I can pay attention.

  When you tell the judge you’d like to recall Dr Wilkes, Jessop sits up, frowns.

  ‘I know he was here on Friday, My Lord,’ you say smoothly. ‘I noted Your Lordship’s observations about time on that occasion. However, a few questions have arisen and I’d beg Your Lordship’s indulgence. I won’t need to trouble him long.’

  You lift one of your papers, and peer at the doctor over the edge of it. ‘Dr Wilkes. The science of pathology enables our bodies to speak, when we can no longer speak for ourselves.’

  ‘In the sense that the body itself can tell how it died, that is correct.’

  You nod, as if to flatter him with your approval. ‘But there’s an art to it?’

  ‘Art?’

  ‘Knowing what to look for. An understanding of human nature . . .’

  He smiles. ‘Knowing what to look for separates scientists from charlatans. And I dare say actually finding it separates them from artists.’

  There are a few chuckles. The doctor lifts his hand to stroke his chin and I fix my eyes on his fingers. Thick as sausages. How does he work with those? In my mind’s eye, they root in blood, pull flesh apart, spoon out livers and brains and hearts. I sway on my feet, close my eyes, and see the Surgeon, waggling his own paws.

  ‘Did you note Madame Benham’s stomach contents, Doctor?’

  ‘I applied a stomach pump, yes.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Only the remains of the ordinary food she had taken.’

  ‘Nothing unusual?’

  He gives a shrug. ‘Carrots.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘You’ve been in court before, Doctor?’

  ‘More often than you, by the look of things.’ Laughter billows out across the gallery. The doctor lets the wind take his chest, smiles up at them.

  ‘Many times, then?’

  ‘I believe my curriculum vitae was established on Friday last, when you declined to ask me any questions.’

  ‘Yes. Very well. Let’s come to it.’ You fiddle with one of the inkwells, bend over it as a woman might, to smooth an iron over a cloth. I’d have liked a trade like yours, I think. Selling words.

  ‘You see, it’s been said many times, here in this very court, that only God sees a man’s heart. But I wonder . . . We must try, mustn’t we, to see to each other’s hearts?’

  ‘Is that what lawyers do now, Mr Pettigrew?’ He smirks.

  ‘Even surgeons must try.’

  ‘There’s no room for sentiment in a surgeon.’

  ‘Or an anatomist?’

  ‘There’s not much call for it. Corpses being incapable of emotion.’

  ‘But you’ve built your profession on the fact that they speak! People come to you, Dr Wilkes, no matter the condition you receive them in. People, who were . . . partial to figs! Or the smell of their babies, the joy of walking beside the ocean, the prick of the sun on one’s nose, and ‒’ You stop, as if embarrassed. ‘Well . . . any of those small joys that may come a man’s way while he has the breath for them.’

  Dr Wilkes smirks up at the judge. ‘A pretty speech, My Lord, but I wonder, what is the relevance of these questions concerning a woman who’s been stabbed? It’s like blaming soured milk for a drowned cat.’

  The judge, caught picking at his teeth with a finger, lowers it. ‘Yes, I agree. Mr Pettigrew, I’m afraid you’ve lost me as well.’

  ‘I am going somewhere, My Lord.’ You turn back to the doctor. ‘Did you make any enquiries about Madame Benham? Her habits? How often she took opium, for example?’

  The judge taps a hand on his bench. ‘Mr Pettigrew. At some point if a man hasn’t got anything on his hook, he might assume the problem is his bait.’

  ‘My Lord, I’ve been led to wonder whether Dr Wilkes overlooked the presence of opium in the stomach contents. I’m instructed that Mrs Benham was a laudanum addict ‒’

  The doctor juts out his chin. ‘I’d been informed that Mrs Benham had been taking laudanum for some months, on advice of a physician. I can’t now remember his name. Folke? Falk?’

  You glance at your paper. ‘Fawkes?’

  ‘Fawkes. Yes. I think that was it. The presence of the drug would have been entirely consistent with that medical history. Mrs Benham had attended her soirée earlier that evening, and appeared in perfectly good spirits. Testing for opium, even if such a thing could be done, would have been nothing but a wild-goose chase.’

  ‘Did you perform any tests?’

  ‘Mr Pettigrew,’ interrupts the judge. ‘Set yourself down a different path.’

  ‘My Lord.’ You take a step back. ‘Something else is troubling me, Doctor. Do you see here the clothes worn that evening by the victims?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, look. His clothes are soaked. Bow to stern, as they say. Do you see? As if he bled and bled again. Like the old superstition which held that a corpse’s wounds would bleed when the killer approached ‒ “open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh”, as Shakespeare wrote. Yet hers are stained only lightly.’ The lavender-grey silk clings as you hold it up, a woman holding fast her lover’s ankles. Splashes of dark dried blood on the bodice. ‘How would you account for it?’

  He pauses, folds his arms. ‘Simple, Mr Pettigrew. He had numerous wounds. Stabbed over and over, and stabbed deep. On the other hand, hers were not so deep.’

  ‘Not so deep?’

  ‘No.’ His voice blunt as granite. But he hesitates. A heartbeat. Or is that only the spinning in my head?

  ‘Yet you still swear positively that exsanguination was the cause of her death?’

  I can’t look at Dr Wilkes. I can’t look anywhere. Velvet, brass and polished wood are all stripped away, until all I can see is her. The whole dread scene. The meat-slab of her laid out on a cold table. The black blood puddling through her lungs and heart. Her body nothing more than a sack for organs, a pop of eyes and tongue. I stumble forward. I cry out. Heads turn. One of the turnkeys takes a step towards me and I shake my head, to show them I’ll be good. I must try to compose myself. But now I can’t un-see it. What a mess they would have made of her! And I’d done the same. To so many. So many! I sway on my feet, close my eyes, fall into the darkness inside.

  The turnkey steps forward, grips my wrist, yanks me back into place. ‘Sorry,’ I whisper. ‘Sorry.’ I look up meekly, snatch for breath. The judge nods, and he releases me and steps back, but I’ve lost the thread of what the doctor was saying, have to lean forward to pick it up again.

  ‘. . . it was obvious from the bodice, Mr Pettigrew, just as it was obvious from the body.’ But he blusters when he says it, and looks unsure.

  As you take your seat, Jessop gives an annoyed little
toss of his head, and I see that, for the first time, there’s a ruffle to his crow-black feathers. He darts a look behind him. ‘I have no further questions for this witness, M’Lud, and, quite frankly, I’m surprised he had to be troubled to come back here for such a damp probing as that.’

  But both Jessop and the doctor look up, towards each other, when you say you wish to call Dr John Pears. The courtroom falls silent. All eyes turn to me in the dock, as they do whenever we must stop and wait. Dr Wilkes stops, going up the steps, wipes his hand along his breeches. The room waits. After a few minutes, Tomkin scurries out, comes back in. Shakes his head, then goes out again. You narrow your eyes up at the gallery before turning back to your papers. ‘My Lord, I – ah, might I request a brief adjournment, to take instructions?’

  When you come back, you give a twitch of your gown, which hangs flattened and black. It has slipped, and your smile has slipped, too.

  ‘My Lord, it seems it will be Dr Lushing this morning, not Dr Pears. I wonder if we might adjourn again until the half-hour, to allow him time to arrive.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Pettigrew. Let’s hope Dr Lushing hasn’t also disappeared,’ says the judge, snickering at his own joke.

  Dr Wilkes, arms hooked over the gallery railing, gives a single blunt nod. When I look up again he’s gone, and you are too. Leaving me to wonder what it’s all about.

  Doctors all seem to have skittering hands and skin under their eyes that sags like purses. As if it’s a profession that draws men unable to sleep or sit still. Dr Lushing tugs at his side-whiskers while he waits for you to start. You have been shaken by something, I can see it. By what? You draw a deep breath, tap the papers in front of you. You’re composing yourself. You fiddle your gown up, then remind him of my claim to have taken laudanum on the night of the murders, which rendered me unable to remember anything thereafter.

  He leans forward. ‘Oh, yes, I was very interested in your client’s claim, Mr Pettigrew. Most interested. It has the hallmarks of a classic stupor. There’s been a great deal of scientific debate recently covering these states. Somnambulism, animal magnetism, mesmerism.’ He ticks them off on his fingers. ‘All of those states seem to involve consciousness and unconsciousness to the same degree and at the same time. A split down the middle, one could say. The person affected can still have the will to act – people have indeed been known to perform very complicated actions – but the moral nature is entirely wanting, because they have lost the regulating power of their own minds. In other words, they are not responsible, not in a moral sense anyway. Somnambulism is more common than the man on the street, or even the man on the jury benches, might think. Alfred the Great was a sufferer, as was La Fontaine. Condillac.