The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  ‘It is a kind of insanity, in the sense that it is also a kind of dreaming awake, a link, if you will, between dreaming and insanity. It causes the sufferer to act on false impressions as if they are real.’

  ‘I see.’ You glance at the jurors. ‘For example, a woman might believe an infant to be hidden under a hedge and set about looking for it, though there is no such thing?’

  ‘Yes! Exactly that. In such a state, one of my patients wrote an entire symphony yet next morning remembered not a single note. Another walked the lanes around his own estate all night, shot a fox and dragged the body back all the way through his own top field. Next morning, he swore he’d been in bed the whole time and he’d still believe that, too, except the whole thing had been witnessed by the local priest.’

  ‘Those were somnambulistic trances? Sleepwalking, in colloquial terms?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Could the same state be produced by an excessive consumption of opium?’

  ‘That’s what excited me about your case, Mr Pettigrew. I believe, quite strongly indeed from what you’ve told me, that what your client experienced was akin to a somnambulistic trance, except of course we’re talking not about a sleeping state but a soporific one. Under an excess of opium, as in a dream, a user might also act under false impressions. The delirium in this instance created by the drug itself. But the memory of those actions could then be obliterated by the stupefying effect, resulting in the same split in consciousness.’ He hooks his fingers on his own lapels, as if he’s the prosecutor, rolling out his argument like a tailor’s cloth. ‘These matters, gentlemen, are as exciting, as reliable, as any of the century’s scientific advances. You may have faith in that.’

  You look pleased with yourself again, reaching up to finger your wig.

  But frustration knots my guts. This might be a good lawyer’s trick, but it siphons up all my own doubts, all my own fears. As if my own defence will be the very thing that seals my guilt.

  This is planting someone else’s idea like a cuckoo in my head. If you killed her, Frances, this is how. Twin shapes, shadows moving in the dark, until one goes cold. But is that real? I know that blackness all too well. My heart staggers behind my ribs. It would have been unknowing. Of all Lushing’s paid-for words, I cling to that.

  When it’s his turn, Jessop tosses his papers onto the barristers’ table. ‘Insanity! That is indeed an accurate assessment of this entire defence.’

  ‘Well, no, that’s not what I –’

  ‘Do you mean to suggest that the prisoner could have killed Mr Benham, taken herself upstairs, killed his wife, cleaned the carpet and the knife, and then – presto! ‒ got into bed, all in this alleged somnambulistic state?’

  ‘Oh, yes, very possible and I should say –’

  ‘The savagery to butcher them both, yet the presence of mind for all that . . . tidying up.’ He huffs out a laugh. ‘It’s hardly likely, Doctor. Those are not involuntary actions. Not some pitiable automaton, but a person making decisions, acting with care and deliberation, even self-interest.’

  ‘As I’ve said, Mr Jessop, there is the will to act, yes, but there is this form of mental derangement laid over it. Think of the moment between sleep and waking, when it is difficult for the mind to be conscious of its own condition or even the condition or location of the body. It is a form of derangement close to that, save that it can last for hours.’

  ‘Sleepwalking!’ Jessop throws up his hands, spins around to the jury benches. ‘My friend makes a circus of this court.’

  You jump up, palms flat on the table. ‘My Lord, were I permitted, I’d argue that my client’s state amounted as a matter of law to non-insane automatism. It might be novel, but isn’t that how the law develops? By looking for advances, by building on foundations –’

  ‘Mr Pettigrew.’ The judge pinches his lips together. ‘You are sneaking argument in through the back door again.’

  ‘Nor can he cut his cake both ways, My Lord,’ Jessop cries out. ‘Does the prisoner say she didn’t do this terrible thing? Or that she did it while sleepwalking? The sleepwalking defence kills her denial dead.’ He wags his lip, pleased as a cat with the warm squirm of feathers on his tongue.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  After Dr Lushing, Pru, dear Pru, comes and gives me a character. But it seems too little, too late, my head now teeming with the same dreadful image that’s no doubt filling all their heads. The butchering maid, the mistress dying in her bed. But I try for a smile, for Pru has been a friend, and a true blessing. This may be all the thanks I can ever give her. Her own smile thins, like something mixed in water, no doubt thinking of Madame, as I am. She says her kind words about me, a soothing balm, and then I lose her to the crowd. The second morning draws to a close, the judge breaks for lunch, and then the afternoon is upon us. And I am next to speak.

  The prisoner is never permitted to take the oath, which is one of the many ways they tell us what we’re worth. But I find myself thinking it’s a good thing I’m not permitted to swear to it. I stare around the courtroom. Faces on top of faces, pressing as if against glass, layered like a grim cake. Sucked cheeks and slanted brows. A shot of panic, hot and swift as laudanum. How can I speak here? Who will listen? Who will believe me? I lean forward. ‘Sirs.’ My own voice booms back at me off the sounding board.

  ‘I was faithful to my lady, and happy to serve her. When I came back to Levenhall, it was because she sent for me herself. She was not well . . . and I . . . came back to nurse her. I loved my mistress. I couldn’t have done what you say I’ve done because I loved her.’

  My thoughts crowd each other like frightened cattle and I see you give a small shake of your head. This will harm your case, not help it. I find myself wishing for the drug again. To wet everything and make it slide easily, whether in or out. I must tiptoe around my first days back, picking out what I can and cannot say. ‘It has been said that I am an opium-eater, that I have been a whore.’ I pause. ‘Those things are true. I did fall into the habit of taking opium, but it was my mistress who gave it to me, saying it was to help me sleep.’

  I press my hands together. Steady. Steady. ‘And for a time last autumn I . . . did live at the School-house. That was the work I could get. I had to eat, and it was a more moral course than thieving. Mr Benham forgave me for it, and I’d beg your forgiveness, too, if I need it. I’d remind you –’ I lift my chin ‘– if bawdry alone was cause to convict of murder, there’d only be a handful of women left in all of London.’

  High up in the gallery, a flurry of fans. Bright as butterflies. Sniggers. Even Jessop coughs up from his papers in surprise.

  I’m a puzzle. They expected a sly African. Or a bent-double maid. A mulatta whore. The Black Murderess.

  Which one will save me?

  My next words are as much of a shock to me as to them.

  ‘Sirs, I wonder . . . in the whole sum of history, by what order have you white men been wrong more than you’ve been right?’ An uproar. From the whole crowd of them, there rises a squabble like hens quarrelling over corn. Judge, jurors, clerks, turnkeys, barristers and gallery. One of the jurors shakes his head. I’ll have put them off me, as so often happens when you speak the truth. It’s the reason so many do not.

  But I press on. ‘Whatever it is . . .’ I raise my voice ‘. . . whatever it is, that must be the whole scale of human suffering.’

  I come to a stop, needing to draw in both breath and courage to go on. Swarmed by the cries, the heat, the gold letters hammering into my head: A false witness shall not be unpunished. The unbearable smell, so very like the reek of this city when I first came to it. Perfume on top, but down below, where rotting always starts, a stench. There’s not much you can do to get rid of an honest smell, which you’d know if you’d ever been a maid, or the sort who can’t pay another to maid for you. I lift my head, and try to fix my eyes on the stone columns at the very back of the gallery, so I don’t have to look at the jurors, or the other snarling faces, s
o I can compose myself and speak again. But what I see up there makes me cower. It can’t be.

  A row of bodies, black bodies. Where there were no bodies at all before. They straggle against the columns, some leaning, some straight. They march down the stairs, jut elbows on the wooden railing, press chins on fists. There are so many of them. They slide onto the benches, nudging people down with their hips. They gawp. Same as everyone else. But their hands are still, their faces are ashen as the marble, and their eyes are all white, blank as paper. Unmoving. They stare and stare. I feel a blink of confusion. But then I see precisely what to scoop out of the stew of my thoughts, like a candle brought into the dark room inside my head, and I tilt my head back, the better to see them. I take in the sight of them. There’s the new-bought Coromantee. I never thought to see him again! He lost his leg under the plough, and his will to live under the Surgeon’s knife. The carpenter. Whittled to bone by yaws, and despair. The milk-toothed boy, hair springing like burrs in grass, mother-smoothed with palm oil. The man who seemed to be all belly, broad and hairy, with curling yellow toenails. Gullah, of the rum-dark eyes. I see them. I see the coach-house. The small arched windows just below the roof. The night like black oil tipped against the glass. Wind muttering against the loose pane. The cadaver, under wetted muslin. The lectern, on which stood Vesalius. De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Me, coughing. Always coughing. The thick flags of smoke from the tobacco burning in pans. And gunpowder in vinegar. The sting of the arsenic solution pumped through the corpse.

  I find I can speak, after all. I raise my voice again. ‘You think I am a monster.’ The bodies nod. Heads flying every which way like cotton dolls shaken by a child.

  Gullah squints her eyes. Go on.

  Confess. Confess. I look down at my hands.

  ‘Mr John Langton, my old master, brought me to London.’

  Go on.

  ‘He gave me as a gift to Mr Benham.’

  Tell them. Tell them what you are. I glance over at the jurors on their benches, and cough. What happens to me won’t have a thing to do with what you or Jessop say, but whether these men like the look of me or not, which is a thing that is already decided: it was decided in an instant, when I was first brought into the room. The rest is only drawn out to make a show for them. And the jurors, the judge, all of you, are men, made loose by balls and bragging, with no earthly notion how tight it can get inside a woman’s skin.

  Then the words pour out. ‘Mr Langton owned the Paradise estate, in Jamaica. He owned me. He and Mr Benham made a wager. They’d find a black and train him up. Discover the limits of his intelligence. That’s how Mr Benham explained it.’

  One hand twists over the other. ‘Why did they choose me? Neither is here to answer. But Mr Benham once told me Langton wanted a mulatto, not a black. That was part of it. And it could also have been because I was that bastard’s own daughter. His own flesh.’

  I press my tongue against my teeth. Look up. The bodies nod. Go on.

  ‘Just to have the pages of a book beneath my fingers. Fresh air. Early mornings. A view. A mirror. And a bed. People want to see something unusual in what I did there. There was nothing strange about it. That’s what slavery is. Their minds, our hands.’

  The judge creaks forward, taps his quill. ‘Mr John Langton is not on trial here, girl!’

  ‘You might think it was just a matter of one cut after another, like slicing a loaf, but you need all manner of tools to open a man. Scalpels, yes, but also bone-saws and scissors and double-blunt hooks. Forceps and blowpipes and needles. Knives for brains and knives for cartilages and knives for bones. Kept in a wooden chest the Surgeon bought from a ship’s doctor, fastened with two brass clasps and lined in velvet, like a rich man’s coffin. Like a set of dinner forks. Ivory handles.’ The judge is still banging, and I let the words tumble out, racing to finish.

  ‘I’m the one who wrote out Langton’s manuscript. Crania. He used his own slaves for his experiments. Only the dead ones, at first, for he said the dead can’t complain. But neither can slaves. Soon he decided there was more to learn about living men from living skin. He used fire, pierced their skin with small knives, even the soles of their feet, had vices fastened to their skulls, cut them open awake, sewed them up after they’d fainted. He chose who would be put to bed with whom, so he could write it down, and their offspring would be written down also.

  ‘He supposed that blacks would breed, not only with other blacks, but also with the orangutan. The two are close kin, he said, and other planters had tried it.

  ‘Well. He had me write letters for him. Most to skull-hunters, for there are men who will scavenge across the globe for any single thing you want or can imagine you want. He had me write to Mr Leforth Pomfrey, asking him to find one of those creatures, send it to Paradise by ship. That was the worst of it. When that creature came . . . that was the worst of it . . .’ Panic strokes my throat loose. ‘I was his scribe, but I was worse. I did worse. I opened bodies. Many of them. I confess it! I confess.’

  I look up. ‘George Benham was just as bad ‒’

  ‘Enough!’ the judge shouts, his face knitted into the expression of a man straining over his pot. He looks at me, aghast.

  Gripping the railing, I pause. ‘Sometimes . . . sometimes I think the whole aim of this entire universe is to force us to admit the white man has stronger magic.’

  ‘Prisoner at the bar!’ cries the judge. His jaws snap shut. The whole gallery is in an uproar now, benches quaking, some of the men leaping to their feet, waving broadsheets curled into batons.

  The turnkeys step towards me, hands in fists. The darkness is in my head again, same as it was that night. The sharp pain of my fingers digging into wood is the only thing keeping me in the room. I look up into the gallery. Every eye staring. The bodies nodding, all blood and teeth.

  Then the turnkeys are behind me, pinning my hands. My shackles clank and rattle at my back. But I’m not done yet.

  ‘Even being the offspring of debauchery and vice,’ I cry out, ‘I am sure I did not do this thing!’

  Jessop leaps to his feet, leans over the table, his hands either side of his brief.

  ‘That was quite a . . . tale.’ Looking at him, I feel nothing but fatigue. I rest my hands on the railing. ‘You are a monster. You say it yourself. I say you are the monster who killed Mr and Mrs Benham.’

  I shake my head. ‘That is not true.’

  ‘It was an act of savagery, what was done to them.’ It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer. He sways forward, gaze sharp as a wasp-sting. ‘Will you tell us what services you performed, at the brothel where you worked?’

  I hesitate. ‘The School-house was a spanking parlour.’

  ‘Where you administered whippings?’

  I flick my head.

  ‘Is that a yes?’ He lifts one of his papers, glances down. ‘You spoke of John Langton. John Langton’s estate. John Langton’s experiments. A large part of the Paradise estate was burned to the ground, I understand, in ’twenty-five, just before you came here. Following a slave rebellion. Is that true?’

  ‘There was no rebellion,’ I say.

  ‘It was a savage place.’

  ‘There are savage goings-on here, also.’

  ‘You’ve been made bitter by those experiences. You’ve been made savage yourself.’ He speaks almost gently now, needle rather than blade. ‘Be that as it may. Mr Benham took you in, showed you a kindness. Which you repaid by thieving ‒’

  ‘No.’

  ‘By seeking to address yourself to his wife.’

  I draw stale air into my lungs. He wants to terrify me, to make me doubt myself. But I have held this one true thing, from that day to this: ‘I loved her. She loved me.’

  But, in the vast courtroom, the words come out hollow as quill barrels, even to my own ears. I hear the shuffling, the whispers. I can imagine what they all must think. I can imagine what you must think, that I’m sinking my own ship. But no matter. There was love.

&nb
sp; ‘Your mistress loved you?’ He scoffs and shrugs his gown, gives me a long stare, makes sure I’m the first to look away. ‘So that was why you argued with your master.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why you killed him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You threatened them with death,’ he rattles on, as if I haven’t spoken at all, ‘and then you made good on that threat.’

  I see the gold light shining against the drapes. I see all their shocked faces, weapons formed against me. Meg’s darky maid! How she follows her! How she torments her! A strange one, I’ve always thought it. Something in the eyes . . . How dare she? How dare she? I see him. Olaudah Cambridge. Madame, wavering, pulling away from me.

  ‘This is death.’

  He swings his head. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘This is death. That’s what I said.’

  Please will you stay upstairs, Frances? Please sleep in the attic. I cannot see your face, now. I cannot bear it. It reminds me . . . it reminds me . . . And then I had called her a coward. I’d wanted to hurt her, as she had hurt me.

  Jessop paces like a bull behind a fence. ‘“This is death.” What did you mean by that?’

  ‘I was upset.’

  He sucks his teeth. ‘Upset enough to kill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was it the end of this imagined love affair with your own mistress that had you so upset?’

  ‘It was not a love affair.’