The Unseeing Read online

  • • •

  Sarah followed a line of women snaking through one of the corridors to the long whitewashed breakfast room whose high windows looked into the interior of the prison. She was seated near the warders rather than at the long deal tables with the other prisoners, some of whom she recognized, some not. Most of the women imprisoned at Newgate were kept there only for a short time awaiting trial at the Old Bailey, then moved out to other prisons. A blackboard in the center of the room had the word SILENCE chalked across it in large letters. Sarah could still hear the rustle of whispers beneath the slurping of oatmeal and the banging of spoons on pewter. A pasty-faced woman whom she had not seen before pointed at her.

  “That’s her, ain’t it?” the woman said in a loud whisper. “Greenacre’s whore: the one who mopped up the blood.”

  “More than that,” another girl said. “Cut up the body. Chop, chop, chop.” The girl mimed the slicing action with her hand and laughed.

  “Rook! Boltwood! One more word out of either of you and I’ll place you on report.”

  Sarah looked down into her bowl, raising the spoon to her lips again and again without really tasting the gray contents. The important thing was to keep her face expressionless and to avoid the women’s eyes so that they could not tell what she was thinking. She had had a lot of practice: she would, she thought, make a good card player.

  • • •

  Back in her cell, Sarah picked up her sewing. It was crude stuff: not the skilled needlework by which she had once scraped a living, but flannel garments for soldiers and for other prisoners. All the same, the familiarity and the repetition of the stitching soothed her: in and under, back and up; in and under, back and up. The events of the past months had reduced her, both her body—starved, pinched, deprived—and her mind, which seemed to have turned in on itself. She had not expected the death sentence. None of them had. There was so little evidence against her.

  “You really mustn’t worry,” Mr. Price, their barrister, had said, as they waited for the jury’s verdict in the room beneath the Old Bailey. “Women are never hanged these days.”

  Sarah had been so exhausted by then, after two days sitting in the dock listening to witnesses’ evidence and lawyers’ arguments and judges’ musings: words and more words, running into and over each other while ladies fanned themselves in the stifling air and reporters yawned and offered one another their snuff boxes. She had closed her eyes as they sat in that stone-walled room waiting, her mind empty. Beneath the table, James had grasped her hand tight, like a vice. “It will be all right,” he had said. But it was not all right. It was about as bad as it could be.

  For a moment, Sarah saw again the jury being led back in, their faces impenetrable. She heard the roar of blood in her head, drowning out the sounds of the courtroom. She saw once more the foreman standing, the spectators in the gallery leaning forward, the clerk placing a square of black cloth over the judge’s long white wig, and the judge’s mouth opening and closing.

  “…And Lord have mercy upon your soul.”

  It was not just the Lord’s mercy she needed, though. It was the King’s. She felt a crushing sensation within her chest as she calculated that ten days had now passed since she sent her petition for clemency, and still she had received nothing in response. What else could she do? What else could she say? In and under, back and up. Think, Sarah, think. It was only by piecing everything carefully together that she would escape.

  Sarah glimpsed a shadow beneath the door before it was pushed open. Miss Sowerton stood before her, unsmiling.

  “Get up. You’ve a visitor. A lawyer. Sent by the Home Office, so he says.”

  Sarah’s throat constricted. What did this mean? That her petition had been rejected? That it was to be investigated? She tried to smooth out her coarse dress and tidy her hair under her plain white cap. Miss Sowerton watched Sarah with a smirk on her pockmarked face.

  “Making yourself pretty for ’im, are you?” she said. “I shouldn’t bother. I’m sure he knows what you are.”

  I doubt that, Sarah thought as she walked toward her and out of the cell door.

  • • •

  Miss Sowerton led Sarah to a small desk in the corner of the legal visitors’ room where a man sat, apparently occupied with the papers spread in front of him. He wore a black frock coat, a double-breasted waistcoat, and a crisp white shirt. He had removed his hat, which sat on the table before him, and his chestnut-brown hair stuck up in tufts. Sarah saw that he had a squarish jaw and smooth fair skin—he could not have been much more than thirty. She had the distinct impression she had seen him somewhere before.

  “Here she is,” Miss Sowerton said to him. “You’ve a half hour.”

  “Well,” the man said, getting up and smiling. “Then we must get on.”

  The matron nodded and then seated herself on a chair beside the table.

  The lawyer’s smile faded. “I am afraid I must speak with Miss Gale privately.”

  “Not possible,” Miss Sowerton said. “Regulations.”

  “I discussed this with the Governor. It’s important that Miss Gale is able to speak freely during our meeting. I hardly think I will be in danger.” He glanced around at the other desks occupied with legal advisers and their clients.

  “She was convicted of murder.”

  “In fact,” he said, “the charge was aiding and abetting.”

  From where she stood, Sarah could see that the lawyer had been reading some notes about the trial. The words from her own statement—“That is all I have to say”—had been underlined.

  “Whatever the charge was, I can assure you she ain’t to be trusted. She’ll tell you lies, the world round and the heavens broad, to save ’erself. And she’s deceived cleverer than you.”

  “Thank you for your concern, but I’m sure I would be able to deal with any situation that should arise.”

  The matron fixed him with a look of contempt. “Suit yerself,” she said, getting up. “I’ll be keeping a close eye on you, Gale.”

  • • •

  “Please sit,” the man said to Sarah, gesturing to a wooden chair. He took out a rich brown leather-bound notebook and then looked up. “My name is Edmund Fleetwood. I’m a criminal barrister.”

  Sarah looked at him closely. Fleetwood.

  “I’ve been commissioned by the Home Secretary to investigate the circumstances that led to your conviction.”

  “I might be pardoned?”

  “It’s one of the options, Miss Gale. That’s all I can say at present. It’s possible that the Secretary of State could grant you a reprieve or at least commute your sentence. However, I need to investigate the matter fully, as fully as I can in the time available. I have only seven weeks.”

  His voice was unnatural somehow, as if he had deepened the tone. It occurred to Sarah that he was a novice: he was on the back foot.

  She looked directly into his eyes. “And what is it you want from me exactly, sir?”

  “Simply your story, Miss Gale. Your own account of what happened. You said very little at the trial and you have not, so far as I am aware, given a full account elsewhere. I would like you to tell me in your own words what happened last December.”

  In your own words. She had heard that before. And her own words had been twisted against her. Sarah’s hands, which she clasped in her lap, were cold and clammy, but when she spoke her voice was level.

  “It happened as I said during the trial, sir. James told me to leave his house before Christmas to make way for Hannah Brown, whom he intended to marry, and I did so. I returned on Boxing Day as he asked me to. I didn’t know at that stage that she was dead and knew nothing of his hiding the body.”

  “Yes, Miss Gale, I’m aware of what you said in your statement for the trial. However, it doesn’t make a full account.”

  Sarah adopted a blank expressi
on while she waited for him to explain. It was best, sometimes, to let a man think he was cleverer than you.

  “For example,” he said, “can you explain how you came to have pawn tickets for Hannah Brown’s silk dresses, and why you were wearing her jewelry when you were arrested?”

  “As I’ve said before, sir, the jewelry was mine. The earrings weren’t expensive: just little drops of carnelian in gold filigree.”

  “Is there anyone who can confirm that?”

  “You may ask my sister, Rosina, for it was she who bought them for me. Or you may ask those who knew Hannah Brown, for they will know she never wore such things.”

  “I believe that her family have already been asked and that they confirmed that they did in fact belong to Hannah Brown.”

  Sarah shook her head. “You mean her brother. He’s lying. She told me they hadn’t seen one another for months. He would have said anything to get me convicted.”

  The lawyer made a note of this but did not respond to the accusation. He emitted a good clean smell, she noticed, of shaving soap and boot polish.

  “And the rings?” he said.

  “The rings were mere thin bands of gold.”

  For a second she saw Hannah Brown’s large, workman’s hands, the close-bitten nails.

  “My son dug them up out of the ground some months ago while he was playing in the garden. If you look on the inside, you’ll see that one reads ‘From AF to SW.’”

  As the lawyer wrote this down in his notebook, she noticed that the elbows of his coat were worn to a shine. He was not rich.

  “What about the dresses?” he asked.

  The dresses. Hannah Brown had shown her the embroidered silk gown she planned to wear on her wedding day. She had spread it out before Sarah on the bed, and Sarah had thought it the purplish-red color of a heart or a kidney. But she would not tell him that.

  Instead she said, “James told me that they’d had a falling-out about financial matters and that he’d broken off the marriage and asked her to leave. He said Hannah had given him the dresses as part payment for money she owed him. I had no reason to disbelieve him.”

  “Did you not think it rather strange that she’d left even her clothing at the house?”

  “No, not really. She had other dresses. And James was always a man of business. If someone owed him money, he’d make sure that he was paid. In whatever form.”

  “So you accepted that she’d simply quitted the house and left her belongings behind?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  After a long moment of silence, the lawyer said, “You have a young son, do you not? Four years old.”

  “Yes. George.”

  The very saying of his name hurt her deep inside. A gnawing, empty feeling.

  “Then for the sake of your son, Miss Gale, tell me the truth about what happened last Christmas. It may be that I can help you.”

  She looked up into his eyes—bluish-gray with a circle of darker blue around the iris. Did he really mean to help her? So far, everyone who had offered help had meant something else altogether. The charity ladies who visited had wanted her merely as a curiosity: a macabre specimen to discuss with their friends. The journalist who claimed he would tell her story had printed only lies. Her lawyers had said they would defend her, but were interested only in furthering their own reputations and protecting the man who was paying them. When she had tried to speak to Mr. Price, he had placed his sinewy hand over hers to stop her midsentence. “As you know, Miss Gale, we act for both you and Mr. Greenacre. You would not, I am sure, want to put us in a position where we were unable to represent you. It is far too late for that. Do not lose faith at this hour.”

  How did she know that this lawyer was any different?

  Sweat beaded Sarah’s upper lip. “I am telling you the truth, Mr. Fleetwood.”

  He nodded slowly. “Maybe the thing is to start from the very beginning in order to gain the complete background. We can make it into a full affidavit—a statement of evidence. It would be a way of giving you a voice in all of this. I may not use it all, of course, but it would be helpful for me to understand how the situation came about.”

  The situation. He meant the murder. He meant, how had a woman ended up beaten and mutilated, the floor washed with red?

  “The beginning, sir?”

  She wondered where on earth he thought the beginning was. When she was born? When she first met James? When he first tired of her? When James first met Hannah Brown? When the first blow was struck?

  As Sarah watched the lawyer dip his pen into his inkpot, she felt a sharp stab of anxiety. Everything she said would be written down, black on white—her words turned into a book of evidence.

  Perhaps it was fortunate that at that very moment the bell rang out, marking the end of visiting time. From all around them came a scraping of chairs and rustling of papers as the solicitors got up to leave.

  The lawyer’s face fell. “Well.” He screwed the top back on his pot of ink. “We will need to start on your statement tomorrow. In the meantime, maybe you could think about what you would like to say.”

  Yes, Sarah thought. She would think about it very carefully.

  4

  “He said the correspondence was broken off between him and Mrs. Brown, and he wished me to come back again—That is all I have to say.”

  —Statement of Sarah Gale, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 10 April 1837

  Back out on Newgate Street, Edmund was hit by the stink of horseshit and cesspits, the shouts of hawkers, the clatter of hoofs, the crack of a coachman’s whip. It was a relief, however, to escape the prison walls. He had visited the men’s side several times before and had on each occasion been revolted by the place—by its odor of neglected bodies, rotten food, and disease; by the casual violence and constant dismay of its inmates—some seasoned felons, some young pickpockets, all fighting and drinking together. The women’s side was very different: an ordered and muted domain. But Edmund sensed that beneath the surface coursed the same violence, the same despair.

  He walked briskly past the crowds thronging outside the Old Bailey, then down Ludgate Hill and into Fleet Street, until he reached the turnoff for the Temple, a haven of calm with its quiet squares and green lawns. He opened the door to his chambers carefully and climbed the stairs to his study.

  Against the far wall of the study was a little bookcase of volumes on law practice and a row of law reports, and under the window was a mahogany desk, on which stood a stick of sealing wax, a variety of pens, a box of wafers, and a writing pad. From this room a door led off, first to the bedroom that he shared with his wife and then, beyond, to a closet room that served as both wardrobe and washroom.

  Edmund removed his coat and waistcoat, washed the city’s grit from his hands and face, and seated himself at his desk. He needed to identify the gaps in the evidence and formulate the questions that would draw out the truth. He dipped his pen into the inkwell and pressed the steel nib onto a piece of paper, enjoying the clean and fluid way in which the words formed: “The Edgeware Road Murder: Eliciting the Evidence.”

  As a younger man, he had nurtured ideas of becoming a journalist, exposing political corruption and inequity. His father, a senior Chancery barrister, had quickly and firmly squashed such ideas: “I did not fund your costly education so that you could sully the family name with cheap writings.” Since he had to be a lawyer, Edmund had resolved that he would at least be the sort that made a difference. He would bring people to justice, defend the innocent, provide recompense for those who had been wronged.

  Things had not gone as planned, however. Although quick-witted and eloquent, Edmund struggled to compete with the brasher and better-connected men who vied for the same criminal work. He took whatever briefs came his way, but the fees were insufficient to cover his and Bessie’s living costs. He was creeping further and further into debt,
and was by no means sure that his father would keep him from the debtors’ prison should the bailiffs come calling.

  This case could change things for him, however. If he could bring to light evidence that the authorities had missed—if he could get Sarah Gale to speak—then maybe his name would be made.

  It was difficult to know what to make of her. She was slight of figure, with an angular, elfin face and large dark eyes, which she had kept cast down for most of their interview, staring at her raw hands. Handsome, yes, but there was something sharp and sly about her, like a wild animal, hunted.

  Throughout the prosecution she had kept her silence. She had said nothing during her examinations by the magistrates, and only a few words during the trial at the Old Bailey. What exactly was it that she had said? Edmund tried to place himself back in the courtroom where he had sat in the dimly lit gallery among politicians, women in veiled hats, and scholars still in robes. James Greenacre alone had been worth the price of admission: he played to the crowds, sitting with his arms folded and his legs apart, like a man watching a cricket match, shaking his head violently when witnesses spoke against him, and laughing audibly during the prosecution barrister’s closing speech.

  Sarah Gale, however, had remained almost motionless and expressionless throughout. Price, the barrister for the defendants, had read out a short statement on Sarah’s behalf, saying that she had not been at the house on the evening of Hannah Brown’s death and that she knew nothing about it. Price had been moving on to another point, when the judge had stopped him and, unusually, spoken directly to the prisoner.

  “Miss Gale, is there anything you wish to add to that statement? Is there anything else you wish to say?”

  Sarah Gale, however, shook her head. “Thank you, sir,” she said quietly, “but there is nothing else.”

  Nothing else. Edmund had struggled then to understand why she did not take the opportunity to retaliate against the Crown’s case, so much of which had been speculation and supposition. Now, as he sat at his desk, he wondered why, even though she stood in the shadow of the gallows, Sarah Gale refused to speak out. It was not, he was sure, that she was resigned to her fate. He had seen the hope in her eyes when she realized why he had come to interview her: she understood that he represented a way out. What was it, then? Was she afraid? Ashamed? A memory floated before him of his own mother, covering her face with her hands as his father took out the cane to beat him. She had not spoken out for him then, and he had not spoken out for her later, even though he had screamed inside.