Chapter 4 The Inquest

The inquest into the death of Mr. Jonas Figgis, cooper, was held in the long room at the Bell and Anchor, because the town had no other room large enough and because a public house was thought to give the proceedings a proper gravity. It was held on the Friday, at eleven, in a fog that had settled on Cinderthorpe like a lid. Prudence went early and stood at the back, near the door, where the draught was worst and where a woman could stand without appearing to claim a seat. The coroner was Mr. Horatio Cobley, a solicitor of the old school who had held the office for a quarter of a century and had a way of reading his own notes as though they were a foreign language he was translating for the benefit of the room. The jury was twelve tradesmen, drawn from the respectable end of the town: a draper, a corn merchant, a printer, a chemist, and eight others who had left their shops on a Friday to do their duty and wanted their dinners. They sat in a row with their hats on their knees. The foreman was a builder named Marle, who had a face like a wall and the manner of a man who had seen enough suffering to be neither surprised nor moved by it. Jonas Figgis had been forty-six, a widower, a member of the Unity since he was twenty. He had taken ill in the second week of October, been paid his sick money for a fortnight, and died on the twenty-eighth, having shrunk in his bed over eleven days until his sister, who nursed him, said he was no more than a shadow of the man who had gone to work at the beginning of the month. The sister sat in front now, in black borrowed twice over, twisting a handkerchief. Dr. Osmund Creel was called first. He was a tall, careful man with silver at the temples and a manner that had been polished by committees. He had attended Figgis twice, he said, and had found him suffering from a gastric fever of the kind common in low-lying districts at that season, attended by vomiting and exhaustion. He had prescribed a sedative and a nourishing diet, and the patient had sunk notwithstanding. It was the water, he believed; the well in the cooper's yard was fouled by the state of the drains. It was no one's fault. It was the town. "You had no reason," Mr. Cobley said, "to suspect any other cause?" "None whatever. I have seen a hundred such cases." Dr. Creel's voice was courteous and final. "It is the fever of the season, and it is worse this year than last, and it will be better next." The sister was called next, and gave her evidence in a rush, anxious to be done. Her brother had been strong, she said, and then he had not. He had kept nothing down. He had taken the cordial from the society, which the visitor brought on Fridays, and it had been a comfort to him, a comfort, whatever they said now. She did not know what she meant by whatever they said now, and Mr. Cobley did not ask her. Then the foreman of the jury, the wall-faced builder, asked the question that Prudence had come to hear asked by someone other than herself, and she looked up. "How many of these gastric fevers have you attended this season, Doctor?" "Several." "More than usual?" "A hard year, Mr. Marle. A hard year makes hard fevers." "That does not answer it." "It answers it as well as the art permits," Dr. Creel said, and smiled, and the jury, most of them, smiled with him, and the moment went by. When the last witness had finished, Mr. Cobley did what he always did, and what made him, in the town's opinion, a just man: he laid down his pen and looked over his spectacles at the room and said that if any person present knew anything which might assist the jury in arriving at the truth of how Jonas Figgis came by his death, now was the time to say it, and the law would hear them. The room did nothing. The fog pressed at the windows. A coal shifted in the stove. Prudence said, "I do." Every hat in the jury box came round. The draper's mouth opened. The printer's did not. At the table where the society's interests were represented, Barnaby Skell turned his head a fraction and looked at her the way a man looks at a clock that has struck the wrong hour. Mr. Cobley raised his eyebrows. "Come forward, madam." She came forward. She had thought about this moment for four days, and had prepared nothing, because there was nothing to prepare but the truth, and the truth was that she was going to be disbelieved and that she meant to be disbelieved anyway. "Your name?" "Prudence Ruddock. I keep a chemist's shop in Bellhouse Lane." "You are a registered chemist?" "I am not, sir. No register will admit a woman. I am a chemist by trade and by training, and I have served the town fifteen years." A murmur went along the jury. Mr. Cobley wrote something down and did not look up. "And what do you wish to tell the jury?" "That the sickness which took Mr. Figgis is not the water. That it is the same sickness that has taken eleven members of the Cinderthorpe Unity since the autumn, all of them on the society's sick list, all of them consuming the society's cordial, and that the cordial contains enough of a warm metal to stain copper black in an acid bath, which iron will not do and which the fever of the season will not do either. I have made the test. I will make it again before any man you please to name." The room was quiet for a moment. Then the draper laughed, a small, incredulous, honest laugh, and someone at the back said *the cordial*, and the whole thing turned, as she had known it would turn, from a question into a woman. Mr. Skell rose. He did it slowly and with great courtesy, and he was smiling, and his smile was the worst part. "Mr. Coroner, I should be glad to answer. Miss Ruddock is a neighbour and I honour her. But the Unity has distributed its cordial to two hundred members these ten years and more, and no such charge has ever been made. The society's own physician has spoken. If a woman's private grudge against the society is to be received as evidence of poisoning, then the King's law has come to a pretty pass. I am content to let the jury judge between the doctor's evidence and hers." The jury judged. That is to say, they looked at Dr. Creel's silver hair and Mr. Skell's clean collar and Prudence Ruddock's plain brown coat, and then Mr. Cobley instructed them, kindly, that a stomach pump was a thing no coroner would order on the word of an unregistered person, and that they should return their verdict, and they returned it in three minutes: that Jonas Figgis died of gastric fever, of natural causes, in a season of uncommon sickness, and the court offered its condolences to the family. They filed out. The sister in borrowed black asked her, on the step, whether it was true, and Prudence said she believed it was, and the woman looked at her a long time and then went away without saying whether she believed it too. At the corner of the yard, a young man with a clerk's ink-stained fingers and a deputy's ribbon in his buttonhole caught her arm, very lightly, and said, "Do not go to the dispensary." "Who are you?" "Ephraim Cope. I write for Mr. Cobley." He glanced back at the Bell and Anchor, where the door was still spilling men into the fog. "You were right, you know. I have all their names. I keep the sworn depositions, and I have been keeping them for a year, and I have a list you would give your shop for, and I will give it to you for nothing, because a man should know when he is being lied to as carefully as this." ---