第14章 The Summons

The summons came on the Saturday. It was a summons to appear before the magistrates at the Petty Sessions on the charge of unlawfully and without lawful authority opening a grave and disturbing the remains of the dead, and it was brought to the shop by a clerk in a bowler hat who read it out at the counter in front of a customer, which was part of the punishment, and who then asked her to sign for the receipt, which was the rest of it. The whole town knew by evening. It is one of the properties of a town like Cinderthorpe that a thing said in a shop at noon is known in every court and every public house by suppertime, and the version that travelled was not hers. The version that travelled was that the mad chemist on Bellhouse Lane, who had no licence and had accused the society of murder, had gone into Sallowfield in the dark and dug up a corpse to prove a grudge, and there were people who said she had done it for money from a rival society, and people who said she had gone mad with grief for her father, and there were even one or two who said she had done it because she liked it. Ned Trigg came to the shop with a black eye and a new one on the other side and a note from his mother, who was a decent widow, asking that the boy be let go, because her brother worked at the chapel and she could not afford the trouble. Prudence let him go and gave him half a sovereign and told him to come back when the town was quiet, and he cried, and so did she, after he had gone. Even Dorcas came warily, and stood in the doorway and did not come in. "You have frightened the whole town, Prue." "Good." "You have frightened me." "That is not good. But it is true." "They are saying the charge will not be the grave." Dorcas's voice dropped. "They are saying the charge will be worse, and that the grave is only the beginning of it, and that by the time the quarter sessions have done, the word will not be grave-breaking at all. The word will be murder, and it will be yours, and it will be said that you poisoned half a court to prove a theory, and that the society's cordial was clean all along and you were the one with the poisons in your cupboard and the key in your pocket." Prudence stood very still, because she had not, until that moment, seen the final move, and now she saw it whole. "Of course," she said. "That is what the bottles were for. He has been putting it in the medicine all along, and now he will put it in the story, and there will not be a jury in the county that can tell the difference between a chemist who tested a poison and a chemist who made one. He does not need to convict me of the grave. He only needs to stand up in a court and say the woman is clever and strange and keeps her own account of her poisons, and the town will do the rest." "Then do not go," said Dorcas. "Do not go to the sessions. Let them fine you for the grave in your absence. Keep the shop. Live." "If I do not go," Prudence said, "the jars never go into the record, and the eleven clean dead stay buried with a fever on their certificates, and the cordial goes back on the orders, and by the spring there will be twenty of them, and it will be my name on every mouth that ever tasted it that could have stopped it. I would rather be ruined proving it than rich and quiet and knowing." On the Monday she appeared at the Petty Sessions in the town hall, in her good coat, with Ephraim behind her with the note and Sneed in the gallery with his hat on his knee, and she stood in the dock of a little room that smelled of beeswax and damp and did not look at Mr. Trubshaw, who was on the bench. The clerk read the charge. The society's solicitor rose to open the case for the Crown, because the society had laid the information, and he was a smooth man in a good coat and he began by saying that the prisoner was an unregistered person with a private cabinet of poisons and a history of quarrels with the Unity, and that the court would hear how she had gone by night to a churchyard to manufacture evidence, and he used the word *manufacture* twice, and then he called his first witness. The room was fuller than the charge deserved. That was the first thing she understood, and it told her more about Cinderthorpe than any deposition could. A woman charged with opening a grave would ordinarily have drawn a dozen idlers and a reporter; this room held fifty, and among the fifty were men she recognised from the chapel and the market and the boards of the societies, and they had not come to see a grave opened. They had come to see which way the town would fall, and they knew, the way crowds always know, that a small charge in a small room on a Monday morning can be the hinge on which a whole winter turns. Sergeant Rounce stood by the door with his arms folded and his eyes on the middle distance, and when Prudence looked at him he did not look at her, and she understood that too: a policeman who has already told you he is paid from the police and not the purse does not want to be seen to nod. She had prepared herself to be alone in the dock, and she found, instead, that she was not. Behind her, at the back, stood Dorcas Trewin with her satchel and her flat, frightened, immovable face; and beside Dorcas stood Alvina Cardew, who had walked the whole way from Throstle House in the fog because she had said she would not let a woman stand up for the women of the town and have no woman in the room to hear it; and in the gallery, on the public bench where no woman was expected, sat the three of them together, and the clerk had twice asked them to sit further back and twice been answered with a look that made him write something down instead. The solicitor opened. He opened well; it was his trade and he had a good trade. He said that the prisoner was a woman of no qualifications and a private cabinet of poisons and a long quarrel with a charitable society, and that she had gone by night into a churchyard, in the company of an undertaker and a clerk, and had opened the coffin of a man already buried, and had taken from it what she chose to call evidence but what the law called the manufacture of a case. He used the word manufacturer twice more, and each time he looked at the jury, which was what a good solicitor does with a word he wishes the jury to keep. And then, having made the woman small, he did the thing that a careful advocate does when he knows his case is thin: he called a witness he was certain of, to put the floor under it. The first witness was Dr. Osmund Creel. Prudence looked at him as he took the oath. He had come, then. She had not been certain he would come. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, and the solicitor asked him, smoothly, whether he was the physician of the society, and whether he had examined the cordial, and what he had found. And Dr. Creel did not answer the question he was asked. "I have practised medicine in this town for twenty-eight years," he said, "and I have signed more certificates of gastric fever in the last three months than in the last three years, and I have examined the cordial, and I will tell the bench what I found before I answer any other question the learned gentleman cares to put to me." The room went quiet in the way it had gone quiet at the Board of Guardians, except that this time it did not go quiet the way a room does when a question has been refused. It went quiet the way a room goes when a door has been opened in a wall, and everyone in it, on all sides, leans toward the dark in the doorway to see what is coming through. ---