第18章 The Assize

The trial of Barnaby Skell was held at the county assize in the spring, and it lasted four days, and Prudence sat through all of it in a small warm room that smelled of varnish, on a bench behind the bar with Ephraim on one side and Alvina Cardew on the other, and she wore the good coat she had worn to the first inquest and had it mended twice since, and she listened to her own life being read out in a stranger's voice by a barrister who had never been north of the county town. The Crown's case was built on the letters, not the bodies. That was the thing the town had not expected and Prudence had, because a barrister knows what a jury will hold in its hand, and a jury will hold a book. The prosecutor put the quarterly returns on the board and showed the dead man's forged signature and the smooth sums, and then he showed the paper twists, taken from the basket that had come out of the fire, folded in three folds, one of them still holding enough of the white powder to make the analyst's test sing, and then he showed the list of the eleven, and he set it beside the list of the members who had ever spoken at an annual meeting or kept a column of figures, and the two lists lay side by side on the board for the whole of one long afternoon, and no witness who followed was ever quite able to unsee them. Skell's defence was that he was a good man. It was the only defence he had, and he gave it himself, in the box, at length, in his quiet reasonable voice, and it was the most frightening thing Prudence heard in the whole of that spring. He said that the society had been his life; that the fund had failed under a bad trade through no fault of his own; that he had borrowed to cover it and had meant to repay; that the members who died had been ill already, or would have died of the town in any case; that he had chosen the ones who were sickening, and had merely hurried what the winter would have done; that there was a difference between a murderer and a man of business who had made an error of arithmetic under great pressure; that if the society had failed openly, two hundred families would have gone to the workhouse, and that he had kept the society alive for three years by the sweat of his forehead and the sacrifice of his own name. He said that he had never once intended to kill a person who was not going to die, which he said was a thing that no jury of sensible men could call murder. The judge asked him whether he had ever intended to tell the families what he had done. Skell said that he had not. The judge asked him whether he had ever intended to repay the fund. Skell said that he had, when trade improved. The judge asked him whether, in eleven years of keeping the accounts, he had ever once been able to look at his own books and see the truth. Skell said that the books had been kept correctly, which was a statement so strange and so sincerely meant that the court sat silent for a moment and then the judge wrote something down and told the jury to disregard the answer. The jury was out for two hours. They came back and found him guilty of the wilful murder of Jonas Figgis and of Mary Ragg and of the two children of the weaver Gantry, and the judge put on the black cap and sentenced him to be hanged, and Barnaby Skell stood and received it with the same courteous, arithmetic face he had worn at the lock-up, and asked, before he was taken down, whether the society's outstanding levies might be collected, because the widow of the gatekeeper was behind with hers and he did not like to leave a debt standing. The gallery made a sound when the words came, a thin shifting sound like a congregation settling, and Prudence heard a woman behind her begin to cry and could not tell, and never learned, whether the woman cried for the dead or for the man. She looked at Skell's hands on the rail of the dock and saw that they were steady, folded the way they had been folded in the office every Friday for eleven years, and she understood that this, and not the poison, was the thing she would keep: a man could do it with folded hands and a clean collar and the face of a man at his books. The judge, who had tried men for forty years and had grown tired of the arithmetic of them, did not answer the question, and instead said a thing that Prudence carried away from that room the way a person carries away a stone found on a beach. He said that the prisoner had kept eleven books and eleven accounts and had called the killing of eleven persons a matter of business, and that there was no arithmetic in the world that could make a man safe from the simple fact that he had put a poison where a poor woman went for comfort; and then he said that the prisoner had not been caught by the law, which had looked at him four times and seen a charitable gentleman, and had not been caught by the physicians, who had written fever on eleven clean bodies, and had not been caught by the society, which had signed his returns; the prisoner had been caught by a woman whom his world had given no standing at all, and the law, when it had come to its senses, had only been able to follow her in. He was hanged in the spring, in front of the county gaol, and it was said afterward that not many came to see it, because the town had got what it wanted and had lost its appetite on the way. Prudence was not there. She was in the weighing room that morning, testing nothing, weighing nothing, sitting with the balance in front of her and the second lamp lit, and it was Ephraim who came to tell her, at eleven, that it was done, and who sat down opposite her and put his hat on the bench and said nothing for a little while, and then said the thing that was on both their minds. "And your charge?" he said. "The grave?" It had been tried at the Petty Sessions in February, before the assize, because the society's solicitor had pressed it, and the facts were not in dispute, and the bench had found the charge proved, and the penalty for unlawfully disturbing the dead was a fine of five pounds and the costs, and Prudence had paid it, and Mr. Cobley the coroner had written the amount in his own hand in the margin of the order and had added, under it, the words *this court is not insensible of the circumstances*, which was the nearest a coroner of twenty-five years' standing could come to an apology, and there had been a paragraph in the county paper, and the paragraph had not been kind, and it had said that a woman of no qualifications had disturbed a churchyard on a suspicion and had been heavily fined, and the rest of the paper had been about the assize and the fire, and had called her, once, *the Cinderthorpe chemist*, without quotation marks, which was the first time in fifteen years that anyone had printed the word next to her name without apologising for it. ---