Elizabeth Is Missing

“Lost: A Girl”

[ #1 ]

Elizabeth Canning said good-night to her Aunt Alice Colley at the foot of Houndsditch and started on her way. She was bound for the house of Edward Lyon, where she was a servant. Her Aunt Colley leaned across a post and watched her disappear into the darkness. This was on the night of January 1, 1753.

Elizabeth Canning did not emerge from that darkness again until the evening of January 29, when she stumbled, starving, ragged, and blue, into her mother’s house in Aldermanbury Postern, and told a story that set London by the ears.

[ #2 ]

Elizabeth Canning was eighteen years old, and she had never had much fun. In the eighteenth century girls like Elizabeth had a pretty thin time.

In the first place, half the population was constantly scheming to seduce them; and the other half (the female half) was just waiting to kick them finally into the gutter if they succumbed. To this obsession of both sexes everything they said and wrote bears witness. The most popular book of Elizabeth Canning’s day was Richardson’s Pamela. A best-seller received with moral ecstasies, it is no more than the monotonous record of the attempts of a man of fashion to seduce his fourteen-year-old servant-maid. He had her abducted by his coachman, and he hid in her closet, and he would have accomplished his fell design if the girl had not conveniently gone off into fits. Nobody thought this behaviour at all odd of him. Casual whoring was universal, but seducing virgins was generally considered finer sport. What reduced the public to a pulp of sentimental admiration was the virtuous resistance of the serving-wench, and all rejoiced to see it suitably rewarded with the unsuccessful seducer’s hand in marriage.

Not that Elizabeth Canning could hope for any such happy ending, for she was universally admitted to be plain. In this she differed not only from Pamela, but also from later-day heroines of sensational cases, who are always promoted to beauties by the yellow press. Far different the pamphleteers of 1753, who with brutal frankness described Bet Canning as a dowdy, a coarse piece of stuff with an ugly phiz.

This was harsh of them. Betty Canning was a pink-and-white blonde with a trim little figure, worth a second look from any man. True, the second look would reveal that her brows and lashes were a rabbity yellow, and that smallpox had marred the rosy complexion, while her small nose had a foolish droop at the tip. When she sat for her portrait later, her little mouth was set and her big eyes were sad; but perhaps there was reason enough for that.

Elizabeth Canning was brought up in Aldermanbury Postern. In 1753 most of the old gates in London Wall were still standing. They had accumulated, in the course of centuries, huddles of old buildings clustered against them like barnacles. They were an impediment to traffic, but tearing them down meant taking with them many such old houses as that in which Elizabeth lived. Ten years later they all went; but by that time it was nothing to Elizabeth Canning.

Aldermanbury Postern was a mere cleft in the ruins of London Wall, just west of Moorfields. About it clustered a congestion of dark old warrens. It was so narrow and inconvenient that the men of Aldermanbury petitioned the Common Council to have it pulled down, but it stood for another ten years in their despite.

In one of the tall narrow houses Elizabeth Canning grew up. Her father was a journeyman carpenter by trade. He was married to a hard-working, rather stupid, rather flighty woman, given to dreams and fortune-telling and Methodism. By her he had Elizabeth, a boy six years younger, and two still younger children—not counting those that died in babyhood, or were carried off by the smallpox that spoiled Elizabeth’s face.

With babies, and smallpox, and all, the Cannings barely managed to keep their heads above water. Canning was employed by Edward Lyon, master carpenter, of Aldermanbury. Mrs. Canning attempted to supplement his scanty earnings by plying the related calling of sawyer, picking up a bit on the side by selling the materials of their trade to her husband’s associates. To help in this venture she took an apprentice, one James Lord. But all her efforts and her husband’s were not quite enough, and she had to look around for another source of income.

This she found in the house they lived in. The men of Aldermanbury wished it torn down; it was old and narrow, being only one room wide and two rooms deep, like many ancient houses in the city; but it could be put to use. Mrs. Canning, pressed for cash, found a tenant for most of the house. Mr. Francis Roberts, blue-maker, engaged the two garrets, the chamber, and for his counting-house a little room below, at seven pounds a year. The Cannings had very little space left. Not counting the kitchen and wash-house, which were separate at the rear, they had only two rooms to house them all. In one of these rooms slept the apprentice and the little boy. In the other, husband and wife and growing daughter and the rest of the youngsters all lay together, not improbably in one bed and the truckle underneath. Sleeping was amazingly communal in the eighteenth century. It was a saving in bedding and bed-curtains, and besides, it was warmer that way.

In this narrow life her eldest daughter was a comfort to Mrs. Canning. She was good and industrious and fond of the youngsters, and had no flighty notions. Unfortunately, she was also a source of care to the good woman. She pulled through the smallpox all right, though it marked her. But she was so costive that Mrs. Canning had to call in Dr. Catridge, and the old man’s purges were a little drastic for the child. Then when she was fourteen, the old house showed its instability by letting down a garret ceiling upon her head—this must have been before the blue-maker’s tenancy. The accident threw the girl into a fit, and from that time she was liable to fits.

You would think that Elizabeth’s mother had it hard enough. But alas, when the newest baby was on the way, the hard-working husband died. His widow was put to shifts. She had Mr. Roberts’s seven pounds, and James Lord could carry on the slim trade of sawyer, but things with her were harder than ever. There were days when all Elizabeth had to eat was half a roll. She was just sixteen, and all the education she had was a quarter-year at charity school.

There was only one thing to do, and Elizabeth did it. She went out to service. She found a place with a family friend, John Wintlebury, keeper of a respectable alehouse in Aldermanbury, the Weavers Arms. Not as a barmaid—she was temperamentally unfitted for that extravert’s occupation, as Mr. Wintlebury soon saw. So far from being forward and gay, she was shy and had no interest in the customers, or indeed in any man. She kept out of the public part of the house almost entirely; she would hardly, Mr. Wintlebury noticed, go to the door to speak to anybody.

Mr. Wintlebury thought very highly of her. There was no hope in this, however, that she might do a Pamela, in a small way. There was a Mrs. Wintlebury, a travelled dame who hailed from Hertford and was always going back there. When she wasn’t going there, she was sending letters and parcels. One of Elizabeth’s duties was to carry the letters and parcels to the coaching-house in Bishopsgate Street. She became well acquainted with the great high lumbering coach with its spans of horses, and the honest driver on the box.

The interludes of the Hertford coach must have been pleasant ones for Betty Canning. For the most part, all the drudgery of the house fell to her share, and she performed it conscientiously. Those were days when the only water in the house was what the servant lugged in by hand; the only fire was on the open hearth; plumbing was unknown, the piss-pot only too well known to the serving-wench who had to cope with it.

Laundry was done in a stone outbuilding, by main force. Bet Canning was short, but she was sturdy. She never complained about carrying the water and handling the voluminous wet garments. She was intent on doing her best. She worried so for fear that the watchman would not call her in time to do her washing—before dawn, for the whole household would be stirring by daylight—that she was known to spend the night in the damp stone wash-house.

Such working conditions seem to us like a pretty good reason for looking for a better place, but they did not seem so to the eighteenth century. Such was the lot of the servant-girl. Nevertheless, Elizabeth left the Weavers Arms, some time in mid-October 1752. Elizabeth’s friends gave a reason for it afterwards. As she advanced towards maturity, they said, she could not avoid some freedoms from the multitude of company who resorted to her master’s house, which were offensive to her modesty, and which she feared might be injurious to her reputation.

Betty was so well liked in the neighbourhood that many of the neighbours offered her a place. She elected to go to her father’s former employer, Edward Lyon.

Mr. Lyon was a deaf old gentleman in a prosperous way of life. For sixteen years he had been carpenter to the Goldsmiths’ Company. Now growing old, he lived a jolly life with his fellow artisans of Goldsmiths’ Hall. They had a club, and met convivially together every couple of weeks at Gawen Nash’s coffee-house in Gutter Lane. There Lyon consorted with the plumbers and bricklayers on the company rolls, as well as with Edward Aldridge, silversmith, and John Hague, goldsmith.

While Betty was living servant with the Lyons, Mrs. Canning continued in the narrow old house in Aldermanbury Postern. James Lord was in the fifth year of his indentures, and attended to the business. He was a good sawyer, if rather too much like Hogarth’s Industrious Apprentice.

In Aldermanbury Mrs. Canning had no need to be lonely, for she had her knot of cronies there. There was Mrs. Woodward from over the way, in the goods-broking line; she was a grave woman, to be called first in any emergency. The widow Myers was more volatile; and there were Mrs. Garret, and Mrs. Maynard the turner’s wife of London Wall, and Mary Northan, she was only a young chit, but she could read and write a little; and by a kind of reciprocity, Lyon’s daughter Polly was living in Mrs. Canning’s house as servant to Mr. Roberts.

Nor did Mrs. Canning lack for protectors among her husband’s friends. Besides Mr. Lyon and Mr. Roberts, she could look to Edward Rossiter, the near-by baker, Thomas Miles, distiller, or John Marshall, cheesemonger of Fore Street. How well she knew her next-door-neighbour-but-one, Mr. Carlton, the potter, does not appear; but Mr. Carlton’s lodger had already caught her eye as he passed and repassed. This lodger was Mr. Robert Scarrat, something of a smalltime sport among the turners and bakers and cheesemongers of Aldermanbury. He was acquainted with the great world, for he had been servant in Mr. Snee’s country house near Enfield, out Hertford way, where he knew his way about among the hedge-bawdy-houses and alehouses of the suburbs. He had left Mr. Snee to become his own master in the capacity of a hartshorn-rasper. Rasping, or grating, hartshorn must have been a noisome occupation; the horn of the hart was the natural source of the ammonia so much in demand for the smelling-bottle which no eighteenth-century beauty could be without. Mr. Scarrat rasped hartshorn on a piece basis for Mr. Roberts’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Waller of Old ’Change; but he made it as little irksome as he could by not working very much, and varying the monotony by a rich social life and a warm interest in other people’s affairs. He liked to go to the play; he took a few days off visiting in the suburbs; he went dancing at the Bell at Edmonton. His chosen partner these days was Sarah Carlton, his landlord the potter’s daughter.

Elizabeth Canning got no chance to see much of her mother’s neighbours. She worked for the Lyons for ten weeks without so much as an hour off. The Lyons liked her for that. She wasn’t always gadding out.

Mrs. Lyon cherished this treasure. Come Christmas, she gave her half a guinea in gold and three shillings in silver for a Christmas box.

“Thank you, madam,” said Elizabeth.

“And,” added good Mrs. Lyon, “Betty, you shall have a holiday this Christmas; and, as the shop will be shut up,” she added shrewdly, “I think you shall have it on Monday.”

Monday was New Year’s Day.

“Very well, madam,” replied the model serving-wench, “whenever you please.”

[ #3 ]

Elizabeth dressed herself very cheerfully for her holiday, in a purple gown shot with yellow, a black quilted petticoat, a green undercoat, blue stockings with red clocks, and a white shaving hat with green ribbons. Under all she wore a sad little shift, of coarse linen patched in places; but the stays that cinched in her sturdy waist under the loose gown were worth ten shillings.

In spite of the sharp January weather, she had neither cloak nor mittens; but in her petticoat pocket she had the golden half-guinea, the three silver shillings, and some small change.

It was going on noon when she walked sedately down to her mother’s house at the foot of Aldermanbury. There she showed her mother her Christmas present and told her how she meant to spend it—for a cloak and a pair of mittens. She asked her mother to join her in a shopping expedition that afternoon. Her mother agreed, and gave her a little box to put the half-guinea in. A half-guinea is not a very big piece of gold and could easily get lost.

Out of her small wages Betty had a Christmas box for the children—in each small hand a penny. But the little boy was saucy and provoked her, and she put his penny back in her pocket to teach him manners.

Then she took leave of her mother till afternoon, and set out to dine with her Aunt and Uncle Colley in Saltpetre Bank. Aunt Alice Colley was her father’s sister. She had married a glass-blower named Thomas Colley, and lived comfortably with him in their house near Wellclose Square, close by the glass-house.

Elizabeth’s way led through Moorfields, just back of Bedlam Hospital, through the neatly laid-out park under the exactly spaced trees; and so along Houndsditch into Rosemary Lane, and then it was just a step to Uncle Colley’s.

At the Colleys’ Bet Canning met with something less than holiday fare. Her aunt set before her the remains of yesterday’s shoulder of mutton and potatoes. If there is anything less festive than cold left-over mutton it is cold left-over potatoes. The only concession to the festive nature of the day was a draught of ten-shilling beer.

By all accounts Betty ate of this repulsive repast willingly enough. Nevertheless, it was on the Colleys’ conscience, as well it might be. They declared firmly that their niece must stay and make up for her cold dinner by eating a hot supper with them; to which Elizabeth made no demur.

In the afternoon Thomas Colley went back to the glasshouse, leaving aunt and niece together. Elizabeth suggested that they might while away the afternoon in Rosemary Lane, shopping for the cloak and mittens; but Aunt Alice couldn’t be bothered. So Elizabeth amused herself, off and on, by watching the glass-blower at work. There was buttered toast for tea, but she only nibbled at it. Towards evening Aunt Alice sent her niece to fetch the glass-blower to his supper. Elizabeth knew where to find him: not at the glass-house, but seven or eight doors down at the Black Boy, taking a friendly glass. They came back to supper together.

Supper was a roast sirloin of beef. Again Bet only nibbled. Aunt Alice paid her little attention, but Uncle Colley noticed.

After supper it was time to go. Mr. Lyon expected the serving-maid to be home by nine. But Elizabeth lingered. It was nine o’clock already when she set out to walk back to Aldermanbury. Her aunt and uncle walked with her as far as the corner of Houndsditch, past the pastry-cook’s and almost to the Blue Ball, to set her on her way.

Aunt Alice leaned across a post and watched her go; she went directly on her way down Houndsditch and disappeared into the darkness.

[ #4 ]

“Lost, a girl about eighteen years of age dressed in a purple masquerade stuff gown, a white handkerchief and apron, a black quilted petticoat, a green under coat, black shoes, blue stockings, a white shaving hat with green ribbons, and had a very fresh colour. She was left on Monday last near Houndsditch, and has not been heard of since: whoever informs Mrs. Canning a sawyer, at Aldermanbury Postern, concerning her, shall be handsomely rewarded for their trouble.”

The old gentleman under the clock chewed irritably on the long stem of his churchwarden pipe. When he took his favourite seat in Batson’s coffee-house and called for his dish of coffee and the gazettes, he wanted value for his twopence. He expected his London Daily Advertiser for this day of January 4, 1753 to provide him with better food for reflection than the disappearance of an absconding wench, though adorned like the rainbow. Here was no matter for pointing with pride or viewing with alarm. The old gentleman under the clock had no notion how soon and how passionately London would be doing both to the sawyer’s daughter.

It was useless to look for excitement in the foreign news. “If we recollect the transactions of the year past so far as they regard the political system of Europe,” remarked the Gentleman’s Magazine smugly, “it will appear that they have tended chiefly to the establishment of peace, the improvement of trade, the cultivation of arts, and the establishment of mutual harmony among the several powers.” This, the old gentleman supposed, was gratifying, but you had to admit it was dull.

Europe was between two wars. England and France had fought it out in Europe and America, and were ready to fight again at the drop of a hat, the Gentleman’s Magazine’s advancement of mutual harmony notwithstanding. Already Englishmen were fighting Frenchmen, if unofficially, in India, and getting ready to fight them in America.

The year past, though uneasily peaceful, had not been entirely devoid of interest here at home. If barley at Basingstoke had fallen three shillings, South Sea stock was up from 116½ to 123⅜. Slack, the Norwich butcher, had beaten Faulkner, the cricket-player of Kent, in the ring at Broughton’s amphitheatre before a £300 crowd. Bendal, the farmer of Gloucestershire, rode 1,000 miles in 900 hours for a wager of £50. The Bishop of Worcester preached in favour of inoculation for the smallpox. In Gough Square Mr. Sam: Johnson was busy over his folio Dictionary of the English Language. Everyone was repeating Mr. Franklin’s experiments with electricity, and a daring gentleman had erected a lightning-rod. Sir Crisp Gascoyne was elected Lord Mayor of London.

The cultivation of the arts flourished in Sir Crisp’s London. The furniture of Mr. Chippendale, the music of Mr. Handel, the playing of Mr. Garrick, with the gaming table at White’s and sillabubs at Vauxhall, made life pleasant for the fortunate.

For the unfortunate there was no other resource than beggary, gin, or the highroad. London was swarming with sturdy rogues and felons, who had no fear of God or man, and certainly none of the watch, decrepit old dodderers fit for no more than their routine duties of crying the hour and the weather. “Three o’clock of a cold, blustery morning, and all’s well,” they would cry in their cracked voices, just before a gang of rogues set upon them, or, as it might be, a gang of riotous young gentlemen, to beat them and take away their staff and lantern.

The gaols were full to bursting. They were crowded so thick with felons and desperate rogues that there were not fetters enough to go around. They had to be chained by twos and threes to prevent such a gaol delivery as had happened at the Gatehouse, when twenty armed men stormed the prison and liberated the bold prig artist who had picked General Sinclaire’s pocket on the very doorstep of Leicester House.

The old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s viewed all this with plenty of alarm, but his theories in the matter were exclusively moralistic. He laid it all to the devil. In his view there were good people and bad people. The good people worked hard and told the truth. The bad people stole from the good people and then lied about it. The bad people, in his opinion, ought to be hanged. And hanged they were, in 1753; for cutting purses, for forgery, for writing threatening letters, for damaging a rabbit-warren, for impersonating a Greenwich pensioner, for being found masked in a public road, for stealing a shilling, or for frequenting the company of gypsies. One result of this severity which the old gentleman failed to perceive was that a footpad would just as soon cut your throat as your purse. The risk was no greater.

There was George Carey, the higgler of Epping, waylaid and killed as he plied his rounds trading for poultry. Coffeehouse frequenters, touched by his fate, had started a subscription, and raised no less than £200 for his widow. The old gentleman under the clock had put up his shilling. Mr. Justice Fielding, he had heard tell, he that was justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex, had had the matter under examination for twenty-eight hours together.

Henry Fielding viewed the matter with as much alarm as the old gentleman at Batson’s. Though sickening for his death, he would not leave his post, but busied himself night and day examining into crime and its causes in Westminster and the county round. It had been more amusing writing Tom Jones, but this was more important. He saw the devil in it too, and pursued the old demon relentlessly.

But Henry Fielding saw more in it than the devil. He saw grinding poverty in it, and gin at a penny a quartern. He felt more pity than scorn for such poor creatures as the woman who was taken up at Weston for shamming Abram, “seemingly,” says the chronicle, “in great distress, being wounded in two places of her body, stript and almost naked, and otherwise greatly abused, as she pretended, by a man she met on the road, who afterwards robbed her.” There was no truth in her. She subsequently confessed that “she had practiced the most desperate methods of imposing on charitably disposed persons, by hanging herself in one place, pretending to be ravish’d in another, and using very extraordinary means to gain belief; sometimes she counterfeited abortion in the highways, and at times horrible convulsions; all with a view of obtaining charity, or gaining the opportunity of committing theft.”

The old dark streets and alleys of London spawned such miserable criminals and gave them shelter. “Alsatia,” south of Fleet Street, still afforded the sanctuary of complete lawlessness. Even the outskirts of the city were not free of lurking malefactors. The Common Council had been forced to take action, decreeing that the wall which parts the upper from middle Moorfields should be pulled down, “as it was a screen for thieves and obnoxious persons.” Moorfields adjoined one of London’s favourite places of amusement, Bedlam Hospital, whither all who had a mind to a good laugh flocked to see the antics of London’s madmen. It was a disgrace that footpads were allowed to lurk there and spoil the fun. The council had done well, thought the old gentleman under the clock, to abolish their lurking-place.

The city fathers had done well, too, in making possible the new Foundling Hospital, thus “suppressing the inhuman custom of exposing new-born infants to perish in the streets”; while justice was rightly done on the whores their mothers and the bawds their godmothers by setting them to beating hemp in Bridewell. No provision was made for the rakes their fathers. Presumably they were free to pursue their diversions in White’s, Moorfields, or Alsatia, as the case might be.

As a good moderate Church of England man, the old gentleman viewed Methodism with moderate alarm. As a good conservative, the item in his London Daily Advertiser which must have caused him most alarm was the date-line: January 4, 1753.

In the view of the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s it was not January 4, 1753, but the day before Christmas, December 24, 1752.

The cause of the old gentleman’s confusion was the recent reform of the English calendar. For centuries all Christendom had measured the year by the Julian calendar. The Julian year was eleven minutes longer than the solar year. Year by year Europe was more out of step with the sun, until in 1582 Pope Gregory reformed the calendar by dropping out the accumulated minutes, which by that time amounted to ten days.

In 1582 no Protestant country could bow the neck to Rome by obeying a papal bull, however sensible its contents. The English year had rolled up an eleventh superfluous day when in 1752 Parliament finally acted, decreeing that the day after September 2, 1752, was to be called September 14, 1752, thus putting the English calendar in step with the Gregorian calendar and the sun.

The change threw many an Englishman out of step, including the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s. They could not get used to celebrating Christmas eleven days early. All England watched the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury, that miraculous shrub that always bloomed on Christmas Day. The Holy Thorn ignored Parliament’s December 25 and waited for Old Christmas, Parliament’s January 5, before bursting into flower.

To the old gentleman under the clock, and to many like him, the decision of the Holy Thorn was another objection added to the many they had against calendar reform. Nevertheless, reformed the calendar was, and every Englishman in 1753 had to cope with two systems of dates, new style and old style, official and traditional, eleven days apart.

“Fine work it will make among the lawyers in Westminster Hall!” thought the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s.

The coffee over the charcoal steamed, the hum of voices in the wainscotted room blended with the rumble of drays in Cornhill and faded into distance. The old gentleman let his churchwarden droop and drowsed over his paper. Nothing in the gazettes today, January 4, 1753 by the new style, properly Christmas Eve 1752; no news of any interest in the Daily Advertiser, nothing but the sawyer’s tiresome daughter gone off and not returned.…

“Lost, a girl about eighteen years of age … a white shaving hat with green ribbons … had a very fresh colour.…”

[ #5 ]

It was Aunt Alice Colley who laboriously penned the advertisement that found so little favour with the old gentleman at Batson’s. She wrote it in her sister-in-law’s kitchen, scraping away with the clotted quill, her tongue-tip caught anxiously between her teeth. Despite all her care she made the improbable mistake of writing “scowerer” for “sawyer.” She knew the difference: a sawyer dealt in wood, while a scowerer was a Mohock, a disorderly young blood who would royster through the streets at night, breaking windows and beating the watchman. She meant to write “sawyer,” but what with the bereaved mother sniffling by the fire, and Mary Northan waiting in the doorway to carry the writing to the printer’s, it put a body off. Besides, no wonder scowerers were in her mind; perhaps they had carried off Elizabeth.

Mrs. Canning had been undisturbed by Elizabeth’s failure to return in time for the shopping expedition, conjecturing, and rightly, that she had elected to sup at her uncle’s. That being the case, she ceased to expect her daughter that day; Elizabeth would have to return directly to Lyon’s.

It was Lyon himself who gave the first alarm. Sharp at nine he was ready to lock up, and no Elizabeth. Promptly he walked down to her mother’s, ready to reprimand her for her late hours. She was not there. He walked back home.

At ten o’clock he was back again.

“I wonder Elizabeth stays so long,” he said severely to Mrs. Canning.

It was then that Elizabeth’s mother began to be alarmed. Night-wandering was totally unlike her steady reliable daughter.

“I was frightened out of my wits,” Mrs. Canning would recall. “I sent my three children into the fields to see after her, and I sent my apprentice to Mr. Colley’s, her uncle; they said they had parted with her after nine o’clock at Houndsditch. I sent again in the morning, and I went myself before it was light. Mrs. Colley was abed then. I said: ‘Let me in, let me in’; Mrs. Colley got up, and said: ‘Oh lack, has not she come in yet?’ I said: ‘No.’ She said she left her there. Her husband was called from the glass-house; and I was ready to run distracted.”

Mrs. Canning had no rest that night. She moved about the neighbourhood, waking the neighbours, asking for her daughter. The next morning James Lord was at the Colleys’ at six, Mrs. Canning was there by nine, without learning anything further; so they returned to their own neighbourhood and their fruitless inquiries.

There was nothing to be learned from the neighbours. James Lord was philosophical about it. He made a point not to miss his dinner, and after dinner he went back to work.

Mrs. Canning could not rest. She continued to scour the neighbourhood, and when she became convinced that Elizabeth was to be sought farther afield, she trudged wearily from hospital to hospital, and even from gaol to gaol. Not that she thought for a minute that Elizabeth might have been gaoled for cause.

“The people told me,” said Mrs. Canning apologetically, “if there were any quarrels, they would take all away, good and bad together, was the reason I went there.”

Uncle Thomas Colley formed a posse, pressing into service James Lord and Mary Northan, and they skirred the city round, marching from watch-house to watch-house, Bishopsgate to Aldersgate, White Chapel to Coleman Street. They stopped at every public-house to describe the lost girl to the loungers. If they took a nip of something at each, they needed it. It was a cold January.

Elizabeth was not in the hospitals nor the watch-houses, the taverns nor the gaols. Nobody had seen a girl whose purple and yellow gown was set off with green ribbons; though you would think her colour scheme would draw the eye like a magnet.

Mrs. Canning had spent her time to no purpose. Now she saw that she would have to spend some of her slender supply of money as well; she would have to advertise for Elizabeth.

So Aunt Alice Colley was supplied with the seldom-used quill and a sheet of fair paper from Mr. Roberts’s counting-house. Between sobs Mrs. Canning told her what to say; and Mary Northan waited to run with it to the printer’s.

Soon every coffee-house in London learned that the sawyer’s girl had gone off in her best clothes and not come back. The loungers at Nando’s and Lloyd’s and Garraway’s cared no more for that than the old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s. Nobody had seen Elizabeth Canning on the night of January 1.

Mrs. Canning waited in vain for a response to her advertisement. She had no money to advertise her again, and so she told her solicitous friends.

The remedy for that, her friends agreed, was easy. One gave a shilling and another gave a shilling, until the sum was made up, and again Mary Northan stood ready to carry the paper to the press. This time Aunt Alice Colley was spared the agony of composition—“scowerer” indeed! This time the task was entrusted to a sager head, the landlord of the White Lion at the end of Fore Street facing the gulley-hole. Mary Northan stood by and told him what to say:

“Elizabeth Canning went from her friends between nine and ten on Monday night, betwixt Houndsditch and Bishopsgate, fresh-colour’d, pitted with the small-pox, high forehead, light eyebrows, about five foot high, well-set, had on a purple masquerade-stuff gown, black stuff petticoat, a white chip hat bound round with green, white apron and handkerchief, blue stockings, and leather shoes.”

While this document was writing at the White Lion, Mrs. Canning paid a visit to the Two Jars, an oil-shop in Bishopsgate Street. The keeper of the Two Jars thought she had a clue: she had heard a young voice screaming out among the coaches that thronged Bishopsgate Street.

“I heard a coach drive in great haste,” she told Mrs. Canning, “and a young person screaming out in it.”

“Alack,” cried Elizabeth’s mother, “why did not you send and stop the coach?”

“I was alone in the shop, and had no one to send.”

“Was it a girl’s voice?” asked Mrs. Canning.

“Indeed, I cannot tell,” replied the oil-woman. “I took it for a young boy’s voice; but the coaches made a great noise, and I could not certainly distinguish.”

This was disappointing; but none the less Mrs. Canning went home in great excitement. Elizabeth’s friends were as excited as she.

“Put in a reward,” cried generous Uncle Colley. “Write two guineas; I’ll pay that if I strip my skin!”

When Mary Northan came back from the White Lion with the landlord’s business-like writing for Mrs. Canning’s approval, she found the mother ready with more copy. They wrote it on the back:

“Any coachman, who remembers taking up such a person, and can give any account where she is, shall have two guineas reward, to be paid by Mrs. Canning, in Aldermanbury Postern, sawyer, which will greatly satisfy her mother.”

Then they scratched their heads over it. They had left out a lot. They scored it through and tried again:

“Note, It is supposed she was forcibly taken away by some evil-disposed person, as she was heard to screek out in a hackney coach in Bishopsgate-street. If the coachman remembers anything of the affair, he shall be handsomely rewarded for his trouble.”

This was the paper, with the additions on the back, that Mary Northan carried to the printer of the Daily Advertiser. That worthy considered the additions, and amalgamated them into one, and so the advertisement appeared on January 6. But this time nobody reported anything more to satisfy Mrs. Canning, sawyer, in Aldermanbury Postern; and the hackney-coachman did not come forward.

Mrs. Canning was in despair. She never had rest, night or day, for her thoughts were wandering. She brooded about her lost daughter. Sometimes she feared some rakish young gentleman had catched her up and so carried her away. She had grounds for that fear, in the oil-woman’s story. More often she had visions of her daughter murdered in Houndsditch and thrown into some ditch there. It was the Jews did it, she sometimes thought; she had heard of such doings in old songs and stories.

If Elizabeth was alive somewhere, how was she faring? Mrs. Canning shivered sometimes to think of it. It was a cold January, cold and frosty, and in the city, a few days excepted, very dark. The wind was often northerly, and when from the south and south-west, generally blustering, with cold rain and sleet. Mrs. Canning had bad dreams about it, Elizabeth lying frozen in some ditch, or shivering with cold somewhere in the dark winter weather. It never entered her head to picture her enjoying the cozy wages of sin; Elizabeth was not that kind.

[ #6 ]

The dark days went into weeks, and no news of Elizabeth. Mrs. Canning was at her wits’ end, when a new expedient was thought of.

She was wringing her hands and tearing about; there was a crowd of people about her door, all talking at once, like a crowd at a fair.

Among these solicitous neighbours was one who, like Robert Scarrat, had had experience of the great world, “a gentlewoman,” Mrs. Canning described her, giving her fair words, “that lived cook or chambermaid; she lodged at a house over the way, being out of place.”

This gentlewoman had seen high life, and she suggested an expedient that no one in the neighbourhood had thought of. She advised recourse to the powers of darkness, in the person of a conjurer or cunning man who plied his trade in the ancient street called the Old Bailey.

At this there was a clamour of approval about the doorstep. More to the point, a collection was immediately set afoot. One gave sixpence, another threepence, until Mrs. Canning had the equivalent of silver to cross his palm with; and once she had the fee, she went directly.

Mrs. Canning must have had more than usually wandering thoughts as she trudged down to the Old Bailey. She was a superstitious woman; her own dreams and visions must have been awesome enough, but the prospect of facing a real live practising wizard must have been worse.

The wizard was at home. She had hardly clapped at the dark old door when he admitted her himself.

With faltering steps Mrs. Canning advanced into the darkened room. A skeleton gleamed in the fitful light, trembling a little as the air touched it where it hung. On the table lay the conjurer’s magic instruments, his wand, the sacred pentagram.

Most frightening of all was the cunning man himself. He had a black wig over his face.

It was a bushy full-bottomed wig, and he had it on backwards, peering through it like a sheep-dog. His cabalistic robe billowed as he seated himself before the table. He lit the candles and drew a magic circle.

Mrs. Canning faltered out her errand. The conjurer was a man of business. He got his client’s shilling before he would exert his powers on her behalf.

Afterwards Mrs. Canning could give only the most confused account of this awesome occasion. She remembered that he asked her two or three questions, and wrote, scribble, scribble, scribble along. They weren’t very penetrating questions—just how old was Elizabeth, and when did she go away? Mrs. Canning told him about the advertisements, and about Bishopsgate Street, and he wrote that down too. His jottings seemed to reveal something to him, for he gave good value for his shilling: a categorical prophecy that Elizabeth was in the hands of an old woman and would return shortly. He bade Mrs. Canning advertise her again.

He had no time to amplify his prediction, for Mrs. Canning had had all she could stand. Between relief and terror she fled from his presence.

“He frighted me,” she told her gossips in Aldermanbury, “when he shut the door and lighted the candles up, he looked so frightful, I was glad to get out at the door again.”

The injunction of the man of gramarye, however, stayed with her, and she dared not disobey it. She advertised Elizabeth again: “a young woman upwards of eighteen years of age, pitted with the small-pox, a high forehead, fresh coloured, light eyes and eyebrows, dark hair, about five feet high, and had on a masquerade purple stuff gown, a black quilted petticoat, a coat and green under coat, blue stockings with red clocks, black leather shoes and clogs.… Any coachman, or person, that can give intelligence to Mrs. Cannon, sawyer, in Aldermanbury Postern, near Fore Street, shall have six guineas reward, to be paid by the said Mrs. Cannon.”

No one was disturbed by the variant spelling of Cannon. After all, the name was pronounced that way. But even the clogs jogged no one’s memory, and Uncle Colley was not called upon to provide the promised reward.

[ #7 ]

This third advertisement closed Mrs. Canning’s only transaction with the powers of darkness. To the powers of light she applied steadily and in every way she knew how. No sooner was Elizabeth missing than she applied for the prayers of the faithful at the parish churches of Aldermanbury and of Cripplegate, where she was christened. She coppered her bets by applying also to the Methodists, both at Whitefield’s meeting and at Mr. Wesley’s. She did not neglect a meeting or a place which she could put up a bill in.

She was on her knees constantly, praying for news of her daughter, and earnestly recommended the apprentice to do the same. James Lord followed her admonition, though, being a practical young man, he preferred to pursue his duties with a prayer in his heart.

One of the apprentice’s duties was to lock up for the night. That was what he was preparing to do at a quarter after ten on the fourth Monday, January 29, when Mrs. Canning once more urged him to pray for Elizabeth’s return.

“The last thing you do, pray for her,” said Mrs. Canning.

“I never go to prayer, ma’am,” replied the unctuous apprentice, “but what I do.”

Mrs. Canning knelt down by the bed to set him the example. She seems to have prayed aloud, and wildly, to hear somewhat of her, whether she was alive or dead; and specifically, that she might have a vision of her. “Mistress was down on her knees a-praying to see her apparition,” according to James Lord.

The boy was at the door, candle in hand, ready to drop the bar, when the latch lifted, and in at the door, ragged and emaciated and blue, bent almost double and walking sideways, holding her hands before her, Elizabeth Canning came home.