Connoisseurs in Mystery
“Verum in Occulto Latet.”
[ #1 ]
Elizabeth Canning carried her secret her grave in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Nevertheless, if we question her rightly, she will tell it to us.
Draw up the forms to the long table at Batson’s. Fill the little clay bowls of the churchwardens with tobacco from the pennyworth twists (there is a tobacco mould on the coffee-bar). Let the coffee-girl fill the finjans from the long thin spout of the coffee-pot. Ignore the pamphlets scattered on the table. They are folios now, and more numerous than ever; but there is nothing new in them. We can solve the mystery of Elizabeth Canning with what we have in our heads.
What position shall we take?
Did Elizabeth Canning tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Position [#I
The crux on which that question turns is the alibi of the gypsy.
There were some very odd things about those gypsies. They travelled through the West Country selling smuggled goods. There is nothing odd about that; the trade in smuggled goods then was as widespread and highly organized as rum-running in the American twenties. The odd thing was that their own counsel blandly announced so much in open court, and Elizabeth’s counsel made practically no capital of it at all.
Another odd thing: they went to Wells’s because they were broke and in debt and dared not appear at their usual haunts. The old woman trudged about the highways cadging food and halfpennies. Yet when she was taken up, George Squires somehow found enough journey-money to take him down to Abbotsbury and bring three friends back. Later on, money was poured out in the gypsy cause; gossip said it came out of Sir Crisp Gascoyne’s pocket. But who paid for that first trip, before Sir Crisp became interested in the case?
Who guaranteed the fees of the high-priced Mr. Davy, who was accustomed to touch gold before he would display his talents in court?
Under whose protection did George dare to return to London with a price on his head?
Another odd thing: the gap from Coombe to Basingstoke. If the gypsies really passed that way, how strange not to recall, and not to discover, any trace of themselves in the four-day hiatus. If, on the other hand, the evidence of their journey to the west was perjured evidence, bought and paid for (by whom?), then why not buy an oath or two at Stock-bridge?
Another odd thing: George Squires could not, or would not, account for a single stop of his two months’ ramble to the west until the alibi witnesses picked him up at South Parrot.
Oddest of all, of course, is the parade of twenty-eight witnesses who swore they saw old Mary at Enfield, from December 15 to New Christmas, from January 5 to February 1, the day she was carted off to gaol.
Let us settle this matter at once: These witnesses were not suborned perjurers. If they had been, they would have been instructed to offer more conclusive testimony. Three or four of them would have sworn to seeing the old woman on January 1 and 2, the actual dates of the abduction and robbery; they would have sworn to her and to George as well. Another accommodating pair would have been told off to testify that they had seen Elizabeth Canning escaping from the loft window.
If they were not suborned perjurers, how account for them?
Barrett Wellington, writing in 1940, agreed with Lawyer Miles (though, not being deeply read in the case, he did not know it). He thought there were two sisters so much alike that they could not be told apart.
One of them was old Mary Squires, “quiet, clean, orderly, unobtrusive, inoffensive, good-hearted, non-china-mending, non-fortune-telling, and giving trouble to none.” This old paragon was virtuously visiting her friends in Abbotsbury, with her son George and her daughter Lucy.
The other one was haunting Enfield, looking for a little horse. She told James Pratt her name was Squires. Examined, James thought she said Mary Squires. “Was it not Sarah?” suggested Mr. Davy. Sarah was accompanied by her children John and Katharine, as Virtue Hall called them in her confession.
Around these hypothetical twins Wellington wove his theory in his book The Mystery of Elizabeth Canning. John abducted Elizabeth, the story runs, mean old Sarah cut her stays. When Mary heard about it, by gypsy underground, she and her children raced to London to save Sarah. She endowed Sarah with her Abbotsbury alibi, and vanished—though she wore the most notorious face in London—forever. Katharine passed for Lucy. At the first trial old Sarah was revealed to have learned her alibi lesson very imperfectly. At the second trial only George, passing for John, went on the stand; only George had really been to Abbotsbury. Old Sarah, scrubbed up, confused the Enfielders, notably Elizabeth Sherrard; they had never seen her so clean before. Between them Sarah and the vanished Mary had the laugh on Elizabeth Canning.
It is an ingenious network, and has the disadvantage of a network—it doesn’t hold water.
It could never have happened. No gypsy would willingly put herself in the hands of the law. There were laws against gypsies against which the strongest alibi was no defence. To wait to be arrested, even after Elizabeth had escaped to testify against her, was to wait for certain doom—and quite unnecessarily, for if Mary could be kept under cover, even though Miles suspected her existence and must have had an eye out for her, why could not Sarah be as easily hidden?
Besides, old Mary’s ugliness was unique, whether she had a twin or not. Its most noticeable feature, the swollen lip and purple scars of the King’s evil, was not congenital, but acquired.
Virtue Hall’s confusion of names proves too much. If you take it as gospel that John and George, Lucy and Katharine, are different people, then you must believe that for some sinister reasons of her own “Sarah” Natus was impersonating her (identical twin?) sister Judith; which is absurd. It is much more likely that Solicitor Salt, slicking up Virtue’s confession, filled in first names all round by conjecture and a bad memory.
No; Mr. Miles and Mr. Wellington to the contrary notwithstanding, Mary Squires was not twins.
Then was the gypsy alibi a chain of perjury? Frederick Darton thinks so. Darton knows every highway and byway in Dorsetshire, and he has followed the route of the gypsies in his book Alibi Pilgrimage with loving care. He finds that their route lay along highroads and vanishing tracks traditionally haunted by the smugglers of the west. He thinks that they were part of the smugglers’ organization, and the organization stood behind them when they got in trouble. Therefore the crowds of witnesses from Abbotsbury, where they ran cargo; therefore the long gaps before and after Martin and Coombe, where there were inland storehouses but no chain of smugglers between.
But if the three men of the west were smugglers, and perjured themselves at Mary Squires’s trial, how oddly they went about it! Why, for instance, did they drag in the presence of the exciseman? If he stood ready to add his perjury to theirs (he was a dishonest exciseman) why did he not come forward? They could not hope the old woman would be granted a second hearing. If he was not in the plot, what a chance they took in drawing attention to him!
The longer you study the testimony of the men of the west, the more you believe it. It is rich in truth. Darton believes it; he suggests that it all happened, but at another time.
It cannot have happened at another time. The excise-books prove that Wake was sent to Abbotsbury on December 31. Another date is cast-iron: the gypsies were at Ridgway when a known date coincided with a memorable natural phenomenon. Blandford sessions, January 10, were indelibly impressed on the many who journeyed thither, by the floods that hindered their journey.
In the testimony of the men of Dorset, the eleven-day difference between old and new style is not a factor, tempting as it looks to a detective-story reader. It makes no difference whether the gypsies danced at the Old Ship on old or new New Year’s. They had a Dorset alibi for both days.
The defence cavils against the details of the alibi are picayune. A shoemaker looks carelessly at a dish of cut-up chicken; he thinks that it adds up to part of one. An old woman goes out to look for her son; the son guesses that she hiked the whole distance to Abbotsbury; the landlord, a better guesser, surmises that she went part of the way and returned. A drunk remembers looking over a hatch and seeing a friend by daylight; he stubbornly associates it with a particular occasion, though he saw his friend every day for nine days.
Three gypsies wander into the West. They have one stopping-place in mind—Abbotsbury, over the holidays. They leave directions for their sister to write to them. Where? George Squires gets confused and can’t think, but clearly there is only one answer—Abbotsbury. Where is the nearest post-house? Dorchester. The gypsies leave Abbotsbury and stroll along easily to Portersham and then to Ridgway. The next day their stroll takes them to Dorchester; and from that point they walk without let-up for twenty-three miles. What happened in Dorchester? Obviously, they visited the post-house and collected their mail.
Maybe old Mary collected the mail while George attended to more of that mysterious business that carried him back again from Portersham to Abbotsbury and to the schoolmaster’s door.
What about the schoolmaster who did or did not get fuddled at the dancing? George was simply mistaken. The schoolmaster, depressed and unhappy over parting with his wife, returned on January 8; it was probably that night he got fuddled. There was no reason for George to associate his presence with any date.
The gypsy alibi holds; it is sound and strong within itself.
What about the Enfield testimony?
All those people had really seen an old gypsy, and most of them had seen Mary Squires.
Probably the gypsy of the cow-house was not Mary Squires. She was more likely the brother-in-law’s wife, named Sarah Squires: “they wander about as we do,” and presumably also seek winter quarters. She was seen outdoors, by Farmer Smith and his hangers-on; at Wells’s open door, begging, by Samuel Story on December 23. He took a closer view, to see if she was the same he had seen before, and she was.
Then why did these people identify Mary Squires when they saw her in Newgate? In the first place, did you ever try to tell red Indians apart? To white people unacquainted with the race, they all look alike. Show me an Indian today, and an Indian almost three months later, and they will look like the same Indian to me.
Especially if it is worth my while, in excitement, prestige, trips to town, and expense money and a little more, to think they are the same Indian. And once I have said so, the visage of the second Indian takes firm place in my mind, and when I try to recall the first Indian, my obliging memory comes up with the image of the second Indian.
Nevertheless, most of the Enfielders really saw Mary Squires. When? Well, the trial pretty clearly established that many of them did not know when. As to dates, they were in a fog. But like Parsons’s handyman, many of them dug up a date that would be acceptable to the kind lawyer, and get them their junket to London and their booze and scramm at the ordinary, and maybe something over. They thought they saw the old woman on a day when something else happened; but the something else is never proved. The famous trip of Squire Parsons is a case in point. He was up and down very often, he left the 9th and returned the 12th; too bad he was never called, to say whether he had not made a second trip to London later in the month. I don’t think the missing documents were fraudulently suppressed, but I do think they proved nothing; what if Farmer Starr did carry a load of pease to Hertford on the 18th? We have no proof his wife saw the old woman on the same day, and none that it was the 18th new style; it may have been, by the new style, the 29th.
One witness, the Sherrard woman with her Christmas box, was a malicious liar; it comes through every speech. But practically all the others look like honest muddleheads, who had talked themselves into remembering not only an occurrence, but the date on which it happened.
Then what was the mystery of the gypsy? What secret had they under cover then, under cover now? Why did official London stand behind them? Where did the money come from that was poured out on their behalf?
The gypsies travelled through the west with smuggled goods. Whatever their occupation, they took a rest from it at Abbotsbury. For their inn they chose the excise office, where George shared his room with an excise official. He owed money to another customs official, Mr. Norman; he paid it to him during the trip.
Later he needed money; he meant to apply for it to Samuel Squires of White Hart Yard, in the Borough, he was in the customs too.
Like every other gypsy, Samuel Squires dealt in horses on the side; it was he who said sharply to Sir Crisp that he was determined to save the gypsy. Sir Crisp let that slip to Rossiter and Miles. I don’t for a minute think they made that detail up; they would never have thought of it, and it proves nothing to their purpose.
How came a gypsy to tell the Lord Mayor what to do? How came the smuggler to choose to live cheek by jowl with the excise office, and have monetary transactions with other customs officers?
It all makes sense, if the Squireses were only ostensibly dealers in smuggled goods, under which guise they were in reality government spies, under-cover agents on no pay-roll, but under backstairs protection. Every government officer had a long roster of under-cover agents in those days; the most famous one was Daniel DeFoe. There were two strolling Squires families; the second one, George said, “travel about as we do”; but later he let the tie-up slip—“Samuel Squires, he is in the customs.”
George let it slip—George was stupid. The master mind was the old woman, who had such charm when she wanted to exercise it, who told her son when it was bedtime, and persuaded the landlord to take the dashing waistcoat length, and arranged for free lodgings before she summoned the young people to join her. She was an expert snooper, with plenty of excuses for prowling into people’s houses and inspecting their barns.
By this hypothesis the gaps in the gypsy story become explicable—they represent days when the gypsy doings had to be covered by official secrecy. If, like most spies, George was quietly playing both ends against the middle, smugglers against government for the benefit of George Squires, his furtive air and confusion as to his doings become doubly clear.
This theory also explains what no other theory does—the shifting about of the Squires headquarters. They planned to quarter at Brentford; but in three days they had left, saying they were going to Epping. Apparently they never thought of settling down in the house at Newington Butts. Instead they tramped out to Enfield Wash, just across the Lea River, to the west of Epping Forest.
George’s own story, that they went to Enfield to hide out from his creditors, won’t wash. It does not explain why they left Brentford. It does not explain why, after he had collected the money he needed, he still lingered at Wells’s. It does not explain why, when bills were out for him, and ten pounds on his head, he felt safer in Southwark than when he had no more to fear than a writ for debt. It does not explain why the womenfolk followed him to Enfield. They might better have lodged at Newington Butts and saved the hire of Wells’s best chamber.
Unless they had work to do along the Lea, nosing out smugglers and smugglers’ caches. You would think Southwark a likelier lay for smugglers; but you would be wrong. It is a matter of record that the notorious Dick Turpin, who married the landlord’s daughter of the Rose and Crown, from that base of operations harried the smugglers who haunted Epping Forest. He passed himself off as a riding-officer. This argues the presence of the real riding-officer, with his spies before him, old Mary Squires among them.
Therefore when she got into trouble, her under-cover employer gave her his protection. He paid George’s journey-money, and found the fees for one of the best-known trial lawyers in London. When even that did not avail, he sent a message to the court that tried her, through its head, the Lord Mayor of London: the gypsy must be saved.
Since she was innocent, a pardon was easy enough. The malice of the gypsies might or might not have been enough to cause the implacable pursuit of the girl who harmed them; but her friends crossed the ambition of Sir Crisp, and the girl had to suffer.
[ #2 ]
The mystery of the gypsies has cluttered up this story long enough. Through it her enemies were convinced that Elizabeth lied; through it you and I are convinced that Elizabeth lied. But although we have sent the gypsies about their business at long last and got them out of the way, the mystery of Elizabeth Canning still remains. The gypsies were never an integral part of it.
Position #II]
Did Elizabeth Canning lie? Yes, she did.
Did Elizabeth Canning tell nothing but lies?
The evidence for what Elizabeth Canning told is harder to assess than the evidence of the Abbotsbury men. The main difficulty is that we are dealing with human beings, not invented characters, and human beings listening and questioning under stress, not in a court of law. They forget, and they get mixed up, and they think they remember what they want to remember, or what they have heard that someone else remembers.
Take that all-important scene in Aldermanbury Postern on the night of January 29 when Elizabeth came home and told her pathetic story, in dying-away whispers, to the wrought-up neighbours. Can we believe that they reported her truly?
I take it as certain that they did not lie in concert. I have painstakingly collated all the evidence at both trials, and all the affidavits that Elizabeth’s friends published as their last word in the matter. They form an almost perfectly coherent story of that night. No two of them corroborate each other, except that several people heard and noticed Elizabeth’s colloquy with Wintlebury. That is making concerted lying too hard. It would have been more advisable, and easier, to report that Elizabeth told her story once, in the hearing of them all. If they had had good sense, they would have managed it that way in actual fact, and then left the exhausted girl alone. Actually, every excited friend who ran in put the girl through another catechism. Each story is separate, with here or there another caller or two hearing a part of the conversation. Each one remembers his first sight of Elizabeth and what she told him. They had certainly not memorized a prearranged story.
Did they slip into their testimony, here and there, a few of the things they wished Elizabeth had said that night? That is much more possible. When Wintlebury, in his affidavit later, rather thought that Elizabeth mentioned “a swarthy person, and had a wide mouth,” though no one else heard any such statement; when Scarrat told the court she described her prison as longish, when all the others say only dark, I fear their wishes are getting mixed up with their memories. In Chapter II, which is a pastiche of all this evidence, I give place only to statements in which two or more corroborate each other.
The truth of Elizabeth’s next public utterance is even harder to get at. It is the convention in detective stories that policemen and magistrates must tell the truth; and a book would go into the ash-can in which a mystification was discovered to be due solely to the inattention, defective notes, and faulty memory of a police official. Unfortunately, when we deal with Alderman Chitty, we are dealing with a real police official, a man taking longhand notes under pressure with dinner-time coming on, confused by the clamour of fifty spectators. Unfortunately also, when he finally for the first time spoke out, the court and all the lawyers treated the alderman by the detective-story convention, unquestioningly taking his single word against any contradiction, whether by the unfriendly witnesses, the friendly Nash, or himself. He was not cross-examined at all.
Let us take an unprejudiced look at Alderman Chitty. What he read in court was a coherent statement cooked up from incoherent notes that he took himself from the talk of Elizabeth and her fifty voluble friends: “This is not,” the alderman told the court cloudily, “what I had taken at that time, but what I took since from that paper I took then of hers, and other persons that were brought before me.” He was totally unable to remember which of the fifty-one said what; that was clearly proved when they questioned him about who mentioned Wells.
Furthermore, Alderman Chitty’s three documents contradict one another. The day he examined Elizabeth, he wrote two of them: the warrant, and the entry in the justice-book. According to both of them, Elizabeth was robbed first, and then put into the loft. In his account in court he quoted her as saying the opposite.
As to the salient contradictions that were held against Elizabeth, although there were fifty people present, not one of them ever corroborated her mentioning the old table, the four or five pieces of bread, or escaping by taking out a pane of glass and sliding down a penthouse.
To the contrary. Gawen Nash, a witness unfriendly to Canning, expressly denied that Elizabeth mentioned a penthouse. He heard what she said about escaping, and it agreed in detail with what she had said from the first: she pulled down a board, and in getting out at the window she tore her ear as she turned herself about. Neither did Nash hear her mention the number of pieces of bread, but he did hear her say she had heard the name of Wells mentioned while she was confined in the loft.
Both men were probably honest; but their situations were different. Chitty had taken hundreds of informations, some undoubtedly as bizarre as this one. He recorded the case in the justice-book and forgot it until it became notorious. Then he tried to re-create what he had heard from his disorganized jottings, taken, as he himself admitted, from the girl and the voluble fifty. There was no paper that she read and signed; just what a busy man could recollect with the aid of inadequate notes, for which he himself apologized.
Nash, on the other hand, had never heard anything like it before. He went home and told and re-told every word of it while it was fresh in his memory. He acted upon it when they went down to Enfield. He looked about, and again recollected what he had heard as he compared it with the actuality. He told it again to the Lord Mayor. Furthermore, he was a fair-minded kind of witness, he was careful not to say more than he knew. On every count the testimony of Nash is preferable to the testimony of Chitty.
Now, if Chitty was honest, why did he say so many things that Nash contradicts? I am sure he did not make them up. They were probably misinterpretations of his telegraphic jottings. For instance: Elizabeth said something about a shed or penthouse. Chitty scribbled down “shed or penthouse.” Later, his mind a blank, he expanded it by conjecture to “slid down a shed or penthouse.” But Elizabeth was imprisoned in a shed or penthouse or lean-to built onto the back of the house.
Nevertheless, sift as you will to be sure to play fair with the girl, you cannot maintain she never lied. The Lord Mayor could not get over the alibi of the gypsy, the jury could not get over Elizabeth’s contradictions as to when she drank her water; and neither can I.
Position [#III
Did Elizabeth Canning mix some truth with her lies?
To answer that question, study the behaviour of Elizabeth when her friends took her into the loft at Enfield. Some of the things she said there were not true; but her behaviour was not the behaviour of a liar. Her enemies repeated that on that occasion she picked up every suggestion that was made and adopted it as her own. She did nothing of the kind. They asked her if she remembered this, that, and the other. “Yes” is as easy said as “No,” especially if you adopt a policy of always saying “Yes,” as Elizabeth’s foes suggested. But Elizabeth did not say “Yes” to everything. She gave each thing her attention and an answer. She remembered the pitcher, the tobacco-mould, the hay. She remembered one of three saddles. What conceivable advantage could come from forgetting the other two, when she claimed to have lived with them for so long? She did not remember the pulley in the ceiling; she did not remember the biggest piece in the room, the six-foot chest of drawers. What kind of clever lying is this?
Most revealing of all is the episode of the grate in the chimney. She said she got the bedgown out of a grate in the corner chimney. Then she came into the loft, and they pointed out to her that there was no grate in the chimney. She looked at it and saw with her own eyes that there was not. It was a very peculiar chimney. Every chimney had its grate; so much so that grate was often used as a synonym for fireplace. She had only to say: “I meant it was in the fireplace,” or even: “You misunderstood me, I said fireplace,” to clear up the seeming contradiction without question. She did no such thing; she stuck to it, there was a grate, and from it she took the bedgown. Only one hypothesis explains all these replies of hers: she was trying to tell the truth.
We find ourselves, then, taking up Position #III: ELIZABETH CANNING TOLD A MIXTURE OF TRUTH AND LIES.
[ #3 ]
Can we sort the truth from the lies? Let us scan the story step by step.
Was Elizabeth Canning abducted in Moorfields on January 1 by two men? Although there was no eyewitness, all London thought this entirely probable. Outrages of every sort were common in the London streets, and the Common Council had officially labelled Moorfields the resort of “thieves and obnoxious persons.”
Was Elizabeth Canning taken by them towards Enfield Wash? For this we have an eyewitness: the turnpike man saw her dragged, reluctant and weeping, past his turnpike.
Was Elizabeth Canning brought into the house of Mother Wells about jour o’clock in the morning? Richard Long admitted to Metcalf that she was; that he was there when two men brought her in and then took their departure without her.
Did Elizabeth Canning remain at Enfield Wash? There is plenty of evidence that she did. Mother Wells, Virtue Hall, Judith Natus, Richard Long, even Mary Squires, all admitted that she did. “The person was there, I believe,” old Mary told the publican.
Did a tall, dark, swarthy woman, early in the morning of January 2, solicit Elizabeth Canning and then rob her of her stays? Certainly not. I never heard such rubbish in my life. It is the wishy-washy invention of a green girl who has no idea in the world of the language or behaviour of bawdry. “Will you go our way?” indeed! When the simplest and likeliest way to introduce her to the way of the Wash would be the way they took with the girl from Edmonton.
Did Elizabeth Canning fast for twenty-eight days on bread and water? Again certainly not. This is more of the same stuff. This is a child’s notion of the severest kind of punishment. Apart from the extreme unlikelihood of all the mumpers’ orts being strewn about in this prodigal fashion, there is one detail that makes this fasting story absolute nonsense. “For twenty-five days,” says Elizabeth Canning, “I lived on mouldy crusts of bread. On the twenty-sixth day not a bite crossed my lips. On the twenty-seventh day I ate the mince pie I had bought on the 1st of January!” A likely story, that a girl with a pie in her pocket and no foreknowledge of the duration of her imprisonment would frugally eat crusts for twenty-five days, saving the pie, as it were, for dessert. This is an even worse gastronomic heresy than the Howard system of aging mince pies. Then why did she tell such a stupid tale? Because that particular part, about eating the pie last, was true; for a reason which will presently appear.
Did Elizabeth Canning spend twenty-eight days locked in the loft? Her ignorance of her supposed prison caused the first suspicion that she did not. Judith and Fortune Natus swore that she did not; they ought to know, because the loft was their home. When Virtue Hall was Canningite, she said that was a lie, cooked up on the Thursday night after they all came back from the magistrate’s, all but the two old women. But the Mayor’s officer found Judith in the hay bed up there, presumably having spent the night in it, when he raided the house at nine o’clock on Thursday morning. Other people swore that Elizabeth was not in that loft: Wells’s daughter, the victualler who bought the sign of the Crown, the men who lopped the tree.
Was Elizabeth Canning ever in the loft? The shepherd of Cheshunt saw her there. Her behaviour in the loft, as we have already seen, was not that of a person pretending familiarity with a strange place; it was that of a person trying to recall a place she has seen before. Whatever she had forgotten, some things she remembered: hay, the black pitcher, “a long piece of iron” (this was the spit that stood by the chimney); she mentioned those things the night she came home. She knew the view from the back window. Fields and hills were a good guess anywhere, but a lane with houses on the left was too long a chance to take, if she was guessing.
Did Elizabeth Canning take the ragged bedgown out of the fireplace? I think she did. If so, how did it get there? Who keeps an article of clothing in a disused fireplace? The answer is: nobody. But John Howit stored his tools in the loft. I think he naturally placed them with the other oddments, the lanthorn and the spit, which stood in or near the fireplace, according to Fortune Natus. First he shoved in the small stuff, wrapped in a rag—an old bedgown of his wife’s. Then in front he stood his cross-cut saw upright. This part is not a guess, but the testimony of Fortune Natus. A cross-cut saw is like an H of which the cross-bar has dropped down to its ankles. Reaching across the six inches of metal in the dark of a winter afternoon, Elizabeth registered a grate on her memory, and stuck to it afterwards.
Did Elizabeth Canning break out of the loft in the afternoon of the 29th of January? Circumstantial evidence was offered that she did, and that she didn’t. Adamson pointed to the scar in the plaster, and the nailing job where the boards had just been knocked into place. The farmer’s boy found the unmistakable window-lead that had been torn from the frame by some recent disturbance.
The objections to that part of her story vanish when you examine them. She thought that the back window was nailed shut. It wasn’t; but that it was sufficiently warped to defy her small strength is likely, in a loft where the bottom drawer of the chest was so warped out of line that it could not be forced into its place, but had to stand perpetually open. She elected to pry off the boards rather than break any glass. I think she was wise. The boards were all in one piece, and flimsily nailed up, if the way they were replaced was any criterion; they could be pried up in silence, which is more than you can hope for if you go breaking glass.
She got into the window, turned herself about, and jumped. She described the place where she landed, minutely, before she saw Enfield again: soft clay ground, a little narrow place (actually a passage eighteen inches wide) by a bank on the back-side of the house, with fields along the lane.
The Mayor’s marshalman, at the trial, would not admit that he saw any marks in the plaster. Further, he pointed out, there were no marks in the soft clay. Even the zealous Adamson did not try to say that there were. The officer thought that this proved that there had never been any. Any detective-story reader can tell him better. It proves only that no one had dropped from the window since the last rain or snowfall. But the afternoon of Elizabeth’s escape turned into a very wet night. This detail was recorded, triumphantly, by an anti-Canning pamphleteer who wanted to know why Elizabeth’s sodden shoes and stockings were not brought forward to substantiate her story. (The answer of course, is that Elizabeth only owned one pair of each; they were dried and cleaned and back in use before anyone thought that Elizabeth’s story needed substantiating.) The rain that soaked her shoes as she stumbled down the Hertford road must have obliterated the prints that they left under the loft window. Three days later of course no print was to be found.
Did Elizabeth Canning walk eleven miles back to London? Bennet, Dyer, and Mrs. Cobb all met her on the road. Elizabeth said from the first, and Bennet corroborates her, that she met a man and asked him the way to London. Doubt has been cast upon Dyer because he did not adhere to the line and say that the girl was blue. She had been walking but a half-mile, and the cold of the night was barely setting in. Doubt was also cast on the four stories—Elizabeth’s and those of the three people who saw her—because the times mentioned cannot be made to work out mathematically. Nothing can be proved from that except that these people, none of whom consulted a timepiece, none of whom was in the habit of consulting a timepiece, none of whom had any particular engagement to set the time by, made some rather wild guesses as to what the time was. If they had been lying, they would have memorized a uniform time-table.
Did Elizabeth Canning return home to Aldermanbury in rags, starving, ill, and blue? Nothing is more certain. Her friends, and after them the doctors, unanimously attest it. The blue was probably cold; though the black and blue marks that were still visible on March 30 are a different story.
Arranged in a series like this, Elizabeth Canning’s lies form a pattern. Ramsay put his finger on it:
“What happen’d to Elizabeth Canning, during the six hours and a half that she was upon the road betwixt Moorfields and Enfield? Her own account will inform your Lordship: NOTHING.
“What happen’d in the whole hour she remain’d in Mother Wells’s kitchen? Next to NOTHING.
“What happen’d to her during the 28 days that she was confined in Mother Wells’s house? NOTHING.”
We may now form a new question: Why did Elizabeth Canning tell the truth about the events of January 1 and January 29 and lie about what went between?
Well, for a first guess, because she was ashamed of it? No; because if she wanted to conceal what she was doing during those twenty-eight days, she would never have localized her story on the Hertford road. That was pointing the way directly to discovery. She could hardly hope Wells would hold her tongue. Bribery, I suppose, would do it; but what had the poor servant-girl to bribe with?
Only one hypothesis fits the pattern of truth-fiction-truth in Elizabeth’s story:
Elizabeth Canning filled the gap from January 1 to January 29 with made-up stories, of which she was the heroine, because she did not know what really happened between the time when she fell into a fit in Moorfields and the time when she escaped from the loft.
SHE COULD NOT REMEMBER.
In technical language, she was the victim of amnesia.
Elizabeth’s amnesia was not the result of the time-honoured “blow on the head.” It was inherent in her personality. Elizabeth Canning was a hysterical subject, and this period of amnesia was but one, and by no means the first, of many neurotic manifestations.
It is curious how some such idea flits through the mind of practically everybody who studies the case. Even her own age came very close to it, the author of The Imposture Detected closest of all.
Ever since, writers on the case have paused briefly to wonder whether little Bet’s story did not come out of a mind disordered—by her sufferings, her sympathizers would suggest—by concussion of the brain, according to one of her warmest admirers, Andrew Lang. Lang thought immediately of hysteria—the fits put it into his head—but he would have none of it. He loved Betty too much.
Nevertheless, the more you explore the half-world of hysteria, the more you learn about Elizabeth Canning.
Heredity is an important factor in the development of hysteria. Think of Elizabeth’s mother, a very enthusiastical woman, a consulter of conjurers, a dreamer of dreams.
The hysterical personality is shy, emotional, and suggestible. Hysterics are incapable of pity; if they exhibit any emotion, it is the one that is likely to get them the greatest attention. Here we have the girl who would not so much as go to the door to speak to anybody at the Weavers Arms, yet went through months of public notoriety quite unmoved.
Hysteria is most common among girls, and puberty is a favourite period for its appearance. Elizabeth was fourteen when she fell into the first of those fits of hysterical coma (Bratz calls it “affect-epilepsy”) which were her response “when anybody speaks sharply to her, or on any surprise.” They were precipitated, but not caused, by the accident of the garret ceiling. The cause lay deep within herself.
Hysteria in adolescent girls is often connected with sexual frigidity and anxiety. Think of the “good character” Elizabeth bore for “modesty,” in spite of every effort her enemies made to show that she had a lover, or even a suitor.
The sexual anxiety of hysterical virgins is likely to come out in disturbed physical functions. It may result in amenorrhea—that is, stoppage of menstruation. Elizabeth’s “female benefit” had ceased at the Weavers Arms. It may interfere with sphincter action. Elizabeth had a history of stubborn constipation. It may interfere with urination. This was Elizabeth’s complaint after her return. It may cause hysterical self-starvation. The last three symptoms are quite as likely to be slyly pretended as real. Of Dr. Dodd’s cases of famous fasters, for instance, practically all of them hysterical adolescent girls, some were clearly faking, others not. Elizabeth Canning does not seem to have been faking.
The hysterical puts on a good show in the public eye, and so did Elizabeth. Even in the matter of seeing visions, without which the author of The Imposture Detected would not diagnose “the catalepsy,” Elizabeth, what with Mother Shipton and the angel, ran true to the hysterical type.
The only major hysterical manifestation that is not recorded of Elizabeth is hysterical paralysis. For all we know to the contrary, however, such an attack may have complicated her malady when the obscene threats of the sailor-men of the Tryal laid her on her death-bed; from which she rose miraculously cured by the sailing of the Tryal.
The threat of sexual assault was enough to throw the girl “first into a fainting fit, then into a fever.” The actuality, at Mother Wells’s bawdy-house, brought on hysterical fasting, and covered itself with the hysterical blocking of memory called amnesia.
“Hysterical amnesias obliterate recollections for a definitely circumscribed period of time. Such amnesias … cover periods and experiences with which shame or other intense feeling tone is connected” (Noyes). “In retrograde amnesia the events preceding some episode are involved; in anterograde amnesia, the events immediately following. Both may be observed, especially in the case of an incident involving strong emotion or shock.… In paramnesia the patient has illusory memories, and often attempts to fill in the gaps of recall by false recollections” (Hollingsworth).
Often too, fragmentary memories of the amnesic period may float to the surface of the mind.
“I have now learned,” Freud remarks of hysteric subjects, “that … besides what has actually occurred to them, they unconsciously conceive horrible or fantastic images, which they construct from the most harmless and commonplace things they have experienced.”
The story Elizabeth Canning told was compounded of these elements. It involved true memories of her few conscious moments in the loft, cloudy momentary recalls from the amnesic period, and self-glorifying fantasies woven around people and things she saw when memory returned. The more she told it, the more it satisfied her. The knowledgeable author of The Imposture Detected concluded from observing her that she had become convinced of the truth of her story and could no longer be said to be lying. There is every reason to think he was right.
NOTE: In formulating the case of Elizabeth Canning in terms of abnormal psychology, I had the advantage of consulting Dr. Bradford Murphey by letter, and in person Dr. Gerald Webb, Dr. Paul A. Draper, and the late Dr. Heinrich Rosenhaupt, and I found all four in agreement with the general outline of my solution.
My statements in the text rest on the following authorities: Brown, Junius Flagg: Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior, New York and London, 1940; Dorcus, Roy M., and Shaffer, G. Wilson: Textbook of Abnormal Psychology, Baltimore, 1934; Fisher, Vivian Ezra: An Introduction to Abnormal Psychology, New York, 1931; Franz, Shepherd Ivory: Persons One and Three. A Study in Multiple Personalities, New York, 1933; Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams, London and New York, n. d. [1922], and Selected Papers on Hysteria, third edition, New York and Washington, 1920; Hollingsworth, Harry Levi: Abnormal Psychology, Its Concepts and Theories, New York, n. d. [1930]; Miller, James Grier: Unconsciousness, New York and London, 1942; Kraines, Samuel Henry: The Therapy of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Philadelphia, 1941; Noyes, Arthur Percy: Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Philadelphia, 1934.
[ #4 ]
Elizabeth Canning set out from her mother’s at noon on New Year’s Day. She was wearing all her best clothes, and in her pocket she had the price of a new cloak and a pair of mittens. She had nothing in particular on her mind.
Half-way down Aldermanbury she met a man standing at an alehouse door.
“Bet!” he cried. “Well met! Whither are you bound so early? Will you stop and take a mug of ale with me?”
“No, sir, if you please,” said Betty, and curtsied hurriedly; “I must be at my Aunt Colley’s to dine with her.”
“Still cruel, eh, Bet?” said the man.
“Oh, no, sir, I must hurry,” and Bet fairly ran down the narrow street.
The man regarded her flying figure with something between a leer and a frown. He snapped his fingers and went into the alehouse.
Aunt Colley leaned across a post and watched her niece vanish into the darkness.
Elizabeth was thinking of her little brother as she trotted up Houndsditch. She was sorry she had snatched back his penny. When she passed the pastry-cook’s, the lights were still on; she stopped in, and chose a mince pie for his Christmas box. She wrapped it in her handkerchief and stowed it in her petticoat pocket.
Now she was hurrying through Moorfields. Suddenly two dark figures in greatcoats barred her path. They wore slouch hats flapped down over their faces. They seized her by the arms. She jerked her arm away and struck out wildly. As she struck at them she screamed with all her might.
“Damn you, you bitch,” grated one of the ruffians, “I’ll do for you by and by.”
The promise was accompanied by immediate execution. He struck her a blow on the side of the head. Moorfields spun, and disappeared.
The next thing Elizabeth Canning knew, she was sitting in a heap on a cold floor. She was shivering, for she was attired only in her black quilted petticoat and her thin linen smock. The rest of her clothes were gone. The men—memory began to come back a little—the men in Moorfields must have stolen them.
As her head cleared she began to be sensible of several things. One was that she was thirsty. She turned her head and saw standing near her a large black jug with a broken lip. Painfully she tipped it up, for she was very weak, and drank the few drops left in the bottom.
Then she knew how hungry she was. She thought of her Uncle Colley’s good cold mutton the day before. She thought of the mince pie. Perhaps the men who stole her clothes had missed the mince pie. She felt in her pocket—there it was. It was stale and dry, but she ate it greedily.
As she ate she looked around, vaguely, still confused. Her head ached. She was in a rough sort of empty room, with odds and ends standing about. The place was dark with the darkness of a winter afternoon filtered through dusty panes. Beside her some steps ran down to a closed door.
She saw a hole in the wall beside the steps. She crept to it and peered through.
She looked into a dirty kitchen, firelight from the fireplace at the left revealing its appointments by flickers. On a dresser stood a quartern loaf. Beside the dresser stood two young women. One was little and queer-looking; the other was taller, dark, and pretty. The little one said something about somebody named Wells, and they both laughed.
Then a third figure came into view. She was tall and stooped. Elizabeth could not see her face, for it was swathed in clouts and shadowed by an old black hat tied down under the chin; but there was something sinister in the deliberation with which she reached out her coppery old hand and opened a drawer in the long dresser.
She took out a wicked-looking long carving-knife; the firelight ran on its edge like blood.
Panic flooded Betty Canning. Just before the old woman reached for the quartern loaf, the girl drew back from the opening in terror. Beaten, robbed, hungry, cold, she had just one instinct, to escape and get home to her mother.
She stole to the nearest window. What she saw shocked her. She was somewhere outside of London. Trees and fields stretched to a hill on the horizon; across a lane to her left she could see little houses strung along. She had no idea where she was.
Frantically she tried the window. It stuck. She shivered with cold and terror. She looked around to see whether there was not a rag she might wrap herself in.
To her right in the corner was a little chimneypiece. Above it stood a picture, roughly painted on board; it represented a fountain. A strip of metal gleamed at the fireplace opening; she thought it was a grate. Behind it had been tossed down some tools and the cloth in which they had been wrapped. She fished it out. It was a dirty old faded bedgown. She huddled it on gratefully. There was a half-handkerchief in the torn pocket.
Then she crept to the end window. It was half boarded up and half glass. She tried the casement, but she could not budge it. As she stood staring up the road in despair, there was a great blowing of horns, and the Hertford coach swept into view. The road was so near that she could recognize her old friend the coachman on the box. She repressed the cry on her lips. She was in terror lest the old hag in the kitchen should come upstairs and cut her throat.
Despairingly she wrenched at the warped casement. She had not the strength to pull it free. She would have to break the glass. This thought scared her worse than ever. Surely the sound of breaking glass would be the signal for the woman with the carving-knife to come up the stairs and murder her prisoner.
She looked at the boarded half. The boards were all in one piece, and flimsily nailed into place. She tugged at it; it gave. With the strength of desperation she worked at the nails until the whole thing came away.
With beating heart she looked down from the window. There was a pile of something underneath; she would have to jump sideways to clear it. She got into the window, took hold of the sides, turned herself about, and jumped. A rough piece of window-lead left in the empty frame tore her ear. The impact loosened the lead, and it fell to the ground unnoticed beside her.
The soft clay ground broke the force of the fall. After a minute Betty picked herself up and crept away up the lane. When she was far enough from the house she turned into the fields so as not to get too far from the road.
In the fields nausea overcame her, and she sank down momentarily. The mince pie had been a mistake; she could not keep it down. But after a few minutes terror of the old woman with the carving-knife drove her on again. Her ear was bleeding. She tied it up with the half-handkerchief. Then she went on.
From the third field she could see the road. She crossed a brook by the tanyard and came onto the highway. Once there, she stood in doubt. She had no way of knowing which way London lay. As she stood debating, a dog ran out of the tanner’s yard and barred her way, barking threateningly. She was afraid, and went rapidly away, back towards the direction she had come from.
She had not gone far when she saw a figure approaching. She hastily took shelter by a gate at the side of the road, for fear it was the old woman come after her.
It was a man, and he looked kind. She crept out of her shelter and asked him the way to London. He directed her back the way she had come from. She told him about the tanner’s dog.
“There is no occasion for you to go near the tanner’s dog,” said the man.
Elizabeth fetched a compass round about, as the man directed, and so got past the dog, and held her way towards London. It never entered her head to stop on the way; she wanted to go home. She hardly heard Dyer’s greeting. She barely glanced at Mrs. Cobb. By this time clouds were lowering and the darkness of the night was setting in, and she was blue with cold.
She was almost spent when she lifted the latch at her mother’s. She could not see why her mother fainted dead away at sight of her, or why the apprentice ran out so suddenly; but she sat in a half-stupor by the fire and let the warmth creep into her bones.
It was when her mother began to exclaim over her that she got the worst shock she had had that day.
“Alack, alack,” exclaimed the volatile matron, “where have you been these four weeks past?”
Four weeks! Betty Canning’s head spun. Four weeks! Where had she been? What had she done in the lost four weeks? What could she say? She could never say she had forgotten. No one would believe her; or if they did, they would call her mad or bewitched.
“And where are your clothes?” lamented Mrs. Canning.
“Stolen,” said Elizabeth, “Two men in Moorfields stole them, they took my gown and hat, my kerchief and my apron.”
“Who stole your stays?”
Elizabeth had forgotten the stays.
“An old woman,” she improvised, “an old black, swarthy woman.”
“I hope,” said Mrs. Canning, “that you did not take to ill ways, so as to lose your virtue.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. She hoped this was true.
“Praise God!” exclaimed Mrs. Canning.
“They asked it of me,” said Elizabeth, “but I would not.”
This proved so successful that she elaborated it—the old woman, the blow on the face, the knife. The story was taking form. Elizabeth Canning had no very clear idea of the language of bawdry. She phrased the old woman’s solicitations daintily, and threw in the best bribe she could think of—the offer of fine clothes.
Mrs. Canning thanked God rapturously that her daughter had resisted these blandishments.
When Mrs. Woodward arrived, the story had taken shape in Elizabeth’s head and was ready for telling.
“I am almost starved to death,” said Elizabeth.
The man at the alehouse heard the news: “Betty Canning is come back, Betty Canning is come back!”
He did not know what to do. He did not think Bet would tell where she had been, or what had happened to her after his bullies had caught her up in Moorfields and carried her off; but he had to be sure. He hurried down to the Postern.
She was sitting by the fire, wan and emaciated. The man was almost sorry for what he had done. If only he had not left her to Wells’s tender mercies—
He took her hand.
“How do you, Bet?” he cried.
“Oh, sir,” said Betty Canning, “you don’t know what I have been through.”
John Wintlebury drew a long breath. She was going to cover him.
(Wait a minute, you say.
Why Wintlebury?
Because it makes the most sense. If the men were white-slavers, or were abducting the girl for their own benefit, there were nearer brothels than Wells’s. To seize the girl in London and drag her to Enfield argues intention: they must have been instructed to deliver that girl to that brothel.
That must mean someone who knew the girl well enough to want her. It was Wintlebury who knew her best; she had lived in his house for eighteen months. He knew the Hertford road. He was the only one of them all who had a horse of his own. Although he denied it in court, he was suspected of contributing to the girl’s support. He hurried to her when she returned.
He lied about why she left him. Because she got a better place, that was the reason, he said; and when she left, all the neighbours would have had her. But these two statements are inconsistent. The girl who announces: “Mr. Lyon offers me a better place, and I shall take it,” does not become the object of other offers; but the girl who simply says: “I cannot stay here,” will, if her services are desirable, have her choice of new places.
Further, the girl’s last days with Wintlebury were marked by the onset of that probably hysterical amenorrhea, as if at his house she met with some shock that both upset her psychically and caused her to decide to leave him.)
She was going to cover him, thought John Wintlebury. For form’s sake, he asked her a question or two.
Then that long-nosed hartshorn-rasper nearly spoiled everything. He identified Wells’s.
From then on, Wintlebury had to walk warily. He made it his business to get to Wells’s quickly. Wells and her hangers-on would have to be squared. It was easy enough to slip the coins in her hand. There would be more if they held their tongues.
For a day or two Elizabeth had elusive flashes of memory—of being hustled out Bishopsgate Street, of Judith Natus’s provender of bread carelessly tossed about, of a little square dark room with an old table and some stools.
(In the garret? There is something very suggestive in the unanimous blank ignorance of all Wells’s witnesses about the garret. The garret windows were boarded up; anyone escaping by the staircase window would really have to pull down a board, slide down a penthouse, and jump into a little narrow place by the side of a lane. But the unreliability of Chitty’s evidence makes assuming an early escape and recapture an unnecessary complication.)
Elizabeth did her best to remember, when they took her to Enfield. She at once identified the witch-like old figure about whose gesture with the carving-knife she had woven her self-glorifying fantasy, and she was in no doubt about the two girls who had stood laughing by. For a moment she remembered the front staircase. George Squires puzzled her. He was not one of the men of Moorfields, but she almost remembered him; and she almost remembered Mother Wells, though she had seen neither in her waking state.
If she had remembered Wells, of course, the jig would have been up. Wells would have talked to save her neck. But she accused the old gypsy, who had never seen her before, and who, to Wells’s certain knowledge, had been elsewhere at the time. Wells pinned her faith to the gypsy’s alibi and pocketed Wintlebury’s money without a qualm. The hangers-on took some, and the defence attorney took some; but there was more to be had. Wells counted on a life of plenty through this lucky accident.
(Wait a minute, you say.
This secret had to be known to too many people. Count them: Wintlebury and his two bravoes, Wells, Virtue, Sal, Fortune, and Judith. Add those who must have had their suspicions: Elizabeth and Richard Long, the four Squireses, the shepherd of Cheshunt. Fifteen people.
Fifteen people is too many to keep a secret. Sooner or later, in an unguarded moment, or to save her own skin, or overtaken in liquor, somebody will let it slip.
Sooner or later, in unguarded moments, or frightened by threats, or convinced in liquor, or on a death-bed, it is a matter of record that no less than six out of the fifteen did let the secret slip and admit that Canning was at Wells’s.
Virtue Hall got scared, and promised the Aldermanbury men that she would tell the truth. She walked right into Fielding’s presence, and for six hours insisted upon some story which Fielding and Salt labelled as prevarications and contradictions. She was not sullen and silent; she told him things. What things? Clearly, what she had said she would tell him: the truth—how Elizabeth was brought to Enfield, and lay with her protector in the best chamber, and the rest of it. Fielding and Salt would have none of it; and after doing her best to get the truth believed, the terrified girl finally gave up, and told instead the things Salt was willing to hear. She was more cynical by the time the Lord Mayor got hold of her; she told him at once what he was willing to hear.
Wells’s old pal the breeches-maker got an earful at the Clerkenwell Bridewell. “You know the room very well,” she told her old customer, and leered. She did not mean the loft, which he did not know well, but the best chamber, where he had in old times often taken his pleasure. She did not think that he would give her away, and he didn’t, until the case became more notorious than she could have expected.
Gin caught up with Judith Natus: “Indeed, Mr. Crumphorne, I cannot say but what she really was there when we were there.” The publican’s wine loosened Mary Squires’s tongue. She had no more than a suspicion to impart: “The person was there, I believe.”
Metcalf caught Richard Long off guard, and he let out that Elizabeth Canning was brought to Wells’s by two men that night. The shepherd of Cheshunt saw her there.
All these admissions illustrate the economy of this solution of the case. They cannot have been perjury, because many of them are useless for proving that Elizabeth Canning told the absolute truth. They would not have come out in the form they took unless they were true. Mary Squires denies the stays-cutting, but she thinks the girl was there. What good does this do the defendant in a perjury case? Richard Long is quoted as saying that two men brought in the girl, and took their departure without her. This cannot have pleased the Canningites; they insisted that one of the men was George, who would not have departed; he lived in the house. The shepherd of Cheshunt sees the girl in the loft; but she is not locked in, and is so far from secret or a prisoner that it is an inmate of the house who opens up the door and reveals her presence. In the same way Beals saw Elizabeth pass his turnpike; but his evidence availed her nothing, because although she swore she had been stripped of her yellow-and-purple gown, she was wearing it when he saw her. None of these witnesses could save the girl from a perjurer’s fate; but each of them confirms those parts of her story, and those parts only, which happened to be true.
Why, finally, did Wells not speak out when she saw herself in danger of being branded? Because speaking out would not save her. Keepers of disorderly houses were branded; and to speak the truth was to confess that Elizabeth Canning was brought to her house for an assignation. They would brand her just the same. She had nothing to gain, and Wintlebury’s money to lose.
Would she have spoken to save the old gypsy from the gallows? There is no telling. Squires was no sooner sentenced than the rescue forces got into action, so Mother Wells was never put to the test.)
[ #5 ]
John Wintlebury looked after Elizabeth Canning as she tripped past the Weavers Arms, and he wanted her. He had wanted her since she lived in his house. She wasn’t pretty, but she was young, and she had charm, and she had proved provokingly hard to get. He was still angry and sore at the memory of how hard to get she had turned out to be. He had long turned over in his mind schemes to have her by force if not by favour. Perhaps today was the day. There was much in favour of it. For one thing, it was a holiday, and likely lads aplenty were tippling withinside. For another, he was now informed of her movements, and it would go hard but two spry lads could pick up the girl and bring her to some bagnio. Wells’s for his money; he had used Wells’s in the old days, when he lived and courted at Hertford.
To think was to act. In a minute two stout fellows in bob-wigs had been winked to the door; a long look after the yellow and purple stripes, the red clocks and green ribbons, and they would know her again. Noon was no time for the attempt; they must wait for the return journey. They had only to go down to Saltpetre Lane and post themselves at the handy Black Boy; then they could follow her home and pick her up at their convenience, say in Moorfields.
Mother Wells was not surprised when the strange trio knocked her up so late. It was a frequent occurrence in her line of business. She was up with the farrowing sow, and her son-in-law was helping her. She put the weeping girl into the best bedroom, locked her in, in case of accident, and went back to the son-in-law and the sow. Elizabeth’s abductors took themselves off.
Wintlebury rode out the next night. It was handy enough, for a man with a horse of his own. He brought with him a gift for the girl, a fine furred bedgown, to replace her own poor things.
Wintlebury got little good out of the girl he had wanted for so many months. After the first night she was not like herself. It puzzled him. She acted as if he were a stranger; she did not even answer to her name.
Nevertheless, he bade Wells keep her close while he went back to the Weavers Arms. He was careful not to be seen at Enfield, or missed in London.
Wells kept her close. The girl was pale and bewildered, and wept much; she refused to touch her victuals.
Wintlebury tired of her quickly. She made but poor sport, and as she grew pale and thin she irritated him. In less than two weeks he had said to Wells: “You can have her,” and ridden off for the last time.
Wells was a woman of business. The girl might have the best room to weep in, as long as she paid for it. First she took the half-guinea from the petticoat the girl had laid aside. Whatever it was that was wrapped in the handkerchief, she let it alone. Then she took the furred bedgown; the girl might have back her own clothes. Then she took the gown and stays and kerchief and apron, they were worth something.
The girl got thinner and paler. She was no good in Wells’s business; Wells was wondering how on earth to get rid of her, when she had an application for lodgings. It was a parcel of gypsies; they wanted two rooms. So the staring thin creature in the best room was turned out quietly, and Mary Squires moved in.
Wells did not know what to do with the girl. There was no profit in her, and she was starving herself before their eyes. Wells bade her go home, but the stupid thing only shook her head and stared. Wells shrugged her shoulders, and shoved her into the shuffle-board room; she might share it with the ninepenny lodgers. This was on the 24th of January. Two days later (on the 15th, old style) the shepherd of Cheshunt saw her there with one of Judith’s sacks huddled about her shoulders. Judith and Sal did not care whether he saw her or not, but the feckless bitch irritated them. Judith shut the door on her.
On the 29th, when the Natuses mounted to their cock-loft, the girl was gone; wind and rain streamed in at the casement where the boards had been. They called for nails; Sal Howit knocked the boards back in place, in a cobbling sort of way. They were all glad to be rid of Wintlebury’s strange doxy.
They had warning of how the thing was turning out; Wintlebury rode up in a lather the Wednesday afternoon. They were all to hold their tongues, and he would do the right thing by them. Wells agreed; so did Sal and Virtue and Judith. The gypsies were left out of it; they [had never seen the girl in the loft, though they had heard her shuffling about. Mary, the daughter, had a new apron; she had bought it cheap of Wells; but when she guessed where it came from, she hid it. The stays and gown had long since found their way to a London pawnbroker.
What made it easier was that the stupefied girl had stayed close within-doors; none of the neighbours had ever seen her. The admissions of Wells and Squires, Virtue and Judith, were awkward; but the lawyers talked them away. Feeling ran so high for a while that they were terrified for their lives if the truth should come out. Then feeling died out, and there was nothing in it for anybody if they did peach. Fortune had his house at Waltham Cross, and Wells had booze and scramm for the rest of her days. It cost Wintlebury quite a sum before he was through; but the Weavers Arms prospered enough to carry him. Elizabeth Canning never came back to trouble his conscience.
Elizabeth Canning died an exile in a strange land, convinced that she had told the truth about the missing twenty-eight days. She never told her secret; she never knew what it was.