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Book Two: The Golden Thread
Chapter Two: A Sight
“You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of clerks to Jenny the messenger.
“Ye-es, ma’am,” returned Jenny, in something of a dogged manner. “I do know the Bailey.”
“Just so. And you know Ms. Lorry.”
“I know Ms. Lorry, ma’am, much better than I know the Bailey. Much better,” said Jenny, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradeswoman, wish to know the Bailey.”
“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the door-keeper this note for Ms. Lorry. She will then let you in.”
“Into the court, ma’am?”
“Into the court.”
Mrs. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
“Am I to wait in the court, ma’am?” she asked, as the result of that conference.
“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Ms. Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Ms. Lorry’s attention, and show her where you stand. Then what you have to do, is, to remain there until she wants you.”
“Is that all, ma’am?”
“That’s all. She wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell her you are there.”
As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mrs. Cruncher, after surveying her in silence until she came to the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”
“Treason!”
“That’s quartering,” said Jenny. “Barbarous!”
“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning her surprised spectacles upon her. “It is the law.”
“It’s hard in the law to spile a person, I think. It’s hard enough to kill them, but it’s wery hard to spile them, ma’am.”
“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”
“It’s the damp, ma’am, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jenny. “I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”
“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”
Jenny took the letter, and, remarking to herself with less internal deference than she made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one, too,” made her bow, informed her daughter, in passing, of her destination, and went her way.
They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lady Chief Justice herself, and pulled her off the bench. It had more than once happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced her own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before her. For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making her way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a woman accustomed to make her way quietly, the messenger found out the door she sought, and handed in her letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam -- only the former entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded -- except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a very little way, and allowed Mrs. Jenny Cruncher to squeeze herself into court.
“What’s on?” she asked, in a whisper, of the woman she found herself next to.
“Nothing yet.”
“What’s coming on?”
“The Treason case.”
“The quartering one, eh?”
“Ah!” returned the woman, with a relish; “she’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then she’ll be taken down and sliced before her own face, and then her inside will be taken out and burnt while she looks on, and then her head will be chopped off, and she’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.”
“If she’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jenny added, by way of proviso.
“Oh! they’ll find her guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be afraid of that.”
Mrs. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom she saw making her way to Ms. Lorry, with the note in her hand. Ms. Lorry sat at a table, among the ladies in wigs: not far from a wigged lady, the prisoner’s counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before her: and nearly opposite another wigged lady with her hands in her pockets, whose whole attention, when Mrs. Cruncher looked at her then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After some gruff coughing and rubbing of her chin and signing with her hand, Jerry attracted the notice of Ms. Lorry, who had stood up to look for her, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.
“What’s she got to do with the case?” asked the woman she had spoken with.
“Blest if I know,” said Jenny.
“What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?” “Blest if I know that either,” said Jenny.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.
Everybody present, except the one wigged lady who looked at the ceiling, stared at her. All the human breath in the place, rolled at her, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight of her; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of her; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of her -- stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of her. Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate, Jenny stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a whet she had taken as she came along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at her, and already broke upon the great windows behind her in an impure mist and rain.
The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young woman of about five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye. Her condition was that of a young lady. She was plainly dressed in black, or very dark grey, and her hair, which was long and dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of her neck; more to be out of her way than for ornament. As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which her situation engendered came through the brown upon her cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun. She was otherwise quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.
The sort of interest with which this woman was stared and breathed at, was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had she stood in peril of a less horrible sentence -- had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being spared -- by just so much would she have lost in her fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.
Silence in the court! Charlotte Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an indictment denouncing her (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that she was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of her having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jenny, with her head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charlotte Darnay, stood there before her upon her trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that Ms. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew she was) being mentally hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. She was quiet and attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest; and stood with her hands resting on the slab of wood before her, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon her. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a change in her position making her conscious of a bar of light across her face, she looked up; and when she saw the glass her face flushed, and her right hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened, that the action turned her face to that side of the court which was on her left. About on a level with her eyes, there sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom her look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of her aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon her, turned to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a young man of little more than twenty, and a lady who was evidently his mother; a woman of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of her hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When this expression was upon her, she looked as if she were old; but when it was stirred and broken up -- as it was now, in a moment, on her speaking to her son -- she became a handsome woman, not past the prime of life.
Her son had one of his hands drawn through her arm, as he sat by her, and the other pressed upon it. He had drawn close to her, in his dread of the scene, and in his pity for the prisoner. His forehead had been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for her were touched by him; and the whisper went about, “Who are they?”
Jenny, the messenger, who had made her own observations, in her own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off her fingers in her absorption, stretched her neck to hear who they were. The crowd about her had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and from her it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got to Jenny:
“Witnesses.”
“For which side?”
“Against.”
“Against what side?”
“The prisoner’s.”
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them, leaned back in her seat, and looked steadily at the woman whose life was in her hand, as Ms. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.
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