First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (14 page)

Above them, in a sky of a billion cold stars, the moon was massive, its mountain ranges quite visible. My uncle had pulled himself along the pathway as far as the gate, twisted and gnarled in the moonlight. As he fumbled with the
catch, Lizzie looked around for what she wanted. She took her time. She picked up one of the jagged lumps of lava that adorned the flower-bed.

My uncle kept scrabbling desperately at the latch till the rock crashed onto his head. He fell flat with his arms over his head in a useless effort to protect himself. The rock thudded down again and again, two different types of thudding sound, sometimes against his arms, sometimes against his head. A dozen thuds; then he lay absolutely still. One more thud, and this last time, the rock seemed to stick to his head like a magnet.

My sense of horror was made even worse by the knowledge that Lizzie’s blows were doing irreparable damage to my own life too.

She stood for a while looking down at him. Then she turned towards the cottage.

I tiptoed quickly back to my room, closed the door quietly and climbed into bed. I adjusted the mosquito net and lay with my back to the bedroom door. Lizzie’s bare feet slapped on the floor of the living-room, my door opened and she approached the bed.

“Andrew.” She said my name quietly as though not wishing to frighten me. “Andrew.”

I turned and lifted the net. She was standing with a dreamy look in her eyes. Blood and some other substance dripped from her breasts and drooled down her belly. As she talked, her hands smeared the bloody mess over her face, as though she were washing herself.

“Go down to the town,” she said through the awful liquid mask. “Go to Doctor Hebblethwaite. Tell him this time Norman Beck’s dead.”

A
FTER
A
UNT
L
IZZIE
was arrested, I was left on my own in the cottage for the three days before her trial.

The first night, I had a nightmare. And each of the last nights I stayed in the cottage, it came back. I’d never experienced anything so awful as that nightmare before. Being already asleep, there was nowhere to escape to. In the nightmare, the earth would begin to subside, and everything would start sliding slowly downwards into a bottomless pit. I was near the edge, trying to scramble away to safety, but the ground was crumbling under me faster than I could run. I’d grab hold of a bush, but it would slowly come away in my hand. Just as I was about to plunge down, down—I’d wake up, bathed in sweat, my heart pounding.

The first day, I didn’t go back to sleep. I just sat in a chair, terrified. As soon as it was light, I made some breakfast and went down to see Doctor Hebblethwaite. I waited outside The Motte till he was ready, then we walked together to the graveyard to meet the sexton. That gave him an excuse to tell me the history of the graveyard.

“One of the sextons in the nineteenth century was a weird bird by the name of Wellesley,” he said. “Part of his job was making coffins. At that time the cemetery was even smaller than it is now. So to economize on space, Wellesley dissected the bodies to make them more compact and fitted them into boxes no bigger than tea-chests. The various parts hung from hooks in the lid. He made little windows on each side so the mourners could look at the deceased from various perspectives. One of my predecessors says in his notes that Wellesley’s dissections were masterly. Says he got the idea from having to deal
with bits and pieces of bodies after those sea battles I told you about.”

He was puffing on a cigarette as we walked.

“Wellesley’s wife was the only artist St Jude ever produced. She composed operas that were performed in the military chapel. From what I can gather in one of my predecessors’ notes, the music was quite brilliant. Her heroines were all madwomen who wandered around the lava plain, or jumped off the mountain, singing arias. One night, Wellesley’s wife woke up the whole town. She was up on the battlements, half-naked, howling at the moon.” He threw half of the cigarette away and lit another. “St Jude does have the potential of driving susceptible souls mad.” He said this, I’m sure, to make me feel better about Aunt Lizzie.

The graveyard was just outside the battlements. It consisted of a trench the size of a football field dynamited out of the lava and filled with imported soil. Little stone markers protruded everywhere. The dimensions of the graves were very small, but they were ten feet deep, for the coffins were lowered into them upright, to save space. Doctor Hebblethwaite said it was always a challenge to inter a body without disturbing the remains of those already buried there over the past two hundred years.

The sexton, Mr Rigg, a small, black-haired man with a nut head, came to meet us with his wife.

“Will there be any problem finding a spot?” Doctor Hebblethwaite asked.

“Martha always finds a spot,” Mr Rigg said confidently, nodding to his wife, who smiled complacently. She was a curious-looking woman. Uncle Norman, during that period when he’d been restored, had told me about her. He said she was the nearest thing to a successful potato on the island. And here she was: a big, lumpy woman. Even
her face had the warty look of a potato: a potato with clear blue eyes.

From the cemetery gate, Mr Rigg and Doctor Hebblethwaite and I watched her perform her craft. She walked to the oldest part of the graveyard where the convict graves were unmarked. She held in front of her a V-shaped apparatus consisting of two human arm bones, tied together at one end with a string. As she walked, she hummed in a monotone we could hear distinctly in the morning air. Whenever the bones dipped, she would stop humming, and stand as though she were listening intently. She did this several times, the last time at a corner nearest the battlements. She stood as though she were listening. I could hear only the buzzing of flies.

Then Martha Rigg looked towards us and nodded her big head.

“She’s found a spot,” Mr Rigg said proudly. “She always does. Now we can make arrangements.”

The burial took place the next day. There was a blustery wind, not refreshing, but hot and salty and irritating to the skin.

We walked from the infirmary, where the body had been kept, to the graveyard. We were a small funeral party: Doctor Hebblethwaite, who’d brought his skinny daughter along; Rigg, the sexton, and Martha Rigg; Commissioner Bonnar, who smelt of rum; and two soldiers who pushed the infirmary wheelbarrow, draped with black velvet cloth for the occasion. I was at the back. I might also include the thousands of blowflies that followed us. They were bad-tempered at being deprived of the meal they could plainly smell through the plywood coffin. So they harassed the funeral party instead.

At the graveyard, no ritual was performed. The soldiers
lowered the plain coffin, feet first, into the narrow, deep grave. We could hear the body slide as they tilted the coffin. It slipped into the hole snugly. They quickly shovelled dirt into the space that was left on top.

I noticed the Hebblethwaite girl watching me throughout. Perhaps she thought I’d cry. But I didn’t, though I was sad. I was wondering what was to become of my life now.

T
HE TRIAL TOOK PLACE
the next morning. It was held in a hall that jutted out from the battlements and had once served as the military chapel. It looked like the banquet hall of a castle and would have been pleasantly cool if the walls had been what they seemed from the outside—three-foot-thick stone. But they were only plywood, and did little to keep out the heat. Doctor Hebblethwaite sat beside me in one of the heavy wooden pews at the front, his clothes smelling of stale cigarette smoke. The air generally smelt of sweat, for the hall was packed. Small windows in the shape of crosses near the ceiling diluted the gloom slightly.

“Justice and religion,” Doctor Hebblethwaite murmured to me. “Neither one of them can stand too much light.”

Some of the islanders had brought their children along to see the trial. Doctor Hebblethwaite’s own daughter was in the pew behind us. Aside from islanders, there were a few sailors sitting at the back: the SS
Patna
had docked the night before to pick up mail, and here was some unexpected entertainment for the crew.

At nine o’clock exactly, a soldier in a white dress uniform entered the courtroom from a door at the front and stood to attention. Commissioner Bonnar shuffled along behind him. He wore a black robe rimmed with scarlet, and a tightly curled white wig that highlighted the protruding wisps of his own red hair. He was a big-bellied man, and tall; when he sat down on the wooden chair that had been placed on a dais, his knees came up so high, his head seemed attached directly to them.

A moment later, Aunt Lizzie came through the door escorted by a soldier. She sat down on a three-legged wooden stool near the dais. She was wearing her usual black dress, but no headscarf. Her brown hair was brushed back from her forehead and coiled at the back in a tight bun.

Sitting there, so calm, she reminded me of my mother. When her eyes became used to the gloom, she saw me and smiled.

I quickly looked at the floor.

The trial was almost as brief as my uncle’s funeral.

The Commissioner called the audience to order. His throaty voice echoed round the hall, hitting the corners and rushing back at him. He seemed to know how to outwit the echo; he broke up what he had to say into short phrases.

“Lizzie Beck. Please stand.” His words were a bit slurred.

She stood and faced him.

“You are charged … with the murder of … your husband … Norman Beck. How do you plead? … Guilty … or Not Guilty.”

The hall was completely silent; not even the boards creaked. Through those openings high in the walls, we could hear the squawk of gulls in the harbour and even the
dull crash of the waves breaking on the shoal a quarter of a mile out to sea.

“Guilty.” Her voice was firm.

“Do you have … anything to say … before I … pass sentence?”

Lizzie waited till the last echo faded, then replied.

“Nothing.”

He spoke to all of us assembled in the hall.

“In my opinion … this was … an act … conceived … by a mind … clearly unsound.…”

Then he faced Lizzie directly.

“It is the … sentence of … this court … that you … Lizzie Beck … shall be … transported … at the first opportunity … to an institution … for the criminally … insane … where you shall … be incarcerated … for the rest of … your natural life.”

I couldn’t bear to look. Around me, I heard much sighing. I just kept staring at the wooden planks on the floor beneath me. After a while, Doctor Hebblethwaite touched my arm.

“It’s over,” he said.

I looked up. The chair at the front was empty; so was the stool. The Commissioner was gone and Lizzie must have been taken back to her cell.

At seven o’clock the next morning, a warm, windy morning, Aunt Lizzie, bareheaded, was escorted by two soldiers in scarlet uniforms to the dock. The
Patna
, a rusty freighter, was ready to sail. I stood among a large number of islanders watching. Crew members of the
Patna
leaned on the rails watching, too. Some of the women near me in the crowd had tears in their eyes caused, perhaps, by the salt wind.

As Lizzie walked along, her face was not calm, the way it was at the trial. She was looking around frantically. The soldiers escorted her up the gangway. She kept turning and looking back. From the top, she spotted me among some of
the adults. Her face lit up and her lips moved as though she were trying to say something. I couldn’t make it out above the deep grumble of the engines. One of the soldiers took her by the arm and began leading her away. She wrenched her arm away and screamed so that I could hear the words above all the noise.

“Love! Andrew! Love!”

Then she was gone. After a few minutes, the soldiers reemerged from the recesses of the ship and came down the gangway, which was then hoisted aboard. The
Patna
cast off her lines and steamed slowly away. When she reached the deep ocean, she turned northwards and was soon out of sight around the northern horn of the bay.

I
WALKED BACK UP
the path to the cottage. About halfway, I looked back out over the ocean and I could see the
Patna
disappearing into the heat haze on the horizon. It looked like a black snail at the end of its creamy thread.

When I got to the cottage, I went inside and sat at the kitchen table. I rested my head on my hands and fell asleep from exhaustion.

“Andrew.”

The hoarse voice surprised me out of sleep.

Standing at the open door, quite visible through the bead curtain, was Commissioner Bonnar.

I went over to the door.

The Commissioner was holding an old black umbrella that he used as a parasol. With his swollen belly and the
fringe of red hair round his bald crown, he looked like one of those pictures of medieval monks. He had changed from his judicial robes and was dressed now in the standard white shirt and black pants.

“I won’t come inside,” he said. His nose was patterned with broken veins and his words were a little slurred. “Let’s sit out here.”

We sat together on the curved park bench under the shade of the little verandah—it was only a few yards from where Lizzie had finally killed Uncle Norman. I could smell rum from Commissioner Bonnar’s breath; it comforted me, reminding me of those evenings with Harry Greene and his grog.

The smooth wooden spars of the bench bowed and creaked under the Commissioner’s weight. He put the umbrella on the ground beside him.

“The reason I’m here is that I promised Lizzie Beck I’d talk to you.” He sighed as though it wasn’t going to be easy.

“I couldn’t do much for her in a legal way.
Prima facie
, she was guilty. In fact, she was guilty twice over. But as to the
mens rea …
”

He saw I didn’t understand.

“Legal jargon,” he said. “I mean there was no doubt she did it. But what about her state of mind? I went to see her the night before the trial and she admitted she’d been planning to kill him for years. She said the only thing that kept her from going insane was the prospect of killing him.”