Heaven Knows Who (40 page)

And so it might all have ended; but the poor firework lying guttering in the mire, gave one more dying fizzle. Messrs Smith and Wright, indefatigable in their fight for the Fleming family's good name, nagged away at the prison authorities until they finally consented to the publication of the Governor's account of Mr Dixon's last and final meeting with Convict 389/21. What good it could be expected to do to the Fleming cause, it is difficult to see. It related only Jessie's total denial of any such confession as Mr Dixon had described, her total denial that she had ever so much as mentioned laudanum to him, her total repudiation of any suggestion that she should clear Mr Fleming in the eyes of the world by confessing to her own guilt; for she was innocent. And the prison Governor added a note of his own.

On the morning after this interview, said the Governor, the prisoner requested to see him. She asked him what Mr Dixon's object had been in seeking this interview with her.

The Governor knew that it had been to seek a word from her that would exculpate old Mr Fleming. He temporised, however. He said he hadn't quite been able to make that out himself.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I do now remember saying something about laudanum to him. But what I said was that I knew no more about the murder than if he'd placed a glass of laudanum on the table fore'anent me'—in other words, than if she had been drugged.

So the ‘deed of darkness' remained dark and now will remain dark for ever. One ray of light there might have been but that was extinguished at its very first glimmer. A Miss Hislop, Scripture Reader in Jessie's prison, several times visited No. 389/21, consoling the convict as was her wont, with the reflection that she was a lost sinner in the sight of God. On one occasion, she reported, this apparently unaccountably failed to comfort Jessie; for she remarked that her case was a very sad one. Such presumption burst the bounds of Miss Hislop's pious tolerance. Since Jessie had brought up the matter of her crime, she said, she would state her own mind on the subject. ‘I believe you to be the guilty person and to me you seem to have acted as a guilty person throughout. You have been guilty of a deed for which you ought to have been hanged, as God has never repealed His law that blood should answer for blood; but by a very mysterious providence your life has been spared.…' Miss Hislop reports
that Jessie looked at her and said, ‘Well, Miss Hislop, I am obliged to you for your honesty'; but Jessie, if she did say so, must surely have added
sotto voce
, ‘if for nothing else'. She was silent for a while and then, says Miss Hislop, she burst out: ‘I had as little thought of it an hour before I left my own house, as you have at this moment.'

Says Miss Hislop. Differently framed, the sentence could simply mean, ‘How could I dream when I left home so unsuspectingly, that such a thing was going to happen?' As reported, it sounds very much like an admission and so of course Miss Hislop took it. ‘I had never supposed it to be a premeditated crime; but one sin led to another till the deed was committed.'

Jessie might have retorted as she had about Mr Fleming's friends, ‘How can
you
know—you weren't there?' But she was silent. We can see her sitting there at the scrubbed wooden table in her drear prison dress with her poor, weary head in her work-worn hands. She said at last: ‘I feel sometimes as though I could go through these prison walls. I often think my mind will give way.' And she began again to talk about the crime. Mr Fleming had asked her to go out for some spirits.…

What might have come out then? But Miss Hislop, high-flown with spiritual pride, was set only upon getting back to her lecture. ‘It's no use going over it all again, nothing you can say will alter my opinion.'

‘But Mr Fleming was not a good man,' protested Jessie.

Miss Hislop would not hear. Nothing Jessie could say, she reiterated, would alter her opinion.

It was the last chance to have heard anything that might have altered ours.

The London
Daily Telegraph
was not at the mercy of Miss Hislop's interruptions and thundered reverberatingly. ‘Even in a Scotch gaol we can scarce believe that Scripture-readers are allowed to act as private inquisitors, and to report their investigations to the authorities of the gaol … Really, this is too bad! Let gaolers, lawyers and policemen try, if they like, to extort some statements to her own detriment from the lips of the unhappy woman who has fallen to their tender mercies; but for heaven's sake, let us have no more Scripture-readers acting as amateur detectives. Our law does not admit of moral torture … Surely there are some other ways by which the partisans of Mr
Fleming may establish his innocence, if that be possible, than by torturing this poor creature into some garbled admission in his favour. Let them show, as they have never done before, what his character was—what his relations were with his family, his servants, and the murdered woman—and they will do more to clear his repute than by recording every doubtful expression twisted none knows how, from a woman half-crazed with misery.'

Let us hope that Miss Hislop read that; though, armoured in conscious virtue, it may be doubted that she would be vulnerable to such arrows from more merciful hearts. Mr Dixon, too, may have quailed a little—that shining champion whose banner now trailed in the journalistic mud. At any rate it does seem that from then on the prisoner was left in peace—such peace as, innocent or guilty, her sad heart could find behind those prison walls. ‘And I'm tae be kept in jail a' my days?' So it was to be.

James M'Lachlan had emigrated after her reprieve, leaving the little boy with Jessie's brother in Inverness. Her sister, Ann M'Intosh
¹
, had gone with him. She had written at the end of November after Jessie's penal servitude began, to the
Morning Journal
, begging for financial help, a letter written from the Edinburgh Female Institution. She had put down £1 she said, towards her passage to New Zealand, but she now found she had bills to meet for lodgings and so forth, and she had no money, she was friendless, she couldn't get work (because of the notoriety of the trial?) and she couldn't raise money to fit herself out for her new life. The
Journal
made enquiries and evidently found it all genuine, for they sent her £3 for which she wrote back a charming letter of gratitude. But when the
Glasgow Herald
tried to raise a subscription, she would have none of it. ‘I want no subscriptions gathered for me by you and I advise you for your own sake not to put my name in your
Herald
again.' Poor little threat!—but at least the
Herald
had to publish the letter (with a sneering comment which did not obliterate the snub.) In December she and James M'Lachlan sailed away. Another sister, Mrs Jack, meanwhile had gone out of her mind under the distress of Jessie's situation and the taunts of the neighbours and had been conveyed to a lunatic asylum—so the poor little boy found his family
sadly whittled down. It is good to know that grown to manhood he stood by his mother to the end.

In 1892 a dying woman created a small sensation by declaring with her last gasp that she had been guilty of the murder. Her niece reported what had happened and it proved that the woman had been an inmate of the Perth Penitentiary for ‘three terms' with Jessie. Nothing came of it all; but the niece told enquirers that her aunt had told her that Jessie always maintained her innocence. She said that she had suffered but, ‘You will maybe find out all about it when I'm gone' and that it would all come right at the Judgement Day.

But as the years went by there were fewer and fewer left who might have assisted in finding out all about it. Out of all those legal lights who had been concerned with her case, not one survived her (in the light of Dr Buchanan's letter, it does make one think a bit!). Mr Strachan, three years later had absconded, been outlawed and struck off the Rolls. In 1879 Mr Wilson had died. In 1882, aged only forty-nine, Mr Dixon also had died—in the odour of sanctity, however, for it was said of him that no stronger or more incisive intellect existed in all Scotland and that his place among lawyers there was almost unique: so the mystery of his conduct in the matter of Jessie M'Lachlan remains a mystery. And in the fullness of time Sir Archibald Alison was gathered to his fathers, faithful to Jessie to the last; so that by the time she had served ten years of her sentence none remained of her champions but counsel for the defence. In the year of her release died both the prosecuting counsel—Mr Gifford and Lord Deas; and in the year of her own death, Rutherfurd Clark. Both he and Adam Gifford, distinguished lawyers, had in due course been raised to the Bench.

And old Fleming was gone and stood at last before that Bar where he had assured all and sundry he was so ready to appear. To the last he had attended the church at Anderston and now he lies buried there—a bleak, black graveyard, 200 years old, with rank grass growing up between the tumbled tombstones, the rotting houses surrounding it now coming down to be replaced by new—those high, thin tenement houses, each with its narrow, dirty ‘close' and the marks still of the old original outside wooden stair. The gravestones are black with the blue-black weathering of Glasgow soot and fog, the names for the
most part undecipherable. Soon, perhaps, even these will be removed, pushed aside so that gardens or a playground may flourish above those forgotten, ancient bones. Till then he lies undisturbed, guarding his secret still. To the end of his life he lived under the ‘black shadow of her accusation'. Hoots and catcalls followed him wherever he moved, he was jostled, mobbed, jeered at, threatened with death a hundred times. But he bore it all with outward equanimity, continued to linger, unescorted and apparently deliberately, drawing the hostile crowds about him as though he rather gloried in his notoriety. His family doubtless accepted it with less resignation. A great peace must have fallen all round when old Mr Fleming was at last laid to rest in that churchyard at Anderston.

And so the years fall, veil upon veil, hiding her away from our sight: the frail, broken, friendless creature, ‘half crazed with misery', walking through the weary, endless days, withdrawn and silent, except in invariable declaration of her innocence when her innocence was challenged; associating not at all with the common felons of the prison, even in the chapel sitting apart from them, curtained off, by the mercy of her jailers, from their curiosity. A ‘model prisoner', her conduct ‘exemplary'. And in the autumn of 1877—suddenly the veils of fifteen years were lifted: and she was free.

Fifteen years in prison had earned her thirty pounds. With this she must creep forth into the bright light of a changed and alien world and begin life anew. She was forty-four.

She went straight to Greenock—a cousin living there offered her asylum. Some reports say that James was there with the boy—now eighteen years old. She had avoided Glasgow, and in little Greenock doubtless hoped for obscurity and peace, but the
Greenock Advertiser
soon hounded her out and the publication of a so-called interview for the last time roused the Glasgow press to fireworks. ‘We can conceive of nothing more cruel than this transfixion of the unfortunate woman upon the spear of notoriety. A disgraceful attempt has been made to achieve popularity and profit, by harassing an unfortunate woman and hawking the result about for a ha'penny.' So Jessie was left alone. Some time later she emigrated to America—under what circumstances it is hard to discover. Some say that her husband and the boy were
already there and she joined them, some that she went alone after James M'Lachlan's death—he died suddenly, two years after her release—and that the son followed her; it seems far more likely that he at least went with her. At any rate, in the new world she married again, and settled there for the rest of her days. In 1899 her son wrote from Port Huron, Michigan, to the cousin in Greenock: ‘Dear Cousin, I am very sorry to let you know that my poor mother is dead! She died of pleurisy of the heart on New Year's morning, at 10.20 o'clock.'

What secrets did it hold?—that fickle, flickering heart of hers that, having surmounted so much stress and strain, so much of anguish, did finally let her down. Or was it empty of secrets, all the truth told? We shall never know now. The judge at her trial believed her guilty and carried with him fifteen jurymen in a city where opinion was on the whole on her side. Her own husband, reputedly devoted, failed to stand by her; and as soon as her sentence began emigrated to Australia. Had he really believed her wrongfully convicted, one would have thought that a sailor might have contented himself with long voyages, from which he could from time to time return and not leave her quite alone. Her ghostly counsellor, the Reverend Doran, is reported—though only reported—to have believed in her guilt; and it really is rather shattering to find her closest adviser throughout, declaring to the world his conviction that she was in fact ‘a damnable woman who all that night was ranging the house for what answered her'. Moreover, true or false, there is something a little alarming in the cleverness of her last story to him, the one about the laudanum—obviously false in some parts, failing in others to cover the facts, it does all the same in its central ‘plot' answer many questions if Jessie were really the murderer; and its details (‘I was creeping about in the dark on my hands and knees, not knowing where I was or what I was doing') are as convincingly vivid as any in the famous statement; nor have the marks of blood in the lobby outside the kitchen been explained away—those marks high up inside the door as though someone with blood on his hands had been hiding there.

And finally, that letter from Dr Buchanan! We may doubt that James M'Lachlan spoke the truth when—possibly to spare the doctor's feelings—he told him that Jessie saw no other practitioner, but there is the undoubted fact that it was he who
attended her on the birth of her child: and if at such a time, no mention was made of the famous heart trouble …? Ah, well—we shall never know now.