They Hanged My Saintly Billy (7 page)

After long deliberation, we of the whist club decided not to exclude him from the twice weekly sessions at my house, and thus add a last, and perhaps fatal, drop to his cup of bitterness; nor did the woman ever venture to pursue him there. I have since heard it said that these two evenings were sacred to amatory revenge; she had a lover, a bricklayer's labourer, whom she entertained in style during her protector's absence.

So it went on for some years, until the reign of the late King William—the year 1834, to be precise—when one morning Colonel Brookes was found dead in the parlour of his house, clad in dressing-gown, slippers and cap, with a bullet through his heart and a still-smoking pistol lying on the carpet beside him. The old cook made the discovery. She had heard her niece's voice raised in a shriek of anger, which was followed by a cry of despair from the Colonel, and then a pistol shot. A moment later Mrs Thornton quitted the parlour in hysterics and, rushing upstairs, slammed and locked the bedroom door behind her. The cook at once hastened to summon Mr Weaver, who in turn sent post haste for Dr Knight; and the two of them, so soon as Dr Knight had satisfied himself that life was extinct—mounted the stairs up to the bedroom and demanded that Mrs Thornton should come out and give them an account of this melancholy event. When she made no reply, Mr Weaver entered the room by way of the window—a ladder left by the painters affording him convenient and easy access to it. He snatched the gin bottle from Mrs Thornton's hands, and unlocked the door to admit Dr Knight.

Fortified by the spirits, Mrs Thornton agreed that she had had words with the Colonel, whom she reproached for his constant and unnatural demands on her services between the sheets; but swore, by all
that she held most holy, that th
e cry overheard by her aunt was one of indignation, when he drew a pistol from beneath a sofa squab, pointed it at his heart, and warned her very coolly: 'If you utter one more word, I shall kill myself.' Then, inadvertently (they were told), she had uttered another word, or words, namely: 'For God's sake, don't! Think of the child!'— whereupon the Colonel pressed the trigger.

Dr Knight and Mr Weaver went pensively downstairs again. Unable to decide on the truth of the story, they came to ask my advice as a Justice of the Peace. In the absence of any witnesses other than the aunt, who was hard of hearing, and Mrs Thornton herself
, the truth could never be exactl
y known; but Dr Knight pleaded that the child's future must, at any rate, be
safeguarded. Little Annie was alr
eady proverbial in the neighbourhood for her simplicity, goodness of heart and gentle manners, and had become a leading scholar at St Mary's Sunday School. 'It is bad enough to be born out of wedlock,' said Dr Knight, 'it is worse to be the daughter of a suicide. And what girl in Christendom, however saintly, could face the world in the knowledge that h
er moth
er had committed murder?'

'How does the will run, my dear Sir?' I asked Mr Weaver, whom I still esteemed highly at that time.

'Well,' said he, 'al
l I know is that you two gentlemen are named as his executors. The Colonel drew the will himself last July—against my advice, because it's no easy matter for a layman to draw a sound will unassisted by a solicitor—and would not show me the document, but deposited it, sealed, in my safe.'

'Can you explain the hugger-mugger?' I asked.

'Well, Sir,' he answered, 'it may be that Mary Ann Thornton figures in the will, which made him ashamed to discuss her case with me. She has occasioned him much unhappiness of late years, and because I recommended her to him as his servant

'As his concubine, Sir,' I reminded him.

'For Heaven's sake, let me be! You'll be saying next that I charged a stud-groom's fee for the transaction.'

'You have earned it, at all events,' said I bitterly.

Mr Weaver then accompanied us to his office and unsealed the will in our presence. The Colonel had divided his property into two parts: the nine houses were to go to Mary Ann Thornton absolutely; a capital of some twenty thousand pounds, mainly in Sicca rupees, and the rents of the farmland (which might not be sold in her lifetime), were to be divided between Mary Ann Thornton and his daughter Ann Brookes, in the proportion of three parts to two. Dr Knight and I wer
e also appointed guardians of th
e child, and charged to pay her only
the
interests of her fortune until she came of age or married, when she might receive the whole of it. The Colonel, however, insisted that the child must be taken from her
mother
, a confirmed drunkard, and brought up genteelly.

We both professed ourselve
s happy enough to comply with th
e testator's wishes, but Mr Weaver sighed as he said: 'This will is flawed. I fear it will be disputed.'

Disputed it was, by Mrs T
hornton, who went to another soli
citor for advice. While not objecting to the legacies, she was outraged by the Colonel's animadversions on her character and his attempt to rob her of Annie, whom he claimed as his own daughter; and vowed that she would fight the case in every court, low or high.

Meanwhile, she was in danger of the rope; for all Stafford knew her character and openly accused her of murder. A Coroner's inquest could not be avoided. Dr Knight managed the business very well; he somehow contrived to bring Mrs Thornton to t
he inquest cold sober and decentl
y garbed in widow's weeds. He also coached her into telling the same story she had told before, though omitting the scandalous part and altering the account of her quarrel with the Colonel. When she had done, Dr Knight himself gave evidence of the Colonel's confidences made him some years previously, as to why he would never marry, and mentioned the Colonel's promise to call upon him at the surgery if ever he felt the suicidal mania threatening him again.

The Coroner then asked: 'Dr Knight—pray remember that you are on your oath—did the Colonel in effect call upon you at the surgery, and did he warn you of the recurrence of his mania?'

Dr Knight replied: 'The answer, Mr Coroner, is both yes and no. He came, as I now believe, ready to make such a statement, and if he had done so, I should have taken immediate steps to place him under restraint. But he contented himself with hints, which I was too obtuse to grasp. He came calling at about five o'clock, and talked somewhat disjointedly; a condition characteristic of the malarial fever from which he suffered at regular intervals. I at once urged him to take the usual stiff dose of quinine. He promised that he would do so upon his return home; but before rising to go, he asked me: "Dr Knight, are you a Freemason?" I smiled as I answered: "If you were yourself a Mason, and if I were also a Mason, you would have already known me as your fellow by my manner of shaking hands on our first acquaintance; but if you are not a Mason, as I suppose must be the case, how can you expect me to reveal myself as one, if indeed I am? You must surely be aware that membership of the Order is a close secret."

* Colonel Brookes let that comment pass, and launched into a story. "I have just had very sad news from Liverpool," he said. "It concerns a friend of mine, the Captain of a fine East Indiaman, which makes a regular run between Liverpool and Bombay. I dined at his table every day, b
oth when I returned to India in
1817, as a major, after a six months' convalescence; and again on my last voyage, when I sold out and came home to
the
among my own people. This Captain was a Freemason, and as conscientious in his loyalty, Dr Knight, as you seem to be. Well, one day he was aggrieved to find that his first mate had confided to a lady passenger some disquieting news about the soundness of the ship's rigging, and added: 'God knows, madam, what our fate will be if we chance to run into foul weather off the Cape!' The lady's husband, a Madras merchant, ran in alarm to the Captain's cabin and demanded to know the facts of the matter. My friend reassured him that the rigging was sound—though, in truth, he had been forced by the owners to sail, on penalty of losing his command, despite his protests that 'the yards were rotten as damp straw'. The merchant having gone, my friend charged the first mate with spreading dangerous alarm and betraying nautical secrets. To which the mate replied, rudely laughing in his face: 'And I suppose, Captain, that you yourself have never betrayed any secret which you solemnly swore "to heal, conceal and never reveal"?'

' "At this reference to the Masonic oath, my friend looked up sharply, whereupon the first mate quoted to him certain prime Masonic secrets entrusted only to adepts of a high degree." '

The Coroner somewhat testily asked, at this point, whether the evidence was relevant.

'Pray have patience,' answered Dr Knight, 'and you will see that it is not only relevant, but crucial.' He proceeded: 'The Colonel then told me that his friend the Captain, knowing the first mate not to be a Mason, was both amazed and alarmed; but it came out that he had himself betrayed these secrets one night in a feverish delirium, when the first mate came to him for orders. He had the impudent officer put in irons, then returned to his cabin, and was found soon afterwards shot through the heart— clad in dressing-gown, slippers, and cap . . . This, Sir, was the end of the Colonel's story. He took his leave of me, and from the circumstance that his corpse was found the next morning similarly clad and similarly shot, my opinion is that you may, without the least compunction, bring in a verdict of suicide. If anyone is to blame it must be myself, for not insisting that
he should take the quinine then
and there in my surgery.'

The Coroner thanked Dr Knight for his frankness, confessed himself satisfied with the evidence, and 'suicide while under the delusive influence of a malarial fever' was the verdict returned by the jury. When I afterwards complimented Dr Knight on the fertility of his invention, he made no reply.

Mrs Thornton, as I have said, disputed the will in so far as it denied her a
mother
's natural rights. It was also disputed by a Mr Shallcross, who represented himself as Colonel Brookes's heir-at-law; he pleaded that
the
Colonel had not be
en of sound mind for the past th
ree years, as large bequests to
the
drunken and sordid woman who made his existence a living hell sufficiently proved. The Court found
that
the Colonel had been of sound mind, save during his occasional bouts of malaria, and therefore had the right to bestow his property at pleasure. He had, however, wrongly described the child as 'Ann Brookes', and wrongly assumed the right to appoint guardians for her. Nevertheless, Mr Shallcross's evidence, and the testator's own considered opinion, made it apparent that the child stood in want of suitable protectors. The Court also ruled
that
the testamentary language was not sufficiently forcible to convey the estate to mother and child absolutely, but gave them only a life interest in it. At their decease, it must become the property of Mr Shallcross, or whoever else might then be the late Colonel's heir-at-law. The estate was therefore thrown into Chancery, the costs of the trial deducted from its value, and Anne Thornton made a ward in Chancery. The Court appointed Dr Knight and me her guardians, at the charge of the estate; and the Colonel's wishes were, in effect, respected— except that
the
value of the estate, after the lawyers had been satisfied, was whittled to less than a half, and that Annie's fortune now consisted
solely of a two hundred pound life-annuity, pur
chased for her by us.

Well, as little Annie Thornton's guardian, and a married man, it was only natural
that
I should take her to live in my house, where I put her under the same governess as my own children. And let me tell you, Sir, that I never had a moment's cause to regret my action. That girl was a paragon of virtue, and had not an enemy in the whole world. Though painfully sensible of her false position as an illegitimate child—even if one of independent means—and as being banished for her own good from the society of an ill-bred and dissipated mother, yet she trusted in the kindness of God; showing in all her looks and actions the profoundest gratitude to Dr Knight and myself for the care bestowed on her. We had no scruple in referring to her as 'Annie
Brookes', and
thus keeping alive in her mind the nobler part of her natural inheritance.

Soon after Annie's arrival in our house, my wife had the misfortune to be struck down by an incurable disease. Though still only a little girl, Annie insisted on acting as sick-nurse, and her intrinsic kindness of heart and constant vigilance by night as well as by day were something more than surprising. My poor wife's sufferings terminated six weeks later. Annie wept bitterly; and after a decent interval I married again, for the sake of my children. What I had done to deserve further chastening by Heaven, Heaven alone can say; but as the result of a fall on a slippery road my new wife miscarried in the first year of our marriage; and the complications of this accident were also mortal in their effect. Once again Annie played the ministering angel, and was constantly at the sufferer's sick-bed; not only to administer medicine and perform the often distasteful duties of a nurse, but to give her spiritual consolation in the dark hours of the night when sleep was far, and pain unabating. Indeed, Annie combined three noble professions in those sad months: those of doctor, nurse and clergyman. She was reduced to a mere shadow when my wife's death at last released her from these self-imposed tasks.