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Authors: Robin Blake

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The public was immediately twittering like starlings in
reaction. Sarah showed no emotion, but the bailiff was looking this way and that, unsure of what the verdicts meant for the prospects of his cousin. I rose to my feet and waited for silence. Then I said the words that I had to say.
‘Thank you, foreman and your fellow jurymen. In view of these two verdicts I pronounce that Ramilles Brockletower be eligible for Christian burial. His property is not forfeit to the crown. However, Dolores Brockletower has been found a rational self-murderess and I must accordingly declare that her personal fortune, whatsoever it be, shall not form part of Mr Brockletower's estate, but pass instead to the crown. I further direct that she be buried in unconsecrated ground, in the manner prescribed by the law. As for you, I enjoin you to speak in no way, to any person whatsoever, of your deliberations this afternoon. And so you are dismissed and this inquest is closed.'
In twos and threes the jury rose, yawning and stretching and looking about them for their relatives and friends among the public, amongst whom the starling discourse had fiercely resumed. I hurried from my place and caught George Pennyfold by the arm.
‘What on earth persuaded you she killed herself in reason, and with forethought?' I asked, drawing him away from the others.
‘I didn't want it, Mr Cragg,' he said. ‘I agree with you that suicide is rarely a rational act, and that the punishments it draws are not in proportion. Like you I would have preferred a verdict of accident, or madness, to avoid what must follow a finding of self-murder. But we witnessed your discoveries inside the tree. We know what she did.'
‘But still you could have found her mad, surely.'
Pennyfold shook his head.
‘No. There was clear forethought, and undoubted reason.
Mrs Brockletower was not mad for want of a child, but angry with her husband. And your discovery showed she had coldly calculated and prepared a means of killing herself that would, as she hoped, incriminate him.'
‘So you saw her as perverted, but not insane?'
‘Yes. And to have behaved with unmixed wickedness. I'm right sorry, Coroner, but that is how we all saw it in the end.'
I patted his arm consolingly. There was little point in reproaching him.
‘Don't be. Go on, back to your forge. There must be many a horseshoe waiting to be bent.'
 
‘So!' exclaimed Elizabeth, ‘Dolores Brockletower killed herself just to trap her husband! She hated him so much she wanted to see him hang.'
We were sitting side by side in bed, my wife's head resting on my shoulder, and I had just told her of the jury's decision, and of our discoveries inside the hollow tree earlier that morning.
‘It's what the jury concluded,' I confirmed. ‘Of course, she could only see that outcome from a seat in the hottest room in hell.'
‘It is mad indeed to wish for one's own damnation, Titus, in whatever cause.'
‘I wish the jury
had
found her mad,' I said. ‘That would have allowed her a Christian burial and saved her fortune for the family. But the plans she hatched were in such detail that the jury was convinced of her rationality.'
‘She was jealous of the architect Woodley, you say. I do not think jealousy is rational, Titus. It made Othello mad in the play.'
‘I agree, but I'm not sure it was only jealousy that drove her.
A storm of competing furies raged in her mind. One of them came from her childlessness, too, I believe.'
Elizabeth looked at me, with sudden concern. I put my hand gently up and stroked her cheek.
‘Do not distress yourself, my love. The Brockletowers' case was not at all like … like anybody else's. You see, Luke Fidelis made a discovery about Dolores that means she always knew she could not conceive. By marrying him she embarked on a course of wicked deception – or was it merely a desperate contrivance to escape from her bad life in Jamaica? I wonder about that.'
‘What do you mean, her bad life?'
And so, because there could be no secrets between us, I told my wife about Luke Fidelis's post-mortem discovery, and the outburst of her husband in his library, when he described to me the circumstances of their meeting. Elizabeth sat up. Her hands went to her face. Her eyes widened in disbelief.
‘Dolores was not a woman?' she gasped.
‘Not entirely, no.'
‘She was a
man
?'
‘Not quite that, either. She was hermaphrodite, according to Dr Dapperwick – half man, half woman. He is an authority in such things.'
‘Such things?
Are
there such things? Oh Lord, a monster, a foul mistake of nature. Poor Dolores, poor thing. How she must have suffered!'
We fell silent for a while, Elizabeth sitting still as a funerary monument, staring at the counterpane. Then she roused herself again.
‘So what is Sarah Brockletower's position now, Titus?'
‘She loses Dolores's fortune, settled on her by the father in Jamaica. But I have had Furzey check on the quiet with the
clerk at Rudgewick & Tench, and by the squire's will, she has a life interest in Garlick Hall, but without any responsibility for her brother's debts. They will be in the care of the bailiff's wretched cousin in Lancaster.'
‘I'm glad of it,' said Elizabeth. ‘It doesn't matter that the sugar fortune is lost. My father would say it is tainted money, anyway, because it is earned by the slave system, which he always says is unjust. But now, at least, she will continue to have a home. Yes, I know she once meant something to you, Titus, and it does you credit that you still care for her future well-being.'
How many women would have such clear-headed charity? I told her I loved her for it, adding, ‘But the whole thing leaves me with a very melancholy duty to perform, which will be hard to bear.'
‘I hope it is not something very unpleasant.'
‘I'm afraid it is. That is why these days there are so few verdicts of self-murder.'
And when I told her what had to be done, she crossed herself three times.
‘The angels and saints preserve us against such barbarism!'
‘We must hope they will. But there is nothing the saints can do for Dolores Brockletower, at all events. It is too late.'
And so I kissed her, then reached over and snuffed out the light.
 
 
A
S WE MADE our way along the Moor Road, with the axle of the cart that bore the coffin squealing and its rusty wheel hoops grinding over the stony sections, we glimpsed Robert Crowther standing up ahead on a rise in the ground. His form was silhouetted against the full moon, with hands on his spade, and head bowed. No doubt he was only resting, but he looked like a sentry mourning at the corner of a royal catafalque. As we came up to him we saw that he had chosen a spot at which a bridle-path intersects with the road, making a crossroads of a kind, for the unmarked resting place of Dolores Brockletower. I pulled out my watch and, tilting the face to catch the moonlight, read the time: a quarter before midnight.
‘How do, Coroner?' said Crowther, tipping but not removing his hat.
I gave him how-do in return and dismounted.
‘The digging is finished?' I asked.
‘Aye. Once I got through the heather roots it made easy work. Just the one big stone to shift.'
We had set out from Market Place twenty minutes earlier, with me riding a few yards in the lead of Dolores's pitiful cortège. This was made up of the decayed Corporation cart, with its equally old horses, and similarly decrepit driver, whose
name was Wintly; Sergeant Sutch and a fusilier from Lord Derby's regiment in military support; and, bringing up the rear, the hangman, Stonecross from Lancaster, who had ridden down during the day to perform his duty. Waiting for them to catch me up, I stood beside Crowther and we looked together down into the grave, a deep, black, wet slot that even this moon, high and round, could not penetrate. I had a sudden apprehension of a bottomless hole which, if one fell in, would tumble you all the way to hell.
With Sarah's consent the body of her sister-in-law had continued to lie locked in the Garlick Hall Ice-house for a week past the inquest. For all that it was a body condemned and cursed by the jury's decision it had undergone little additional decay.
In the meantime Reverend Brockletower had read his nephew's obsequies and laid him decently to rest in the family vault, under the chancel of Yolland Church. The funeral was the last time I had seen Sarah, and it had brought an unbidden, sad and sudden memory of my first-ever glimpse of her, across those same pews. But at least I could assure myself that she would in future be provided for, if not luxuriously, then decently. I knew this because one of Sarah's first acts as mistress of Garlick Hall had been to remove her affairs from the firm of Rudgewick & Tench, and return them to my office. I found looking over them that there were heavy debts and encumbrances, but by arrangement with her banker I had ensured that the Hall's dairy income would be hypothecated to her personal needs and costs, while the rents from tenant-farms would furnish the bank interest.
Wintly brought the cart to a standstill, but stayed on his box, keeping firm hold of the driving reins. His jades tossed their heads, stamped their hooves, and looked for a moment as jumpy as unbroken colts in the edgy and desolate moonlight.
But Wintly was a man of faint courage, and I could tell he, too, wished himself elsewhere at this moment.
So it was left to Sutch and his trooper, with Stonecross and myself, to seize the box between us and slide it over the cart's tail, then heave it clear. We carried it without ceremony to the graveside and placed it across two bands of strong webbing that Crowther had lain in parallel on the ground, so that the coffin could be lowered hand over hand into the grave.
But one awful piece of ritual yet remained before that descent, and it was Stonecross's to perform. The celebrated executioner was a strong, well-set man in his fifties, wearing a sober and gentlemanly black coat, almost clerical in cut, and a neat, business-like wig. He fetched his saddlebag and laid it beside the box, before kneeling himself and drawing on a pair of white kid gloves. He took a short crowbar out of the bag and began, with infinite care, to jimmy the crowbar under the coffin lid. As he exerted leverage the nails creaked and finally popped loose, allowing the lid to be opened. We all peered down at what was revealed. Dolores Brockletower was wearing the clothes she had died in. The caked wound to her throat was plainly visible, the hands were crossed on her chest and the eyelids lay closed. In form she looked frayed, and dirty, but anyone would have said that she also looked peaceful.
Not for long, Stonecross returned the crowbar to his bag, and rummaged in it again. Finally he produced a short-handled mallet and a stake, whittled in white wood and sharpened at one end. With these in his fists, he looked back questioningly towards me. I held up a hand in warning and, once again, extracted watch from pocket. It was now five minutes to midnight.
‘Not yet,' I told him.
It was a long-drawn-out five minutes. The feathering breeze was from the north and chilly, but I felt hot. I had twice before
presided over this ritual of purgation, if that is the right word for what we were about to perform, but one did not become accustomed to it. Fidelis, who refused to attend though I had invited him, called it a damnable desecrating act. But how can one desecrate a suicide? I asked. By decision of the law she is found to have desecrated herself.
‘But the procedure is abominable!' he spluttered. ‘It is intolerable to reason. And, besides, she might have repented between letting go the blade and falling from her horse. She might have saved herself after all.'
This was just like Fidelis. He could speak of reason in one breath and mouth papist quibbles the next. That, however, was his personal confusion, and my Elizabeth, though she shared his religion, had clearer thoughts.
‘If it must be done,' she said, ‘it is better supervised by a good man like you, Titus, with a pure heart. The people are bound to be afraid of one that dies by her own hand. They cannot help believing she will wander the earth, spreading alarm and doing all sorts of evil, until Judgement Day. In their eyes it is for you to stop her, and so you must.'
‘Thank heaven it will not be me, but the public executioner who does the stopping. I doubt he has a pure heart.'
‘Oh, I'm sure he has!' she exclaimed, charitably.
‘Are we ready yet, Mr Cragg?' said the pure-at-heart now. ‘Shall I proceed?'
His voice was dark and musical, its sounds intoned on one melancholy note. My watch said it was still one minute before midnight.
‘Wait for my signal,' I told him.
The two soldiers took up positions one at each end of the coffin. Crowther and I stood opposite Stonecross, on the other side of the box. We watched as Stonecross bunched his left fist
around the stake and poised its sharpened point directly over Dolores Brockletower's frozen heart. I waited, watching the alignment of the minute hand as it imperceptibly moved towards the vertical.
‘Now!' I whispered.
With sudden dispatch, and not a second's hesitation, Stonecross struck the head of the stake hard with the mallet. And, as the point penetrated, the body seemed to convulse for a moment, to convulse again, and then the eyelids flipped open.
The fusilier swore. Crowther gasped, and I felt that a clammy hand had clutched at my guts. The eyes of Dolores Brockletower were staring upwards. They were not directed towards the five of us who gathered around. They were staring beyond, far beyond, at the full moon.
‘Put the lid back on, quickly!' I ordered.
And so we returned her to the dark.
 
My pledge to Sarah had left me with one more task. If the jury in the inquest on Benjamin Woodley should happen to give the true verdict – his murder by the squire – the law would after all require the forfeiture of his estates, and leave her destitute as she had feared. Yet, to prevent this was easy. I had only to maintain a judicious silence. Apart from myself, only Fidelis and Elizabeth knew the truth, and I trusted them to follow me. Without the letter that I pulled from the squire's pocket and never made public, there was no other material evidence.
So I was faced with the question that bedevils many who hold official positions: which ought to take precedence, the public or the private duty? It was Elizabeth who made up my mind.
‘Titus, you gave the woman your word. You owe nothing to Woodley and, anyway, he and his killer are both dead and
beyond the reach of human justice. You must keep your peace now, and save poor Sarah.'
So it happened at the inquest that twelve men of Preston, destitute of evidence, sent Woodley into the ground under the rubric ‘murder by person or persons unknown'. A few weeks later, after getting my inquest fee of thirteen shillings and fourpence, I slipped one day into St John's Church. After muttering a few words of prayer for Woodley's soul, I quietly dropped the money into the poor box.

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