She looked beautiful and fresh despite the late night. I imagined she had selected her clothing for comfort and ease of movement: tweed Tartar-style cycling trousers and a matching jacket. A common enough lady’s sporting outfit in the London parks, but not, I reasoned, in an industrial backwater such as this. Still, probably better to be fashionably conspicuous than hampered by billowing skirts.
The gaol was within walking distance but the doctor’s pace was slow. It was positioned at the highest point in the town and, as I looked back, a view unfolded of bleak terraces, and farther off the grey scar of the quarry against otherwise unspoiled green hills. On arrival, the doctor spoke to the gaoler, a muscular fellow called Pugh.
“Mr. Crane said I’m not supposed to let no one in there, see,” said Pugh. His bewildered manner and thick-boned jaw suggested a person of limited intelligence.
“Come on, man!” barked the doctor. “We’re here on official medical business.”
This seemed to do the trick. Pugh collected his keys and beckoned us to follow. The gaol was a typical provincial establishment; damp stone walls, a single passage leading to just four tiny cells, smelling of mould and faintly of human waste. Pugh showed us the boy’s cell then left us to it, slamming the iron door behind.
Tobias Jones lay on a bunk with his knees tucked in his chest. His pale blue eyes were open but did not follow our progress into the cramped space. I saw that he and the striking young man in the photograph on the doctor’s mantelpiece were one and the same. With those blond curls, pale clear skin, and melancholic blue eyes, I imagined he had broken the hearts of more than a few local girls. Some faint bruising showed on the side of his face, and there was a partially healed cut above his eyebrow. Miss Appleby began with several straightforward questions. The boy, however, was unresponsive.
“What happened to Charlotte?” she asked. At the mention of the girl, his eyes looked into hers yet still he said nothing. “Do you want to hang?” She thrust a pad and pencil at him. “If you cannot speak then write the answers down.” The boy ignored this and buried his head in his arms. From beneath his pillow he had taken a red woollen hat and grasped it close. “We’re wasting our time here,” she said.
Dr. Mortlock was looking at the boy, on the verge of tears it seemed. “Would you both mind if I spent a moment alone with him?”
I called Pugh. After he let us out, we followed him to the dark recess by the gaol’s entrance where he wiled away the hours. He stared rudely at Miss Appleby, as though he had never seen a lady before.
“What’s the story there, Pugh?” she asked.
“Uh?”
“With the boy, what happened?”
His dull features grew animated. “Done her with his ’ands like … in …”
“His hands? Are you sure?”
“Round her neck, aye …” He made out he was throttling himself. “… tchsss…like that, see.”
I remembered what the doctor had said yesterday about a ligature.
“How do you know it wasn’t a belt or a cord?” asked Miss Appleby, clearly thinking along the same lines.
“Mr. Crane said.”
“And how would he know?”
“He found ’em up there.” Pugh’s grin revealed misshapen yellow teeth. “He’ll swing for squeezing that sweet kitten. And I’ll be on duty, see. Can’t wait!”
Looking down now, he seemed to have noticed her shapely legs in fashionable cycling trousers for the first time. He licked his lips and chuckled. “Them’s a pair of fancy pants you got on.” His hand reached out and squeezed her tweed covered thigh.
Before I was able to intervene, she struck him hard across the face. He cowered, as though expecting another blow.
“Pugh, do you like money?” she said.
“I like to spend it, aye.”
“Then how would you feel about earning a good sum?”
Afterwards I made notes in my room at the house, thinking about what was at stake here. It was much the same throughout the country. Like Pugh, certain folk delighted at the prospect of another’s execution, yet those with an ounce of compassion were naturally repulsed. After an outrage that shocked the public, such as a particularly gruesome murder, society demanded that somebody pay the price. This pressured the police, who were then often too quick to deliver a suspect. It did not matter if the person might be innocent, so long as an example was set. Miss Appleby, I suspected, had a particular aversion to this barbaric toss of a coin, and the noose itself, enhanced by personal experience, which drove her to pursue her work so diligently.
I unfolded the yellowed newspaper cuttings and read them again, except this time from a more personal perspective now that I was acquainted with one of those involved. Miss Appleby had returned home from university one evening to discover a mob hanging her father from the tree overlooking her bedroom window. When she tried intervening, some men held her back, and when she screamed, she was punched in the face. A gang of shrieking women insisted she accompany her father on the tree, and for a wavering moment it almost went that way. She was unable to look, a witness said, so one of the men, with a gleeful expression, gripped her chin and wrenched her face towards her father kicking and squirming. The correspondent, who in a previous article had virtually incited the mob, was this time sympathetic. He called for those responsible to face the noose, which of course they did.
The servant knocked the door and announced that lunch was about to be served.
The meeting with the boy had clearly upset the doctor. We ate watery pigeon soup in the dining room, in silence except for the tick-tock of the grandfather clock and a crude slurping as the doctor’s spoon met his lips. After a time, Miss Appleby looked him in the eye and said, “Yesterday I mentioned certain terms. On the basis of those terms I agreed to help. And yet you have already broken them, Doctor.”
He seemed offended. “That’s not true. I feel I must protest here.”
“You have not been honest with me.”
“In what sense?”
“Why didn’t you tell me Tobias is your son?”
He turned his head, looking ashamed. “Is it really that obvious?”
“Your manner with him earlier was paternal, certain physical characteristics are similar, and there is a photograph of him on your mantelpiece.”
“Ah, I grow complacent. Sometimes I forget to put it in the drawer. In truth, since my wife died, I’m past caring. Let them think what they like!” He turned defiant for a moment before reverting to the more familiar despondency. “I had a very brief affair with Tobias’s mother, just a single occasion where temptation got the better of us. She fell pregnant. Naturally I supported her financially in secret. And we both did a thorough job of hiding it from our respective spouses. Her husband always believed Tobias to be his, and my wife never suspected. She was not able to bear us children. Consequently, over the years, I have felt a growing yet distant affection for the boy. It would break my heart to see him hang. Also, as the presiding physician, I would be expected to examine him afterwards to confirm his passing.” He wiped a tear from his cheek with a handkerchief. “I feel that is beyond me.”
“What about family? Has he anyone else, any brothers and sisters that may help?”
“His mother died of fever several years ago, his father in a quarry accident. There is an older half-sister. She teaches at the school here. But I fear she is too afraid to speak out and defend him. Crane’s donations keep the school running. I suspect he has approached her in private.”
She brushed her lips with a napkin. “Then I shall pay her a visit too.”