Smuggler's Moon

innocence and insisted they had neither seen nor heard anything of a suspicious nature during the night. Having listened carefully to Mr. Baker, Sir John thanked him and sent him on his way. Then did he turn to me with a most woeful look upon his face.

“You know what this means, Jeremy, do you not?”

“That there will be no murder trial-is that not so?”

“Exactly so.” He sighed. ”Potter might have been put upon the witness stand and badgered into telling what he had seen in spite of his intentions to keep silent. But now, with no witness at all …”

“There would be no point in bringing Sir Simon to trial for murder.”

“My certainty of his guilt counts for nothing. Well, I shall have a letter for you to take down as soon as I am dressed.”

“A letter to whom?” I asked.

“To the Lord Chief Justice.”

”Surely not your letter of resignation?” I was for a moment truly alarmed.

“No, that would serve no good purpose. I shall simply inform him of this event and make a few comments upon it.”

Yet the letter, as dictated by him and taken down by me, was a good deal more than what he described. I should like to have had a copy of that letter so that I might present it here verbatim, for it was a good example of how Sir John’s mind worked. He began by informing Lord Mansfield of Potter’s death and assuring him that there could be no doubt that he had been murdered, since his throat had been cut. Why had he been murdered? The most likely reason, Sir John suggested, was that Sir Simon had ordered it, sent word down from his private cell that Potter, poor specimen that he was, nevertheless constituted a danger to him as a witness to the crime he most certainly had committed. If Lord Mansfield believed that because Sir Simon and the smuggler crew were in separate cells, some distance apart, such communication would be impossible, then he had no practical notion of just how corrupt was the guard force there in Newgate Gaol. A proper bribe would bring a prisoner anything he desired. Notes delivered within the prison were the least of it; a guard might well oblige with murder, if murder were required and if the sum paid were sufficient.

Of course, said Sir John in the letter to the Lord Chief Justice, there could be no question now of trying Sir Simon on the charge of murder. Without a witness to the act, all that could be held against him were Sir John’s suspicions and his theory of the crime. But (I recall these concluding lines so well that I believe I may put them within quotation marks): ”I would remind the Lord Chief Justice that in addition to the charge of homicide, Sir Simon Grenville was also bound over for trial on the lesser charge of smuggling. He will not, I hope, be forgiven this simply because his father was lucky enough to be your friend.”

Though put more eloquently than I have done here, this was what I remember of the letter to Lord Mansfield-direct, forceful, and challenging. By the time he had read to the end of it, the Lord Chief Justice may well have wished that he had instead received that letter of resignation with which Sir John had threatened him.

The letter was delivered by me into the hands of Lord Mansfield’s butler. With that, he seemed actually to be disappointed that we were not to have our usual disagreement over whether or not I was to be admitted into the great man’s presence that he might scrawl an answer in the margin of the letter.

“No need for that,” said I to him, ”though it might be best if he were to be given the letter before he leaves for the day.”

Having said that, I danced down the stairs and set off along Bloomsbury Square to continue on my way. I had a number of other errands to run. Though they were of no real consequence, they took up the rest of the morning. As a result, I did not return to Number 4 Bow Street until after the noon hour. At such time, of course, on nearly any day of the week, Sir John Fielding holds his magistrate’s court. For more than a week, however, he had been absent. This day’s session was the first he had held in quite some time, and when word went out that he was back, a great crowd turned out to greet him. It was composed of friends and relations of the prisoners and disputants before the court, as well as those who came from the district round Covent Garden. Now, those who live and work thereabouts are not all of them greengrocers. For a district of modest size, it has more than its fair share of pickpockets, sneak thieves, burglars, prostitutes, procurers, drunks, et cetera, and so a good many of these turn out at noon each day to attend Sir John’s session of his magistrate’s court. Add a few of the aged and infirm, those too poor to afford any other form of entertainment, and you have a sense of the sort of people who might be in attendance on any given day of the week.

There were so many present on that day that when I entered, it seemed I might not find a place to seat myself. But far to the front I saw space enough for me upon a bench just opposite the prisoners’ section. There was nothing more that I could see, and so I blustered down to it, claimed it, and sat myself down.

I looked over at the three prisoners. I meant only to glance, but one of them held my eye. He was an ordinary-appearing fellow, a little stronger than most from the look of his chest and shoulders, but not the sort that one would otherwise notice. I had seen him before, had I not? Ah well, probably in or about Covent Garden. I saw so many in my daily rounds. Then he looked my way and obviously recognized me. His eyes brightened, and he smiled at me. It was clear that he was glad to find me present. Yes, I had seen him before-and more than that, we had conversed. I was in some sense acquainted with the man.

Sir John had been conferring in whispers with Mr. Marsden, his clerk. But then he turned toward the court and bellowed out: ”Call the next case, if you will, Mr. Marsden.”

“Henry Curtin, come forth!”

The man who looked so familiar-he who had smiled at me-then rose and took a place before the magistrate. He glanced back at me, as if looking for assurance. Why should he seek such from me?

Yet of a sudden I knew the answer to that. Henry Curtin was the coachman in whose care I had entrusted Lady Katherine Fielding. I had tipped him a shilling-a goodly amount-but thinking that somehow insufficient, I had gone on to ask his name and to hint broadly to him that I would pass it on to Sir John, and if ever Mr. Curtin came before the magistrate of the Bow Street Court, then he would receive special consideration. A sense of horror swept over me. I had been trapped by my foolish desire to seem important. It was necessary for me to fight to keep my place on the bench, for I felt a nearly overwhelming desire to bolt from the courtroom.

“What is the charge against this man, Mr. Marsden?”

“Public drunkenness.”

“What have you to say for yourself, sir?” asked Sir John.

“Well …” The prisoner cleared his throat. ”My name is Henry Curtin …” There he paused.

“I understand who you are. Get on with your story, man.”

“Uh, yes, yes sir. Well, Henry Curtin is my name, and I work as a coachman on the run to York and back, and I come by a bit of money just yesterday.”

“Let me stop you there and ask you how you came by this ‘bit of money’?”

“It was won on a wager, sir.”

“What sort of wager?”

“‘Twas a contest of fisticuffing. ‘Twas held in a field just north of Clerkenwell. I bet on the black fella and Charlie Tobin bet on the white one.”

“Hmmm,” Sir John mused, ”and I assume the black pugilist was the winner?”

“Weren’t he though!”

“Very well, you came away from the contest five shillings richer.”

“That’s right, and I then and there decided I would take that money and drink my way home on it.”

“Drink your way home? What a novel idea.”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I did not say it was a good idea. I simply said it was a novel one. Now get on with it.”

“Yes sir. What I was going to do was drink a drink of something-gin or rum or brandy-every place I took a notion from Clerkenwell to home.”

“And where is home?”

”Just round the corner in Tavistock Street. I made it as far as Drury Lane, then I fear I ran out.”

“Ran out of money?”

“No, ran out of sense, just completely lost out, like I’d been hit hard by the black fella.”

Sir John turned to Mr. Marsden and asked if there were any comments by the constable who made the arrest. ”Who was that, by the bye?”