“Quite right,” said he.
“Well, I, sir, am Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Court, and I am conducting this investigation. I have no intention of going back over what we have heard from her already. It would be unnecessary for me, and, no doubt, quite painful for her.”
“Oh, no doubt you’re right.”
“I will, however, briefly summarize what has already been established.”
And this he proceeded to do in his impressive and inimitable fashion. None but Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice himself, could even begin to approach Sir John’s powers of summary. His, I do honestly believe, was the more logical mind. When he had concluded with that, he made an offer to Mr. Turbott.
“Sir,” said he, “I shall allow you and those who have come with you to remain and hear the rest of this sad tale. But I do so only on the condition that all three of you will keep silent and allow me and only me to conduct the interrogation. There will be no additions, interruptions, or comments. Do you agree to this?”
“Oh, certainly! And without reservation. I speak for myself and my employees,” said the silversmith.
“All right then, I believe that Mistress Hooker was about to tell us that she was taken to a house in. . Would you say Holborn or Clerkenwell?”
“I think that Clerkenwell is the more likely,” said she.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I’ve visited there once or twice on errands for Mr. Turbott.” She turned to him and offered him a smile. “And I was less dazed than before. I took note of my surroundings, you see, and it was all quite familiar-the fields and that.”
“I understand,” said Sir John.
“But there was a house at a crossroads-I can’t say where any better than that-and that turned out to be the place we were headed.”
“And what did it look like? What was its appearance?”
“Its appearance was ordinary. It was just a house.”
“Come now. You can do better than that, surely. Was it a house of one story or two? Had it been painted? What color had it? What of the yard-large or small? Please, Elizabeth, you must make a blind man
Quite inappropriately, she giggled at that last request of his. Yet she soon brought herself under control and gave a fair description of the place. It was, she said, a house of two stories and a garret. (“How well I remember that garret!”) One would not call it a house in good condition, for it was unpainted-or if indeed the house had once been painted, any trace of color had long ago disappeared from it. There were trees in the yard, though none of them of any real size, and a great pile of leaves, left over from last autumn. And one final detail: As she had declared earlier, it was a house at a crossroads; there was another, a proper farm house, at the opposite corner. It was well built and well maintained-all that the house she described was not.
(So fixed was my attention upon Sir John and Elizabeth that I had not noticed until she began her description that Clarissa was taking down all that was said by her with paper and pencil. This was something new.)
“Now,” said Sir John to Elizabeth, “you have given a fair and complete description of the place to which you were taken, but I note that much of it, perhaps most, could only have been noted by you from a distance. You seemed to have known in advance to which house you were headed.”
“Well, I didn’t!” said she rather hotly. “Whilst I was prisoner in that house I had much opportunity to study the details that you eagerly sought. But for that matter, my two captors talked of it in such a way that I knew we were close.”
“Saying. . what?”
“Oh, they wondered what sort of price I might fetch. The one called Dick seemed to doubt whether I would be taken at all, kept insisting that I was not pretty enough, nor was my bosom sufficient.”
“All right. I’ll accept that,” said Sir John. “Let’s get on with it, shall we. You entered this old house in the company of the two men, and then what?”
“We went round the back and entered through the kitchen. I remember they knocked upon the door and said who they were. Bobby and Dick, they said, and the door was opened to us. Waiting for us there in the kitchen were three people-a man about forty, a young girl who was fair pretty, and a woman with the ugliest face I did ever see. It was her, the ugly one, that the two men who brought me bowed and scraped to. She looked me over proper, pinched my arm and my bosom and just all over. And finally she says to me, ‘What about it, dearie? Will you join us?’ Which I took to mean, will you follow the Devil’s path? And then-”
At this point, Mr. Tarkington, unable to contain himself further, interrupted, calling to his chief, the silversmith Turbott: “Sir, that sounds like Mother Jeffers’s house to me-from the look of the house, the way she describes the old harridan herself.”
“You’ve been there?” Turbott demanded.
“A time or two.”
“What about it, Elizabeth?” cried Turbott. “Was that the woman’s name?”
“I. . I think so. Yes, perhaps it was. When I said no and declared I would have no part of her life she slapped my face, took my dress from me, and said I should be thrown into the garret. Then did the two men say, ‘Yes, Mother Jeffers.’ That was it!
The room then fell into complete turmoil. Mrs. Hooker was shouting out in praise of her daughter for resisting the Devil and his minions. Mr. Tarkington shouted, “Well, let’s go out and get the old witch.” Joe the apprentice urged that they bring a rope. And Mr. Turbott cried, “Let’s see if some of those people out in the hall might wish to come along.” But Sir John, alone of them all, resisted these calls for swift justice and sought to restore some order.
“Listen to me,” said he who could outshout them all. “I warned you, gentlemen, that you must leave if you did not keep silent-and you agreed to my terms. Now you have violated your side of the agreement, so I must ask you to leave this room most immediate.”
“Oh, we shall leave right enough,” called out Mr. Turbott, “and we shall head for Clerkenwell. You may command in this room, sir, but once outside it, we shall command, as you will see.”
“I put you on warning, sir, that all who defy the law will be punished severely, and that includes yourself. I will not allow rule by mob in my precincts.”
The difficulty-as Sir John well knew-was that he could not confidently speak of “my precincts,” for, truth to tell, though there was no strict division of territories, as a matter of custom, it would generally have fallen to Mr. Saunders Welch, as magistrate of Holborn to deal with this matter; Clerkenwell, after all, was near to Holborn. All this and more we discussed once we had returned from that memorable visit. Yet as we four-Elizabeth, Clarissa, Sir John, and I-rocked back and forth along the way to the house at the four corners in Clerkenwell, we spoke little amongst ourselves. The reason for this, of course, was the presence of Elizabeth, whom we had come to regard in a different light from before. No longer a hapless victim, she now seemed to be hiding more than she had disclosed, altering facts to suit her, and generally providing unreliable information. There was but a brief period at the beginning of our journey when we, the Bow Street contingent, felt free to speak our minds, and that was when Mrs. Hooker was preparing Elizabeth for the trip as we awaited the putative victim in the hackney coach. ’Twas then that Clarissa opened the discussion with a confession.
“Never, I believe, have I been so mistaken about a person,” said she, “as I have been about my old friend Elizabeth.”
“Oh?” said Sir John. “Mistaken in what way?”
“In every way. I thought her dull and commonplace, unimaginative and without ambition-oh, specially without any sort of intellectual ambition.”
“And now what do you think of her?” I asked. “You were signaling something to me from across the room of her consistency.”
“Oh yes, that! Yes, of course, it proves my point.”
“What do you mean by saying that it proves your point?” asked Sir John.
“Simple enough,” said she. “You remember when she claimed to have been beaten about the head by one of the two who had abducted her? She said she was in a daze for quite some time afterward.”
“Yes, naturally I remember.”
