“I was between cases and it was interesting. It served to distract me from the monochromatic tedium of life,” he added with a sigh.
“From the beginning I was certain it was a copy-cat crime. A few months ago, I went to visit my brother Sherrinford. He urged me to come and take away some of the things I’d left at home when I went off to Oxford and had no room for them. Essentially, he advised that if I did not cart them away, he would discard them. And he gave me some of our father’s things, a lovely roll-top desk, for example.
“At dinner one evening, Sherrinford said that he had an odd feeling about a neighbour, Mr. Horton. His farm was nearby and Sherrinford passed it almost daily. He noticed that there were usually children playing near the road, but it dawned on him one day that he hardly ever saw the same children. There always seemed to be new arrivals. As I’d told him about the Hardy case, Sherrinford was concerned that it was a similar child abduction scheme. I proceeded to check at the workhouse from which these children were taken. Hundreds had been placed with Horton. According to the employees at the workhouse, Horton’s arrangement seemed noble at first. For a fee, he agreed to take the children to his farm. He would teach the boys trades, and his wife would instruct the girls in needlework, laundry, washing, and general household work. The children ranged in age from ten to fourteen.
“I also learned that authorities were planning to see the children to determine if they had been vaccinated. A wise decision, given that in London - the best-vaccinated city in England - some five to ten thousand people have died of smallpox in the last five years. So I accompanied the doctors to Horton’s farm. It turned out that he used the children as slaves. They plowed, they cleaned. He worked them to the bone.
“When we started taking account of them,” he continued, “we realized that many of the children were missing. Some of the children had been there only a few months and they were but ten or twelve years of age. Of course, Horton argued that many had left on their own, but they were not there long enough to learn a trade or mature enough to go off on their own to make a living.”
“You’re right. His scheme was similar to that of Margaret and Millicent Hardy.”
He nodded. “We found hundreds of graves. It became quite clear that when Horton acquired too many to feed and when they became too ill and malnourished to work, he got rid of them. He simply made room for new ones.”
I felt sick to my stomach.
“You said you saw it as a copy-cat crime, Sherlock. What do you mean?”
“I use the term to describe someone who imitates another person’s crime.”
Almost twelve years later, I realized that perhaps Sherlock coined the term, for it was not until I purchased Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel, Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls, for my daughter that I saw the term ‘copy-cat’ in literature for the first time.
“You, see, back in the late 1840’s,” he explained, “a man named Bartholomew Peter Drouet was tried for the murder of several children. He also was a child farmer who neglected and abused poor children he took from an overcrowded workhouse. But what Bartholomew Drouet had not counted on was an outbreak of cholera that brought doctors to his farm to treat the pauper children. Drouet’s immensely profitable business came quickly to a halt. Likewise, Horton had not counted on his farm being investigated as to whether the children had received smallpox vaccinations. So now his sordid business and greed and the deaths at his hand of these children led him to the Cold Meat Shed.”
I simply nodded and turned my head to stare out the window, wondering how such cruelty and heartlessness could exist in the world. Yet I still questioned the right to execute anyone, even for such vile crimes as Horton committed.
Clearly, Sherlock felt it was a suitable end. More than once he’d told me that when one commits a heinous crime, when one does something very bad, it needs must end on a gallows. Just now, all I wanted to do was banish the sights and sounds of Horton’s final moments out of my mind, but I could not.
I was thankful that public hangings had finally ceased. For years, hangings were a public spectacle. In fact, the proceedings were so popular that not very long ago, twenty-eight people died in a crush after a crowd of up to twenty thousand would-be spectators rampaged out of control. Things had changed a little. Horsemonger Gaol and other prisons had closed. The death penalty was now reserved for heinous crimes like wilful murder, malicious assault, and treason. To hasten death and cause less pain, Executioner Marwood had made some improvements to the process of execution. He had introduced the ‘long drop’ method, designed to break the person’s neck and cause near-instantaneous unconsciousness.
But efforts to repeal capital punishment altogether had failed. Charles Dickens opposed it vehemently and wrote many letters trying to stop executions, to no avail. He was appalled at the swelling crowds, the people clustered together to watch a hanging of a criminal, to applaud as his head dangled, to clap as the body was cut down.
So was I.
I had considered the moral arguments and come to the conclusion that though it might seem right to punish the vicious and reward the virtuous, such renderings were not up to us, to Man. Indeed, if there is an immortal soul, should not its Creator be the one who decides when the soul comes into the world and when it leaves it? I’d come to the conclusion that the death penalty should be abolished.
Finally, I
