Alias Grace (50 page)

This is the man, then, who once saved the life of Grace Marks, against considerable odds – cold evidence, outraged public opinion, and her own confused and implausible testimony. Simon is curious to find out exactly how he managed it.

“Dr. Jordan. A pleasure.”

“It is kind of you to spare me the time,” says Simon.

“Not at all. I have Reverend Verringer’s letter; he speaks very highly of you, and has told me something of your proceedings. I am glad to be of help in the interests of science; and as you have heard, I am sure, we lawyers always welcome a chance to show off. But before we get down to it –” A decanter is produced, cigars. The sherry is excellent: Mr. MacKenzie does himself well.

“You are no relation to the famous rebel?” Simon asks, by way of beginning.

“None at all, though I would almost rather claim kin than not; it isn’t the disadvantage now that it once was, and the old boy has long since been pardoned, and is seen as the father of reforms. But feeling ran high against him in those days; that alone could have put a noose around Grace Marks’ neck.”

“How so?” says Simon.

“If you’ve read back over the newspapers, you’ll have noticed that those which supported Mr. Mackenzie and his cause were the only ones to say a good word for Grace. The others were all for hanging her, and William Lyon Mackenzie as well, and anyone else thought to harbour republican sentiments.”

“But surely there was no connection!”

“None whatsoever. There is never any need for a connection, in such matters. Mr. Kinnear was a Tory gentleman, and William Lyon
Mackenzie took the part of the poor Scots and Irish, and the emigrant settlers generally. Birds of a feather, was what they thought. I sweated blood at the trial, I can tell you. It was my first case, you know, my very first; I’d just been called to the bar. I knew it would be the making or the breaking of me, and, as things turned out, it did give me quite a leg up.”

“How did you come to take the case?” asks Simon.

“My dear man, I was
handed
it. It was a hot potato. No one else wanted it. The firm took it pro bono – neither of the accused had any money, of course – and as I was the youngest, it ended up with me; and at the last minute, too, with scarcely a month to prepare. ‘Well, my lad,’ said old Bradley, ‘here it is. Everyone knows you’ll lose, because there’s no doubt as to their guilt; but it will be the
style
in which you lose that will count. There is graceless losing, and there is elegant losing. Let us see you lose as elegantly as possible. We will all be cheering you on.’ The old boy thought he was doing me a favour, and perhaps he was, at that.”

“You acted for both of them, I believe,” says Simon.

“Yes. That was wrong, in retrospect, as their interests proved to be in conflict. There were a lot of things about the trial that were wrong; but the practice of jurisprudence was much laxer then.” MacKenzie frowns at his cigar, which has gone out. It strikes Simon that the poor fellow doesn’t really enjoy smoking, but feels he ought to do it because it goes with the racehorse pictures.

“So you’ve met Our Lady of the Silences?” MacKenzie asks.

“Is that what you call her? Yes; I’ve been spending a good deal of time with her, trying to determine …”

“Whether she is innocent?”

“Whether she is insane. Or was, at the time of the murders. Which I suppose would be innocence of a kind.”

“Good luck to you,” says MacKenzie. “It was a thing I could never be satisfied about, myself.”

“She purports to have no memory of the murders; or at least of the Montgomery woman’s.”

“My dear man,” says MacKenzie, “you’d be amazed how common such lapses of memory are, amongst the criminal element. Very few of them can remember having done anything wrong at all. They will bash a man half to death, and cut him to ribbons, and then claim they only gave him a little tap with the end of a bottle. Forgetting, in such cases, is a good deal more convenient than remembering.”

“Grace’s amnesia seems genuine enough,” says Simon, “or so I have come to believe, in the light of my previous clinical experience. On the other hand, although she can’t seem to remember the murder, she has a minute recollection of the details surrounding it – every item of laundry she ever washed, for instance; and such things as the boat race that preceded her own flight across the Lake. She even remembers the names of the boats.”

“How did you check her facts? In the newspapers, I suppose,” says MacKenzie. “Has it occurred to you that she may have derived her corroborative details from the same source? Criminals will read about themselves endlessly, if given the chance. They are as vain in that way as authors. When McDermott asserted that Grace helped him in his strangling escapade, he may very well have got the idea from the Kingston
Chronicle and Gazette
, which proposed it as fact, even before there was an inquest. The knot around the dead woman’s neck, they said, obviously required two persons to tie it. A piece of rubbish; you can’t tell from such a knot whether it was tied by one person or two, or twenty, for that matter. Of course I made hash of this notion at the trial.”

“Now you have turned around, and are pleading the other side of the case,” says Simon.

“One must always keep both sides in one’s head; it’s the only way to anticipate the moves of one’s opponent. Not that mine had a very
hard job of work, in this case. But I did what I could; a man can but do his best, as Walter Scott has remarked somewhere. The courtroom was crowded as Hell, and – despite the November weather – just as hot, and the air was foul. Nevertheless, I cross-examined some of the witnesses for over three hours. I must say it took stamina; but I was a younger man then.”

“You began by disallowing the arrest itself, as I recall.”

“Yes. Well, Marks and McDermott were seized on American soil, and without a warrant. I made a fine speech about the violation of international frontiers, and habeas corpus and the like; but Chief Justice Robinson was having none of it.

“I then attempted to show that Mr. Kinnear was something of a black sheep, and lax in his morals; which was undoubtedly true. He was a hypochondriac as well. Neither of these things had much to do with the fact that he’d been murdered, but I did my utmost, especially with the morals; and it’s a fact that those four people kept popping in and out of one another’s beds like a French farce, so that it was hard to keep it straight who was sleeping where.

“I then proceeded to destroy the reputation of the unfortunate Montgomery woman. I didn’t feel guilty about slandering her, as the poor creature was already well out of it. She’d had a child previously, you know – which died, I presume of midwives’ mercy – and at the autopsy it was found she was pregnant. Undoubtedly the father was Kinnear, but I did my level best to produce a shadowy Romeo who’d strangled the poor woman out of jealousy. However, pull as I might, that rabbit refused to come out of the hat.”

“Possibly because there was no rabbit,” says Simon.

“Quite right. My next trick was an attempted sleight-of-hand with the shirts. Who was wearing which shirt, when, and why? McDermott had been caught in one of Kinnear’s shirts – what then? I established the fact that Nancy had been in the habit of selling her employer’s cast-off garments to the servants, with or without her
master’s permission; so McDermott could have come by his Shirt of Nessus honestly enough. Unfortunately, Kinnear’s corpse had churlishly slipped on one of McDermott’s shirts, which was a stumbling block indeed. I tried my best to avoid it, but the Prosecution hammered me with it, fair and square.

“I then pointed the finger of suspicion at the peddler to whom the bloody shirt thrown behind the door could be traced, as he had tried to palm off the same goods elsewhere. But that was no good either; there was testimony that the peddler had sold that very shirt to McDermott – a whole poker hand of shirts, in fact – and had then been unobliging enough to have vanished into thin air. For some reason he didn’t wish to appear at the trial and run the risk of getting his own neck stretched.”

“Cowardly fellow,” says Simon.

“Just so,” says MacKenzie, laughing. “And when it came to Grace, I must say I wasn’t given much help. The foolish girl could not be dissuaded from dressing herself up in the murdered woman’s finery, an act which was viewed with horror by the press and public; although if I’d had my wits about me, I would have advanced that very fact as evidence of an innocent and untroubled conscience, or, even better, of lunacy. But I didn’t have the cunning to think of it at the time.

“In addition, Grace had muddied the trail considerably. She’d said at the time of her arrest that she hadn’t known where Nancy was. Then, at the inquest, she said she suspected Nancy was dead and in the cellar, though she hadn’t seen her put there. But, at the trial, and in her supposed Confession – that little item put out by the
Star
, and a tidy sum they made by it – she claimed to have seen McDermott dragging Nancy by the hair, and tossing her down the stairs. She never went so far as to admit to the strangling, however.”

“But she did admit it to you, later,” says Simon.

“Did she? I don’t recall.…”

“In the Penitentiary,” says Simon. “She told you she was haunted by Nancy’s bloodshot eyes; or so Mrs. Moodie reported you as having said.”

MacKenzie gives an uncomfortable wiggle, and looks down. “Grace was certainly in a troubled state of mind,” he says. “Confused and melancholy.”

“But the eyes?”

“Mrs. Moodie – for whom I have the greatest regard,” says MacKenzie, “has a somewhat conventional imagination, and a tendency to exaggerate. She put some fine speeches into the mouths of her subjects, which it is highly unlikely they ever made, McDermott having been an unmitigated lout – even I, who was defending him, found it a stretch to scrape together a few good words for the man – and Grace a near child, and uneducated. As for the eyes, what is strongly anticipated by the mind is often supplied by it. You see it every day on the witness stand.”

“So there were no eyes?”

MacKenzie wiggles again. “I couldn’t swear to the eyes, on oath,” he says. “Grace said nothing, exactly, that would stand up in court, as constituting a confession, although she did say she was sorry that Nancy was dead. But anyone might say that.”

“Indeed,” says Simon. He suspects now that the eyes did not originate with Mrs. Moodie, and wonders what other parts of her narrative were due to MacKenzie’s own flamboyant tastes as a raconteur. “But we also have McDermott’s statement, made just before he was hanged.”

“Yes, yes; a scaffold pronouncement always makes it into the newspapers.”

“Why did he wait so long, I wonder?”

“Until the very last, he hoped for a commutation, since Grace had been given one. He considered their guilt to be equal, and thought the sentences ought to be, as well; and he could not accuse
her without knotting the noose very firmly around his own neck, as he’d need to admit to the axe play and so forth.”

“Whereas Grace could accuse him with relative impunity,” says Simon.

“Just so,” says MacKenzie. “Nor did she flinch from it when the moment came.
Sauve qui peut!
That woman has nerves like flint. She’d have made a good lawyer, if a man.”

“But McDermott didn’t get his reprieve,” says Simon.

“Of course not! He was mad to expect it, but furious nonetheless. He considered that too to be Grace’s fault – in his eyes, she’d cornered the clemency market – and as I read it, he then wanted to be revenged.”

“Somewhat understandably,” says Simon. “As I recall, he claimed that Grace came down into the cellar with him, and strangled Nancy with her own kerchief.”

“Well, the kerchief was indeed found. But the rest of it is not hard evidence. The man had already told several different stories, and was a notorious liar into the bargain.”

“Although,” says Simon, “to turn Devil’s advocate – just because a man is known to lie, it does not follow that he always does so.”

“Precisely,” says MacKenzie. “Well, I see the fascinating Grace has been leading you a merry chase.”

“Not so merry,” says Simon. “I must admit I’ve been baffled. What she says has the ring of truth; her manner is candid and sincere; and yet I can’t shake the suspicion that, in some way I cannot put my finger on, she is lying to me.”

“Lying,” says MacKenzie. “A severe term, surely. Has she been lying to you, you ask? Let me put it this way – did Scheherazade lie? Not in her own eyes; indeed, the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood. They belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has
merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end.”

“Which is?” asks Simon.

“To keep the Sultan amused,” says MacKenzie. “To keep the blow from falling. To forestall your departure, and make you stay in the room with her as long as possible.”

“What on earth would be the point of that?” says Simon. “Amusing me won’t get her out of prison.”

“I don’t suppose she really expects that,” says MacKenzie. “But isn’t it obvious? The poor creature has fallen in love with you. A single man, more or less young and not ill-favoured, appears to one who has long been sequestered, and deprived of masculine company. You are doubtless the object of her waking daydreams.”

“Surely not,” says Simon, flushing despite himself. If Grace is in love with him, she has preserved the secret extremely well.

“But I say, surely so! I had the very experience myself, or the twin of it; for I had to pass many hours with her, in her jail cell in Toronto, while she spun out her yarn for me to as great a length as it would go. She was besotted with me, and didn’t wish to let me out of her sight. Such melting and languorous glances! A hand placed on hers, and she would have thrown herself into my arms.”

Simon is disgusted. What a conceited little troll, with his natty vest and bulbous nose! “Indeed?” he says, trying not to let his anger show.

“Ah yes,” says MacKenzie. “She thought she was going to be hanged, you know. Fear is a remarkable aphrodisiac; I advise you to try it some time. We lawyers are so often cast in the role of St. George, at least temporarily. Find a maiden chained to a rock and about to be devoured by a monster, rescue her, then have her yourself. It’s the usual thing with maidens, wouldn’t you agree? I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. She was very young and tender then; though no doubt prison life has hardened her.”