Authors: Sheridan Le Fanu
MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE,—MY LORD,
I am ordered by the High Court of Appeal to acquaint your lordship,
in order to your better preparing yourself for your trial, that a
true bill hath been sent down, and the indictment lieth against your
lordship for the murder of one Lewis Pyneweck of Shrewsbury,
citizen, wrongfully executed for the forgery of a bill of exchange,
on the —th day of — last, by reason of the wilful perversion
of the evidence, and the undue pressure put upon the jury, together
with the illegal admission of evidence by your lordship, well
knowing the same to be illegal, by all which the promoter of the
prosecution of the said indictment, before the High Court of Appeal,
hath lost his life.
And the trial of the said indictment, I am farther ordered to
acquaint your lordship, is fixed for the both day of — next
ensuing, by the right honourable the Lord Chief Justice Twofold, of
the court aforesaid, to wit, the High Court of Appeal, on which day
it will most certainly take place. And I am farther to acquaint your
lordship, to prevent any surprise or miscarriage, that your case
stands first for the said day, and that the said High Court of
Appeal sits day and night, and never rises; and herewith, by order
of the said court, I furnish your lordship with a copy (extract) of
the record in this case, except of the indictment, whereof,
notwithstanding, the substance and effect is supplied to your
lordship in this Notice. And farther I am to inform you, that in
case the jury then to try your lordship should find you guilty, the
right honourable the Lord Chief Justice will, in passing sentence of
death upon you, fix the day of execution for the 10th day of —,
being one calendar month from the day of your trial.
It was signed by
CALEB SEARCHER,
Officer of the Crown Solicitor in the Kingdom of Life and Death.
The Judge glanced through the parchment.
"'Sblood! Do they think a man like me is to be bamboozled by their
buffoonery?"
The Judge's coarse features were wrung into one of his sneers; but he
was pale. Possibly, after all, there was a conspiracy on foot. It was
queer. Did they mean to pistol him in his carriage? or did they only aim
at frightening him?
Judge Harbottle had more than enough of animal courage. He was not
afraid of highwaymen, and he had fought more than his share of duels,
being a foul-mouthed advocate while he held briefs at the bar. No one
questioned his fighting qualities. But with respect to this particular
case of Pyneweck, he lived in a house of glass. Was there not his
pretty, dark-eyed, over-dressed housekeeper, Mrs. Flora Carwell? Very
easy for people who knew Shrewsbury to identify Mrs. Pyneweck, if once
put upon the scent; and had he not stormed and worked hard in that case?
Had he not made it hard sailing for the prisoner? Did he not know very
well what the bar thought of it? It would be the worst scandal that ever
blasted Judge.
So much there was intimidating in the matter but nothing more. The Judge
was a little bit gloomy for a day or two after, and more testy with
every one than usual.
He locked up the papers; and about a week after he asked his
housekeeper, one day, in the library:
"Had your husband never a brother?"
Mrs. Carwell squalled on this sudden introduction of the funereal topic,
and cried exemplary "piggins full," as the Judge used pleasantly to say.
But he was in no mood for trifling now, and he said sternly:
"Come, madam! this wearies me. Do it another time; and give me an answer
to my question." So she did.
Pyneweck had no brother living. He once had one; but he died in Jamaica.
"How do you know he is dead?" asked the Judge.
"Because he told me so."
"Not the dead man."
"Pyneweck told me so."
"Is that all?" sneered the Judge.
He pondered this matter; and time went on. The Judge was growing a
little morose, and less enjoying. The subject struck nearer to his
thoughts than he fancied it could have done. But so it is with most
undivulged vexations, and there was no one to whom he could tell this
one.
It was now the ninth; and Mr Justice Harbottle was glad. He knew nothing
would come of it. Still it bothered him; and to-morrow would see it well
over.
(What of the paper I have cited? No one saw it during his life; no one,
after his death. He spoke of it to Dr. Hedstone; and what purported to
be "a copy," in the old Judge's handwriting, was found. The original was
nowhere. Was it a copy of an illusion, incident to brain disease? Such
is my belief.)
Judge Harbottle went this night to the play at Drury Lane. He was one
of the old fellows who care nothing for late hours, and occasional
knocking about in pursuit of pleasure. He had appointed with two cronies
of Lincoln's Inn to come home in his coach with him to sup after the
play.
They were not in his box, but were to meet him near the entrance, and
get into his carriage there; and Mr. Justice Harbottle, who hated
waiting, was looking a little impatiently from the window.
The Judge yawned.
He told the footman to watch for Counsellor Thavies and Counsellor
Beller, who were coming; and, with another yawn, he laid his cocked hat
on his knees, closed his eyes, leaned back in his corner, wrapped his
mantle closer about him, and began to think of pretty Mrs. Abington.
And being a man who could sleep like a sailor, at a moment's notice, he
was thinking of taking a nap. Those fellows had no business to keep a
judge waiting.
He heard their voices now. Those rake-hell counsellors were laughing,
and bantering, and sparring after their wont. The carriage swayed and
jerked, as one got in, and then again as the other followed. The door
clapped, and the coach was now jogging and rumbling over the pavement.
The Judge was a little bit sulky. He did not care to sit up and open his
eyes. Let them suppose he was asleep. He heard them laugh with more
malice than good-humour, he thought, as they observed it. He would give
them a d—d hard knock or two when they got to his door, and till then
he would counterfeit his nap.
The clocks were chiming twelve. Beller and Thavies were silent as
tombstones. They were generally loquacious and merry rascals.
The Judge suddenly felt himself roughly seized and thrust from his
corner into the middle of the seat, and opening his eyes, instantly he
found himself between his two companions.
Before he could blurt out the oath that was at his lips, he saw that
they were two strangers—evil-looking fellows, each with a pistol in his
hand, and dressed like Bow Street officers.
The Judge clutched at the check-string. The coach pulled up. He stared
about him. They were not among houses; but through the windows, under a
broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to
left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air,
standing here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and
twigs like fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge's coming.
A footman came to the window. He knew his long face and sunken eyes. He
knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years ago a footman in his service,
whom he had turned off at a moment's notice, in a burst of jealousy, and
indicted for a missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the jail-fever.
The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed
mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.
The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror considered the question of
resistance. But his athletic days were long over. This moor was a
desert. There was no help to be had. He was in the hands of strange
servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they
were under the command of his captors. There was nothing for it but
submission, for the present.
Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the
prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window.
It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and
from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight
or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away,
leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder
reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay
bones.
On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from
the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these
unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we
see him in the famous print of the "Idle Apprentice," though here his
perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly
shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that
hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg.
A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean;
and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over
which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin
were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.
This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up,
and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the
air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering
over a gibbet, "A robe for Judge Harbottle!"
The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.
So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most
hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought, he must be raving. And the
dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was
dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.
There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A
brutum fulmen
might bring a real one on his head.
Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he
would move to unearth and hunt them down.
Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a
porte-cochère
.
The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the
walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards
placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and
gigantic soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders.
They looked straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury,
with no noise but the clank of their shoes. He saw these by glimpses,
round corners, and at the ends of passages, but he did not actually pass
them by.
And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock,
confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There
was nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind
elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent
abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror's back was seen
escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some
dozen barristers, some fiddling with pen and ink, others buried in
briefs, some beckoning, with the plumes of their pens, to their
attorneys, of whom there were no lack; there were clerks to-ing and
fro-ing, and the officers of the court, and the registrar, who was handing
up a paper to the judge; and the tipstaff, who was presenting a note at
the end of his wand to a king's counsel over the heads of the crowd
between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never rose day or
night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of everybody in
it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid features of all
the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or less secretly
suffering.
"The King against Elijah Harbottle!" shouted the officer.
"Is the appellant Lewis Pyneweck in court?" asked Chief-Justice Twofold,
in a voice of thunder, that shook the woodwork of the court, and boomed
down the corridors.
Up stood Pyneweck from his place at the table.
"Arraign the prisoner!" roared the Chief: and Judge Harbottle felt the
panels of the dock round him, and the floor, and the rails quiver in the
vibrations of that tremendous voice.
The prisoner,
in limine
, objected to this pretended court, as being a
sham, and non-existent in point of law; and then, that, even if it were
a court constituted by law (the Judge was growing dazed), it had not and
could not have any jurisdiction to try him for his conduct on the bench.
Whereupon the chief-justice laughed suddenly, and every one in court,
turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also, till the laugh grew and
roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but
glittering eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all
the voices laughed, not a single face of all those that concentrated
their gaze upon him looked like a laughing face. The mirth subsided as
suddenly as it began.
The indictment was read. Judge Harbottle actually pleaded! He pleaded
"Not Guilty." A jury were sworn. The trial proceeded. Judge Harbottle
was bewildered. This could not be real. He must be either mad, or
going
mad, he thought.
One thing could not fail to strike even him. This Chief-Justice Twofold,
who was knocking him about at every turn with sneer and gibe, and
roaring him down with his tremendous voice, was a dilated effigy of
himself; an image of Mr. Justice Harbottle, at least double his size,
and with all his fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage,
enhanced awfully.
Nothing the prisoner could argue, cite, or state, was permitted to
retard for a moment the march of the case towards its catastrophe.
The chief-justice seemed to feel his power over the jury, and to exult
and riot in the display of it. He glared at them, he nodded to them; he
seemed to have established an understanding with them. The lights were
faint in that part of the court. The jurors were mere shadows, sitting
in rows; the prisoner could see a dozen pair of white eyes shining,
coldly, out of the darkness; and whenever the judge in his charge, which
was contemptuously brief, nodded and grinned and gibed, the prisoner
could see, in the obscurity, by the dip of all these rows of eyes
together, that the jury nodded in acquiescence.