The Wench is Dead (12 page)

The black coif, emblematical of death, was placed on the Judge’s head; and after asking the prisoners if they had anything to say, he passed his sentence in the following awesome
terms:

After the trial was over, and sentence pronounced, the three men still persisted in maintaining their innocence. Indeed, Oldfield’s wife, who visited the prison, was so agitated by her
husband’s protestations that “she herself was thrown into a sore fit”.

It had seemed reasonably clear, from various statements including those of Oldfield and Musson that Towns had been somewhat less involved in the happenings on the canal journey than the other
two. It was no surprise therefore, that some members of the legal profession now thought there was a case for the last-minute reconsideration of the sentence imposed upon Towns; so a letter setting
forth their agreed view was taken to London by a barrister, and a special interview with the Secretary of State was obtained. As a result of such representations, Towns was reprieved at (almost
literally) the eleventh hour. The good news was broken to him as the three men were receiving for the last time the Holy Sacrament from the Prison Chaplain. Towns immediately burst into a flood of
tears, and taking each of his former associates by the hand kissed them affectionately, repeating “God bless you, dear friend!” “God bless you, dear friend!” He was later
transported to Australia for life, where he was still alive in 1884 when he was seen and interviewed by one Samuel Carter (like Oldfield and Towns, a citizen of Coventry), who took a lively
interest in local history and who wrote of his experiences on his return to England the following year.
⁴

Oldfield and Musson were duly hanged in public at Oxford. According to the newspaper reports, as many as ten thousand people were estimated to have witnessed the macabre spectacle. It is
reported that from an early hour men sat high on walls, climbed trees, and even perched on the roofs of overlooking houses in order to obtain a good view of those terrible events. A notice-board
placed by the Governor in front of the gaol door stated that the execution would not proceed until after eleven o’clock; but although this occasioned much disappointment among the spectators,
it did not deter their continued attendance, and not a spare square-foot of space was to be found when, at the appointed hour, the execution finally occurred.

First to appear was the Prison Chaplain, solemnly reading the funeral service of the Church of England; next came the two culprits; and following them the Executioner, and the Governor, as well
as some other senior officers from the prison. After the operation of pinioning had been completed, the two men walked with firm step to the platform, and ascended the stairs to the drop without
requiring assistance. When the ropes had been adjusted round their necks, the Executioner shook hands with each man; and then, as the Chaplain intoned his melancholy service, the fatal bolt was
drawn, and in a minute or two, after much convulsion, the wretched malefactors were no more. The dislocation of the cervical vertebrae and the rupture of the jugular vein had been, if not an
instantaneous, at least an effective procedure. The gallows appeared to have sated the sadistic fascination of the mob once more, for there are no reports of any civic disorders as the great throng
dispersed homewards on that sunlit day. It was later disclosed, though it had not been observable at the time, that Oldfield’s last action in life had been to hand over to the Chaplain a
postcard, to be delivered to his young wife, in which to the very end he proclaimed his innocence of the crime for which he had now paid the ultimate penalty.

Locally produced broadsheets, giving every sensational detail of trial and execution, were very quickly on sale in the streets of Oxford – and were selling fast. They were even able to
give a full account, with precise biblical reference, of the last sermon preached to the men at 6 p.m. on the Sunday before their hangings. The text, clearly chosen with ghoulish insensitivity,
could hardly have brought the condemned prisoners much spiritual or physical solace: ‘Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck: they did worse than
their fathers’ (
Jeremiah
, ch. 7, v. 26).

The horror felt by the local population at the murder of Joanna Franks did not end with the punishment of the guilty men. Many, both lay and clerical, thought that something more must be done to
seek to improve the morals of the boatmen on the waterways. They were aware, of course, that the majority of boatmen were called upon to work on the Sabbath, and had therefore little or no
opportunity of attending Divine worship. A letter from the Revd Robert Chantry, Vicar of Summertown Parish, was typical of many in urging a greater degree of concern amongst the boatmen’s
employers, and suggesting some period of time free from duties on the Sabbath to allow those having the inclination the opportunity of attending a Church service. Strangely enough, such attendance
would have been readily possible for the crew-members of the
Barbara Bray
had Oxford been a regular port-of-call, since a special ‘Boatmen’s Chapel’ had been provided by
Henry Ward, a wealthy coal-merchant, in 1838 – a floating chapel, moored off Hythe Bridge, at which services were held on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings. For Joanna Franks, as well
as for her sorrowing husband and parents, it was a human tragedy that the sermon preached to the murderers on the Sunday prior to their execution was perhaps the first – as well as the last
– they ever heard.

But it is all a long time ago now. The floating chapel has long since gone; and no one today can point with any certainty to the shabby plot in the environs of Oxford Gaol where notorious
criminals and murderers and others of the conjecturally damned were once buried.

M
ORSE WAS GLAD
that the Colonel had ignored Doctor Johnson’s advice to all authors that once they had written something particularly fine they
should strike it out. For Part Four was the best-written section, surely, of what was proving to be one of the greatest assets in Morse’s most satisfactory (so far) convalescence; and he
turned back the pages to relish again a few of those fine phrases. Splendid, certainly, were such things as “sated the sadistic fascination”; and, better still, that “ghoulish
insensitivity”. But they were
more
than that. They seemed to suggest that the Colonel’s sympathies had shifted slightly, did they not? Where earlier the bias against the boatmen
had been so pronounced, it appeared that the longer he went on the greater his compassion was growing for that disconsolate crew.

Like Morse’s.

It was such a good
story
! So it was no surprise that the Colonel should have disinterred the bare bones of this particular one from the hundreds of other
nineteenth-century burial-grounds. All the ingredients were there for its appealing to a wide readership, if once it got its foot wedged in the doorway of publicity. Beauty and the Beasts –
that’s what it was, quintessentially.

At least as the Colonel had seen it.

For Morse, who had long ago rejected the bland placebos of conventional religion, the facility offered to errant souls to take the Holy Sacrament before being strangled barbarously in a string
seemed oddly at variance with the ban on the burial of these same souls within some so-called ‘holy ground’. And he was reminded of a passage which had once been part of his mental
baggage, the words of which now slowly returned to him. From
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
– where Tess herself seeks to bury her illegitimate infant in the place where ‘the
nettles grow; and where all unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others …’ What was the end of it? Wasn’t it – yes! – ‘others of the
conjecturally damned are laid’. Well, well! A bit of plagiarism on the Colonel’s part. He really should have put quotation marks around that memorable phrase. Cheating just a little,
really. Were there any other places where he’d cheated? Unwittingly, perhaps? Just a little?

Worth checking?

That floating chapel interested Morse, too, particularly since he had read something about it in a recent issue of the
Oxford Times
. He remembered, vaguely, that although the Oxford Canal
Company gave regular monies towards its upkeep the boat on which it was housed had finally sunk (like the boatmen’s hopes) and was terrestrialized, as it were, later in the century as a
permanent chapel in Hythe Bridge Street; was now, at its latest conversion, metamorphosed to a double-glazing establishment.

Without looking back, Morse could not for the moment remember which of the other crew-members had been married. But it was good to learn that Oldfield’s wife had stood beside her husband,
for better or for worse. And a pretty bloody ‘worse’ it had turned out to be! How interesting it would have been to know something of
her
story, too. How Morse would like to have
been able to interview her, then and there! The recipient (presumably she had been) of that terrible card addressed to her, and handed to the Chaplain at the very foot of the gallows, she must have
found it well-nigh impossible to believe that her husband could commit so foul a deed. But hers had been only a small role in the drama: only a couple of walking-on appearances, the first ending
with a dead faint, and the second with a poignant little message from the grave. Morse nodded rather sadly to himself. These days there would be a legion of reporters from the
News of the
World
, the
Sunday Mirror
, and the rest, hounding the life of the poor woman and seeking to prise out of her such vital information as whether he’d snored, or been tattooed on
either upper or nether limbs, or how frequently they’d indulged in sexual intercourse, or what had been the usual greeting of the loving husband after coming back from one of his earlier
murderous missions.

We live in a most degenerate age, decided Morse. Yet he knew, deep down, what nonsense such thinking was. He was no better himself, really, than one of those scandal-sheet scouts. He’d
just confessed – had he not? – how much he himself wanted to interview Mrs Oldfield and talk about all the things she must have known. And what (sobering thought!) what if
she
had invited each of them in, one after the other, separately – and asked for £20,000 a time?

No chance of any interview or talk now though – not with any of them … But, suddenly, it struck Morse that perhaps there was: Samuel Carter’s
Travels and Talks in the
Antipodes
. That might be a most interesting document, surely? And (it struck Morse with particular pleasure) it would certainly be somewhere on the shelves of the three or four great UK
libraries, the foremost of which was always going to be the Bodleian.

Lewis had already been given his research project; and work was now beginning to pile up for his second researcher in the field: what with
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
, and now
Carter’s book … Had the Colonel consulted that? Must have done, Morse supposed – which was a little disappointing.

That Friday evening, Morse was visited by both Sergeant Lewis and Christine Greenaway, the latter suddenly changing her mind and foregoing a cocktail reception in Wellington
Square. No trouble at all. Just the opposite.

Morse was very happy.

A
S USUAL WHEN
she went into Oxford on a Saturday, Christine Greenaway drove down to the Pear Tree roundabout and caught the Park-and-Ride bus. Alighting
in Cornmarket, she walked up to Carfax, turned right into Queen’s Street, and along through the busy pedestrian precinct to Bonn Square, where just past the Selfridges building she pushed
through the doors of the Westgate Central Library. Among the wrong assumptions made by Chief Inspector Morse the previous evening was the fact that it would be sheer child’s play for her to
fish out the fiche (as it were) of any newspaper ever published, and that having effected such effortless entry into times past she had the technical skill and the requisite equipment to carry out
some immediate research. She hadn’t told him that the Bodleian had not, to the best of her knowledge, ever micro-filmed the whole of the nation’s press from the nineteenth century, nor
that she herself was one of those people against whom all pieces of electrical gadgetry waged a non-stop war. She’d just agreed with him: yes, it would be a fairly easy job; and she’d
be glad to help – again. To be truthful, though, she was. Earlier that morning she’d telephoned one of her acquaintances in the Reference Section of the Westgate Central, and learned
that she could have immediate access to
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
for 1859 and 1860. How long did she want to book things for? One hour? Two? Christine thought one hour would be
enough.