The Wench Is Dead (7 page)

George Bloxham, the captain of a northward-bound Pickford boat, testified that he had drawn alongside Oldfield's boat just below Aynho, and that a few exchanges had been made, as normal, between the two crews. Oldfield had referred to his woman passenger in terms which were completely "disgusting", vowing, in the rudest language, what he would do with her that very night" or else he would burke her".
^[3]
Bloxham added that Oldfield was very drunk; and Musson and Towns, too, were "rather well away, the pair of 'em".

James Robson, keeper of the Somerton Deep Lock, said that he and his wife, Anna, were awakened at about midnight by a scream of terror coming from the direction of the lock. At first they had assumed it was the cry of a young child; but when they looked down from the bedroom window of the lock-house, they saw only some men by the side of the boat, and a woman seated on top of the cabin with her legs hanging down over the side. Three things the Robsons were able to recall from that grim night, their evidence proving so crucial at the trial. Joanna had called out in a terrified voice "I'll not go down! Don't attempt me!" Then one of the crew had shouted "Mind her legs! Mind her legs!"
And after that the passenger had resumed her frightened screams: "What have you done with my shoes – oh! please tell me!" Anna Robson enquired who the woman was, and was told by one of the crew: "A passenger – don't worry!", the crewman adding that she was having words with her husband, who was with her aboard.

Forbidding to Joanna as the tall lock-house must have appeared that midnight, standing sentinel-like above the black waters, it presented her with her one last chance of life – had she sought asylum within its walls.

But she made no such request.

At this point, or shortly after, it appears that the terrified woman took another walk along the towpath to escape the drunken crew; but she was almost certainly back on board when the boat negotiated Gibraltar Lock. After which – and only some very short time after – she must have been out walking (yet again!) since Robert Bond, a crew-hand from the narrow-boat
Isis
, gave evidence that he passed her on the towpath. Bond recorded his surprise that such an attractive woman should be out walking on her own so late, and he recalled asking her if all was well. But she had only nodded, hurriedly, and passed on into the night. As he approached Gibraltar lock, Bond had met Oldfield's boat, and was asked by of its crew if he had seen a woman walking the path, the man adding, in the crudest terms, what would do to her once he had her in his clutches once again.

No one, apart from the evil boatmen on the
Barbara Bray,
was ever to see Joanna Franks alive again.

As with Part One, Morse found himself making a few notes (mentally, this time) as he read through the unhappy narrative. For some reason he felt vaguely dissatisfied with himself. Something was nagging at his brain about Part One; but for the present he was unable to put a finger on
it. It would come back to him once he'd re-read a few pages. No hurry, was there? None. The theoretical problem which his mind had suddenly seized upon was no more than a bit of harmless, quite inconsequential amusement. And yet the doubts persisted in his brain: could anyone,
anyone,
read this story and not find himself questioning one or two of the points so confidently reported? Or two or three of them? Or three or four?

What was the normal pattern of entertainment for canal boatmen, like Oldfield, on those 'protracted stops' of theirs? Changing horses was obviously one of the key activities on such occasions, but one scarcely calculated to gladden every soul. Dropping in at the local knocking-shop, then? A likely port-of-call for a few of the more strongly sexed among them, most surely. And drink? Did they drink their wages away, these boatmen, in the low-beamed bars that were built along their way? How not? Why not? What else was there to do? And though drink (as the Porter once claimed) might take away the performance, who could gainsay that frequently provoked the desire? The desire, in this case, to rape a beautiful woman-passenger.

So many questions.

But if sex was at the bottom of things, why were the rape charges dropped at the first trial? Agreed, there was no biological fingerprinting in the 1850s; no genetic code that could be read into some desperate fellow's swift dilations. But even in that era, the charge of rape could be made to stick without too much difficulty; and Confucius's old pleasantry about the comparative immobility
of a man with his trousers round his ankles must of sounded just as hollow then as now. Certainly to the ears of Joanna Franks.

The footnote referring to the
Court Registers
had been surprise, and it would be of interest, certainly to the sociologist, to read something of contemporary attitudes rape in 1859. Pretty certainly it would be a few leagues less sympathetic than that reflected in Morse's morning of
The Times:
'Legal Precedent in Civil Action -£35.000 damages for Rape Victim'. Where were those Registers, though – if they still existed? They might (Morse supposed) have explained the Colonel's bracketed caveat about discrepancies. But
what
discrepancies? There must been
something
in old Deniston's mind, something that bothered him just that tiny bit. The Greeks had a word for it –
parakrousis –
the striking of a slightly wrong note in an othrrwise tuneful harmony.

Was that 'wrong note' struck by Mrs Laurenson, perhaps? Whatever the situation had been with Joanna, this
-
Laurenson woman (with her husband's full assent, one must assume) had joined
the Barbara Bray
for the journey down to King's Sutton with – as the reader was led to believe -a boat-load of sexually rampant dipsomaniacs. Difficult to swallow? Unless of course the wharfinger, Laurenson, was perfectly happy to get rid of his missus for the night -for any night. But such a line of reasoning seemed fanciful and there was a further possibility – a very simple, really rather a startling one: that the crew of the
Barbara Bray
had
not
been all that belligerently blotto at the time. But no. Every piece of evidence – surely! – pointed in opposite direction; pointed to the fact that the boatmens robes of honour (in Fitzgeraldian phrase) were resting, like the Confucian rapist's, only just above their boot-laces.

Boots… shoes…

What
was
all that about those shoes? Why were figuring so repeatedly in the story? There would have been more intimate items of Joanna's to wardrobe pilfer if the crewmen had been seeking to effect easier sexual congress. One of them
might,
perhaps, have been a clandestine foot-fetishist…

Morse, telling himself not to be so stupid, looked again, at the last couple of pages of the text. A bit over-written all that stuff about the sentinel-like old lock-house, look out over the dark waters. Not bad, though: and at least: made Morse resolve to drive out and see it for himself, once he was well again. Unless the planners and the developers had already pulled it down.

Like they'd pulled down St Ebbe's…

Such were some of Morse's thoughts after reading second instalment. It was quite natural that he should wish to eke out the pleasures afforded by the Colonel's text. Yet it: must be admitted that, once again, Morse had almost totally failed to conceive the real problems raised by this narrative. Usually, Morse was a league and a league in front of any competitive intellects; and even now his thought processes were clear and unorthodox. But for the time being, he far below his best. Too near the picture. He was standing where the coloured paints on the narrow-boat's sides had little chance of imposing any pattern on his eye. What he really needed was to stand that bit further back from the picture to get a more synoptic view of things. 'Synoptic' had always been one of Morse's favourite words. Quickly he re-read Part Two. But he seemed to see little more general terms than he had done earlier, although there e a few extra points of detail which had evaded him on first reading, and he stored them away, haphazardly, in his brain, there was that capital 'J', for example, that the Colonel favoured whenever he wished to emphasize the enormity of humnan iniquity and the infallibility of Jury and Judicature like the capital 'G' the Christian Churches always used for God.

Then there were those journeys through the two tunnels, when Oldfield had sat with Joanna… or when, as Morse translated things, he put his arm around the frightened girl in the eerie darkness, and told her not to be afraid…

And those last complex, confusing paragraphs! She had been desperately anxious to get off the boat and away from her tipsy persecutors – so much seemed beyond any reasonable doubt. But, if so, why, according to that selfsame evidence, had she always been so anxious to get back
on
again?

Airy-fairy speculation, all this; but there were at least two things that could be factually checked. 'Nothing was convenient', it had said, and any researcher worth his salt could easily verify
that.
What
was
available, at the time Joanna reached Banbury? He could also soon discover how much any alternative route to London would have cost. What, for example, was the rail-fare to London in 1859? For that matter, what exactly had been the rail-fare between
Liverpool
and London, a fare which appeared to have been beyond the Franks's joint financial resources?

Interesting…

As, come to think of it, were those double quotation marks in the text – presumably the actual words, direct transcribed, and reported
verbatim,
and therefore primary source material for the crewmen's trial. Morse looked: through the interspersed quotations again, and one in particular caused his mind to linger: "coaches to London -and coaches from Oxford to Banbury". Now, if those were the
exact
words Joanna had used…
if
they were… Why had she asked for the times of coaches 'from Oxford to Banbury'? Surely, she should have been asking about coaches ‘from Banbury to Oxford?’
Unless… unless…

Again, it all seemed most interesting – at least to Morse What, finally, was he to make of that drink business? Had Joanna been drinking – or had she not? There was some curious ambivalence in the text; and perhaps this may have been in the Colonel's mind when he referred to 'a few conflicting statements'? But no – that was impossible Mr Bartholomew Samuels had found no alcohol in Joanna s body, and that was that!

Or, rather, would have been, to most men.

The thought of drink had begun to concentrate Morse's mind powerfully, and with great circumspection and care. Morse poured a finger of Scotch into his bedside glass, with the same amount of plain water. Wonderful! Pity that no one would ever believe his protestations that Scotch was a necessary stimulant to his brain cells! For after a few minutes his mind was flooding with ideas – exciting ideas! – and furthermore he realized that he could begin to test one or two of his hypotheses that very evening.

That is, if Walter Greenaway's daughter came to visit.

As she walked down Broad Street at 7.40 a.m. the following morning (Thursday), Christine Greenaway was thinking
(still
thinking) about the man who had spoken to her the previous evening in Ward 7C on the top floor of the JR2. (It was only on rare occasions that she welcomed her father’s pride in his ever-loving daughter!) It wasn't that she’d been obsessively preoccupied with the man ever since; but there had been a semi-waking, overnight awareness of him. All because he'd asked her, so nicely, to look up something for him in the Bodley. So earnest, so grateful, he’d seemed. And that was silly, really, because she'd willingly have helped him, anyway. That's why she'd become librarian in the first place: to be able to locate some of landmarks in the fields of History and Literature, and provide where she could the correct map-references for so many curious enquiries. Even as a five-year-old, with blonde plaits reaching half-way down her bony back, she'd envied the woman in the Summertown Library who similarly located tickets somewhere in the long drawers behind the high counter; envied, even more, the woman who stamped the dates in the front of the borrowed books, and inserted each little ticket into its appropriate, oblong folder. Not that she, Christine Greenaway, performed any longger such menial tasks herself. Almost forgotten now were those inevitable queries of who wrote
The Wind the Willows;
for she, Christine, was now the senior of the three august librarians who sat at the northern end of the Bodleian's Lower Reading Room, where her daily duties demanded assistance to both senior and junior members of the University: checking slips, identifying shelf-marks, suggesting reference-sections, making and taking phone-calls (one, yesterday, from the University of Uppsala And over these last years she had felt a sense of importance and enjoyment in her job – of functioning happily in workings of the University.

Of course, there had been some major disappointed in her life, as there had been, she knew, with most folk. Married at twenty-two, she had been a divorcee at twenty three. No other woman on his part; no other man on hers – although there'd been (still were) so many opportunities No! It was simply that her husband had been so immature and irresponsible – and, above all, so boring! Once the pair of them had got down to running a home, kept, a monthly budget, checking bank-statements – well, she'd known he could never really be the man for her. And as things now stood, she could no longer stomach the prospect of another mildly ignorant, semi-aggressively macho figure of a bed-mate. Free as she was of any financial worries, she
could do exactly as she wished about issues that were important to
her;
and she had become a modestly active member of several organizations, including Greenpeace, CND, Ramblers' Association, and the RSPB. Quite certainly, she would never join one of those match-making societies with the hope of finding a more interesting specimen than her former spouse. If ever she
did
look for another husband, he would have to be someone she could, in some way, come to
respect:
to respect for his conversation or his experience his intellect or his knowledge or his – well, his anything an all, really, except a pride in his sexual prowess. So what (she asked herself) had all this got to do with
him'?
Not much to look at, was he? Balding, and quite certainly carrying considerable excess weight around the midriff. Though, to be honest with herself, she was beginning to feel a grudging regard for those men who were just
slightly
overweight, perhaps because she herself seemed never able to put on a few pounds – however much she over-indulged in full-cream cakes and deep-fried fish and chips.