Bruce Alexander - Death of a Colonial

“Jeremy?” he said. “Is that you?”

“It is, Sir John, and I’ve still not found the red file.”

“Hmmm. . well … it must be somewhere about.”

As he took his customary position in the chair behind his desk, I continued my search. I saw no red stripe. There was no such file. I came to doubt its very existence. Had I been sent upon a fools errand? I could not believe that Sir John would intentionally put me on the track of an object he knew could not be found. Yet perhaps it had long ago disappeared without his knowledge. It might have been borrowed by the Lord Chief Justice. Not knowing its contents, I could not say who else might have taken it away, but of course there might be a great many.

“There,” said I to Sir John, “I’ve been through every box in Mr. Marsden s alcove, and every file here in this room, and I can tell you in all truth, Sir John, the red file simply is nowhere to be found.”

“Hmm. . looked both places, have you? All those files?”

“Yes, sir, and the last I examined in this box was dated 1764.”

“Well, if they go back so far in time as all that, you may as well look in the cellar.”

“In the cellar, sir?” My heart was sinking.

“Ah, indeed,” said he. “The records of the Bow Street Court back to its beginnings are kept below. If it’s not here, then it must be there. It stands to reason, don’t you think?”

“As you say Sir John.” (With a sigh, reader, with a sigh.)

“Ask Mr. Marsden to take you down there. He’ll acquaint you with the order in which the records have been stored. Surely you’ll find it there.”

With that, I turned smartly and started from the room.

“And Jeremy?”

“Yes, Sir John?”

“Do be sure to bring with you a sufficiency of candles. There are many files stored there, and Mr. Marsden tells me that it is as dark as pitch in the cellar, even in the daytime.”

I sighed. “Yes, sir.”

It was, as described, dark as pitch. As Mr. Marsden led the way down the stairs, candle in hand, he seemed to move through the surrounding blackness with some slight difficulty, as if it were a substance so heavy, so thick, as to be almost palpable. And so it was as I followed him: The darkness pressed in upon me.

“Mind your step here at the bottom, “ said he. “There’s a bit of a bump down where the brick floor leaves off and the dirt bottom begins.”

I did as he admonished, feeling my way carefully with my toe, discovering a drop that I reckoned at no more than an inch or so. Still, it would have been sufficient to send me sprawling had I come upon it unwarned and lost my balance.

“Give me two of that handful of candles you’ve got, and I’ll stick ‘em up here in the holders on the wall and light them,” said he.

We managed the exchange without difficulty, and he did as he said he would do. The light of three candles pushed back the darkness somewhat and made the cellar seem more commonplace and far less threatening. There were, it is true, boxes piled upon boxes all along the wall, indeed more than I had examined thus far up above. It looked to be a daunting piece of work.

“These go back to the beginning of the Bow Street Court, do they not?” I asked. “Back to the time when Henry Fielding was magistrate.”

“That’d be right, Jeremy.”

“Were you his clerk, as well?”

“Not I,” said he. “I followed a fellow named Brogden. He’d been clerk as long as anyone could remember — back to Henry Fielding’s time, anyways.” He stood silent for a moment, hesitating. Then he added: “Well, I’ll leave you, Jeremy. I must write my accounts of today’s session. As you can see, the boxes are marked by year — usually about two boxes per calendar year. The farther you go back in time, the deeper into the cellar you go.”

“I understand.”

He then left me with a nod and a good-luck wish and, ascending the stairs, he deprived me of a fraction of the light by which I had viewed the cellar. Should I light another candle? Probably unnecessary. Even as a child I had had no fear of the dark. Yet this place, dank and a bit mysterious, was not merely dark; it seemed somehow threatening, more like a dungeon than a cellar. From deep within it came the sound of water dripping, and from somewhere nearer I heard the scurrying of little feet. Rats, they were, and I quite disliked the filthy little creatures then as much as I do now. I wondered if they had ever kept prisoners down here. Perhaps a discreet inquiry to Mr. Marsden. . Ah, well, I had put matters off quite long enough. I must resume my search for that ever-elusive red file. I dragged down the first box, which was marked with the year 1764, and began my way through it.

I found the red file in the next box, one that bore the date 1763.

“What title did Mr. Marsden put upon the file?” Sir John asked of me.

In responding, I held up the file, which as I had been told was marked with a wide stripe across the top, then read to him the legend printed in bold black letters upon the red. “It says, ‘Unresolved,’ sir. I confess I looked inside and found three separate cases, one from 1756, another from 1759, and the last from 1763, the year under which it was filed.”

“Yes, I had Mr. Marsden gather the three together in a single file. He generously called these cases ‘unresolved,’ whereas I referred to them as my ‘failures.’ “

“ ‘Failures,’ Sir John?”

“A ye, Jeremy, failures. And that was why I encouraged our worthy clerk to decorate the file in some manner with red, which is universally recognized as the hue of embarrassment. In other words, lad, these were the cases that left me red-faced and full of shame/‘

This was altogether a surprise to me. I knew not what to make of this confession of failure — or more, failure in triplicate. Among the magistrate’s many virtues, neither I nor others would have rated humility high. Though never arrogant or excessively proud, he nevertheless felt himself the equal of any man, aristocrat or noble, and superior to most. Yet as I gazed at him across the desk there in the simple room he called his chambers, it seemed to me that for him now to call attention to his mistakes, his “failures,” was but final proof of his great confidence in himself. Only a man who believes profoundly in his own worth will undertake to criticize himself.

“I thought, Jeremy, you might benefit from my mistakes.”

“Oh? In what way, sir?”

“I should think it reasonably evident, if not obvious,” said he in a somewhat peevish manner. “If you were to read through them one by one, I believe you might put your finger, so to speak, upon the place — or perhaps places — where I went wrong in my investigation. In each case, I believe, my failure can be attributed to mistakes in interrogation — though in the earliest instance bad medical advice certainly played a part.”

“But,” said I, “would I be able to grasp the background, the circumstances, of these cases from these notes?” I glanced through them and saw, as I suspected, that there were oddments of every sort mixed together — scraps of paper, letters, interrogation records, and in two instances full accounts of coroners’ inquests. What was I to make of such a hodgepodge?

“Well… I had thought so,” said he, “though perhaps not. Perhaps I should give you something on the order of a sketch of each one. . the details. . the context.” And that, reader, he then proceeded to do.

The first case taken up by Sir John in this manner was the earliest. In 1756 (only a year after my birth) a chemist of Tavistock Street fell ill. His wife summoned a physician, who diagnosed his difficulty as acute indigestion and prescribed a common powder to ease his upset. Yet the problem continued into the next day and the next. He did then rally somewhat and throw off the symptoms of this lingering discomfort. On the fourth day he was back behind the counter of his shop, serving his customers; whereas earlier he had been forced to remain behind a curtain, whispering instructions to his wife. That night he fell ill again in the same way; the doctor was summoned again and was present when the chemist expired, Sir John — then simply John Fielding — suspected poisoning, but the attending physician assured him this was quite unlikely: Though there were many poisons in the chemist’s stock, the wife (now widow) was a simple country girl, recently married, who could not even read labels on the bottles, much less know the power of the potions they contained. Thomas Cox, then coroner, held an inquest into the death of the chemist, and his jury found “death by natural causes.” The widow sold the shop and returned to her home, a village in Hampshire. For a time, and a brief time it was, she lived with her mother; but then she remarried, taking as her new spouse one near her age with whom she had grown up. There were rumors in the village.