The Strange Story Book

It was the apprentice and not Mrs. Canning who attended to Elizabeth and placed her in the chimney-corner, where she sat exhausted and to all appearance nearly dead. Her mother's first act on recovering from her fit was to send, not for the doctor but for the neighbours, and so many flocked to see the lost girl, that in two minutes the room was full, and the apprentice had to stand at the door to keep fresh people out. Of course it was long before anyone thought of putting Elizabeth to bed, and giving her something to eat or drink; instead they plied her with questions as to where she had been and what she had been doing, and how she had got in that dreadful condition. To these she replied, telling the same tale which she repeated to Alderman Chitty upon oath two days later.

On the following morning an apothecary was summoned, and attended her for a week till a doctor was called in, and he for some days thought very badly of her chance of living.

But weak and ill as she might be, two days after her return home she 'was brought' before Alderman Chitty to tell her story. And this was what she said:

After her uncle and aunt had left her in Houndsditch, she was passing along the wall which surrounded the lunatic asylum of Bedlam, into Moorfields, when she was suddenly attacked by two men who took all her money from her pocket, and then stripped off her gown and hat. She struggled and tried to scream, but a handkerchief was quickly thrust into her mouth, and she was told that if she made any noise they would kill her. To show that they spoke the truth, one of them did indeed give a blow on the head, and then they took her under the arms and dragged her along Bishopsgate till she lost her senses, as she was apt to do when frightened. She knew no more till she found herself in a strange place which she had since learned was a house at Enfield Wash, about eleven miles from Aldermanbury. By this time it was about four in the morning of January 2.

In the kitchen in which she recovered consciousness were several people, among them an old woman who asked her if she would stay with her instead of returning home. To this Elizabeth replied No; she would not, as she wanted to go back to her mother at once. The old woman looked very angry at her answer, and pushed her upstairs into a room, where she cut her stay-laces, and took the stays themselves away. She then told her there was bread and water for her if she was hungry, but that was all she would get; adding that the girl had better be quiet, for if she attempted to scream out, she herself would come in and cut her throat.

Having said this, the old woman went away locking the door behind her, and that was the last the girl saw of any human creature for four weeks, except the eye of a person who peeped through the keyhole.

Left alone, Elizabeth looked about for the food which was provided for her, and found there were some pieces of bread about as much as a 'quartern loaf' – and three-quarters of a gallon of water or a little more, in a pitcher. She had besides a penny mince-pie that she had bought while she was at her uncle's the day before, and intended as a present for her little brother; for, as she said to her mother, the boy had 'huffed her,' and she had not given him a penny like his sisters, so the mince-pie was to make up.

At this point Chitty seems to have stopped her, and asked her to describe the room in which she was imprisoned and to tell him what it contained. There was but little furniture of any sort in it, she answered. An old stool or two, an old chair and an old picture over the chimney. The room itself had two windows, facing north and east, one of which was entirely boarded up; but the other, though there were some boards on it, was mostly glass. It was through the window at the end of the room that she escaped about half-past three on the afternoon of Monday January 29, dropping on to the roof of a shed built against the house, and so to the ground.

She knew, it appears, that the road which ran past the house was the one leading from London into Hertfordshire, because she recognised the coachman who had carried parcels for her mistress many a time. Thus, when she escaped, tearing her ear as she did so on a nail outside the window, she had no difficulty in starting in the right direction for London, though after a short distance she became confused, and had to ask the way of several people. She ended by saying that she arrived at home about ten o'clock very weak and faint, and that her mother gave her some wine, which however she was unable to swallow.

Now in those times both lawyers and judges were apt to be very careless, and according to our ideas, very dishonest, and Chitty seems to have been no better than the rest. He took, he says, a few notes of the interview with Elizabeth for his own memorandum, but 'not thinking it would have been the subject of so much inquiry later, did not take it so distinct as he could wish.' Even this paper which he did show was not what he had written down at the time when the girl was telling her story, but something that he had pieced together from her own account and that of various other people who had been present at her mother's two nights before, and had gone with her to the Alderman. So that no court of law in these days would have thought that Alderman Chitty's account given more than a year later, of what Elizabeth told him, was to be trusted. In the end, however, Chitty, who declares he had examined her for an hour and asked her 'many questions not set down' in his paper, granted a warrant for the arrest of one Mother Wells at Enfield Wash, for assaulting and robbing her. Elizabeth herself expressly says she 'could tell nothing of the woman's name,' though 'she believed she should know her;' but one of Mrs. Canning's visitors on the night of the girl's arrival, who was acquainted with Enfield, was certain that the house described could only be that in which Mother Wells lived, and on his information Chitty allowed the warrant for her arrest to be made out.

This man, Robert Scarrat, seems to have put to Elizabeth a great many questions which never occurred to the Alderman. He asked her, for instance, to describe the woman who had cut off her stays, and she replied that she was 'tall, black and swarthy, and that two girls, one fair and one dark, were with her.' This answer surprised him; it was not what he expected. Mother Wells was not a tall, swarthy woman, and he said at once that it could not have been Mother Wells at all, as the description was not in the least like her.

On Thursday February 1, Elizabeth was put into a coach and drove with her mother and two other women to Mother Wells' house in Enfield Wash, where they were met by the girl's two masters and several friends. The object of the visit was to prove if the description given by her of the room, in which she was confined, was correct, and if she could pick out from a number of persons the woman who had cut off her stays and locked her up. As to how far the room, as seen by Elizabeth's friends, at all resembled what she had told them, it is impossible to be certain. It assuredly was very different from the place which Alderman Chitty swore she had described, containing a quantity of hay, old saddles, and other things that the girl had apparently not noticed, even though she had been there a month; while there was no old picture above the mantelpiece – nothing, indeed, but cobwebs – and there was no grate, though she had sworn she had taken out of it the bedgown or jacket she had come home in. Besides, – and this was more serious – there was not a sign of the pent-house on which, she said, she had jumped after tearing away the boards at the north window; and one of the witnesses declared that you had only to push open the east window to get out of it with perfect ease, and that he himself had leaned out and shaken hands with his wife, who was standing on the ground which rose on that side of the house. But then the witnesses were not at all agreed among themselves what Elizabeth had really said, so again we are unable to make up our minds what to believe.

After she had seen the room, she was taken into the parlour where eight or ten people were sitting, and it is curious that now everyone tells the same tale. On one side of the fireplace sat Mother Wells, and on the other Mary Squires.

Mary Squires was a gipsy, tall and swarthy, very ill made and extraordinarily ugly, and altogether a person whom it would be impossible to forget. At the time of Elizabeth's entrance she was sitting crouched up, with a white handkerchief on her head such as women often wore, and over it a hat, while a short pipe was in her hand. Several more persons were on the same side of the room, in a sort of circle round the fire.

Elizabeth glanced towards them. Her eyes rested first on Mother Wells and then looked past her.

'That is the woman who cut off my stays,' she said, pointing to the gipsy. At these words Mary Squires rose and came up to the girl, throwing aside her hat and handkerchief as she did so.

'Me rob you?' she cried. 'I hope you will not swear my life away, for I never saw you. Pray, madam, look at this face; if you have once seen it you must remember it, for God Almighty I think never made such another.'

'I know you very well,' answered Elizabeth; 'I know you too well, to my sorrow.'

'Pray, madam, when do you say I robbed you?'

'It was on the first day of this New Year,' replied Elizabeth.

'The first day of the New Year?' cried the gipsy. 'Lord bless me! I was an hundred and twenty miles away from this place then, at Abbotsbury in Dorsetshire, and there are a hundred people I can bring to prove it.'

But no one at that time paid any attention to her words, or thought of allowing her to prove her innocence. Elizabeth, with two girls found in Mother Wells' house, were examined before Henry Fielding, the novelist, author of 'Tom Jones,' then a magistrate of London, who showed, according to his own account, gross unfairness in dealing with the matter, and by him the case was sent for trial at the Old Bailey.

Elizabeth repeated the story she had told from the first, with the result that the gipsy was condemned to be hanged, and Mother Wells to be branded on the hand and to go to prison for six months. Luckily, however, for them, the president of the court that tried them was the Lord Mayor Sir Crispe Gascoigne, a man who had more sense of justice and fair play than many of his fellows. He did not feel sure of the truth of Elizabeth's tale, and never rested till both the old women were set at liberty.

This made the mob very angry. They were entirely on Elizabeth's side, and more than once attacked the Lord Mayor's coach. Other people were just as strong on behalf of the gipsy, and things even went so far that often the members of the same family declined to speak to each other.

Then came Elizabeth's turn. In April 1754 she was arrested on a charge of perjury or false swearing, and sent to stand her trial at the Old Bailey. Now was Mary Squires' opportunity for calling the 'hundred people' to prove that she, with her son George and daughter Lucy, was down at Abbotsbury in Dorsetshire, on January 1, 1753, at the moment that she was supposed to be cutting off the stays of Elizabeth Canning at Enfield Wash! And if she did not quite fulfil her promise, she actually did summon thirty-six witnesses who swore to her movements day by day from December 29, 1752, when all three Squires stopped at an inn at South Parret in Dorsetshire, to January 23, 1753, when Mary begged for a lodging at Page Green. Now Page Green was within two or three miles of Enfield Wash, where the gipsy admitted she had stayed at Mother Wells' house for ten days before Elizabeth Canning had charged her with robbery. Her denial of the accusation was further borne out by a man and his wife, who appear in the reports as 'Fortune and Judith Natus' (he was quite plainly called 'Fortunatus' after the young man with the fairy purse), both of whom declared upon oath that they had occupied the room in which Elizabeth stated she had been confined, for ten or eleven weeks at that very time, and that it was used as a hayloft.

Mary Squires had called thirty-six witnesses to 'prove an alibi' – in other words, to prove that she had been present somewhere else; but Elizabeth's lawyers produced twenty-six, stating that they had seen her about Enfield during the month when Elizabeth was lost. This was enough to confuse anybody, and many of the witnesses on both sides were exceedingly stupid. To make matters worse and more puzzling, not long before a law had been passed to alter the numbering of the days of the year. For instance, May 5 would suddenly be reckoned the 16th, a fact it was almost impossible to make uneducated people understand. Indeed, it is not easy always to remember it oneself, but it all helps to render the truth of Elizabeth's tale more difficult to get at, for you never could be sure whether, when the witnesses said they had seen the gipsy at Christmas or New Year's Day, they meant Old Christmas or New Christmas, old New Year's Day or new New Year's Day. Yet certain facts there are in the story which nobody attempts to contradict. It is undisputed that a young woman, weak and with very few clothes on, was met by four or five persons on the night of January 29, 1753, on the road near Enfield Wash, inquiring her way to London, or that on the very same night Elizabeth Canning arrived at home in Aldermanbury, in such a state that next morning an apothecary was sent for. Nor does anyone, as we have said, deny that she picked out the gipsy from a number of people, as the person who assaulted her. All this is in favour of her tale. Yet we must ask ourselves what possible motive Mary Squires could have had in keeping a girl shut up in a loft for four weeks, apparently with a view of starving her to death? Elizabeth was a total stranger to her; she was very poor, so there was no hope of getting a large ransom for her; and if she had died and her kidnapping had been traced to Mary Squires, the gipsy would have speedily ended her days on the gallows.

On the other hand, if Mary Squires did not know Elizabeth Canning, Elizabeth equally did not know Mary Squires, and we cannot imagine what reason Elizabeth could have had in accusing her falsely. Only one thing stands out clear from the report of the trial, and that is, that Elizabeth was absent during the whole of January 1753, and that she very nearly died of starvation.

'Guilty of perjury, but not wilful and corrupt,' was the verdict of the jury, which the judge told them was nonsense. They then declared her guilty, and Elizabeth was condemned to be transported to one of his Majesty's American colonies for seven years.

We soon hear of her as a servant in the house of the Principal of Yale University, a much better place than any she had at home. At the end of the seven years she came back to England, where she seems to have been received as something of a heroine, and took possession of £500 which had been left her by an old lady living in Newington Green. She then sailed for America once more, and married a well-to-do farmer called Treat, and passed the rest of her life with her husband and children in the State of Connecticut.

Up to her death, which occurred in 1773, she always maintained the truth of her tale.

Was it true?

The lawyers who were against Elizabeth said, at her trial, that as soon as she was found guilty, the secret of where she had been would be revealed.

It never was revealed. Now several persons must have known where Elizabeth was; all the world heard her story, yet nobody told where she had been. If the persons who knew had not detained and ill-used the girl, there was nothing to prevent them from speaking.

Yet to the end we shall ask, why did Mary Squires keep her at Enfield Wash – if she did keep her?

MRS. VEAL'S GHOST

Now you are going to hear a ghost story published, but he says, not written, by Daniel Defoe the author of 'Robinson Crusoe.' If you read it carefully, you will find how very curious it is.

Miss Veal, or as she was then called according to custom, Mrs. Veal, was an unmarried lady of about thirty living with her only brother in Dover. She was a delicate woman, and frequently had fits, during which she would often stop in the middle of a sentence, and begin to talk nonsense. These fits probably arose from not having had enough food or warm clothes in her childhood, for her father was not only a poor man but also a selfish one, and was too full of his own affairs to look after his children. One comfort, however, she had, in a little girl of her own age, named Lodowick, who often used to bring her neighbour half of her own dinner, and gave her a thick wadded tippet to wear over her bare shoulders.

Years passed away and the girls grew to women, meeting as frequently as of old and reading together the pious books of the day, 'Drelincourt upon Death' being perhaps their favourite. Then gradually a change took place. Old Veal died; the son was given a place in the Customs, and his sister went to keep house for him. She was well-to-do now, and had no longer any need of a friend to provide her with food and clothes, and little by little she became busy with her new life, and forgot the many occasions on which she had exclaimed gratefully to her playfellow, 'You are not only the best, but the only friend I have in the world, and nothing shall ever loosen our friendship.' Now she visited in the houses of people who were richer and grander than herself and sought out her old companion more and more seldom, so that at length when this story begins, two years and a half had passed by without their having seen each other.

Meanwhile, though Mrs. Veal, in spite of a few love affairs, had remained a spinster, her friend had married a Mr. Bargrave, and a very bad match he proved, for the way in which he ill-used his wife soon became known to everyone. They left Dover about a year after Mrs. Bargrave's last visit to Mrs. Veal, and several months later they settled in Canterbury.

It was noon, on September 8, 1705, and Mrs. Bargrave was sitting alone in an armchair in her parlour, thinking over all the misery her husband had caused her and trying hard to feel patient and forgiving towards him. 'I have been provided for hitherto,' she said to herself, 'and doubt not that I shall be so still, and I am well satisfied that my sorrows shall end when it is most fit for me.' She then took up her sewing, which had dropped on her lap, but had hardly put in three stitches when a knocking at the door made her pause. The clock struck twelve as she rose to open it, and to her profound astonishment admitted Mrs. Veal, who had on a riding dress of silk.

'Madam,' exclaimed Mrs. Bargrave, 'I am surprised to see you, for you have been a stranger this long while, but right glad I am to welcome you here.' As she spoke, she leaned forward to kiss her, but Mrs. Veal drew back, and passing her hand across her eyes, she answered:

'I am not very well;' adding after a moment, 'I have to take a long journey, and wished first to see you.'

'But,' answered Mrs. Bargrave, 'how do you come to be travelling alone? I know that your brother looks after you well.'

'Oh, I gave my brother the slip,' replied Mrs. Veal, 'because I had so great a desire to see you before I set forth.'

'Well, let us go into the next room,' said Mrs. Bargrave, leading the way to a small room opening into the other. Mrs. Veal sat down in the very chair in which Mrs. Bargrave had been seated when she heard the knocking at the door. Then Mrs. Veal leaned forward and spoke:

'My dear friend, I am come to renew our old friendship, and to beg you to pardon me for my breach of it. If you can forgive me, you are one of the best of women.'

'Oh! don't mention such a thing,' cried Mrs. Bargrave. 'I never had an unkind thought about it, and can most easily forgive it.'

'What opinion can you have had of me?' continued Mrs. Veal.

'I supposed you were like the rest of the world,' answered Mrs. Bargrave, 'and that prosperity had made you forget yourself and me.'

After that they had a long talk over the old days, and recalled the books they had read together, and what comfort they had received from Drelincourt's Book of Death, and from two Dutch books that had been translated, besides some by Dr. Sherlock on the same subject. At Mrs. Veal's request, Mrs. Bargrave brought Drelincourt's discourses down from upstairs, and handed it to her friend, who spoke so earnestly of the consolations to be found in it that Mrs. Bargrave was deeply touched. But when Mrs. Veal assured her that 'in a short time her afflictions would leave her,' Mrs. Bargrave broke down and wept bitterly.

'Are you going away and leaving your brother without anyone to look after him?' asked Mrs. Bargrave as soon as she could speak.

'Oh no! my sister and her husband had just come down from town to see me, so it will be all right,' answered Mrs. Veal.

'But why did you arrange to leave just as they arrived?' again inquired Mrs. Bargrave. 'Surely they will be vexed?'

'It could not be helped,' replied Mrs. Veal shortly, and said no more on the subject.

After this, the conversation, which continued for nearly two hours, was chiefly carried on by Mrs. Veal, whose language might have been envied by the most learned doctors of the day. But during the course of it Mrs. Bargrave was startled to notice Mrs. Veal draw her hand several times across her eyes (as she had done on her entrance), and at length she put the question, 'Mrs. Bargrave, don't you think I look much the worse for my fits?'

'No,' answered Mrs. Bargrave, 'I think you look as well as ever I saw you.'

'I want you to write a letter for me to my brother,' then said Mrs. Veal, 'and tell him to whom he is to give my rings, and that he is to take two gold pieces out of a purse that is in my cabinet, and send them to my cousin Watson.' Cousin Watson was the wife of a Captain Watson who lived in Canterbury. As there seemed no reason that Mrs. Veal should not write the letter herself, the request appeared rather odd to Mrs. Bargrave, especially as then and afterwards it was the custom for people to leave rings to their friends in their wills. These rings contained little skulls in white enamel, and the initials in gold of the dead.

Mrs. Bargrave wondered if her friend was indeed about to suffer from one of her attacks. So she hastily placed herself in a chair close by her, that she might be ready to catch Mrs. Veal if she should fall, and, to divert her visitor's thoughts, took hold of her sleeve, and began to admire the pattern.

'The silk has been cleaned,' replied Mrs. Veal, 'and newly made up,' and then she dropped the subject and went back to her letter.

'Why not write it yourself?' asked Mrs. Bargrave. 'Your brother may think it an impertinence in me.'

'No,' said Mrs. Veal; 'it may seem an impertinence in you now, but you will discover more reason for it hereafter;' so to satisfy her, Mrs. Bargrave fetched pen and ink and was about to begin when Mrs. Veal stopped her.

'Not now,' she said; 'wait till I am gone; but you must be sure to do it,' and began to inquire for Mrs. Bargrave's little girl, Molly, who was not in the house.

'If you have a mind to see her, I will fetch her home,' answered the mother, and hastily ran over to the neighbour's where the child was. When she returned, Mrs. Veal was standing outside the street door, opposite the market (which was crowded, the day being Saturday and market day), waiting to say good-bye to her.

'Why are you in such a hurry?' inquired Mrs. Bargrave.

'It is time for me to go,' answered Mrs. Veal, 'though I may not start on my journey till Monday. Perhaps I may see you at my cousin Watson's before I depart whither I am hastening.' Then she once more spoke of the letter Mrs. Bargrave was to write, and bade her farewell, walking through the market-place, till a turning concealed her from view.

It was now nearly two o'clock.

The following day Mrs. Bargrave had a sore throat, and did not go out, but on Monday she sent a messenger to Captain Watson's to inquire if Mrs. Veal was there. This much astonished the Watsons, who returned an answer that Mrs. Veal had never been to the house, neither was she expected. Mrs. Bargrave felt sure that some mistake had been made, and, ill though she was, put on her hood and walked to the Watsons' (whom she did not know) to find out the truth of the matter.