Madeleine stepped into the dock. The court was not at all what she expected: it was dim, untidy, and very small, lit only by wedges of dusty sunlight which forced a fuzzy warmth through its tall windows. The roars of the crowds outside – ‘Hoo-er! Hang the wee hoo-er!’ – died down and she was startled by a new sound, a steady drone like the buzzing of wasps in a byke. It was a murmur of excitement from dozens of male throats. She glanced across at the public gallery and saw that gentlemen were lounging with their feet on the brass rails. They were peering at her through opera glasses. And they had kept their hats on in her presence. A warm flush of affront crept up her neck.
     The friendly wardress whispered, as if Madeleine were some music hall performer pleased to draw a crowd, that the gentlemen had paid golden guineas to secure a seat in court, and double the amount for a place on the day when her love letters would be read. A high pitched gibber of fear filled Madeleine’s head at the mention of her letters. She tried to catch Mr. Inglis’s eye, needing his granite reassurance, but her advocate was riffling through his papers. She steadied herself with what he had told her: ‘Evidence of immorality is not evidence of murder, Miss Smith; evidence of the convenience of a death does not prove that it was hastened; and suspicion is no evidence at all.’ She repeated his words silently, but his mellifluous confidence dried in her mouth and tasted of too much protesting. The crowd had roared ‘Hang the whore’, not hang the poisoner. Immorality could be proved, poisoning not, but would that matter?
     It would be better not to think. As the clerk read out three separate charges of wicked and felonious administration of arsenic, she lowered her eyes to her lap, to her small hands gloved in lavender kid, and began to count the stitches in the seams. She counted all through the reading of the charges and the examination of the first witnesses and never looked up, not when the Lord Advocate, the clerk to the court, and the witnesses all in turn mispronounced Emile’s name; nor when the pathologist explained that Emile L’Angelier had died of enough arsenic to kill six men; nor when he said that the medium for the poison was likely cocoa; and not even, especially not even, when witnesses described Emile’s death throes: his vomitings and purgings, his writhings, his weepings, and his green arsenious bile.
     But if Madeleine did not look up, she heard, and her face coloured pink and sweet as an angry rose. She had never heard the like of this evidence in all her life. She grimaced and tugged at the cuff of her glove. They were no true gentlemen who subjected her to such coarseness! And to think that Emile had considered suicide by poisoning a romantic end for a disappointed lover! He was fortunate indeed to have been spared this last disillusion.
     Witnesses gave tedious evidence of arsenic mixed with soot, and arsenic mixed with indigo, and which kind it was she’d had in her possession and which kind it was that killed Emile; they produced tables to show that arsenic could not be suspended in cocoa, and charts to show that it could; they opined confidently that Emile’s death was convenient to her, and with assurance that it was not. Their certainties brawled and knocked one another out of the witness box. And all the while the opera glasses remained trained on her face.
     Madeleine’s heart lurched. They were looking for signs: gentlemen prided themselves on being judges of dogs, horseflesh and women: they knew what to look for and if they found her wanting, they would hang her. The opera glasses scanned her face, seeking out the flicker of an eyelash, the quickening of a pulse. Madeleine’s heart lurched again. The Daniels were come to judgment: my learned friends, the gentlemen of the jury, the gentlemen of the Press, the gentlemen of society who had left their manners at home with their wives – all were come to sit in judgement. But that was the way of things – always the gentlemen must be pleased. Quiet rage bloomed prettily in Madeleine’s cheeks.

That night the friendly wardress told Madeleine that she had made a good impression on the court. She had not been what they expected. Her modest demeanour and shy blushes had given all present pause for thought, and her purchases of arsenic were scarce spoken of at all.
     Alone at last in her cell in the failing summer twilight, Madeleine studied the newspaper the wardress had smuggled to her. There was a lurid account of Emile’s death throes and a sketch of him which she disliked on sight: something about his light waving hair and upturned eyes suggested a martyred saint. She scanned the densely printed columns: apart from an irritating excess of exclamation marks, the bulk of the reportage pleased her. It was concerned with her background, her upbringing, her education, her stylish new bonnet, her fine grey eyes. Poor Emile, so vilely mispronounced, so dramatically and excessively dead, had been quite upstaged – how piqued he would have been had he known!
     Editorials agonised over her downfall, demanding to know how it had come to pass. Madeline stared sightlessly into the gathering dusk. She hardly knew herself how things had come about. The trouble was that she had changed so much that it was difficult to remember what she was like at the beginning; that Madeleine was a stranger to her now, a stiff and distant little figure seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She had not been what she seemed, that young girl, but then in the end, neither had Emile.
     She took up the newspaper again, and studied the sketch which had been made of her. Her much admired bonnet was lovingly drawn and shadowed meekly downcast eyes. She recognised that posture at least. It had been painfully acquired over many years. As Mrs. Gorton used to say, a young lady’s posture must always show her breeding and education. The younger Madeleine, whom she could not think of as ‘I’, only ‘she’ or ‘Madeleine’, had tried very hard to be what everyone expected…

 

 

To read more, buy now