Soul

London, 1861

SAMUEL PUSHED HIS WAY THROUGH the crowded streets. Stunned citizens huddled on street corners, oblivious to the falling snow. Outside the palace gates, the crowd’s mourning clothes transformed them into a black moving mass. It was as if the whole country had dipped itself in ink to stand weeping in the white frost. Some cried openly, while others simply stared incredulously at the paperboys, sooty-faced messengers, holding up the ha’penny gazettes as they shouted the grim news.

‘Fourteenth of December, day to remember, the Prince Consort is dead!’

‘The Queen grieves!’

It was the morning after Prince Albert had died suddenly of typhoid fever and Samuel had never seen the English surrender to such emotion. It was disorientating, and the whole city had taken on an apocalyptic atmosphere.

Stoically, he forced a path through the motley bunch of spectators lingering on the steps of the Old Bailey. It was the fourth day of the trial; and it had taken him that long to find out where the proceedings were taking place. He had discover

ed the information only through persistent questioning of the new coachman at the bereaved Huntington household.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ A policeman stopped him as he stepped into the warmth of the reception hall.

‘The trial of Mrs Lavinia Huntington and Aloysius O’Malley, sir. The public gallery is open now, is it not?’

The peeler, who wore a mourning band around his arm, hesitated. The Negro servant seemed courteous enough, but he didn’t recognise the expensive livery the youth was wearing.

‘I’m here on my master’s business,’ Samuel lied, ‘the ambassador of the Confederate States of America, sir.’ He saluted for good measure. In truth, Samuel had told his owner an elaborate fiction about having to travel to the country to purchase some new horses—a trip that would take several days. It was a measure of the esteem in which the ambassador held the young slave that he had allowed him to go at all.

Reluctantly, the policeman stepped aside.

The court was still settling into position as Samuel found an empty seat in the balcony of the public gallery. He spied the two accused; separated, they sat in a row behind the lawyers, flanked by policemen. Aloysius’s face was thinner than ever; misery had emptied his eyes and his nose had become pinched.

Lavinia Huntington looked slighter than Samuel remembered. Dressed in a plain prison dress, her hair scraped back in a simple bun, she looked scarcely older than a child. She was still beautiful Samuel noted, marvelling at the creature his friend had risked everything for; Aloysius’s dream of escape and more than that, of the two of them transcending the confines of both their existences had also launched Samuel’s aspirations. He had encouraged Aloysius and during the Irishman’s short employment with Lady Morgan the two men had spent evenings planning out the manner in which Aloysius could rescue Lavinia Huntington; fantasising how the coachman, once free of his station and with Lavinia as his wife, would flourish as independent tradesman in France or even Holland. Some dream, Samuel thought to himself bitterly. Nevertheless he promised himself that, upon his master’s return to America, he would escape his servitude and make his way to the North whatever the outcome of the war.

A murmur swept through the court. Samuel glanced down. The judge was shuffling in to take his chair; his potbelly seeming to balance on thin spindly legs occasionally visible beneath his gown, his face a pockmarked mask below the powdered wig.

The hammering of his gavel brought the scraping of chairs, the clearing of throats and the low murmuring of those who had congregated along the wooden rows to an end. A court official in black robes stood up.

‘The fourth day of the trial of Mrs Colonel Lavinia Huntington and Aloysius O’Malley, both of whom stand here today accused by the Crown of the murder of the late Colonel James Edwin Huntington on the sixteenth day of September in the year of Our Lord eighteen sixty-one.’ He glanced down at his notes. ‘The prosecution calls to the witness box Doctor Jefferies, a noted phrenologist,’ he announced portentously.

Turning, Mr Erasmus Elijah Cohen studied the pale young woman. She must have been a beauty once, he observed, but anxiety had etched her face and her skin was drawn. Mr Cohen’s forte was moral outrage: he was rumoured to be able to make a martyr out of an assassin, as long as there was enough raw material for him to construct a heart-wrenching fiction, the basic requirements being that the accused was female, young, of pleasant demeanour and preferably of genteel origin. Of Mrs Huntington’s innocence he had not a doubt, and if there was any ambiguity he had not allowed it to penetrate his reasoning—like all good defence barristers.

As for the Irishman, his was a harder case to prove. Aloysius O’Malley’s sudden dismissal gave him some motive, as did the accusation that he was Mrs Huntington’s lover. However, four witnesses had placed him ten miles from the scene at the time of the murder.

Erasmus Cohen reached over and squeezed Lavinia’s hand reassuringly. ‘Fear not.’

‘But he has examined me and will have damning evidence.’

‘Phrenology, my dear girl, is the science of absolute speculation. In other words, total tosh, and I intend to expose the charlatan.’

Dr Jefferies, several charts tucked under his arm, the shiny orb of his bald head looking particularly prominent, took his place in the witness box. The prosecutor, Mr Abby, an ambitious zealot of some forty years with the unpleasant habit of finishing each sentence by poking the air with a long, sharp index finger, as if reiteration meant truth, strode to the front of the jury box. He waited until Dr Jefferies had finished proclaiming the obligatory oath then launched into his examination of the witness.

‘Is it true that on the fifteenth of April this year you assessed the accused at the request of her husband for symptoms of hysteria?’

‘It is true.’

‘And this visit had been preceded by an act of violence committed by Mrs Huntington upon her husband, unprompted by any provocation of his own.’

Erasmus Cohen leapt to his feet. ‘Objection! Your Honour, unless Dr Jefferies was witness to that act of violence, there is no way of verifying the statement.’

‘Objection sustained. Dr Jefferies, pray continue.’

The phrenologist nodded importantly. ‘Colonel Huntington, who himself was a respected expert on phrenology, had expressed a concern that because of the violent and unpredicted mood swings of his wife, which had culminated in an injury to his head, so he told me, and Mrs Lavinia Huntington’s physical restlessness and nervous disposition, which appeared to have worsened since the birth of her child, that she may possibly be suffering from hysteria. He requested that I examine her skull for such characteristics—’

‘Which you did.’ Mr Abby seemed disinclined to be left out of proceedings.