The Tell-Tale Heart Page 7

  And throughout all I heard the chop of Tom’s cleaver, like a madman’s.

  How did the spoons come to be there?

  I cannot tell you.

  Cannot or will not?

  I cannot properly recollect it.

  But you were there, and you held the spoons in your hand, you cannot deny that.

  Yes, I was there, sir, but beyond that, my mind is bare.

  At what point did your father, Mr William Beamiss the elder, join you?

  I cannot recall, sir.

  Was he with you at the point when you broke into the house of the Reverend Vachell? Or perhaps at the moment when the riotous mob smashed their way into Mr Dewey’s house?

  I—

  You cannot recall. So you all say. And the main charge, that you and your father later held up a chaise with farmer Henry Tansley of Littleport, Ely, in it and put him in bodily fear – what recall you of that?

  Witnesses called as to the character of the prisoner. They all stated they had known me from a child, and that I had always been peaceable, honest, and industrious, that I was by trade a shoemaker. One of those same witnesses, James Loddington of Littleport, mentioned that he had asked me, the prisoner Beamiss, to keep the mob out of his house, as he had a child dying. The mob went to his house, but Loddington told how Beamiss the younger said: ‘Go back, you shan’t go in there,’ and they obeyed.

  So you had influence over the mob?

  I’m just a boy, sir.

  You had enough influence to prevent them from going in a house where a child was dying?

  I cannot recall—

  So you say. Witnesses claim you were a good man but if you had some influence we can assume you could have stopped them. And if that had been the case, neither you, nor your father, would be in this courtroom today.

  That was how it went.

  The learned judge did not think it necessary to repeat what had already been said about my good character. The prisoner, he said, acknowledged that he went in the house but did not take the spoons. A witness agrees. He later, with his father – who others named as the ‘cashier’ in the operation – opened the door of a chaise with passengers in it but did not take any money from those inside. Henry Tansley spoke up, saying in his measly little voice that Beamiss the elder was the cashier for the mob. That, Henry Tansley squeaked, Henry Tansley was certain of. The jury immediately returned a verdict of guilty.

  I was the only prisoner who answered the questions put to me in court. Terror silenced the rest. Mr Hart spoke for one or two of us. The rest had no defence. We all knew what dangled in front of us. We had been brought in, our legs in chains. We saw the monstrous Ely Cathedral rise up above us and can you imagine, in a place as empty and featureless as ours, how fearsome that building was to us, how much power and majesty it commanded? I used to think of it as a great whale rising above a white foamy sea and me on a tiny wooden boat in its wake . . .

  The occasion called for Special Assizes – we did not know what that term meant – and for the trial to be rushed through and judges brought from London and elsewhere in view of the great significance of the trial. We, placed standing on the grass, had to watch the Bishop of Ely make his slow and certain way to the Cathedral, with his sword of state carried by his butler in front of him. All pomp and ceremony was laid on, to make the point to us. ‘Tell it out among the people that the Lord is King,’ sang the choir. We remained outside with our gaolers and guards, but we heard every word of the sermon that Henry Bate Dudley made: ‘The Law is not made for the righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.’

  Then we was ushered to the town hall with another speech, this time by Judge Abbott, telling all of how it was of the highest import not just for the peace of our Isle of Ely but of the whole nation that an awful lesson might here be taught. You can imagine the black dread struck in our hearts at that; and then the trial began.

  Their questions come in the cold light and our night had been all bloody and inky-dark heat. And their intention: to set an example. To crush ‘those very daring acts of outrage’ – to show that none of us who rioted would be spared. To show it had nothing to do with poverty or need and to point out that the inhabitants of Ely is more ‘rude and uncivilised’ than anywhere else. The conduct of the rioters was not due to poverty, or bad crops, the courts was told, because all the prisoners was robust men receiving great wages, too frequently wasted in drunkenness.

  They read out a letter in court that was meant to shame us. It was an ignorant letter full of curses so foul it would make your mother faint, they said. Listening to it, ‘You do as you like, you rob the poor of their common right, you plough the grass up that God sent to grow, that a poor man may not feed a cow or pig . . . we intend to have things as we like and we will fight you for it,’ revealed to me that it was rage and impulse that fuelled us, yes, but older grievances too, going back to an earlier time. I thought of Pa and his strong feelings and politicking and whether it was possible that, despite the difference in our natures, he had sometimes succeeded in passing them to me. Where do Feelings live? Inside us, surely, in our hearts. Where do they end, where do they stop? Pa’s feelings sometimes made such a vivid spark in my nature that I believe I shall not forget it in my grave.

  The trials lasted a week. Taken in chains afterwards to Ely Gaol and was barely enough room to stand up. Face to face, like animals taken to market. I breathed in George Crow’s breath and heard him mutter, why am I standing in these shoes, when Aaron the pock-pecked bastard escaped to London, when Henry blasted Benson escaped with a misdemeanour?

  I said to Pa, damn the eyes of the bugger who spoke so freely in court against him, Henry Tansley, but Pa was quiet and shook his head. I said, a bare year ago, didn’t you share a pint of ale with him, at the Peace celebrations, didn’t you sew shoes for his daughter? But again Pa’s eyes only filled with tears, and he said nothing. Was he not our own neighbour, had I not gone to school with that same daughter, hadn’t Pa once helped him drag his horse from a ditch, I whispered, still hoping to raise Pa’s ire, his lively seditious spirit . . . This, I thought, would surely rouse Pa to fury, but again it was met with only tears.

  I hung my head in weary pain, trying not to weep myself. Could not recognise this quiet Pa, this Pa who was beat, and that was most frightening of all. My neck was sore, my stomach growled with hunger, but Pa’s strange spirits was the thing that pained me most.

  And then two mornings later, and a message came to the Bishop’s Gaol in the form of one of Judge Bate’s junior men. We was all assembled in the Felons’ Hall and was screamed at by the gaoler for silence.

  Tom shuffled to his feet, dragging Isaac Harley, bolted at the shins, with him. A tiny breath of fresh air and a smell of spring blossom came in as the young messenger and a small troop of military men with guns entered the prison, then was quickly snuffed as the door locked shut behind them. We was told a message was delivered and would now be read to us.

  We shuffled and clanked into some kind of silence. The stink of straw soaked in sweat and the stench from the privy in the yard choked the room. George Crow had an iron spike around his neck, on account of the trouble he’d caused last night, and was rubbing at his throat and staring at his hand, which came away spotted with blood. The rest of us lay slumped, defeated, on the straw mattresses, or struggled to our feet. The gaoler watched us warily, sucking on a clay pipe. Extra men had been brought in from Ely for the task of watching us ‘dangerous felons’ and they stood either side of the gaoler, their hands nervously stroking the smooth wooden truncheons at their sides.

  The youth was trembling and took fright of us. The old gaoler put aside his pipe and grunted, ‘Read the notice then!’ and silence fell. We held our breath. A mouse could be heard scratching in the straw.

  I had manoeuvred myself next to Pa. His bad foot had swollen within his constrained irons and the skin was shiny and almost blue. I stared at this. I tried to listen, but the names read out seemed unearthly and wave
red on the youth’s voice, like a bird cry, not like human speech. I only heard Tom’s soft crying, and looked up and saw his red head dropping forward, and remembered the day we had climbed the tallest tree on the banks of the River Ouse to peep inside the buzzard’s nest, and Tom had let go his grip and fallen from it, dropping like a stone into the water, and how I had jumped down and run alongside the river, crying out: Tom! Tom! until his head broke the surface again. Being Tom – Tom Foolery – he resurfaced with a madman’s laugh like the honk of a goose.

  I kept my mind on that; closing my eyes. As I did so it was Susie’s face that filled my mind. Her little pointy chin. Her vivid hazel-coloured eyes. Her liveliness, how all around her was always glittering, bright. Was this true, or a fancy, my own thoughts colouring her so?

  Nineteen of us was reprieved. I heard the words at last: they drove into my thoughts, like a stake. Pa they deemed too seditious, being in possession of some intelligence that should have made him know better. Tom too violent with cleaver and his feverish chopping. John Dennis they said was a leader, and without need and therefore greedy. The deeds of George and Isaac unforgivable. But seven was to be transported. Twelve was to stay in Ely Gaol for at least one year. I was one of those.

  Pa and Tom, Isaac Harley, John Dennis and George Crow was to be hanged.

  They came for Pa, Tom and the others in the morning. Light scoured our eyes early, streaming in through the one square window, falling to the floor in stripes. A cuckoo piped its bum notes, the most detested bird, singing for all the world as if there was joy in the air. Staggered to my feet, tried to speak. Pa hugged me and nodded and touched my cheek, and he looked soft, soft, his face melting in front of me like the softest of clouds, as if he was already fading.

  ‘I can see you now in your little pink frock, sealskin cap . . .’ Pa muttered, in his embrace a madness that seemed to grip him, that made him want to babble sweet nothings in my ear as if I was but two years old. The gaol chaplain stepped between us and we was rudely parted.

  The same armed men from yesterday gripped at Pa’s shoulder. He showed no resistance. We felons could hear the crowds that waited outside the gaolhouse, hear the clop of the horses ready to carry the condemned away to the swampy grounds at Parnell Pits. We knew without seeing it of the waiting cart, draped in its black crêpe. Even in gaol news had reached us, how troubling they found it to purchase horses, so strongly did locals feel about it. There was barely a man in the area Pa didn’t know. Men he grew up with, drank ‘good Ely ale’ alongside, played cards with, sewed shoes for. Boys he had swum with in the River Ouse; skated beside under Sandhill bridge, when the river iced over.

  Tom wept openly and noisily. Gave me a last beseeching look, wild with fear, and all jokes wrenched from him. Why Pa? I could only think. Tom – it was clear to all that Tom would one day come to the bad, but Pa? In the courtroom it was said that his position in life should have restrained him. The fact of his job as a shoemaker. His age. In the end, they wanted to make an example of him.

  ‘Bear up, Willie!’ Pa shouted, one last flare of his old spirit as he was bundled from the gaol.

  We could hear the horses’ impatience, hear them snorting and stomping. Pa’s words rattled around the empty walls.

  The iron doors clanged behind them. I only wanted to die myself.

  I fell then into some kind of faint, a dreaming state, where I lay on straw in a corner of the gaol and felt myself neither living or dead. Wondered if I was a horse: was that why I could smell straw in my nostrils? Was I already in heaven, or had I fallen into a dark deep well? Once again the will-o’-the-wisp came to me, this time skating across the gaolhouse floor as if on ice, and on its face the most terrible expression and it seated astride a creature nothing like a horse . . .

  I do not know how many hours or days I lay in this place, willing myself to die too. The pain in my heart was so great I believed it would surely complete the task and break in two.

  One night I dreamed a most fearful dream: of the noose hanging and Father’s head, looming at me, expanded as big as a bladder. I began shaking and weeping in my sleep. But the strangest thing: Pa spoke to me, and it was just as if he was beside me. Bear up, he said again. Your death is yours alone, it belongs to you, it is contained in the first seed of you; none can take it from you, not even your killer.

  I thought this a nonsense remark and wanted to strike him. Where am I? I asked him, in the dream. You’re just a twinkle in my eye; you’re a star, you don’t yet exist, Pa said. I tried to will myself awake, to continue this conversation with him, so comforting was it. Where am I before I’m born, then, and after my death? Pa smiled, and told me not to fear. I was where he was now: in dreams, in the memories of my children. Pull your children in sledges over the frozen lake, never stop them from squealing from joy.

  I woke with my ear pressed to the floor, feeling the cold brick seep through, and I felt as if I’d been straining to hear more, to catch Pa’s voice. I covered my head with my shirt and jacket for warmth, and tried not to listen to the gossip of the other prisoners, but could not prevent myself from hearing as how Tom South was the most vexed and agitated; how Pa’s last words was to forgive Henry Tansley who spoke wrong in court against him. That struck me. That shocked me and infuriated me at first.

  And I heard too how the women of Littleport was allowed – no, invited – to come and weep over the bodies of their menfolk as they lay in the house next to the prison, awaiting burial. I closed my eyes against the picture this drew for me of the five men in the cart with the black cloth draped over it, white caps on their heads, slumped there like shot birds. And thoughts of my own dear mother. Her bonnet and her calf-leather slippers, sewn for her by Pa.

  They had had to build a gallows new and fast, to make their point, I knew that much. Parnell Pits – a swampy place, old Fen, quag, they call it, foul-smelling water; a place to avoid since all Fenmen knew it gave you the ague: Marsh fever. There was a crowd, the others whispered. Women carrying babies, mothers iced over with shock. A few infantrymen to keep the crowd in order.

  I close my eyes and ears but still I’m there with Pa, with Tom, in my mind. I see it clear: the morning sun making finger shadows across the marshy spot; we’ve all seen that round here. How the reeds look, spiked with the blood red of the summer’s last poppies. Their silky paper petals drooping their sorry heads. A woodpigeon tooting fit to burst. I know Henry Tansley would be there. John Griffin, our gaoler, praying. May their awful Fate be a warning to others.

  A hush. A crow rummaging in its feathers, searching for something lost. Nettles and the sharp juice of grass and that stink of bad Fen water. My breath held at the hour they did it – the exact hour – five men are paraded on the wooden platform, hands tied, white caps covering heads. The dark seeds of their eyes.

  Pa would be bold, I know that. Stare out at the Fen countryside he loves. Hear the geese honking overhead – there’s always geese honking overhead; hear the bittern booming. He would be dreaming of lying low on his stomach in the boat on the river with a punt gun.

  Perhaps he thinks of me, of his son Willie back in Ely Gaol, or of his daughters, or his wife, or the future. Of a first grandchild he’s never going to see. Or the far future – of a long line of Beamisses. He had modest aims, I think, did Pa. He wanted a fair wage and a fair price for flour. He didn’t plan on being supernatural.

  Those fragile poppy heads – a sudden breeze lifting them from their stalks and scattering red petals and seeds and black hanging figures everywhere. William, Isaac Harley, John Dennis, Thomas South the younger, George Crow, taking their leap into the dark. A stain upon the Fens.

  They whispered that Pa cried out as the drop fell, ‘I forgive Mr Tansley that he swore falsely against me.’ Finally I knew it was just Pa being Pa, a man hotly rash but full of forgiveness. Fair, and straight: a good man.

  ‘Might as well be hanged as starved,’ muttered Richard Rutter, from his bed of straw in the gaol.

  ‘His
heart continued alive for a full four hours, expanding and contracting after the body was cut down,’ whispered little John Badger.

  ‘Its powers was visible past one o’clock.’

  ‘Preserved his rebellion until the last gasp.’

  Did not need to know of who they spoke. Who had the Fen Tiger’s heart that could continue to pump like the wind-pump with its steady inexorable task when all life from the body was gone? I knew anyway, knew without asking. William Beamiss the elder. Dear Pa. Now launched into all eternity.

  Thought then that my life would fade to nothing and that be the end of me. Gaol rations, sickness, the ague; longed for one of them to carry me off. But one day, an icy day, when frost coated the cobwebs in the gaol and lit the trees outside the window as if with heavenly light, a new prisoner was brought in. A thirteen-year-old boy, one week for trespass on the Spencer farm in Prickwillow. And with him, something queer. A note. Blue paper. Folded small and thick and hidden in the boy’s breeches. He hands it to me with a sullen, dull-eyed face.

  Dearest Willie,

  I do not know if you can read this. I have risked all to send it and bribed the boy you see before you. I endeavour too to send money each week to your mother and sisters. Little Jenny has been very sick but she is recovering.

  Willie Beamiss. Dearest one – know that I am waiting for you. I am yours. If you will have me. I would run away with you, whatever you ask of me I will do. Know that my middle name is Constance and that my heart is constant too.

  Your

  Susie Spencer

  (Mother, being superstitious, had taught me that book learning was the blackest of Witchcraft, and now I rejoiced once again that Pa had always been such a ticklish devil, full of disobedience, and had allowed me, as I have said, to learn my letters.)