London - Edward Rutherfurd [404]
He was a little surprised therefore, just as he was beginning this sermon in St Lawrence Silversleeves, one January afternoon, to observe that two of his congregation, Martha and Gideon, were slipping out.
Jane and Dogget were lying on her bed together when the door suddenly opened and they found themselves face to face with Martha.
Martha had been thorough. It had not taken her long to get the truth from Gideon. Once directly challenged, he had not felt he could lie. “I do not know,” he had said defensively, “but I think it is so.”
“Even now?”
“Perhaps.”
Now, as well as Gideon, she had another neighbour with her. “There must be proof,” she had told Gideon. And the proof was there. The neighbour looked shocked, Gideon embarrassed. Martha’s face was taut and white. Having seen, she left.
An hour later, having heard Jane’s account, Meredith looked grim. “It’s the very thing I always feared. I could see the way the wind was blowing even before they killed the king. Now the Puritans have changed all the laws . . .” He shook his grey old head sadly. “Curse these saints with their moralizing and their witch-hunts,” he muttered. “And now you are taken in adultery.”
“At my age,” Jane shrugged, “it sounds absurd.”
“But you forget,” Meredith warned her urgently. “The penalty for adultery nowadays is death.”
Young O Be Joyful sat on the edge of his seat. It was strange to see Mrs Wheeler and Uncle Dogget, as he called him, standing together like criminals. But then of course they were. Everyone knew it now. Even Dogget’s children understood that their father was wicked. Martha had seen to that.
The trial of Jane and Dogget took place in the Guildhall. The courtroom was packed. There was, even amongst the good Puritans and the crowd, some wry amusement at the age of the accused. Yet there was no sense, it seemed, of the deeper irony of the event.
That here, before a stern judge and a jury of twelve solid citizens, was a woman, entering old age, absent from her husband for over a decade, who was prosecuting another woman older than she, for doing something with her husband which, if truth were told, she did not even wish to do herself. Why? Because she had been made a fool of; because she was jealous of both for loving each other; because her God was a vengeful God.
The judge was grave. He knew what the verdict would be.
The evidence was irrefutable. The crime had been seen; the witnesses were reliable. The accused, upon the advice of a lawyer found by Meredith, pleaded not guilty. The witnesses, they said, had misunderstood what they had seen. No carnal act had taken place. But there was not a single soul in that courtroom who believed this manifest lie. The business did not take long. Everyone knew what the penalty for their crime must be. There was no needless mercy, no extenuation in the London of the saints. Their justice was a great, dark rock. The court became quiet as the judge instructed the jury. Nor did the twelve good men take long to consider their verdict. After only minutes they signalled that they were ready. Solemnly the jury foreman stood before the judge, to answer the awful question: “How do you find?” And clearly his voice rang out. “Not guilty, my lord.”
“Not guilty?” Martha was standing, trembling with rage. “Not guilty? Of course they are guilty.”
“Silence!” the judge thundered. “The jury has spoken.” He nodded to Jane and to Dogget. “You are free to go.”
“This is an outrage,” Martha cried. But no one was listening.
The judge sighed. The verdict had been exactly as he expected. For if, in their zeal, the saints had passed stern, Old Testament laws, they had overlooked one thing: the trials resulting still had to go before an English jury. And the ordinary citizens had not entirely lost their humanity. The idea of hanging a man and a woman for adultery, however much they disapproved of the culprits’ conduct, offended their sense of fairness. So they refused to find them guilty. Of the twenty-three known cases brought to court in the London area, only one secured