When they bade her recount it, Mary Ann sought first where one ought to begin. At the moment her father had drunk? At the moment she had taken up the pitcher? Or earlier still, before the household implements had learned to turn against those who lived among them? She looked at her hands. They had carried the beer; for weeks now, that simple charge had lent them, in her own eyes, a consequence she would gladly have stripped away.
She saw once more the kitchen table on an evening in April 1820. The pitcher had been fetched back from the public house, her father Thomas had drunk, and Rebecca leaned over him. Mary Ann waited to be commanded. That was what she knew how to do: to fetch, to hold, to carry. Her father’s agony suggested no precise errand. She knew not where to place her eagerness.
“Get out of the way,” said the mother.
The girl backed away toward the door. She heard the shifting of a chair, then the sound of liquid. Rebecca rinsed the pitcher. The movement was no different from those she performed every evening; yet this time, Mary Ann watched it through to the end. Her father suffered, and her mother washed. Grave matters ought to interrupt small drudgeries; since they did not, the child persuaded herself still that the affliction would pass.
It did not pass. In the days that followed, the house took on another purpose. The bedchamber supplanted the kitchen; adults entered without asking whether they disturbed, lowered their voices before the children, and raised them again the moment they believed themselves alone. Mary Ann caught her Christian name in a conversation. She stopped, ready to answer, but it was not to her they spoke. They spoke of her, of her errand, of what she had brought back. She discovered this way of becoming present without being admitted.
Thomas Worlock died on the twenty-first of April. His wife was apprehended for having poisoned him with arsenic. A woman testified to the purchase of the poison. Their daughter Mary Ann had gone to fetch the beer he had drunk. These few facts were henceforth enough to transform a child sent on an errand into a witness in a capital cause.
The first night without her parents, Mary Ann thought she heard herself called back. She raised herself upon her bed before recognizing the wind against the windowpane. The room where they had laid her held nothing menacing; a woman had made a place for her, had set water beside her, had seen to it that she was not cold. Yet none knew that at home she slept facing the door, and this detail, which she dared not explain, made her feel the absence far more than all the condolences.
On the morrow, this woman asked her if she would eat.
“I can wash up after,” Mary Ann replied.
She offered the only coin she possessed so as not to be a burden. The woman handed her the bread without accepting the bargain. For a moment, the child hesitated: to receive without returning seemed to her a dangerous indulgence, for which a reckoning might later be demanded. Then she ate, in small bites, watching the hands of her hostess. They remained still upon the table.
The weeks passed. It was necessary to repeat what she had seen. Mary Ann took pains not to confound what she had witnessed with what she had heard told since. The effort exhausted her. Certain images grew so distinct through being summoned again and again that she no longer knew whether she preserved them or invented them. So she returned to the simplest things: a vessel in her hand, the threshold crossed, her father within. For all the rest, she learned an answer that cost her dearly: she did not know.
“You must speak the truth,” the woman who kept her urged.
“Even if Mother doesn't come back?”
The woman drew toward herself the needlework she had laid upon her lap. She might have promised a happy resolution; the child was still young enough to believe her. But the promise would remain between them when all was done. She therefore laid her work back upon the table and answered merely:
“It is not for you to decide what shall befall her.”
Mary Ann wished to hold fast to that phrase. She succeeded only halfway. In her mind, speaking and deciding remained bound together, like two garments held by a single pin that prevented their parting.
The trial took place at Gloucester on the fourteenth of August 1820. Rebecca was found guilty. The decision of the court belonged to the adults who sat in judgment; the presence of her daughter among the witnesses made her neither its author nor its cause. Yet it was not enough to restore responsibilities to their proper place for the child, upon leaving, to find her own again.
Mary Ann sat upon the edge of a bench outside the courtroom. They offered her a drink. She pushed the cup away, then took it back because she understood her refusal caused concern. Everyone now examined her movements with a gentle solicitude. She almost longed for the old commands, their brevity, the ease they gave her to obey without being watched.
“I told it as it was,” she murmured.
The woman seated beside her answered that she had done well. Yet that good had mended nothing. The girl had expected the truth to unbind misfortune; she discovered it could make it only more irrevocable. She would have liked an extra chore, a place to run to, some oversight to repair before it was too late. They asked nothing more of her.
Rebecca Worlock was hanged at Gloucester on the sixteenth of August. Between the judgment and the execution, two days had elapsed. In the life of her daughter, the absence that now commenced would know no such convenient measure.
When the news came, Mary Ann did not weep at once. She asked whether she might finish mending the sleeve she held. The woman said yes. The needle moved forward, missed the cloth, returned; three stitches had to be undone. This minute resistance allowed her to remain seated. So long as the sleeve was not finished, she possessed still a reason not to raise her eyes.
In the evening, they cleared the table. Mary Ann took the plates, then stopped before the water vessel. The woman reached out her hand to relieve her; the child held it back.
“This one I can carry.”
She bore it to the table without haste. No one applauded her, no one told her she was brave. They merely made a place for her. For the first time since April, that which she carried reached its destination without turning into a question. She set the water down; someone asked her to sit. She sat.