The hat was slashed to ribbons. The neckband and comb discovered upon the road were smeared with blood. On the seventeenth day of August 1660, on the morrow of William Harrison’s disappearance, these relics guided his family to a desolate furze field. There the earth was dug up, yet no trace of the aged man was found. Nevertheless, his servant John Perry was soon arrested; within days, he accused his own mother and brother of the murder.
The judicial compilation by George Borrow, published in 1825, opens the inquiry at Campden, in Gloucestershire. William Harrison, seventy years of age, acted as steward of the estates of Lady Campden. On the sixteenth of August, he set forth on foot for Charringworth to collect the Michaelmas rents. As dusk gathered and he failed to return, his wife sent John Perry, his servant, along the road to meet him. Neither man returned that night.
With the dawn, Edward Harrison, the steward’s son, rode out in search of his father. He was informed that a traveller resembling him had been glimpsed near Charringworth; in a neighbouring hamlet, none could confirm his passage. Upon their return, Edward and John learned of certain garments found by a poor washerwoman between Ebrington and Campden. They recognized the hat, the neckband, and the comb as belonging to William. The fresh blood upon the ivory teeth and the deep gashes in the cloth gave the disappearance all the violent hallmarks of murder. The folk of Campden—men, women, and children—scoured the countryside far and wide. The earth yielded no corpse.
Suspicion fell heavily upon John. He alleged that, after having been dispatched to seek his master, he had repeatedly altered his course. As darkness overtook him, he had first retraced his steps to procure a horse, then waited by the courtyard gate, spoken with two passing rustics, and ultimately laid himself down to sleep in the hen-roost. At midnight, observing a candle glimmering in his mistress’s bedchamber, he resumed his journey, only to lose himself in a thick mist. He claimed to have passed the rest of the night beneath a hedge. The next morning, he questioned several husbandmen, who confirmed having paid twenty-three pounds into William Harrison’s hands. Several witnesses supported parts of this rambling itinerary. Yet six days of close custody failed to bring forth the missing steward.
Then the prisoner’s tales began to multiply. John spoke first of a tinker who had purportedly slain his master, then of a neighbouring servant, and lastly of a body concealed beneath a stack of bean-stalks. Every site dug up proved barren. On the twenty-fourth of August, before the same justice of the peace, John acknowledged that his master had indeed been murdered, though he denied striking the blow. Thereupon, he denounced his mother, Joan Perry, and his brother, Richard.
In the deposition read before the magistrate, John declared that his family subsisted upon his place in Harrison’s household. His mother and brother, he swore, had repeatedly urged him to disclose the day on which the steward would gather the rents. He claimed to have alerted Richard, then followed William Harrison at a distance. Near the churchyard at Campden, John said he came upon his brother bending over the fallen body, their mother standing by. He asserted that Richard had strangled the old man and taken a bag of gold, which he delivered into Joan’s apron. Their design, so he said, was to cast the remains into a mill-pond. John maintained he had subsequently slashed the steward’s hat, neckband, and comb, scattering them along the highway to simulate an assault. Thus the very articles that had launched the hue and cry were, by his account, mere theatrical contrivances.
Joan and Richard were straightway apprehended. They vehemently denied the accusation and likewise repudiated a charge of an earlier burglary of one hundred and forty pounds from Harrison’s house. Lacking a body, the assize judge initially refused to try them for murder. The three were nevertheless indicted for the felony of housebreaking and pleaded guilty to that count. John persisted in his claim that his mother and brother had slain Harrison, adding that they had sought to poison him in gaol. At the following spring assizes, the murder charge was revived. His written confession was produced; John now protested that he had uttered it in a fit of mad distraction. All three were convicted and condemned to die near Campden. John was hanged in chains upon the hill. His confession, which he had recanted as madness, remained the sole testimony linking his mother and brother to the crime; yet no corpse had ever been discovered.
Some two years thereafter, William Harrison reappeared alive in Campden. The man for whom the fields had been upturned and three souls sent to the gallows was not dead. He presented to the magistrate Sir Thomas Overbury a written narrative accounting for his long absence. At Charringworth, so he related, three horsemen had beset him in a narrow lane, wounded him with their swords, and carried him off behind one of their saddles. They had rifled his pockets near a hay-rick and thrown him into a stone-pit, only to hoist him back onto the horse; one rider had then stuffed money into his pockets before bearing him away across lonely moors to an isolated cottage. The woman who unbarred the door expressed astonishment that they should bring her a man half-dead and scarce able to speak. She admitted only a young girl into the chamber; the party kept vigil that night and revived him with broth. On the morrow, the horsemen conveyed him toward the Kentish coast. At Deal, he was bundled into a boat and thence to a vessel where his wounds were dressed.
The narrative went on to describe a second abduction, this time by Turkish corsairs. After some six weeks aboard the English coaster, Harrison claimed to have been bartered away to a Turkish ship and thrust into a dark hold. Landed with other wretches, he was confined for four days before being bought by an octogenarian physician residing near Smyrna. He served this master under the name of Bell. The physician, having formerly travelled in England, would discourse with him of Crowland in Lincolnshire. Harrison remained in this servitude for nearly two years, until the old doctor fell gravely ill and exhorted him to flee. Destitute of means or papers, he made for the port and pleaded for passage with two mariners of a Hamburg ship. They hesitated long, for discovery meant the forfeiture of vessel and liberty; in the end, they concealed him beneath timber and freight, baffling the search of the harbour guards. He reached Lisbon. There, an Englishman hailing from Lincolnshire paid his passage back to his native realm. Arriving at Dover, Harrison journeyed to London, received sufficient relief to pursue his road, and returned through Crowland to Campden.
This resurrection instantly dismantled the judicial scaffolding that had brought Joan, Richard, and John Perry to the gallows. Harrison affirmed that he had seen neither the mother nor the brother of his servant that fateful evening, and remained utterly ignorant of his abductors’ identities. John had obstinately accused his kin; his fabrications had sent them to the scaffold for a murder that had never occurred. The letter offered no clue as to why the servant had lied so ruinously, nor why he had invented caches for a non-existent corpse. Neither did it unmask the three horsemen who had fallen upon the steward.
The mystery hardened into a cruel historical paradox: a missing man returned after two years, while three innocent beings had already perished for his supposed destruction. The blood upon the comb had incited an entire parish to seek a dead man; John’s fevered confessions had supplied the phantom corpse. When Harrison returned, the executed could no longer hear their vindication.