A dead man had been found, and Richard Houseman appeared to know that he was not the right one. The man before whom the bones were laid might easily have confined himself to stating that he recognized nothing; instead, he displayed a singular assurance. That particular skeleton, he insisted, could never be that of Daniel Clarke. In an investigation where no one had yet traced the missing man, so positive a denial was distinctly troublesome. To exclude a burial with such vehemence, a man must perhaps know of another.
The discovery occurred in 1758, near Knaresborough. For more than thirteen years, Clarke had been missed by the town and by those who had entrusted him with goods of value. His absence had at first worn the appearance of flight. It was plausible enough that a man who had obtained plate, jewels, and various wares had withdrawn with his booty to some corner where no one would demand their return. Then time had blunted every question. The bones brought the questions back before they had even received a name.
A Table Too Well Furnished
Clarke was a shoemaker. Following his marriage, he had given out that his wife was to inherit a considerable fortune, and these expected riches soon began to procure him the conveniences of wealth already possessed. He borrowed, bought on credit, and gave his neighbors assorted reasons for placing their property in his hands. The Newgate Calendar associates Eugene Aram and Houseman with this fraudulent design; the three men were thus linked by something more than ordinary neighborliness.
In the shop our imagination conjures, a merchant withdraws a piece of plate from paper already creased by repeated folding. He knows Clarke and would gladly do him a service, yet he wishes his customer to appreciate the worth of what he is taking away. He reminds him of it with studied lightness, then adds a pleasantry on the fine life that awaits him. Clarke smiles. The merchant accompanies him to the threshold; it would have seemed ungracious to show suspicion toward a man who brought such good tidings.
What vanished thereafter was not merely a debtor. Objects to which several households attached their own history ceased to return, and the explanations grew less agreeable to hear. The names of Aram and Houseman remained entangled in the suspicions raised by the affair. Yet the vanished man could still pass for the principal architect of the fraud, the one who had carried off the precious share while leaving others to answer for it. There was no body. The town could go on speaking of an ordinary swindle.
Eugene Aram in turn departed from Knaresborough. He had taught in the town; he subsequently led an itinerant existence, earning his bread in various schools and pursuing an inquiry into languages that occupied a singular place in his life. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew had not satisfied him; he collated words, sought out affinities, and amassed materials for a comparative lexicon. To those who watched him at his desk, his past might have been summed up in a few scattered places and appointments.
What Houseman Knew
The first discovery of bones took place at Thistle Hill, during the course of quarrying work. It revived what Aram’s wife had once let fall: she had long suspected her husband and Houseman of having done away with Clarke. Houseman was examined. His refusal to identify the bones did not bring the inquiry to a close; the manner in which he delivered it induced his hearers to ask whence such certainty came.
He ended by pointing to St. Robert’s Cave. He gave directions as to the placement of the body, and a second skeleton was found at the designated spot. The difference between the two discoveries governed the entire proceedings. The first dead man had been stumbled upon by chance; the second had been pointed out by a man possessing knowledge that chance could scarcely explain. Such knowledge was invaluable to the prosecution. It also placed the man who imparted it in a position from which he had every reason to extricate himself.
Houseman laid the accusation upon Aram. According to his account, a nocturnal walk had brought Clarke near the cave, where Aram had struck him down. This narrative came from a confederate in the business, not from some disinterested passer-by whom misfortune had stationed behind a hedge. By speaking, Houseman might purchase his own deliverance. He was to turn witness against the man whose name, several counties away, was then inscribed in the ordinary routine of a schoolroom.
Aram was run to earth at Lynn, in Norfolk, and arrested in August 1758. In our reconstruction of the schoolroom, a boy remains by his desk with an exercise awaiting correction. The master has been called out; another adult undertakes to dismiss the children. The lad gathers his paper, then returns for a forgotten book. The room still holds all the customary things. Yet someone will presently have to explain to him why the man who taught him to weigh the meaning of words will not return to resume the lesson.
Giving the Bones Another Meaning
At York, on the 3rd of August 1759, Aram defended himself in a speech of which the chronicles preserved an extended text. He first set his life of study against the accusation. Could a laborious, sober man, debilitated by infirmity, have turned suddenly into an assassin for gain? He urged his judges to consider the unbroken tenure of a life. Yet that continuity, which he advanced as proof, was known only by those portions of his existence that had been visible to the world.
He directed his attack above all against the bones. Why affix a name to a skeleton without establishing beyond doubt to whom it had belonged? An ancient hermitage might well contain interments; wars, destructions, and common labors had disturbed the dead over centuries. He summoned historical examples, multiplied comparisons, and ushered into the court the whole forgotten pageant of unrecorded graves. Where the prosecution pointed to Clarke, he invited the jury to acknowledge an uncertainty.
The argument derived its vigor from the very discipline that had nourished his philological pursuits. Aram knew that a semblance of affinity is not enough to identify a word, and that context alters what one thinks one understands. He brought to these human remains the selfsame need for distinction. His address, however, possessed none of the detachment of pure research: his life hung upon the doubt he could implant. The instances he heaped together were designed to hold the jurors at a distance from the grave Houseman had pointed out.
In the chamber imagined around these recorded words, a listener ceases to wait for the close of each sentence. He has surrendered to the cadence of the reasoning. Then the name of Houseman recurs in the arguments, and with it the precision of the place disclosed. An ancient burial site might harbor bones; did that suffice to explain why this particular man knew where to dig? The question dragged back to the cave those minds the defense had carried across the centuries.
The jury pronounced him guilty. The judge acknowledged the ingenuity of the defense without embracing its conclusions. Erudition had neither broken the chain of circumstances nor undone the testimony of Houseman. It bestowed upon the trial its memorable character: that of a man employing all the resources of his intellect to save his life, while the dead man whose bones were in dispute had left no comparable rhetoric behind him.
The Name of Daniel Clarke
Following the conviction, the early accounts record that Aram admitted his complicity before several clergymen. They also ascribe to him a justification grounded in jealousy of Clarke. This belated version does not establish the infidelity with which he reproached his wife; it merely reveals how the condemned man sought to account for his deed. Houseman’s testimony had thrust a role upon him, and he still endeavored to redistribute the burden of guilt.
He attempted his own life prior to execution, yet was nonetheless hanged at York on the 6th of August 1759. His body was subsequently hung in chains near Knaresborough. The romantic narratives that seized upon his fate would make of the scholar a figure far more enduring than the vanished shoemaker; their literary power gives them no title to be ranked among the testimonies of the trial.
In our final scene, the merchant comes upon an old ledger leaf where he had set down what Clarke owed him. He can no longer turn it to account to recover the goods, nor has he any wish to cast it away. The customer’s name still stands between a date and a sum. For years, that single line had signified an absconded debtor. He reads it in a different light, then folds the sheet once more: the debt remains unchanged, but the man who was to discharge it has at last returned among the dead.