The door opened upon a girl who had been sought for eight-and-twenty days. It was late on the evening of the 29th of January, 1753, in the quarter of Aldermanbury, and her mother’s household had learned what is known to every house where someone is missing: each step in the street may be the right one, until the moment it recedes into the distance. This time, Elizabeth Canning had indeed returned. Emaciated, exhausted, ill-clad, she brought with her a tale that would bring another woman to the very foot of the gallows.
Let us imagine the chair drawn forward, the hand bringing a light nearer, the questions held back and then bursting forth all at once. First, one must recognise the child one has so longed to see again; only then does one seek to know. Elizabeth had parted from relatives after a New Year’s Day visit. Between that evening and her return, nearly an entire month remained a blank. She was to fill it with crusts of bread, a pitcher, a locked door, and the countenance of an old woman. London would soon find that chamber more familiar than many of its own thoroughfares.
Two men, she explained, had set upon her at Moorfields, stripped her, struck her, and dragged her out of the city. Of the journey itself, she retained only disjointed sensations: she had lost consciousness, then come to her senses whilst still being forced forward. At last, she was brought into a house. A woman had offered her fine clothes if she would consent to adopt their manner of life; Elizabeth understood that she was to be given over to prostitution. She refused. The woman had then cut the laces of her stays, taken the garment, and thrust the girl into an upper room.
Such was her tale. Yet as it passed from mouth to mouth, caution grew less necessary to those who heard it: the recovered captive had offered them hunger, cold, and peril; they repaid her with their certainty.
The Chamber That Every Man Beheld
Elizabeth described the barest means of survival: crusts of bread, water in a dark pitcher, a morsel of food forgotten in her pocket. On this store she had subsisted for nearly four weeks, without aid. On the 29th of January, she claimed to have pulled a board from the window, slipped her body through the opening, reached the ground, and walked back to London. The hardship of this survival, of this escape, of this return on foot would later feed countless objections. For the present, men looked above all upon the girl who had come back. Her body seemed to bear witness before she could speak.
The house, by her account, lay upon the Hertfordshire road. From her place of confinement, she said she had recognised a carter she had seen in the employ of a former mistress. This recollection gave a direction to the search, and suspicion fastened upon the establishment of Susannah Wells at Enfield Wash. Thither Elizabeth was conducted, accompanied by persons resolute in her support. An accusation hitherto suspended upon a few sparse hints was now about to meet walls, staircases, and inhabitants whom the law could call to account.
There is something formidable in such an encounter. Those who enter seek a recognition; those who are in their own home see strangers arrive who already know what they wish to discover. In such a meeting, a movement of surprise may wear the guise of guilt, a silence that of cunning. Elizabeth pointed out Mary Squires. It was she, the girl affirmed, who had cut away her stays. Another woman, Virtue Hall, was said to have witnessed the act.
Squires denied it. Against this certainty she set a journey into Dorset: at the time alleged, she had been far from Enfield. Her vagrant life, while it provided stages that might be corroborated, exposed her likewise to the prejudices visited upon wanderers. Much heed was paid to her face. Narratives and broadsheets made an argument of her features, as though a singular countenance could stand in place of proof. The old woman possessed an alibi; a portion of London preferred her likeness.
The Witness Awaited
Virtue Hall began by denying all knowledge of the matter. This answer left a void in the prosecution, for the testimony of an inmate of the house would have lent Elizabeth’s account a second prop. She was examined afresh before Henry Fielding, the magistrate whose name was likewise to remain attached to novels. The examination was prolonged; she was made to contemplate prison and prosecution. In the end, she confirmed Canning’s story.
There were now two voices. In the eyes of Elizabeth’s supporters, their accord completed what her physical condition had begun. Yet for any observer attending to the circumstances of the interrogation, one question remained: what had just been obtained—a recovered memory, or a statement that had become the sole means of escaping peril? A deposition does not carry, at the foot of every line, the weight of the expectation that gave it birth. A later reader receives an affirmation; the woman who uttered it had before her a magistrate, a menace, and hours already spent in fear.
In February 1753, Mary Squires was convicted of the robbery. The penalty was death. Susannah Wells was likewise found guilty of her share in the affair. As for the men who had testified that Squires was in Dorset, their testimony, instead of immediately saving the prisoner, exposed them to prosecutions for perjury. To say that one had seen a wayfaring woman in the wrong place was enough to shift a man from the witness-box to the dock.
Elizabeth’s victory seemed complete. It lacked precisely that which a public triumph is least willing to demand: a scrutiny capable of undoing it.
The Days of Mary Squires
Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Lord Mayor of London, remained unconvinced. He undertook to have the matter examined further. In the streets and in print, this obstinacy drew attacks upon him; it was possible, then, to defend a condemned woman and be treated as the enemy of the victim. Passion had allotted the parts. Gascoyne troubled the pageant by inquiring after what had occurred beyond London.
The inquiry shifted to the stages of the journey alleged by Squires. Persons had lodged her or crossed her path; their recollections were bound up with working days, passings-by, and chance meetings. Each possessed but a small fragment of time. Brought together, these fragments formed the only wealth a woman without a settled habitation could command against an accusation: the trace she had left in the memory of others.
One may imagine a witness recalled to a visit he had deemed of no account. He searches for a date, hesitates between two weeks, recalls what he was about that day; then he learns that a life hangs upon the calendar he had pondered with so little heed. The whole affair was contracted within this disproportion. A pitcher and a few crusts of bread had stirred the capital. Now it must be brought to hear the testimony of folk who remembered a wandering woman.
The royal mercy saved Squires. This outcome altered the judicial sentence without restoring unanimity to London. Canning’s defenders never ceased to believe her; the adversaries of her tale demanded that she, in her turn, should answer for what she had sworn. The men prosecuted for supporting the alibi were at last acquitted, no one appearing to sustain the charge against them. Justice had begun to untie the knot. The quarrel, however, found fresh means to draw it tight.
She Who Must Depart
In 1754, Elizabeth Canning stood trial for perjury. The roles were reversed. She whose complaint had been received was now obliged to hear witnesses maintain that her accusation was false; the recollections brought from Dorset returned to the centre of the trial, whilst her friends appealed to her past conduct, her honesty, and all they had known of her before that vanished month.
This defence possessed a genuine human force and a cruel judicial weakness. To have lived without reproach did not answer the question of where Mary Squires had been. Yet the folk who had employed Elizabeth, taken her in, succoured her, and believed her, were not merely speaking of an accusation. They were defending their own knowledge of a human soul. To admit doubt, in their eyes, might resemble the abandonment of a girl they had pledged to protect.
The verdict was one of guilty. Elizabeth received a sentence of seven years’ transportation. She left England for New England at the end of July 1754, still supported by funds collected by her adherents. The judgment sent her far away; it did not banish from the realm those who believed her. Her departure set a sea between her and the scenes of the dispute, without supplying the missing narrative of those weeks of absence.
Mary Squires had escaped the cord; Canning was to rebuild her life elsewhere. We know these determinations. They do not warrant our contriving a definitive explanation for that month of January, nor our repeopling the chamber at Enfield with gestures that might at last be caught unawares. That which remains certain suffices to lend the affair its violence: a word had imperilled a life, an inquiry had stayed an execution, and a second trial had condemned the first accuser.
In the house in Aldermanbury, the door had restored Elizabeth to her mother. London, which had hailed her as a heroine and dismissed her as a convict, never ceased to ask what she had truly brought back with her.