He begged to be put in prison. The magistrates who had just discharged him believed they were doing him a service; Christopher Slaughterford discovered, upon taking the road home, that a man may enjoy freedom of movement and yet find nowhere a place to dwell. At doorways, conversations fell silent as he drew near. People stepped aside with that peculiar civility wherewith small communities sometimes cloak their cruelest certainties. He wished for a trial. He imagined that after a verdict, they would be compelled to restore his name.
Jane Young had disappeared. She had been seen in his company; this circumstance, at first passed along as mere intelligence, was soon freighted with every explanation that was lacking. In an obscure affair, the last man seen beside a woman possesses the fearful privilege of furnishing everyone with the beginning of a tale. The rest is easily supplied, especially when it can be recounted in whispers.
The Wedding Clothes
Slaughterford came from a family of Surrey millers. Following his apprenticeship and several employments, he had taken a malthouse at Shalford; his aunt kept his house, and his labor had earned him a measure of comfort. Nothing in these early years resembled the violent adventures that popular broadsides promise the public. A trade, a few savings, a woman to manage the hearth: here were the makings of an existence to which neighbors readily grant their approval, until the day when those very same elements are transformed into the instruments of an indictment.
Jane, for her part, had spoken of marriage. Her mistress, Elizabeth Chapman, was later to report that she had quitted her service announcing this hope, and that she had bought clothes for the occasion. Let us take note of these garments, which are not the most sensational detail of the case, but perhaps the saddest. A young woman had prepared herself to be received under another roof; she had given her future a shape distinct enough to choose what she would wear upon crossing the threshold.
The last evening she was seen in Christopher’s company was the fifth of October, 1703. Then the days slipped by. Those who sought her inquired whether she had wed, whether she had joined an acquaintance, or whether she had returned to the lady she had previously served. The questions circulated from house to house without fetching back an answer. Christopher said he knew not where she was. What an innocent man might have answered was likewise what a guilty man could have said: the crux of the entire trial already lay within that fatal encounter.
About a month later, her body was found in a pond. It bore marks of violence. From that moment forth, there was no longer talk of an unexplained absence, but of a death for which someone must answer.
A Verdict That Does Not Suffice
The old chronicle relates that Slaughterford went of his own accord before two justices of the peace. They did not detain him. He might have regarded this decision as a deliverance; but a magistrate’s ruling cannot be worn upon one’s countenance, and the folk he encountered continued to read something else entirely upon his features.
He therefore went to a third magistrate and asked to be committed. The Marshalsea prison opened its gates to him. One can measure what such a measure implies of faith in the law, or of despair before public opinion: choosing a cell because the street has become uninhabitable, preferring the interrogatories of a court to the glances that no man is required to explain. He was not merely seeking to be left in peace. He wanted an authority to proclaim publicly what he went on repeating without being believed.
At the Kingston assizes, a jury acquitted him.
We should like to be able to write that the affair ended there. That would be to impute to a sentence a power that men do not always grant it. For those who had convinced themselves of his guilt, this acquittal by no means demonstrated their error; it revealed only that the judges had been ill-informed. Their indignation now possessed two objects: Jane’s death and Christopher’s return.
The young woman’s family was poor. Neighbors contributed to the charges of a fresh prosecution, brought in the name of her brother Henry Young under the peculiar procedure of an appeal of murder described in the old account. Thus the money of the neighborhood purchased a second hearing for its conviction. One might perceive in this the devotion of folk resolved not to forsake a dead woman; one might also recognize the power of a community that refused to accept having been answered with a refusal.
The Same Words, Another Man
Before the Court of Queen’s Bench, with Lord Chief Justice Holt presiding, the prosecution rehearsed, in the main, the evidence already heard. But this evidence consisted not of objects whose weight anyone could verify upon a scale. It consisted of encounters, reported words, night hours, and impressions hardened into testimony.
A man swore to having passed, toward three o’clock in the morning, a couple not far from the spot where the body had been discovered. The man wore light-colored clothes; Christopher had worn such apparel. The witness had subsequently heard a woman’s cry. This sequence was dreadful, and yet a great gulf remained between discerning a color in the dark and recognizing a murderer.
Two women reported utterances that appeared damning. In one conversation, Slaughterford was said to have jested with singular coarseness about his manner of ridding himself of women. In another, questioned concerning Jane and the possibility of a child, he was said to have answered weeping. The same eyes might discern in those tears the remorse of the guilty or the grief of a shattered man; the same brutality of speech might pass for a veiled confession or for that defensive foolishness from which the innocent themselves are not always exempt.
Christopher’s aunt and a lad of the household maintained that he had slept at home on the night of the crime. Their closeness to the accused might invite mistrust; it also afforded them the means of knowing his whereabouts. That is precisely what renders certain depositions so difficult to weigh: the very reason for hearing them is the reason for which they are suspected.
The second jury declared him guilty.
What He Left Behind
Until his death, Slaughterford maintained his innocence. The divines who visited him hoped to obtain a confession; an interview requested with a Guildford clergyman even raised the belief that he would at last alter his language. He repeated what he had said before. A guilty conscience may fall silent; an innocent conscience possesses not, for its defense, words of a different breed. The silence of remorse and the stubbornness of truth can, seen from without, resemble each other with terrifying exactitude.
He was executed at Guildford on the ninth of July, 1709. Before dying, he delivered a paper wherein he petitioned especially that his fate should cease to be visited upon his mother, his aunt, and his kindred. He could no longer preserve his own life; he was still endeavoring to prevent his name from dragging down those of others in his ruin.
The Newgate Calendar, which transmits this case, inclines to believe him the victim of the prejudices of his neighborhood. Such is the judgment of that chronicle, not a fresh proof in our possession. We can neither restore to Jane Young the certain narrative of her final night, nor transform Christopher’s protestations into a demonstration of his innocence.
There remain two lives whose endings do not entirely illuminate one another. A woman had bought wedding clothes. A man had asked to go into prison so that he might come out innocent. The garments had not made the bride; the first verdict had not made the freeman. Between Jane’s hope and Christopher’s trust, a community had uttered the words it wished to hear. Justice had spoken twice. Doubt had survived.