The silver tankard lay in the very place where no one would have dreamed of seeking an object of such value: within a close-stool. It was drawn forth in Mr. Kerrel’s chambers at the Temple, just as suspicion was closing fast upon Sarah Malcolm. Bloodstained linen had already troubled the eyes of the searchers; silver, however, could be sworn to. A household had been plundered, three women lay dead within it, and here was an article of their daily use reappearing in the rooms where a laundress went about her labour.
One may readily picture the instinctive step backward that makes way for the examiner, then the hands arrested above the cold metal. The tankard tells no tale of its own. It merely compels Sarah to answer. It had quitted a chamber whose mistresses would speak no more; it had passed through living hands; now, every man present was determined to trace that passage to its conclusion. In the narrow space where the young woman was questioned, the distance between theft and murder seemed suddenly to have vanished.
To restoring that distance, Sarah would dedicate what little remained of her life. She would admit her hand in the theft; she would deny to the end having slain a living soul.
The Sunday of the Bolted Doors
One must return to the fourth of February, 1733. The Temple was home to men of the law, their briefs, their peculiar habits, and all the necessary labour required to maintain the chambers in which they lodged. A person was known there because he pleaded causes, because he tenanted rooms upon a certain floor, or because she carried in the coals and set the chambers to rights. Sarah belonged to this latter condition. She moved through an environment where trust was practiced daily without ceremony: a key was handed over, an oak was left unbolted, and one looked to have the work done.
Mrs. Lydia Duncomb occupied an apartment with Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Price. She was advanced in years, as was Harrison; Price was of younger age. Sarah had formerly worked for Mrs. Duncomb. She knew the interior of that dwelling not as a visitor who is received and ushered out, but with the particular intimacy of those whose humble offices give them access to what others never display.
On that Sunday, the neighbours grew uneasy to see no stir within. Friends who called found the door fast shut and received no answer to their summons. At the outset, there was no doubt that ordinary patience we grant to the living, presuming that their silence conceals some quiet occupation: someone will surely hear at last, leave a room, and draw the latch. Then they knocked again. The silence held possession of the entire house.
Entry was at length obtained through a casement from the adjoining chambers. A Mrs. Oliphant crept into the apartment. Lydia Duncomb and Elizabeth Harrison had been strangled; Ann Price’s throat was cut from ear to ear. There was no longer anyone to be awakened, no one to be shielded from danger. The women who had come seeking their friends had stumbled upon three corpses, and the absence of an answer, which had at first seemed a petty vexation, proved to be the last token they were ever to receive from them.
The dreadful tidings ran swiftly through the quarter. The premises were searched. Money and valuables were missing. Henceforth, it became necessary to trace whatever might have quitted that chamber: the goods carried off, the persons who had entered, those who knew how to approach the inmates without alarm. The inquest sought movement and circulation where the bodies had imposed an absolute stillness.
What Was Carried Away
Suspicion soon reached Sarah. In Mr. Kerrel’s chambers, within the selfsame close of lodgings, blood-marked linen and the silver tankard were brought to light. The circumstance of the place was of great moment: this was no common footpad whose chest had been forced open in her own garret. Her employer’s rooms, the utensils she handled there, and the corners to which her daily toil gave her free access now formed part of the judicial enquiry. The familiar routine of the chambers turned against the very woman who kept them.
She was apprehended, examined, and committed to Newgate. The discoveries did not end at the prison gate. Johnson, the turnkey, discovered upon her person a considerable sum in gold and silver coin. Sarah confessed that this money had belonged to Mrs. Duncomb. According to the early accounts, she offered to let the turnkey keep the hoard if he would only hold his peace. Johnson retained the coins to lay them before his superiors and made a full report of the bribe.
For Sarah, each hiding-place laid open narrowed the ground for any possible answer. The gold could no longer be spirited away; she was forced to explain how it had come into her hands. She adopted, or adhered to, a line of defence whose peril is instantly apparent: she had consented to the robbery, she had taken part in it, but the blood belonged to others. She offered the law a measured guilt, in the desperate hope that justice would be content to halt there.
Three names figured in her narrative: a woman named Tracy, and two brothers named Alexander. Sarah maintained that she had kept watch on the stairs while they entered Mrs. Duncomb’s rooms. To them she imputed the butchery committed within. These individuals were arrested and cast into prison. Yet their complicity does not become established fact merely by the word of a woman struggling to preserve her neck from the halter. To affirm it would require something more than the convenience of an explanation.
The staircase was the pivot of her entire defence. A few steps, a threshold, an interior she claimed never to have seen: there Sarah placed the line of demarcation between what she owned and what she denied. She could have helped to strip an aged gentlewoman, so her plea ran in substance, without having dipped her hands in murder. But the victims were three; the goods had come from their bedsides; they had been found in her immediate keeping and concealed upon her body. To those who sat in judgment, the distance she so sorely needed appeared dreadfully short.
A Word from Which More Is Demanded
At her trial, Sarah maintained this defence. She could not undo the theft, having confessed to it, and the discovered goods binding her fast to the apartment. Her task was to convince the bench that the most damning circumstances did not necessarily prove all that was inferred from them. It was a perilous ground to occupy: to win belief regarding the murder, she asked the court to believe the exact boundary of her own falsehood.
We may readily envision the goods produced in evidence, the reiterated questions, an auditor gazing once more upon this young woman whom he now knew to have been familiar with the dead. None of these imagined scenes decides the cause. They merely evoke the agonizing slowness of an assize during which a human creature hears her actions related in words that bring her step by step toward the gallows. Whenever Sarah named her confederates, her accusers returned to her. Whenever she pointed to the staircase, they returned to the chambers.
The jury found her guilty. She was sentenced to death. The sentence put an end to the trial, but it could not wrench from her that final protestation. Within the walls of Newgate, Sarah persisted in admitting the robbery while obstinately denying the murders. Those who visited her cell looked for a fuller confession, one that would bring her dying words into harmony with the verdict. She would grant them no such satisfaction.
It is easy to forget the three women once the condemned prisoner enters upon her final days. The scaffold draws the whole narrative to itself; the bearing of the wretch about to die becomes a cipher to be interpreted, while the victims recede into a few brief lines where their fate has already been dispatched. Yet Lydia, Elizabeth, and Ann had each possessed an existence which that single night had severed. The infirmity of the elders, the servitude of the younger, the life they shared within those quiet walls had made their house ordinary. The crime turned it into a place of public talk, and one in which no friend would ever find them again.
The Backward Glance Toward the Temple
By the beginning of March, Sarah’s days were narrowed to the grim preparations for execution. The old accounts depict her hearkening to the exhortations of the Ordinary, then passing from prayer to weeping. They ascribe to her a petty charity—a shilling slipped to the man who came to warn her that her hour was at hand. Such details prove neither innocence nor unreserved repentance; they belong to the daily existence of a condemned felon who continued, between paroxysms of terror, to receive visitors and to answer their summons.
She was hanged near Fetter Lane on the seventh of March, according to the Newgate Calendar. As she drew near to the fatal tree, her eyes are said to have turned back toward the Temple, and her dying voice was raised calling upon her mistress. The chronicle that preserves this last cry places it at the conclusion of a public agony; we must not transform it into a belated proof, capable of unravelling what the trial had left unresolved. A dying word may utter sheer misery without yielding up the secret demanded by the staring throng.
There remained the tankard, the coins, the depositions, and the verdict. Sarah had been executed for murder while continuing to deny the deed. Her tale of other hands had never supplanted the evidence that brought her to the rope.
In the Temple, however, the routine business of life had to be resumed: chambers were to be cleaned, doors opened, and property entrusted to hands that were not one’s own. Trust had been struck in the very place where it is most vulnerable—in that quiet, unremarked labour that allows a household to subsist. One might change the lock upon the door. One could never restore to Lydia Duncomb, Elizabeth Harrison, and Ann Price the Sunday morning when their friends had come calling at their threshold.