Damn His Blood (34 page)

Life inside the gaol was hard and unpleasant, locals regarding it as a place of punishment and correction rather than moral reform and tuition. The unheated cells were cold and damp in winter, and a sour, fetid stench escaped from the latrines. Apart from the officials’ quarters, no part of the building was lit, meaning that after dark prisoners saw little more than the occasional swing of a warder’s lantern till dawn. There was minimal flexibility in the treatment of inmates. Daily life was simple but exhausting. It was considered best to keep prisoners busy with the maximum amount of work. ‘Labour is severe,’ the author of a report into working standards at the prison reported in the 1820s. Prisoners worked all day beating hemp, cranking handmills or feeding looms. In 1824 the authorities had controversially voted to erect a treadmill, a vast frame of slatted steps that projected from a revolving cylinder, in the yard. Teams of inmates silently turned the treadmill in endless shifts, the exhausting machine serving two functions: grinding the corn used to make the prison bread, and satisfying the prevailing belief that dangerous criminals should be occupied with continuous activity so their minds would be diverted from schemes or subversive thoughts.

Those who broke the rules were punished in several ways. They could have their ration of tobacco or snuff taken away, or in more serious cases they could be thrown into one of the seven solitary cells, two of which were completely dark. One visitor in 1823 found four prisoners in this state, two of whom had been in confinement for three days. ‘The door of one of these dark cells being opened,’ it was declared, ‘the poor fellow immediately fell on his knees, most earnestly entreating that some alteration might be made in his situation.’

By six o’clock it was long since dark and Clewes was left alone in his cell, a sparsely furnished room with an iron bedstead, straw bed, pillow, two blankets
²
and a rug. He was left with painful memories of Collins’ evidence and his foolish attempts to interfere with the other witnesses. Worse still, he had no idea of what was now being said at the Talbot. Smith would continue to question witnesses for three and a half hours yet, and if any villager was to testify to screaming or shouting at Netherwood in the summer of 1806, however vague their recollection might be, then his fate might well be sealed. Clewes had no one to advise or console him. His wife and family were in Oddingley, and no lawyer or clergyman came to counsel him. He could only dwell on a situation that had worsened by the day, the combined agonies of fear, conjecture and detachment closing in on him.

Just a few weeks before, the year had started brightly. Clewes had been appointed temporary bailiff at a nearby farm, signalling a welcome change of status and better wages. After many years toiling in Trench Wood with his axe, it was an opportunity that Clewes seemed determined to seize. Within a few days he had taken lodgings at the farm and applied himself to his new position, drawing up lists of fold-yard tasks and planning for a thaw in the snow.

This was Clewes’ situation on 21 January, the date of Burton’s find. His first reaction to the news – like his later reaction to his arrest – had been of cool reticence. Marta Davis,
³
the housekeeper at the farm, had not noticed any perceptible change in his manner or attitude, only observing that he arrived back from the first day of the inquest ‘hungry and tired’. Davis had asked him whether the business was over and he had replied that it was not, and that he was going again on Friday.

On Thursday evening Clewes told Davis that he needed to visit his home at Trench Wood. Perhaps he wished to spend the evening with his family or to have some uninterrupted time to think. He called in the following morning, though, in a frantic rush. Davis saw him hurry into a room and change his clothes. He explained that he was ‘rather late … had a cup of cider and left’. On his way to the Talbot Clewes would talk to William Smith and John Collins, his old farmhands. It was an imprudent move. He would not return that night.

After his committal locals discussed Clewes’ position. While it certainly seemed as if he had had some hand in Heming’s murder, there was still no hard evidence against him. Just as the smuggler waited for a dark lonely field and a burglar for an empty house, Clewes might have found a quiet moment in his barn to dispose of Heming. If this was so, then how would it be possible to mount a successful prosecution? If nobody had seen and nobody had heard, what could be proved?

*

That Friday night there was no sign of an improvement in the freezing weather, which had coated the streets in ice, and
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
had begun to urge ‘the sprinkling of salt
⁴
on the pavements’. In the city residents could huddle around their hearths to shelter from the cold, but at the gaol there was no adequate means of keeping the inmates warm. It was a brutal initiation for Clewes. Even in fine weather the prison was a nest of disease, a hundred or so coughing and wheezing bodies thrust into a tiny area and given insufficient protection from the elements. The weakest of the inmates succumbed to fevers and jaundices or went down with other, putrid infections: abscesses in the ears or ulcers on the legs and hips – some within days of their arrival. For Clewes, who was now in his sixtieth year, the prospect of prolonged exposure to this environment must have been terrifying. And his age did not just make him physically vulnerable; it also singled him out from the transient and mainly young prison population. The days ahead would be a test of both mind and body.

Worcester glowed white in the snow that night, beneath a clear starry sky. Clewes lay hunched on his iron bed, wrapped in blankets, glassy-eyed, lost in thought. This picture of the prisoner on his first night in gaol comes from the surviving sources and knowledge of subsequent events. It is one of the enduring images of the Oddingley story. In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote, ‘Nothing is as painful to the human mind
⁵
as a great and sudden change.’ Clewes had begun January 1830 as a fallen farmer, he had glimpsed financial and social redemption for a few fleeting weeks, but then it had gone, and he had ended the month a murder suspect, his disgrace and downfall played out in public. William Smith’s inquest had narrowed the beam on him alone. He had come to represent both murders: his name was becoming synonymous with both crimes. The scrutiny of others – Captain Evans, John and William Barnett and George Banks – was fading into nothing.

At dawn on Saturday the turnkeys noticed a change in Clewes’ manner. He was no longer the confident and protesting man he had been the evening before. He applied for a Bible and prayer book and at midday asked to see a clergyman. The request was relayed to the governor, who in turn sent a note to Reverend Robert Clifton.
⁶

The request reached Clifton’s home in the early afternoon. He lived a quarter of an hour’s walk away from the gaol at St Nicholas’ Rectory in the city centre. William Smith had asked Clifton to escort the farmer to gaol the previous evening in his capacity as a magistrate, and it was under his authority that Clewes had been detained. Many clergymen enjoyed a dual identity as spiritual leader and law enforcer, but it was rare for them to be employed in both positions in the same case. This may have struck Clifton but it did not prevent him setting out for the gaol. Clifton was a man of form and duty. He supplemented his chief role as rector of St Nicholas Church with a lengthy list of additional responsibilities. As well as being a city magistrate, he was the official county chaplain and secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He had a master’s degree, was erudite and evidently pious, but when it came to magisterial matters of law and form, he was horribly inexperienced.

Clifton spent Saturday afternoon locked in private conversation with Clewes. It was dark when he returned to his rectory. Bewildered by what the farmer had revealed to him, he decided to write to the home secretary for advice. He began his letter to Peel the following morning.

In the course of yesterday I visited Clewes in the Gaol, and after a very long interview, in which I drew from him certain expressions which confirmed me in the opinion that he had guilty knowledge of the affair, I told him that
probably
I could obtain the promise of his majesty’s pardon for any person (but the actual striker of the fatal blow) who might give information which might lead to the conviction of any person present at, or accessory to, the murder of Heming. He then made
some
declarations but not sufficient in my judgement to secure the conviction of any living participant in the crime.

Clifton believed that Clewes was teetering on the brink of a confession. If Peel could offer the farmer a royal pardon – therefore allowing him to turn King’s witness – then the balance would be tipped and the facts, which had been concealed for so long, would be exposed for the first time. It was a reasoned conclusion, but Clifton was advancing blindly into a mire of legal quicksand. Lawyers understood that when a case developed at speed it was liable to be ruined by inexperienced or unskilled hands. Robert Clifton was primarily a clergyman, and his duties as a magistrate – like Pyndar before him – ran to little more than adjudicating on instances of petty crime or delinquent behaviour. He was now embroiling himself in a complex and uncertain case. With only threadbare legal knowledge, he had grasped the reins from William Smith at a vital juncture, and rather than conferring with his peers in Worcester had opted to communicate directly with Peel in London.

On Sunday morning Clewes attended divine service in the prison chapel. He then sent for Clifton again. When the clergyman arrived, Clewes told him that if Clifton promised to obtain a royal pardon, ‘he would disclose all the circumstances of
both
murders, as far as he knew them’.

Clifton’s letter to Peel lay half-finished on his desk at home. He had still not spoken to William Smith, but here was Clewes, prepared to confess. Clifton informed the farmer he would do his utmost to secure a pardon from Peel if he revealed all he knew about the murders. He then cautioned him, reminding Clewes that if he was guilty of striking the fatal blow, there was nothing that could be done to save him. Clewes paused for a second then replied that he understood. During the next few hours the magistrate sat in silent horror as Clewes, in his words, ‘presented a narrative unparalleled in the annals of crime’.

At around two o’clock that afternoon Clifton hurried along the frozen Foregate Street to his rectory. His involvement in the case had spanned no more than a week – from the opening day of the inquest – but within the space of a few hours he had learnt more about what had happened in Oddingley than any other investigating official before him. The result of the inquest and several men’s lives rested on his actions over the next few hours, and his first thought was his letter to Peel. With the inquest due to resume on Tuesday morning, it was crucial for the home secretary to be informed as swiftly as possible. The London mail left Worcester Post Office at half past four in the afternoon, and Clifton was determined to catch it.

‘I write with unsteady nerves and with great haste for the post,’ Clifton resumed his letter. ‘My persuasion is, that enough had not, nor will, come out before the jury to
convict
anyone & it was under this persuasion that I ventured to make the promise of applying for his majesty’s pardon, without which I could not get the slightest information from Clewes.’ He signed off breathlessly, that he most ‘respectfully and anxiously, awaited Peel’s response’.

A biting easterly wind swept up the Thames, over the port and Old London Bridge – a structure that would be demolished the following year – towards Whitehall. Like much of the country, London was frozen to the bone and buried in snow. The rigging, masts and timbers of craft moored in the waters outside the Houses of Parliament were iced white. Growing sheets of ice slid over the black waters, leaving the
Morning Herald
to remark that the view between Westminster and Vauxhall Bridges now formed ‘as characteristic and complete a winter scene
⁷
as could well be imagined … it could be only superseded by the Thames being completely (and it is now very nearly) frozen over’.

At the Home Office, a short distance from the river, Robert Peel received Clifton’s letter on Monday 1 February. Reports of the Oddingley affair were now a daily fixture in the national newspapers, and the coroner himself had sent the home secretary the latest issue of the
Worcester Herald
, which was replete with transcripts of everything that had been said at the Talbot. To Peel, Clewes’ guilt seemed assured, so he was confused to learn that a confession had suddenly been made and a royal pardon was required. More perplexing for the home secretary was the fact that the letter had come from Reverend Clifton – a man he had never heard of before. Until now all Peel’s information had stemmed from William Smith. Clifton, then, was an unknown quantity, who appeared to be acting arbitrarily, outside the realms of Smith’s inquiry.

Peel decided it was unwise to discard all the evidence at a stroke and to offer a royal pardon before the facts had been established. His reply was assured and forthright. He told Clifton that the promise of clemency had been ‘most indiscreet’. He pointed out that the inquest was still ongoing and that subsequent discoveries ‘may prove that Clewes had a greater share in the murder of Heming than any other person now living’.