Elizabeth Is Missing by Lillian de la Torre

Author:Lillian de la Torre
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504044585
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

Conversation Piece at Batson’s: “A Ridiculous, Idle, Absurd Story!”

“What the plague!” methinks I hear the grave old gentleman under the clock at Batson’s say. “Still more of Canning! Surely these fellows, who have nothing else to live by but scribbling, think they have a right to impose a tax upon the public as often as they want money. But then they should give us something new for it; this subject is worn quite threadbare; I’ll none of it.”

“On which side is it wrote?” cries another. “If it is not in favour of the poor injured girl, I am sure it can be good for nothing. Dr. Cox is unanswerable.”

“Pshaw!” answers a third, “a ridiculous, idle, absurd story! Nothing offered in its defence can be worth reading.”

“Hold, gentlemen,” cries a fourth, “else you may condemn this unfortunate pamphlet to the most ignominious purposes, without any inquiry into its merits.”

This conversation never took place. It was the invention of the lively Grub Street scribbler who wrote Canning’s Magazine.

He had Batson’s coffee-house in his mind’s eye, with its dark panelling and the smell of roasting coffee hot in the spicy air. The old room had hardly changed in fifty years, save for the slow smoking of the wainscot from the deep hearth. Batson’s was the favourite resort of medical men, grave in their full-bottomed wigs; they sat at the long cross-braced tables with the apothecaries who resorted hither to consult them. Their sober cocked hats hung in a line along the wall, and under them were posted the latest broadsheets.

No wonder the old gentleman under the clock was disgusted. Even among the broadsheets Elizabeth Canning had the most prominent place. James Maclaine, the Gentleman Highwayman, depicted in sentimental attitude at the bar of the Old Bailey, had been edged aside to give the place of honour to a luridly inaccurate broadside showing “Elizabeth Canning at the House of Mother Wells at Enfield Wash.”

Elizabeth Canning is all over the table, too, in sixteen pamphlets and gazettes innumerable, reciting her woes or scoffing at them.

Gathered about them at the long table, the four men of Batson’s epitomize in little the attitude of London towards this spectacular affair. The old gentleman under the clock sees the devil in it. The vehement Canningite loves a sensational case; he is the kind that never misses a hanging on Tyburn Hill. His gypsyite neighbour is a factious man, and belongs to the Lord Mayor’s faction.

The fourth man is something new in eighteenth-century London. Not because he is open-minded—the open mind, the inquisitive temper, is typical of the best men of the eighteenth century. There is nothing unusual about it except its application to the matter in hand. The men of the eighteenth century were curious and open-minded about lightning-rods and the causes of gaol fever and extracting salt from sea-water; but the case of Elizabeth Canning is almost the first in which they brought their intellectual curiosity to bear on the solution of a mysterious crime.

The pamphlets on

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