The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise

Author:Sarah Wise
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

ELEVEN

At the Bailey

At eight o’clock on the morning of Friday, 2 December, the public gallery of the Sessions House in the Old Bailey was already crowded, and surgeons made up a sizeable proportion of the onlookers. Offers of over a guinea were being made for a seat (the sheriffs normally pocketed a shilling a head but raised prices for the more interesting cases), and some people had tried to pass themselves off as court officials, newspaper reporters, and even jurors in an attempt to get into the room. One man rented a barrister’s wig and gown at a theatrical costumers for three shillings and six pence and sat unchallenged in the well of the court. Even though the hearing was not due to “come on” until ten, the customary aromatic herbs had been strewn about the courtroom—an attempt to block out the infamous Newgate Stink from the prison adjoining the court. (Not just Newgate: to legal noses, those appearing before the court typically had the aroma of last night’s gin, cheese, and onions on their breath, clothes, and skin.)1

The dock in the courtroom had a notable feature, a mirror that was fixed above the heads of the accused, tilted in such a way that the bench and most of the room had a view of the back of the prisoners, from the crown of the head down to their boots. Three heads now appeared in the mirror. The thick, dark, wavy hair of John Bishop; the dark-blond mop of James May, and the nondescript mousiness of Thomas Williams. Still in his smock frock, which was by now filthy, Bishop looked like a rustic, according to the Morning Advertiser, but “tinged with metropolitan cunning”; he stood at one side of the dock and gazed at the floor. Alongside him, and seeming to hang back slightly, was Williams in a fustian jacket with a brown neckerchief at his throat; he looked, wrote one reporter, “extremely inoffensive” and “shorter than average”—though at five foot four he was by no means short for a workingman of the time. May, also in fustian, and with a yellow silk cravat carefully tied at his neck, appeared to be brimming with life—athletic and alert, with lips pressed tight together and a stern, determined expression on his face. “Their appearance rather indicated low cunning than hardened ferocity,” declared the Times’s man of the trio.2

At nine o’clock, the assistant judge, Serjeant Arabin, deputy recorder of London, entered the court to open the proceedings. William St. Julien Arabin was a notorious figure of fun on the circuit, so much so that one young lawyer, Henry Blencowe Churchill, had started to scribble down verbatim his bizarre sayings, non sequiturs, and eccentric decisions; these were privately published and circulated among cognoscenti in 1843 as Arabiniana; or, The Remains of Mr Serjeant Arabin. They included such oddities as: “A man with a cold is not fit to try on a ladies shoe”; “Woman, how can you be so stupid. You are tall enough to be wise enough”; “She goes into a shop and looks at several things, and purchases nothing.

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