The Paper Chase by Joseph Hone

Author:Joseph Hone [Hone, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473568785
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

One of Harley’s challengers among the newly ascendant Whigs, Lord Cowper, shared Edwards’s dissatisfaction with Harley’s interrogation method. He was ‘extream bad at it’,10 Cowper confided in his diary, and managed the task ‘neither with cunning nor gravity, to imprint any awe on those examined; by which I believe he spoil’d the thing on his former examinations’.

Three sleepless nights later, on Thursday 25 January, Harley stepped up the pressure, to salvage his reputation as much as the investigation. After Edwards confirmed that ‘Nurse Gough is the very woman that came to my house with the gentlewoman that brought the copy of the Memorial’, Harley acted on Mary’s suggestion that the other woman at Thomas Mackworth’s house could have been the masked lady. According to Mackworth, the woman was one Mrs Mary Purdon, a guest whom he had been representing in an ongoing legal dispute over the past year. Harley’s minions duly hauled Purdon before the committee that same afternoon. She seemed flustered. Thomas Mackworth had already visited her on Wednesday to check whether she had been questioned: ‘He told me it was a wonder I had not been before the councill, and said to me, how you will be frightned when you are called before the councill; and he went away laughing.’

Purdon was bemused by Harley’s line of inquiry. She remembered Gough as ‘the old nurse, that does all works of Mr Mackworth’s house’, but claimed not to have seen her in months, nor to have been at Thomas Mackworth’s house when Mary had visited. Despite Mrs Purdon being ‘extreamly like’ the woman in the vizard mask, and Edwards even remembering ‘her voice to be like that woman’s’, the printer and his wife were both eventually ‘satisfyed this is not the woman’. The revelation came as a serious blow to Harley, who was desperate to resolve the matter and secure a conviction.

In his desperation, Harley grew uncharacteristically slack. He missed crucial evidence. Though she always professed her innocence, Nurse Gough repeatedly testified that she assisted one ‘Mrs Jones in child bed about six months ago in Mr Mackworth’s house’ – that is to say in June, right around the time Edwards was first contacted by the woman in the vizard mask. Mrs Jones was, in Gough’s account, ‘a jolly, handsome, fair woman, pretty fat; as tall as myself, or taller’; she ‘lived beyond Bloomsbury before she came to Mr Mackworth’s’, the nurse added helpfully. Compare this with Mary’s portrait of the masked woman: ‘she had fair hair, black eyes, and was something taller than I am, and pretty burley.’ Edwards likewise described her as a ‘pretty fat’ woman, ‘oval faced and black eye’d’, though of course he could not describe the features hidden by her mask. These accounts paint a remarkably consistent portrait. Of course, Mrs Jones’s recent pregnancy would explain her physique. Could the masked woman really have been Mrs Jones and not Mrs Purdon? If so, this was a clue which Harley failed to spot.

Instead of pursuing this line of questioning, Harley returned to William Shiers.

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