"There are seven of us here, three of us outside and four inside the hall, all armed as you see us here. If any of you servants offer to leave the premises or to folloo (sic) you will be shot dead. Therefore all of you keep in the servants' hall, and you nor anybody else will take any arme (sic), for we are only come to take possession of the Stanfield Hall property.
"Thomas Jermy, the Owner."
The very illiteracy of this document may have been designed, for the original Jermys, having come down in the world, had, as Rush well knew, come down with a run to the very bottom. Indeed, one of them, probably this Thomas, swore at the trial that he did not know how to write. If he had been in the dock, instead of in the witness-box, as Rush had planned, his mouth would have been closed and, with the Recorder and his son dead, with the memory of the riot of 1839 fresh in the minds of the jury, things might have been very awkward for Thomas and others of the true Jermy family. They had been seen about the Hall on the day of the murders; the murderer had disguised himself, most likely so that he might be taken for one of the true Jermys; he had not been careful to go unseen, though he had avoided observation in leaving Potash Farm; the rude warning, printed on the cover of a book, was just the kind of missive an illiterate person might be expected to produce; and Thomas Jermy would have stood in quite measurable peril of that last interview with Calcraft which Rush went through with callous effrontery. Of the penmanship of the other forged documents it is not possible to speak, but their phraseology is sufficiently clear, and they might have passed muster. The question whether they would have done so or not has, however, no bearing on the character of Rush. He had laid his plan with devilish ingenuity; he had made all things ready in such fashion as to satisfy his knowledge of what legal documents ought to be. It was a plan as complete, cunning, and merciless as it was possible for man to devise.
Sir Llewelyn Turner had little doubt that, if Rush had escaped scot-free, and the forged documents, or either of them, had been effectual, Rush would have murdered Emily Sandford also; and, in the circumstances, the view can hardly be stigmatized as uncharitable. She would have had Rush at her mercy; she would have been in his way; and Rush had no scruples in dealing with those who were in his way. It was believed locally that he got rid of his mother and forged a codicil in his own favour to her will. That forgery at any rate succeeded, for he obtained £1500 by it; and the circumstantial story of his stepfather's death, by which the money came to the mother, raises a strong suspicion that Rush murdered his stepfather also. It shall be told in Sir Llewelyn Turner's words:—
"His stepfather was shot in 1844. He had gone to sleep after dinner, which, I believe, was his custom, and from that sleep he was not allowed to wake. His mother was ill upstairs, and Rush's account was that he (Rush) had gone upstairs, leaving his gun on a table; that, hearing a shot, he went downstairs and found the gun and his stepfather on the floor, the gun having exploded and killed the latter."
Rush himself gave the intelligence to the coroner, and he was the only witness. His story was believed and a verdict of accidental death was returned, but the subsequent career of Rush leaves little doubt that the guilt of this murder also lay upon so much of conscience as he possessed.
Stanfield Hall, then, a very beautiful building still, although full of tragic memories, may justly claim to have been the scene of crimes as brutal, planned by a brain as devilish and ruthless, as ever were committed in England or found in man.
From Wymondham we swung on to Norwich easily, and without difficulty or incident of any kind, and at half-past six or thereabouts passed under an archway into the Court of the "Maid's Head"; and the "Maid's Head" is an absolute reason for ending one chapter and beginning another.