‘They affirm that they saw the holes which he had bored, and discovered a tree-nail auger in his cabin.’
‘Oh, he would not do it!’ I cried. ‘It is a lie! He is innocent!’
Here my aunt advised me to go to bed, and said that she herself could sit up no longer. But I detained my uncle for another half hour with many feverish, impassioned questions, before I could force myself from the room, and a church bell struck one through the stillness of the snowing night as I went to the bedroom that had been prepared for me.
My uncle was to see Tom next morning at Newgate, and told me he would inquire the rules and bring about a meeting between my sweetheart and me as speedily as possible. After breakfast, my box was put into a coach, and I drove to my house in Stepney. Mr. Stanford came into the hall to speak to me. I forced a wild smile and a hurried bow and pushed past. I could not address him nor listen to what he had to say. When I went upstairs and sat down in my own room, the room in which Tom and Will had dined with me, where I had passed hours in sweet musings upon my lover, where there were many little things he had given me—a picture I had admired, a screen, a little French chimney clock, above all, his miniature—I believed my heart was breaking. I wept and wept; I could not stay my tears. My maid stood beside me, caressed and tried to control me, then drew off and stood looking at me, afraid.
By-and-by I rallied, and since activity was life to me—for sitting still and thinking were heart-breaking and soul-withering to one situated as I was, without a father or a mother to carry her grief to, without an intimate friend to open herself to—I considered what I should do; and then I reflected that all the money which I could scrape together might be needful for Tom’s defence. Thereupon I went straight to the bank into which my trustees paid my money, and ascertained how my account stood. I saw the manager of the bank and asked him to what amount he would allow me to overdraw, should the need arise, and he told me that I was at liberty to overdraw to a considerable sum against the security of the title-deeds of my house, which were in his possession, and which had been originally lodged at the bank by my father.
This and other errands I went upon helped to kill the day, and the distraction did me a little good. In the afternoon, before it was dusk, I walked as far as Ludgate Hill, and turned into the Old Bailey, and went a little distance up Newgate Street, and continued walking there that I might be near Tom. I crossed the street and looked at the horrible walls, dark with the grime of London, and at the spiked gates, and at a huddle of miserable, tattered wretches at one of those gates, as though they yearned in their starvation and misery for the prison food and the shelter of the cells within; and I wondered in what part behind those fortress-like walls my sweetheart was, what his thoughts were, what he was doing, if he was thinking of me as I was of him, until I stamped the pavement in a sudden agony of mind, and crossed the street to the walls, and went along the pavement close beside them, to and fro, to and fro.
The dusk drove me away at last, and being very weary, I called a coach and went to my aunt’s, that I might get the latest news of Tom. My uncle had had a long interview with my sweetheart in the morning.
‘He is fairly cheerful and hopeful,’ said he. ‘You will scarcely know him, though. His anxiety during the long voyage home in the man-of-war has pinched and wrinkled and shrunk him. You’ll see him to-morrow. We will go together.’
‘Uncle, you will employ the very best people on his side.’ He named a well-known Old Bailey pleader of those days. ‘Do not stint in money, uncle. All that I have in the world is Tom’s,’ I said.
‘The deuce of it is,’ exclaimed my uncle, thumping his knee, ‘we have no witnesses to call except as to character. It’s four-tongued positive swearing on one side, and single-tongued negative swearing on the other.’