The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (70 page)

Rose did not, in fact, write poetry, but she made up for this deficiency by preferring her dirty literature to be rhymed. She had been sufficiently intrigued by the pornographic ditties sung by the younger villagers of an evening to request the youth who lived next door to supply her with written copies of these edifying verses; for a maiden of half a century ago, she was singularly advanced, and her contemporaries must have shuddered at her depravity. She was also not unacquainted with certain of the franker passages of holy writ to be found in
Genesis
and
Proverbs
. In short, Rose Harsent enjoyed her role of village belle and was a most unsuitable companion for a susceptible young elder whose wife’s frequent confinements entailed for him the occasional period of sexual abstinence. For William Gardiner was clearly a full-blooded male and it may be that his visit to Paris had not been without resulting effect on his character.

On 1 May 1901, Mrs Gardiner was once again in the last stages of pregnancy and on that evening Rose was seen to enter a little thatched building known as the Doctor’s Chapel:
²⁷
this was the place of worship of old Crisp, and one of her domestic duties was to sweep it out: it stands a little way back from the main road, is immediately opposite the Drill Works (where Gardiner was employed), and is only a minute’s walk from Providence House. Rose was observed by two inseparable young men who were also employed at the works. One of them, George Wright (known in the village as “Bill”), was twenty years of age and came directly under Gardiner: the other, Alphonso Skinner (known as “Fonzo”), was somewhat older and worked under another foreman. They were intrigued to see Gardiner follow the girl in and both subsequently admitted that they crept up outside the chapel in the hope of hearing something indecent, from which one can only infer that rumour had already linked the names of the choirmaster and the chorister. Certainly, if they were to be believed, their eavesdropping was amply rewarded: nor can their tale have been wholly fabricated since, though he strenuously denied the dialogue, Gardiner admitted being in the chapel with the girl.

The conversation they overheard was significant: Rose was heard to exclaim “Oh! Oh!” and her exclamations were followed by a rustling sound and by merry feminine laughter. Wright then lost his nerve and slunk away but the more mature Skinner was determined to hear more. Rose, so he said, then asked Gardiner if he had noticed her reading her Bible on the previous Sunday: the elder asked her what she was reading about and she replied, “I was reading about like what we have been doing here to-night. I’ll tell you where it is. Thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis”, with which she mentioned the particular verse to which she referred. Now this chapter is devoted to the remarkable adventures of the widow Tamar at the hands of Onan her brother-in-law and Judah her father-in-law. Even in the verbatim account of the trial the actual verse is not specified, but whichever one it was we cannot but agree with Sir Max that the passage was so compromising to her virtue that, assuming the incident to be true, the nature of their relations was left in no doubt.

Bill and Fonzo were not pleasant young men: not content with spying, they proceeded to spread the scandal around Peasenhall. Some, no doubt, rejoiced that the sanctimonious foreman was not, after all, above the selfish lusts of the flesh: others were horrified that a young woman could quote scripture to such purpose. At the risk of irrelevance, I note that times have changed and that Alexander Woollcott has placed on record that a well-known American critic has named a favourite canary after Tamar’s brother-in-law. Within a short while, the rumour reached the ears of Gardiner himself and, on 8 May, he sent for both youths at the works and demanded a written apology. They refused and insisted that they had only told the truth: Gardiner was later to say that they gave as the reason for their refusal that if they withdrew their allegations they would have been hooted in the village, but even if this was said it is not an admission of lying.

The reason why an abject written confession of lying was required was because Gardiner wanted something to lay before his brother elders at the forthcoming investigation at Sibton into his conduct. It is not clear who was responsible for initiating this inquiry: Gardiner claimed that it was held at his request but it appears that the person who in fact wrote to the circuit superintendent, the Rev. John Guy, was a septuagenarian lay preacher named Rouse. As Rouse claimed to have supported Gardiner on this occasion (although he certainly did not do so later) it may be that he wrote his letter at the instigation of his traduced colleague. Accordingly on 11 May, a score of senior Primitive Methodists forgathered at Sibton under the presidency of Mr Guy. They heard the evidence of Skinner. They heard the evidence of Wright. They heard the denials of Gardiner. They did not bother to hear Rose at all, presumably because they did not feel it right to put that sort of question to a young girl. Guy decided that the case had not been made out: he may have told some members of the sect that Skinner’s tale was a fabrication from beginning to end but his considered judgment seems to have been that, in such a case, it was safer to rely on the word of one member of the sect than on that of two strangers who worshipped in the Church of England. It is obvious that the main purpose of the investigation was to smother the scandal, if it were possible, and if the facts did not prove too blatant to ignore. Gardiner resigned all his offices but was solemnly re-elected to them all. Guy had a word in private with Rose who assured him that she had never been guilty of any impropriety with the choirmaster: he also warned Gardiner against being too friendly with the female choristers, while Gardiner conceded that in the past he had been indiscreet. In short, the case was, in Scots usage, not proven which, we are told, means “not guilty, but don’t do it again”.

The acquittal was certainly not as honourable as Gardiner himself would have liked and we must now consider three letters that he either wrote or had written. The first two, from internal evidence, seem to have been written between 8 May and 11 May, and were sent to Rose: they were later found among her possessions—the little minx proving too sly to destroy them—and it was then suggested that they were carefully composed epistles whose purpose was to warn the recipient what policy to adopt. One ran:

Presumably it was not practicable, or deemed impolitic, to arrange the meeting, since a second letter followed in which Gardiner as good as said that, while he had no doubt of his own ability to bluff and brazen his way out of the predicament, he did not entertain such sanguine hopes about her capacities in such a direction, indeed he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that she would give the show away. To quote him:

This strikes a much less confident note than the earlier letter. It is curious that Gardiner’s wife should be ready to supply him with some sort of alibi, but he was able to point out to her that Wright had been caught spying on her own brother some years earlier when her brother was courting in Wright’s mother’s orchard: perhaps it was a telling debating point. The meeting in the Doctor’s Chapel was to be admitted, but its duration was to be cut down, in order that an innocent explanation might be more readily accepted.

But whatever he may have felt of Rose’s shortcomings as a witness, it is known that Gardiner did consult a solicitor. The man of law certainly told him that, against penniless youths, he would not recover his costs and may have told him that to allege un-chastity
against a man
was actionable as slander only in rare cases, e.g., against a beneficed clergyman, and that Gardiner’s unpaid offices hardly brought him within the exceptions. However, the solicitor did write to Wright and Skinner on 15 May to threaten legal proceedings unless they apologized in writing within seven days: the bluff failed. There was no apology from either, nor was a writ ever issued. The matter was officially dropped and might, in time, have been completely forgotten. What is uncertain is whether the association between Gardiner and Rose now ceased.

It cannot have ended completely, as they must have met at choir practices during the week and at the Sunday services. It is, however, worthy of record that only one person subsequently alleged anything untoward between them, and that person was that bumbling busybody Henry Rouse who had been so largely responsible for the solemn
Vehmgericht
of the Sibton elders. Nine months after the original scandal, Rouse said he saw Gardiner and Rose walking down a lane at nine o’clock at night: he bade them good night but neither vouchsafed a reply. Nine days after that, he called Gardiner aside after a Wednesday prayer meeting and berated him for continuing an association which could only “do the chapel a great deal of harm”. If Rouse is to be believed (and Gardiner denied the conversation in its entirety) Gardiner expressed the hope that his wife would not be informed and, upon receipt of this assurance, undertook to refrain thenceforth from such nocturnal peripatetics.

A second incident, also denied by Gardiner, is said to have occurred a month or so later. Though improbable and seemingly senseless, there is contemporaneous evidence that, whether or not it was true, there was certainly a complaint about it. The redoubtable Rouse chanced to glance behind himself while ranting from the pulpit and was horrified to see Gardiner with his feet up on Rose’s lap. “You gentlemen,” said Rouse in the witness-box, “know what I mean by the lap of a person. I ceased to speak, with the intention of telling one of them to walk out of the chapel but something seemed to speak to me not to expose them there.” In the end Rouse did not speak to his colleague at all: instead, on 14 April, he dictated to his wife what was to be an anonymous letter to Gardiner, correctly assuming that her writing would not be recognized. Gardiner kept this letter and it was read at the trial:

It is thus clear enough that Gardiner, in spite of the scandal, was not averse to sitting beside the girl in the choir. Such conduct was incautious, to say the least, and the more unfortunate when it is realized that, at about the end of the previous November, Rose had had intercourse with some man that had resulted in pregnancy. She seems to have kept her condition secret as long as she could, but her situation was not one that permitted indefinite concealment. She borrowed a book on abortion from the obliging youth next door who had previously supplied her literary desiderata, but her pregnancy continued uninterrupted. About the middle of May, she was taxed with her condition by her mistress, Mrs Crisp: she denied it, but obviously the time was coming when she would have to follow her domestic predecessor into retirement. In such circumstances, she could do only one thing, to seek assistance from the man, whoever he was, who was responsible for her impending motherhood. In view of her secrecy in the matter, one assumes that this man was unable to marry her because he already had a wife: an unmarried man would have been jostled to the altar by the mere weight of local opinion. And so, at the end of May, there was a married man in Peasenhall, on the verge of exposure and, if he held any position of respect, of shattering disgrace.

At twenty past eight on the morning of 1 June, Rose’s father called at Providence House to bring his daughter her laundry. It was a Sunday and the previous night had been marked by a heavy thunderstorm. Old Harsent was surprised to find the back door open: he went into the kitchen, to find his daughter dead on the floor. Her body was in a pitiful condition, turned towards the wall of a room only ten feet six by eight feet six inch with its head towards the staircase. Rose had been wearing stockings and a nightdress but some paraffin had been spilt and an attempt made to burn the body which had consumed most of the nightdress while merely charring her arms and lower part of the body. The fire was not the cause of death, as there was a wound in the chest which a medical expert later said had been made with an upward thrust: her throat had been cut twice, practically from ear to ear and with such force as to sever the windpipe. Some blood had spurted towards the staircase, and there was a large pool of blood between her head and the wall. There were no footmarks in the blood, and therefore no reason to assume that the murderer had been stained. Although it should have been obvious that the unhappy girl had been suddenly struck down by the blow to the chest, turned over to the wall so that the blood would spurt away, and then despatched with no more ceremony than a sheep or goat, such was not the original police theory.