Blood from Stone

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With heartfelt thanks to Ian Goldup, and Rebecca Cobb, Coroners, for facts and information.

Thanks also to Judith Dorey, for giving me the atmosphere of a place where clothes are lovingly restored.

All errors are my own.

Following his acquittal, which happened without too much of a fanfare but with dramatic abruptness on the fourth day of the sixth week of his postponed and protracted trial, the Defendant waited outside Court Three in the Central Criminal Court long after everyone else had departed. He was admiring the older part of the building. He had been granted the accolade of the original, seventeenth-century courtroom that had once led, via a trapdoor in the floor, to the cells of Newgate Gaol beneath. Two centuries ago, prisoners would enter the court via this hole in the ground; it was said that the judge would hold a perfumed nosegay to his face to mask the smell of incarcerated humanity. Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies, Atishoo, atishoo! We all fall down. Or maybe, as Ms Shearer, QC, his learned Counsel for the Defence had said, this ditty referred to the plague years.

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