Property of a Lady

But all the resolve and determination in the world does not quench this overwhelming desire for Elizabeth. Perhaps if I had not been inside her house – if I had not sat on chairs where she must have sat, touched doors and walls she must brush past every day . . .

Just once. If I could have her just once. But how? How? I would not use force on her, but if only there was some way . . .

Some months ago Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends led me to the dark root of his parody of the Hand of Glory legend. He clearly knew the original source of the belief, of course, and after some searching I knew it as well. It has its core in music – music again! – in an eerie sequence of music that is credited with the power to open locks and cast every person in a house into a deep and dreamless slumber.

Every person in the house . . . William Lee, the child, their servants . . .

How far can I believe this? How much of it is old wives’ tales, the beliefs of the credulous, the wish-fulfilment of the bereft or the lonely?

Even if it were true, I cannot do it. I dare not. In any case, my reading has informed me of what’s needed to set the enchantment working and the ingredients are impossible to obtain.

Or are they? For on Monday morning, by nine o’clock, the one ingredient that would normally be beyond my power to acquire will be there for the taking.

Next Monday afternoon I am to attend a meeting of the John Howard Group at Shrewsbury Gaol.

And at 8 a.m. on that day they will have hanged the murderer who killed his sister’s seducer in the Black Boar.

October cont’d

I am moved to copy down parts of the recipe for creating the Hand of Glory – partly so I have the information in a safe place other than on my shelves. There are several versions, but this one, from Petit Albert, dating back to 1722, is the most detailed.

‘Take the right or left hand of a felon who is hanging from a gibbet beside a highway. Wrap it in part of a funeral pall and, so wrapped, squeeze it well to drain all blood. Then put it into an earthenware vessel with zimat, nitre, salt and long peppers, the whole well powdered. Leave it in this vessel for a fortnight, then take out and expose it to full sunlight during the dog days until it becomes quite dry. Next, make of it a candle with the fat of a gibbeted felon, virgin wax, sesame and ponie, and use the Hand of Glory as a candlestick to hold this candle when lighted.’



The practice of hanging a felon from a gibbet hasn’t existed in this country for a century or more so I cannot follow this part to the absolute letter. But I believe – and trust – that the hand of any hanged murderer will suffice. The dog days are a difficulty – October in England can scarcely be called sufficiently hot to warrant that term; however, there is another version of the enchantment which says this:

‘If the sun be not powerful enough, dry the Hand in an oven heated with vervain and fern.’



That I can do with no difficulty.

The poet Robert Southey places the Hand in the possession of the enchanter Mohareb, when he would ‘lull to sleep Yohak, the giant guardian of the caves of Babylon’. Southey writes:

‘A murderer on the stake had died;

I drove the vulture from his limbs, and lopt

The hand that did the murder, and drew up

The tendon strings to close its grasp;

And in the sun and wind

Parch’d it, nine weeks exposed.’


Nine weeks is a long time, but everyone knows poets are given to exaggerating, so I shall accept the Petit Albert direction of two weeks and use the oven instead of the hot sun.





29th October 1888


In two days’ time I will be in the grounds of Shrewsbury Gaol, and it will rest on my ingenuity as to whether I can do what has to be done to the body of the hanged murderer. It seems fitting, although macabre, that I shall carry out my grisly task on the Eve of All Hallows. Will the powers said to walk abroad on that night stand at my side as I go about my work?

If ever I believed myself to have crossed the line from sanity, I think I have done so tonight. Tonight I believe I am mad.





TWENTY-FIVE



1st November 1888: 10.00 a.m.