A Little Death by Laura Wilson Page B

Well, one or two I thought I could remember and I told him, and then he said, ‘Did you see Jenny?’
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t rightly know.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘I don’t think I saw her.’
    ‘You’d remember Jenny, wouldn’t you? She’s different from the others.’
    ‘Yes, she is. But I can’t remember if I saw her.’
    ‘Think carefully,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to hurry.’
    Well, I’m not so daft I couldn’t tell that he wanted me to say, yes, I’d seen her. ‘Some of the others said they’d seen her go down to the back door,’ he said. ‘So she must have come past you.’
    I said, ‘She might have done,’ because that was true, she might have. The thing was, I could see Jenny coming along the passage in my mind, ever so clear, but I couldn’t remember if it was that day or another one, and it seemed so important to this policeman that I felt I mustn’t get it wrong. Well, he kept going over and over it, and he seemed so certain that in the end I thought, well, it must be me that isn’t remembering right, and I said, ‘Yes, I suppose I must have seen her.’
    ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Well done.’ And then he clapped his notebook shut and that was the end of it.
    Well, Ellen had gone in before me because her name was Corrigan, so that night we had a talk about it. I told her I didn’t feel right. I thought the policeman had made me say something against Jenny, even though I didn’t see how it could be, really, because five or six at least must have gone past while I was in the scullery and they weren’t all going to do something bad to hurt poor Master Freddie, were they? I said to Ellen, ‘I think it’s barmy, all these questions. Who’d want to hurt a child like Master Freddie?’ Because that was the part we couldn’t understand, either of us. I said, ‘I’m so worried I’ve got Jenny into trouble, saying what I said.’
    Ellen said, ‘Well, if she did do something, I’m sure she never meant to do wrong.’
    Poor Jenny. When the policemen took her away, the other servants stoned the carriage. I heard people say she’d gone mad and killed poor Master Freddie, and took the other children round to see the body out ofmalice. Soon everyone was saying it, even Ellen. I was embarrassed to say anything in disagreement, because when had I ever had a kind word to say to the poor girl? I should have stood up for her, but I never, because I thought then they’d think I was like she was. But I noticed William wasn’t paying any mind to all the gossip and that made me like him all the more.
    They never charged Jenny with anything. They took her away and locked her up in a loony asylum. She did go berserk after she saw the body, and the police told Mrs. Mattie it had sent her barmy for good. Most of them at Dennys thought she’d done it. ‘Why didn’t they charge her?’ that’s what they were saying. ‘Hanging’s too good.’ Some people thought the police never charged her because Mr. Lomax went and asked them not to, but I never saw how that could be, myself. More likely they couldn’t because she was too crazy for them to get any sense out of her. As I say, I can’t be high and mighty over that; there’d been plenty of times before Master Freddie died when I felt I should go and say something to Jenny, just something a bit friendly, but I thought: If the others see me talking to her, they’ll think I’m the same as her and I won’t get on. So I ignored her, same as the rest of them. But we were ignorant, we didn’t understand. And to be honest, I thought if you were mad then it was all funny turns and hide the carving knife. It’s not, though, and I know that now.
    But it didn’t make no sense to me. Because if Jenny never did it, who did? To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to think about it too much, what happened, so I finished up saying to myself, well, it must have been an accident. But I suppose it was daft, really, because how could a thing