The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 286: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GRAVESTONE 259 and unsettled as her own brain, would carry her elsewhere. Now therefore that she reappeared in the same place, he was again seized with alarm, and yielding to that terror, had suddenly absented himself under the pretext which we have described. From the window of old Carnabie’s cottage he watched the woman and the sexton as they stood in discourse together in the churchyard, and as he perceived by her manner and her gesticulations that she was much excited, he feared lest the conversation regarded himself; but when she so precipitately hurried off again, and the sexton stood in a musing manner for a few minutes, the Burker’s courage revived. ‘Tf it was me they was talking of,” he said to himself, ‘“‘ they would have gone off at once to raise the whole willage and hunt me down like a mad dog.”’ The Burker thereupon issued forth from the cottage, and hastened to rejoin old Carnabie; but we will interrupt the progress of our narrative for a few moments, to depict the precise nature of the Burker’s apprehensions. He had of course read the newspaper accounts of Lettice Rodney’s trial at Liverpool; and beyond what we ourselves have recorded on that subject in our narrative, the journals had given several minute particulars in respect to the female who, without being brought forward in court, had neverthe- less, through the medium of another species of deposition, given so important a turn to the proceedings. The caterers for the public press had described her as a poor wandering maniac who had for some years been known in the neighbour- hood of Liverpool; they had delineated her personal ap- pearance, and had added that she was usually known by the denomination of Crazy Jane. All these particulars had Barney the Burker read at the time, for they were transferred from the provincial to the London papers; and thus when ,;, “-° the woman so suddenly appeared before old Carnabie and himself in Woodbridge churchyard, he had been smitten with the apprehension that she was the person whose testimony, presented in writing to the court, had led to the acquittal of Lettice Rodney, the incarceration of Mrs. Webber, and the subsequent arrest of himself. Still the Burker was not completely sure that this woman who now haunted the neigh- bourhood of Woodbridge was in reality Crazy Jane, though he had certainly little doubt on the subject. (GO) mn 0)(0)(0) <S (C(O)