When I was called to the Bar, I proclaimed to all assembled that I wished to plead not guilty, whereupon the jury heard the details of the Crown’s evidence, as shown in my examination before the Justice of the Peace in the Quarter Session in my own town of Maldon.The jury—fine men all, I’m sure—heard how Sarah Baker had come into my house carrying a basket of eggs and found me kneeling beside Hugo’s bed, my hands splashed with blood. (No matter that he had been cold and melancholic a half hour before, and that bleeding him was the only way to release the evil black bile. No matter that any physician or barber would have done the same.) They heard that I had been present at the birth of Sarah Pilly’s baby, and that the girl had been born blue and still, and again that I had been with Beatrice Spynk at the birth of her son, which child is now a drooling idiot who spends his days tied to a pew in the church in the hope that the divine words of the Mass will soothe his mad soul.
