Now in those times both lawyers and judges were apt to be very careless,
and according to our ideas, very dishonest, and Chitty seems to have
been no better than the rest. He took, he says, a few notes of the
interview with Elizabeth for his own memorandum, but 'not thinking it
would have been the subject of so much inquiry later, did not take it so
distinct as he could wish.' Even this paper which he did show was not
what he had written down at the time when the girl was telling her
story, but something that he had pieced together from her own account
and that of various other people who had been present at her mother's
two nights before, and had gone with her to the Alderman. So that no
court of law in these days would have thought that Alderman Chitty's
account given more than a year later, of what Elizabeth told him, was to
be trusted. In the end, however, Chitty, who declares he had examined
her for an hour and asked her 'many questions not set down' in his
paper, granted a warrant for the arrest of one Mother Wells at Enfield
Wash, for assaulting and robbing her. Elizabeth herself expressly says
she 'could tell nothing of the woman's name,' though 'she believed she
should know her;' but one of Mrs. Canning's visitors on the night of the
girl's arrival, who was acquainted with Enfield, was certain that the
house described could only be that in which Mother Wells lived, and on
his information Chitty allowed the warrant for her arrest to be made
out.
This man, Robert Scarrat, seems to have put to Elizabeth a great many
questions which never occurred to the Alderman. He asked her, for
instance, to describe the woman who had cut off her stays, and she
replied that she was 'tall, black and swarthy, and that two girls, one
fair and one dark, were with her.' This answer surprised him; it was not
what he expected. Mother Wells was not a tall, swarthy woman, and he
said at once that it could not have been Mother Wells at all, as the
description was not in the least like her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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