The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo Page A

children, the now-dead infant Louisa, in a workhouse.
    The testimonies that followed weren’t any more in his favor. The people who testified said they remembered seeing George Foster and his wife and child arguing on the fourth. They had not been on loving terms and melancholy had plagued Jane. Worst of all, it appeared that George Foster had wanted to get out of the marriage.
    When Hannah Patience, the keeper of the Mitre Tavern, was sworn in, she spoke of George, Jane, and little Louisa as having been at the tavern for a good while, where she had served them some liquor. Though they had sat drinking for some time, the matter didn’t point to the fact that the two might have been drunk and that the liquor might have instigated a domestic dispute while on the road back to their place of sleeping, which in turn might have caused George Foster to commit murder against his wife and daughter.
    The official case hinged on the testimony of Sarah Daniels, a girl who had seen the Fosters when she went to buy candles for her employer that afternoon and was the last one to see Jane and Louisa alive. But when Daniels took the stand and was questioned about what she knew and what she had seen, her testimony seemed rehearsed. Though she had seen the Fosters walking near the tavern, she had not witnessed the murder.
    Next was John Atkins, who had found the corpses. On Monday, December 6, a bitterly cold day, he was walking near the canal when he discovered an infant girl’s body under the bow of his boat. He was directed by the authorities to search the nearby waters of the canal even further, and on the third day, he and some other men found the body of a woman entangled in twigs and grass. They dragged it up. Atkins’s description of the infant child’s being dredged out of a frigid canal in the middle of winter, followed a few days later by her young mother, must have devastated the hearing’s attendees, including George Foster.
    Foster was arrested soon after the bodies were discovered. He had also signed a statement to which some more of his words were later added. Those read in part: “I left her directly when I came out of the Mitre Tavern, which was about three o’clock . . . in order to go to Barnet, to see two of my children, who are in the work-house there; I went by the bye lanes, and was about an hour and a half walking from the Mitre to Whetstal; when I got there I found it so dark that I would not go on to Barnet, but came home that night; I have not seen my wife or child since; I have not enquired about them, but I meant to have done so tomorrow evening, at Mrs. Hobert’s.”
    The coroner reported no bruises, blows, cuts, marks, or other injuries of any sort on the bodies. When he was asked what he believed about the crime, if indeed a crime had been committed at all, he shook his head and told the courtroom the deaths had been “accidental.” He had come to the conclusion that the woman had fallen into the river, for “between the rail and the side of the river it is impossible to walk with safety, it is so slippery like soap.”
    Perhaps Jane had committed suicide. Mr. Alley, Foster’s court-appointed barrister, asked witnesses if she had ever said anything about her desire to die.
    Sarah Going shook her head. She had known Jane for some years before, when she had stayed with the Fosters. Sarah Going said no again. She had been so surprised by the Fosters’ turn of events, their financial situation and marital troubles, for George Foster had seemed like a very good husband and father.
    She must have been the only one to feel that way, for the Second Middlesex Jury before the Lord Chief Baron quickly returned a guilty verdict. George Foster would hang. Worst still, as he had imagined and feared, his body would be handed over to the anatomists.
    Giovanni Aldini had finally found his perfect corpse.
    I n 1836, Charles Dickens visited the prison of Newgate.