Chapter 10: Ann Kerr

A few days before my birthday one of my men tripped over a canal side bollard and fell heavily, dislocating his shoulder. I managed to push the shoulder back into place, but as it remained very swollen and painful I sent for Surgeon Armityge at Devizes, as I knew he would have some lineament or lotion to assuage the pain, -- Surgeon Major Armityge had taken over from Sawbones Casey as Regimental Surgeon on our return to England. Meantime I bought a bottle of rum from the Anchor Inn and poured a liberal amount down the injured man's throat. Fortunately Surgeon Armityge was nearby, and within the hour he had arrived and coated the swelling with a foul smelling lineament.

"Your man will be unable to fire a musket for a week or two, but he is well able to stand a guard." Armityge said, as he packed his potions away.

"I think it best he returns to his quarters, the smell of that lineament will give his fellow sentinels the vapours," I joked. "You may return to your quarters, Woody, but mind you stay down wind of your fellows."

Woodrow Allen had enlisted with me at Lincoln, and I had a high regard for him as a soldier and as a man. He smiled, and saluted, grimacing at the pain, then made his way back to his quarters in the stables behind the inn.

"You have a light and easy touch with your men," Armityge said, surprising me with his observation. He spoke rarely, and for him to make such a personal statement was quite unusual.

He lit one of his cheroots and continued, in a similar vein. "I've watched you with your men; they evidently admire, respect and like you, which are not the usual characteristics of enlisted men towards their officers in the British army."

I was quite embarrassed at his remarks, but before I could say anything one of the men who had been with a patrol on the north side of the canal, came running and shouting along the towpath on the opposite side of the canal.

"Captain, Captain, we have found a body!" He was breathless from running but indicated to us, between gasps, where the body had been discovered. Armityge and I mounted our horses and crossed over the canal via the nearest bridge, and made our way to where the rest of the patrol stood, in a silent circle, around the small slight body of a young girl lying at their feet. Armityge made a quick examination.

"There are wounds on this child similar to those on the body found at Wilsford a month ago," he said tersely. "Bound, strangled, and mutilated; what sort of monster does this to a child?"

We wrapped the poor mite's body in a blanket and carried her back to The Anchor on my horse. Armityge acted in the office of coroner when the military was involved in finding bodies, and thus was responsible for carrying out the post mortem, as he had on the body of the young boy found at Wilsford. He didn't take long on the investigation.

"The poor girl has been violently -- and repeatedly -- penetrated, in both her vagina and her anus. I would expect there to be massive damage to her internal organs, but that is not what killed her. She has been choked to death; it was asphyxiation that killed the poor soul. Her genitalia and her immature breasts have been mutilated; her nose slit and an ear removed. I would hope those wounds were inflicted after her death." He sighed. "They are practically the same injuries that the poor lad at Wilsford displayed, given the difference in gender."

"Wasn't that devil worship; is this another ritual killing?"

He looked at me in astonishment. "Why would you suppose this, or the previous killing, was carried out by devil worshipers?"

I told him what Rector Proctor had said about consecrated communion wafers being found at the site at Wilsford, with the remains of black candles.

"Stuff and nonsense," he snorted. "There was nothing of the sort when I viewed the area, and there had been a guard set over the place until I arrived. Some churchmen see devil worshipers everywhere, but in truth whoever is carrying out these murders has the devil within them." He packed up his instruments. "I will inform the magistrate of my findings, I would suppose the poor child can then be buried as soon as is possible."

"Should we not wait for someone to claim the body?"

"All the young children that have been found murdered in the area over the past year have been runaways from the Foundling Home in Hungerford. They have no relatives and are quickly buried in a pauper's grave once the post mortem has been concluded." He looked sad. "The poor souls have a short, unhappy life; the Home hires them out to masters, who beat them, starve them, and abuse them in all the ways that wicked men can. They then run away from that life, only to fall into the hands of an even more evil man, and die in pain and terror." He shook his head ruefully. "We think ourselves civilized in this country, but we are no better than savages in our treatment of the poor, who find it a harsh brutal and uncaring existence in our society."

He mounted his horse and rode off, and I put Woodrow Allen to guard the stable where the body lay.

I had started to walk back towards the canal when Mrs. Makepeace approached me.

"Is it true, has there been another killing?" She had a concerned look on her face, so I told her that we had discovered a murdered child, and that it appeared to be a foundling runaway.

"Just like that boy up at Wilsford," she said sadly. "I thought those wicked murders would have finished when they hung Ragged Robin."
I asked what she meant, and she explained that there had been a spate of similar murders in the area about eighteen months ago; the last murder was of a beggar boy in Devizes. A local rag picker, Ragged Robin, had been found with a bloodstained knife, and a locket that had belonged to the young boy, given him when his mother had breathed her last in the work house. Ragged Robin had pleaded his innocence, saying that he had found the knife and locket -- no one believed the story, and he danced at the end of a rope on a scaffold set up in Devizes market square.

"He must have had an accomplice," Mrs. Makepeace said, "who has laid low until well after Ragged Robin was executed. He is now continuing where that evil man finished, even to cutting off the boy's tally whacker, the fiend!"

It seemed unlikely to me, but I suppose it could be the answer to the murders. However I had to return to duty, and I made to leave.

"Captain!" Mrs. Makepeace stopped me with her tone of voice. "I must aplologise for my uncivil behaviour towards you since your arrival at the Anchor. I was mistaken as to your identity."

I looked at her quizzically. "Who did you think I was?"

She explained that her sister- in- law lived in Wedhampton, and during the summer had frequently confided in Mrs. Makespeace as to the lawless behaviour of the men of the 69th billeted in the village. She had finally taken her complaint to the officer in charge of the men.