The Weight of a Number Six Iron

by Edward Marshall Hall, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Tribe put the parcel on the table in my lodgings at Lewes at a quarter to eleven at night, and stood back from it with the air of a man who has delivered a baby and wishes it to be known that he will not be held responsible for its character.

"One and fourpence, sir," he said. "Number six. Mr Verrall in the High Street was in his nightshirt. I told him it was for the Crown."

"It is not for the Crown."

"No, sir. But he would not have come down for the defence."

I untied the string. Brown paper, and inside it a flat-iron of the common pattern, black, the sole ground bright and slightly greasy, the handle a loop of cast metal curving up from heel to point like the handle of a jug. I lifted it. Six pounds is nothing in a sentence. In the wrist, at the end of a long day, it is a good deal. I held it out at arm's length, and Tribe watched me do it the way he watched me do everything, as though I might at any moment break something that would be charged to chambers.

"You'll want it in court, sir."

"I shall want it in the jury box, Tribe. Which is not the same thing."

He went to bed. I sat up with the iron and the depositions until the fire was grey. I have defended in better rooms and worse cases, but I remember that night better than most. The iron sat on the brief like a paperweight, and every time I turned a page I had to lift it.

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The facts were small. That is what I wish to be understood about the Loveday case. Nobody in London had heard of it, and nobody would have, if it had gone the other way, except the hangman and his assistant and the Brighton Gazette.

Ada Loveday was a laundress. She took in washing at a terrace house in Brighton, in one of the steep streets above the Lewes Road, and did it in a lean-to washhouse at the back. There was a brick copper in one corner with a fire-hole under it and a wooden lid on top, an ironing table under the window, and a little black stove on which the irons stood to heat. I give you the room because the whole case was in it. It was nine feet by eleven. I had it measured.

Her husband Walter was a carman for a coal merchant. He was a big man, fourteen stone, a drinker on Saturdays and on other days when the opportunity came up. On a Saturday night in October of 1911 he came home from the Gladstone with eight pints in him, by the landlord's count, and some time before half past ten he was lying on the washhouse floor with the back of his head opened. He died on the Monday in the Sussex County Hospital without having said anything that anybody could use.

When the constable came she told him first that she had been upstairs and heard him fall. Then, being asked again, she said that she had been in the washhouse ironing and he had come at her, and she had stepped back, and he had gone down. The iron was found on the floor. Two neighbours had heard her say in the street on the Thursday, with a black eye on her, that if he touched her again she would do for him. The police surgeon found a curved wound on the left side of the back of the head, two inches and a half long, the shape of a crescent moon. The Crown said that the curve was the handle of the iron.

That was the case for the Crown, and I want to be fair to it. It was a good case. Mr Penfold, who led for the prosecution, was a careful man and a decent one, and he opened it with no ornament at all. He did not need any. He had a lie, a threat, a weapon and a wound, and a jury of twelve Sussex men, farmers and shopkeepers, who had all of them at some time heard a woman say she would do for somebody.

I sat and listened and looked at the jury. That is what one does in the opening, whatever the books say. I do not listen to the case against my client; I have read it. I watch twelve faces learning it for the first time, and I note which of them looks at the dock and which will not.

The foreman was a corn-chandler from Uckfield with a grey beard and very large clean hands. He looked at the dock a great deal. Two places along from him sat a young man with a farmer's neck, who never looked at it once.

Ada Loveday sat in the dock between two wardresses. She was a small woman of thirty-four with her hair pinned flat, in a brown dress which somebody had lent her, and her hands were in her lap. They were a laundress's hands, red to the wrist and cracked at the knuckles, and she kept turning the right one over and looking at the palm, as women do when they have been told not to fidget and have nothing else to do with themselves.

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There is a rule which I learnt young and paid for, and it is this: do not deny what the jury already knows. Twelve men know when they are being sold something. If they catch you lying about one small matter, they will take it that you are lying about all the rest.

So I did not cross-examine the neighbours about the threat. I stood up and asked Mrs Pellow, who had heard it, one question.

"When she said it, Mrs Pellow, what was the state of her face?"

"Her eye was shut up, sir. Black and shut up."

"Thank you. That is all."

And I sat down. Penfold half rose, thought better of it, and let her go. The young farmer two places from the foreman looked at the dock for the first time.

With the constable I went a little further. He was a heavy, honest young man named Dunk, and he was afraid of me, which I regretted, because I wanted him on my side.

"She told you first that she had been upstairs?"

"She did, sir."

"That was untrue."

"It was, sir."

"And then she told you she had been in the washhouse, ironing."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you look at the ironing table, Constable?"

He had. There was a basket of linen on it, half done, a cloth, and a pressing-blanket scorched in the shape of an iron where one had been set down hot and left too long. He had not thought anything of it. Why should he? But I had him describe it, and I had the blanket produced, Exhibit Seven, with its brown sole-shaped mark, and I asked him how far the ironing table stood from the copper.

"Seven foot, sir. Thereabouts."

"And the iron itself. Where did you find it?"

"On the floor, sir, by the table leg. On its side."

"By the table. Not by the copper."

"By the table, sir."

"Was there any mark on the floor where it lay?"

There was. A scorch on the boards, and a little ring of white where the wet floor had steamed. He had seen it with his own lamp. I asked him whether he had ever seen a cold iron scorch a board, and Penfold objected, and the judge, who was Rowsell, and who did not like me, said that the constable might answer if he knew. The constable said, with great simplicity, "No, sir. It has to be hot."

I let him go. I had not yet said anything to the jury about it. Better that they should start to work it out for themselves, which they would do over their lunch, and which they would value far more than anything I could tell them.

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The surgeon was Dr Pring, and he was the Crown's whole case, as I had known he would be. He was a good witness, precise, not vain, and he had brought a drawing of the wound which went round the jury box on a card. It was a curved laceration, a true arc, with bruising along the inner edge.

"Consistent," said Penfold, "with a blow from a curved implement?"

"Consistent with it, yes."

"Such as the handle of a flat-iron?"

"It might be. The curvature would answer."

I let Penfold sit down, and I got up slowly, and I asked the doctor first whether a man falling backwards against a hard rolled edge, such as the lip of a copper, might split the scalp in an arc.

"He might," said Dr Pring. "The skull is round. An edge driven into it will often split the scalp in a curve. I have seen it."

"So the curve tells us that the head was round, Doctor, and very little else?"

"It tells us less than I should like," he said, and I thanked him for it.

Then I said nothing for a moment, because in court a silence is the only scenery one is given, and I wanted the jury to look at me and wonder what was coming. At last I bent down under the bench and brought up Tribe's parcel, in its brown paper, and set it on the ledge in front of me, and untied the string.

Rowsell said, "What have you there?"

"A flat-iron, my lord. Not the flat-iron. That is Exhibit Four, and it is in the custody of the Crown. This one is of the same make and number, bought yesterday evening in the High Street of this town for one and fourpence. I should like the witness to look at it, and then, with your lordship's leave, the jury."

Penfold objected. It was not an exhibit; it was not proved; it might differ from the real one in some particular. I said that I should be very happy to have Exhibit Four handed up instead, and that the jury could compare them. Penfold was an honest man. Exhibit Four came up from the solicitor's table. The two irons stood side by side on the witness-box ledge like a pair of black cats, and you could not have told them apart, except that Ada Loveday's was worn silver at the point where it had been pushed into ten thousand collars.

"Dr Pring. Would you take up the Crown's iron by its handle."

He did.

"In what position would the handle have to be, to make that wound?"

He thought about it honestly. That is the thing about a good witness, and why one should never bully one. "The curve of the handle would have to meet the head," he said. "The iron would be held upside down, sole uppermost, and swung downward so that the loop struck."

"Held by what?"

"By the sole, I suppose. Or the sides."

"Would you show the jury?"

He turned the iron over in his hands and tried to take hold of it by the sole. It was a clumsy business. The sole of a flat-iron is a smooth flat triangle with nothing on it to grip. You can pinch the sides between your fingers and thumb, and then the weight hangs out beyond your hand and pulls your wrist down. Dr Pring was a strong man, and when he made the downward stroke in the air the iron turned in his grip and he very nearly dropped it.

The jury watched him do it. I did not say a word.

"And at the time of this blow," I said at last, quite gently, "the iron was hot?"

"I could not say."

"You heard Constable Dunk. A cold iron does not scorch a board."

"If it was the same iron which made the scorch, it was hot when it was set down."

"How hot does a laundress keep her iron, Doctor? Hot enough to hiss on a wet finger?"

"I believe so."

"Hot enough to raise a blister on the palm of a hand that held it by the sole?"

"Certainly."

"You examined the prisoner at the police station that night."

"I did."

"You examined her hands?"

He looked at his notes. He did not need to. "I examined her hands for blood. There was none. There was no burn."

"No burn on either palm?"

"None."

"Thank you." I took up my own iron, the one and fourpenny one, and held it out across the well of the court towards the jury box. "My lord, may the jury have it? It is cold. I give my word it is cold. Tribe has had it in his overcoat pocket since seven o'clock."

Somebody laughed in the gallery, and Rowsell looked up and the laughter stopped. Then he said, "Very well."

The usher carried it over. The corn-chandler from Uckfield took it in his big clean hands as though it might go off, and turned it over, and tried to take hold of it by the sole as the doctor had, and his wrist dropped, and he frowned. He passed it to the man on his right. It went down the front row and back along the second, hand to hand. Twelve men weighed it, and I let them do it in silence. It took nearly four minutes. Four minutes of silence in a court of assize is a very long time, and I have never in my life been more careful not to cough.

The young farmer with the thick neck was the last but one. He held it for a long time. Then he put his thumb along the curve of the handle, where it rose from the heel, and he looked across the court at the dock. It was the second time he had looked at her. She was looking at her hands.

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She gave evidence. I did not want her to, and she insisted, and in the end she was right and I was wrong. I have been wrong more often than the newspapers suppose.

She told it plainly, without any help from me. She was ironing Mrs Gorringe's pillowslips. He came in at the back door, and she knew from the way the latch went what sort of state he was in. He said something about his supper. He came at her across the washhouse. She put the iron down on the blanket because she was afraid he would knock it out of her hand on to the linen and she would have to do the lot again. She stepped back against the wall. He went for her, and his boot went on the wet by the copper where she had been rinsing, and his feet went out from under him, and he went over backwards, and she heard his head on the copper rim "like a door shutting". Then she picked up the iron off the blanket, because it was scorching. Then she saw the blood, and she dropped it.

"Why did you tell the constable you had been upstairs?"

That was Penfold, in cross-examination, and it was a fair question.

"Because I thought they'd say I done it, sir."

"Did you?"

"No, sir."

"You had said you would do for him."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you mean it?"

She looked at him, and then she looked at the jury, which no one had told her to do. "I meant it on the Thursday, sir," she said. "I didn't mean it on the Saturday. I was doing Mrs Gorringe's slips."

I did not re-examine her. There are answers one does not touch.

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I will not give my speech. A speech in a court is made for one room and one afternoon. Printed, it is a dead thing, like a play read by someone who never saw it acted, and most of mine read worse than they sounded. I will say only what I did with it, which was very little.

I told them she had lied to the constable. I told them she had threatened her husband in the street. I told them he had blacked her eye, and that she had hated him, and that I did not ask them to like her for any of it. I asked them only to remember the weight in their hands. I asked them to remember the burnt mark on the blanket seven feet from the copper, and the burnt boards by the table leg, and a woman's two palms with no blister on either. And I asked them to remember the copper itself. Nobody had measured its rim until Tribe took the train to Brighton with a tape and a borrowed lantern. It stood two feet ten inches from the floor, with a rolled iron lip, at the very height where the back of a tall man's head would meet it as he fell.

Then I sat down, and I did a thing I have done only a few times in my life, because it cannot be done often and still work. I took the one and fourpenny iron off the ledge and set it on the floor at my feet, where the jury could see it and I could not, and I left it there through the whole of Rowsell's summing-up, which was against me.

They were out an hour and forty minutes. Tribe spent it walking up and down the corridor with his watch open. Ada Loveday spent it in the cells, and I do not know what she did there. I spent it reading a newspaper upside down, or so I was told afterwards.

The corn-chandler gave the verdict in a voice so low that Rowsell had to ask him to repeat it.

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I saw her once more. I had gone down the steps into the yard to find a cab, with Tribe behind me carrying the brief and the brown-paper parcel, and she was standing by the railings in the borrowed brown dress with nobody at all to meet her. A wardress had given her a shawl. She came up to me, and she did not thank me, which I liked. People who thank you in the yard are usually thinking about something else.

"Begging your pardon, sir," she said. "The police has got my iron."

"They will return it in due course, Mrs Loveday. When the case is closed."

"Only I've got Mrs Gorringe's slips still to do, sir, and the Pellows' wash on Monday, and I can't do it with the one."

I looked at Tribe. Tribe looked at the cab rank, at the sky, and at the Assize Court of the County of Sussex, and then he held out the parcel to her as if he were serving a writ.

She took it in both hands. She did not open it. She knew what was in it from the weight.

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Edward Marshall Hall, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Edvardō Marshall Hall per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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