Wm Boon

This is wrote with allmost a broken hart so don’t mind the badness of Writeing But now I think of it you not see W. Ives til after the Assizes Go to see the Gen first but see W. Ives for he may be a friend this being my first offince.

Send me a answer by the return of post

Horsham Gaol

Sussex

As I copied out William Boon’s letter with one of my many pencils, it seemed I was re-living his anguish. The poor man’s thoughts were all over the place, from God to the price of a horse and cart in the same moment. I could hear the sweaty terror of what was happening, the panic to end this bad dream, the desperate effort to think clearly.

Boon’s letter was followed in the book by one from General Watson, appealing on Boon’s behalf to Lord Hawkesbury. Then some minion of Lord Hawkesbury forwarded the general’s letter to the original trial judge, who replied: ‘I have perused the petition of William Boon, and the other papers left therewith: and I am humbly of opinion that he is in no wise the proper object of the Royal Mercy.’

A wave of grief overwhelmed me there at the quiet desk in the Public Record Office. William Boon’s letter had lain there for two hundred years. He was dead, his wife and children were dead, General Watson was dead. And yet William Boon himself was more real to me than many of the people I knew. His howl of regret echoed down the years.

What could you do for so much distress in the past? It seemed wrong to turn away from it, close the book, kill it all over again. The only thing I could do was copy it out: tell the story. It didn’t change anything, but it felt like an act of respect.

All the way back to the hotel on the Tube it was as if William Boon was beside me, a living, speaking man. My search for facts about Wiseman had been fruitless. They were there, somewhere, and if I knew more about how to look, I might even have found them. But my meeting with William Boon was telling me I didn’t have to approach the past in a forensic frame of mind. I could experience the past—as if it were happening here and now.

Staring out from the train at the Thames, gleaming darkly under a lowering yellow sunset, I decided to suspend the paper search for Wiseman. Instead I’d look for him in the places where the past had happened: the lanes and streets, the churches, and above all the river.

7
Three Cranes Wharf

I nearly didn’t bother to try to find Three Cranes Wharf on a map. To expect to stumble on a place mentioned in the Old Bailey transcript of so long ago seemed ridiculous, like finding a Neanderthal cave, bison-paintings and all, in the basement of a skyscraper.