Free The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise

Garden, and was where the poorest of the parish were destined. 1 (Later, there would be criticism that the subject of an ongoing criminal case had been buried so swiftly, the Lancet medical journal pointing to the decision as one more example of the incompetence of coroners.) Augustine Brun, an elderly Birmingham-based padrone named by Joseph Paragalli as the dead boy’s master, had been brought to London to view the corpse. This, along with other new evidence that had come to light, so excited George Rowland Minshull that he convened a special hearing for the Italian Boy case at Bow Street, on Monday, 21 November. Joseph Paragalli acted as Brun’s interpreter to the magistrates.
    Brun revealed that he had brought a boy called Carlo Ferrari to England from northern Italy in the late autumn of 1829; though from Piedmont, Carlo was a Savoyard, said Brun. His father, Joseph, had signed Carlo over to Brun for a fee. Brun had had charge of the boy for his first nine months in England, though Carlo had lodged at the house of another man, called Elliott, at 2 Charles Street, just south of Bow Street.
    In the summer of 1830, Brun had bound Carlo over to a new master, an Italian called Charles Henoge who played the hurdy-gurdy and exhibited monkeys, for a period of two years and one month, and, as far as Brun knew, the new master had taken Carlo to Bristol. Carlo would now be about fifteen years old, Brun believed. (The Globe and Traveller newspaper report has Brun additionally claiming, “The poor boy ran away from his master about a year ago,” and that Carlo made sure that he left London whenever this particular padrone—presumably Henoge, though the newspaper does not make this clear—was rumored to be coming to the capital.) 2
    As soon as the coffin lid came off at the St. Pancras workhouse, Brun was reported to have exclaimed, “Mon pauvre garçon, pauvre Carlo, mon pauvre garçon.” This seems odd: if Brun had spoken French, Paragalli would not have been the only person who could have acted as his translator. Even odder was Brun’s subsequent statement to the magistrates that he had been unable to identify the dead boy because of the extent to which the body had decomposed. The child was green, and the facial features were disfigured; the attentions of the surgeons at the postmortem had not helped matters either. Brun said he believed the hair color and stature of the dead boy were similar to Carlo’s. He added that Carlo had been a well-known figure in the squares of the West End of London and that his customary phrase—in French, though he was an Italian boy—was “Donnez un louis, signor.” (Short for un louis d’or, a gold coin with a value of twenty francs. Presumably the word was used figuratively—twenty gold sovereigns was a steep price to pay for a look at white mice.) Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas now revealed that the corpse had a number of warts on its left hand, and he asked Brun whether Carlo Ferrari had had such blemishes. Brun replied that the hand had been too green for him to tell if there were any warts on it—not the question he had been asked.
    Vestry clerk James Corder, however, was quite satisfied with Brun’s evidence, telling the magistrates court that it was clear to him that Brun had identified the boy as his former charge, Carlo Ferrari, since Brun had been unable to stop crying since viewing the corpse—itself a rather extraordinary claim. Corder added that Margaret King had also been taken to see the exhumed corpse—a pointlessly distressing exercise, since King had admitted that she had not seen the boy’s face on the day he appeared in Nova Scotia Gardens; King, sure enough, was unable to identify the dead boy.
    Next, Joseph Paragalli explained that he was now able to recall that a boy called Carlo Ferrari had been living at 2 Charles Street eighteen months ago. He stated that when he had first seen the body, he had thought that it was Carlo, whom he had last seen alive