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met before, William Corder knew her well by reputation as, at the age of nineteen, she had born his elder brother Thomas an illegitimate child which had died in infancy and was buried in St Mary’s churchyard. Such was the clear favouritism shown by the God-fearing John Corder that the affair, well known through Polstead village gossip, had been both quietly ignored by the family and wrestled with some ease from the old man’s conscience, with the result that unlike William, Thomas Corder had not been banished to a life on the high seas for his misdemeanour. Far from being the village saint that later Victorian writers and commentators made out, Maria was in fact a forceful, highly sexed and promiscuous young woman, the course of whose short life of illicit affairs and drama was to ultimately begin and end with tragic associations with the Corder family.
    The eldest of four daughters, Maria had been born to Thomas and Grace Marten on 24 July 1801. At the age of seven, and to assist with the family finances, she was put into service in the household of a clergyman at Layham, a nearby village, where she was taught to read and write, and for a number of years enjoyed a good relationship with her employer who unwittingly created the conditions for the girl’s later love of the high life by allowing her to wear his daughter’s cast-off dresses. By the time she was fifteen Maria’s true colours began to show. Dismissed from Layham ‘for levity of behaviour and an inordinate love of fine clothes’, she returned to Polstead where circumstances dictated – much to her dissatisfaction – the necessity of taking on much of the responsibility for running the Marten household; by this time Grace Marten had died and there were three other children besides her father to look after, a situation that continued for some time until Thomas Marten eventually remarried. Maria’s stepmother Ann, a local woman, was young, the equal of Maria in terms of good looks, and the two women found it difficult to get along. Ann Marten was known locally for her ‘second sight’ whose accuracy was to prove distressingly accurate as the years wore on.
    As the Polstead ‘village belle’, Maria had many male admirers but her years living amongst the finery of the rector’s household at Layham had created the desire and a firm belief that she was destined for something better than simple country life. Then came the affair with Thomas Corder, which was followed soon after by another liaison, this time with a relative of the owner of Polstead Hall, Mary Cook. This was Peter Matthews, a wealthy visitor from London with his own estate in Berkshire, who Maria encountered for the first time as he rode through Polstead during the Cherry Fair, an annual fête, and whose introduction to the seductive village beauty was said to have been foretold by a gypsy fortune teller passing by the Marten cottage some years before. Such was the power of the Red Barn murder in Victorian England that, grafted onto the story in later years, was an alleged village tradition that this gypsy was none other than the formidable Hannah Fandango in disguise, filling the impressionable young girl’s head with tales of future riches and high living that would be brought to her by a handsome stranger riding a grey horse.
    Whatever the truth of such tales, Maria needed little encouragement to keep an appointment with Matthews in a hotel bedroom in Ipswich. It was the beginning of another illicit affair, this time with secret meetings in Suffolk and London, a second pregnancy and the birth of another bastard child, Thomas Henry, who was brought up in the Marten household with support from Peter Matthews, who drew a line under his involvement with Maria by agreeing a quarterly £5 allowance for her and her son. By the time that William Corder returned to Polstead, Maria, whose promiscuity seemingly knew no bounds despite the disapproval of her family and the continued gossip of village