Gallows Thief

by Bernard Cornwell

  The crowd shouted for silence, hoping there would be some final words.

  ‘I did nothing!’ the girl screamed.

  ‘Go to hell, you fat bastard,’ one of the murderers snarled at the Ordinary.

  ‘See you in hell, Cotton!’ the highwayman called to the priest.

  ‘Now, Botting!’ The Sheriff wanted it done quickly and Botting scuttled to the back of the scaffold where he stooped and hauled a wooden bolt the size of a rolling pin from a plank. Sir Henry tensed himself, but nothing happened.

  ‘The bolt,’ Logan explained softly, ‘is merely a locking device. He has to go below to release the trap.’

  Sir Henry said nothing. He shrank aside as Botting brushed past him to go down the stairs at the back of the pavilion. Only the four condemned and the Ordinary were now out in the sunlight. The Reverend Cotton stood between the coffins, well clear of the trapdoor. ‘“For when thou art angry all our days are gone,”’ he chanted, ‘“we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”’

  ‘Fat bastard, Cotton!’ the highwayman shouted. The girl was swaying and under the thin cotton that hid her face Sir Henry could see her mouth was opening and closing. The hangman had vanished under the platform and was clambering through the beams that supported the scaffold to reach a rope that pulled out the baulk of timber that supported the trapdoor.

  ‘“Turn thee again, O Lord!”’ The Reverend Cotton had raised one hand to the heavens and his voice to the skies. ‘“At the last and be gracious unto thy servants.”’

  Botting jerked the rope and the timber shifted, but did not slide all the way. Sir Henry, unaware that he was holding his breath, saw the trapdoor twitch. The girl sobbed and her legs gave way so that she collapsed on the still-closed trapdoor. The crowd uttered a collective yelp that died away when they realised the bodies had not dropped, then Botting gave the rope an almighty heave and the timber shifted and the trapdoor swung down to let the four bodies fall. It was a short drop, only five or six feet, and it killed none of them. ‘It was quicker when they used the cart at Tyburn,’ Logan said, leaning forward, ‘but we get more Morris this way.’

  Sir Henry did not need to ask what Logan meant. The four were twitching, jerking and twisting. They were doing the Morris dance of the scaffold, the hempen measure, the dying capers that came from the stifling, killing, throttling struggles of the doomed. Botting, hidden down in the scaffold’s well, leapt aside as the girl’s bowels released themselves. Sir Henry saw none of it for his eyes were closed, and he did not even open them when the crowd cheered itself hoarse because Botting, using the highwayman’s pinioned elbows as a stirrup, climbed up to squat like a black toad on the man’s shoulders to hasten his dying. The highwayman had paid Botting so he would die more quickly and Botting was keeping faith with the bribe.

  ‘“Behold, I show you a mystery.’” The Ordinary ignored the grinning Botting, who clung like a monstrous hump on the dying man’s back. ‘“We shall not all sleep,”’ Cotton intoned, ‘“but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”’

  ‘There’s the first one gone,’ Logan said, as Botting clambered down from the corpse’s back, ‘and I’ve got a mortal appetite now, by God, I have an appetite!’

  Three of the four still danced, but ever more feebly. The dead highwayman swung with canted head as Botting hauled on the girl’s ankles. Sir Henry smelt dung, human dung, and he could suddenly take no more of the spectacle and so he stumbled down the scaffold steps into the cool, dark stone shelter of the Lodge. He vomited there, then gasped for breath and waited, listening to the crowd and to the creak of the scaffold’s timbers, until it was time to go for breakfast.

  For devilled kidneys. It was a tradition.

  1

  Rider Sandman was up late that Monday morning because he had been paid seven guineas to play for Sir John Hart’s eleven against a Sussex team, the winners to share a bonus of a hundred guineas, and Sandman had scored sixty-three runs in the first innings and thirty-two in the second, and those were respectable scores by any standards, but Sir John’s eleven had still lost. That had been on the Saturday and Sandman, watching the other batsmen swing wildly at ill-bowled balls, had realised that the game was being thrown. The bookmakers were being fleeced because Sir John’s team had been expected to win handily, not least because the famed Rider Sandman was playing for it, but someone must have bet heavily on the Sussex eleven which, in the event, won the game by an innings and forty-eight runs. Rumour said that Sir John himself had bet against his own side and Sir John would not meet Sandman’s eyes, which made the rumour believable.

  So Captain Rider Sandman walked back to London.

  He walked because he refused to share a carriage with men who had accepted bribes to lose a match. He loved cricket, he was good at it, he had once, famously, scored a hundred and fourteen runs for an England eleven playing against the Marquess of Canfield’s picked men and lovers of the game would travel many miles to see Captain Rider Sandman, late of His Majesty’s 52nd Regiment of Foot, perform at the batting crease. But he hated bribery and he detested corruption and he possessed a temper, and that was why he fell into a furious argument with his treacherous team-mates and, when they slept that night in Sir John’s comfortable house and rode back to London in comfort next morning, Sandman did neither. He was too proud.

  Proud and poor. He could not afford the stagecoach fare, nor even a common carrier’s fare, because in his anger he had thrown his match fee back into Sir John Hart’s face and that, Sandman conceded, had been a stupid thing to do for he had earnt that money honestly, yet even so it had felt dirty. So he walked home, spending the Saturday night in a hayrick somewhere near Hickstead and trudging all that Sunday until the right sole was almost clean off his boot. He reached Drury Lane very late that night and he dropped his cricket gear on the floor of his rented attic room and stripped himself naked and fell into the narrow bed and slept. Just slept. And was still sleeping when the trapdoor dropped in Old Bailey and the crowd’s cheer sent a thousand wings startling up into the smoky London sky. Sandman was still dreaming at half past eight. He was dreaming, twitching and sweating. He called out in incoherent alarm, his ears filled with the thump of hooves and the crash of muskets and cannon, his eyes astonished by the hook of sabres and slashes of straight-bladed swords, and this time the dream was going to end with the cavalry smashing through the thin red-coated ranks, but then the rattle of hooves melded into a rush of feet on the stairs and a sketchy knock on his flimsy attic door. He opened his eyes, realised he was no longer a soldier, and then, before he could call out any response, Sally Hood was in the room. For a second Sandman thought the flurry of bright eyes, calico dress and golden hair was a dream, then Sally laughed. ‘I bleeding woke you. Gawd, I’m sorry!’ She turned to go.

  ‘It’s all right, Miss Hood.’ Sandman fumbled for his watch. He was sweating. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Saint Giles just struck half after eight,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ Sandman could not believe he had slept so late. He had nothing to get up for, but the habit of waking early had long taken hold. He sat up in bed, remembered he was naked and snatched the thin blanket up to his chest. ‘There’s a gown hanging on the door, Miss Hood, would you be so kind?’

  Sally found the dressing gown. ‘It’s just that I’m late,’ she explained her sudden appearance in his room, ‘and my brother’s brushed off and I’ve got work, and the dress has to be hooked up, see?’ She turned her back, showing a length of bare spine. ‘I’d have asked Mrs Gunn to do it,’ Sally went on, ‘only there’s a hanging today so she’s off watching. Gawd knows what she can see considering she’s half blind and all drunk, but she does like a good hanging and she ain’t got many pleasures left at her age. It’s all right, you can get up now, I’ve got me peepers shut.’

  Sandman climbed out of bed warily for there was only a limited area in his tiny attic room where he could stand without banging his hea
d on the beams. He was a tall man, an inch over six foot, with pale-gold hair, blue eyes and a long, raw-boned face. He was not conventionally handsome, his face was too rugged for that, but there was a capability and a kindness in his expression that made him memorable. He pulled on the dressing gown and tied its belt. ‘You say you’ve got work?’ he asked Sally. ‘A good job, I hope?’

  ‘Ain’t what I wanted,’ Sally said, ‘because it ain’t on deck.’

  ‘Deck?’

  ‘Stage, Captain,’ she said. She called herself an actress and perhaps she was, though Sandman had seen little evidence that the stage had much use for Sally who, like Sandman, clung to the very edge of respectability and was held there, it seemed, by her brother, a very mysterious young man who worked strange hours. ‘But it ain’t bad work,’ she went on, ‘and it is respectable.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ Sandman said, sensing that Sally did not really want to talk about it, and he wondered why she sounded so defensive about a respectable job and Sally wondered why Sandman, who was palpably a gentleman, was renting an attic room in the Wheatsheaf Tavern in London’s Drury Lane. Down on his luck, that was for sure, but even so, the Wheatsheaf? Perhaps he knew no better. The Wheatsheaf was famously a flash tavern, a home for every kind of thief from pickpockets to petermen, from burglars to shop-breakers, and it seemed to Sally that Captain Rider Sandman was as straight as a ramrod. But he was a nice man, Sally thought. He treated her like a lady, and though she had only spoken to him a couple of times as they edged past each other in the inn’s corridors, she had detected a kindness in him. Enough kindness to let her presume on his privacy this Monday morning. ‘And what about you, Captain?’ she asked. ‘You working?’

  ‘I’m looking for employment, Miss Hood,’ Sandman said, and that was true, but he was not finding any. He was too old to be an apprentice clerk, not qualified to work in the law or with money, and too squeamish to accept a job driving slaves in the sugar islands.

  ‘I heard you was a cricketer,’ Sally said.

  ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘A famous one, my brother says.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ Sandman said modestly.

  ‘But you can earn money at that, can’t you?’

  ‘Not as much as I need,’ Sandman said, and then only in summer and if he was willing to endure the bribes and corruption of the game, ‘and I have a small problem here. Some of the hooks are missing.’

  ‘That’s ’cos I never get round to mending them,’ Sally said, ‘so just do what you can.’ She was staring at his mantel on which was a pile of letters, their edges frayed suggesting they had all been sent a long time in the past. She swayed forward slightly and managed to see that the topmost envelope was addressed to a Miss someone or other, she could not make out the name, but the one word revealed that Captain Sandman had been jilted and had his letters returned. Poor Captain Sandman, Sally thought.

  ‘And sometimes,’ Sandman went on, ‘where there are hooks there are no eyes.’

  ‘Which is why I brought this,’ Sally said, dangling a frayed silk handkerchief over her shoulder. ‘Thread it through the gaps, Captain. Make me decent.’

  ‘So today I shall call on some acquaintances,’ Sandman reverted to her earlier question, ‘and see if they can offer me employment and then, this afternoon, I shall yield to temptation.’

  ‘Ooh!’ Sally smiled over her shoulder, all blue eyes and sparkle. ‘Temptation?’

  ‘I shall watch some cricket at the Artillery Ground.’

  ‘Wouldn’t tempt me,’ Sally said, ‘and by the by, Captain, if you’re going down to breakfast then do it quick ’cos you won’t get a bite after nine o’clock.’

  ‘I won’t?’ Sandman asked, though in truth he had no intention of paying the tavern for a breakfast he could not afford.

  ‘The ‘sheaf’s always crowded when there’s a hanging at Newgate,’ Sally explained, ‘’cos the folk want their breakfasts on their way back, see? Makes ’em hungry. That’s where my brother went. He always goes down Old Bailey when there’s a scragging. They like him to be there.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘His friends. He usually knows one of the poor bastards being twisted, see?’

  ‘Twisted?’

  ‘Hanged, Captain. Hanged, twisted, crapped, nubbed, scragged or Jack Ketched. Doing the Newgate Morris, dancing on Jemmy Botting’s stage, rope gargling. You’ll have to learn the flash language if you live here, Captain.’

  ‘I can see I will,’ Sandman said, and had just begun to thread the handkerchief through the dress’s gaping back when Dodds, the inn’s errand boy, pushed through the half-open door and grinned to discover Sally Hood in Captain Sandman’s room and Captain Sandman doing up her frock and him with tousled hair and dressed in nothing but a frayed old dressing gown.

  ‘You’ll catch flies if you don’t close your bloody gob,’ Sally told Dodds, ‘and he ain’t my boman, you spoony little bastard. He’s just hooking me up ’cos my brother and Mother Gunn have gone to the crap. Which is where you’ll end up if there’s any bleeding justice.’

  Dodds ignored this tirade and held a sealed paper towards Sandman. ‘Letter for you, Captain.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Sandman said, and stooped to his folded clothes to find a penny. ‘Wait a moment,’ he told the boy who, in truth, had shown no inclination to leave until he was tipped.

  ‘Don’t you bug him nothing!’ Sally protested. She pushed Sandman’s hand away and snatched the letter from Dodds. ‘The little toe-rag forgot it, didn’t he? No bleeding letter arrived this morning! How long’s it been?’

  Dodds looked at her sullenly. ‘Came on Friday,’ he finally admitted.

  ‘If a bleeding letter comes on Friday then you bleeding deliver it on Friday! Now, on your trotters and fake away off!’ She slammed the door on the boy. ‘Lazy little bleeder. They should take him down bleeding Newgate and make him do the scaffold hornpipe. That would stretch his lazy bloody neck.’

  Sandman finished threading the silk handkerchief through the gaps in the dress’s fastenings, then stepped back and nodded. ‘You look very fetching, Miss Hood.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ Sandman said. The dress was pale green, printed with cornflowers, and the colours suited Sally’s honey-coloured skin and curly hair that was as gold as Sandman’s own. She was a pretty girl with clear blue eyes, a skin unscarred by pox and a contagious smile. ‘The dress really does become you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the only half good one I’ve got,’ she said, ‘so it had better suit. Thank you.’ She held out his letter. ‘Close your eyes, turn round three times, then say your loved one’s name aloud before you open it.’

  Sandman smiled. ‘And what will that achieve?’

  ‘It will mean good news, Captain,’ she said earnestly, ‘good news.’ She smiled and was gone.

  Sandman listened to her footsteps on the stairs, then looked at the letter. Perhaps it was an answer to one of his enquiries about a job? It was certainly a very high class of paper and the handwriting was educated and stylish. He put a finger under the flap, ready to break the seal, then paused. He felt like a fool, but he closed his eyes, turned three times then spoke his loved one’s name aloud: ‘Eleanor Forrest,’ he said, then opened his eyes, tore off the letter’s red wax seal and unfolded the paper. He read the letter, read it again and tried to work out whether or not it really was good news.

  The Right Honourable the Viscount Sidmouth presented his compliments to Captain Rider Sandman and requested the honour of a call at Captain Sandman’s earliest convenience, preferably in the forenoon at Lord Sidmouth’s office. A prompt reply to Lord Sidmouth’s private secretary, Mister Sebastian Witherspoon, would be appreciated.

  Sandman’s first instinct was that the letter must be bad news, that his father had dunned the Viscount Sidmouth as he had dunned so many others and that his lordship was writing to make a claim on the pathetic shreds of the Sandman estate. Yet that wa
s nonsense. His father, so far as Rider Sandman knew, had never encountered Lord Sidmouth and he would surely have boasted if he had for Sandman’s father had liked the company of important men. And there were few men more important than the Right Honourable Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, erstwhile Prime Minister of Great Britain and now His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State in the Home Department.

  So why did the Home Secretary want to see Rider Sandman?

  There was only one way to find out.

  So Sandman put on his cleanest shirt, buffed his fraying boots with his dirtiest shirt, brushed his coat and, thus belying his poverty by dressing as the gentleman he was, went to see Lord Sidmouth.

  The Viscount Sidmouth was a thin man. He was thin-lipped and thin-haired, had a thin nose and a thin jaw that narrowed to a weasel-thin chin and his eyes had all the warmth of thinly knapped flint and his thin voice was precise, dry and unfriendly. His nickname was ‘the Doctor’, a nickname without warmth or affection, but apt, for he was clinical, disapproving and cold. He had made Sandman wait for two and a quarter hours, though as Sandman had come to the office without an appointment he could scarce blame the Home Secretary for that. Now, as a bluebottle buzzed against one of the high windows, Lord Sidmouth frowned across the desk at his visitor. ‘You were recommended by Sir John Colborne.’

  Sandman bowed his head in acknowledgement, but said nothing. There was nothing to say. A grandfather clock ticked loud in a corner of the office.

  ‘You were in Sir John’s battalion at Waterloo,’ Sidmouth said, ‘is that not so?’

  ‘I was, my lord, yes.’

  Sidmouth grunted as though he did not entirely approve of men who had been at Waterloo and that, Sandman reflected, might well have been the case for Britain now seemed divided between those who had fought against the French and those who had stayed at home. The latter, Sandman suspected, were jealous and liked to suggest, oh so delicately, that they had sacrificed an opportunity to gallivant abroad because of the need to keep Britain prosperous. The wars against Napoleon were two years in the past now, yet still the divide remained, though Sir John Colborne must possess some influence with the government if his recommendation had brought Sandman to this office. ‘Sir John tells me you seek employment?’ the Home Secretary asked.