Gallows Thief

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Nothing that need trouble you,’ Berrigan said. Berrigan, Sandman and Sally slept on the grass, guarding Mackeson and Billy, though there was no fight left in either man for they were confused, frightened and obedient. They reminded Sandman of a French colonel his men had taken captive in the Galician mountains, a bombastic man who had whined and complained about the conditions of his captivity until, in exasperation, Sandman’s own colonel had simply freed the man. ‘Bugger off,’ he had told him in French, ‘you’re free.’ And the Frenchman, so terrified of the Spanish peasants, had begged to be taken captive again. Mackeson and Billy could have walked away from their tired captors, but both were too scared of the strange village and the sheer darkness of the night and the daunting prospect of finding their own way back to London.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Berrigan asked Sandman in the short summer night.

  ‘We take her to the Home Secretary,’ Sandman said bleakly, ‘and let him pick over her bones.’

  It would do no good, he thought, but what choice did he have? Somewhere a dog barked in the darkness and then, as Berrigan kept watch, Sandman slept.

  9

  It was just after dawn when the main door of Newgate Prison was eased open and the first pieces of the scaffold were carried out into Old Bailey. The fence that surrounded the finished scaffold was fetched out first and part of it was placed halfway across the street to divert what small traffic went between Ludgate Hill and Newgate Street this early on a Sunday. William Brown, the Keeper of Newgate, came to the main door where he yawned, scratched his bald head, lit a pipe, then stepped aside as the heavy beams that formed the framework of the scaffold’s platform were carried out. ‘It’s going to be a lovely day, Mister Pickering,’ he remarked to the foreman.

  ‘Be a hot one, sir.’

  ‘Plenty of ale over the street.’

  ‘God be thanked for that, sir,’ Pickering said, then turned and stared up at the prison’s façade. There was a window just above the Debtor’s Door and he nodded at it. ‘I was thinking, sir, we could save ourselves a deal of trouble by putting a platform under that window. Build it there for all time, see? And put a hinged trap there and a beam over the top and we wouldn’t need to make a scaffold every time.’

  The Keeper turned and stared upwards. ‘You’re talking yourself out of a job, Mister Pickering.’

  ‘I’d rather have my Sundays at home, sir, with Mrs Pickering. And if you had a platform up there, sir, it wouldn’t obstruct the traffic and it would give the crowd a better view.’

  ‘Too good a view, maybe?’ the Keeper suggested. ‘I’m not sure the crowd ought to see the death struggles.’ The present scaffold, with its screened flanks, meant that only the folk who rented the upper rooms immediately opposite the prison could see down into the pit where the hanged men and women choked to death.

  ‘They see them struggle at Horsemonger Lane,’ Pickering pointed out, ‘and folk appreciate seeing them die proper. That’s why they liked Tyburn! You got a proper view at Tyburn.’ In the old century the condemned were taken by cart from Newgate to the wide spaces at Tyburn, where a permanent scaffold of three long beams had stood with embanked seating all around it. It had been a two-hour journey, punctuated by stops where the tavern crowds obstructed the roads, and the authorities had detested the carnival atmosphere that always accompanied a Tyburn hanging and for that reason, and in the belief that executions outside Newgate would be more dignified, they had demolished the old triangular scaffold and with it eliminated the rowdy journey. ‘I saw the last hanging at Tyburn,’ Pickering said. ‘I was just seven, I was, and I’ve never forgotten it!’

  ‘It’s supposed to be memorable,’ the Keeper said, ‘else it won’t deter, will it? So why hide the death throes? I do believe you’re right, Mister Pickering, and I shall pass on your suggestion to the Court of Aldermen.’

  ‘Kind of you, sir, kind of you.’ Pickering knuckled his forehead. ‘So it’s a busy day tomorrow, is it, sir?’

  ‘Just the two,’ the Keeper said, ‘but one of them is the painter, Corday. Remember him? He was the fellow who stabbed the Countess of Avebury.’ He sighed. ‘Bound to attract a fair crowd.’

  ‘And the weather will encourage them, sir.’

  ‘That it will,’ the Keeper agreed, ‘that it will, if it stays fine.’ He stepped aside as one of his wife’s kitchen servants hurried down the steps with a tall china jug to meet a milk-girl carrying two lidded pails on a shoulder yoke. ‘Smell it, Betty,’ he called after her, ‘smell it! We had some sour last week.’

  The platform’s frame was slotted and pegged into place while the cladding for the sides and the black baize that swathed the whole scaffold were piled on the pavement. The Keeper tapped out his pipe against the door’s black knocker, then went inside to change for morning service. Old Bailey had little traffic, though a few idlers vacantly watched the growing scaffold and a half-dozen choirboys, hurrying towards Saint Sepulchre’s, stopped to gape as the heavy hanging beam with its dark metal hooks was carried from the prison. A waiter from the Magpie and Stump brought a tray of ale pots to the workmen, a gift from the tavern’s landlord who would keep the dozen men well supplied all day. It was traditional to provide the scaffold makers with free ale, and profitable, for the presence of the gallows would mean a glut of customers next morning.

  In Wapping, to the east, a chandler unlocked his back door to a single customer. His shop was closed, for it was Sunday, but this customer was special. ‘It looks like being a fine day tomorrow, Jemmy,’ the chandler said.

  ‘It’ll bring out the crowd,’ Mister Botting agreed, edging into the shop past hanging swathes of ropes and dead-eyes, ‘and I do like a crowd.’

  ‘A skilled man should have an appreciative audience,’ the chandler said, leading his guest to a table where two twelve-foot lengths of hemp rope had been laid ready for Botting’s inspection. ‘One-inch rope, Jemmy, oiled and boiled,’ the chandler said.

  ‘Very nice, Leonard, very nice.’ Botting lowered his face and sniffed the ropes.

  ‘Like to guess where they’re from?’ the chandler asked. He was proud of the two ropes that he had boiled clean, then massaged with linseed oil so that they were pliable. Afterwards he had lovingly fashioned two nooses and spliced an eye in each bitter end.

  ‘Looks like Bridport hemp,’ Botting said, though he knew it was not. He just said it to please the chandler.

  And the chandler chuckled with delight. ‘Bain’t be a man alive that can tell that ain’t Bridport hemp, Jemmy, but it ain’t. It’s sisal, it is, hawser laid sisal.’

  ‘No!’ Botting, his face grimacing from its nervous tic, stooped for a closer look at the rope. He was instructed to buy only the best new Bridport hemp and his bill to the Court of Aldermen would indeed demand repayment for two such expensive ropes, but it had always offended him to waste good rope on gallows scum.

  ‘It came out of the halliard barrel of a Newcastle collier,’ the chandler said. ‘West African shoddy, at a guess, but boil it, oil it and give it a light coat of boot blacking and no man could tell, eh? A hog apiece to you, Jemmy.’

  ‘A fair price,’ Botting agreed. He would pay two shillings and indent nine shillings and ninepence for the two ropes, then slice them after they had served their purpose and sell off the pieces for whatever the market would bear. Neither of the men to be hanged was truly notorious, but curiosity about the Countess of Avebury’s murderer might drive the price of Corday’s rope up to sixpence an inch. There would be a fat profit, anyway. He tested that the noose of one rope would tighten, then nodded in satisfaction. ‘And I’ll be wanting some strapping cord,’ he went on, ‘four lengths.’

  ‘I’ve a butt of Swedish lanyard all ready for you, Jemmy,’ the chandler said. ‘So you’re still lashing their hands and elbows yourself, are you?’

  ‘Not for long,’ Botting said. ‘Thank you!’ This last was because the chandler had poured two tin mugs of brandy. ‘They had a pair of aldermen at the last swingi
ng,’ Botting went on, ‘pretending they was just there for the entertainment, but I knows better. And Mister Logan was one of them, and he’s a good enough fellow. He knows what’s necessary. Mind you, the other one wished he’d stayed away. Emptied his belly, he did! Couldn’t stand the sight!’ He chuckled. ‘But Mister Logan tipped me the wink afterwards and said they’ll give me an assistant.’

  ‘A man needs an assistant.’

  ‘He does, he does.’ Jemmy Botting drained the brandy, then collected his ropes and followed the chandler to a barrel where the lanyard cording was kept. ‘Nice easy job in the morning,’ he said, ‘just two to top. Maybe I’ll see you there?’

  ‘Like as not, Jemmy.’

  ‘We’ll have an ale afterwards,’ Botting said, ‘and a chop for dinner.’

  He left ten minutes later, the ropes and cords safe in his bag. He just had to fetch the two cotton bags from a seamstress, then he would be ready. He was England’s hangman, and in the next day’s dawn he would do his work.

  Sandman was in a vile mood that Sunday morning. He had hardly slept, his temper was frayed and taut, and Meg’s whining only made his bad temper worse. Berrigan and Sally were hardly more cheerful, but had the sense to keep silent, while Meg complained about being forced to London, then started screeching in protest when Sandman savaged her with accusations of selfishness and stupidity.

  Billy, the stable hand, was left behind in the village. He could hardly get back to London ahead of the coach and so he could not warn the Seraphim Club of what was happening and thus it was safe to abandon him. ‘But how do I get home?’ he enquired plaintively.

  ‘You do what the rest of us did from Lisbon to Toulouse,’ Sandman snapped. ‘You walk.’

  The horses were ragged and tired. They had cropped the grass on the village green, shying away from the intrusive geese that resented their presence, but the animals were used to oats and corn, not thin grass, and they were sluggish in the harness though they responded briskly enough to Mackeson’s whip and by the time the sun had climbed above the eastern trees they were going northwards at a fair clip. Church bells jangled a summer sky where high white clouds sailed westwards. ‘You a churchgoer, Captain?’ Berrigan asked, judging that their progress would have improved Sandman’s mood.

  ‘Of course.’ Sandman was sharing the box with Berrigan and Mackeson, leaving the carriage’s interior for Sally and Meg. It had been Sally’s idea to share the coach with Meg. ‘She don’t frighten me,’ Sally had said, ‘and besides, maybe she’ll talk to another girl?’

  ‘I ain’t a church sort of man,’ Berrigan said. ‘Ain’t got time for it, but I do like to hear the bells.’ All about them, concealed by the leafy Kent woods, the church towers and spires rang the changes. A dog cart clipped past them, loaded with children in their Sunday best and all carrying their prayer books to morning service. The children waved.

  The bells went silent as the services began. The carriage came to a village, its main street deserted. They clopped past the church and Sandman heard a cellist accompanying the old hymn, ‘Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run.’ They had sung it, he remembered, on the morning of the battle at Salamanca, the men’s voices hard and low beneath a sun climbing into a sky that became pitiless with heat on a day of burning death. Mackeson stopped the team in a ford on the other side of the village and, as the horses drank, Sandman folded down the steps to let Sally and Meg stretch their legs. He looked quizzically at Sally, who shook her head. ‘Stubborn,’ she murmured to Sandman.

  Meg came down and glared at Sandman, then bent to scoop water into her mouth. Afterwards she sat on the bank and just watched the dragonflies. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she said to Sandman, ‘if the foxes have eaten my chooks.’

  ‘You care more about your hens than the life of an innocent man?’

  ‘Let him bloody hang,’ Meg said. She had lost her bonnet and her hair was lank and tousled.

  ‘You’re going to have to talk to other men in London,’ Sandman said, ‘and they won’t be gentle.’

  The girl said nothing.

  Sandman sighed. ‘I know what happened,’ he said. ‘You were in the room where Corday was painting the Countess and someone came up the back stairs. So you took Corday down the front stairs, didn’t you? You left his painting and his brushes in the Countess’s bedroom and you hurried him out to the street because one of the Countess’s lovers had arrived, and I know who it was. It was the Marquess of Skavadale.’ Meg frowned, looked as if she was about to say something, then just stared away into the distance. ‘And the Marquess of Skavadale,’ Sandman went on, ‘is engaged to marry a very rich heiress, and he needs that marriage because his family is short of money, desperately short. But the girl won’t marry him if she knows he was having a liaison with the Countess, and the Countess was blackmailing him. She made money that way, didn’t she?’

  ‘Did she?’ Meg asked tonelessly.

  ‘You were her procuress, weren’t you?’

  Meg turned her small, bitter eyes on Sandman. ‘I was her protector, culley, and she needed one. Too good for her own good, she was.’

  ‘But you didn’t protect her, did you?’ Sandman said harshly. ‘And the Marquess killed her, and you discovered that. Did you find him there? Maybe you heard the murder? Perhaps you saw it! So he hid you away and he promised you money. But one day, Meg, he’ll be tired of paying you. And he’s only keeping you alive until Corday is hanged, for after that no one will believe anyone else was guilty.’

  Meg half smiled. ‘Why didn’t he kill me there and then, eh?’ She stared defiantly at Sandman. ‘If he killed the Countess, why wouldn’t he kill the maid? Tell me that, go on!’

  Sandman could not. It was, indeed, the one thing he could not explain, though everything else made sense and he believed that, in time, even that mystery would unravel. ‘Perhaps he likes you?’ he suggested.

  Meg stared at him incredulously for a few seconds, then gave a short bark of raucous laughter. ‘The likes of him?’ she asked. ‘Liking me? No.’ She brushed an insect off her skirt. ‘He let me look after the chooks, that’s all. I like chooks. I’ve always liked chooks.’

  ‘Captain!’ Berrigan, sitting up on the coach’s box, was staring north. ‘Captain!’ he called again. Sandman stood and walked to the carriage and stared northwards across some fields and up a low, thickly wooded hill and there, on the crest where the London road crossed the skyline and made a gash in the trees, was a group of horsemen. ‘They’ve been looking down here,’ Berrigan said, ‘like they was dragoons and they was trying to work out how many redcoats they could see.’

  Sandman had no telescope and the horsemen were too far away to see clearly. There were six or seven of them and Sandman had the impression, no more, that they were gazing towards the coach and that at least one of them had a telescope. ‘Could be anyone,’ he said.

  ‘Could be,’ Berrigan agreed, ‘only Lord Robin Holloway likes to wear a white riding coat and he’s got a great black horse.’

  The man at the centre of the group had a white coat and was mounted on a big black horse. ‘Damn,’ Sandman said mildly. Had Flossie talked in the Seraphim Club? Had she revealed that Sandman had trespassed there? In which case they would surely have connected him with the missing carriage and then started to worry about Meg in Kent, and then they would send a rescue party to make sure that Sandman did not bring the girl to London, and even as he thought that so he saw the group of horsemen spur forward and disappear into the trees. ‘Whip ’em on,’ he told Mackeson. ‘Sergeant! Get Meg into the carriage! Hurry!’

  How long before the horsemen arrived? Ten minutes? Probably less. Sandman thought of turning the coach and going back to the village where there had been a crossroads, but there was no room to turn the vehicle and so, when Meg was safely bundled aboard, Mackeson urged the horses on and Sandman told him to take the first turning off the road. Any lane or farm track would do, but perversely there was none, and as the coach lurched on Sandman e
xpected to see the horsemen appear at any second. He stared ahead, watching for the dust to show above the trees. At least the countryside was heavily wooded here, which meant that the coach would be hidden almost until they encountered the riders, and then, just as Sandman was despairing of ever finding an escape route, a narrow lane fell off to the right and he ordered Mackeson to take it.

  ‘Rough old road, that,’ Mackeson warned him.

  ‘Just take it!’

  The vehicle swung into the lane, narrowly missing the gnarled bole of an oak tree as it negotiated the sharp bend. ‘I hope this goes somewhere,’ Mackeson sounded amused, ‘or else we’re stuck to buggery.’

  The coach lurched and swayed alarmingly, for the lane was nothing but deep old cart ruts that had solidified in the dry mud, but it ran between thick hedges and wide orchards and every yard took them farther from the London road. Sandman made Mackeson stop after a couple of hundred yards and then stood on the carriage roof and stared back, but he could see no horsemen on the road. Had he let his fears make him too cautious? Then Meg screamed, screamed again, and Sandman, scrambling down off the roof, heard a slap. The scream stopped and he jumped down to the road. Berrigan dropped the unbroken window. ‘Only a bleeding wasp,’ he said, flicking the dead insect into the hedge. ‘You’d think it was a bleeding crocodile the fuss she bleeding makes!’

  ‘I thought she was murdering you,’ Sandman said, then he started to climb back up onto the coach, only to be checked by Berrigan’s raised hand. He stopped, listened and heard the sound of hoofbeats.