“I am sure he will return when all the trouble has abated,” soothed Grainger. “In the meantime, I have a task for you.”
“Dear me, what is it?” asked Mr. Tyre, staring at the rooftops over Cold Stone Row.
Grainger drew Mr. Tyre even further to the side. “You must put it about, at the crucial hour, that Dirk Tallow was not taken by the strategy of the watch, but by treachery and malice within the Bellstrom Gaol.”
Both men were jostled by the mob, for the gate had shut again, yet the crowd lingered, reluctant to disperse. Mr. Tyre was very pale, very worried, very troubled. “That is a particular request, Mr. Grainger. It requires commitment—and boldness, I may say—and you know it is not my habit to draw the least attention, or give the slightest offence.”
By a hand on the shoulder, Grainger set Mr. Tyre a little nearer. “You have been here—how many years?”
“Oh, more than I care to recall,” said Mr. Tyre, with a forlorn little shrug.
“You are a good man, Mr. Tyre. A meek man, a useful man, and a humble man. A most excellent fellow, in my opinion. You have tolerated the intolerable these many years, and you have held yourself whole. I believe that you have seen and known a great deal more than you will ever say. More folly and cruelty and deception than you can show. But you are not deceived. Speak only the truth in this, and I will be content. Speak the truth that an honourable man knows. It cannot open those gates for you, but it will stand you better than the idiocy of authority and the tyranny of evil purpose.”
Mr. Tyre smiled, though nervous. His eyes were watery, but his stance firm. “You have found me out, Mr. Grainger. I cannot say that I care for it. But you have always been kind to Roarke, and I will do as you ask.”
“So be it. And if I come by him in my goings, I will make a note of that black-feathered rascal!” And so saying, Grainger slapped the debtor cheerfully on the arm and passed by.
A CONSIDERABLE AUDIENCE gathered in Gales Square, for the notoriety of the principal part was immense. Several carriages were drawn up on the margins of the square, providing the ladies with an excellent vantage, while the hawkers of nuts and apples, ribbons and tobacco, set about their trades. But there was something brittle about the scene. The rookeries and tenements of The Steps had opened out and given up their souls to attend and see their hero dance—a pleasing illustration of the majesty and awfulness of the law, were there not in the people’s expressions traces of contempt and resentment. It was cold and damp. The stones were black and slippery, and would not get dry. Above the crowd travelled columns of cloud and mist, sometimes darkening the air, sometimes dissolving into showers, sometimes opening like a door to admit a shaft of tarnished light, and often showing, ranked beyond, masses of glowering rain cloud. The winds nipped at ankles and hands and cheeks.
William Quillby and Clara Grimsborough hastened about the margins of the square, while the hangman’s train descended from the Bellstrom and forced a way through the mob, which parted reluctantly. A few men clung to the beams of the gallows platform. Dirk Tallow was brought up, with a white cockade in his hat. From beneath the arms of the fatal tree, he made his oration. The wind snatched at his words: they fluttered and scattered. Once or twice, the crowd laughed and showed by their merriment that the lesson of the law was not well taken. They raised tattered hats and waved at the gallows. Presently, a hiss ran through the square. Stones and scraps of refuse were hurled at the hangman. The pickpockets worked the gathering while Dirk Tallow climbed the steps. He walked steadily and did not slip on the planks, though his hands were clasped at his sides. The hangman applied the noose and set the knot, then stepped back and pulled the lever to open the trap. Dirk Tallow dropped and kicked for his last few minutes, then ceased.
Yet as the corpse was brought down and Brock came forward to claim it and ready it for the waiting surgeons, the crowd groaned and cursed. Some shouted black words. A woman began shrieking distinctly, though she could not be seen. A brawl broke out at the foot of the gallows, and the man stationed there laid about with his cudgel before he was leveled by a blow from a stone in a coal-carrier’s hand. Suddenly, it was impossible to make out the order and intention of the assembly.
“Enough,” said William, grim-faced, taking Clara by the arm. “It is not safe here.”
“I am afraid they will call out the soldiers,” said she.
William nodded. “We must find your father at once.”
Many of the carriages drew away, and the horses reared and stamped at some impediment. Perhaps a child was hurt by flailing hooves. Men and women formed small, angry knots that scattered among the little alleys and streets that met at the square. A shoving, kicking, bellowing mass formed beneath the scaffold.
WHEN THE CONDEMNED had taken their final steps across the black threshold, and the rising roar of the crowd reached over the walls of the gaol, the mood of the Bellstrom was discontented. Strange rumours were brought into the yard by the beggars the gaoler permitted to follow their craft in the street. Some said there was a brawl beneath the gallows, and the thief-taker had fallen and been taken away. Others hinted at skirmishes among the winds of The Steps, and rent-collectors stoned by fractions of an angry mob. Uneasy whispers and retributive oaths passed along the passages of the gaol, from Cold Stone Row and the common cells to the Maids Tower and the Cosy. The prisoners were reluctant to return to their cells; those who had freedom of movement lingered in the yard and about the passages. Edgar Swinge, coming in, was sufficiently alarmed; he forbade the gate to be opened on any but official business and made a show of returning some of the meeker inmates to their cells, cuffing and swearing at them.
When Grainger went up to the tap-room at about three or four o’clock, he found many there in a bleak cast of mind. The clouds that had lowered all day had meshed themselves into a blank, grey overcast that seemed to oppress the senses and make vision dim. A few mournful tallow dips had been lighted, but they glimmered rather than burnt in the stew of smoke and fumes. Swinge, abiding by his methods, had been liberal with the drink, but the company was still belligerent.
Grainger made out Mr. Tyre, blinking and watchful in a corner. “I have put about the substance of what you told me,” he said. “I had scarce need—the charge was already abroad, and in many mouths. I only fanned the flames.”
“All the better then,” said Grainger.
In the tap-room, which had almost exceeded its capacity, so that drunken men hung upon the windows and slumped at the doors, Gabriel Sholto, Harry Noyes, and a few other loyalists in Dirk Tallow’s crew had cleared a table near the centre of the room and were steeped in strong waters. Presently, Sholto rose and held high his cup, and waited for a grudging silence. He was drunk, and grieving drunk, and his great frame swayed.
“A salute,” he cried, “to our brother and captain who has made his amends this day: against all falsifiers, traitors, and informers we say, confusion to their plots, ruin on their estates, damnation for their souls.”
Grainger stood, among two or three others at the back, but his hand was steady, and he looked on with a deep interest. Amongst the company of thieves and felons, seated on a stool near the tap, Daniel Cleaves did not stir.
“What,” said Gabriel Sholto, with a dark deliberation, “do you object to the toast?”
“I object to being made out a traitor, and then being invited to drink to my own damnation,” replied Cleaves.
“Do you own yourself a damned ’peacher?” demanded Sholto.
“I ain’t nothing of the sort.”
“Then stand for the toast, you villain.”
“Damned if I will!” cried Cleaves.
With a roar, Gabriel Sholto threw himself at the other man, and though half-blind with drink, he was able to take hold of Cleaves’s coat and try and lift him to his feet by main strength, for which courtesy he was rewarded with a head-butt to the face. Blood gushed from his nose. He cuffed Daniel Cleaves and knocked him off his feet, with a backward blow of the arm, but two of the Harfoot Men
were on him at once.
Grainger rose, for the disturbance was spreading rapidly, and the tap-room was seething with bellowing men, as arms were raised and hands caught at coats and sleeves. Stools and tankards were thrown, and an earthenware jug shattered.
“It has started,” said Grainger to Mr. Tyre, “and disorder is our cover. We must go at once.”
With difficulty, but jostled and hampered rather than threatened, for the closeness of the room was the main hindrance to the struggle, Grainger and Mr. Tyre made their way outside.
In the tap-room the first shock of mayhem was soon concluded, for Sholto was bleeding prodigiously with a broken nose, while Danny Cleaves lay groaning on the floor with a knife set between his shoulder blades, and none knew who drove it there. Swinge’s first thought had been to take up the massive, iron-bound single-stick he always kept at hand, but the brawl was spreading, and not to be put down with a few oaths. Already, some men were tearing at the casks of rum, and Swinge bethought himself of the day’s takings and snatched up the cashbox. He cleared a path with his heavy stick and his son, Edgar, at his side, and crossed the prison yard at a jog. The door to the gaoler’s lodge was already locked, for Mrs. Swinge had been alarmed by the sound of a disturbance in the Maids Tower and the yard, and only by bellowing and persuasively rattling the cash-box did Swinge bear on his wife to admit him and their son.
Whereas the custom of the gaol was disorder tethered to indifference, as the riot spread it also fractured into countless instances of purpose and misrule—but it was no reversal of the natural order of the place, but rather its extension. Many gathered around the gatehouse and tried to break the main gate down from within, though the old planks were immense and hardy, and easily withstood the beating of many hands and boots. Some reasoned that the keys were in the gaoler’s lodge and made straight there, though a few, recalling years of fees and garnish, and believing the monies to be secreted there, were already baying at Swinge’s door. Still more sought the leaden roofs of the gaol for a means of escape, and others went about snatching what scraps of bedding and other linens they could, among the open cells, with the intent of making ropes. A number of the meeker prisoners sought to hide in the chapel, though a clutch of ruffians were pounding on the chapel door, believing that Edgar had hidden himself there. Close by the yard, a mob amused themselves by surrounding two of the turnkeys who could not make it to safety, baiting and abusing them. In the common cells, the more charitable sought the means to break the fetters and chains of the other prisoners, and so strengthen the insurrection and confusion. Yet for each instance of common purpose, many in the chaos saw the means to settle their own debts and petty resentments. There were thefts and beatings and reeling brawls in every quarter, as old feuds and wrongs were resurrected. In the debtors’ wing, six or seven men made a fortification of the Cosy, while several families barricaded their own doors and sat down to watch the entrance and wait for the tumult to decline.
OUTSIDE THE TAP-ROOM, at the base of a little twist of wooden steps, Grainger and Mr. Tyre paused to take counsel. Grainger was outwardly calm, but there was in him a severity that spoke of a settled and dangerous intent. Mr. Tyre was flushed about the cheeks and animated.
“This disorder will guard us and conceal our purpose,” said Grainger. “But for the next step, and to go safely about, we must be armed.”
“Well, as to that…” Mr. Tyre, looking rather abashed, drew out of the pocket of his tattered coat a gleaming, pointed awl with a worn handle. “I have been a shoemaker and leather-worker these many years, and when I knew you were determined to start some trouble, I thought of this. It will punch through a man’s hide as surely as through a piece of shoe-leather, should we be pressed to it.”
At this revelation, Grainger was briefly astonished, but after a moment he grinned wolfishly and slapped Mr. Tyre on the back. “You are a man of foresight and hidden depths. Keep it by, Mr. Tyre, for I have something to fetch from my own cell.”
There was a bellow of rage or pain in the next room. Crockery shattered, and uncertain shadows appeared, merged, and shifted at the end of the narrow little passage in which they sheltered.
“By all means,” said Mr. Tyre, peering and shrinking back as he hid the awl again. “But let us not linger.”
THEY PASSED THROUGH Cold Stone Row, where all was darkness and confusion. The cells were opened up, and many prisoners, dazed at their release from confinement, had stumbled out, and now sought to delay those who passed, for the tumult of the yard was heard faintly in the depths of the prison. The air was cloudy with bitter smoke, as a few dips and cheap lamps had been broken and little piles of straw smouldered on the floor. At the nearer end of the row, observed by two or three heckling women, one of the turnkeys was being beaten. Grainger turned at this sight, but Mr. Tyre, plucking at his sleeve, drew him away.
As they went on, Grainger darted aside and hauled up one slinking figure by its collar. It was Toby Redruth, swearing and kicking until he looked up and made out Grainger’s face.
“Let me by,” squealed Toby, dropping something to the straw.
“We won’t tarry,” said Grainger. “But there’s work to be done and you owe me a service.”
“I’ll do as you ask, if that will quit you—but I’d best not be found here.”
“Then come,” said Grainger. “Stay by us, for your sister’s sake!”
Figures blundered into them in the shadows. A man fell against Grainger, but he was drunk or wounded, and Grainger set his shoulder low and heaved him aside. A few moments later, Mr. Tyre struck out against a form that reached for his necktie and drove the point of his awl into the clutching hand. Grainger turned back, but the attacker was already sloping away into the murk, howling at his wound, while Mr. Tyre stared, appalled, at the tool in his grasp.
No less dangerous was the ascent into the western tower, with prisoners moving up and down, slipping on the steps and tumbling over Grainger in the crush. Some, higher up still, entertained themselves by hurling earthenware jugs and other trash down the winding stairs.
Once Grainger was back in his own cell, he went quickly to the bedstead and unscrewed the heavy wooden knob at the head. He reached with his fingertips into the hollow post and drew out a narrow packet wrapped in linen.
“I had thought,” said Mr. Tyre, coughing slightly, “that you favoured a loose brick behind the hearth.”
Grainger shrugged. “So I did, until it occurred to me that that particular trick was familiar to others in the prison. Then I ordered a new bed!”
The parcel, unwrapped, revealed a narrow-handled, narrow-bladed dagger, and something else, wrapped in a paper, that Grainger slipped into a pocket. The dagger, after a moment’s thought, he slid into the top of his boot and made snug there.
“I acquired this after Bartelby Storpin’s experience put the importance of good steel before me,” said Grainger.
He rose and looked briefly around his cell. The old grey stones and mean gap of a window he regarded with distaste, yet some trace of prescience or self-knowledge warned him that they would lay a tenacious claim on his thoughts and memories for many years to come.
“It is best to quit this place at once,” he said, though it is doubtful his companions heard him. Noises rising from the base of the tower alerted them, and they went out again into the affray.
AT THE BASE of the tower they came upon five or six scoundrels who were approaching the crooked steps, perhaps with the intention of robbery or assault against the wealthier prisoners whose privileges they despised. They had armed themselves with pieces of broken wood, crude knives, and even one or two lengths of chain. Their leader was a man called Naylor, a master-weaver held for murdering an apprentice. Before Grainger could call out to him, they charged. A chain rattled over Grainger’s head as he ducked to retrieve the blade he had only just secured in his boot. When he rose, Naylor was drawing back to strike again. His face drifted before Grainger in the half-light of the passageway. Rage and lo
athing boiled in Grainger’s heart, yet he had no wish to do murder or abase himself to the violence of the mob. He stepped in and struck the man with all his force on the bridge of the nose, using the pommel of the dagger. Naylor screamed and staggered, and Grainger pushed him to the ground with the heel of his other hand. The cutthroats had not anticipated the resistance of determined men armed with steel. They broke up and scampered away.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Tyre faintly.
“I fear for any other they might meet in the course of this night,” said Grainger. “Women particularly.”
“Then whatever you hope to accomplish,” returned Mr. Tyre, “let us get to it quickly.”
To avoid notice, they went by the back ways, the tight, choking gaps through the heavy walls. Once or twice, they passed a window or a crack that looked out upon the yard. The rioters, with many of those who had been released from confinement in the Writhans, had assembled a great bonfire of broken chairs, stools, benches, and tables, and added to this mouldy bedding and festering rags. Flames slithered and writhed across the mass of material. The later part of the afternoon was passing, and the sky was heavy with clouds. The flames and reeking smoke made the prison yard darker still. Around the fire, the prisoners danced and drank.
“They will call the horse-guard, surely,” said Mr. Tyre.
“No doubt,” Grainger affirmed. “But they will delay a little longer, I hope, for their honours on Battens Hill are not the only authority with which they must consult.”
Avoiding the gangs that roamed the lower cells, they crossed the prison and came to the iron gate at the foot of the Bell Tower. The gate was open, for it had settled on its hinges and not been shut up for many years. Tendrils of smoke laced the air, traces of the burning in the yard. The steps beyond the gate were dark, but at their base the massive shadow of a man moved. It was Herrick. He had armed himself with a stout hawthorn stick and taken the trouble to drive a ship’s nail through the head. This weapon he held loosely in his hands, occasionally hefting the weight of it.
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