The Sign of the Gallows

by Susanna Calkins

  Lucy looked from one man to the other. Neither seemed happy. ‘It is settled then.’

  Within the hour, the three were travelling back to Hoddesdon, in a rickety carriage that Duncan had managed to summon with some alacrity. Hank was also there, and Lucy found herself talking mostly to him along the journey. The other two men stayed quiet, listening, but hardly talking, clearly wary of one another.

  Lucy remembered something that had been bothering her for a while. ‘Duncan, what happened to Philip Emerson? After he escaped from Newgate?’

  Duncan shrugged. ‘Who’s to say? Disappeared, it seemed.’

  ‘Did anyone ever check his home?’

  ‘Well, that I don’t know. The world was in chaos during the Great Fire and those weeks that followed. No one knew up from down. At the time, soldiers were sent to round up those that had escaped, I believe, but if he was smart, he would have long fled.’

  ‘Or perhaps he has returned home. Is he from London?’

  Duncan frowned. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘We have speculated that he might have taken on a new identity, in the same way that Jack Campbell assumed Paul Corbyn’s,’ Adam intervened. ‘Perhaps it is worth sending an inquiry to Cambridge. Emerson’s address should be in their rolls. I’ll dispatch a message when we arrive in Hoddesdon.’

  Duncan grunted his thanks, and they all fell into an uncomfortable silence.

  Then Hank asked Lucy a question about bookselling. Gratefully, she began to tell some of the silly stories that filled her days as a bookseller. Just as she was regaling them with the time that Master Aubrey had caught Lach setting the type forward instead of backwards, they arrived back at Hoddesdon.

  TWENTY-ONE

  As before, the Two Doves Inn was dark inside but more of the windows had been opened to let in the last bit of afternoon sun. Peeking in through the window, Lucy could see Tabby inside, passing out some ales. She didn’t see either the innkeeper or his wife.

  When they entered, Tabby gave them a little wave and walked over. ‘You again! I thought you were returning to London. Or did you end up staying with your sweetheart?’ She winked at Adam, causing all of them to shift uncomfortably.

  ‘Let’s sit here,’ Duncan said, gesturing to an open table close to the entrance.

  ‘Some ales?’ Tabby asked. ‘I can’t drink with you again, I’m afraid. Mrs Browning boxed my ears for that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Adam replied.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No matter. Worth it for the extra coins.’ She looked hopefully at Adam.

  ‘Does a man named Pike work here, too?’ Duncan asked.

  ‘Pike? Of course! He owns the inn with his brother.’

  So they were brothers. Lucy remembered thinking there had been a family resemblance.

  ‘Pike’s right over there, with that customer.’ Before they could stop her, she had called out to the man. ‘Pike! Someone’s asking for you!’

  When the man turned, Lucy darted a quick glance at him before ducking her head. It was definitely the other man she’d seen at the crossroads. ‘That’s him,’ she whispered.

  Pike came over. ‘What can I do for you, gents?’ he asked, and then stared at Lucy. ‘You!’

  He turned then and walked out, nearly running into Dev who was just entering the inn with his hands wrapped around a small barrel of ale. ‘What the—’ Dev started to say before catching sight of Lucy.

  Before either man could flee, Hank had caught hold of them both by the upper arm. ‘We’ve got some questions for you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sit down.’

  The two brothers sat down with a constable on either side of them. Lucy and Adam remained standing, Adam standing slightly in front of Lucy.

  ‘What kind of questions?’ Pike asked.

  ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about the death of Paul Corbyn of London.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Pike asked, spitting on the ground.

  ‘The man you hanged.’

  ‘We did no such thing,’ Pike said.

  ‘You saw us hang a man?’ Dev asked, his brow rising. ‘Who claims such a thing?’

  ‘On the morning of the twenty-fifth of November, Paul Corbyn was found hanged,’ Duncan said. ‘Tell us what you know about his death.’

  ‘We don’t know anything. We weren’t even there,’ Dev said.

  ‘A witness placed you at the gallows where the man was found.’

  Pike looked up at Lucy. ‘What witness? Her? We saw her on the road to St Giles-in-the-Fields, peddling papers, some distance from the gallows. That man was already dead when you saw us.’

  Dev punched his brother. ‘Dunderhead.’

  Adam’s stare hardened. ‘Thank you for confirming your presence at the scene.’

  ‘All right, we saw the man hanging there. We had nothing to do with his death,’ Dev conceded. ‘Besides, he had clearly committed self-murder.’

  ‘I saw you steal some things from his body. His pocket, shoes and a watch,’ Lucy said. She pointed at Pike’s shoes. ‘I believe you are wearing them now!’

  Dev and Pike stared at her. ‘So you were there!’ Pike said. ‘You probably stole the ring around his neck.’

  Dev slapped his head and then punched his brother again. ‘Stop talking,’ he hissed at him. Turning back to Duncan, he said, ‘We’ve said all we know.’

  ‘That is most certainly not true,’ the constable replied. ‘Given that the man who died was Jack Campbell, the Newgate jailer who freed your sister’s murderer during the Great Fire.’

  ‘What?’ The man tried to feign innocence.

  ‘We know nothing of that—’ Dev began, but Pike interrupted him.

  ‘He came to us! He felt guilty! He said he deserved to die. So we, er, helped him.’

  Dev punched his brother in the face. ‘What does it take to shut you up?’

  ‘According to the physician, this man was murdered,’ Duncan said. ‘He was struck on the head before being hanged. You did not help him to commit self-murder; you killed him. You are under arrest.’ He beckoned to Hank. ‘We’re bringing you in to stand trial.’

  ‘It wasn’t just us!’ Pike cried.

  They all stopped and stared at Pike. Dev just groaned. ‘Just stop talking!’

  ‘Explain yourself,’ Duncan growled. ‘We may go easier on you.’

  ‘Someone told us to do it. She sent us a message. Said it was the only way to get the revenge we sought.’

  They all sat back down, looking at each other. Lucy recalled the message that had been found on the guard’s body. This is the man who set the Devil free. Make him lead us to the Devil.

  ‘Who was it?’ Duncan asked.

  ‘It was the woman. Hammett’s sister. She told us to do it.’

  Hammett’s sister? Lucretia de Witte.

  ‘Tell us everything,’ Adam said.

  ‘Hammett’s sister came here after it happened, before the trial. She kept saying she couldn’t wait until Philip Emerson was dead. We saw her again at the trial and she was so pleased when the verdict was read. We wanted him dead, too. She didn’t seem quite right in the head. Addled, you know.’

  Lucy frowned. Lucretia had not seemed so confused to have lost her wits. Perhaps she’d not been herself after her brother was killed. Such a thing would hardly have been surprising. Could she not remember those moments of numbness and fury? Yes, she most certainly could. ‘Tell us. What did this woman look like?’

  ‘Noble born. White-blonde hair. Green eyes. Small build. Smaller than you,’ Pike said.

  They described Lucretia perfectly. Adam and Duncan looked to her for confirmation. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘That does sound like her.’

  ‘Seemed at first as if she was sculpted from an icicle. Until she saw the bloodstain on the floor. She lay right down on the floor and started screaming and weeping. Then the icicle was fully melted,’ Dev added.

  ‘She started writing to us, a few months after the Great Fire. At first we could not make any sense of the mes
sage, but then we realized it was in cipher – the same cipher that her brother had used to write messages to Ellie. I still had the key in my possession.’

  ‘Why did Hammett de Witte use a cipher to write messages to Ellie?’ Adam asked. ‘Was your sister’s mind great but untrained?’ He glanced at Lucy.

  Dev frowned. ‘I asked him the same thing, after the first time she came to me. Poor lass could not work out how to decipher the messages, even with the key. She hadn’t much ability with reading and writing as it was.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘He couldn’t fathom that anyone, even a merry light-hearted lass like our sister, wouldn’t be able to read such a thing!’

  ‘He had her on a pedestal, he said,’ Pike said, sounding scornful. ‘Said he could not bring himself to address her in an ordinary way.’

  ‘I ended up having to figure it out,’ Dev replied, anger rising in his voice. ‘The first time he sent her the message, I read it to her, but his words – all romantic gibberish – shamed her and made me angry. Suffice it to say, she did not have me read it again. I think the next time she asked Philip Emerson to read it for her, bringing the fate into motion.’

  Both men shook their heads. ‘The cad!’ Pike exclaimed. ‘My sister did not deserve such a fate. It’s those godforsaken, good-for-nothing scholars that are the leeches of our society. Living off others and contributing nothing. We were better off without them, and we are heart-sick that Ellie was taken in by their handsome countenance and fell for their nonsense.’

  ‘I will say that Mr de Witte was not one of the usual sorts we had to protect her from at the Two Doves,’ Dev said, a look of regret passing over his features. ‘I believe that his love for her was true. As true as anything can be between a man of means and a serving wench like her.’

  Adam’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Tell us about Miss de Witte’s messages. What did she write?’ Lucy asked hurriedly.

  ‘A few weeks ago, she wrote to us that she’d located the guard, which was the next best thing to finding Emerson,’ Dev replied. ‘She said she’d send him to meet us outside St Giles-in-the-Fields and that he’d be carrying a message from her. That she’d send along some spirits that would get him talking.’

  Lucy nodded. That explained the whiff of alcohol she’d smelled when she first encountered the corpse.

  ‘Sure enough, we were waiting there at first light and he came right up to us with his handcart full of goods and handed us the message, along with two bottles of wine,’ Pike explained. ‘He told us she’d paid him handsomely to make the journey, but that he hadn’t minded as it was part of his regular trading route.’

  ‘As soon as we deciphered it, we knew what to do,’ Pike added. ‘In her message, she told us to hang him with the ring around his neck.’

  ‘You went along with it,’ Adam said, his voice even. ‘Why did you agree to carry out her wishes – to murder a man?’

  ‘At first we didn’t want to,’ Pike said. ‘Then we remembered how he had given that murderer a chance to live when our dear sister was in the ground, never to live or love again.’ He wiped away a tear. ‘We thought it best to make it look like suicide. So we took him to the old hanging tree at the crossroads.’

  ‘How did you get Mr Corbyn to the crossroads?’ Duncan asked, pushing on.

  ‘We got him drinking. Miss de Witte had marked the bottle for him. It made him tired. We struck him over the head, hid his mercer’s goods, and rolled him there in the cart,’ Pike said. ‘The hardest part was getting him over the tree branch and pushing him off.’

  Dev sighed. He seemed to have given up reining in his brother.

  ‘Why did you place the ring around his neck?’ Lucy asked. This point was still puzzling her, especially since it was different from what the sender of the message had instructed.

  ‘The ring was cursed,’ Pike said. ‘Hammett had given that dreadful thing to our dear sister, and Emerson took it off her hand as she lay dying. We all wanted to be done with it.’

  ‘Yet you went back to rob him,’ Lucy said, her lip curling. ‘Why were you planning to take the ring back if it disgusted you so?’

  ‘Well, we thought we might as well make some money off him.’

  Ignoring him, Lucy softly recited the message from memory. ‘This is the man who set the Devil free. Make him lead us to the Devil.’

  Pike stared at her. ‘You know the message?’

  ‘Hang the ring from the Devil’s neck. Punish him for his deed. Send him to the gallows,’ Lucy continued in the same soft tone. ‘You fools. She wasn’t telling you to murder the guard. She wanted you to make the guard tell you where Philip Emerson was. It was Philip you were supposed to hang, not the guard.’ She took in the men’s shocked faces and continued. ‘Did the man you killed tell you where to find Mr Emerson?’

  Both men shook their heads vigorously.

  ‘Time to go,’ Duncan said, gesturing to Hank to seize Pike’s arm. He pulled some ropes from his bag and handed one to Hank. ‘Tie him up. Let’s get these men to the jail.’

  Lucy and Adam followed the men back to the carriage. Lucy still had questions. She turned to Dev. ‘It was you who came after to me in London, wasn’t it? You’re the one who threatened me!’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Dev replied. Pike shook his head as well.

  Confused, Lucy stepped back. If it had not been Pike or Dev, who else would have threatened her in such a manner?

  She watched as Duncan and Adam tied the men to the back of the cart so that they would not be able to make an escape on the journey back to London. They would be in jail before nightfall.

  Duncan came back over to speak to them. ‘After I lock them up for evening, I will need to speak with Miss de Witte about these accusations. To do this I will need an entry.’ Irritated, he looked up at Adam. ‘That means you. Men of your kind are always allowed in such places.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ Lucy said. ‘She might be willing to speak to me again.’ Straightening up, she added, ‘I can be of help here. Let us go together in the morning. Right now, we can stop back at Master Barnaby’s before we head back, to pick up some tracts that might entice Miss de Witte.’

  Adam and Duncan looked at each other with a sense of shared exasperation. ‘I don’t think there’s any stopping her,’ Duncan said, while Adam just watched her ruefully.

  ‘Are we really going to be able to prove that Miss de Witte helped those men murder Paul Corbyn?’ Lucy asked Adam as they settled into the carriage that Adam had acquired for the long drive back to London. She placed the full pack of books she’d procured at Master Barnaby’s on the seat beside her. ‘I can scarcely believe it myself.’

  Adam scratched his chin. ‘We will have to approach our quarry delicately, or we’ll frighten her away.’

  For a few minutes more they discussed what they had learned from Pike and Dev. Then Lucy pulled out the copy of the cipher and several of the messages that had passed between Miss de Witte and Professor Wallace. ‘It may be a good idea to understand her thinking,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should figure out the rest of these messages as well.’

  They spent the rest of the journey deciphering the remaining messages together. A few turned out to have been in Latin, which Adam studied in some detail as well. They all seemed to be flirtatious riddles, mostly consisting of Professor Wallace praising Miss de Witte, followed by Miss de Witte’s coy replies.

  ‘They had quite a flirtation,’ Lucy commented, after reading through them all. She tucked them back into her small embroidered pocket.

  ‘That seems to be the case,’ Adam agreed, sounding a bit disgusted. ‘He doesn’t seem to have thought too highly of his marriage vows.’

  ‘I can understand why Mrs Wallace felt wronged and why she insisted that her husband destroy their correspondence.’

  ‘Yes, I can understand that, too,’ Adam said. ‘Although it is good that she had a change of heart
and kept them from being destroyed. She told you it was out of duty to her husband’s work, but I wonder if she may also have pondered the professor’s admiration for the woman he seemed to favour.’

  ‘She said she never deciphered the messages, and I can see why.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’d have been able to do that myself,’ Adam commented. ‘If one is fair, one will see many good and admirable qualities. How could someone you love be in love with someone bad or lacking in virtuous traits?’ He looked out of the window. ‘Sometimes it is very easy indeed to see what draws someone you love to another.’

  For a moment they stayed silent. Then he spoke again. ‘I meant to tell you,’ he said, back to his regular conversational tone. ‘I received a letter from Sarah yesterday. In the excitement, I forgot to tell you about it. A Friend dropped it off. Said it had been passed to him in Bristol. It’s from a month ago, written just after I saw her.’

  ‘What did Sarah have to say? Does she fare well?’

  ‘I’ll let you read it,’ he said, pulling it from his pocket.

  Smoothing out the crumpled letter, Lucy struggled to read Sarah’s careless script. Though Lucy could read print quite well, sometimes handwritten letters still gave her pause. The ink had smeared in parts as well, making some of the missive nearly unintelligible.

  ‘My dearest Brother Adam,’ she murmured Sarah’s words out loud. ‘I give thee the most truest love from my heart and wish you blessed of mind and spirit.’ She smiled at the exhortations in the opening, which were typical of the Friends’ speech. She could still remember Sarah as a rather merry and silly girl, clamouring for ribbons from her brother and to be taken to the local fair. ‘Sometimes it’s still hard for me to believe she has become a Quakeress,’ she murmured.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Adam replied, watching her as she continued to read.

  She continued to whisper Sarah’s words softly to herself. ‘I did find it in my most tender conscience to protest some of the King’s most recent petitions as they had come to the New World. I know that it upset thee to see myself in the stocks, but thou should be pleased that my dearest heart’s content is being fulfilled.’ Lucy sighed. It always worried her to think about Sarah getting punished by authorities who did not appreciate the Friends’ expression of their Inner Light and conscience. ‘I do hope that thou hast given some thought to my words when I last saw thee. I hope too that thou will find thy way—’ Here she abruptly stopped reading out loud – to Lucy. Will all my love, thy sister Sarah.