The Last Days of Newgate pm-1

by Andrew Pepper

  Pyke’s search for Davy Magennis had led him to Ireland — he had been reliably informed that Magennis had long since fled London — but in Belfast he felt both anonymous and hopelessly visible. He sensed acutely the fact of being a stranger in a town where people seemed to be warily accustomed to each others’ faces. The previous day, Pyke had gone out with the intention of asking for Davy Magennis in the public houses and terraces of Brown’s Square, but had soon realised the futility and, indeed, the danger of such a mission. It was not that the pubs were any more menacing than those in St Giles in London, or that the district was any poorer, though it probably was. It was simply that, in Belfast, his reputation counted for nothing, and when he had walked into one particular pub, the Boot and Crown on the north side of Smithfield Square, the hostile silence he had provoked and the collection of brickbats, swords and knives hanging up on the wall behind the counter had convinced him of the need for a subtler approach.

  On his first morning in the town, Pyke was approached by a scruffy adolescent. ‘How’ye,’ the lad said, nervously pushing past the dog. ‘You here for the celebrations, mister?’

  The dog growled and bared its teeth. The lad retreated a little.

  ‘The celebrations?’ Pyke said, uncomprehendingly, even though he had been asked the same question by others.

  ‘You know, the parades.’

  Pyke stared at him blankly. ‘What parades?’

  ‘To celebrate King Billy’s victory.’ The lad sounded breathless with excitement. ‘You know, over the papists at the Boyne.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the Dutchman’s victory over the French king a hundred and fifty years ago?’

  ‘Eh?’ the lad said, stepping warily round the dog this time. ‘There’s gonna be a show of strength this year, so there is, whatever the lodge masters reckon. Ordinary Orange folk want to show nothing’s changed, despite the Catholics gettin’ emaciated.’

  Pyke smiled, pushing the dog gently towards the lad. ‘Aren’t they eating enough, then?’

  ‘Eh?’ The lad seemed both confused by Pyke and intimidated by the small dog.

  To its credit, the dog seemed to know what was expected of it and nipped at the boy’s leg. The boy swore and said, ‘Would ye away,’ to the dog. The dog bit him harder, causing him to yowl with pain and fall to the ground clutching his ankle. Pyke heard himself say inadvertently, ‘Good dog.’ It wagged its runty tail even harder.

  Pyke had been told that Belfast was a tidy, orderly town comprising stout, red-bricked edifices and broad, straight streets: a clean-living, industrious place, someone had said to him on the steamship, an Ulster-Liverpool, eminently preferable to Dublin’s effete grandeur. Another man had commented on its enviable setting: a pleasant location at the mouth of a beautiful bay ringed by soaring gorse-clad mountains. What Pyke had discovered, however, was a squalid, industrial town spoiled by unedifying warehouses and monstrous cotton and linen mills — gargantuan structures that policed the town’s skyline and belched plumes of black smoke through giant chimneys into overcast skies.

  As in most industrial towns eager to show off their new-found wealth, there were a few buildings, such as the White Linen Hall on Donegall Square, which were palatable enough. There was also a smattering of attractively attired people going about their daily business. But on the whole, Pyke quickly concluded, Belfast was a drab town, inhabited by unattractive creatures, made even worse by the fact that it had been built on a bog. Accordingly, sanitation was non-existent, and at high tide the seawater rose up into the town’s sewers and overflowed into the streets, turning them into noxious rivers of waste.

  London faced similar problems, of course. But London had other attractions that tempered the bleakness. Here, everything seemed different, more depressing. For one thing, it was a fervently religious town; there were more meeting houses and churches than there were public houses. For another, the guttural accents, as much Scottish as Irish, reminded Pyke that, despite the Act of Union, he was in a foreign country. The green-clad mountains that ringed the town compounded this sense of difference, and while some may have regarded them with approval, Pyke found them oppressive.

  From his less than desirable lodgings, it took him only five minutes to walk to the newly constructed mill on York Street. Pyke did not have to ask for directions. All he had to do was look upwards: it was possible to see the giant, six-floor edifice from most parts of the town. From the end of the street, the mill towered above the neighbouring houses, a sheer wall of red brick soaring vertically into the gloomy sky. There was something forbidding, even monstrous, about the building. Its giant chimney stack, its depressingly uniform symmetry and its long, angular windows reminded him of a prison. This impression was augmented both by the number of cripples in the immediate vicinity of the building — mostly women whose hands and feet had been deformed by operating the new machinery — and by his first impressions of the cavernous interior. Pyke wandered through the vast chamber and inspected the hundreds of thousands of whirring wheels, all connected to a giant steam engine, and feeding an army of individual machines. Slumped over each of these was a legion of women and children, some as young as ten, red-faced and blotchy from the stifling humidity. Their dull stares told of the deadening nature of the work.

  Eventually Pyke found his way to the main office, where the mill owner, John Arnold, was waiting for him. Pyke had arranged the meeting by correspondence, prior to his departure from Liverpool. In his introductory letter, he had claimed to be the son of a Lancastrian mill owner who was to embark on a fact-finding tour of linen and cotton mills in Ulster and who was particularly interested in those mills that had recently been adapted to the wet-spinning of flax.

  Arnold was a younger man than Pyke had been expecting, no more than forty years of age. He cut an ungainly figure, with large jug-like ears and a thick wall of black hair which had been cut into the shape of a pudding bowl. On first impression, he seemed like the kind of man who had once been bullied, but then Pyke noticed his cold, symmetrical face, his wax-like skin and his studied gaze, and understood that this was a man who was comfortable with violence. Pyke took against him immediately and reluctantly consented to a tour of the factory during which Arnold wasted no opportunity to laud his own achievements and business acumen.

  Throughout this drawn-out introduction to the intricacies of wet-spinning flax, Pyke had thought about getting straight to the point and asking Arnold whether he knew where Davy Magennis was hiding, but he managed to bite his tongue and limit himself to an apparently innocuous question about the employment of Roman Catholics in the mill.

  For a moment, it was as though he had unbuttoned his fly and urinated on the floor. Arnold’s stare suggested incomprehension as well as revulsion.

  ‘Are you a card player, Mr Hawkes?’ This was the name Pyke had given himself.

  Pyke shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps we could continue this conversation later, in more. . relaxed surroundings.’ Arnold grinned, as though pleased with something he had said. ‘There’s a card game, takes place tomorrow night in a gentleman’s club called the Royal on the south side of Smithfield.’ He was about to dismiss Pyke but instead focused on his unprepossessing attire and started to frown. ‘It’s just a silly wee game, nothing fancy, you’ll understand, but, if I were you, I’d think about wearing an outfit that better suited your rank and station.’

  Without another word, he left Pyke to ponder the implications of his parting remark.

  Entering his room, Pyke was greeted by the sight of a young woman standing over the bedside table, carefully inspecting his gold fob-watch. More surprising, for Pyke, was the fact that she displayed no embarrassment at being caught. When she finally turned to acknowledge him, still holding the fob-watch, he saw that she was quite attractive: mid-twenties, with a firm, almost plump figure, thick coal-black hair that flowed down her back practically as far as her waist, and the clearest blue eyes he had ever seen. She wore a simple white cotton dress and plain black shoes.r />
  ‘Lookit,’ she said, holding up the watch. ‘Make no mistake, mister, you’ve been cheated.’ Her accent was softer than many he had heard, but it still had a vaguely unappealing twang.

  ‘And you were going to do me the favour of taking the watch away, I suppose?’

  ‘Why in the Lord’s name would I want a cheap old watch?’ She studied him warily for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, what are ye doing with a cheap old watch?’

  ‘Maybe I like cheap old watches,’ he said, amused now it was clear she wasn’t a threat.

  ‘What? Ye just playin’ at bein’ rich?’ She paused for a moment and looked him over. ‘That could be it, because ye don’t look too comfortable in your new clothes. And if ye were rich, ye wouldn’t be stayin’ in a boggin’ room like this.’ She looked around the room, shaking her head.

  ‘How do you know they’re new?’ He’d purchased shirt and jacket from a gentlemen’s outfitters on Castle Place.

  She shrugged, as though the answer was obvious. ‘Why else would ye be scratchin’ yourself under the collar like you got the fleas?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Cleaning the room, what does it look like?’ She raised her eyebrows and then nodded, as though coming to some kind of realisation. ‘I was thinkin’ ye travelled awful light for a gentl’man. No clothes to speak of, no servants. Still, ye hide your money well. Friend of mine, works in the new bank in Castle Place, happened to mention a fellow fitting your description changed up twenty pound the other day.’

  ‘Maybe I should go to the bank right now and have it out with your friend,’ Pyke said, still sizing her up.

  ‘And what would ye want to go and do a thing like that for? Getting poor hard-working folk into trouble,’ she said, finally putting the watch back on the dresser. ‘Now, back to what I was sayin’. Your money’s not in the room which means you’re carrying it around with ye.’ She smiled, disarmingly. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘If you were, would I tell you?’

  ‘Walkin’ the streets with a whole pile of money? Tell me one gentl’man who’d be stupid enough to do that.’ She laughed at her own joke. ‘Then again, tell me one gentl’man who’d willingly stay in a dump like this.’ Then she was offering him her hand. ‘Name’s Megan, nice to make your acquaintance.’

  Pyke took it, surprised at the firmness of her shake, and said, ‘Francis Hawkes.’

  ‘So what brings ye to our fair town, Mr Hawkes? And don’t be tellin’ me you’re here to see the marchin’.’

  ‘I take it you don’t approve,’ he said, pointing at the red ribbon she wore on her cuff.

  ‘Ye mean this?’ She motioned at the ribbon and laughed.

  ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘You heard of this fella Pastorini?’ Pyke shook his head. Megan went on, ‘Ribbonmen reckoned your man’s prophesies said the Protestant faith would be destroyed under orders of the Lord Almighty on the twenty-first of November 1825.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It rained.’

  Pyke smiled. ‘Is that why you wear the ribbon?’

  Megan shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m hopin’ he just messed up the date.’

  ‘Meanwhile it’s still raining,’ he said, brushing water from his coat.

  ‘So you’re not here for the marchin’,’ she said, cocking her head flirtatiously to one side.

  Instinctively he decided to jettison part of his cover. ‘To everyone else, I’m the eldest son of Robert Hawkes, owner of the Hawkes cotton mill in Lancashire.’

  She seemed amused by this. ‘And to me?’

  ‘I’m just someone looking for a way to meet John Arnold.’

  ‘Why didn’t ye say that sooner?’ she said, shaking her head mischievously.

  This time, Pyke scrutinised her face carefully for signs of lying. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Of him.’ She shrugged, as though it wasn’t important. ‘I worked for a while in the big house in Ballynafeigh, the family’s grand new residence. I never cared for the place myself, ugly-looking building, pretendin’ to be something it ain’t. All its pretensions, mind, it didn’t have running water, so it were my job to fetch and carry water from a well. It’s how I came to get these manly-looking arms.’ She flexed her muscles, only half joking, for him to see.

  ‘Tell me about Arnold,’ Pyke said, becoming impatient.

  ‘What’s to tell?’

  ‘Well, for a start, what do you know about him?’

  Megan held his gaze for a while. ‘Well, there are these meetings in front of the Custom House. Every Sunday, after church, folk head there, like they’re the best thing to happen in the whole week. Not the likes of me, you’ll understand, but other folk. Protestant folk. Gather there dressed in their Sunday best and watch with gleaming eyes as men less respectable than Cooke scalp and burn effigies of the Pope. Arnold, in particular, likes to put on a performance.’

  ‘A rabble-rouser and a businessman.’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘As the latter, he seems canny enough.’

  Megan looked away. ‘Aye, he’s a canny one, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Not to be underestimated?’

  ‘What’s your real business with him, Mr Hawkes?’ This time her expression seemed graver.

  ‘He’s invited me to a card game tomorrow night.’

  Megan nodded, as though she was aware of such an event. ‘Aye, at the Royal.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Ye turn up lookin’ like that, they’ll eat you alive.’

  Pyke assimilated this new information without giving anything away.

  ‘Arnold is a fella who started out life with next to nothing. He likes to surround himself with tough labourin’ types, to remind everyone else where he’s come from, he’s no pushover. He likes to hurt folk, too, or likes to watch as other folk do the hurtin’. There are those in the Royal who might take against a well-dressed Englishman.’ Megan shrugged. ‘Unless he’s a friend a’ ye, I’d say that Arnold is maybe countin’ on that fact.’

  Pyke took out his wallet and removed a five-pound note. ‘You want to earn some money?’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ she said, grinning.

  ‘From what you’ve just told me, I’ll need a pistol.’ He already had a knife but it might not be sufficient.

  ‘A pistol.’ Her expression became serious. ‘What ye plannin’ to do?’

  ‘It’s for my own protection.’

  ‘But ye know how to use one, I’d wager.’ She came a little closer, and looked up at him, playfully holding his stare.

  ‘I’d know which way to point it.’

  She cocked her head to one side. ‘How would the son of a mill owner know that?’

  ‘Shooting workers who step out of line.’

  That drew a giggle. ‘An’ what would ye do with me, if I were to step out of line?’ She was now close enough so that he could smell the tobacco on her clothes.

  He started to sigh. ‘I just need a gun, Megan.’

  ‘So?’ She made no attempt to move away. ‘What about what I might need?’

  FIFTEEN

  Outside smelled of rotting carcasses from the nearby tannery. Inside smelt of stale tobacco and turf. Pyke did not necessarily think the latter smell was any better than the former, but he was glad to get in from the driving rain.

  As soon as he stepped into the taproom, Pyke became aware of the rancorous stares of those men — for they were, as he later realised, all men — who sat on wooden benches attached to the wall, clutching pots of black stout. To a man, they stopped whatever they had been doing and looked at him, silently assessing the threat that he posed. In the middle of the room, a man who had been playing the fiddle turned his instrument around and pointed it at Pyke’s head, as though it were a rifle. His teeth were bloody at their roots. Pyke reached into his coat pocket and ran the tip of his index finger across the sharp point of his knife. On the far wall, the wooden handles of an axe and a machete had been decoratively arranged to form a makeshift cross. Next to it was a lu
rid painting of King Billy riding a white horse.

  The absence of women, and the resultant lack of sexual tension, made the violence even more palpable.

  When he asked about the card game, there was no response. He repeated the question. Finally someone said, ‘Who wants ’a know?’ Before he could answer, another voice had said, ‘Where ye from, mister?’ Pyke told him Manchester. The same voice said, ‘That’s England, right?’ A ripple of noise spread throughout the room.

  Standing in the doorway, Pyke was approached by a young man who looked as if his face had been mauled by a savage dog. He swayed slightly from side to side, as though drunk. Up close, his face was a thatch of coarse skin and scar tissue. Without much conviction, he took a lazy swing at Pyke’s chin and missed it by a good six inches, by which time Pyke had spun him around, twisted his arm, and was pressing the sharpened blade of his knife into the man’s neck. Calmly, he repeated his question about the card game and added that he had been invited by John Arnold. At once, an older man said, ‘You mighta said that earlier, steada stannin’ there with a face on ye.’

  In the far doorway, Arnold appeared and carefully surveyed the scene. Pyke released the young man from his grip. For some reason, Arnold seemed disappointed. ‘I see you’ve met the welcoming party,’ he said, without any warmth.

  Pyke pocketed his knife. Arnold met him in the centre of the room and held out his hand. Pyke made to shake it but Arnold withdrew it slightly and said, ‘The knife, if you don’t mind.’ Realising that he didn’t have any option, Pyke gave up the knife. Arnold smiled. ‘You come well armed for a businessman.’ Without hesitating, he whipped his arm down and sent the knife cartwheeling through the air until it lodged in the frame of the door, narrowly missing the head of a nonplussed drinker. The sound reverberated around the otherwise silent room. Arnold motioned for someone to search Pyke for further weapons, ‘just as a precaution’. Pyke acquiesced, if only because he had already lost his knife and Megan had not returned to the inn with the pistol he had requested. Stripped of his knife, he felt even more vulnerable. Arnold, though, seemed oblivious to his unease. Already out of the room, he said, ‘You’ll have to excuse our manners. I’m afraid we started without you.’