The Outcasts of Time

by Ian Mortimer

  ‘It’s Kinner, not Turner,’ says another woman.

  ‘Deserves it,’ says another.

  I push forward, hearing more comments.

  ‘Should’ve known better than to swive with a girl against her will.’

  ‘You hang on to Jenny – don’t want her to be having nightmares.’

  ‘Kinner and Turner used to do it to Edith Gosling too. Took it in turns, they did: every night she had to put up with one of them. I used to comfort her afterwards sometimes. It was a blessing for her when she died.’

  ‘Vengeance is always worth it. Kinner had it coming. They all have it coming.’

  Then I hear a second man’s voice from the end of the room. ‘Stand back, for God’s sake, give him space. Let him breathe.’

  ‘Shit,’ says a woman, ‘he’s still alive.’

  ‘The worst of both worlds. She’ll hang and he’ll carry on soiling the next little pearl.’

  ‘Even if the bastard lives, I hope he pays for what he’s done. Scarred or something.’

  ‘Pay? They never do. Not his sort.’

  ‘Scars won’t make him any uglier.’

  I force my way past the last few women and see Mister Pethybridge crouching on the floor, tending a blood-covered body on a mattress. Mister Rogers is beside him, holding the lantern. There is a smear of blood in a quarter-circle on the wall above the bed, where blood-soaked fingers have clutched at the plaster in the act of falling. Mister Kinner is on his back, mouthing incomprehensibly, like a dying fish on land. Mister Pethybridge is holding a candle by his shoulder, trying to control the bleeding. The spindle is still embedded in Kinner’s neck.

  I think of the desperation of the woman who did this. Or the girl. I wonder if it was Rose.

  ‘Give me the light,’ I say in a loud voice.

  Mister Pethybridge looks up. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘You called me John Simonson when you admitted me this afternoon. But my name is John of Wrayment.’

  ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the dormitory?’

  ‘I have come to do a good deed,’ I reply.

  ‘Take this, hold it,’ says Mister Rogers to his companion. Then he rises to his feet, pulling his baton from his belt. ‘Get back to the men’s dormitory. Or you will regret it.’

  His silhouette looms before me and I back away slightly, feeling the women around me also retreating. ‘Give me back my ring, which Mister Kinner stole from me,’ I say, provoking Rogers to step further from the light. ‘He stole it when he was flogging me.’

  Mister Rogers readies his baton. But he cannot see me as well as I can see his silhouette. I let him come two more paces forward, into the dark. Although my right hand is weak it is easy for me to step forward and seize the baton with my left hand and twist it backwards out of his grasp. I kick his feet out from beneath him as he lunges to grab me, and fall on him. Pushing myself up, I bring the baton down on his head as hard as I can – once, twice. The third time I miss as he writhes on the floor, and I strike his shoulder.

  ‘Mister Rogers!’ shouts Pethybridge, who is now also on his feet, holding the lantern. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Stay there,’ I shout. ‘Listen, all of you in here. You all know the woman who did this only did it to protect her virtue. Mister Pethybridge and Mister Rogers know that too, in their hearts. But Mister Kinner is not yet dead. In return for lashing my back, in return for the theft of my brother’s ring from me, and in order that no girl or woman might suffer at his hands again, nor be unfairly judged guilty of the crime of killing him, I am going to finish him off now. If they want someone to hang for the death, they can hang me, John Simonson. So, if you’d help me in this, allow Mister Pethybridge and Mister Rogers to leave this dormitory now. Someone relieve Mister Pethybridge of his lantern.’

  ‘You are going to kill Mister Kinner in cold blood?’ shouts Mister Pethybridge. ‘The man is defenceless . . . It is sheer murder!’ But then I hear him shout, ‘Leave off me! Leave me!’ He is dragged to the door, his lantern knocked from his grasp and extinguished.

  Now there is just the light burning by Mister Kinner’s shoulder.

  I walk to the end of the room, the women making way for me. I bend down and look at the blood-soaked mattress and the dying man. His leg is trembling. I can hear his short breaths, his gasping for air. I notice his breeches are not properly up, only drawn up by one of his colleagues to cover his modesty. I see the spindle in his bloodied throat. He raises a hand but I grab it and push it down. With his other hand, however, he makes a sudden lunge for the candle. I go to stop his hand and he knocks the candle over, plunging us into darkness.

  ‘Mister Kinner, you told me those extra ten lashes were for nothing – in case I should “try something”, as you put it. Now, this is what I am going to “try” to do. I am going to try to send you to Hell.’ I feel his face, and put my finger on the bridge of his nose. He moves his head from side to side. There is a gasping and a gurgling of blood in his throat. I move my fingers across to an eye socket. He continues to move his head but he knows there is no hope. I withdraw the spindle from his throat with my painful right hand and place the point there, in the corner of his eye, and push it into his skull, as far as it will go. His head stops moving. I withdraw it and plunge it in again, at the other corner. His body goes limp beneath me.

  Cutting the throats of French soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield was much harder.

  I feel for his hand: he is not wearing William’s ring. I search his clothes and find it in a small pocket inside his overtunic. I replace it on the ring finger of my wounded right hand, and get to my feet.

  Three lights are burning beside the door. They are waiting for me.

  I take up the baton in my left hand and walk slowly in that direction. In the near-darkness I am once more engulfed in the mass of women. But then someone stands in my path and does not move aside. In the silhouette of the flames I see the shape of her head. She embraces me. I cannot see her face, for the candles are too far away. But the smell of her is familiar. I know it is Rose. When I try to move past her, she holds me more firmly. Without a word, she kisses me on the cheek, and continues to hold me. She lingers there for a long moment. And then hands silently draw her away from me.

  I see the men’s faces in the candlelight: Mister Pethybridge, Mister Rogers and the unpleasant-looking man whose name I do not know.

  ‘Well? Have you carried out your cowardly threat?’

  ‘He deserved to die. This house was built to take care of the poor, and orphaned children, not to ruin them.’

  ‘Give me that baton,’ Mister Pethybridge replies.

  ‘Let him go,’ shouts a woman behind me.

  ‘Let him make a run for it.’

  ‘Kinner had it coming to him.’

  Mister Pethybridge shouts with fury in his voice, ‘Give me that baton, damn you!’

  ‘Hit them with it, the bastards!’

  I stand still. ‘I’ll not give it to you. I am sure you will beat me if I am defenceless.’

  ‘Oh, you are going to be beaten, make no mistake.’

  ‘You might outnumber me,’ I say calmly, ‘but in the dark, I’ll cause all three of you to regret lifting a finger against me. I’ve nothing to lose.’

  ‘Very well,’ replies Mister Pethybridge. ‘Have it your way. Mister Rogers, Mister Fley, we are going to take this man down to the lock-up. We will deal afterwards with the late Mister Kinner.’ Turning to the women, he says, ‘All of you, stay in the dormitory. Anyone who leaves will be flogged a hundred times. We will be back to remove Mister Kinner later.’

  I am marched along the corridor, down the stairs and along another corridor. Suddenly I feel something whip across my back and a heavy blow on my head. The next moment I am on the ground. Their violence is severe – all the more so as they are hitting me out of guilt. I try to strike at their lights, so they cannot aim at me. But I cannot get off the floor, and have to endure the onslaught. Curled up, with my r
ight arm protecting my head, and my back in so much pain, I hit blindly with the baton in my left hand. Only when I finally connect with a man’s kneecap, and there is a yell of pain, do the other two make a last concerted effort to kick me in the chest and head. They force the baton from my grip and drag me down some stone steps into a dark cellar. There they leave me.

  Breathing heavily, chilled to the bone, I turn so I am on my knees, bent over, with my forehead on the stone floor. I take stock of my pains. My back is burning, my right hand stinging, my head ringing. I am covered in blood – both my own and Mister Kinner’s.

  The sound of my panting is loud. But gradually it calms down, and returns to normal.

  There is someone else in here, breathing too.

  ‘Who is there?’

  There is a long pause before I hear the voice that sounds like my own. It sings.

  Ei! Alas!

  This night is long.

  And I, most unjustly wronged,

  sorrow and mourn fast.

  ‘Never has that song sounded so bitter,’ I reply.

  ‘You killed a man, John. Now the gates of Heaven are swinging in the breeze, as if the locks were broken, the hinges creaking. Fire has burned through the halls of your Lord, and all is a desolate waste.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You broke the Commandment. Again. Your place in Heaven is wasted by the vengeance of the Devil.’

  ‘You are the Devil.’

  ‘I am your conscience, John.’

  ‘Then are you on your knees also?’

  ‘You know I am, as I know you are. You put me here.’

  ‘It was no worse than what we did on the battlefields in France.’

  ‘You did not kill that man in the name of your king or the Lord but on your own behalf.’

  ‘I did it for the girl, Rose. Do you suppose it was an idle indulgence?’

  ‘Nothing was supposed. You were trying to do a good act.’

  ‘Yes, I was. And that was one.’

  ‘You do not know what a good act is.’

  I think of George Beddoes, who killed Richard Townsend out on the moor that cold night. Was that killing as justified as mine?

  ‘You think of morality as something certain,’ continues the voice. ‘Even now you think of it as a rock on which you can rest your arm and say, “What I have done is good.” But, in truth, morality is like a long ribbon trailed along in the breeze by a happy child. It floats up and down; it flickers and twists. You may take aim. Your deeds might or might not hit the difficult mark. Only of this can you be certain: morality is not something you can own.’

  Over the course of this day I have seen all the seven deadly sins displayed. There was the pride of the haughty man with the long walking stick in Cowick Street; the gluttony of those at the Bear Inn, particularly the man dining with the wenches; the sloth of those idling their time away drinking; the greed of the gamblers; the envy and the lust of Michael Kinner and, finally, the wrath of whoever tried to kill him, whether it was Rose or someone else. And then there was my own wrath. I too am as guilty as the rest.

  ‘It is the city that makes us sinful,’ I say. ‘Too many people. Does that not lessen our guilt?’

  ‘It is easy for a hermit in the wilderness to think of himself as a good man. For there is no one there to challenge his declaration that all his works are good. But in the city, the judgement of a man’s soul lies with others. If your fellow citizens damn you, then you are damned indeed.’

  ‘The will of the folk is the will of God,’ I say, remembering Mister Perkins.

  ‘That is the great illusion.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You will see.’

  Chapter Seven

  As I wake there is a bell ringing. It sounds as if a boy is running along the corridors upstairs wakening the institution. He calls out something every so often and then runs on, the slowing clapper telling me that the bell is heavy in his hands. He fits into the routine of this world like I do not. For this must now be the seventeenth of December in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-three. I am even further from home. And even further from Heaven.

  I hear many footsteps, thundering on the stairs and scurrying along passageways. I feel a piece of smooth round wood, which I realise is the baton from last night, ninety-nine years ago. What other things do I have? Apart from William’s ring, and Mister Parlebone’s old breeches, my boots are my only possessions.

  I could remain here, in this cellar, safely for my last two days. Yet I know I will not. I have a curiosity that will not be satisfied by hiding in the shadows. I suspect that it is an instinct we all share – to know where and how we will die. Will death find me curled up on the side of a road, freezing? Or will a musket ball flying through the air lodge in my heart? Or will the demon of the plague that I know lurks within me reach up with its gnarled black hands from the pit of my stomach and push its fingers through my throat, clawing at my mind and the backs of my eyeballs, and force me into a frenzy?

  I wonder what time I will die tomorrow. Will it be at night, or as the dusk comes on at five? Or in the morning? Every day of my life I have breathed easily through the hour of my death and never given it a second thought. And yet, quite soon, that time of day will be the moment of my very last thought.

  I wonder what happened to Rose? Did she grow up? Did she leave the workhouse? Did she ever know the joy of love? If she did, was it because of me? I do not know if I stand to be credited with even that much goodness.

  I pick myself up off the floor, and feel for the door. I touch what seems to be a handle and turn it. It is not locked.

  I walk slowly up the stone stairs and into the grey light of the morning, like some ghost of a shipwreck victim returning to haunt the mariners who survived. No one sees me until I step into the main entrance hall of the building, where there are two wardens talking and a third taking delivery of a wooden crate. They are all taller than me – as tall as William was. They do not have grey curly wigs but are wearing tall black hats. Their grey breeches are long, their black overtunics cut away above their waists. Their expressions are of astonishment as they see me come from within the workhouse, baton in hand, half-naked, in my old knee-length brown breeches, covered in blood, bruises, cuts and lashes, with a length of stubble now that could be fairly called a beard and my hair as wild as a furze bush.

  ‘Who the devil is that?’ says one.

  ‘No one I know,’ says another.

  ‘You!’ shouts the first man. ‘Whence in God’s name have you come?’

  I stare at them. ‘Forget you saw me. I was never here.’

  ‘He isn’t one of ours,’ says the third man.

  The lashes on my back still hurt. So do the bruises from last night. I leave the building and walk into the bright light of the morning. No one follows me.

  The immediate approach to the workhouse is much as it was, and so are the adjoining fields, but everything else has changed. The cows are much larger than those I saw in the High Street, ninety-nine years ago. There are rows of houses of brick around the centre of town. The last spire on the cathedral has disappeared. Clouds of black smoke are billowing up from an immense chimney above a building on the south side of town. There are many people on the roads: some in black two-wheeled carriages drawn by a single horse; others in carriages with four wheels; others riding horses. People are walking strangely coloured small dogs, which they have tethered on short ropes. Rich-looking women are strolling side by side, their coats covering their dresses and their hair trimmed with intricately woven thin tracery. The menfolk have elaborate beards and moustaches. They swing silver-topped sticks as they stride along or lean forward in their carriages to give directions to their drivers. And all of these people are tall. I, who used to think of myself as being of normal height for a man, now see women who are taller than me. Only a few people are shorter, and they all seem to be poor or children. A woman with an old cap on her head and a heavy basket on her ba
ck stares at the muddy gravel of the road, bent double as she hauls her load into Exeter. Also shorter than me is the water carrier, with a bright-red undertunic, a grey overgarment and a straw hat, puffing on one of those long smoking tubes as he forces his emaciated nag forward, hauling his cart and its heavy barrel up the hill.

  Everywhere I look, I see something has changed. On the ground are iron bars sealing the light wells to underground cellars. Large flagstones now line the streets, so men and women are raised above the dung-smitten dust. Even the road is cleaner than it was. You cannot imagine a herd of cattle being auctioned in the High Street now: there are too many carts and carriages. The gates to the city have disappeared. Narrow, brick-fronted traders’ houses seem ubiquitous, with tall windows at ground-floor level, each one filled with many rectangular panes of glass. Inside they show what they have for sale, in packets and boxes with writing on them. The more I look, the more I see words all around me. The shops have scripts above their doors, and there is writing on the doors of some of the carriages and on the clock faces that project out into the street above large buildings or on church towers. Some buildings have large words painted across them.

  There is a greyness to the air and the acrid smell of something like charcoal burning. The smell is horrible, as if the whole city were a blacksmith’s forge. It is as undesirable as the bowls of congealing blood that barber surgeons used to put outside their shops to advertise their services back in my day.

  If the look and the smell of the city do not make me feel at home, the expressions of the people are even less inviting. I see curled lips, turned heads and expressions of shock at my appearance. If I draw near to someone, he or she walks quickly away. Children playing in the street stop their games and stare as I walk past. These people are not my folk; they are strangers from a world of words and metal. Iron-framed signs hang down from metal hangers. Every house has iron pipes leading down from its iron guttering. There are iron railings in front of many buildings, lamps and lanterns in the streets, and metal scrapers for people to clean their feet set into walls. I come across two bridges made purely out of iron – in particular, one very large one at the bottom of North Street, where the North Gate once stood.