The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins

by Antonia Hodgson

Eliot squeezed himself into his coat, flexing his arms with a look of surprise, as if it had shrunk since he took it off. ‘I doubt Mr Gay will be welcome in court from now on. But I suppose that was the point. The play is his revenge upon them all.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Eliot made it his business to read every newspaper and broadsheet he could lay his hands upon, and always knew the gossip around the court. ‘How so?’

  He plucked his hat from its hook on the wall. ‘Gay is a great friend of Henrietta Howard. He was sure she’d secure a nice plump position for him at court one day – planned his future on it. Then old frog eyes was crowned king and it transpired that Mrs Howard had no influence over him whatsoever. It’s the queen he listens to and no one else. Who would have guessed it? A man taking advice from his wife.’ He winked at Kitty. ‘Most unnatural.’

  I smiled but stayed quiet, thinking of the terrified woman I had met so briefly tonight. I was not surprised she’d failed to help John Gay: she couldn’t even save herself. Had she promised something similar to the man who had attacked her tonight? Some preferment that had failed to appear? Ach, and what did it matter? I would never see her again.

  ‘Mackheath should have hanged,’ Sam said.

  ‘Hanged?’ Eliot was outraged. ‘He’s the hero!’

  ‘He’s a highwayman,’ Kitty corrected him, plucking his hat from his head and setting it upon hers at a jaunty angle.

  ‘You can’t kill the hero, not in a comedy,’ Eliot persisted, reaching for his hat. Kitty swirled away from him, laughing. ‘The audience would riot.’

  Sam disagreed. ‘Seen fifty or more Mackheaths turned off at Tyburn. The audience cheers.’

  Later, Kitty and I lay in bed, drowsing under thick blankets as the fire dwindled to ash. I rested my head against her heart, listening to its soft beat as she ran her hand over my scalp, bristles rasping beneath her fingers.

  ‘I must visit the barber,’ I said.

  She traced a finger down my bruised jaw. ‘Leave it to grow a little. I like it when it turns soft. It feels like moleskin.’

  I chuckled and reached for her hand.

  ‘Tom,’ she said, after a while. ‘Could I have lost you tonight?’

  I thought of the man’s fingers tearing at my throat. The heavy thud of horses’ hooves. The desperation and terror in Henrietta’s eyes. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I couldn’t live without you,’ she said, very quiet.

  I laughed. ‘You could live very well without me. Think of the money you’d save.’

  She sighed and said nothing. The room was dark, and silent, but I could feel her disappointment in the air all around me, settling upon me like a dank mist.

  There was a loud thud against the wall behind us. We both started in alarm.

  Thud. Again, louder this time, something slamming hard on the other side of the wall.

  ‘What is that?’ Kitty whispered, crawling closer to the wall to listen.

  I fumbled for my tinderbox, sparked a light. As I lit the candle, a woman cried out.

  ‘Ahh! Ahh, God. Yes!’

  Kitty clapped a hand to her mouth. Started to giggle.

  The bed thumped again, and the woman yelped.

  I stared at the wall in astonishment. Next door was Joseph Burden’s house. People didn’t fuck one another in Joseph Burden’s house. We exchanged excited looks. ‘Who is it, do you suppose?’

  Kitty put an ear to the wall. ‘Alice? Alice and Ned?’

  ‘No. Their rooms will be up in the attic.’

  She listened closer, frowning in concentration. ‘It can’t be Judith. I suppose it must be Alice.’

  ‘With Stephen?’

  There was a long, shuddering moan, then silence. Kitty pulled a face. ‘Ugh. That wasn’t Burden, was it?’

  We threw up our hands in horror at the idea – then sniggered like children. Joseph Burden, proud member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, was fucking his housekeeper. Well, well.

  ‘Oh! Your gift!’ Kitty said, then reached under the bed and lifted out a handsome wooden box. She slid it towards me, a little nervous.

  I put the box on my lap and rested the lid on its hinge. Inside lay a dozen packages, narrow and flat. I took one out and opened it up, conscious of Kitty watching for my reaction. Nestling in the envelope was a long, translucent sheath folded in two and tied loosely with a thin piece of ribbon. A condom.

  ‘I ordered them from France, for the shop. They’re made from sheep’s intestines.’

  How arousing. ‘Yes. I’ve er . . . I’ve used them before.’

  She slipped her hand in mine. ‘So . . . we don’t have to wait, any more.’

  Her face gleamed in the candlelight. So young, so pretty. This was her gift to me, then. The last of her innocence. I brushed her hair from her face. She smiled, nervous, and looked deep in my eyes.

  Tell her. Tell her why you’ve waited this long. Tell her that you want to marry her first and take care of her. That you want it to be different from all the other times. Tell her that you’re afraid if you don’t wait, she will never have cause to marry you.

  Tell her that you love her, damn it.

  I opened my mouth . . . and the words died in my throat. ‘I’m . . . I’m rather tired tonight, Kitty. After all that’s happened . . .’ And it was true, save for my lie of omission.

  Her eyes softened with concern. ‘Oh. Of course,’ she agreed, embarrassed, shutting up the box at once and slipping it beneath the bed. She touched her lips to my cheek. ‘Of course.’

  I blew out the candle and we lay in silence in the dark.

  Part Two

  On now – the procession carries them to the narrow stone bridge and the Fleet ditch. He smells it long before he sees it: a stinking slurry of shit and offal. Not so much a river as a running sore, oozing its way down to the Thames. Thank God it is a cold, sharp day in March, not the dense heat of summer. The wind whisks the stench away down south towards Blackfriars. Hawkins closes his eyes, his body swaying as the cart turns on to Holborn Hill.

  ‘Murderer!’

  An old woman’s voice pierces the air. His eyes snap open. She screams it again and he sees her, a stranger in the swirling crowds, her face twisted with hatred. Others take up the call, shouting curses down upon him.

  ‘Monster!’

  ‘Burn in Hell!’

  How they hate him. Not just for the life they think he took, but for the life he squandered. A young gentleman, given every opportunity. Money, good health, an education – all wasted.

  A gang of apprentices leans out of a tavern window, waiting for the cart to pass below them. As it does, they throw a hail of stones at him, laughing at the sport. They are drunk and most of their shots sail wide, but one catches him hard. Blood spurts from his temple. He shields his head with his hands, half-stunned.

  A lean, black-clad figure clambers on to the open end of the cart and crawls towards him. The Reverend James Guthrie, the Newgate Ordinary. He holds out a handkerchief. ‘They would hate you less if you confessed.’

  Hawkins presses the handkerchief to the wound and leans back, staring up into the cold, white sky.

  ‘I’m innocent, Mr Guthrie.’

  ‘Mr Hawkins . . .’ Guthrie begins, then thinks better of it. He cannot help a man who will not help himself. He jumps down from the cart. ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ he says loudly, as he strides away. Playing to the crowd.

  By the time they reach the edge of St Giles, the bleeding has stopped. St Giles. Drowning in vice, soaking in gin. Shake a house in St Giles and more thieves, whores, and murderers will tumble out than you’ll find in the whole of Newgate Prison. It’s a fitting place for one last drink. The horses stop outside the Crown tavern without a prompt from their riders. They have taken this road many times before.

  The guards help him down from the cart. It is so cold he can see his breath, escaping in clouds from his lips. Someone passes him a cup of mulled wine, pats him on the shoulder. He curls his fingers around the cup, gr
ateful for the warmth. The dark-red wine looks almost like blood, steaming in the freezing air.

  The crowds are friendlier here. They shout encouragements and promise to pray for him. They are the lowest of men and the lewdest of women: cutpurses, highwaymen, fraudsters and cheats, only a step from the noose themselves. For the first time in his life he wishes he could linger here, but he has barely finished his wine when he is ordered back on the wagon. As the Crown fades into the distance a thought comes into his mind, hard and certain as prophecy. That was the last time my feet will ever touch the earth.

  And now he feels it – the horror that he has fought off for so long. It knocks him reeling, harder than any stone hurled from the crowd.

  He is about to die.

  No. No! They promised. He will live.

  He is a coin, spinning on its edge. Heads or tails. Life or death.

  Chapter Six

  It was almost a week before I was ready to step into the world again. My jaw was so black and swollen for the first few days that I could only eat light broths and syllabubs. The gouges in my neck worried Kitty so much she insisted on washing them in hot wine twice a day.

  ‘I’ll stink like a tavern floor,’ I complained, flinching as the wine invaded the cuts.

  ‘Clean wounds mend faster,’ she said, dabbing a home-made salve over my throat. Kitty’s father Nathaniel had been a renowned physician – and a close friend of Samuel Fleet. When she first moved in to the Cocked Pistol, Kitty had found a cache of his books and journals locked in a chest in the cellar. She would read them avidly when the shop was quiet, or late at night, squinting by the light of the fire.

  One morning, a few days after the attack, I was lying in bed when there was a soft tap on the door. I had just propped myself on my pillow when Jenny slipped into the room. She stayed close to the door, fingers on the handle. Her eyes trailed to my bare chest, then darted away. ‘May I speak with you, sir?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid I must leave your service, sir.’

  I hid my dismay. ‘Because of Sam? I’ll arrange a bolt for your room, Jenny, I promise – it’s just that I’ve been distracted these past days . . .’ I gestured to my wounds. ‘I will speak with him too, if you wish—’

  ‘It’s not that, sir. At least – only in part.’ She shielded herself behind the door, half in, half out. ‘I’ve found a position in a house on Leicester Fields. I met the family at church.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Well, Kitty will miss you.’ She’ll be furious. ‘D’you need a reference?’

  She shook her head, alarmed by the offer. ‘It’s kind of you, sir, but I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention to no one that I worked here. They . . . they say such dreadful things about you in church.’

  I chuckled. ‘Oh, I can imagine.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Her words stilled the room. No, sir. An interruption and a contradiction. This was not how Jenny spoke to me. A chill crept over me; a premonition that whatever she said next would destroy everything. I wanted to jump from the bed and cup a hand to her mouth. Instead, I waited, and a silence stole up between us.

  Jenny twisted her fingers together in an anxious fashion. Her hands were red and chafed from her work and there was a small burn at the base of her thumb, where it had brushed against a hot pan. She too seemed reluctant to continue. Her lips were pressed together and she was breathing hard through her nose. She’s scared. Scared of me.

  Don’t ask. Don’t ask her.

  ‘What do they say of me, Jenny?’ The fear made my voice turn cold. The question had sounded almost like a threat, even to my ears.

  She swallowed. ‘They say you killed a man, sir. In the Marshalsea.’

  There was a long pause. She began to shake.

  ‘You must know that is a lie,’ I said.

  She nodded, without conviction.

  ‘Who is it, who tells such foul lies about me?’ But I knew the answer even as I asked. ‘Mr Burden?’

  Another nod. She took half a step on to the landing. ‘He said Mr Gonson will prove it.’

  ‘And people believe him?’ Jenny attended St Paul’s church at the west end of the piazza. Half the neighbourhood worshipped there of a Sunday.

  ‘No . . . at least . . . not so much, sir. But then you was seen coming home all beaten and covered in blood and people began to wonder. Sir – I must think of my own reputation, you see? This new position, it’s most respectable . . .’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, and relief washed over her face. ‘I would be grateful, Jenny, if you did not speak of this to Miss Sparks.’

  ‘No, sir. I won’t say nothing. I promise.’

  ‘You do not believe I am a killer, Jenny?’

  ‘No, sir!’ she said. But oh – the pause before she answered. It near broke my heart.

  ‘Very good.’ I dismissed her with a nod.

  She dipped a curtsey and closed the door. Packed her few belongings and left within the hour.

  Damn Joseph Burden, spewing his poison. Rumours spread like the pox in this town – before long half of London would know me as a murderous villain. Heaven knows, I looked the part with my black eye and swollen jaw. I dared not venture out or even downstairs into the shop in such a dreadful state – that would only complete the portrait and set our neighbours gossiping afresh. And so I brooded alone in my room, prowling up and down as if I were back in prison.

  I didn’t tell Kitty about Jenny’s confession. Kitty’s love was fierce and volatile as wildfire and it would only bring more trouble. At best she would worry. At worst she would confront Burden. So I kept quiet and prayed for the rumours to die away.

  But Kitty was no fool, and she soon grew suspicious of my behaviour. I have always preferred to be out and in company. It was not in my nature to hide away in my room, not even for the sake of vanity.

  One night I dreamed that I was trapped once more in the Marshalsea. The guards came for me in my cell and dragged me through the yard towards the wall. They were taking me to the Common Side, to the Strong Room. I began to scream, but I had no voice. They laughed and pushed me inside, locking the door behind me. I was alone. Breathing in the stench of death. The rats, writhing and squealing about my feet. I took a step forward and cold, dank fingers wrapped about my ankles. More hands, fleshless skeleton hands pulling me down. A pile of rotting corpses. I staggered and fell among them. They were holding me down, wrapping me in a tight embrace as the rats swarmed over us, claws scrabbling at my face. The more I struggled, the deeper I sank into the pile, until I couldn’t breathe and there was earth in my mouth and I would never be free, I was trapped in here for ever . . .

  ‘Tom!’ Kitty shook me awake.

  I sat up, heart racing. My shirt was soaked with sweat.

  She reached for my hand in the dark. ‘You were screaming.’

  ‘Gaol.’ But it had been more than that. I could still taste the soil in my mouth. And there was a tinge in the air – the high, sweet scent of putrid meat. I had dreamed of Death and it clung to me still, even though I was awake.

  ‘It’s no wonder you’re dreaming of prison,’ Kitty said. ‘You’ve been trapped in this room for too long. You must go out, Tom.’

  She was right. The longer I stayed locked in the house the more I would feel like a prisoner. And the more old dreams would return to haunt me. I lay back down against the pillow.

  Kitty curled up beside me, stroking my chest. ‘Your heart is beating so hard . . . Are you in trouble, still?’

  We both are, my love, if I can’t stop Burden from spreading his lies. I kissed the top of her head. ‘No.’

  She sighed, her breath warm against my skin. ‘I hate it when you lie to me.’

  The next evening Kitty decided to visit the Eliots. She tried to persuade me to join her but I refused, insisting she take Sam instead. I didn’t like her walking the dark streets alone and it would do Sam good to spend some time in decent company.

  ‘Stay close to Miss S
parks,’ I said, as he wound my best cravat around his neck. ‘And remember what I taught you about good conversation.’

  He looked at me in the mirror. ‘Sentences.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Sentences.’ I paused. ‘That wasn’t one, for example.’

  He tied up his hair with a black ribbon. I had still not persuaded him to shave his head. He would never pass as a gentleman without a wig. Then I tried to imagine Sam in a wig, bowing to ladies and exchanging idle banter with other gents – and was struck once again by the folly of my endeavours. Sam would never be a gentleman – counterfeit or otherwise. He might as well keep his curls if he loved them so much.

  I waited until he and Kitty had left, then dressed and strode out into Covent Garden. My jaw was still a little swollen, but my eye was much better. The night would hide the worst of it.

  Moll’s coffeehouse was as rowdy as ever – the din carried halfway down Russell Street. The customers I knew well, the girls even better, flashing glances at me through the yellow haze of pipe smoke. Another life, I reminded myself, with a twinge of regret. I had not come here for sport but for information. This was the best place to discover how far Burden’s lies about me had spread. And how much trouble I was in.

  Moll King was winning a game of cards, surrounded by drunken admirers. No one knew Moll’s real age – middling thirties, I guessed. She was no longer in her prime, but she had a wicked charm, more alluring than the sweet complexion and slim ankles of her freshest girls. Once, her husband Tom had ruled the coffeehouse and the marriage – and Moll had the scars to prove it. But she had worked and waited over the years – always sober, always clever – as the drink weakened him. Now he sat by the fire, bloated and gouty, with half his teeth rotted from his head, while his wife flirted and schemed and ran the place as if he were already in his grave. His name remained above the door, but this was Moll’s place and the world knew it. I had been one of her favourites for a while, but she had lost interest now I shared my life with Kitty. I gave her the odd secret from the gaming tables to keep her friendly, but there were so many other young men in town, willing to spend money on her and on her girls. She blew me a kiss across the room and returned to her game.