George scratched his head, digging his fingers into his oily scalp. ‘They came this morning, asked us where he was, we showed them, then they started shouting at us, cursing us. When they finished we took him back downstairs. They’s still there.’
With sick stomach I turned to the staircase and the pit beyond it before venturing gingerly downwards. The air was clammy and thick. I coughed and spat, disgusted at the thought that I was actually breathing this stuff, wondering nervously how easy it was to contract the typhus – Newgate was famous for typhus. As we turned the last corner of the spiral stair we saw the silhouettes of two men alone in the tiny vault, talking. A single small torch burnt on the wall. Looking round when they heard our steps, they appeared frightened, staring out of the darkness. Finely dressed, better than me, with long black wigs, feathered hats, petticoat breeches and lots of lace. They wore pattens, wooden clogs with iron bottoms and tie straps, to protect their exquisitely embroidered silk-braided shoes.
‘What’s the news?’ I asked quietly.
Neither man spoke.
‘They work for the Lord Chief Justice,’ the gaoler said. ‘I told you before.’
‘Yes,’ the man on the left said, ‘we work for Lord Keeling.’
‘What are you doing here?’
While they looked at each other, uncertain of themselves, Dowling and I stood in patient silence side by side, waiting. There was no way past us.
The gaoler sighed and blinked wearily. ‘They said they came here to search the prisoner.’
‘Why couldn’t you search him upstairs?’ I asked, angry. My skin prickled and I could smell my own sweet perfume.
‘I searched him myself yesterday,’ Dowling said slowly, his voice suspicious, his usual amiability replaced with a quiet wariness. ‘I searched him from head to toe.’
The two men fidgeted unhappily. By the flickering light of the torches I could make out their eyes, alive and shifty. ‘He must stay down here until such time he is called to trial. That’s the order of the Lord Chief Justice. We work for him and take our instruction by him. Now we have to go.’
‘What did you find?’ Dowling demanded.
‘I can’t tell you. We can tell only Lord Keeling what we found, if anything. Those are our instructions.’
‘They say they found a necklace,’ the gaoler piped up indignantly. ‘Told me, so they did, so don’t see why they can’t tell you.’ A shapeless forefinger slid up his broad nose and scraped around.
Dowling stepped forwards and they stepped backwards. ‘Show us what you say you found, or else I’ll ask George here to find you cells of your own.’
‘You can’t do that,’ the man snorted, looking at George. George’s face was set, expressionless. Whether it was out of support for Dowling or just resigned boredom, impossible to know. I suspected the latter.
‘We have our own authority,’ the second man said.
‘We have the Mayor’s authority. Show me yours.’ I held out my hand.
‘He knows who we are.’ The second man pointed at the gaoler.
‘Show us what you have,’ I insisted.
They turned to each other once more. The one on the left pursed his lips, his face grim, brow set. The one on the right shrugged unhappily. The man on the left dipped his hand into his pocket and took out a small object wrapped in a dirty stained cloth. I took it and unwrapped it. It was a golden necklace cast in the shape of a cross, with surface rough to the touch. Just as John Giles’s mother had described it.
‘It proves he’s guilty. Now you must give it back.’ The man put out his hand. He wore leather gloves.
It went in my pocket. ‘How do you know it belongs to the girl?’
‘We know,’ the man replied. ‘Now give it!’ Dowling pushed him back, nodding apologetically as he did so.
‘I will keep it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ The second man put a hand on his colleague’s shoulder. ‘It has been seen.’
‘Where was it hidden?’ I asked, nodding at Dowling. ‘He has already been searched.’
‘It was well hidden,’ the second man answered. ‘Clearly he wasn’t searched well enough.’
‘You fetched it with you, gentlemen,’ Dowling said quietly. ‘It wasn’t there yesterday.’
‘The Lord Chief Justice seeks with undue haste,’ I ventured.
‘That’s treasonable talk,’ the man on the left said quietly, smiling menacingly as he did so, and even Dowling muttered at me in warning. They waited, sensing my lack of resolve, challenging us to find some excuse to detain them. There was a moment of silence, oppressive and muffled, broken only by the sound of a steady drip. In the absence of any support from Dowling I was wary. I could hardly apprehend agents of the Lord Chief Justice. Shrewsbury would have to be involved regardless of his feelings in the matter. Reluctantly I stepped back and gave them room to walk away. They edged past awkwardly and hurried up the stairs out of the stone hold, the clacking of their wooden footsteps echoing loudly as they departed. I cast Dowling a dark stare, unhappy that he had been so useless.
By the light of the gaoler’s torch I could make out Joyce’s thin shadow in his cell, still and unmoving, hear the quiet wheezing of his steady breathing, see the lice crawling slowly across his close-cropped scalp.
‘George,’ I turned, ‘I will give you another five pounds if you get this man upstairs in front of a fire, unchained and proper food inside of him. If the officers of Lord Keeling return, then by all means fetch him back down, but take him up again when they have left. Can you do that?’
‘Not for five pounds.’ George screwed up his face and shook his head. ‘Ten pounds.’
Ten pounds? Ten pounds was enough to keep Jane going for three months. Ten pounds was a tenth of my entire wealth. And what chance was there that the King would reimburse me – half of London was owed by him. Anyway, I didn’t have ten pounds with me. I looked at Dowling. George was his friend.
‘I’ll be wanting that ten pounds today, sir.’ The gaoler tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Though it’s an extravagant way to use your money. He’ll be hung and quartered before the week’s out.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘They say they found the necklace on him. That’s what matters. They said it was the dead girl’s necklace.’
‘Where did they find it?’
‘They said they found it on the floor.’ He stuck his thumbs in his belt and waddled away. Then stopped. ‘That reminds me. I was going to tell you. There’s two fellows out there what work for a justice somewhere up north. I forget where exactly, but I recognises them.’
‘Out where, George?’
‘Outside in the street with them apprentices. You can sees them if you look hard enough – them’s the ones with the hair on their faces.’
‘Do you know what they’re doing there?’
‘No idea,’ George gestured with his torch. ‘Told myself to tell you. Now I told you.’
Dowling grunted, but thumped the gaoler on the shoulder gratefully. We made our way back the way we’d come, pushing past the two men that still stood staring hopelessly into the stinking closet. I felt my stomach cramp again, and pushed my way outside. Ten pounds.
‘So you be Lytle.’ The man with the baton waited for us. Now he had two, one in each hand. One he lifted to my chin, the other he used to warn off Dowling. ‘You here with your bears?’
‘Let him be,’ Dowling grumbled from the pit of his stomach.
‘Your eye’s black too, Dowling.’ The man held his arm out straight. Others began to crowd in, pushing forward to see what was going on. I recognised the drunkard, with his square red hat drooping over one eye, still grinning foolishly.
‘Honey or turd with me, wretch. Stand away.’ Dowling’s arm whipped out and grabbed the baton, twisting it out of the man’s grip. Then he stepped forward and brought it down hard on the arm that reached to my chin, with a cushioned crack. The man doubled over in pain, nursing his broken arm across his chest, and s
unk to his knees white-faced.
‘Haste now, Lytle. We have one opportunity,’ Dowling whispered in my ear, pushing me forward roughly into the crowd. We strode forward, fending off the occasional blow with our arms. Dowling cracked another man over the head with the wooden club, and pushed forward with all his considerable strength against the wall of apprentices, always with an eye for the youngest, the most hesitant, the drunkest. Something hit me on the temple, causing me to stumble in dizzy pain. ‘Up!’ Dowling roared, grabbing me by the collar of my shirt and dragging me upright. I felt the stitches tear. Struggling to stay on my feet, I was propelled forward by Dowling’s shovings, stopped from falling by the wall of people against which I was being pushed. I looked up into the purple face of an older apprentice, pockmarked and gleaming, teeth clenched and eyes blazing. Then Dowling’s baton landed on his nose with a heavy crunch and the face disappeared. We were pushed up against the woodwork of a yellow coach that was engulfed by the crowd. I looked aloft, holding up an arm to ward off the blows. Was that the face of Shrewsbury pulling away from the window? Could it be? I clambered up to get a better view, and saw William Hill sat in there too, to my amazement. Neither of them saw me, their efforts focussed on avoiding the eyes of the multitude that swarmed about them. I was pulled roughly backwards by a pair of mighty hands. Dowling again. He pulled me towards an alley mouth, next to the open door of a bawdy house. The noise abated, and the heavy hot air was replaced with a cold, sharp wind and we were running. As we ran, I wondered to myself about the necklace, tucked safely in my pocket. For if it was indeed planted by these men, where did they get it? It must have been taken from Anne Giles’s body. What did this imply of Keeling’s involvement? And what the boggins was Hill doing with the Earl of Shrewsbury?
John Parsons was waiting for me outside my home. He stood in the street with a sick smirk upon his wretched face, attracting curious glances. People walked round him. When he saw me he leered. I approached reluctantly. What possible good could this satisfaction signify? He didn’t wait for me to speak – I had nothing to say to him in any case. He bid me escort him to a low house in Mincing Lane. It wasn’t far away and I followed him in silence. When we arrived I could not believe what he showed me there.
The hovel he took us to consisted of rough-hewn planks of wood standing precariously against the sturdier wall of a two-storey house. Parsons stood in front of the open front door with his hands clasped before him. He took off his hat and urged me to enter. The front room was small and damp. Rat droppings peppered the bare boards. A door stood ajar behind. Parsons didn’t speak.
‘Is she in there?’ I asked, pointing at the room behind.
‘Of course.’ Parsons smiled. Seriously I began to wonder if I had ventured into a world of demons, for he had an air of unworldly evil about him that made me fearful. He said nothing else, just stood there. Suddenly I was sure that this man had done something unspeakable, that he had reneged upon his commitment. There was a thin line of sweat upon his brow and his eyes betrayed a manic intensity that burnt from his soul.
‘I assume you kept our pact,’ I said levelly, sure that he had not.
‘In a manner. I did not test her myself, but it was my judgement that she be tested without delay, else her familiars would have had time to plot her release. I arranged for another to test her, which he did.’
No noise came from behind the door. As I approached it, I could smell the same sweet sticky odour that lingered about Dowling, only whilst on Dowling it was faint, buried beneath the smell of pig grease and other Newgate smells, here it was pure, fresh and overpowering. A loud buzzing of flies.
The first thing I did upon entering the room was to empty the contents of my stomach on the floor. I will not dwell upon what I found, for I don’t wish my account to become unpalatable to all but a perverted few. So I will stick to the essentials. I think I half expected to find Mary Bedford dead or mutilated, so this was perhaps not a shock. What appalled me was the state I found her in, and the fact she was not alone. There was another woman in the room; barely recognisable as the woman that Dowling and I had spoken to near Whitefriars, the simple harmless soul that had told us second-hand tales of witchery. They lay side by side stripped of all their clothes. They had not been drowned, nor had they been watched, for their interrogator clearly had not sufficient patience. This, I suppose, must be called searching, but whosoever had done this had searched them with tools the like of which I could not imagine. Every orifice was stretched and torn, leaking pools of blood. Short, sharp cuts and long rounded channels; I will not relate what I saw in greater detail than that. But someone had used implements made of iron or some other metal, to penetrate deep into their bodies; in search of what … I still have no idea. They were both dead. Mercifully.
I turned to John Parsons. Did I see pride in those shiny green eyes? He smiled at me again. At that moment I felt a greater anger than I had ever felt before in my whole life. My hands started to tremble, so did my whole body, and that smile was the trigger that persuaded me to do what my instinct told me to. I punched him in the throat as hard as I could. He collapsed on the floor, choking, one hand spread in a pool of Mary Bedford’s blood. I kicked him on the forehead, kicking high into the air and pulling a muscle at the back of my leg as a result. Then I knelt down, seized him by the ears and rubbed his face in the blood, grinding it into the floor. I wiped one of his cheeks across the floor, then the other, determined that he would never lose the smell of it, the mark of it that showed what an evil coward he was. These parasites were famous for never doing the deed themselves. Picking up his stick, I beat him about the body with it. Then I stamped on his wretched hat and stood there panting, my heart pounding, for the first time questioning whether what I was doing was right. He rolled over slowly, the mask obliterated in the cloying blood, his expression now one of pure contempt.
Once he had slowly got to his feet he stood stooped like an evil little flibbertigibbet. Snarling at me he slowly regarded the surroundings, his clothes, his hat, the dead bodies. He walked slowly over to where his stick lay and picked it up, then stood motionless, staring at me. I stared back. Then he left, without a word, headed back to Hell. I remained there a few moments longer, my wits frozen, then ran after him, determined to seize him and have him incarcerated. My hesitance was my ruin. When I emerged from the house he had gone.
I never did set eyes on him again, which I do not regret. At nights I rest unburdened, certain that his soul rots in Hell. Quite what state my own soul was in upon leaving him there that day, I cannot say. I felt overwhelmed by events and totally out of control of the situation. In truth, I had never felt such black despair. Cocksmouth was too far to travel and the prospect of exchanging conversation with my father too depressing. I would have to talk to Shrewsbury.
Chapter Eight
Water-horehound
The juice of this herb gives a black dye that clings so tenaciously that it cannot be washed off or removed.
I arrived at Westminster to look for Shrewsbury with a wide, blue silk sash across my tunic, washed, scrubbed and doused with lavender oil. I reeked like a bawdy house. Not inappropriate for Westminster Hall. The place was lined with stalls selling books, clothes, hats and the like, but more business was done selling the other, if you know what I mean. National disgrace, I say, though they say that the French are a lot worse. The French don’t have time for running the country; they’re so busy dropping their drawers. I tipped my hat at Mrs Martin the linen draper. I knew her well, as did many others in London. She pointed at my sash and placed a hand on her brow as if about to swoon. I smiled politely and turned away. Betty Howlett caught my eye, waved and then blushed when she realised her mother was watching. I made a mental note to follow that up later. She lived out at White Cock Alley amongst the dockers and lightermen. I sneezed – too much lavender oil.
I headed towards the Court of the Chancery, for this is where Shrewsbury spent much of his time I knew, but that day was a busy day and
sentries barred passage. I managed to make eye contact with one of them, enough that he listened to my request and took the shilling that I gave him to deliver my message to Shrewsbury. Then it was a matter of waiting which I did for more than an hour.
‘Lytle.’ A quiet voice spake into my ear, little more than a whisper. ‘You seek Lord Shrewsbury?’
It was Robert Burton, one of Shrewsbury’s chief aides. He stood at my shoulder, a smaller man than me even, with shaven head and large red ears looking at me with his bright little eyes. His glance let you know that he was a lot more intelligent than you could ever hope to be.
‘Be at the crypt of St Mary-le-Bow at five. Do not be late and be on your own.’ He turned smartly on his heel and was gone before the words had registered.
St Mary-le-Bow was a strange rendezvous. I knew the outside of it very well, for it sat right next door to the Mermaid tavern, on Cheapside. By the time I arrived my tunic was covered in a thin layer of soot and I smelt more like an old shoe than a field of flowers. Never mind.
The bells were ringing loud and bright, but still I felt a clutching reluctance to cross the threshold of the heavy, squat little building. The front door was open, but all was quiet inside with only a few people in view. When I poked my head inside I saw why − there stood Robert Burton, just inside, and next to him a big man with a long sword at his waist. I stopped outside. Perhaps I would forgo this appointment after all. Burton must have seen the fear in me for he bid me enter in a voice that left little opportunity to decline.
The inside of Mary-le-Bow is richly decorated, full of memorials to those who have money to waste, but its polished facade hides a bloody history. Here it was that the friends of Ralph Crepin murdered Lawrence Ducket and hung his body from a window, trying to make it look like suicide. Crepin had been attacked by Ducket in a quarrel over a woman called Alice, yet it was his friends, not he, that took it upon themselves to kill Ducket, for which grim misdemeanour Crepin was hanged. Beaten senseless and then hung for it! Poor old Alice got burnt to death and she knew nothing of any of it.
The Sweet Smell of Decay Page 9
