Gideon the Cutpurse
Page 33
‘Go! Go now! Go with Gideon!’ Sir Richard managed to say. ‘Take this gold and send word when you can.’
He put a bag of coin into Gideon’s hand. Gideon mounted the horse and the Parson pushed Peter up behind him.
‘Take this,’ said the Parson, thrusting Mrs Byng’s diamond necklace into Gideon’s hands. ‘Deliver it to my cousin and tell her that I have offered you the use of Hawthorn Cottage for as long as you need it.’
‘You would trust me with Mrs Byng’s necklace?’
‘I misjudged you, Mr Seymour,’ said the Parson. ‘I would trust you above all men.’
Gideon met the good Parson’s gaze and bowed his head in thanks.
Joshua reached up to grasp Gideon’s hand.
‘I’ll send word when I can,’ Gideon said. ‘Sir Richard has promised to find a position for you.’
‘You can count on me, Gideon, be assured of that, but if you do not leave on the instant, I shall be visiting you once more in Newgate Gaol! Go now and God speed to you both!’
Gideon dug his heels in and the horse galloped into the cover of the wood. Peter held on to Gideon and looked over his shoulder, his mind blunt with shock. He had a last impression of a forlorn group, still as statues, too stunned to do more than watch them disappear into the trees.
Sir Richard and the Parson thought it best that they all walk out to meet the soldiers who had come to arrest them. No doubt they had discovered the carriages, which had been hastily and not very well hidden. Sidney, Joshua, Hannah and little Jack followed behind, all of them shaken by what they had just witnessed. There was, as the Parson said, no point skulking in the undergrowth when half of London could testify to what they had done. However, they were surprised to find not soldiers but the King’s messenger with an escort of men.
The messenger recognised Sir Richard at once and dropped down off his horse. With a low bow he put a rolled parchment that carried the King’s seal into Sir Richard’s hands. The Parson stood side by side with him.
‘His Majesty King George III is pleased to grant Mr Gideon Seymour a pardon and bids you instruct him that he is a free man.’
The Parson and Sir Richard exchanged glances. The messenger was exhausted and out of breath. He had ridden for three days and two nights to deliver the King’s pardon only to see it greeted with crestfallen expressions. He had hoped for something better.
Gideon urged Sir Richard’s bay mare through Hampstead Heath under cover of the trees and then, by the quietest routes he could find, they made for Highgate Hill. He turned around frequently to check on Peter who would not respond to anything he said. Peter’s forehead bounced against Gideon’s back, awake but eyes firmly closed, conscious only of fluorescent spirals rolling sickeningly and without end across the landscape of his mind. Kate’s scream still resonated in his ears.
‘Do not lose heart, my young friend,’ said Gideon. ‘We might be on the run, but you must not doubt that we will find a way to get you home.’
Halfway up Highgate Hill Gideon stopped and turned the horse around so that they could both see London spread out before them.
‘Look,’ he said.
Peter looked. He took in the great dome of St Paul’s and the Monument, a tall white column surrounded by a cluster of City churches. His eyes travelled over all those parts of the city that now held such vivid memories for him: Holborn, Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and, towards the west, St James’s Park and Buckingham House. How different it was to the London of his time. Would he ever see his London again? Would he forget what it looked like? Would he forget what his mum and dad looked like? He swept the thought away. He could not think about that now. Instead, he inserted, in his mind’s eye, the Post Office Tower, Canary Wharf, the Houses of Parliament. He made himself conjure up the sounds of his century: the incessant roar of the traffic, the background grumble of overhead planes, sirens, car radios, the ringtones of mobile phones … Suddenly, despite himself, a broad grin appeared on Peter’s face.
‘The Tar Man will be terrified of the twenty-first century!’
Gideon’s blue eyes focussed on the city stretched out beneath them. A cool wind blew strands of blond hair from his face.
‘Do not underestimate him, he is more resourceful than you know. I fear it may be the twenty-first century that will be terrified of the Tar Man.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When writing about the eighteenth century in Gideon the Cutpurse I have tried, wherever possible, to be historically accurate and to offer a glimpse of what it might have been like to live 1763. However, this is above all an adventure written to entertain and not a history textbook and I hope readers will enjoy distinguishing between historical fact and historical fiction.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I began writing Gideon the Culpurse for the best of reasons: because I wanted to. It is very easy to start a novel, less so to finish it. And if, over the course of five years, the germ of an idea grew into a series of novels, it is in large part thanks to those who enthused me in the first place, those who encouraged me to keep at it and those who lent me their literary talents to help me get it ready to go out into the world. Looking now at the list of people I have had the pleasure of meeting, it strikes me that although writing is necessarily a solitary occupation, it certainly has its compensations!
I feel that I should first acknowledge my debt to the historian, Lucy Moore, whose works on eighteenth-century criminal London caught my imagination in the first place. I heard her speaking on the radio one morning in June 2000 and by the end of the afternoon, I had already planned out the story of Gideon the Cutpurse in broad brushstrokes. I consulted many works on the period but books which rarely left my desk are Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London and Michael Brander’s Georgian Gentleman. I should also like to thank David Lewis for lending me his copy of The Newgate Calendar – without this often gruesome book I should never have created one of my favourite characters, the Tar Man.
For their constant encouragement and literary expertise my thanks are due to my novelist friends: Stephanie Chilman, Kate Harrison, Jacqui Hazell, Jacqui Lofthouse and Louise Voss. I should also like to thank my first adult readers, Heather Swain, Liz Facer, Anne-Marie Nation-Telleray and Catherine Pappo, and my first young reader, Rachel Walsh. I am extremely grateful for all their comments. Thanks, also, to all in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College for their support and, in particular, to Blake Morrison and to Maura Dooley for all her insight and encouragement. I should also like to thank Maura’s daughter, Imelda, for her reaction to the book. I am grateful to Brigitte Resl for translating Queen Charlotte’s dialogue into German.
I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting my continuing research into story development at Goldsmiths College. My grateful thanks.
Without my involvement with and help from PAWS (Public Awareness of Science), an organisation which promotes the depiction of science in the arts, I doubt whether I should have dared to write about time travel – albeit fictional! My thanks to Barrie Whatley and Andrew Millington at PAWS.
I feel especially fortunate to be represented and published by a literary agency and a publisher who have shown such belief in Gideon the Cutpurse and its sequels. My grateful thanks to: Caradoc King, Judith Evans, Christine Glover and Linda Shaughnessy at A P Watt and to Ingrid Selberg, Venetia Gosling, Joanna Moult (London) and Elizabeth Law (New York) at Simon & Schuster.
Finally, I should like to thank my husband, for his endless encouragement and curiosity about the universe, and also my children, Louis and Issy, who have at various times been my guinea pigs, critics and editors. Gideon was written for them and it was through reading the novel to them in instalments that the plot was refined and developed. There is a large part of all of them in this story.
L.B.-A.
If you enjoyed Gideon the Cutpurse then read
an extract from the sequel The Tar Man
TO THE READER
<
br /> If it is true that a person’s real nature is only revealed in adversity, then the events described in this volume will put the characters of Peter Schock and Kate Dyer into sharp relief. For, as I have previously described, it was at the instant they believed they were leaving the eighteenth century never to return, that they were plunged into another set of circumstances which would test the courage of these twelve-year old children to the limit. Whilst Kate arrived safely back in her own century, her friend Peter was left stranded in 1763, his place taken by Lord Luxon’s villainous henchman, The Tar Man.
The train of events sparked off by the unlikely conjunction of a dog, a Van der Graaf generator and an anti-gravity machine, once started, seemed unstoppable. Kate’s father, Dr Dyer, felt guilty because he had failed to return Peter Schock to his own time, although it was of some comfort to him that the reformed cutpurse, Gideon Seymour, who had already narrowly missed death in his effort to help the children, would be there to protect him. As in the first volume of this story, it is to Gideon’s unique testimony, The Life and Times of Gideon Seymour, Cutpurse and Gentleman, 1792, that I sometimes turn in this narrative.
Dr Dyer also blamed himself for the escape into our century of The Tar Man, the ablest and most feared criminal of the London underworld of 1763. Here was a man who, at a tender age, was hung for a crime he did not commit and when, miraculously, he managed to cheat death at the gallows, he swore to take his revenge on a world that had dealt him such a cruel blow. Yet Dr Dyer should not have been so quick to blame himself – after all, who can shut Pandora’s Box once it has been opened?
This is not a story about hopeful beginnings and easy endings; this is a story about characters who find themselves in a harsh place, not knowing – which is true for us all – how it will all end, and always conscious that only hope and determination stand between them and disaster.
The Marquis de Montfaron, who always displayed such steadfast optimism in science and truth, was very fond, as you will see, of philosophy. Kate noted down some of his ideas because they gave her comfort when her own grip on Time was failing. Kate asked me if I could reproduce them here and this I am very happy to do.
Time is not our master, despite the relentless swing of the pendulum. Through the power of Memory and Imagination, do we not swim through the rivers of Time at will, diving both into our Past and our Future? Equally, the notion that Time is constant is mere illusion. The passage of Time, which is irrelevant in our dreams, is ignored in activity and is only truly experienced in a state of extreme boredom. Therefore, do not let Time be your master, rather seek to master Time.
Citoyen Montfaron, ci-devant Marquis de Montfaron, 1792
(Citizen Montfaron, formerly Marquis of Montfaron)