The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  He checked his cry to a gasp of pain as he clenched on the wooden support. The spikes themselves were set with needle tips on every surface. With nothing else to cling to, dangling forty feet above the paving, he began to move hand by hand in a slow agony round the two walls of the yard. He felt sweat on his shirt-front and then saw it was not sweat but blood running from his hands, back down his arms. The shirt-cloth round his palms had become two blood-sodden rags. But to surrender now would allow the world to chuckle at his bravado, and then hang him just the same.

  The blood-drops falling in the yard might betray him to the first person who noticed them. There was no help for that. Yet to come so far and be caught on the prison roofs was worse than letting go and smashing on the stone paving below. He would smash rather than let them take him again. He tried to hurry and almost lost his grip with one hand.

  But he was at the first corner now. The second wall was the shorter side of the oblong yard. The leads of the death-wards lay only twenty feet along that flank of granite. Twenty feet more of blood that ran slippery on needle-sharp iron. He sobbed with the pain. But then it was ten feet, and five. He came to the end of it. To his right, a dozen feet below the support from which he hung, were the flat leads of the condemned block.

  A rooftop-burglar's dead-fall was the only way. Throwing himself to one side, he let go of the support above him. Twisting and falling, he heard the brief rush of wind at his ears. He missed the roof but felt the stone ledge of it smack into his hands. One hand slipped but the other held. He snatched a second hold. Kicking and flipping like a fish in a net, Jack Rann pulled himself slowly on hands and knees to the flat roof of the condemned block, bleeding, and weeping with relief.

  He was still at the centre of the prison and time was against him. The succession of flat roofs varied little in height, with gaps of eight to ten feet between each and a drop of forty feet to the passageways below. Where some of the roofs ended, a spiked rail marked the boundary of the prison along Newgate Street.

  Blood still dripped as he gathered his strength, sprinted at the first gap, leapt with all his power, saw the drop flash beneath him, and landed sprawling on the next roof. A long chase down it, a narrower leap and a landing with a trip that gashed his ankle.

  How far until he was safe? Even as the question occurred, he knew that he could never be safe. Sooner or later, the nightmare was to come again - unless he could cross an ocean to a new continent; unless the legacy of Pandy Quinn's genius might save him.

  He took another leap and made a landing that was easier. Now a wider gap. Ten feet, he guessed. He drew back, ran with all his might and hurled himself across it. He missed the flat roof, caught the ledge and pulled himself up.

  His strength was gone for another jump like that. Then, a dozen feet ahead of him, he saw a smoke-stack at the edge of the roof he was standing on, its black lettering weathered almost to nothing. Tyler's Manufactory'. He had lost all sense of time and distance on the roofs but now he knew that he must be somewhere beyond the prison, above the first commercial premises of Newgate Street.

  From this moment any man or woman might be his enemy. The first encounter might betray him. He edged forward and saw, several yards from the chimney, a woman in a grey woollen shawl and white apron gathering washing from a line between two posts. Such homeliness after weeks of the condemned cell gave him hope that she would not refuse him. From the shelter of the stack, he watched her carry the washing-basket to an attic well-ahead and go down into the house.

  Rann waited a moment and then moved forward. There was an attic ladder inside the well-head, down which the young woman had gone. Easing himself through the opening, he went softly and barefoot after her.

  It was a Newgate garret, built for extra rent on top of a shabby garment-warehouse. Through a half-open door, he saw the basket of laundry on a table, a grate of dead coals, a child in a wooden cradle. The woman turned as he stepped into the room, her young face round and florid, her arms bare and reddened from scrubbing the sodden clothes by which she earned her starvation wages as a street-laundress.

  'Oh, God!' she cried, lifting the child in its linen shirt, holding it to her. 'Don't hurt us! Whoever you are, don't harm us.'

  ‘I'm Jack Rann,' said Handsome Jack, sinking down on a plain rush chair, 'and I'm hurt worse than you could ever imagine. Help me, if you can. I've come this far, over the prison roofs. If I'm caught now, I must die on Monday. Let God be my judge, I never in my life did harm to any man or woman. But I won't be taken now, not if I have to die for it.'

  She stared at him. She wanted to believe him, he could see that in her eyes, so that she might be sure of her own safety. There was a square of tarnished glass behind her which served as a mirror. Rann caught sight of himself, the grotesque figure of a make-believe murdered ghost from the stage of the Hoxton Britannia. A dozen downward paths of blood from his upstretched hands had streaked his face and matted his hair. His torn shirt-front was splattered red.

  'The spikes on the wall,' he said quietly. 'That's what drew the blood. I want nothing from you. I must get to the street, that's all. I mean you no harm.'

  'But not to the street like that,' she said. 'You'll be seen and took first thing.'

  She still doubted him but must have seen how much greater his fear was than hers.

  'Then how?' he asked.

  The young woman shook her head.

  'There's only what you see us wearing and the linen in the basket.'

  Jack Rann looked about him and knew that she spoke the truth. Apart from the clothes she wore in her poverty, there was nothing but the laundered linen and no other room but this.

  'Soot,' he said suddenly, 'let me have soot from the grate.'

  He stepped to the hearth with its dead coals and the woman drew back a little, holding the child more firmly. Rann put his blood-streaked hands into the hearth and felt the searing coarseness of the black grit. He smeared his face and hair, his shirt and arms, until they shone with it, his eyes gleaming like the whites of boiled eggs, their sockets pale through the mask of blackened skin.

  'Which way?' he asked.

  Still holding the child, she led him down the stairs into a cobbled yard at the rear of the warehouse. At one end, was an archway. Beyond it he saw market-carts and a coster-girl selling apples from a basket.

  Rann looked at her for the last time.

  ‘I got nothing to give you. One day, I'll thank you, though. I don't know how, but I swear I will.'

  She gazed at him, still doubtfully, and at last said, 'God bless you, poor stranger.'

  Before he could reply, she turned and went quickly back to the stairs. Jack Rann walked, blackened and barefoot, towards the arch. He was now indistinguishable by his face or clothes from ten thousand men of his kind in the city.

  The crowds almost obscured the market-barrows of the fruit-sellers and the fish-merchants along either pavement. A woman was singing for coppers outside a tap-room at the far corner, 'The Bird in Yonder Cage Confined'. Rann took it as an omen. Cabs, carts, and twopenny buses moved in a slow procession at the centre of the road.

  The noise of the city, after so many weeks in the silence of his cell, almost overpowered him with jubilation. Now it was time to plan. He wiped the soot from his moist palms over his face for good measure and slipped quietly along Newgate Street.

  5

  'Eight a penny! Lumping pears!'

  An old coster in a moleskin jacket and wide-awake hat laughed in his face at the startled eyes in the blackened skin.

  Rann moved between the barrows and the stalls that fringed the butchers' slabs of Newgate Market, his bare feet raw on the paving-grit. He watched the congested traffic, edging from Snow Hill to Cheapside. To one side was a counter of pickled whelks, like huge snails floating in saucers of brine. On the other, children knelt by a sweet stall, gambling with marbles for 'Albert Rock' and 'Boneyparte's Ribs'.

  A uniformed policeman was talking to an aproned coster-girl with her horse
-pail of ice, as she scooped out lemonade the colour of soap-suds, "ere's your coolers! 'aypenny a glass! 'ere's coolers!' The policeman, his hands folded on the truncheon behind his back, smiled and spoke close to her ear. Rann guessed they could not yet have missed him from his cell.

  The cries of the market rose like a protective screen. He saw a donkey-cart coming slowly up the curve of Snow Hill from Farringdon Market. Behind the driver was a pile of empty, slatted flower-boxes and sacks. Rann moved forward and breathed a fresh earthy smell of potatoes as the wheels rumbled past him. The carter had made his deliveries and was on his way from the city, possibly

  south but more likely east, to market-gardens and fields beyond Bethnal Green.

  The tail-board was down. Rann walked quickly after it, jumped and swung himself up to sit at the end of the cart without the driver knowing or needing to care. It was so neatly done that a coster holding a haddock on a toasting-fork laughed and called out to him, "ooray for that! Let him laugh who wins!'

  Rann waved back, like a man without a care. They would forget him more easily for that. Yet as the cart followed the prison wall of rough-hewn stone with its windowless recesses, he felt a terror of Newgate greater than when he hung from the spikes of its cheveau-de-frise.

  Like a man in a dream, he saw Greyfriars and Christ's Hospital with its Bluecoat boys, the golden cross and upper dome of St Paul's above the roofs. To one side on the tail-board lay the empty potato sacks. A fool would have crept under them and hidden but Jack Rann knew better. He was concealed by the crowds and by his covering of soot more surely than by all the sacks ever made.

  As the cart rattled eastwards, shaking and bumping, he felt the scales tilt to his side at last. He had never had his likeness taken by a camera. The only people who might recognize him were those who knew him before the death of Pandy Quinn, or Flash Fowler and those who had arrested him, or the court that had tried him, or the warders who had guarded him. They were not a hundred people in London's two million, but in time they might be enough. Yet, so long as he moved fast, perhaps only betrayal could hang him now. He pictured Miss Jolly, timid shopgirl and lynx-eyed dancer of the penny entertainments. Maggie Fashion, mannequin of the bereaved at the Mourning Emporium. Such young women would die for Handsome Jack more surely than another man might do. And, if the moment came, they might more easily destroy him.

  Turning his head to glance down Cheapside, he saw the pillared spire of Bow Church, the gilt-figured clock that hung above the pavement, the Sultan Cafe with its sign that 'Smoking-Rooms May be Hired by Private Parties', dark little shops that sold snuff or tobacco, vintners with racks of green bottles displayed on the pavement. Square-paned windows caught the sun at a dozen different angles.

  Beyond the Royal Exchange, the cart entered Cornhill. Not a head in the well-dressed crowds turned to look at him nor at the donkey-cart that carried him. In a city of a million fires and chimneys, there was no more common sight than a sweep on a cart-tail beside sacks that might soon be filled with soot.

  Behind its plain brick fronts, Cornhill belonged to the wholesale premises of goldsmiths, jewellers, watchmakers and tailors. In its pillared banks, the wealth of the city slept undisturbed. Here and there rose a more splendid facade, canopied and balustraded with red brick and stone facing.

  They passed Sun Court, a courtyard of Tudor brick within the arch of Walker's Vaults. Pandy Quinn's legacy. Jack Rann looked away, as if the passers-by might read the secret in his eyes. He gazed instead at the reflections of the vaults in the display windows of Trent's Cornhill Family and Complimentary Mourning Tailors, plate-glass framed by black marble, divided by corrugated brass pillars. But Mr Trent's funeral tailoring was as much part of Pandy's master-plan as the vaults themselves.

  Rann jumped off at Aldgate pump, where the classical pillar under an iron-framed gas-lamp spouted water into a shallow trough for a poorer district of the city. Here the shops and houses were stained by weather and neglect, windows dusty and empty, the road almost deserted. With nothing in the world but the shirt and trousers that he wore, he slipped down as the cart slowed at the crossing.

  His destination was a slum courtyard off Rosemary Lane, along the drab length of the Ratcliff Highway. Narrower streets faded into the distance of a noon haze. Provision merchants and gin-shops traded behind the plain shop-fronts, families lodging two or three to a room on the floors above. The long canyon of the street was crowded at this hour by labourers from the nearby docks, in round, wide-brimmed hats, canvas trousers and shirt-sleeves. Bells that might have tolled for a funeral were sounding from Wapping to the Isle of Dogs to call the gangs back to work from their dinner break.

  Boys with trays of glazed cakes slung about their necks, and girls offering fried fish, mingled with the crowd. A thinly clad woman with a child on her back bought a piece of fish for a halfpenny. She walked in front of Rann, tearing at it hungrily with her teeth, eating the warm flesh covered in breadcrumbs and sucking at the bone before she threw it away.

  From Rosemary Lane, he turned into a low archway, no wider than a house door. It led into the slum court known as Preedy's Rents.

  Beyond this narrow tunnel, which lay under the upper floors of the building that fronted the street, rose a turmoil of voices. A crowd was packed into a courtyard, a hundred feet long but not twenty feet wide. Men and women shouted and jumped at the far end. Every window of the upper floors was filled with faces, watching a quarrel between two neighbours as it turned into a fight.

  Even at noon, the yard was in deep shadow, wooden tenements rising like cliffs above it. Projections had been built out at random on the higher levels. Preedy's Rents had the air of a slum that might crumple at any moment in a cascade of rubble and timber upon the crowd in the courtyard.

  Inside the tenements, a narrow hallway and wooden stairs were almost in darkness. He climbed slowly and with care. The unlit stairway creaked and trembled under the gentlest footstep. He came to an unpainted door at the top and listened. There was movement but no voices. Rann knocked sharply.

  'At?' The reply sounded brisk and confident.

  'You there, Lord Tomnoddy? That you, Short-Armed Tom?'

  A chair-leg scraped. Whoever had been sitting down said something to himself as he got up. A bolt was drawn and the door opened by a thickset man with a florid face and dark hair, arms conspicuously long for his height. He was any age between fifty and seventy, his face lightly wrinkled like fruit dried on the branch. Lord Tomnoddy, or Short-Armed Tom, was a tosher or sewer-hunter. His trade gave him the only names by which he was known.

  Before the sewerman could speak, Rann said quietly, "s all right, Lord Tomnoddy. It's me, Jack Rann. And I ain't a ghost, 'cos I ain't been hung. Nor mean to be! Not if you'll help me now.'

  'Christ Aw-mighty!' Tomnoddy stood back and opened the door wider to let out more light. 'You never been respited?'

  Rann shook his head and stepped into a plainly furnished garret-room. Tomnoddy had been at dinner.

  'If you ain't been respited, Jack

  Rann put his hand against the wall.

  'I'm that famished ...' he said, and fell silent.

  Tomnoddy helped him to a chair, as if caring for an invalid.

  'Famished? You look like the Cock Lane Ghost, my son. 'Course I'll help you. What else would I do?'

  On the bare table was a half-eaten plate of cold boiled beef, a saucer of red pickled cabbage and some dingy-looking pickled onions. The meat was profusely covered with mustard, ready to be eaten with thick slices of bread that had been cut into big mouthfuls by a clasp pocket-knife lying open beside the plate. A dented pewter pot contained half a pint of ale.

  'I got your kit safe,' Tomnoddy said proudly, the worn face breaking into a quick smile. 'All in the carpet-bag. No one touched it. It's back of a wall in a Shadwell tunnel, well off the main drain. No one been there for years. Anyone looked for it'd have to choose from a couple o' million bricks! Old Samuel had to make himself scarce from Bragg and Catskin Nas
h. So he's with it. Flash Charley Fowler'd give a bit to know where your tools was. And Bully Bragg'd give as much to have Samuel with a fork through his gullet.'

  The kindly smile returned to the sewerman's face but the smile and the words meant nothing to Rann. He sat on the plain wooden chair and could neither eat nor drink. He began to shiver, in the heat of the day and the stifling air of the garret. Once he had begun to shiver, he found he could not stop. And when he could not stop he began to weep, until he could not stop that either. For all his hunger and thirst, it was half an hour before he could eat or drink or tell his story. Tomnoddy listened. Then they sat in silence until the old sewerman spoke.

  'Mind you,' he said admiringly, 'that was a swift dodge, that soot. Won't last but good enough for now.'

  'Nothing can last me here,' said Rann thoughtfully. 'I can't stay. Not on the same manor with Flash Fowler and Bully Bragg. Elsewhere in London, my face ain't much known. But even then it's a chance someone'd spot me, next week, next month, next year. I never hurt Pandy Quinn, he was my friend. On my soul's salvation, I swear I never did. Pandy was like a father who taught me a trade. But so far as that court goes, judge, jury, Flash Charley, and the rest, that's past history. If I'm caught, I'll be stretched. And that's all about that.'

  The lines of Tomnoddy's face deepened earnestly. The crowd outside had long since fallen quiet and the tenements were silent in the afternoon heat.

  'You thought what you'll do, Jack? They'll look for you round here. First place.'

  'I thought of nothing else,' Rann said. 'Lying there, waiting. I decided. There was a job Pandy and I was fitting up before he was cut. A real sweet job, Tom. It's what caused the trouble with Bragg and Catskin, 'cos we never asked them to be putters-up. We worked on it six months and more. It's a big one and it's still there to be done. So, my Lord Tomnoddy, it's what I mean to do. It's my way out.'