A drummer beats out a death tattoo. Now I can see the triple tree, black against the sky. All scraps of joy leave me. This is no celebration. Mary, French Peter and I look at each other and – I am sure – see only dust and bones. We are all stung and instantly infected with a fear so dark and heavy that it feels as though death rides beside us in the cart.
The wheels stop. The crowd, cheering seconds before, quietens. A young woman, heavy with child, throws herself at French Peter, sobbing. Then a small boy starts up some truly awful lament on the pipes. If ever anyone deserved to hang, I think, then natural justice would choose him over me for his crimes against music.
We step down from the cart. I am weak and Mary holds me up. I scan the crowd filling the wooden seats rigged up on a stand for the gentry so they may get a better view. Look us in the eye as our necks snap goodbye. Pretty women, faces lathered in make-up, hold their handkerchiefs to their noses. Their beaus, with wigs as high as heaven and coats that put my own to shame, sit beside them. All pointing at us, laughing, waiting to see us swing. I turn away and meet the executioner’s gaze. He is a broad and heavy-set man, and I wonder if the killing weighs against his soul, or maybe he tells himself the story that we are all monsters and truly deserve our dispatch.
One lady laughs, and I look back to the rows of seats stretching up into the sky. Elizabeth Stapleton, sat arm-in-arm with her father, Captain Walker. His eyes are crueller than the executioner’s. I hold myself as steady as I can and spit upon the ground. He smiles at me. If I could be a ghost, I tell myself, then I will come back and make their lives more miserable than my last months in Newgate.
The Ordinary begins his prayers for our souls and a Roman priest chants in the Latin tongue for Mary, who is Irish, and swings a metal ball which trails incense, a heady, dreamy, sickly smell that makes my senses giddy. The sobbing is louder now.
A cry of: ‘For shame to hang a woman and a boy!’
An echo: ‘Shame! A shame.’ A rotten turnip head whistles close to the executioner’s ear. He ignores it, and holds the ropes like an armful of snakes that will suddenly spring to life and wrap us in their coils. I feel my knees buckle, but take a deep breath. I stand at the foot of a small wooden ladder, my last ascent.
The executioner rigs up the ropes and the nooses hang like empty hoops. I try not to shake, and close my eyes.
‘To Cato Hopkins!’ a shout rings out. ‘The Nest of Vipers send you their regards!’
I open them. I’d swear the voice was Ezra Spinoza’s. I look for him but the crowd is like one mass of people pressed close together. Then something moves: a boy darts through the crowd, shiny brown hair tied back under a battered three-cornered hat. I know that hat. That’s no boy, never! I know that girl. The rope is placed around my neck. The incense makes my head swim . . . I must be seeing things.
The Ordinary leans close. ‘The diamonds, boy, the diamonds. Be quick, be quick.’
I look again. The boy pulls the hat down over her face.
The Ordinary is growling now. ‘I said, the diamonds.’
I lean close to answer.
Then another sound, a voice I don’t know. A scream from the stands.
‘My purse! It’s gone!’ One shriek follows another.
The Ordinary leans aside and whispers to the executioner. I don’t hear what is said. I am staring at the girl’s mouth, and even though I wear the devil’s rope necklace, I feel a smile as broad as the Thames cross my face. I hold myself upright. I will die like a man. I will die proud and tall for the world, for Addeline to see.
Then there’s a sudden creaking, groaning noise from the wooden stands and we all watch open-mouthed. We are staring – Mary Cut and Come Again, French Peter, the executioner, the Ordinary and all the London flash mob come for a free show – as the whole stand collapses like a house of cards. Wigs, hats, dresses come tumbling down to earth, as petticoats, slippers, fans and gloves fly in all directions. Captain Walker’s face is fury, Lady Elizabeth’s mouth makes as wide an ‘O’ as an open noose. So much screaming. This, I imagine, is hell come to London.
We are all smiling now, we who are to die. I look from one to another, then to the boy in the crowd, but she is gone. A dream, a ghost. I hope we will be ghosts together.
‘Cato, Cato, quickly. Run!’ The ghost whispers in my ear and her breath is not cold – clammy but warm. My whole body tingles, comes alive. The ghost has cut the rope.
‘Run!’ she says, and I try but my legs give way and buckle, once, twice, again. French Peter has already vanished. Mary gone an instant later. Time seems to have stretched into a gliding, slowed-down dance. The magistrate’s men shout and the noise of them is drowned by the screams of the gentry.
They are in two minds: help the gentry or stop us criminals. I feel as if I am moving under water. Pushing through the heavy air, I cannot move. The executioner has seen me, and his eyes narrow as he starts towards us.
Then Addeline puts her shoulder under mine and pulls me through the crowd, which parts and closes behind us like the Red Sea before Moses in the Bible. We are cheered and whistled along, the crowd more excited to see me free than to see us all hang. And then ahead, I see a sight I have seen a thousand times in dreams. Sam and Jack on either side of their sedan chair, scuffing their slippers, ready to break into a run. A run for me.
‘He’s gone! The boy is gone!’ I know Captain Walker’s shout and hear Addeline’s reply.
‘Quick sharp, boys, the devil sees us!’
I turn back and see the man’s face, a mask of anger, nearing with every step, knocking men, women, children out of his way with blows from his silver-topped cane. Surely any moment I will feel his breath against my cheek! A woman steps out of the crowd just behind him. She is in widow’s clothes and veiled. She waves a brick-maker’s bat and yells so loud a banshee would protest. In one instant she lifts it, swings it, then Addeline pulls me round before I see the blow. Behind me I hear the bat connect with bone and know the devil Walker will not follow any more.
As I am bundled inside Sam and Jack’s chair, I take in the faded brocade and leather interior, and before I know it, the rocking and swaying of the chair and the complete and utter comfort – compared to my more recent lodgings – have lulled my soul. I close my eyes and give in to the gentle mirror of death that is only sleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Yellow House in Bath, Michaelmas Day
I HAVE PINCHED myself so often my arm is sore, but I have not yet woken up from what is the sweetest dream.
Mother Hopkins has indeed found a good yellow house, and Jack and Sam have a fine two-wheeler in the coach house and an Arabian so black and shiny you can see your face in her sides. And we are no longer Hopkins here, but Staples, in honour of the diamonds that have provided for our new life.
‘Those diamonds made us safe, Cato,’ Mother says. ‘And you have paid a heavy price. But life is good, and you here makes it one thousand times better. I would not leave any one of my chickens to rot in Newgate, or see them go to hell.’ She hugs me tight against her even though I protest. And I know that any questions about my provenance or her history can wait until judgement day for all I care.
And everyone is kind to me, even Bella, who has Jack’s ring on her finger and his child in her belly. She says: ‘If you’d have gone to heaven on a rope, we’d have called my boy here Cato.’ She pats her stomach.
Which is, I think, the nicest thing she has ever said to me.
I cannot recall much of the journey from London, only to say that we went west by river first and then by carriage. I was weak but my appetite returned speedily and now the thought of rat has long since ceased to make my mouth water.
Mother has called a party for me on Michaelmas, to welcome me home. Addeline sends me to fetch the cob nuts and fruit for the party and she says I’m not to come back until six. She says it is a surprise.
When I return, Quarmy is in the hall with his fiddle and we embrace like brothers. He is contrite. ‘Acce
pt my apology, please, Cato.’
‘It is done. A thousand times over!’ I say honestly.
And we go into the hall. There is Mother and Bella with Jack and Sam. Quarmy strikes up a tune, ‘The Thames Flows Sweetly’, and then I feel behind my eyes a pricking sensation. I think of The Vipers and the sounds of laughter by the fire and the streets running down from Covent Garden to the river, and I have to blink and look away.
Then a girl enters, a beautiful, small-boned, brown-haired girl wearing a dress of the palest grey silk that matches exactly the colour of her eyes. And I know I must have been intoxicated by the Roman incense, for there is no way Addeline could ever be mistaken for a boy.
And we dance, and I don’t want the music to ever stop.
POSTSCRIPT
London Gazette,
22 September 1712
THE TYBURN DISASTER
It is now known that person or persons of ill fame had deliberately, and with evil intent, sawed through the struts of the stand at Tyburn, causing it to collapse and leaving several ladies with bruised ribs, turned ankles and severe hysterics. The Lady Sarah Whippswill also lost her purse, containing a guinea piece.
One, Martha Cotton, a pie-seller of Paddington, swears on oath that the previous evening when she was returning from Shepherd’s Market in Mayfair, she saw a widow woman all in black encouraging two young men to set about the stands with some kind of hacksaw.
In the ensuing confusion following the stand’s collapse, the criminals awaiting the just sentence of Her Majesty’s law took it upon themselves to escape.
Captain Walker, an elderly gentleman of good heart, gave chase but lost the Hopkins boy in the mob, and indeed suffered himself an injury to the forehead of which he has since quite recovered.
The mob were said to be led by the same aforementioned ‘fierce widow woman all in black’, who stirred up and inflamed the crowd to such a degree that they turned upon the magistrate’s men and robbed several more of the ladies and gentlemen who had attended the hanging in good faith. She has not been found and it may be imagined that she was, in fact, no woman at all, but some foreign agitator in women’s dress.
‘French’ Peter Villeneuve was later re-arrested in Spitalfields in the company of a young lady of ill repute. The crone commonly called Mary Cut and Come Again has been sighted in Chelmsford and thereabouts.
Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of the Negro boy called Cato Hopkins, or the Stapleton diamonds, should inform Captain Walker of Greenwich or the Marquess of Byfield, lately of St James, now also of Greenwich. There is a most generous reward for any information that will lead to his capture.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Johnson is a born-and-bred Londoner who no longer lives in London but by the sea. She studied film at Central Saint Martins School of Art; the fantastic time she had there made up for school, which was horrible.
She has written many books for young readers, and her recent novel, Sawbones, published by Walker Books, won the Young Quills Award for historical fiction and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Her other books include Brave New Girl (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books), and A Nest of Vipers, published by Random House Children’s Publishers UK.
Catherine has also written for film, notably the critically acclaimed Bullet Boy, and TV, including Holby City.
She lives with her husband and two geriatric pets: a deluded cat and an ancient tortoise. She enjoys baking cakes and knitting. She was taught how to drive (horses, not cars) by an ex-brewery dray driver in Spitalfields.
ALSO BY CATHERINE JOHNSON:
The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo
Brave New Girl
Sawbones
A NEST OF VIPERS
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17271 9
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
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