Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Trailing gore like a stuck pig, he began to totter in the direction of the river. By the time he was in sight of it, he was almost fainting. It was no use. He would never make it this way. As the trill of police whistles rose up from the distance he slipped back through the alleyways and coach-lanes in the direction of Newgate, crossing the back gardens and stealing clothes from a line. A workman’s overalls. A soldier’s old greatcoat. He wrapped his hands tightly to staunch the bleeding and staggered onwards, light-headed with fear. It occurred to him now that there still was a way. If he could stay on his feet for another five minutes, he would not be caught. He would never be caught. Onwards he lurched, back towards the prison. Its blackness loomed up at him like a ghost-hulk in a story. Back to the prison. Only the prison. When he was close enough to see the bars on its windows, Frederick Hall knew he was a free man now.

  He spent the night in the gateway huddled with the beggars, occasionally banging on the door and pleading to be allowed in. He stayed there for a week, until his wounds had begun to heal.

  The harder he banged on the door, the more they told him to go away.

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE SCHOOLMASTER

  THE FURTHER WICKED DEEDS OF PIUS MULVEY, ALSO KNOWN AS THE MONSTER OF NEWGATE; HIS MOCKERY OF LAWFULNESS AND OTHER DARK MATTERS.

  Accounts of the atrocity were published in the newspapers. Most were edited or heavily censored, the details shaded over as being far too gruesome to be placed where women and children might read them. Some articles described his victim as ‘a married man with a family’; others as ‘an officer of great experience’ or ‘a devout Wesleyan and abstainer from alcohol who had entered public service to succour the unfortunate’. No doubt, Mulvey thought, he had been all those things, as well as many others at the same time. The numerous mentions of his charitable work were hardly surprising. There were plenty of leering curs who would throw you a penny mainly because they liked to watch you bow.

  His own description was printed too, and just like the dead man’s it was accurate, if incomplete: A cold cunning thug; irreversibly corrupted; a ‘lone-wolf’ who will gorge on the unsuspecting. It did not offend him to be described in such terms. It was nothing he hadn’t thought about himself at some point, and anyway, every story needed its villain and its hero. It was just that this story had two villains, not one. The description applied both to killer and victim.

  Posters materialised on the streets of London offering twenty pounds’ reward for his capture or shooting. The sketch which appeared on them showed the face of a murderer, a narrow-eyed, ape-chinned, sneering Beelzebub, but Mulvey could see in it the ghost of his own. The artist had merely done what the ballad-maker does; what is done by the historian, the General and politician, and by everyone who wants to sleep with an easy conscience. He had embellished some details and understated others. You couldn’t really blame him for doing his job.

  Sightings of ‘Frederick Hall, the Monster of Newgate’ began to be reported all over the country – in every conurbation except the East End, where the bludgeoning of a prison officer would have won you the Freedom of Whitechapel. It was to his rowdy old quarter that the murderer returned, slipping back into its labyrinths and catacombs. Pius Mulvey of Ardnagreevagh was his pseudonym now.

  Every day he stole the newspapers to learn of the Monster’s latest appearance. It was rumoured that he had been seen in the northern wilds of Scotland; in the ghettos of Liverpool; in a graveyard near Dover, trying to smash off his manacles with a blacksmith’s chisel. Six of the poor were arrested for his crime, and embarrassingly for the police, who were already hated by the poor, five of them confessed to it under vigorous questioning (the sixth notoriously escaping from Manchester Prison disguised as the chaplain’s mistress).

  Gradually the details of what had happened that night came to be ‘leaked’ to the gutter press. In the guise of condemning their widely read competitors, the quality dailies published them too. The frightful particular of the lines of poetry inscribed in the victim’s blood encouraged frenzied speculation, as their inscriber had carefully calculated they should. What half-way normal man, escaping from prison, would take the time to do such a thing? What could the eerie couplet mean? Was that part of the story true or invented? It began to be whispered around the East End that ‘Frederick Hall’ must be a nom de guerre. The crime had been done by somebody else. The guard had been murdered by a colleague he had cuckolded. The murderer was a member of the Royal Family on a visit, a syphilitic minor Duke who had suddenly gone insane. The slaying was the work of a bizarre Masonic cult to which the slaughtered officer had once belonged. (The latter piece of hearsay garnered even more currency when his widow appeared to confirm in a newspaper interview that her husband had indeed been a member of a Masonic lodge. When denied by the Lodge’s captain in a subsequent interview, it came to be regarded as gospel truth.)

  ‘Freddie Hall’ was an agent provocateur for the Crown. A religious fanatic. A secret agent of the Chartists. ‘Freddie Hall’ had been billeted in the Governor’s house. Permitted to work without his mask. Given books. Allowed to speak. Moved around Newgate like a guest in an hotel. Darker rumours began to circulate. The popular papers stoked up the coals. The prison was now said to be a nest of Satanists. If you gave each letter of the monster’s name its corresponding numerical value and added together the resulting digits, you would come up with a total of 66. And if you appended the 6 you got from the capital F, you would be left with the number of the biblical beast. It was the Tomahawk magazine which first pointed out that ‘Freddie Hall’ was an anagram of Hellfire Dad!

  Emboldened by the fact of his own escape, Mulvey began using the now infamous name as a verb; as a schoolboy might scratch his initials into a penny to see how long it takes before it comes back to him. Before too long, it did come back. To freddie a person was to beat him senseless. Men were being freddied all over the country. Oxford had freddied Cambridge in the annual boat race. One of these days those ungrateful bastard Irish would get the bloody freddying they so thoroughly deserved.1

  Every time he heard a rumour concerning the monster, Mulvey tried his absolute hardest to scotch it, knowing that would encourage the rumour-monger to tell it again, and to tell it even more imaginatively the next time he did so. Men in grog-shops would quietly confide to him that they knew for a fact who had done the awful crime. They had met him, or were related to him, or had once had a drink with him. The wife had a brother who had a chum a screw in Newgate, and he said the whole affair was a cover-up by the Jews, and if you didn’t believe it you could ask him yourself.

  When finally it was suggested in the liberal Morning Chronicle, by a scrupulous young reporter who had interviewed many of the prison’s former inmates, that Frederick Hall, the Monster of Newgate, was in fact a cunning Irishman called Murphy or Malvey, who had contrived his crime to look like the work of a madman, Pius Mulvey left the city and quickly headed north. Punch magazine picked up on the item and scoffed at it. No Paddy would be intelligent enough to think of such a plan. Most of them had only recently swung down from the trees.

  Eighteen months were spent rambling the north of England and the borderlands of Scotland from Berwick to Gretna Green; then the midlands and the eastern part of Wales; then down to western Devon and into Cornwall, where Lancelot and Merlin once walked with the elect. Often the fugitive found work at the harvest: the planting time, too, sometimes was good to him. Picking apples or sowing corn was a pleasant disguise; easy to blend with the hordes of migrant Irishmen who filled England’s meadows at those times of the year. Their accents stirred memories he tried hard to put away. The old nights of singing. The nights with Mary Duane. To think about her brought a guilt he found difficult to bear. He could not endure their company when they started into singing.

  For a month he was a gang-man, digging foundations for railway tracks. One entire winter he spent on the outskirts of Sheffield, where a grain merchant was building a Gothic castle, an enormous roo
fless barn of a place, the size of Westport church. The merchant and his family slept in their current mansion, Mulvey and the other workers in a wigwam on the site. At the first stirring of spring, he quietly moved on. He never stayed in one spot for too long.

  For a while he fell in with Lord Johnny Danger’s Travelling Circus and worked at setting up and taking down the tent. It was work he liked, it was simple and pleasing, and yet it required a rational mind. The tent was a three-dimensional theorem from geometry, a vast conglomeration of ropes and hooks, of poles and couplings and bolts and rivets, with only one correct way to put them all together. Mulvey could see a way of doing it more quickly and was given charge of the tentboys by the grateful ringmaster. Under his direction, this little Irish tinkerman, they learned to fling up the entire framing in less than two hours. He loved to sit looking at the naked tent; the skeleton of the dragon King Arthur might have speared.

  He felt oddly at home among the freaks and bearded ladies, the homunculus clowns and pig-faced wrestlers. To make a living out of perceived inadequacy seemed a brave thing to Mulvey; an effort requiring a measure of true adaptability, which by now was the quality he most esteemed. After a show there were plenty of girls; sometimes a drinking session that went on until dawn. But the happy times were not to last. One day while dismantling a cage he was bitten by a lion and lost the greater part of his left foot. His wound was cauterised by the harlequin who doctored the animals, and a wooden clog carved for him by one of the trapeze-boys, from a broken piece of signboard that had once been made to read THE UGLIEST BEAST IN THE WORLD. The upside-down W seemed like a capital M. ‘M is for Mulvey,’ the trapeze-boy smiled.

  They kept him on for a couple of months but he knew he had become a liability. He wasn’t able to manage the tent work any more, nor was he truly needed to direct it. Others had learned from him how it was done and in fact had found ways to improve on it. Neither could he shovel or sweep or scrub: and he was afraid to go near the shabby old furbag that had mauled him. A Piedmontese acrobat helped him learn to walk again, showed him how to shift his balance and change his centre of gravity. They gave him the position of advance-man for a while; his task was to go ahead of the caravan into the next town and pass out handbills or complimentary tickets. One day in York he had performed his duties and sat on a bridge looking down on the Ouse, waiting for the others to trundle into view. By nightfall they hadn’t, and he knew they wouldn’t now. They hadn’t had the heart to tell him he wasn’t wanted, and for that much at least he felt something like gratitude. But it wouldn’t help him much, and he knew that, too. Once again he was alone in a world of strangers.

  The winter of ’42 was devastatingly harsh, by far the worst in living memory. Snow began to fall in early November, followed by multiple freezing frosts that left the few leaves on the trees like steel-hard blades. The roads of rural England became ramparts of slush, buried under yards of ice and frozen mud. Mulvey tried begging, but it didn’t come easily to him; and country people were unimpressed by his poverty and lameness. Lameness was nothing in the winter of ’42. Half-beggared themselves, they had nothing to steal.

  The new year came but the weather did not change. Soon came February. The weather grew worse. One day near Stoke he happened upon an amiable Welshman, a frighteningly emaciated scarecrow of a man whose legs looked as if you could snap them with a twist of your hand. William Swales was a poor schoolmaster of Mulvey’s own age, on his way to seek a position at the village of Kirkstall near Leeds. He had little in the way of food or refreshment but what morsels he had he was surprisingly willing to share. He was fond of the Irish, he let Mulvey know, because his mother had run a boarding house on Holy Island near Anglesey, a port directly across from Dublin, and she had always found Irishmen scrupulously clean. Swales himself was not so convinced, but the Irishmen had paid for his grub and his tutelage, so he felt he owed their countrymen something of a debt regardless of their hygiene or deportment.

  They spent nineteen days together walking the road towards the north and nineteen cold nights in barns or byres. Often as they trudged the slush-filled byways, they would talk about matters of scholarship. Mulvey found such conversations a surprising pleasure. Though his newfound associate was erudite and eloquent, Mulvey could keep up in general discourse and sometimes even best him.

  Swales was a classicist, an old-school man. He knew music and geography, poetry and history: all manner of legends and ancient tales. But his greatest love was mathematics. Numbers were so mysterious and yet so simple and beautiful. ‘For instance,’ he would say, ‘where would we be without Nine? When you think about it, Mulvey, where would we be? The neatness, man. The utter perfection. It isn’t quite Ten, I’ll grant you that. Ten, after all, is the emperor of numbers. But it’s so much more than poor old Eight; a darling little number in its own right of course, and a pleasant sort of number, but not Nine. You’d go to bed with Eight but you’d marry Nine. The sheer, cunning, marvellously bumsucking, miraculously bloody nineness of it.’

  Mulvey found this variety of patter intriguing but often tried to undermine it purely to while away the hours. Nine was a number much like any other, he would maintain, but not quite as useful as most. You couldn’t use it to count the days of the week, the months of the year, the deadly sins, the decades of the rosary, the counties of Ireland or even the teeth in your dense Welsh head. Swales would scoff and roll his eyes. Nine was magical. Nine was Godly. You could multiply Nine by any other number, and the digits of your answer, if you kept adding them together, would always add up to Nine. (A whole day was passed, from Woodhouse to Doncaster, in Mulvey fruitlessly trying to disprove this contention without having recourse to fractions or percentages, entities Swales regarded as actually evil. ‘Fractions are illegitimate,’ he often averred. ‘The bastards of Outer Mathematica.’)

  He had a more than middling bass singing voice, a thing Mulvey found startling in such a thin man; when he sang he seemed to rumble like an antique cello. He taught Pius Mulvey his favourite song, a nonsensical sea-shanty you could chant as a march, and together they would sing it as they crunched the snowy lanes, the scholar’s sonority putting much-needed gravitas beneath Mulvey’s uncertain and piping tenor.

  One night betimes he went to bed, for he had caught a fever,

  Said he, I am a handsome man, and I’m the gay deceiver.

  His candle just at twelve o’clock, began to burn quite palely,

  A ghost stepped up to his bed-head and said,

  ‘BEHOLD! MISS BAILEY!’

  They would bellow the last three words as loud as they could. It became a contest to see which of them could roar the most ferociously. Often Pius Mulvey let the other man win, simply because he liked him and wanted to please him. He had no ferocity at all, the skinny little schoolmaster. He had never won anything in his life.

  Singing was a way to keep up the spirits, but Mulvey was finding it harder to maintain his composure. His ravaged foot pulsated with agony. The pains in his back were growing worse by the day. One morning he woke up soaked with dew, fingertips numb; nose and eyes streaming. A strange itching sensation was irritating his scalp. When he scratched it, his fingernails came back bloodied. An arrow of horror stabbed through Pius Mulvey. His hair was crawling with lice.

  He wept with shame and loathing as Swales shaved him bald, as he plunged his head into the icy stream by the roadside. Had there been an easy way of dying he would have taken it, then. He did not speak a single word for the next two days.

  ‘We’re nearing Leeds,’ Swales would smile. Everything would be fine when they got to Leeds, as though they were walking the golden highway to Paradise. The Yorkshireman was the decentest cully in England; he would always give a fellow a fair crack of the whip. He was a man of his word, the Yorkshireman was, not a twister or a bounder like some Swales could mention. There would be work for Mulvey when they got to Leeds.

  ‘Maybe find ourselves a couple of good girls, eh, Mulvey, my flower? Settle down. We’ll l
ive like princes. Wine and sweet cake and a pork chop for breakfast. And Queen of Puddings for lunch, by Christ!’

  In the meantime they ate anything edible they could find along the road: roots, leaves, wild herbs and cresses, the few berries not picked off the blackened shrubs by the birds. Sometimes they ate the bony birds themselves; occasionally they were fortunate enough to happen upon a starving grouse. One morning near Ackworth they found a dead cat in the lane and had a fire built and lit in a nettled ditch before each man said what the other had been thinking: he would rather go hungry than eat a cat.

  It was a marvel to Mulvey that to talk about food seemed almost the same thing for Swales as to eat it. It appeared to give him genuine sustenance, and oddly Mulvey never found it an irritation. In time he even began to anticipate today’s feast; the banquet of words his companion would cook up as they tramped the frosted fields and slithery canal paths. ‘A roast swan, Mulvey, and a platter of oozing steaks. Sticks of celery and boiled asparagus. Potatoes the size of your Irish head. Cheeses, by Jesus, and Tuscany Muscadee and a flagon of hot cider to wash it all down.’

  ‘That’s only a titbit,’ Mulvey would say. ‘What about the main dish?’

  ‘Coming to it, coming to it. Hold your horses, man. A wild bugger of a boar with a Bramley in his chops. A bathful of gravy and another one of claret. Oranges from Seville in brandy sauce. Served up by Helen of Troy. In her drawers!’