Andrew Pepper - The Last Days of Newgate

Pyke had no time to explain his actions to Megan, who was looking at him, her hands covering her mouth. Taking her hand, he pulled her into the yard and, from there, into the derelict house. Others had heard the blast, of course, and were converging on where they thought it had come from. Safely inside the house, he took Megan in his hands and shook her, to stop her from wailing. ‘I didn’t plan to kill him, but in the end I didn’t have a choice. I need you to understand. I also need your help. Do you live with your family?’

At his feet, the little dog was panting and wagging its runty tail. He reached down and patted the dog on its head.

‘Megan?’ He shook her shoulders harder this time.

‘I got my own room,’ she said, finally.

‘Whereabouts.’

‘The Pound.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Eh?’ She seemed distant, still in shock.

‘Megan. Is it far?’

He heard more voices, outside in the back alleyway. Pyke knew it was only a matter of time before they were discovered. They had to find a better place to hide. Through the broken windows at the front of the house, he looked out on to the main square. In the darkness, it made for a miserable view. There were four or five taverns, in addition to the Royal, which overlooked the square, and with the news of the shooting all of them had emptied and the square itself was now bustling with vigilantes.

‘No, it’s not far at all,’ Megan said, in a quiet, almost childlike voice.

In the ebbing candlelight, Pyke sat down next to her and tried to say something that was appropriate to the situation.

Megan’s room was located on the ground floor of a brick-built terraced house. It had a solitary window that looked out on to the street, and a pile of damp straw for a mattress.

‘I was just a wee child when Mammy died.’ She was still shaking. ‘To this day, I don’t know what from. We all knew she was powerful sick but one morning, me da tol’ us the fairies had come in the night and taken her away. Course, even then we knew the fairies were made up but it helped, in a way.’

Pyke touched her face, felt the wetness of her tears on her flesh. She flinched, though not enough to discourage him entirely.

‘Wha’ makes ye think ye can just kill a man and get away wi’ it?’ Her tone was flinty, even aggressive. ‘Ye can’t just shoot a man as powerful as Arnold and get away a’ it.’

‘Rich men bleed the same as poor men.’ As soon as he said it, Pyke knew the remark was facile.

‘Wha’? That’s supposed to make everything all right?’ She sounded angry. ‘I got ye the pistol. As good as killed the man myself.’

‘I’m sorry for involving you, Megan.’ Pyke touched her gently on the cheek. ‘You don’t deserve this. I didn’t plan on shooting him and I didn’t take any pleasure from it. I did it because I had to. That makes me sound callous, I know. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have to be.’

This time she turned to face him. ‘Couldn’t ye have shown him mercy?’

‘And left him in a position to threaten or kill me later?’

Megan stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘I’m a Bow Street Runner in London. Do you know what that is?’

Megan shrugged.

‘Like one of the constables in green here.’

She looked at him. ‘Ye think they’d shoot a man in cold blood?’

‘Five or six years ago, I knew a man, not a wholly bad man, you understand, but troubled in his own way. He was a thief and would provide me with useful bits of information. He was a jealous man with a violent temper and he liked to drink. I would visit him in his lodgings, which he shared with his wife and three young boys. One night, I interrupted a terrible fight; or rather, he was inebriated and chasing after his wife and his three boys with a bottle in one hand and a leather belt in the other. He was accusing her of cuckolding him. The oldest boy couldn’t have been more than three. It was a brutal scene. I broke things up and warned the man if he ever touched his wife or his boys again, I would find out and I’d track him down and kill him. I showed him mercy. Two months later, a Bow Street patrol was called to the lodgings. The woman had been beaten so badly that her face was no longer recognisable. I was told her eyeballs hung from their sockets. She was dead by the time the patrol arrived. The three young boys had been drowned in a metal tub.’ Pyke stopped himself, not wanting to add to Megan’s woe.

But in a hushed voice, she asked, ‘What became of the man?’

Pyke turned away so she could not see his expression. ‘It took me a year to find him but, when I eventually did, I wasn’t as merciful.’

For a while, neither of them spoke. ‘You know they’ll come after ye with everything they got. Police, soldiers, everyone.’

Pyke nodded. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t know whether I’ll be back.’

‘Oh, aye.’ Something — anxiety, fear, pain — registered in her expression. ‘Have ye got a woman a’ home?’ In her sadness, Pyke saw a reflection of his own unfulfilled desires. He thought of Lizzie’s body, two stab wounds in her abdomen.

‘I don’t guess you’d allow anyone to get too close to ye.’

‘I’m sorry I involved you in this.’

‘Sure you are.’ As she said it, some of her bitterness seemed to ebb away. ‘Will you take me wi’ ye, Mr. .?’

‘My name’s Pyke. There are people who’d pay a lot of money for this information.’

‘Just Pyke?’

He nodded and for a while neither of them spoke. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘will ye or not?’ She stared at him, both angry and forlorn, as though she didn’t require an answer.

Later, as Pyke wrapped his arms around Megan, he was vaguely aware he was using her in some undefined manner. But such was his own nocturnally magnified sense of melancholy that he couldn’t help himself. As he pressed himself against her and kissed her ear lobe, he could not tell whether or not her murmurs were signs of grudging approval.

It was still raining the following morning. Billowing clouds clung to the peaks of the hills that ringed the town and dumped their rainwater on to an already saturated landscape. Still, the streets were choked with ordinary people going about their daily business and dead-eyed groups of males silently congregating on street corners carrying brickbats, knives and even swords. It was a Catholic district, Megan had told him, and some of the men there were fixing themselves up for a fight with the Orangemen who were planning their own twelfth of July celebrations. On one corner, men wearing red ribbons attached to their coats were gathering together piles of bolts and half-bricks. On another, someone was scribbling ‘No Cooke’ on the wall in chalk.

Barrack Street was thronging with uniformed soldiers and armed police dressed in dark green. It was also crowded with slow-moving traffic. The sound of horses and carts rattling over the uneven cobbles was drowned only by the excited chatter of a thousand conversations; shopkeepers told their customers in hushed tones about the shooting; road sweepers swapped embellished tales of murder with anyone who cared to listen. Everyone was nonplussed and excited by the news of Arnold’s death. The question that most people seemed to be asking was: had the mill owner been killed by papists? If nothing else, the shooting promised to further spice up an occasion already made fraught by Catholic emancipation.

Disguised as a mill labourer, Pyke moved carefully but unhindered through the crowds. At his heel, the dog panted with excitement. Megan had left by the time he awoke. He found the clothes next to him. Briefly he wondered whether she would be angered by the money from the card game that he had left for her, and whether he had done so in order to appease his own guilt.