Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

'Bloody liar,' Venables snarled.

'Silence!'

'It's all right, Mister Carlisle,' the Keeper said to the offended turnkey. 'Some men,' he continued, 'go unwilling to the scaffold and attempt to hinder the necessary work. They do not succeed. If you resist, if you struggle, if you try to inconvenience us, then you will still be hanged, but you will be hanged painfully. It is best to cooperate. It is easier for you and easier for your loved ones who might be watching.'

'Easier for you, you mean,' Venables observed.

'No duties are easy,' the Keeper said sanctimoniously, 'not if they are done with proper assiduity.' He moved to the door. 'The turnkeys will stay here all night. If you require spiritual comfort then they can summon the Ordinary. I wish you a good night.'

Corday spoke for the first time. 'I'm innocent,' he said, his voice close to breaking.

'Yes,' the Keeper said, embarrassed, 'yes indeed.' He found he had nothing more to say on the subject so he just nodded to the turnkeys. 'Good night, gentlemen.'

'Good night, sir,' Mister Carlisle, the senior turnkey, responded, then stood to attention until the Keeper's footsteps had faded down the passage. Then he relaxed and turned to look at the two prisoners. 'You want spiritual bloody comfort,' he growled, 'then you don't disturb me and you don't disturb the Reverend Cotton, but you get down on your bloody knees and disturb Him up there by asking Him for bloody forgiveness. Right, George,' he turned to his companion, 'spades are trumps, is that right?'

In the Birdcage Walk, which was the underground passage that led from the prison to the courtrooms of the Session House, two felons were working with pickaxes and spades. Lanterns had been hung from the passage ceiling and the flagstones, great slabs of granite, had been pried up and stacked to one side. A stench now filled the passageway; a noxious stink of gas, lime and rotted flesh.

'Christ!' one of the felons said, recoiling from the smell.

'You won't find Him down there,' a turnkey said, backing away from the space that had been cleared of its flagstones. When the Birdcage Walk had been built the paving slabs had been laid direct on the London clay, but this clay had a mottled, dark look in the uncertain light of the guttering lanterns.

'When was this bit of the passage last used?' one of the prisoners asked.

'Got to be two years ago,' the turnkey said, but sounded dubious, 'at least two years.'

'Two years?' the prisoner said scornfully. 'They're still bloody breathing down there.'

'Just get it over with, Tom,' the turnkey encouraged him, 'then you get this.' He held up a bottle of brandy.

'God bloody help us,' Tom said gloomily, then took a deep breath and struck down with his spade.

He and his companion were digging the graves for the two men who would be executed in the morning. Some of the bodies were taken for dissection, but hungry as the anatomists were for bodies they could not take them all and so most were brought here and put into unmarked graves. Although the passage was short and the prison buried the corpses in quicklime to hasten their decomposition, and though they dug up the floor in a strict rotation so that no part of it was excavated too soon after a burial, still the picks and spades struck down into bones and rotting, deliquescent clay. The whole floor was buckled, looking as though it had been deformed by an earthquake, but in truth it was merely the flagstones settling as the bodies decomposed beneath. Yet, though the passage stank and the clay was choked with unrotted flesh, still more corpses were brought and thrust down into the filth.

Tom, ankle-deep in the hole, brought out a yellow skull that he rolled down the passageway. 'He looks in the pink, don't he?' he said, and the two turnkeys and the second prisoner began to laugh and somehow could not stop.

Mister Botting ate lamb chops, boiled potatoes, and turnips. The Keeper's kitchen provided a syrup pudding to follow, then a tin mug of strong tea and a beaker of brandy. Afterwards Mister Botting slept.

Two watchmen stood guard on the scaffold. Just after midnight the skies clouded over and a brief shower blew chill from Ludgate Hill. A handful of folk, eager for the best positions by the railings that fenced off the gallows, were sleeping on the cobbles and were woken by the rain. They grumbled, shrugged deeper into their blankets and tried to sleep again.

Dawn came early. The clouds shredded, leaving a pearl-white sky laced with the frayed brown streaks of coal smoke. London stirred.

And in Newgate there would be devilled kidneys for breakfast.

CHAPTER TEN

Sally's horse, a gelding, had fallen lame just after Sunday's nightfall, then Berrigan's right boot had lost its sole, so they tied the gelding to a tree, Berrigan scrambled onto the back of the third horse and Sandman, whose boots were just holding together, led the two girls' horses. 'If we don't return all the horses to the Seraphim Club,' Sandman remarked, worrying about the beast they had simply abandoned, 'they could accuse us of horse thieving.'

'They could hang us for that,' Berrigan retorted, then grinned, 'but I wouldn't worry about it, Captain. With what I know about the Seraphim Club they ain't going to accuse us of anything.'

The remaining three horses were so bone tired that Sandman reckoned they would probably have made faster progress by leaving them behind, but Meg had resigned herself to telling the partial truth and he did not want to disturb her by suggesting she walk, especially after she began complaining again, saying her chickens would be eaten by the foxes, but then Sally had begun singing and that stopped the whining. Sally's first song was a soldier's favourite, 'The Drum Major', that told of a girl so in love with her redcoat that she followed him into the regiment where she became the drum major and escaped detection till she took a bath in a stream and was almost raped by another soldier. She escaped him, the officers discovered her identity and insisted she marry her lover. 'I like stories that end happily,' Berrigan had remarked, then laughed when Sally began her second song, which was also a soldier's favourite, but this one was about a girl who did not escape and Sandman was somewhat shocked, but not too surprised, that Sally knew all the words, and Berrigan sang along and Meg actually laughed when the Colonel took his turn and failed to perform, and Sally had still been singing when the robin redbreast pounced on them from behind a hollow tree beside the road.

The patrolling horseman suspected that the four bedraggled travellers had stolen the three carriage horses, in which he was not far wrong, and he faced them with one of his pistols drawn. The gun's muzzle and the steel buttons on his uniform blue coat and red waistcoat shone in the moonlight. 'In the name of the King,' he said, not wanting to be mistaken for a highwayman, 'stand! Who are you? And where are you travelling?'

'Your name?' Sandman had snapped the question back. 'Your name, rank? What regiment did you serve in?' The redbreasts were all men who had served in the cavalry. None was young, for it was reckoned that a young man would be too amenable to temptation, and so steadier, older and well-recommended cavalrymen were hired to try to keep the thieves off the King's highways.

'I ask the questions here,' the redbreast had retorted, but tentatively because there was an undeniable authority in Sandman's voice. Sandman might be in dusty, crumpled clothes, but he had plainly been an officer.

'Put the gun up! Quickly, man!' Sandman said, deliberately talking to the redbreast as though he was still in the army. 'I'm on official business, authorised by Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, and this paper bears his seal and signature, and if you cannot read then you had better take us right now to your magistrate.'