Gallows Thief

‘You must certainly stay for the breakfast,’ the Sheriff said, as the Ordinary recited the prayers for the burial of the dead. ‘They’re very good devilled kidneys.’

‘I could get a good breakfast at home,’ Sir Henry said. ‘No, I came because Botting has petitioned for an assistant and we thought, before justifying the expenditure, that we should judge for ourselves whether or not one was needed. You know Mister Logan?’

‘The alderman and I are old acquaintances,’ the Sheriff said, shaking Logan’s hand. ‘The advantage of giving the man an assistant,’ he added to Sir Henry in a low voice, ‘is that his replacement is already trained. And if there is trouble on the scaffold, well, two men are better than one. It’s good to see you, Sir Henry, and you, Mister Logan.’ He composed his face and turned to Botting. ‘Are you ready, Botting?’

‘Quite ready, sir, quite ready,’ Botting said, scooping up the four white bags and thrusting them into a pocket.

‘We can talk at breakfast,’ the Sheriff said to Sir Henry. ‘Devilled kidneys! I smelt them cooking as I came through.’ He hauled a turnip watch from a fob pocket and clicked open its lid. ‘Time to go, I think, time to go.’

The Sheriff led the procession out of the Association Room and across the narrow Press Yard. The Reverend Cotton had a hand on the girl’s neck, guiding her as he read the burial service aloud, the same service that he had intoned to the condemned prisoners in the chapel the day before. The four prisoners had been in the famous Black Pew, grouped about the coffin on the table, and the Ordinary had read them their burial service and then preached that they were being punished for their sin as God had decreed men and women should be punished. He had described the waiting flames of hell, told them of the devilish torments that were even then being prepared for them, and he had reduced the girl and one of the two murderers to tears. The chapel’s gallery had been filled with folk who had paid one shilling and sixpence apiece to witness the four doomed souls at their last church service.

The prisoners in the cells overlooking the Press Yard shouted protests and farewells as the procession passed. Sir Henry was alarmed by the noise and surprised to hear a woman’s voice calling insults. ‘Surely men and women don’t share the cells?’ he asked.

‘Not any longer,’ Logan said, then saw where his friend was looking, ‘and I assume she’s no prisoner, but a lady of the night, Sir Henry. They pay what’s called “bad money” to the turnkeys so they can come and earn their living here.’

‘Bad money? Good Lord!’ Sir Henry looked pained. ‘And we allow that?’

‘We ignore it,’ Logan said quietly, ‘on the understanding that it’s better to have whores in the prison than prisoners rioting.’ The Sheriff had led the procession down a flight of stone stairs into a tunnel that ran beneath the main prison to emerge at the Lodge, and the gloomy passage passed an empty cell with an open door. ‘That’s where they spent their last night,’ Logan pointed into the cell. The doomed girl was swaying and a turnkey took her elbow and hurried her along.

‘“We brought nothing into this world,”’ the Reverend Cotton’s voice echoed from the tunnel’s damp granite walls, ‘“and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the Name of the Lord.”’

‘I didn’t steal anything!’ the girl suddenly screamed.

‘Quiet, lass, quiet,’ the Keeper growled. All the men were nervous. They wanted the prisoners to cooperate and the girl was very close to hysteria.

‘“Lord, let me know mine end,”’ the Ordinary prayed, ‘“and the number of my days.”’

‘Please!’ the girl wailed. ‘No, no! Please.’ A second turnkey closed on her in case she collapsed and had to be carried the rest of the way, but she stumbled on.

‘If they struggle too much,’ Logan told Sir Henry, ‘then they’re tied to a chair and hung that way, but I confess I haven’t seen that happen in many many years, though I do remember that Langley had to do it once.’

‘Langley?’

‘Botting’s predecessor.’

‘You’ve seen a number of these things?’ Sir Henry asked.

‘A good few,’ Logan admitted. ‘And you?’

‘Never. I just conceived today as a duty.’ Sir Henry watched the prisoners climb the steps at the end of the tunnel and wished he had not come. He had never seen a violent death. Rider Sandman, who was to have been his son-in-law, had seen much violent death because he had been a soldier and Sir Henry rather wished the younger man was here. He had always liked Sandman. Such a shame about his family.

At the top of the stairs was the Lodge, a cavernous entrance chamber that gave access to the street called the Old Bailey. The door that led to the street was the Debtor’s Door and it stood open, but no daylight showed for the scaffold had been built directly outside. The noise of the crowd was loud now and the prison bell was muffled, but the bell of Saint Sepulchre’s on the far side of Newgate Street was also tolling for the imminent deaths.

‘Gentlemen?’ The Sheriff, who was now in charge of the morning’s proceedings, turned to the breakfast guests. ‘If you’ll climb the steps to the scaffold, gentlemen, you’ll find chairs to right and left. Just leave two at the front for us, if you’d be so kind?’

Sir Henry, as he passed through the towering arch of the high Debtor’s Door, saw in front of him the dark hollow underside of the scaffold and he thought how it was like being behind and underneath a stage supported by raw wooden beams. Black baize shrouded the planks at the front and side of the stage which meant that the only light came from the chinks between the timbers that formed the scaffold’s elevated platform. Wooden stairs climbed to Sir Henry’s right, going up into the shadows before turning sharply left to emerge in a roofed pavilion that stood at the scaffold’s rear. The stairs and the platform all looked very substantial and it was hard to remember that the scaffold was only erected the day before an execution and dismantled immediately after. The roofed pavilion was there to keep the honoured guests dry in inclement weather, but today the morning sun shone on Old Bailey and was bright enough to make Sir Henry blink as he turned the corner of the stairs and emerged into the pavilion.

A huge cheer greeted the guests’ arrival. No one cared who they were, but their appearance presaged the coming of the prisoners. Old Bailey was crowded. Every window that overlooked the street was crammed and there were even folk on the rooftops.

‘Ten shillings,’ Logan said.

‘Ten shillings?’ Sir Henry was bemused again.

‘To rent a window,’ Logan explained, ‘unless it’s a celebrated crime being punished in which case the price goes up to two or even three guineas.’ He pointed at a tavern that stood directly opposite the scaffold. ‘The Magpie and Stump has the most expensive windows because you can see right down into the pit where they drop.’ He chuckled. ‘You can rent a telescope from the landlord and watch ’em die. But we, of course, get the best view.’

Sir Henry wanted to sit in the shadows at the back of the pavilion, but Logan had already taken one of the front chairs and Sir Henry just sat. His head was ringing with the terrible noise that came from the street. It was, he decided, just like being on a theatre’s stage. He was overwhelmed and dazzled. So many people! Everywhere faces looking up at the black-draped platform. The scaffold proper, in front of the roofed pavilion, was thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide and topped by a great beam that ran from the pavilion’s roof to the platform’s end. Black iron butcher’s hooks were screwed into the beam’s underside and a ladder was propped against it.

A second ironic cheer greeted the sheriffs in their fur-trimmed robes. Sir Henry was sitting on a hard wooden chair that was slightly too small and desperately uncomfortable. ‘It’ll be the girl first,’ Logan said.

‘Why?’

‘She’s the one they’ve come to see,’ Logan said. He was evidently enjoying himself and Sir Henry was surprised by that. How little we know our friends, he thought, then he again wished that Rider Sandman was here because he suspected that the soldier would not approve of death made this easy. Or had Sandman been hardened to violence?

‘I should let him marry her,’ he said.

‘What?’ Logan had to raise his voice because the crowd was shouting for the prisoners to be brought on.

‘Nothing,’ Sir Henry said.

‘“I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,”’ the Reverend Cotton’s voice grew louder as he climbed the stairs behind the girl, ‘“while the ungodly is in my sight.”’

A turnkey came first, then the girl, and she was awkward on the steps because her legs were still not used to being without irons and the turnkey had to steady her when she half tripped on the top step.

Then the crowd saw her. ‘Hats off! Hats off!’ The shout began at the front and echoed back. It was not respect that caused the cry, but rather because the taller hats of the folk in front obscured the view for those behind. The roar of the crowd was massive, crushing, and then the people surged forward so that the City Marshal and his men who protected the scaffold raised their staves and spears. Sir Henry felt besieged by noise and by the thousands of people with open mouths, shouting. There were as many women as men in the crowd. Sir Henry saw a respectable-looking matron stooping to a telescope in one of the windows of the Magpie and Stump. Beside her a man was eating bread and fried egg. Another woman had opera glasses. A pie-seller had set up his wares in a doorway. Pigeons, red kites and sparrows circled the sky in panic because of the noise. Sir Henry, his mind swimming, suddenly noticed the four open coffins that lay on the scaffold’s edge. They were made of rough pine and were unplaned and resinous. The girl’s mouth was open and her face, which had been pale, was now red and distorted. Tears ran down her cheeks as Botting took her by a pinioned elbow and led her onto the planks at the platform’s centre. That centre was a trapdoor and it creaked under their weight. The girl was shaking and gasping as Botting positioned her under the beam at the platform’s far end. Once she was in place Botting took a cotton bag from his pocket and pulled it over her hair so that it looked like a hat. She screamed at his touch and tried to twist away from him, but the Reverend Cotton put a hand on her arm as the hangman took the rope from her shoulders and clambered up the ladder. He was heavy and the rungs creaked alarmingly. He slotted the small spliced eye over one of the big black butcher’s hooks, then climbed awkwardly back down, red-faced and breathing hard. ‘I need an assistant, don’t I?’ he grumbled. ‘Ain’t fair. Man always has an assistant. Don’t fidget, missy! Go like a Christian!’ He looked the girl in the eyes as he pulled the noose down around her head. He tightened the slip knot under her left ear, then gave the rope a small jerk as if to satisfy himself that it would take her weight. She gasped at the jerk, then screamed because Botting had his hands on her hair. ‘Keep still, girl!’ he snarled, then pulled down the white cotton bag so that it covered her face.

She screamed. ‘I want to see!’

Sir Henry closed his eyes.

‘“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday.”’ The Ordinary had raised his voice so he could be heard above the crowd’s seething din. The second prisoner, the highwayman, was on the scaffold now and Botting stood him beside the girl, crammed the bag on his head and climbed the ladder to fix the rope. ‘“O teach us to number our days,”’ the Reverend Cotton read in a singsong voice, ‘“that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”’

‘Amen,’ Sir Henry said fervently, too fervently.

‘Here,’ Logan nudged Sir Henry, whose eyes were still closed, and held out a flask. ‘Good brandy. Smuggled.’

The highwayman had flowers in his buttonhole. He bowed to the crowd that cheered him, but his bravado was forced for Sir Henry could see the man’s leg trembling and his bound hands twitching. ‘Head up, darling,’ he told the girl beside him.

Children were in the crowd. One girl, she could not have been a day over six years of age, sat on her father’s shoulders and sucked her thumb. The crowd cheered each arriving prisoner. A group of sailors with long tarred pigtails shouted at Botting to pull down the girl’s dress. ‘Show us her bubbies, Jemmy! Go on, flop ’em out!’

‘Be over soon,’ the highwayman told the girl, ‘you and I’ll be with the angels, girl.’

‘I didn’t steal anything!’ the girl wailed.

‘Admit your guilt! Confess your sins!’ the Reverend Cotton urged the four prisoners, who were all now lined up on the trapdoor. The girl was furthest from Sir Henry and she was shaking. All four had cotton bags over their faces and all had nooses about their necks. ‘Go to God with a clean breast!’ the Ordinary urged them. ‘Cleanse your conscience, abase yourselves before God!’

‘Go on, Jemmy!’ a sailor called. ‘Strip the frow’s frock off!’

The crowd shouted for silence, hoping there would be some final words.

‘I did nothing!’ the girl screamed.

‘Go to hell, you fat bastard,’ one of the murderers snarled at the Ordinary.

‘See you in hell, Cotton!’ the highwayman called to the priest.

‘Now, Botting!’ The Sheriff wanted it done quickly and Botting scuttled to the back of the scaffold where he stooped and hauled a wooden bolt the size of a rolling pin from a plank. Sir Henry tensed himself, but nothing happened.

‘The bolt,’ Logan explained softly, ‘is merely a locking device. He has to go below to release the trap.’

Sir Henry said nothing. He shrank aside as Botting brushed past him to go down the stairs at the back of the pavilion. Only the four condemned and the Ordinary were now out in the sunlight. The Reverend Cotton stood between the coffins, well clear of the trapdoor. ‘“For when thou art angry all our days are gone,”’ he chanted, ‘“we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”’

‘Fat bastard, Cotton!’ the highwayman shouted. The girl was swaying and under the thin cotton that hid her face Sir Henry could see her mouth was opening and closing. The hangman had vanished under the platform and was clambering through the beams that supported the scaffold to reach a rope that pulled out the baulk of timber that supported the trapdoor.

‘“Turn thee again, O Lord!”’ The Reverend Cotton had raised one hand to the heavens and his voice to the skies. ‘“At the last and be gracious unto thy servants.”’

Botting jerked the rope and the timber shifted, but did not slide all the way. Sir Henry, unaware that he was holding his breath, saw the trapdoor twitch. The girl sobbed and her legs gave way so that she collapsed on the still-closed trapdoor. The crowd uttered a collective yelp that died away when they realised the bodies had not dropped, then Botting gave the rope an almighty heave and the timber shifted and the trapdoor swung down to let the four bodies fall. It was a short drop, only five or six feet, and it killed none of them. ‘It was quicker when they used the cart at Tyburn,’ Logan said, leaning forward, ‘but we get more Morris this way.’

Sir Henry did not need to ask what Logan meant. The four were twitching, jerking and twisting. They were doing the Morris dance of the scaffold, the hempen measure, the dying capers that came from the stifling, killing, throttling struggles of the doomed. Botting, hidden down in the scaffold’s well, leapt aside as the girl’s bowels released themselves. Sir Henry saw none of it for his eyes were closed, and he did not even open them when the crowd cheered itself hoarse because Botting, using the highwayman’s pinioned elbows as a stirrup, climbed up to squat like a black toad on the man’s shoulders to hasten his dying. The highwayman had paid Botting so he would die more quickly and Botting was keeping faith with the bribe.

‘“Behold, I show you a mystery.’” The Ordinary ignored the grinning Botting, who clung like a monstrous hump on the dying man’s back. ‘“We shall not all sleep,”’ Cotton intoned, ‘“but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”’

‘There’s the first one gone,’ Logan said, as Botting clambered down from the corpse’s back, ‘and I’ve got a mortal appetite now, by God, I have an appetite!’

Three of the four still danced, but ever more feebly. The dead highwayman swung with canted head as Botting hauled on the girl’s ankles. Sir Henry smelt dung, human dung, and he could suddenly take no more of the spectacle and so he stumbled down the scaffold steps into the cool, dark stone shelter of the Lodge. He vomited there, then gasped for breath and waited, listening to the crowd and to the creak of the scaffold’s timbers, until it was time to go for breakfast.

For devilled kidneys. It was a tradition.

1

Rider Sandman was up late that Monday morning because he had been paid seven guineas to play for Sir John Hart’s eleven against a Sussex team, the winners to share a bonus of a hundred guineas, and Sandman had scored sixty-three runs in the first innings and thirty-two in the second, and those were respectable scores by any standards, but Sir John’s eleven had still lost. That had been on the Saturday and Sandman, watching the other batsmen swing wildly at ill-bowled balls, had realised that the game was being thrown. The bookmakers were being fleeced because Sir John’s team had been expected to win handily, not least because the famed Rider Sandman was playing for it, but someone must have bet heavily on the Sussex eleven which, in the event, won the game by an innings and forty-eight runs. Rumour said that Sir John himself had bet against his own side and Sir John would not meet Sandman’s eyes, which made the rumour believable.

So Captain Rider Sandman walked back to London.

He walked because he refused to share a carriage with men who had accepted bribes to lose a match. He loved cricket, he was good at it, he had once, famously, scored a hundred and fourteen runs for an England eleven playing against the Marquess of Canfield’s picked men and lovers of the game would travel many miles to see Captain Rider Sandman, late of His Majesty’s 52nd Regiment of Foot, perform at the batting crease. But he hated bribery and he detested corruption and he possessed a temper, and that was why he fell into a furious argument with his treacherous team-mates and, when they slept that night in Sir John’s comfortable house and rode back to London in comfort next morning, Sandman did neither. He was too proud.

Proud and poor. He could not afford the stagecoach fare, nor even a common carrier’s fare, because in his anger he had thrown his match fee back into Sir John Hart’s face and that, Sandman conceded, had been a stupid thing to do for he had earnt that money honestly, yet even so it had felt dirty. So he walked home, spending the Saturday night in a hayrick somewhere near Hickstead and trudging all that Sunday until the right sole was almost clean off his boot. He reached Drury Lane very late that night and he dropped his cricket gear on the floor of his rented attic room and stripped himself naked and fell into the narrow bed and slept. Just slept. And was still sleeping when the trapdoor dropped in Old Bailey and the crowd’s cheer sent a thousand wings startling up into the smoky London sky. Sandman was still dreaming at half past eight. He was dreaming, twitching and sweating. He called out in incoherent alarm, his ears filled with the thump of hooves and the crash of muskets and cannon, his eyes astonished by the hook of sabres and slashes of straight-bladed swords, and this time the dream was going to end with the cavalry smashing through the thin red-coated ranks, but then the rattle of hooves melded into a rush of feet on the stairs and a sketchy knock on his flimsy attic door. He opened his eyes, realised he was no longer a soldier, and then, before he could call out any response, Sally Hood was in the room. For a second Sandman thought the flurry of bright eyes, calico dress and golden hair was a dream, then Sally laughed. ‘I bleeding woke you. Gawd, I’m sorry!’ She turned to go.

‘It’s all right, Miss Hood.’ Sandman fumbled for his watch. He was sweating. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Saint Giles just struck half after eight,’ she told him.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Sandman could not believe he had slept so late. He had nothing to get up for, but the habit of waking early had long taken hold. He sat up in bed, remembered he was naked and snatched the thin blanket up to his chest. ‘There’s a gown hanging on the door, Miss Hood, would you be so kind?’

Sally found the dressing gown. ‘It’s just that I’m late,’ she explained her sudden appearance in his room, ‘and my brother’s brushed off and I’ve got work, and the dress has to be hooked up, see?’ She turned her back, showing a length of bare spine. ‘I’d have asked Mrs Gunn to do it,’ Sally went on, ‘only there’s a hanging today so she’s off watching. Gawd knows what she can see considering she’s half blind and all drunk, but she does like a good hanging and she ain’t got many pleasures left at her age. It’s all right, you can get up now, I’ve got me peepers shut.’

Sandman climbed out of bed warily for there was only a limited area in his tiny attic room where he could stand without banging his head on the beams. He was a tall man, an inch over six foot, with pale-gold hair, blue eyes and a long, raw-boned face. He was not conventionally handsome, his face was too rugged for that, but there was a capability and a kindness in his expression that made him memorable. He pulled on the dressing gown and tied its belt. ‘You say you’ve got work?’ he asked Sally. ‘A good job, I hope?’

‘Ain’t what I wanted,’ Sally said, ‘because it ain’t on deck.’

‘Deck?’

‘Stage, Captain,’ she said. She called herself an actress and perhaps she was, though Sandman had seen little evidence that the stage had much use for Sally who, like Sandman, clung to the very edge of respectability and was held there, it seemed, by her brother, a very mysterious young man who worked strange hours. ‘But it ain’t bad work,’ she went on, ‘and it is respectable.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ Sandman said, sensing that Sally did not really want to talk about it, and he wondered why she sounded so defensive about a respectable job and Sally wondered why Sandman, who was palpably a gentleman, was renting an attic room in the Wheatsheaf Tavern in London’s Drury Lane. Down on his luck, that was for sure, but even so, the Wheatsheaf? Perhaps he knew no better. The Wheatsheaf was famously a flash tavern, a home for every kind of thief from pickpockets to petermen, from burglars to shop-breakers, and it seemed to Sally that Captain Rider Sandman was as straight as a ramrod. But he was a nice man, Sally thought. He treated her like a lady, and though she had only spoken to him a couple of times as they edged past each other in the inn’s corridors, she had detected a kindness in him. Enough kindness to let her presume on his privacy this Monday morning. ‘And what about you, Captain?’ she asked. ‘You working?’

‘I’m looking for employment, Miss Hood,’ Sandman said, and that was true, but he was not finding any. He was too old to be an apprentice clerk, not qualified to work in the law or with money, and too squeamish to accept a job driving slaves in the sugar islands.

‘I heard you was a cricketer,’ Sally said.

‘I am, yes.’

‘A famous one, my brother says.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Sandman said modestly.

‘But you can earn money at that, can’t you?’

‘Not as much as I need,’ Sandman said, and then only in summer and if he was willing to endure the bribes and corruption of the game, ‘and I have a small problem here. Some of the hooks are missing.’

‘That’s ’cos I never get round to mending them,’ Sally said, ‘so just do what you can.’ She was staring at his mantel on which was a pile of letters, their edges frayed suggesting they had all been sent a long time in the past. She swayed forward slightly and managed to see that the topmost envelope was addressed to a Miss someone or other, she could not make out the name, but the one word revealed that Captain Sandman had been jilted and had his letters returned. Poor Captain Sandman, Sally thought.