Gallows Thief

by Bernard Cornwell

  Botting did not like that judder. No one had been standing on the trapdoor, yet still the beam had been reluctant to move, so he opened his bag and took out a small jar of tallow that had been a gift from the chandler. He climbed the wooden framework and greased the beam until its surface felt slippery, then he raised the trapdoor and clumsily pushed the beam back into place. Two rats watched him and he growled at them. He clambered down to the Old Bailey’s cobbles and pulled the rope again and this time the beam slid easily and the trapdoor thumped down to bang against two of the upright supports. ‘Bloody works, eh?’ Botting said to the rats that were quite unafraid of his presence.

  He replaced the trapdoor and beam, put the tallow back in his bag and climbed to the top of the scaffold where he first replaced the locking peg, then gingerly tested the firmness of the trapdoor by putting one foot on its planks and slowly easing his weight onto that leg. He knew it was secure, knew it would not give way beneath him, yet still he tested it. He did not want to become London’s laughing stock by pushing a prisoner onto a trap that gave way before the rope was round the man’s neck. He grinned at the thought, then, confident that all was ready, he went to the Debtor’s Door and knocked loudly. He would be given dinner in the prison, then provided with a small bedroom above the Lodge. ‘Got any rat poison?’ he asked the turnkey who opened the door. ‘Only there’s rats the size of bleeding foxes under the scaffold. That platform can’t have been up more than two hours yet there’s already rats there.’

  ‘Rats everywhere,’ the turnkey said, then locked the door.

  Beneath them, even though it was a warm evening, the cellars of Newgate Prison held a chill and so, before Charles Corday and the other condemned man were put into the death cell, a coal fire was lit in the small hearth. The chimney did not draw well at first and the cell filled with smoke, but then the flue heated and the air cleared, though the stench of coal smoke stayed. A metal chamber pot was put in a corner of the cell, though no screen was provided for privacy. Two iron cots with straw palliasses and thin blankets were put by the wall and a table and chairs were provided for the turnkeys who would watch the prisoners through the night. Lamps were hung from iron hooks. At dusk the two men who would die in the morning were brought to the cell and given a meal of pease pottage, pork chops and boiled cabbage. The Keeper came to see them during their supper and he thought, as he waited for them to finish their meal, that the two men were so utterly dissimilar. Charles Corday was slight, pale and nervous while Reginald Venables was a hulking brute with a lavish dark beard and a grimly hard face, yet it was Corday who had committed murder while Venables was being hanged for the theft of a watch.

  Corday merely picked at his food then, his leg irons clanking, went to his cot where he lay down and gazed wide-eyed at the damp stones of the vaulted ceiling. ‘Tomorrow …’ the Keeper began as Venables finished his meal.

  ‘I hope that damn preacher won’t be there,’ Venables interrupted.

  ‘Silence while the Keeper’s talking,’ the senior turnkey growled.

  ‘The preacher will be there,’ the Keeper said, ‘to offer what spiritual comfort he can.’ He waited as the turnkey removed the spoons from the table. ‘Tomorrow,’ he started again, ‘you will be taken from here to the Association Room where your irons will be struck and your arms pinioned. You will already have been given breakfast, but there will be brandy for you in the Association Room and I advise you to drink it. After that we walk to the street.’ He paused. Venables watched him with a resentful eye while Corday seemed oblivious. ‘It is customary,’ the Keeper went on, ‘to slip the hangman a coin because he can make your passage to the next world less painful. Such an emolument is not something of which I can approve, but he is an officer of the city, not of the jail, and so I can do nothing to end the practice. But even without such an emolument you will find that your punishment is not painful and is soon done.’

  ‘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 prised 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 sca
ffold. 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.

  10

  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.’

  The redbreast carefully lowered the flint of the pistol, then slid the weapon into its saddle holster. ‘Lost your coach, sir?’

  ‘Broke a wheel thirty miles back,’ Sandman said. ‘Now, are you going to read this letter or would you rather take us to your magistrate?’

  ‘I’m sure everything’s in order, sir.’ The patrolling redbreast did not want to admit that he could not read and certainly did not want to disturb his supervising magistrate who would, by now, have sat down to a lavish supper, and so he just moved his horse aside to let Sandman and his three companions pass. Sandman supposed he could have insisted on being taken to the magistrate and used his letter from the Home Office to arrange another carriage or, at the very least, four fresh saddle horses, but that would all have taken time, a lot of time, and it would have disturbed Meg’s fragile equanimity, and so they walked on until, well after midnight, they trailed across London Bridge and so to the Wheatsheaf where Sally took Meg to her own room and Sandman let Berrigan use his room while he collapsed in the back parlour, not in one of the big chairs, but on the wooden floor so that he would wake frequently, and it was when the bells of Saint Giles were ringing six in the morning that he dragged himself upstairs, woke Berrigan and told him to stir the girls from their beds. Then he shaved, found his cleanest shirt, brushed his coat and washed the dirt from his disintegrating boots before, at half past six, with Berrigan, Sally and a very reluctant Meg in tow, he set out for Great George Street and the end, he hoped, of his investigation.

  Lord Alexander Pleydell and his friend, Lord Christopher Carne, almost gagged when they entered the Press Yard for the smell was terrible, worse than the reek of the sewer outflows where the Fleet Ditch joined the Thames. The turnkey who was escorting them chuckled. ‘I don’t notice the smell no more, my lords,’ he said, ‘but I do suppose it’s mortal bad in its way, mortal bad. Mind the steps here, my lords, do mind ’em.’

  Lord Alexander gingerly took the handkerchief away from his nose. ‘Why is it called the Press Yard?’

  ‘In days gone by, my lord, this is where the prisoners was pressed. They was squashed, my lord. Weighted down by stones, my lord, to persuade them to tell the truth. We don’t do it any longer, more’s the pity, and as a consequence they lies like India rugs.’

  ‘You squeezed them to death?’ Lord Alexander asked, shocked.

  ‘Oh no, my lord, not to death. Not to death, not unless they made a mistake and piled too many rocks on!’ He chuckled, finding the notion amusing. ‘No, my lord, they just got squashed till they told the truth. It’s a fair persuader to a man or woman to tell the truth, my lord, if they’re carrying half a ton of rocks on their chests!’ The turnkey chuckled again. He was a fat man with leather breeches, a stained coat, and a stout billy club. ‘Hard to breathe,’ he said, still amused, ‘very hard to breathe.’

  Lord Christopher Carne shuddered at the terrible stench. ‘Are there no drains?’ he enquired testily.

  ‘The prison is very up to date, my lord,’ the turnkey hastened to assure him, ‘very up to date, it is, with the proper drains and proper close stools. Truth is, my lord, we spoils them, we does, we spoils them, but they is filthy animals. They fouls their own nest what we give them clean and tidy.’ He put down his billy club as he closed and bolted the barred gate by which they had entered the yard that was long, high and narrow. The stones of the yard seemed damp, even on this dry day, as though the misery and fear of centuries had soaked into the granite and could not be wrung out.

  ‘If you no longer press the prisoners,’ Lord Alexander enquired, ‘what is the yard used for instead?’

  ‘The condemned have the freedom of the Press Yard, sir, during the daylight hours,’ the turnkey said, ‘which is an example, my lords, of how kindly disposed towards ’em we are. We spoils them, we do. There was a time when a prison was a prison, not a glorified tavern.’

  ‘Liquor is sold here?’ Lord Alexander enquired acidly.

  ‘Not any longer, my lord. Mister Brown, that’s the Keeper, my lord, closed down the grog shop on account that the scum was getting lushed and disorderly, my lord, but not that it makes any difference ’cos now they just have their liquor sent in from the Lamb or the Magpie and Stump.’ He cocked an ear to the sound of a church bell tolling the quarter hour. ‘Bless me! Saint Sepulchre’s telling us it’s a quarter to seven already! If you turn to your left, my
lords, you can join Mister Brown and the other gentlemen in the Association Room.’

  ‘The Association Room?’ Lord Alexander enquired.

  ‘Where the condemned associate, my lord, during the daylight hours,’ the turnkey explained, ‘except on high days and holidays like today, and those windows to your left, my lord, those are the salt boxes.’

  Lord Alexander, despite his opposition to the hanging of criminals, found himself curiously fascinated by everything he saw and now gazed at the fifteen barred windows. ‘That name,’ he said, ‘salt boxes. You know its derivation?’

  ‘Nor its inclination, my lord,’ the turnkey laughed, ‘only I suspects that they’re called salt boxes on account of being stacked up like boxes.’

  ‘The salt b-boxes are what?’ Lord Christopher, who was very pallid this morning, asked.

  ‘Really, Kit,’ Lord Alexander said with uncalled-for asperity, ‘everyone knows they’re where the condemned spend their last days.’

  ‘The devil’s waiting rooms, my lord,’ the turnkey said, then pulled open the Association Room door and ostentatiously held out his hand, palm upward.

  Lord Alexander, who took pride in his notions of equality, was about to force himself to shake the turnkey’s hand, then realised the significance of the palm. ‘Ah,’ he said, taken aback, but hurriedly fished in his pocket and brought out the first coin he found. ‘Thank you, my good man,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, your lordship, thank you,’ the turnkey said and then, to his astonishment, saw he had been tipped a whole sovereign and hastily pulled off his hat and tugged his forelock. ‘God bless you, my lord, God bless.’

  William Brown, the Keeper, hurried to meet his two new guests. He had met neither man before, but recognised Lord Alexander by his clubbed foot and so took off his hat and bowed respectfully. ‘Your lordship is most welcome.’