Smith

by Leon Garfield

  His trial was already fixed: January twenty-third, the very day they were nubbing Dick Mulrone. “Swing out the old, swing in the new,” so to speak.

  Smith came to thinking his fate and Mr. Mulrone’s were somehow linked and if the highwayman perished, then he’d not be long after. Eight more days had Dick Mulrone. How many had Smith?

  The document! The cursed document! Furiously, he shut his eyes and tried to picture it, hoping his new skill in reading would reveal—from his mind’s eye—what Mr. Billing wanted to know. But, alas, he could make no more of it now than when he’d looked at it in his darkest ignorance. His mind’s eye showed him nothing but a spidery jumble. Not having understood what he’d seen, he’d not known what to remember.

  He wondered if Miss Mansfield had come upon the document yet—and if it had meant anything to her. He sweated with terror at the thought of her giving it to the attorney for nothing.

  “Oh Gawd!” whispered Smith, staring up into the blackness of the chimney as if for an answer. “Why did the old gent have to stuff his pockets with sich deadly papers? What right ’ad ’e to go stumping through the streets, ’eavy with the Devil’s literature for to tempt the likes of me with?”

  He shook his head and groaned and groaned at the misery of his lot—and wondered if he’d be hanged without ever discovering what he was being hanged for.

  Smith’s hopes were low. Only one held out any promise: Meg, the scullery maid from Vine Street. And then, at last, she came.

  She’d kept her word even though a heavy fall of snow had begun during the night and was not yet done with. Her shawl and bonnet were grandly dappled with it and her nose had been whipped by the wind to a strawberry . . . but she’d brought Smith some veal pie, sausage and white bread. Also two shirts he’d left behind. She’d have come earlier—but she’d been that afraid of having her heart broke, she’d not dared leave the kitchen.

  “You pore thing,” she said, giving him the bundle. “Oh, you pore thing!” She gazed at him sadly. “You’ve grown smaller and wizeneder. You needs feeding up, and—not meaning to be personal, dear—you needs another good wash!”

  Smith shuddered at the memory and began to unwrap his bundle while Meg looked about her at the skinny, blotched and sadly cunning faces that haunted the Stone Hall.

  “Cleverness?” she sniffed. “Look where it gets you! I’ll wager there’s enough cleverness here to sink London Bridge! Brains? Give you a farthing for ’em!”

  Then she settled down with a great commotion of her bonnet and shawl and began to talk of the changes for the worse in Vine Street since Smith had gone. Mr. Mansfield, it seemed, hardly had a civil word for anybody and the mistress was a regular demon, finding fault where there was none . . . which Meg considered was a demon’s chief office. Even handsome Mr. Billing wasn’t particularly welcome for, try as he might to be cheerful of an evening, the talk always came back to Smith; and there was an end of all cheerfulness. Meg said this with some satisfaction, as if it ought to’ve been a real comfort to Smith to learn he was the cause of misery. But Smith nodded and smiled and bided his time. Then, at last, through all the byways of her conversation, Meg came back to “You pore thing!” with the sigh of someone who’s been the long way round.

  Smith said: “They’re a-going to hang me, Meg.”

  “Oh, you pore thing!”

  “There’s but one soul who can save me, Meg.”

  “Ah! The master!”

  “No, Meg. You!”

  Meg looked astonished, fidgeted with the fringe of her shawl, then slowly shook her head with an air of great sadness.

  “If heart can save you, child—then it’s done. But this is a wicked world of cleverness . . .”

  “It’s heart I need, Meg—for it’s cleverness what put me ’ere!”

  Meg nodded deeply. That was no less than the truth.

  “Say on, little one.”

  So Smith bent close and began to mutter urgently and pleadingly in Meg’s large, gentle ear.

  Did she recall the paper she’d found when he’d been washed? She nodded.

  Was it still where she’d put it?

  Most likely . . . most likely, for it had been deep in a drawer.

  Could she get at it?

  Most likely—

  Would she get at it—for Smith?

  She opened her eyes in alarm. “Why, child, it’s the master’s!”

  “No! It was mine! And it’s the only thing that’ll save me.”

  “I—I couldn’t steal from the master.”

  “But it was mine—”

  “It’s all a nasty piece of cleverness, child! You’d be best off without it! Believe Meg!”

  “Meg—Meg! You’re a-hanging me! True as we’re ’ere! If I don’t get it, I’ll be buried afore the spring! Meg—”

  “Oh little one . . . Oh . . .”

  The frightened Meg had begun to cry with the sudden misery of her dilemma. Her heart and conscience were much at odds. More than ever, she hated cleverness and all it brought in its sly train.

  “I—I don’t know what to do. Oh Lord! What would me mother have said?”

  As she rocked herself to and fro, the old man began to rock himself likewise—and then croaked, amazingly like the parrot he so closely resembled: “Meg! Meg! Follow your ’eart, Meg!”

  She looked startled—then stared with wet eyes at the disreputable old man. She nodded.

  “That’s her voice, child, and them’s her words. She often talks to me now she’s dead and gone. Sometimes out of old men, sometimes out of mischievous urchins—and sometimes out of heaps of potato peelings! And it’s always, ‘Follow your heart, Meg.’ So I’ll fetch you the paper, little Smith, and may it save yore poor neck from the shameful noose!”

  Smith considered himself as good as out of the jail, and the change in him was as astonishing as it was abrupt. His spirits rose and he put on a confident, almost patronizing air. He strutted importantly about the dismal Stone Hall, even finding opportunities to practice his reading upon the scratched messages, prayers and rages that scarred the damp walls. God have mercy on me, he read out; and shrugged his shoulders. Next, he read, Jo loves Bess. He scratched his head and wondered why anybody should want to write such a thing on a prison wall. Then, God rot all lawyers. Hm! That was more like it!

  His high spirits were bewildering to his sisters—who’d last seen him in the depths of gloom.

  “Oh, Smut!” said Miss Fanny. “To see you in such spirits is better than a pint of gin, dear. Now, no matter what befalls, we’ll know you went happy!”

  “Oh, I’ll be ’appy going!” said Smith, enigmatically; and Miss Bridget stared at him sadly, as if he was a lost soul.

  But Mr. Billing understood. Maybe at first he wondered if Smith had the document already . . . for he’d arrived shortly after Meg had left. Not that it was really likely he’d seen her—there being such a stew in Newgate at that time, what with Mulrone’s visitors and the bad weather—but he saw the bundle and smiled knowingly. Smith, seeing this look, divined its meaning. He shook his head and grinned.

  “Not yet, Mister Billing. But it won’t be long before the chimney-sweep down the road’ll be situated to buy himself new brooms and a whole new chimney for his very own! If you take my meaning, Mister Billing.”

  Mr. Billing took his meaning.

  “And it won’t be long before a certain little bird flies out of its stone cage, eh lad?” He beamed and laid his hand on Smith’s thin shoulder.

  “How much better it is to put our cards on the table—play fair—and be friends. Oh, the world’s not such a bad place after all—for the likes of you and me!”

  This was on Sunday, January fifteen: a day remembered, if for no other reason than for the extraordinary violence and passion of its snowstorm. It was as if the Devil’s cat had got among the angels and was scattering their feathers everywhere. There seemed no end to the snow . . .

  12

  THE SNOW CONTINUED to fall . . . sometime
s in great whirling quantities, and sometimes—for half a day at a stretch—in idle, drifting flakes that wafted wearily down as if the air was filled with invisible obstructions, then added themselves imperceptibly to the general whiteness below.

  The worn old streets were gone; the blackened roof-tiles were gone; the mournful chimneys and the dirty posts wore high white hats—and the houses themselves seemed to float, muffled, in a sea of white. Never, in all its life, had the Town looked so clean; it shamed the very sky, which was of a dirty, yellowish gray.

  The business of the Town was slow and tedious: carriages and chairs crawled along where they supposed the streets to be like huge, tottery snails, bearing snow houses on their backs and leaving wet black trails to mark their passing. Even the nimble piemen capered silently, sometimes slipped and lost their smoking trays so that half a hundred hot pies burned into the snow and pitted it like a black pox.

  Visitors to Newgate Jail were few and far between. Only the loving and hardy called. Dick Mulrone’s friends were much diminished and it was said he grew scornful and sour and melancholy. Smith, waiting on Meg, grew uneasy; there was no snow inside of Newgate, so the traveling troubles of the world seemed as remote as the stars. Only his sisters and the ever-faithful Mr. Billing came to see him and, once in a while, Lord Tom. In these days Lord Tom spent a deal of time with his doomed colleague, whose room, being less crowded, offered more space for Lord Tom to be noticed and welcomed. After which, smelling strongly of wine and with a kind of swaggering stagger, the green-cloaked high toby would look in briefly on Smith and give him the news of “glorious Dick.”

  “He’s hopes,” said Lord Tom, with a mournful grin, “of the snow piling so high under the Tree that, when the cart drives off, he’ll be left standing instead of the horrible swing!”

  Smith nodded, and was not above being grateful for his friend’s efforts to be companionable. Then his abstracted air returned as he tried hard to imagine what was preventing Meg.

  There was now little time left; Thursday came and went without a sniff of her. Smith feared Mr. Billing would wax suspicious and impatient. But he never did and always contrived to remain amiable. Sometimes, though, Smith fancied he detected a curiously calculating air behind the attorney’s good-will: as if he was not going to commit himself, heart and soul, till he knew the outcome of some other event. And it was on the Thursday that this abstraction of Mr. Billing’s became most plain. He was almost agitated . . . but still cautious not to offend. When he went, he left a more than ordinarily puzzled Smith.

  But on the Friday Mr. Billing came to Smith with a rueful and disarming smile which Smith returned with a look of such deep and earnest hope that stonier hearts than Mr. Billing’s (if any there were) would have been melted by it. He shook his head and laughed and murmured something about “Smith’s winning,” and “friendship coming before all.” Then he sat down and, to Smith’s amazement, relief and delight, confided the plan for the escape.

  Not long before, there’d been set up on Newgate’s roof a great windmill with vanes a full twenty feet across. Its purpose was to purify the air. As it turned, it drew (by natural suction and skillful design), through tubes and tunnels joining into a middle shaft, much of the foul and pestilential vapors of the jail. So? The ventilators! The grated apertures in the walls. The narrow tunnels that led, through dark and angled ways, to the great shaft that rose up to the windmill on the roof. From which grimy eminence, it was but a hop, a jump and a scramble to the nestage of adjoining roofs.

  With beating heart and glittering eyes, Smith listened as the attorney muttered rapidly on. Dipping his finger fastidiously in Smith’s ale he drew on the tabletop a plan of the wards and halls of the jail alongside which the ventages ran. Very narrow were the lower tunnels—wide enough only to admit a thin child. But on the next floor they were somewhat more spacious and roughly bricked so’s to afford finger- and toe-holds for “little birds to reach the sky.”

  Wider and wider grew these tunnels, till at last they came into the main shaft that rose to the windmill and the heavens. Upward, always upward, must the little bird go, else he’d find himself in another cage!

  Mr. Billing carefully wiped his finger on his handkerchief and Smith stared at the shining lines and squares that were beginning to dry and lose their powerful meaning. But they were already well fixed in his mind. He nodded and looked up for the last question. When was he to go? Not yet. Why? The grating was not yet unlocked. The good offices of a certain gentleman (here, Mr. Billing looked about him quickly) were not yet bespoke. But, never fear, they would be. When? On the Tuesday. Why so long? Not so long, only four more days. But why not Monday? Ah! Tuesday would be a day of great commotion. Dick Mulrone would be setting forth. Jailers and turnkeys would be busied in keeping order—and too busy to notice a little bird fly out of its cage! Tuesday, at six o’clock, before Smith would have been moved to the sessions house for his trial. Tuesday: freedom day! Mr. Billing grinned: document day!

  Smith’s wavering spirits lifted and he stared long and hard at the ventilator grating that was let into the wall beside the fireplace. But even now it was impossible to rid himself of a thousand uncanny fears of disasters pouncing before the Tuesday. Yet Mr. Billing had been confident—and Mr. Billing was nobody’s fool. All that remained, then, was the visit from Meg with the document. Surely she’d not fail him! Not Meg with her monstrous great heart!

  She didn’t fail him. Or, at least, not entirely. She came on the following day. Her shawl, bonnet, skirts and shoes were loaded with snow. She’d walked the whole way and the effort had made her stream, so that there was a general melting-ness about her. Her hair, eyebrows, nose and chin all seemed to be discharging water, which gave her red face a curiously dismayed air.

  “A glass of gin, Meg?” said Smith anxiously, as she dripped into the tap-room.

  She shivered and shook her head . . . and seemed unwilling to sit down. Suddenly, Smith—with a dreadful fear—saw that her dismay was more than snow deep. Her customarily round face was oval and her eyes were unnaturally red.

  “Have you—have you got it, Meg?”

  She stared at him in terrified sorrow—as if imploring him to hold his peace.

  “Meg! Where is it?”

  “Oh, child! Oh, little one! They’ll hang you now for sure, and bury you afore the spring! Oh, you pore thing!”

  “Meg! Where is it?”

  “Heart weren’t enough, little one. Horrible cleverness is all. Brains? Lord! I wish I had ’em!”

  “Where is it?”

  She dabbed at her nose with her sleeve and her whole face grew veiled with fearful memories.

  “On Thursday . . . yes, the Thursday, the master and mistress went out together; so I took me chance, little one, and crept like a mouse to the study . . .”

  Smith, the first shock of dread spent, listened in a sick dismay. What had gone so grievously awry?

  “I was in the very room, child—the very room—” She repeated herself, as if to prove her heart had ever been twice as strong as any circumstance. “—When I heard a noise, child, from upstairs. From upstairs where you used to sleep. Oh Lord, dear! I thought—I feared you’d lost patience and gone from the jail and come back on your own desperate account. I was worried half out of my mind! I thought of calling out to you . . . then I thought it’d frighten you off. So, quiet as a mouse, I crept out and went up them dreadful stairs. Sure enough, there was noise coming from your own dear room. But queer noise: scraping—dragging— pulling—panting . . . like it was being torn apart by dumb beasts. Lord! Lord! I was that frightened! I thought maybe a bear had got in!”

  “What was it, Meg?” whispered Smith—though maybe he had already guessed . . .

  “I screamed, child! That I did! Screamed and shrieked till Vine Street echoed. I got a good pair of lungs, child—a good pair of lungs.”

  “And—then?”

  “It must have scared ’em!”

  “Who?”

 
“Two horrible men in brown! They burst out of the room in a terrible rage! I thought they’d kill me—but they rushed past me and down the stairs, then out through the front door like the wind o’ Hell!”

  “The Thursday? This was on—on the Thursday, Meg?”

  Meg stared at him vaguely, wondering why the day should have mattered so much. But among all the wild and panic-stricken thoughts that had whirled through Smith’s head, one had stuck fast. On the day following that Thursday (when the attorney had been so agitated), Mr. Billing had come to him with a rueful smile—a smile that Smith knew now was of disappointment. And he’d said Smith had won. Indeed, he’d won! The men in brown had failed.

  “So there’s no more hope, little one,” said Meg at last, with the grandmother of all sighs.

  “No more hope?”

  Smith looked at her, bewildered—having missed the chief part of her bad news. With a groan she repeated it. The burglary had so alarmed Mr. Mansfield that he’d locked all his papers securely away. There was now no hope in the world of getting at them.

  “Oh, child! They’ll hang you now, and Meg, heart and all, won’t be able to stop ’em! Why, child—you’re a-smiling! Why, Smith, dear—you ain’t down-hearted! Oh, God bless you, dear, for not breaking Meg’s heart with your despairing. You’ll go straight to heaven, Smith—no matter what you done!”

  Smith, in spite of the evil news, was smiling in the most strangely excited way; and when at last she went, promising that she’d try to do something, no matter what, to save him, he called loudly after her: “Thank you, Meg! Truly, thank you! You’ve saved me life!” Which was like Sunday bells in her ears!

  Even the old man had been surprised, and he’d thought himself long past such sensations. But Smith, saying nothing, grinned most knowingly. Aggravated, the old man shuffled close beside him.

  “You’ve not got it yet, have you?”

  “No. I ain’t. But nor has he!”