by Peter Sirr
‘What?’ said the man, looking amazed from one to the other. He seemed genuinely puzzled, as if he could not comprehend the situation.
Kelly ran to him and, without a word, cracked him over the head with his cudgel filled with shot. The man fell in a heap to the ground.
James stood staring in shock. ‘There was no need for that,’ he said.
Kelly lifted his cudgel again and made for James. ‘Why, you damned whelp, I’ll do you too!’
‘We’re wasting time,’ Darcy barked. ‘Get to work, and let’s get out of here.’
They proceeded to strip the man of his coat and waistcoat. Darcy held his pocket watch aloft. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I knew he’d be a good one. Get the wig, Kitty.’
Kitty pulled the wig from the man’s head. Blood dripped from it onto the man’s face. He looked old. A few tangled strands of grey hair pressed on a wrinkled head. Kelly and Hare swept shoes and breeches off with a practised economy, while Kitty busied himself pulling a ring from his right index finger. When they had got all they wanted, Hare pulled out a knife and bent over the man, who was now coming to with loud groans.
‘Will I finish him?’ He looked up eagerly at Darcy, the knife trembling in his hand as if it couldn’t wait to do its work. He let the blade touch the skin of his victim’s neck.
James looked over at Darcy and caught his eye.
‘No,’ Darcy said, ‘we don’t want to upset Master Brown.’
Hare glared at James and pointed the tip of his blade in his direction. The prospect of a night without blood seemed to disgust him. Suddenly the knife was out of his hand and it landed within an inch of James’s boot, embedded deep in the grass.
Darcy looked at the man impatiently. ‘Don’t forget it was the boy who brought us this creature.’ He indicated the groaning and nearly naked form on the ground. ‘We all have our parts to play. He’s one of us now.’
This pronouncement didn’t appease Hare much. He retrieved his knife, put it away, and as they were slipping away into the night, he stepped back and kicked the helpless man several times in the head and body until the groans stopped.
Sixteen
‘One of us’
‘He’s one of us now.’ The words continued to turn over in James’s head. And Darcy had repeated it throughout that night as they sat in Red Molly’s with their plates of beef and mutton, and their tankards of beer and jugs of the best claret. It seemed a large reward for a mean crime, but as James learned over the following weeks, every robbery, no matter how small the pickings, was celebrated in grand style in Red Molly’s. Sometimes the crime didn’t even pay for its celebration, and Darcy had to sign the chit at the end, promising to pay in the future.
‘You know me, Molly,’ he’d say, raising his glass to her. ‘Jack Darcy always pays his way.’
It seemed to be that way with many of Red Molly’s customers, so that every meal, every carousing night, every rental of her unclean sheets and flea-bitten beds provided another reason to rob. Even fleas had to be earned. This was the unending circle that defined their lives.
He’s one of us now. What did that mean? Where was James Lovett, Lord Dunmain as he should be? What has he to do with James Brown, member of the Darcy gang, assistant footpad, deceiver of the innocent? He remembered how shocked he had been when Kelly had kicked the man in Stephen’s Green, at the needlessness of it. He’d quickly sensed that for Hare, Kelly and Kitty, a large part of their excitement came less from the robbing than from the chance to kick, punch, cudgel or stab.
One night they went to Kilmainham where they waylaid a man in the field near the soldiers’ hospital. Kelly and Hare began beating him severely even though the man offered no provocation. Kitty, meanwhile, thrust his pocket knife at the man’s head and shouted, ‘You dog, do you resent it?’ The highwayman then cut then man so deeply James could see his skull under the flaps of skin.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ James said. ‘You have his money, isn’t that enough?’
Kitty turned on him, snarling, his bloody knife an inch from James’s throat.
‘Are you going to tell me what to do? You isn’t my nursemaid, posh boy. I could slit you now.’
‘Enough squabbling, children,’ Darcy said. ‘I’ll be Daddy and Daddy says it’s time to go home.’
‘At least see if he’s alright,’ James said. ‘He could bleed to death.’
‘No time for that,’ Darcy said.
All that for a wig, a coat and some little money. James couldn’t get the bleeding man out of his mind as the gang made its way back to Red Molly’s to toast their bravery and wash the blood from the wig and coat. The kitchen was often the first stop for the clients of the tavern, where they could be found scrubbing and scraping breeches, coats, wigs and boots, on the same table where the food was being prepared.
Lately, though, Darcy had grown weary of these small raids. It was not a question of blood or excitement for him, but of business, and he had little interest in coats, wigs or small change.
The low point for Darcy came on a dark day coming into winter when the gang had, on a whim, decided they needed new wigs. Since money was short, they went to the wigmaker’s shop at the sign of the Peruke in Meath Street and waited for the hair-picker to come selling his wares. Kelly then stepped out of the shadows, grabbed the bundle of hair and sent the man on his way with a kick. Then they went in and presented the hair to the wigmaker, and asked for new wigs for all.
‘That’s not enough,’ the wigmaker said, looking at the bundle of hair. ‘That might buy you half a wig. For the rest, I’ll need coin of the realm.’
Hare whipped out his hanger. ‘Will this do?’ he asked.
Darcy raised his hand apologetically. ‘Forgive my friend,’ he said smoothly. ‘He is somewhat rash.’
The wigmaker eyed them closely. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘We understand that currency too.’
He disappeared into his workshop and, a little later, emerged with new wigs for Darcy, Hare, Kelly and Kitty. They preened in front of the mirrors and left well-satisfied. The gang went to a gin shop and when they came out some hours later a heavy shower greeted them, and by the time it had finished the wigs were a tangled mess – whatever the wigmaker had used, it was not human hair; the wigs lay like drowned rats on their heads. James tried hard not to smile. The men took them off in disgust.
‘We should go back and slit that wigmaker’s throat,’ Hare said.
‘We’ll make him swallow the rat-hair he gave us,’ Kelly added.
‘It serves us right,’ said Darcy. ‘If you act like a pile of by-blows and dunghills, a shower of lobcocks and eejits, then you get what you deserve. What we need to do is show this damn town what we’re made of, and the sooner the better.’
They stood in the rain and swore an oath to serious crime, and, from that day on, they’d kept their word. Darcy was like a man possessed as he coordinated their plans and not a day went by when they weren’t engaged in some action. Apart from robbing on the streets, they stripped lead from vacant houses and began to try their hand at housebreaking.
James dreaded these expeditions. As the smallest in the gang, he was the first to enter the houses once Kelly and Hare had levered the window frame up or broken the panes and smashed in the bars between to make an opening just big enough for James to be pushed through. His first job was to open the rear door to let the others in, but those first moments alone in the house were terrifying. It was one thing to rob in the street; it was a terrible thing, but it happened in the open city and the gang could melt back into the streets within a moment of their actions, but if you were caught in a house there was no escape.
As James tiptoed through the drawing room of some fine house in the district where he himself had lived not so long ago, his heart beat violently.
In one particular house the gang decided that he should go in alone. James thought it strange at the time, though, afterwards, the reason was all too clear. Although it was daylight outside, th
e house was in darkness, with all the heavy drapes closed as if the place had been vacated. The only light was that streaming in from the fanlight over the front door; apart from the hall, the rooms were quite dark. James entered the drawing-room and, once his eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom, he began to move around quietly, looking for goods to put in the sack he had brought with him. He found a pair of candlesticks and a silver tureen on a table.
Then he spotted what looked like a silver tankard on the mantelpiece and crept over for a closer look. The mantelpiece was high and he had to strain to reach it, but instead of grasping it securely he fumbled and the piece fell to the floor. The thud of the tankard on the floorboards was accompanied by another noise; a human noise, James realised to his horror, and he suddenly became aware of a human shape in the great wingback chair to the side of the fireplace.
‘Who is it?’ the voice shouted, and the shape leapt up from the chair. ‘Who is in here?’
James dived under the table and then crawled to the window, where he concealed himself behind a thick drape. He could hear the man pacing around the room.
‘What blackguard are you? Come out wherever you are, or I’ll run you through.’
James didn’t dare move, but he realised that his spot wasn’t very secure since the man was bound to open the drapes to let in some light. Yet strangely the man didn’t approach the window and seemed content to thrash around the dark room. James remained utterly still until he couldn’t hear any more noise. The man must have left the room to search the rest of the house. Very slowly, James stepped outside the drape and stood still. The coast seemed to be clear.
He was about to edge toward the door when he suddenly saw two piercing eyes dead ahead of him, blazing like a fiend’s with no body that he could see. James froze with fright and it felt like his own body was melting. But he forced his terror-stricken mind to think. The next thing he became aware of was a flash of steel as a sword lunged. James dropped to his knees and sprang out of the way, feeling the breath of the blade on his cheek. Then he raced for the door and managed to get out into the shocking glare of the hall, expecting the blade at any second to catch up with him. Yet no one came into the hall, and no one pursued James down the stairs to the basement or out through the broken window he had entered by. James hit the ground outside and immediately jumped up. As he raced around the corner he crashed into the bulk of a man. He cried out, but his screams were met with a laughter he recognised. It was Kelly he had run into.
‘What’s yer hurry, son?’ Kelly wanted to know.
The others appeared from the laneway they’d been skulking in.
‘I think James has met the demon,’ Darcy laughed.
‘What demon?’ James asked. Now that he seemed to be safe, he could feel anger rising in him.
‘This house is always dark,’ Darcy said. ‘They say the man who lives in it – if it is a man – can’t bear light; that he can’t see in the light. Some say he is the Devil himself.’
‘The Devil wouldn’t have missed me.’ James said simply. He was angry because they had clearly sent him in knowing there was someone inside. He was not so much ‘one of us’ that they could resist toying with him when the mood took them.
* * *
And so their lives continued that winter, a constant cycle of theft and celebration, with nights spent in Red Molly’s flea-bitten rooms or in other houses around the city where no one would think to look for them. How long can this go on for? James asked himself in the cold morning light as he listened to the snores of the others. The life of a thief was short and usually finished at the end of a rope or on a ship bound for slavery in the colonies. None of these thieves seemed to care much about their likely fate; indeed, it even seemed to James that, in a peculiar way, they lived for the end; they lived in full readiness for the death that, in all likelihood, would come to them. They sang songs about hangings; they went to Newgate to play cards with condemned men in their cells the night before they were executed. For a table they used the coffin which the gaolers had delivered to the cell to make the condemned man think of his fate. And they accompanied him to the gallows, cheering him along. Even when it involved someone they didn’t know, they were drawn magnetically to these gruesome events.
One Saturday morning Darcy announced that they’d rest from robbery by going to the Green to see a hanging.
‘It’ll be a good one,’ he said. ‘Not often we get to see a student dangle.’
‘What student?’ James asked.
‘The one that killed the man in Fishamble Street,’ Darcy replied. ‘They caught him down the country, boasting about it in his local tavern. Not much brains for a student.’
James paled. Could it be that McAllister had come back and been apprehended? But Darcy’s description fitted Vandeleur better; James could easily imagine him bragging in a tavern and assuming no harm could ever come to him. He felt sick at the thought of Vandeleur, and sicker at the prospect of his awful fate. He didn’t go with the gang to watch him die.
‘His lordship’s stomach is too delicate’ had been Kitty’s scornful dismissal.
But if James had no desire to see someone die at the end of a rope, he needed to know that it was in fact Vandeleur they meant. He set out to intercept the prison wagon near the castle. There he waited with a crowd of onlookers for the cart to pass on its way to the hanging tree in Stephen’s Green. Much time went by without anything happening and the crowd was growing restive. Many shouted and hurled oaths. A ballad singer struck up but was shouted down by those near him.
A hawker went round with sheets of paper. ‘Malefactor’s confessions,’ he half-sang, half-shouted. ‘Fresh printed this morning.’
James noticed that many about him had missiles with them: rotten vegetables, eggs, sticks and even stones.
‘Bring the bastard out!’ the man beside him roared.
Eventually a rumbling could be heard in the distance and James heard a wave of jeering, faint at first, but swelling eastward until it filled every inch of Castle Street. James had never heard a noise like it; you couldn’t make out any particular word. There was something savage in it. It was as if a hungry beast had entered the city and was baying for blood. James looked at the people around him and saw the beast in their faces, heard the beast in their roars.
A gang of boys pushed against him, shoving him out of the way in their hurry to get to the front. They craned their necks and raised their fists. They spat and shouted for all they were worth.
James was beginning to think he should leave when he saw Vandeleur, or what might have been Vandeleur’s ghost. First came the horses with the sheriff and the men of the Watch, then the hangman and his assistants, and then the cart with the condemned man. He stood upright on the cart, leaning forward for support on his coffin. The form was the same, but James had to search hard to discern the face he once knew. Gone was the arrogant sneer, the always upturned lip. Instead, the face was white and haggard and twisted in the shape of pure fear. Vandeleur was dressed in his best finery: silk waistcoat, purple coat, fine breeches and stockings, but the clothes hung loose about his frame, as if they belonged to someone else. Around his neck was the rope, the long end of it coiled about his body.
Missiles fell all about him, and his fine clothes were already soiled by the mob’s ritual fury. Vandeleur didn’t look at the mob, but fixed his eyes at some distant space not in this world, as if he had managed to remove himself already from the earth he was about to leave. When an egg splattered on his cheek he made no effort to remove it but continued his staring, as if he had already taken his leave of his body.
James tried to catch his eye, thinking maybe the sight of someone he knew would be a small comfort. He had never liked Vandeleur, but he was going to a lonely and painful death, and James would have liked to offer him a token of human companionship. But what if Vandeleur recognised him and called out, ‘He was there too, why do you hang him too?’
James shrank back, pulling out of the ba
ying crowd. He leant against the wall of a shop, not trusting his legs to keep him upright. Imagine McAllister could just as easily be there! And what of him? James had helped them, after all; he had helped McAllister to leave the country: who knew what the punishment for that might be if anyone connected him with Vandeleur or McAllister? And who knew how long his current life would last before the law found him out, and he’d find himself trundling down these streets like a common criminal? He must change his life, he thought.
Seventeen
A Visit to Newgate
It can’t be that hard to escape, James thought as he sat in the hide, whittling a stick with his knife. I could just walk out these woods and not come back. Avoid Red Molly’s and dark alleys and try for a new life. That was where he kept getting stuck. Walking out was one thing; a new life was another, much harder thing. Where would he go? What would he do? He thought of the ships in the river. Maybe he could sneak onto one and hide in the hold until the ship was on the high seas. Then he would reveal himself and they’d let him become a sailor, and he would go ashore in strange new countries and see what life had to offer there. He had stripped the stick completely, and was climbing the mast to the crow’s nest to look for land when Kitty came rushing in to the hide. For a second James thought he had spied into his head and seen his plans. He tightened his grip on his knife.
‘Darcy’s taken!’ Kitty shouted. Kelly and Hare, who had been slumped against a tree, shot up as if stung.
‘Wha’?’ they said with a single voice.
‘He was drinking in the Ram when that man we attacked in Kilmainham spied him.’
‘The one you cut up.’ James couldn’t help himself. The ship, the ocean, the exotic ports and all thought of escape had vanished.