The House Of Smoke

by Sam Christer

  With trembling hands I lit a cigarette and tried to justify what I had done. It had been what he wanted. I told myself this a hundred times. I had only done what he had wanted.

  As I walked back, I realised I would never walk the gardens again with my old mentor, never feel the grip of his coarse, crocodile-skin hands as he trained me. Nor see that grudging smile he always gave me at the end of a tough workout – his gesture of approval. One that had helped form a brief but strangely meaningful friendship between us.

  The house had become eerily silent during my brief absence. All clocks had been stopped to mark the moment of Michael’s passing. Male servants had begun to wash the body. Maids had already changed bed sheets and opened windows to air the room. Moriarty’s groom stood ready to dress the old wrestler in his one good suit and a photographer had been sent for.

  For the next two hours, Sirius and Cornwell orchestrated the movement of the corpse around the house and grounds so that it might be photographed in memorable poses with all manner of acquaintances. I was even required to pose with him by the ring. I confess that holding Michael’s cold flesh close to me was a distasteful experience and I am sure it made for quite terrible pictures.

  A wreath of laurel with black crepe ribbons was hung on the front door and not until nightfall were the gentlemen of Lymbs the Undertaker allowed to take possession of his body and make all the necessary preparations for the burial.

  A downstairs room at the rear of the house was prepared for visits and festooned with sweet-smelling candles to mask whatever odours might be given off. Mourning cards were rushed to Ireland where there were many Brannigan cousins, nephews and nieces. During all this, Moriarty barely spoke to any of us. He gathered his heavy grief and, along with a large bottle of whisky, retreated to his study.

  I was about to ascend the stairs and retire to bed when Sirius called from behind me.

  ‘What do you want?’ My temper instantly boiled. ‘I warn you, I am in no mood to be aggravated.’

  ‘I wish no such thing. To the contrary.’ He walked up to me, then added, ‘I simply wanted to say that I thought it was a fine thing that you did today. An honourable thing.’

  I was surprised by his comment. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I know you do. We all do.’

  I felt a flush of terror.

  ‘Do not worry. No one disapproves.’ He extended his hand. ‘I wanted to say thank you. Michael was close to me. To us all. And none of us were able to do what you did.’

  I shook his hand but still made no admission.

  ‘We will never talk of it,’ said Sirius, ‘but we are all grateful for what you did.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Goodnight to you.’

  ‘And to you.’

  I climbed the stairs and realised that I had probably misjudged Sirius. Deep down, it seemed he did care for someone other than himself.

  Eight Days to Execution

  Newgate, 10 January 1900

  The stink of the prison even permeated the Press Yard, where supposedly we prisoners benefited from a dose of good old fresh air.

  ‘Get moving, Lynch,’ demanded one of Johncock’s men, before adding a hearty shove that sent me staggering in my chains.

  I regained my balance and greedily surveyed the new landscape. There was only one door, locked and guarded on both sides. That meant the gaolers realised this spot was vulnerable. Escape was possible, but difficult. My heart skipped a beat in excitement.

  ‘Walk!’

  I shuffled my feet as my eyes continued to roam. The yard’s outer walls were very high and sheer. I spotted no easy hand or footholds to begin a climb and even if I were unchained, the screws would be on me before I could scale a fraction of them.

  ‘Walk, I said!’ A turnkey cracked my back with a baton.

  I lurched forward and began a ponderous loop of the small exercise area. Half a dozen other men were walking in pairs, clockwise. I took the other direction. Not because I wanted to register some pointless individuality but because I wanted to face them. Years of murdering and hurting people teaches you not to allow six hardened criminals free access to your back.

  The first two convicts were more boys than men – skinny teenagers who looked as though they should have been starting apprenticeships, not gaol terms. Behind them lumbered two men of my age. Their heads were bent in conversation, their hot breath frosting in the crisp air as they trudged. Bringing up the rear were two old-timers. They lagged a good six yards behind the others and didn’t speak or look up.

  As the prisoners passed me our eyes briefly met. The young boys looked away, partly in shame at their own wasted lives and partly out of respect for an older, more hardened felon. Respect was everything in gaol. Show it and you were left alone. Deny it and you could end up dead.

  The next two men held my gaze a little and weighed me up as they passed. I guessed in that fleeting moment they came to recognise me and remember what I had done.

  Finally, the old men stepped up. Neither gave me a glance, nor broke their stride. Their minds were elsewhere – most probably reliving the past, remembering old loves, nights of ale and pockets of cash. I was beyond their cares. Like me, they were just counting down their final days and taking some comfort from memories.

  Lap by lap, I built up a picture of the yard and committed it to memory. If any part could be climbed, it would be the corner furthest from the gate, but I would have to unchain myself and be fast across the ground before the screws came for me.

  The nail might afford me that break. If I could learn to use it to pick the manacle locks quickly, perhaps fooling the gaolers by pretending to fall, then I might have a chance of fighting them off and hitting that wall with enough power to leap up and grab at something.

  I knew it was a desperate plan, but surely desperation was the platform for every escape from incarceration.

  Johncock’s men followed his orders assiduously. They gave me no rest. Walked me to the point of exhaustion and beyond. I distracted myself by remembering and imagining the earliest days of my life, right back to my birth in 1864. As Moriarty had mentioned when we first met, I had been born in a tavern of ill repute to a woman of even lower standing. Apparently, I appeared in her pooling blood and presented to a room full of drunkards the dilemma of whose life to save.

  The jury of inebriates chose badly. They saved me. And in so doing they sentenced my birth mother to death. After which, the enterprising landlord of that thief-infested flash house arranged, in return for several pounds and a basket of goods, to have me delivered into the care of Cyril and Philomena Lynch, an ageing baker and his childless young wife.

  Along with their good name, they gave me the comforts of the tiny lodgings attached to the bakery and shop that they ran. Theirs was a home of little money but abundant love. They raised me the best they could. Philomena taught me to read and write, to experience what she called ‘the miracles of language and words’.

  Cyril showed me how young boys should behave in order to become good men. How to demonstrate respect and earn it back. ‘Manners maketh the man,’ he used to impress upon me. Had his bakery done better, then undoubtedly he and Philomena would have raised me as well as they did their wholesome breads and cakes. But it was not to be.

  When I was eight years old, the man I had grown to call father worked himself to death during the London Season. While the society debutantes and moneyed politicians flirted and dined upon his produce, my mother wept her eyes red and buried him in a pauper’s grave.

  Less than a week later, his creditors came knocking. The lease was surrendered, hired equipment returned and all stock sold. Still she could not make the frayed ends of our lives meet.

  We were for the workhouse. And in truth, once the tears had been dried, we knew we were lucky to be so destined. Had father not been a friend of Mr Potts, the harness maker, and had he not been a cousin of Mr Flanders, treasurer on the board of governors, then our beds would have been the cobbles of an alley and the roof over
our heads nothing more than the sulphurous skies of London.

  Within moments of stepping into the dark entrance of that awful place we were separated. Still in her black widow’s cap, she was taken to the women’s ward, while I was clipped around the ear and hurried to the children’s house.

  We had each taken with us one of her smaller shades, removed from their rough wooden frames but kept close to our hearts. Mine was that of a beautiful lady, hers that of a well-groomed young boy. It comforted me to know that in her bunk at night she would kiss her picture and I would kiss mine. There and then, at least in our hearts and minds, we were together.

  Every day, my young hands were bloodied by picking clean threads from tarred sailing rope, breaking stones in the yard or, when the stench of the privies got too much, washing down walls with chemicals and vinegar.

  Work was a distraction from the pain of separation but it was also exhausting. Frequently, I was beaten for leaving my bed and trying to make my way to her. The slash of the cane left raw scars on my flesh, but still my aching spirit would drag me down those forbidden corridors. One touch of my mother’s hand was worth a dozen lashes of that cane.

  When my daily labours were over I foolishly asked for books to read. This caused me to be mocked by masters and boys alike. When I complained about pain or hunger, I was beaten into silence. In time, I learned that it is the nature of boys to find someone weak to bully so that they themselves might appear stronger.

  So lost was I in my thoughts of my upbringing that I meandered off my circuit in the prison yard and bumped into the two young men circling in the other direction.

  ‘Lynch!’ One of the screws shouted out as we collectively collapsed on account of our tiredness and the restriction of the leg irons.

  Other turnkeys, fearing some fight had broken out, rushed across the yard and halted the progress of the other circling men.

  As I got to my knees, I saw that the teenager had fallen flat on his face and cut his eye. Blood seeped through the fingers of the hand he put protectively to his face.

  A screw pulled me away and pinned me to the Press Yard wall while they tended the injured inmate. The young man who had been walking with him shouted to me, ‘You stupid bastard, you’ve nearly ’ad his eye out.’

  It was his brother. I saw it now. They were twins, but not identical. The shouter was a little thinner, taller, more angular in the face. But they were twins.

  The screws got the man to his feet and, with head bent and blood still dripping, they escorted him out of the yard.

  The other prisoners were moved out with him and I was left alone. The gaoler at my side gave me a push. ‘Off you go again, Lynch. You’ve had rest enough.’

  I was cold and welcomed the chance to walk a little. The yard reminded me of the one at the workhouse where, whatever the weather, we children were turned out ‘for fresh air’ and often returned so frozen that our bones would ache and our fingers and toes burn from chilblains.

  One such day, I had been keeping a safe distance from the Connor twins when the workhouse matron, a rotund, red-faced woman with a thick Irish accent came for me.

  ‘So this is where y’ave bin ’idin’,’ she’d said with great annoyance. ‘Oi’ve been walkin’ me feet off looking far ya.’ She grabbed my arm and marched me into a building I had never been in before. It was dimly lit and full of strange smells and noises. Through the gloom, I spied rows upon rows of single beds. Flames flickered in two soot-stained fireplaces but the spitting heat was insufficient to warm anyone more than a few feet away.

  The beds were jammed tighter than East End terraces, each cot occupied by a crumpled figure either sleeping or moaning.

  ‘Why are we here?’ I asked fearfully.

  Matron didn’t answer. Her grip on my wrist tightened. She pulled me past bed after bed. At the far corner, she stopped in front of a drawn curtain. ‘Prepare yourself, child. It is time for you to be a man.’ She pulled back the dusty drape.

  My eyes fell on a creature so pale and still that I did not at first recognise her.

  ‘Mother!’

  She was unnervingly white and utterly emaciated. A raw red graze glistened on her left temple. Streaks of wiped blood crusted her beautiful cheeks. There were pennies on her eyes – cold brown metal where there had once been blue as bright as a summer sky.

  ‘Take them off!’ I shouted and made for the bed. ‘Wake her up. Take those things off her eyes.’

  Matron grabbed me. Pulled me back. ‘She’s dead, child. Behave yerself an’ accept what’s ’appened. She’s dead ’n’ gone.’

  ‘Lynch!’

  The voice came from the present, not the past.

  ‘Get walkin’ again, or you’ll be gettin’ a beatin’!’ A screw had his yardstick raised and in line with the centre of my skull.

  Only as I looked up at him did I realise I had stopped moving and had been cowering in a corner of the yard. Memories had stranded me there, left me childlike. Small and frightened. Afraid of what the motherless future held.

  Derbyshire, April 1886

  The three days that followed Michael’s death were lost in sombre preparations for what the professor vowed would be ‘a funeral fit to grace the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris’. I had to wait until the morning of the fourth day to understand what he meant.

  Thackeray arrived with the hearse and six black horses, followed by two velvet-lined mourning coaches drawn by four immaculately groomed animals. The sun glinted off the polished wood and brass of the carriages and enriched the myriad colours shimmering in the ostrich feathers that had been fixed high and proud.

  The coffin itself was of solid oak and bore gleaming brass handles and a plate with the inscription ‘Never Beaten by Mortal Man’. Six pall-bearers shouldered the box from house to hearse, accompanied by two black-gowned mutes, twenty pages and six feathermen.

  The chief funeral attendant signalled to the coachmen and with a collective groan from the idling horses the grand procession began.

  No one spoke. The clop of hooves on cobbles was all that could be heard as I walked at the front, along with the professor, Sirius, Surrey and Lady Elizabeth. Three of Michael’s cousins, each as broad and burly as him, had journeyed from Dublin and Cork, and with them were two young nieces, not yet ten years old. Both of the girls constantly shivered from the cold, a lack of sleep and what I imagine was a fear engendered by the horrors of the day.

  The route was hilly and circular, passing through the small village of stone cottages where most inhabitants had the common sense to turn out and pay their respects. After about a mile, the procession returned to the southern gates of the Moriarty estate, where the private chapel and graveyard lay.

  The startling white headstones and tombs contrasted with the black crepe and silk of the mourners with their long dresses, coats and tall hats, and set against the endless rolling green of the Derbyshire countryside made for a memorable and moving sight.

  Once the casket had been lowered on ropes into the freshly dug grave, we all threw earth onto it and said our private goodbyes. As I dropped my handful of soil, I heard Michael’s voice pleading with me to help him die and I struggled to block out the images of him fighting for breath beneath the clasp of my murderous hands.

  I walked away, wondering how many people knew I had killed him. How many of them condemned me, or praised me for it.

  Back at the house, there was a plentiful supply of ale and cider. A lavish banquet that included ham, pork, beef, pies, cakes and cheeses was laid out in the ballroom, where Christmas functions and summer dances were held.

  I ate and drank like this might have been my last night alive, and I was not alone in doing so. The house was filled with those who had known the old wrestler but had been parted over the years.

  Among them I found Sebastian the Jew, who had given me shelter back in Manchester. He embraced me warmly and introduced me to others who performed similar roles for the professor. ‘We are all lowly recruits in Moriarty’s
great army of criminality,’ he boasted as he raised his tankard and knocked it drunkenly against mine.

  Although the ale and wine continued to flow, I found that once we were alone, our conversation evaporated and my old acquaintance even had trouble holding eye contact with me. ‘You don’t seem relaxed in my company, Sebastian – why would that be?’

  ‘I am sorry. It has been a difficult and emotional day.’

  ‘For some more than others.’

  ‘You have my sympathies.’ He raised his tankard respectfully and sought more solace in its contents.

  ‘Did you know Michael well?’

  ‘Well enough.’ He wiped ale from his moustache and beard. ‘I was one of the few who were aware of what he did for the professor.’

  I saw great nervousness on his face. ‘I sense you have more to say, Sebastian. If that is the case then speak now, or I will remember this moment as the time you chose not to.’

  He took another swig of his drink and wiped his beard again. ‘Myself and some “chosen” others, area lieutenants as Moriarty calls us, knew of Mr Brannigan’s illness and the professor’s hunt for a replacement. He had alerted us to be on the lookout for you.’

  I was thrown by the comment. ‘What do you mean?’

  His eyes showed a reluctance to continue.

  ‘Tell me, what did you mean, “on the lookout”?’

  ‘We were told there was a boy from London whom the professor considered special. He was said to be on the run following a murder. We were given your description and your name.’

  ‘But when we first met, still you allowed me to call myself Jimmy and live a lie.’

  ‘It was your lie to live.’

  ‘Was it you who led the professor to me?’

  ‘It was. I had no choice. After that, he had you watched most closely. Indeed, he and Alexander were in attendance during that country-house burglary we carried out. Sirius even rode with one of your drivers.’

  The news that Moriarty had found me in such a fashion and had gone to far greater lengths to insinuate himself into my life than I had realised was disturbing.