“A brief is an accumulation of facts.” The man’s tone is matter-of-fact; he introduces himself as Dr Clutterbuck.
Walking alongside the doctor with a swaying gait is a large bird, grotesquely lashed with a leather collar. It cranes its long neck, peering up at the captive. The doctor swipes back and forth with a machete to clear a path. Long-legged carapaced creatures jump from shiny leaves at their approach.
Through occasional breaks in the flora the captive spies a hot-air balloon decorated like the tricolour on La Fête Nationale. A brass telescope has been mounted on a pivot fixed to the wicker basket, and is trained down on them.
They arrive at a stagnant pool simmering with mosquito larvae. The captive peers into the water as a face floats to the surface. Half the flesh has fallen away. His father’s features can still be discerned . . . He turns away in disgust.
A woman with her hair tied up in the severe Roman matron style steps from the undergrowth carrying a tureen of soup.
“That heated air will sink is easily proved,” says Dr Clutterbuck, dipping a spoon in the soup.
The bird squints at Wyre. “Costive bowels, a promising symptom.”
They proceed along an avenue of coconut trees bordered by prickly pears and aloe blades. Dark figures are loading something onto a wagon. A horse trots past, followed by a running footman in rags, his black hand twisted in the horse’s tail.
They are standing now at the edge of a great cliff. Far below in the bay a Guinea ship is arriving. Uncountable faces crowd at the portholes, staring up.
“In this heat,” says Clutterbuck, “sheep’s wool is gradually converted into hair.”
“A black horse will become perfectly brown,” says the bird, bobbing.
The island appears to be an archipelago of small, oblong bodies of land, surrounded by an immense depth of water. Salt oozes from the ground, crystallizing into solid cakes. Gangs of ebony-skinned men are gathering the salt into bushels using long rakes.
“Winchester bushels or customary measures?” Clutterbuck frowns. “Who claims the rights to the surplus?”
They plunge back into the undergrowth, stepping over ripe, tawny fruits. The flowers here are hairy reddish tufts hung with juicy green capsules.
“The plant in its natural proportion,” says Dr Clutterbuck.
“Each part in its proper situation,” echoes the bird.
They arrive at a peach-house. Warmed by two fires, the building is filled with all manner of forced forms and grafted specimens. Clutterbuck heads straight to an enormous clay pot that has been placed in the middle of the perfumed house. The pot contains a gigantic puce flower straining from a shroud of flesh.
“The male plant produces male flowers only,” says the doctor. He stands on tiptoe, peering over the rim of the pot.
“Water it,” commands the bird.
Appalled by the sight, the lawyer pushes the creature’s neck from him and dashes from the peach-house. The bird follows, swollen to ostrich size, holding its elongated beak low to the ground.
The captive arrives breathless at the perpendicular edge. Another Guinea ship lies far below. Sailors gaze up from the deck, millions of black eyes at the portholes. How do they fit them all in?
He turns at the sound of the ostrich’s beak snapping.
Leans forward, endlessly.
31. No-Show
Wyre woke with aching stones. The air smelled of sour milk. Roses’s chair was at the foot of the bed, but Mrs Mason sat in it.
“They say when we die, Mr Wyre, we’re never really alone, but hear our loved ones going about their business as if they were in the next room. At first, it’s said to be a comfort, but gradually their concerns become of less and less interest. Could you hear anyone, Mr Wyre?”
He said nothing for a moment; then, “Did Rose come?”
Mrs Mason got up, and squeezed his hand.
When he was strong enough to sit up in bed, his landlady brought him a copy of The Chronicle. It was just as she’d said . . . 24th July. Seeing the date in solid roman type suddenly made the passage of time seem real. The Vere Street trial was long over. For all he knew, Miss Crawford’s fiancé was already surgeon fodder. Exhausted, he let his head fall back.
When he next opened his eyes, a familiar lean face stared across at him from the lady’s chair.
“You had us worried, Kit. Your landlady sent for a doctor – and a priest. We were even considering Mr Birch’s Electrical Magic.”
I had a funny dream,” Wyre said, eyes filling.
“Had your funeral speech all prepared . . .”
A tear brimmed over; Wyre couldn’t help it. “You may still get to use it.”
“Nonsense!” Leighton smiled. “Remember, illness arrives on horseback but leaves by foot. Anyway, you’re one of the lucky ones.” The Runner pushed himself to his feet. He’d changed. Those dark rings under his eyes, for a start . . . (Wyre didn’t want to think about how different he must look.) And was that a livery of some kind? A footman’s perhaps?
Looking around the room, Leighton gave a low whistle. “Uppish lodgings. Sure you’re good for them?”
Wyre made a face. “I’d rather talk about Vere Street.”
His friend looked levelly at him. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
Wyre listened in disbelief as the public officer ran through recent events. Best had led the prosecution? Since when had the Chief Barrister sullied himself with molly briefs? Still more difficult to credit was the fact all five gang members had escaped the noose. An hour’s stand in the pillory would be unpleasant, but it hardly fit the crime. There was some comfort, at least, for Miss Crawford: her fiancé had more chance of surviving a stand in the stocks than the rather more terminal drop from a ladder.
The question was, how had it happened in the first place? Mitchell was sharp, but there was no way he could have trumped Best in the pit.
Leighton had a final shock to deliver, the key to the others. Before a sodomite could be condemned to a capital tariff, two eye-witnesses had to swear to seed. It seemed one of the prosecution’s star witnesses had failed to show up. Some puggard named Wardle.
“Never heard of him,” Wyre muttered.
“No one had, crawled out from under a stone at the last minute. Claimed to have seen everything.”
So Best’s faith in Brockton had been misplaced.
“Where’s this so-called eye-witness now?”
Leighton shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Read has officers out looking for him. What they call scouring the land.”
“And the other witness?”
“Fellow called Taunton. Captain in the Watch.”
“Was he prepared to swear to seed?”
Leighton grinned. “Gallons of it, bubbling from every orifice. He almost made up for Wardle’s absence. But Wardle fucked things up royally.”
Wyre’s eyes felt heavy. “Has a date been set for the pillorying?”
“Tomorrow, as it happens. Bow Street’s been taking on men all week. With a bit of luck, we’ll get the culprits to the stocks in one piece. Getting them back again might be trickier.”
It seemed Aspinall wasn’t out of the fire yet. But there was more at issue here than a molly’s fate. The whole thing reeked of handy-dandy. He’d know more once he’d seen the trial proceedings. The transcripts should have been placed in the Middlesex Records Office by now. He’d make an appointment.
He asked about the New Bridge murder, but there was nothing to report. Mr Have-A-Care had vanished into the ethereal. It was the same story with Thomas and Sellis. As for the Palace’s co-operation . . . Leighton lifted his shoulders.
“It’s just as I said, Kit. They don’t want to know. No support from Bow Street, either. The old bird was plain: the Palace is off-limits for the likes of me.”
Wyre looked incredulous. “Encrypted letters that linked the Vere Street Club to St James’s, molly assassinations . . . Isn’t that too much to ignore?”
“Read
’s writ runs,” Leighton answered. “Of course, I went anyway. But before you get excited, it’s a closed shop. I was passed from gentlemen of the privy chamber to equerries, to the King’s fucking cock-crower. They won’t confirm, or deny, whether anyone with the name Sellis even works or has ever worked there, citing jurisdiction of the Court of the Royal-frigging-Verge. National security’s become the full stop to every sentence.”
Wyre pictured Miss Crawford’s handsome features. He’d let her down. He’d failed to protect her from Brockton. He’d allowed Best to fob him off.
“There’s something else you should know, Kit,” his friend said hesitantly. (Wyre had never seen him so uncomfortable.) “The doctor told Mrs Mason he hadn’t come across your symptoms in any of the fever patients he’d attended.”
“I remember a falling sensation . . .”
“You were puking up blood. There were blisters on your tongue. Your piss was black. Shall I go on?”
Wyre felt faint again. “Poison?”
“What did you eat that day?”
“Only the broth we ordered in The Sun.” He looked oddly at Leighton. “You didn’t eat yours, remember?”
The Runner didn’t flinch from his gaze. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“Who’d want me out of the way?” Wyre said after a pause.
Leighton dragged his nails over an unshaven cheek. “Probably wasn’t you they were after.” He rubbed his eyes with the pads of his thumbs, then patted the lawyer’s shoulder. “This isn’t over yet. I’m resurrecting some old contacts, people I can trust. We’ll talk in a few days. I’ll know more then.”
Wyre was too weak to protest.
32. Tussy-Mussies
A sharp lurch to the left, an echoing pitch to the right. The cavalcade set off for Charing Cross. Like the other gang members, Aspinall hung by a shackled wrist to the high central rail running the length of the open-sided cart. The same caravan, he’d been told, used to take the transports to Portsmouth.
The fruit and dung began to land. He hunched over, using his free hand to protect his head as best he could. Miss Pasiphäe remained stubbornly erect, laughing like a maniac. Aspinall yelled at him, but the customs man continued to laugh, eyes bulging.
––––– Reap the whirlwind!
Citizens were creeping along the house-tops carrying bedpans and buckets. Their loping shapes put Aspinall in mind of troops manning the battlements of some nightmarish fortress. Francis had also seen them; he gave a little whoop of terror. Donne’s eyes were shut tightly. The landlord, Cooke, stood apart, sneering.
––––– Robert!
Aspinall peered into the spectators, falling back with a gasp as a clod struck him on the temple.
––––– Prick-eared bastards!
The crowd tightened about the cart, a blizzard of filth arriving from all sides now. Stinking flounders, fermented fruit, the contents of bedpans. Volleys of slaughterhouse gore rained down on marshals and mollies alike, slowly melting all to one identity.
––––– Dung-lickers!
––––– Bumheads!
––––– Taste the fruit!
Amos grinned madly, bruised and bloodied, somehow still upright. Aspinall saw the brickbat coming that thudded into the custom man’s skull. The defiant old sodomite tipped forward, dangling from the rail.
Thirteen years old, and fresh in the city. James Cooke had flown to her like a crow to carrion, offering her a room in The Horse on Carey Street in exchange for odd jobs. An old brood mare had shown her round. Sarah’s task was to carry buckets of water up to the attics, and return with the slops. Soon she was guiding soused men through the tavern’s passages, paid to fend off their clumsy attempts; and then not to.
One of James’s harlots, whippet-thin and handsome, liked to dance for her, catching up her skirts, sparing nothing. Sarah removed the fug in the girl’s airless chamber with tussy-mussies of thimble-flowers, which she picked herself in the fields above Finsbury. London-pride and columbines, candy-tufts and catchfly.
“Set them in water,” the thin prostitute begged.
“They live longer parched,” Sarah replied.
She thought of those flowers now as she waited with the crowds for the cavalcade to approach.
The firm of Starkey & Jennings had seized James’s license; soldiers had been posted outside The White Swan. The cart with her husband in it appeared, and slowly drew level.
Time hung above the men like bad air. Like summer-fever.
An ounce of nutmeg, an ounce of cloves, an ounce of mace. Sixpence for plague water. Take care your still does not burn.
Crouching, she picked up an apple from the cobbles, drew her arm back with the others.
To a serenade of hisses, the procession arrived at the entrance to Panton Street. Aspinall remembered celebrating Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar here. The crowd was bigger today.
The pillory’s crossed wings were capable of accommodating four heads at once. Francis, Donne and Aspinall were chosen to stand first. The guardsman began to tremble violently, clinging to the side of the cart. Two officers held him up horizontally, while another prised open his fingers, wrenching him free.
Aspinall laid his head through the iron carcan as instructed, heart contracting as the upper portion of the stocks was lowered.
The crowd roared, tame tigers allowed to taste blood.
Twenty women were called forward, and arranged into a semicircle beneath the platform. Aspinall watched helplessly as butcher boys passed egg-sized white stones around the wild sorority.
A musket discharged skywards was the signal to begin driving the machine around its iron-collared shaft. He leaned forward for the city’s discipline.
The first stones arrived among the fruit and dung. Some clattered from the wings, but those that struck stung like hornets. The pinioned men groaned and cried out. Soon, they were shuffling through a smeary circle of crimson blood.
A pebble to the forehead dazed him. For a while, he seemed to stand above the spectacle, perfectly lucid while his physical body was slack. He gazed down sadly at his defenceless head. He’d been put here to learn to suffer, to undergo the punishment of a rogue, like a butcher exposed for selling measly pork, or a baker bad bread. If they’d offered him poison, he’d have accepted it gratefully. He watched his feet trudge, his face raised to the pitching and pelting; welts rising; blood dripping.
Fresh salvos landed like punches. Behind him, Donne’s bellowing was frightful to hear.
With a shriek, one of the women rushed forward. Drawing a blade she’d concealed in her skirts, she clambered onto the platform, pointing the weapon at Francis’s fore parts. Aspinall watched in horror as – to cries of “Slice it off!”, “Cut it close!” – the guardsman began kicking out madly. Before she could inflict any injury there, an officer arrived to haul her back by her hair.
The rest of the stand passed as a timeless nightmare of yells, muddy salvos and the creaking of the unoiled shaft. There must have been a second shot fired in the air, but the physician didn’t hear it. He stopped pushing only when he felt the flat of an officer’s hand on his back.
Aspinall was first to be released, and led numbly from the platform. The carcan was raised next from Donne’s neck. The man’s eyes were bulging, his face a cartographer’s fantasy of welt-roads and bruise-conurbations. Francis looked like he’d been dragged from the Pit. Aspinall had seen such fixed stares and empty faces many times at Wood’s Close.
The three were returned to the cart and re-shackled. Then it was Cooke’s and Amos’s turn to mount the platform, to absorb the city’s scorn. The customs man gazed out at the sea of faces, a dark, spreading stain appearing at his crotch.
The crowd grinned back with a single pair of lips.
33. Transcript
The hackman who drove Wyre to the Middlesex Sessions House behaved as if he had custody of a stately barouche, rather than a clapped-out dust-cart. A Carey’s New Guide man, he gave the lawyer chapter-and
-verse in miles, furlongs and poles. As they rattled past the Panton Street crossroads, Wyre used scenes from The Gazette’s account to populate the public square, picturing the air as it must have been a week ago, thick with missiles. It beggared belief no one had perished. So far, at any rate. The landlord was back in the Courthouse’s cells – for his own protection, according to The Gazette – where he was receiving medical treatment for his hurts.
Wyre disembarked at the Sessions House, where the city’s trial transcripts were kept. The exertion made his head swim. Perhaps Mrs Mason was right, he should still be in bed. Leaning for support against a length of iron railings, his eyes fell on a brass plaque that supposedly marked the exact spot where an oar landed in 1784, dropped by Lunardi as he flew above the city on inflammable air. He could do with some absurd levitation himself.
He waited in the Reading Room for the trial transcripts to be carried up from the stacks. The archivist, a thin, laconic man, placed a stiff pasteboard box of tightly tied docket rolls in front of him. It seemed the Vere Street vellums had been misfiled; he’d found them swaddled with a set of filthy accounts dating from the sodomy trials of 1744. Whoever boxed them didn’t know the first thing.
With a sudden image of the whole city as an archive of misplaced items, Wyre began picking at the knots. Unravelling the transcript, he flattened it out with his palms. At least there appeared to be a full account. These days, it wasn’t unusual for court scribes simply to note ‘crimes too horrid to relate’, before recording a bald verdict. The document before him seemed candid enough, though, even if the customary fucks and fig-holes of a sodomy trial had been civilized into f–ks and fundaments.
Taking a deep breath, he began to read.
437. JAMES AMOS (alias Miss Pasiphäe), EDWARD DONNE (alias Sweet-Lips), ROBERT ASPINALL, RICHARD FRANCIS (alias Jemima Kiss), and JAMES COOKE were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions, Clerkenwell, for not having the fear of God before their eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, wickedly and feloniously did make a filthy nasty lewd beastly assault; and for diabolically and against the order of nature, having venereal affairs in the fundaments of each other in a certain room in The White Swan tavern, which they entered for the sole purpose of perpetuating that abominable and detestable crime called sodomy, on the 9th day of July in the fiftieth year of the Reign of this Sovereign Lord George the Third by the Grace of God.
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