The Fiend in Human

by John MacLachlan Gray

  Of the fifteen hundred inmates of both sexes currently serving in The Steel, only the current occupant of the condemned cell can be said to constitute a danger to the public, and this of an exceptional kind, being of such a freakish disposition as to murder for the sheer pleasure of it.

  The new penal philosophy of incarceration is no longer designed for those awaiting punishment (hanging, flogging), but as a punishment and correction in itself. (Americans, who originated the concept, refer to the facility as a ‘penitentiary’.) Thanks to the modern approach, English children no longer scurry beneath gibbets by the roadside on their way to school, nor do their parents take weekly pleasure in the public flogging of their neighbours; instead, a scientific programme of silence, solitude, the treadwheel, as well as flogging and blistering where necessary, improves these disfigured souls, out of public sight.

  Whitty has written often about the peculiar horror that ensues whenever the scientific mind turns its attention to public morality and the creation of a better world. Stories about the horrors of prison life are always popular, as the imagined spectacle of physical harm done to another inspires in the reader a pleasurable awareness of his own comfortable position.

  Given that it is the usual practice to house convicts awaiting execution in the death cell at Newgate (the site of the hanging itself), the placement of William Ryan in Coldbath Fields has occasioned some speculation. Some see it as an attempt to augment the severity of punishment, at a time when the garrotter has replaced the traditional footpad as a civic bogeyman. Others see Ryan as an object lesson to current inmates at The Steel, who might otherwise contemplate graduating to more serious crimes. Others look to the planned procession from The Steel to the square at Newgate as a revival of a tradition – the public exhibition of the criminal throughout the city, that he may be subjected to the indignation of honest citizens.

  ‘Does our man know we’re here?’ enquires Whitty, jammed in the insufficient shelter of an obscure side doorway (how aptly named, Coldbath Fields!), trying to remain dry against a frigid, angular torrent of rain mixed with sleet (ah, spring!) which abrades his exposed skin like the blades of tiny knives.

  ‘Mr Hook has never been what you call timely,’ Owler admits, it being an hour since the agreed-upon time, the metal door having failed to budge from its sealed position. (The rust, the cobwebs, the state of its hardware indicate a discouraging lack of use.) Whitty observes his companion, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, water pouring off the brim of his crooked hat, skin as thick as buffalo hide, yet with a curiously fragile sensibility.

  ‘Mr Owler, is this necessary to accomplish our purpose?’

  ‘Mr Ryan is in great demand among preachers, women’s societies and likewise. Many would gladly take credit for a condemned man meeting his Maker in a reformed state. Without preferred access we should be lucky to meet with the Fiend once a fortnight. Trust me, Sir: best to make use of my channels what have stood the test of time.’

  ‘Out of curiosity, what are these channels? Do you forward a request in writing?’

  ‘Surely you jest, Sir. That would put us both on the treadwheel side by side.’

  Whitty thinks he is coming down with a fever, a result of the terrible smells ingested of late. He longs to take to his bed, even if it be situated in Camden Town.

  ‘How the devil do you know the message was received at all?’

  ‘Indeed, Sir, I have wondered that about the electric telegraph. How they squeezes the sentences through such a little wire is a great mystery.’ Owler strikes a lucifer to his pipe, filling the tiny doorway with a stench somewhat like burning leather.

  Whitty removes a length of spider web clinging to his sleeve. ‘Why do we not meet your man at the main door, like other prospective visitors?’

  ‘I explained the legalities only moments ago, Sir. Many unforeseen factors could cooper an enterprise such as this.’

  At the door Whitty can detect a faint scratching like that of a rodent, then a teeth-grinding protest as the iron bolt is jerked open, followed by the heavy groan of the door itself. Now a crack appears, and, in the crack, a single eye, framed above and below by a thatch of matted hair.

  ‘Mr Owler, might I presume?’

  ‘You are correct, Mr Hook.’

  The crack does not widen. ‘We made no arrangement about third parties, Squire.’

  ‘Mr Whitty is a factor in our purpose, Mr Hook. He is fly.’

  ‘In these matters I be sensitive on third parties, whether they be fly or not.’

  ‘Mr Whitty is with The Falcon. ’T’will expand our potential wonderfully.’

  The crack does not open.

  ‘Allow Mr Whitty access, Mr Hook, and you will have a new pair of boots from the profits. I knows a fine pair on the Waterloo Road what has the name Hook right on ‘em.’

  The eye disappears momentarily and the door grinds its way to an opening sufficient to allow Owler and Whitty to squeeze through, into the main exercise yard of Coldbath Fields House of Correction.

  ‘What is the meaning of the word “fly”?’ asks Whitty.

  ‘It is the language we call cant, Sir, and it indicates trustworthiness. Mind, I said you was fly to gain entrance, not because I hold this opinion of you myself.’

  The turnkey having forced the door shut again, they now occupy a dark alcove leading to a blank wall – the continuous renovation and expansion of the house of correction having created, in what was once a passage between two buildings, a small, three-sided enclosure, from which they overlook a large open space paved with flat stones. On the far side of the yard stands the hulk of the prison itself, whose surface has been decorated with improving texts designed to uplift offender and officer alike.

  GO TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD

  CONSIDER HER WAYS TO BE WISE.

  Around the yard, walls of squared greystone tower to a height of fifty feet. Just below the top of each wall is a chevaux-de-frise – a continuous rod of revolving iron spikes, supported by a horizontal bar armed with additional points which has been drilled into the stone. Along the top edge of the wall are embedded a row of long, sharp spikes, their points angled inward to further discourage an impromptu exit.

  To Whitty, the paved expanse has the aspect of a grotesque playground, where about a hundred men have gathered in circular groups of ten or twelve in order to participate in what appears to be a child’s game. Within each circle of prisoners sits a concentric circle of twenty-four-pound cannon-balls, evenly spaced; at the bellowed command of an officer, each man picks up a cannon-ball, carries it to his right-hand neighbour, sets it down, then returns to his place, where the cannon-ball formerly belonging to his left-hand neighbour lies waiting for him. He picks up the next cannon-ball and repeats the exercise, again and again, as the cannon-balls go around and around for eight hours of a stretch.

  To maximize the tedium and isolation, each man not only maintains absolute silence but also wears ‘the beak’ – a peculiar cloth cap, the peak of which, also of cloth, hangs low enough that it covers the face like a mask, with two small holes for the eyes. Thus, the men are deprived of communication either by voice or through facial expression. Notwithstanding, so persistent is the human urge to communicate, interchange between the prisoners takes place by means of peculiar movements of the thumb and fingers, in a system akin to the deaf-and-dumb alphabet.

  Whitty notes the ever-present pigeons fluttering about the prisoners’ feet in the yard, visible beneath the beak; the rainbow-like shimmer about their necks must provide a welcome glimpse of colour to an eye accustomed to none.

  ‘Shot drill,’ explains the turnkey, removing his cap to scratch his pate, situated above an explosion of whiskers which sprout in tufts, above which sits an eye, like a robin’s egg in a nest – the one and only eye, thanks to cataract in the other, a milky chrysalis which, thinks Whitty, awaits the emergence of a butterfly.

  Mr Hook’s threadbare uniform of shiny blue serge emits an odour of tobacco, sweat, mutton and
wet wool; its tarnished brass buttons barely contain the flesh packed within. From his belt hang a number of objects: a chain containing many keys, a humphrey (a small shot-filled cosh), a policeman’s night-stick, a whistle, and a canvas bag packed with personal effects – mutton, tobacco, gin, and a potation which, to judge by the smell of his breath, is Mariani wine, a cocaine preparation.

  ‘I was not always as you see me now, Squire,’ whispers the turnkey. ‘I would have you know that.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sir?’ A weariness settles upon the correspondent, for he is about to revisit that almost universal tendency among the lower orders – the urge to present oneself as having once occupied a higher state. Every beggar was once a shopkeeper, every thief plied an honest trade, every harlot is a ravished daughter of the gentry.

  ‘An engineer was I until me sight took for the worse. Depth perception, Squire: without the two eyes you’re jiggered where machinery is concerned.’

  Whitty ventures no reply, distracted by a flutter of pigeons in the yard, where a man has collapsed. Obeying a barked order from the warder, two inmates roughly pick the body off the ground by the wrists and ankles, carry it to the entrance to the building and toss it onto a blanket like a sack of flour, where it joins three of its insensate colleagues, having likewise succumbed to exhaustion, malnutrition or jail fever. On the wall above them is an uplifting message:

  LIFE’S RACE WELL RUN

  LIFE’S WORK WELL DONE.

  In the meanwhile, the remaining men close the circle and, to another bellowed command from the warder, resume their futile enterprise.

  ‘In your experience, Mr Hook, is shot drill an effective tool in the reformation of a criminal?’

  ‘Most efficacious, Squire. Thanks to exercise and diet, our prisoners grow more feeble and present less danger to the public.’

  ‘I had not thought of nutrition as a weapon against crime.’

  ‘A deep thinker, is Governor Cornwallis. If there is a trend, the master has hitched onto it.’

  Whitty notes that Owler is already headed across the yard, eager to get to work, anxious over valuable interview time lost, gloomily conscious of the stakes involved for himself and his wards, leery of his reliance on a party so easily distracted from their intended purpose.

  Having passed through a huge square room from which extend two wings consisting of tiers of cells, they enter the treadwheel house, a building resembling an enormous, roaring factory and containing a number of peculiar machines, each of which is powered by the feet of a line of prisoners, climbing a set of moving stairs.

  Whitty lights a cigaret as a fumigant to ward off the universal prison smell: sweat and raw sewage, combined with the fumes of burning chloride of lime – an unappetizing preparation designed to keep putrid fevers to a minimum.

  ‘I note that the treadwheel has caught your interest, Squire.’

  ‘The famous treadwheel. Much has been written about it.’

  Newgate and Fleet being his normal prison beat, this is Whitty’s first view of this latest in correctional thinking (colloquially known as the ‘cock-chafer’) for which The Steel has become justly famous. Before them stands a long series of compartments, designed to accommodate the labours of five hundred at a time, not unlike the rows of stalls at a public urinal, in each of which a masked convict can be seen treading a turning wheel at a single fixed rate. The focus of their combined effort is an enormous, vented water-wheel, spinning against the far wall without evident purpose. Women in canvas skirts and bonnets work the treadwheel as well as men, their modesty ensured by pieces of linen stretched on a frame behind them, shielding their ankles from immodest display. Below each compartment issue three steps, upon which other prisoners await their turn, without enthusiasm.

  ‘The treadwheel be the pride and joy of our establishment. By tradition, every inmate spends its first three months on the machine. Nobody leaves The Steel without the full benefit.’

  ‘Through labour they see the error of their ways.’

  ‘Well put, Mr Whitty, true for you there.’

  ‘And choking on one’s own filth – that also will straighten a man out.’

  ‘Might you be referring to the odour hereabouts?’

  ‘I should be insensible not to, Mr Hook. We are in the midst of one gigantic cess-pool.’

  ‘The odours is a professional drawback, to be certain, Squire. It is not uncommon for the warder coming in of a morning to become sick. Many is the time I have hurled me breakfast, bought at me own expense not an hour earlier.’

  ‘And it must surely be a torture for the women,’ observes Owler, pained by his habitual worry for the two girls in his care. ‘To allow girls into such a place as this is.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Owler. These is not women as you’d call women in polite society, Squire. These women is the toughest nuts and therefore slow to crack. You wouldn’t credit the inconceivable wickedness of these girls, the impudence of them. Simply to maintain respect, a girl’s head must be shaved and blistered at the slightest sign of rebellion, otherwise you have the very Devil on your hands.’

  ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, which find sermons in stones and good in everything.’

  ‘That was of a pretty composure, Mr Whitty,’ says the turnkey.

  ‘It was Shakespeare, actually. Are you gentlemen acquainted with Shakespeare?’

  ‘I have heard some speeches,’ replies Owler.

  Adds Mr Hook: ‘I’ve heard of an eye-gouging that is most shocking.’

  ‘That would be King Lear. There is also a hot poker up a bugger’s arse in Edward II.’

  Turnkey and patterer wince at the thought.

  The prison bell sounds the quarter-hour, on precisely the same note heard in Newgate, Pentonville and Holloway; prison bells are all cast by the same hands, in the same mould, tuned to the same pitch – a harsh, strident voice expressing callousness and hopelessness in one dispiriting note.

  Hearing the bell, Owler grows once again anxious. Urged on by the patterer, the three proceed down a set of iron steps, then immediately back up to ground level, to what appears to be a small outbuilding attached to the rear, like a garden shed equipped with a heavy iron door.

  ‘Now that we are outside the condemned cell, might I impart a caution?’

  ‘Mr Owler, I eagerly await your counsel.’

  ‘There must be no mention of a Sorrowful Lamentation until such time as our man actually confesses. ’T’would be a fatal blunder if you get my drift, Sir.’

  ‘I agree. An innocent man might find it unnerving to hear his confession read to him in verse.’

  ‘Nobody said he were innocent. Or might you be apprised beyond the horizon of my knowledge?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind, Mr Owler, I was only theorizing about the case.’

  ‘There is no theory to be had about the case. There is nothing theoretical about it.’

  ‘They always confess,’ says Mr Hook, producing a large brass key from the ring attached to his belt. ‘Some confess when I’d of sworn they don’t remember they done it.’

  ‘In this case,’ says Owler gravely, ‘the worry is who will hear the confession. Competition is keen.’

  The turnkey having opened the heavy iron door, they enter a surprisingly large room with a ceiling at about three times the height of a man. There is one rectangular window just beneath the ceiling, topped with a rounded cornice and covered with a grid of flat iron bars, allowing a chequered view of the sky.

  The wall opposite contains a second door which opens onto a tiny, enclosed exercise yard, bounded on three sides by the building itself and two exterior walls. The fourth wall verges on the prison yard and is lower in height, its purpose being not so much to contain the condemned as to protect him from other prisoners, who, having wives and daughters of their own, and tending to a conservative line on crime and punishment, would cheerfully serve out Chokee Bill for the primitive satisfaction of it, thereby saving Mr Calcraft the time and trouble.

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nbsp; The walls are made of square stones, cluttered with the names, dates and last messages of former occupants, etched in its surface with pieces of rock or metal. In the centre is a deal table containing the remainder of a meal consisting of a mutton chop, a fish and what looks to be preserved tongue, as well as a pudding. Remarkably, the table also contains two bouquets of fresh flowers, newly delivered.

  ‘I say, Mr Hook, the accommodations and victuals seem to be of an unusually high order. Wouldn’t mind a stay here myself.’ (Whitty watches the turnkey sharply.) ‘I understand – theoretically speaking of course – that for the payment of a certain sum by an outside party, it is not unknown for a convict to obtain certain supplementaries.’

  Hook’s eye grows shifty, aware of its delicate situation and the correspondent’s ready pencil. ‘True for you, Squire, though we would never countenance it here.’

  ‘No doubt, Mr Hook. I appeal purely to your professional imagination. Were such a thing to occur, how might it be done?’

  ‘I wouldn’t hear of such a thing meself, but it would stand to reason that any such gammy transaction would take place outside the premises – let us say, by means of a package left with the barkeeper of a certain pub.’

  ‘Thereby protecting both the enterprising turnkey and the prisoner’s anonymous benefactor.’

  ‘Exactly, Squire. Of course, we be talking of a purely theoretical matter.’

  Whitty becomes aware of a sound in a far corner of the room, in whose shadow he can make out the back of a man, who is turning a handle, attached to what appears to be a large grinder-organ – without music – to which he is attached by means of chain and ankle-iron. It is as though our man were playing the roles of grinder and monkey, simultaneously.

  ‘Am I finally in the presence of Mr Ryan?’