The Blind Beak

by Ernest Dudley

  The Blind Beak

  Ernest Dudley

  © Ernest Dudley 1954

  Ernest Dudley has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1954 Robert Hale Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1766 — AGED EIGHTEEN

  The Stone Jug

  1.

  2.

  3

  1770 — AGED TWENTY-TWO

  Bartholomew Fair

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  1777 — AGED TWENTY-NINE

  The Spy

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  1766 — AGED EIGHTEEN

  The Stone Jug

  1.

  It was eight o’clock one night in mid-October, 1766, the clock of St. Sepulchre’s Church was striking, the dull heavy notes falling on the misty moonlight air being taken up in varying tones by other clocks in the neighbourhood of Newgate Prison. In his solitary cell on the third floor over the gaol gateway, the manacled figure paused only momentarily from the task absorbing his attention. The past hour he had been twisting and contracting his hands so that they were all bruised and raw in an effort to force them through the gyves clamped about his wrists. He bent his head once more, his teeth gripping the chain linking the irons. From Newgate Street arose the hoarse cry of the night watchman: ‘Eight of the clock of a chill October night and all’s well.’

  Of a sudden the tensed figure in the cell breathed a low hiss of elation as he dragged one hand free. Using his liberated hand to grip the iron clapped around his other wrist he wrenched at it all the harder. Spurred on by his initial triumph, his youthful features contorted as the handcuffs edge bit cruelly into his flesh. He dragged and wrenched until suddenly his other hand drew free. He let the manacles fall to the floor, chafing and massaging his numbed and cramped fingers. They were strong-looking hands, small but sinewy and tapering from broad palms. The long, dark eyes, set deep in his face aglisten with sweat, gleamed beneath their straight somewhat craggy brows, giving his expression a kind of devilish lift so that he appeared aged beyond his mere eighteen summers. ‘Small wonder you were so dubbed, Nick,’ red-haired and sulky-mouthed Doll Tawdry would tell him, lying in his embrace in the St. Giles’s stew. ‘For Satan himself looks out of that face of yours, my darling.’

  Both hands free at last, Nick Rathburn bent all his efforts to release himself from the fetters encumbering his ankles. He inserted the broken and rusted nail, prised three weeks earlier from the heavy oak floor of his cell against just this very moment, in the huge padlock attaching the chain of his fetters to a heavy iron staple driven deep into the floor.

  Nearly an hour later the moonlight which slanted through the barred window high in the cell-wall had swung across the floor to leave him shadowed, an engrossed, graven figure of consummate patience. A rasping click gladdened his heart and the padlock yielded. He was no longer held to the floor but able to move about his cell as much as his leg-irons would permit him. Without a pause to rest himself he crouched upon his haunches and proceeded to twist the chain attaching the iron rings clamping his ankles, so he could obtain some leverage. He could not bite off the groan between his clenched teeth as he tugged with both hands, his biceps bunched, the sweat pouring down his face to drip off his upper lip. Suddenly the chain burst asunder at its weakest link.

  With a shuddering sigh he fell backwards to stretch his length on the floor, his heart pounding in his ears. A burst of raucous laughter came from the Condemned Hold beneath, wherein those felons due for the rope’s-end at Tyburn were crowded in filth and darkness, the squeak of a fiddle, and then from the women’s cell arose the shrieks of a lunatic prisoner in anguish over her new-born child who had died earlier that day. Nick listened to her cries, to be followed inevitably by the shouts and curses of the warders, then more screams of pain from the woman which died away into a low whimpering before the kicks and blows of her captors.

  Two years in Newgate had sharpened to a razor-edge keenness his sensibilities, already tempered and toughened by the vicissitudes he had endured before his incarceration: his earliest remembrance was being found, ragged and emaciated nigh unto death in a corner of Rathburn Yard, a noisome Holborn alley, by a chimney-sweep in need of a boy to climb the chimneys. He had at length run away from his brutal employer to make himself despotic ruler of as desperate a band of thieving, rapacious children as ever St. Giles’s Rookeries spewed up to haunt London’s streets. He vowed to himself even as he had been borne off from Bow Street to Newgate he would not long languish in stench and corruption to wait for gaol-fever to claim him, or rot into premature old age, candidate for the burial-ground or dissecting-table before his time. He would surely find a way to freedom and life, even the uncertain dangerous existence he had led in London’s underworld.

  To this end he had sought out those of his companions in wretchedness and horror whom he knew might offer him a tid-bit of advice, a low-voiced hint, a fragment of reminiscence of some past prisoner who had escaped from even so formidable a Stone Jug as Newgate. He had speedily learned from cheats and sharpers that deceiving dexterity of the hand which enabled him to throw a loaded dice or marked card, using his winnings to bribe his gaolers in return for food and clothing.

  There had also been that drunken Grub Street hack, long languishing in Newgate for some debt, who had encouraged him to acquire the knowledge of reading and writing. ‘You have the face of a sharp fellow, Nick; a little learning would sit neat upon your shoulders.’ This individual obtaining for him a battered copy of the Bible and sundry newspapers, together with writing-materials, Nick, realizing the material use to which he could put the teaching he absorbed, allowed himself to be persuaded to equip himself with the rudiments of learning. His progress was so rapid, however, his aptitude so marked, as to arouse the scribbler’s wonder. ‘You may not know who your parents were, but I vow you were born of no ordinary folk.’ Which speculation, while it momentarily amused him, occasioned Nick, engrossed as he was with plans for the future when he should be clear of his present frustrating circumstances, to dwell no time at all upon the past and insoluble riddle of his origin.

  When, having noted and stored up all the relevant intelligence and knowledge he could and judging the opportunity to be ripe, he had feigned sickness, and, oiling a turnkey’s palm to facilitate the transfer, had been shifted, though still heavily fettered, from the nauseous dungeon wherein he lay to his present, relatively airy cell. The Sessions had begun that day and would continue the next two or three days. Within this time he needs must crack the Stone Jug. Scores of prisoners had to be escorted through to the Justice Hall in the Old Bailey every day and carefully guarded while on their way to and from the prison and the court. Most of them would be awaiting this chance to make some desperate attempt at escape. During this time therefore it would be quite natural for the turnkeys to slacken their vigilance over the young felon, supposedly ailing, in the gateway cell. Early that evening one of the underturnkeys had brought his meal. After the man’s customary examination of his fetters and manacles, Nick had begged him to return later in the evening with a jug of
beer. To this request the other replied he was too busy to pay another visit to the cell until the following morning, which was in fact precisely what Nick had been counting upon in order to be left the remainder of the night uninterrupted.

  Getting to his feet Nick delighted in the new-found freedom of his legs as he stretched them for a few moments. He could move about his cell now, impeded only by the iron bands encircling his ankles. Utilizing the same rusty nail that had secured his freedom from the handcuffs, he probed and prised at the hinges of his leg-irons. Nearly another hour elapsed before first one and then the other ankle was free.

  His knowledge of Newgate told Nick it would advantage him little to break open the door of his cell. Accomplishment of this task would not lessen the number of other doors he would have to unfasten before he gained the prison’s roof. Only over the roof and thus on to the roofs of the houses adjacent could he hope to get clear away. His way must be up the chimney of his cell into the room above. The explanation for the chimney was that the cell had originally been a kind of office for use of the gaol-staff.

  Nick began to climb upwards, soot and filth soon enveloping him. His mind went back to the bitter days when, perpetually begrimed and blackened, he had worked as a sweep’s boy in the choking and blinding sooty darkness hour after hour, months on end, until he had escaped into the labyrinth of London’s malodorous alleys and crumbling hovels. He was brought up with a jerk by a discovery which momentarily took him aback. The chimney had appeared wide enough for his ascent, but suddenly he was blocked by an iron bar, seemingly making it impossible for him to climb any higher. At the same time as he encountered this check he heard, he thought, someone outside his cell-door. He half fell, half jumped down the chimney back into the cell. Had the sound of his scrambling attracted the attention of a passing warder, or was some official returning to see if he was still captive?

  He moved swiftly, placing himself so that should the door open it would give him an opportunity, chancing that the intruder would be alone, to strike him down from behind. He stood there, tensed and waiting, his ears cocked for the scrape of the key in the lock. He could hear nothing but muffled shouting from the debtors’ cell across the way. He returned to the chimney and, scrambling inside once again, set about the tedious task of removing the iron bar above his head. Using the nail and pieces of the broken fetters, he scratched and scraped at the brick-work.

  St. Sepulchre’s, accompanied by the neighbouring clocks, had chimed eleven o’clock some quarter of an hour, when at last he tore the iron bar from its place. He quickly found a use for it as, pushing his way higher up the chimney, he reached the floor-level of the room above the cell, and with the iron length he battered and prised, until at last he had torn an aperture wide enough for him to scramble through the wall.

  The fourth-floor room in which he now found himself was directly over his own cell he had just quitted and similar in shape and size. A barred window high in the wall faced Snow Hill and St. Sepulchre’s Church. Nick made his way to the door which, as he guessed it would be, was securely locked. Little moonlight filtered into the room through the window, and his strong searching fingers told him the door, strong and heavy, its lock corroded with rust, might not have been opened since its last occupants had departed. He found a nut which helped to hold the plate covering the lockbox. Sharp taps from his iron bar enabled him to force aside the plate. Within several minutes he had shot back the lock with his bare fingers. On his right a few yards farther along the dank passage he came to the cell occupied by a gaudy gamester, whose purse was deep enough to bribe the turnkeys into providing him with every luxury: even wenches found their way into his cell, which was heavily perfumed against the intolerable stench that hung over the prison.

  Nick came to the next door he sought, which led into the prison chapel. Running his hands down the door in the blackness enveloping him for a lock or keyhole, to his dismay they encountered nothing and he concluded the door was bolted on the other side. He would have to force a hole through the wall itself to the other side in an attempt to reach the bolt. Once again using the broken nail as he had done in the chimney, together with his iron bar, he set to work to prise loose the first brick, and at length he pushed his arm up to his shoulder through the aperture he had enlarged in the wall, to find the bolt and thrust it back. The chapel was illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the tall, barred windows. It was a familiar enough place to Nick, he had been among the prisoners herded in their pens on many a grim occasion to witness those felons about to kick up their heels at Tyburn, forced to listen, in the condemned pew, to the prison chaplain piously declaiming the death-sermon over them.

  Nick crossed to the centre of the chapel and, with one blow, smashing off three spikes surmounting the tall, wooden partition that barred his way, climbed over it. It was at this moment that he heard voices and the sound of a door across the chapel to his left open. He dropped down into the shadows cast by the partition as there appeared in the doorway a tall, ponderous figure outlined by the glare of a lantern held by another man close behind him, whom Nick knew at a glance to be Ackerman, Governor of Newgate. But his gaze was fixed on the black bandage over the first man’s eyes, that wide, plump face with its lower pendulous lip above the double chin, and he was back in a rush of remembrance in the dock at Bow Street, those dread words sentencing him to Newgate falling on his ears. For it was John Fielding, the magistrate, who stood there, the Blind Beak himself.

  2.

  The figure in the doorway seemed to tower and swell monstrously, black and menacing, with the lantern behind him swinging a trifle to send his massive shadow reaching out across the floor. Then, his reeling senses steadying, Nick concluded that even as he was about to triumph over the remaining obstacles in his path, the very creature responsible for his cruel incarceration had, by some miraculous intelligence, learned of his attempt at escape and arrived in time to thwart him. He gripped his iron bar, grimly determined to use it to defend himself did the newcomers attempt to apprehend him. Doubtless Ackerman, thinking he heard someone in the chapel as he and Fielding were passing, had been prompted to see who it was. Observing no one he was remarking the noise must be nothing more than rats. Nick recalled it was the custom for the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London to give two dinners, one early and one later each evening, during the Old Bailey sittings, to which the judges, leading members of the Bar and various dignitaries were invited. The renowned magistrate had been one of the guests and was now being conducted by Ackerman from the Court dining hall to the latter’s office in the gaol.

  The Governor was glancing about him, with Nick hardly breathing as he hunched there. Fortune was with him, the moonlight was suddenly dimmed by clouds, throwing the place into darkness. The pool of light cast by Ackerman’s lantern was not wide enough to include the evidence of Nick’s handiwork. Came the Governor’s suggestion that Mr. Fielding might care to continue to the office where a warming cordial awaiting him to sustain him against the chillsome night air on his way home to his house in Bow Street. Once more Nick experienced the heart-stopping sensation that the blind man was about to step forward and, guided by some antennae-like sense in place of his eyes, drag him forth from where he crouched concealed. Instead, the massive figure slowly turned to follow the other behind him. The door closed on them, the sound of their footsteps died away and Nick was out of the chapel and proceeding along another dark passage until halted by the next stout door.

  He heard St. Sepulchre’s and its neighbouring clocks striking midnight. It had taken him an hour since he had quitted his cell to arrive thus far on his hazardous journey. Every moment, he knew, added to the risk that some nosy turnkey might glance into his cell, and then he would be swiftly hunted down.

  He decided not to attempt to force the lock or the bolt, but instead attack the strip of iron which ran from top to bottom of the door, aiming to prise it clean away from its position, when he calculated the door would fall open. His invincible
bar met with tough and lengthy resistance. At last with a tremendous effort he wrenched the door open and then he found himself through a door standing ajar and into the night air. He was on that part of the roof he knew to be the lower leads. Above him rose a wall reaching to the higher leads and which he must gain in order to drop to the roof of one of the houses adjacent to the prison in Newgate Street.

  The door through which he had just passed opened outwards on to the leads. Pushing it ajar again, he climbed on to the top of it where he balanced for a few moments on his hands and knees. Clinging to the wall he reached up and drew himself aloft and on to the higher roof. He hurried along the leads until he reached a low wall over which he clambered to the women felons’ tile-roofed ward. He was faced with a sheer drop of twenty feet or more on to the roof of the nearest house.

  With a sickening shock of despair he realized the drop was much greater than he had foreseen; it would be impossible for him to reach his objective without some means of lowering himself to it. At first he considered leaping down, but rejected the idea. Apart from the risk, the noise of his arrival would awaken the occupants of the house, or he might plunge right through the roof with disastrous consequences.

  Suddenly he bethought himself of the clothes he wore. At once he stripped of his stockings, breeches and shirt, all covered with thick sooty filth and sticking to his sweat-drenched body. As he peeled them away he could feel the perspiration drying on his skin before the crisp squalls whipping up from the street. His shoes he slipped on again while he stood naked, knotting the clothes together so he might lower himself by them. One end he tied to his iron bar which he wedged under the coping, to take the strain of his weight as, hand over hand, he descended, feeling each piece of clothing give to his weight. But all held firm and he swung with only six feet below left for him to drop. He released his hold and landed noiselessly on the roof.