For a few moments, gasping and trembling with utter weariness, Nick Rathburn permitted himself the luxury of contemplating his triumphant achievement. The deathly exhaustion his efforts had cost him seemed to vanish from his naked limbs. White and slim in the moonlight he stood and exulted over his success. The manacles which had grappled him to the floor were strewn behind him, as disregarded as the broken handcuffs. Behind him lay broken doors and shattered locks, mutely eloquent witnesses of his prowess. He had broken a way out of his thickly walled cell, chipped the Stone Jug, shattered it. Naught had barred his brave flight until now he stood at last, the free night air of London’s streets chill upon his face. He perceived the tower of St. Martin’s Church on Ludgate Hill, and, nearer, the spire of Christchurch in Newgate Street, and farther distant stood out the great dome of St. Paul’s, black against the sky.
Below, lights shone from several shops still open; he glimpsed people moving about into and out of the beams of the shop-lamps and tallow candles. He began creeping over the roof away from the street, his worn shoes scraping against the tiles. Several minutes later he dropped silently as a cat into a garret, through a window he had chanced upon unlatched, cautiously inching it wide enough to admit him, first reassuring himself the room was unoccupied. He waited, bent under the window, listening for any sound in the room or beyond. He could make out the shape of a bed to one side of the closed door and some furniture. The sight of the empty bed made him long to throw himself upon it and rest his weary limbs. But that luxury he must deny himself. At any moment his escape would be discovered, if it had not been already, the hue-and-cry raised.
He snatched a blanket from the bed and wrapped it round his nakedness, cogitating over the prospects of obtaining some clothing before he risked appearing in the streets and attracting attention. He opened the door and stood on the landing at the head of the stairs, listening. While intuition warned him there were people below, he could hear nobody moving about and he descended, hugging the wall so as to ease his weight on the stairs so they would creak less beneath him. Reaching the next floor he noticed the atmosphere was less chill, while borne up to him from below arose some heavy perfume. A faint glow of candles illumined the darkness and he knew he was approaching that part of the house where he might at any moment encounter someone. Then it happened.
Passing what he took to be a large cupboard he saw a fragment of material projecting from it where the door had been shut upon some garment. Thinking there might be clothes inside, his for the taking, he turned the door-handle. Before he could step back the door swung open, something heavy and yielding toppled out upon him, nearly bearing him down, and sank slowly to the floor, emitting a curious, long drawn-out sigh.
Nick stared at the figure of a man whose head sagged to one side, revealing a terrible gash in his neck, from which a dark trickle oozed slowly. Nick knelt, his hand becoming sticky with blood as he drew back the robe the man wore over his frilled silk shirt and breeches. Blood flowed from half a dozen other stab-wounds about the neck and chest and Nick stood up quickly to move away from the corpse as a sudden movement came from downstairs. Edging his way cautiously to peer through a bend in the banisters he saw a wide door, facing the foot of the staircase, open slowly. A short, thick-set man held unsteadily to the door-post. He had caught up a cloak which dragged behind him, his face incongruously purplish against the whiteness of his body. From the room emanated more powerfully the mingling perfume and smell of wine and then a woman, her voice muffled as if with sleep, spoke.
‘It might be him, darling.’
The man’s eyes narrowed a trifle and he ran his tongue over his lips. He clung more tightly to the door-post. ‘How can it be? You know he will not be back till — till an early hour.’ His words were slurred, his speech thick. Then as Nick drew back instinctively he observed those slitted eyes raised towards the landing.
‘Do you go and make sure, love.’ Nick realized the woman’s voice, too, was blurred with wine as well as sleep. ‘He is late grown so jealous, I believe he may well be hiding in the house, to catch us together.’ She giggled tipsily as if wantonly unconcerned at the risk of being so disclosed, while the expression that flitted across the bloated face told Nick this was precisely the strategem the dead husband or lover, whichever he may have been, had employed. His presence discovered, the tables turned on him, he had been outmatched by his murderous rival and all unbeknown to the woman whose fuddled voice was heard again. ‘He may be hiding upstairs, it was thence came the noise we heard before.’
Her voice drifted into a drowsy sigh. The man, with a series of belches, lurched forward to the banister by which he began to haul himself upwards. Nick backed up the stairs until he stood beside the corpse again. Were he caught now, of a certainty the creature ascending towards him, on learning of his victim’s dead body having been uncovered, and inevitably construing Nick’s identity, would seize the opportunity to shift the blame for the murder on to him. Yet some devilish quixotry impelled him to stand his ground, coupling the simultaneous thought, more practical to his immediate purpose, of the other’s clothes in the room below which Nick might easily make his own. A grin playing at the corners of his mouth Nick waited, the corpse between him and the grunting creature whose head was appearing at the top of the stairs. The man stood there swaying, mouth agape at the body, his wine-laden breath sickeningly strong, before he realized Nick’s presence. As his eyes rounded owlishly and an exclamation started in his throat, Nick moved and drove a jarring blow against the angle of the other’s jaw. The rounded eyes glazed over, he lurched forward, head sagging, and Nick brought his fist down club-like behind the man’s ear. Quickly Nick tore his blanket into strips and secured the unconscious figure’s ankles and wrists and, appropriating his cloak, bundled him into the cupboard, shut it, and darted downstairs.
At the door he saw reflected in the wide gilded mirror the silk-panelled room within, lit by candles flickering in a five-branched candelabra, the tumbled bed, overturned wine-glasses and flagons and plates of delicacies. Over all, the heavy perfume and fumes from the wine, a pool of which spread like a patch of blood upon the thickly carpeted floor. Moving into the room, Nick’s gaze rested on the form among the dishevelled sheets and pillows, one white arm trailing to the floor, pink-tipped fingers curled about a half-eaten sweetmeat. He bent to pick up one of the man’s shoes, exquisitely made with diamond buckles. There were stockings of pale lavender silk, a waistcoat richly embroidered and edged with lace, and thrown over the back of a chair a deep crimson coat, very ample in the skirts, and a fine silk ruffled shirt.
The woman’s voice caused him to turn so she could not see his reflection in the mirror and he hunched the cloak round his ears. ‘Was there no one? Then blow out the candles, love.’ In the sudden blackness Nick grabbed the clothes, preparatory to darting out of the room, but her drowsy tones, a rising hint of petulance in them, halted him at the door. ‘Love, where are you, love?’ Another moment, he guessed, inwardly cursing the woman as he heard her raise herself among the pillows, and she would be wider awake and near to realizing who was in the room. The shock would sober her swiftly enough, dash fuddling sleep from her brain for her to scream thieves and murder to the housetops.
Then suddenly she was snoring. He hurried into the clothes and, carrying the shoes, he slipped noiselessly away, the woman’s snores a trifle steadier and louder following him, and was halfway downstairs to the hall when a sudden thought turned him in his tracks and, like a speeding shadow, he ascended to the landing where the corpse lay stiffening. The other man he could hear breathing stertorously in the cupboard, obviously sunk in a heavy, debauched torpor.
Some few minutes later Nick let himself out of the house and set off boldly along the street, answering with nonchalance that was to the manner born the night-watchman’s: ‘Past one o’clock of a raw October morning and all is well.’ He paused at a corner to take a pinch of snuff he had come upon in the waistcoat-pocket, the devilish grin
playing across his shadowed aquiline face. The macabre jest he had played on the woman in the bed appealed to his mordant sense of humour.
3
Mr. Fielding’s house was a tall, ugly building on the west side of Bow Street, Covent Garden, its ground floor almost entirely taken up with the blind justice’s courtroom, the upper floors being his private dwelling, so that he was always conveniently on hand day and night to deal with urgent cases. John Fielding was in his sitting room finishing his breakfast, his massive figure set off by a full-skirted coat of genteel dark blue with gold lace facings, if somewhat faded, over satin waistcoat and breeches of a contrasting shade of blue. The fringe of his shoulder-length wig almost reached the inevitable black bandage that hid his sightless eyes, and his cravat beneath his double chin, above which his full-lipped mouth puffed out as he bent to cool his tea, was plain but of freshly laundered whiteness. His silk stockings were of a dark grey and his buckle shoes of fine Spanish leather, though a trifle worn, gleamed with polish. It was approaching the hour of eight-thirty by the chiming clock in the corner of the comfortably, if untidily, furnished room when Mr. Bond, his clerk, knocked upon the door.
So agitated was the sharp-featured, bespectacled little man he could hardly pause to accept the dish of tea offered him, but must launch straightway into his news. ‘Young Nick Rathburn — the miscreant got clean away, escaped last night and vanished.’
The Blind Beak’s tea halted half-way to his lips, then, still without sipping it, he set down the dish, remaining as if graven from stone for several moments before taking up his tea once more with a murmured: ‘Say you so, Mr. Bond?’ and drinking it slowly. The other’s words spilled out upon his listener’s ear.
‘When the turnkey entered his cell no one was more dumb-founded. It appears a week before young Rathburn had complained of sickness and was removed from the common cell to this other over the gaol gateway. It is obvious, now, the rogue was feigning his distemper.’ Allowing the Blind Beak time to nod his appreciation of his clerk’s perspicacity, Bond went on to describe the incredulous confusion into which Newgate’s watchdogs were thrown on learning of the escape, together with their open-mouthed wonder as they followed the route Nick Rathburn had taken. ‘It is estimated it will cost sixty pounds to repair the damage the scoundrel has caused to the doors and walls through which he broke.’
‘Which sum the worthy officers should easily recoup,’ was the reply. The Blind Beak suffered no illusions regarding the manner in which, from the Governor himself to the lowest turnkey, Newgate was run. The gaolers robbed the prisoners, the prisoners robbed each other. ‘So soon as the news circulates, Newgate will be stormed by the morbidly curious who, by the time they have viewed the empty cell, will have been forced to dip often into their pockets.’ He paused to finish his tea. ‘I imagine,’ he asked slowly, ‘there is no suspicion Rathburn was aided in his escape by any one of those in his charge?’
The other blinked and gave a little cough. ‘No doubt an inquiry will be held into all the circumstances of this unfortunate affair,’ was the non-committal reply. Fielding shook his double chin dubiously from side to side. His mind was cast back to that day some two years before when young Nick Rathburn had stood before him in his court charged with pilfering meat from a shambles. He could hear again the sixteen-year-old boy recounting his dreadful experiences at the hands of his brutal chimney-sweep employer, running away to become a child-desperado of the Rookeries. Here, Fielding had assured himself, was another scrap of human driftwood to be rescued, properly cared for and set upon the path of honesty, instead of being committed to prison where men, women and children all herded together fell victim to the disease and vice rampant about them. Devoted as he was to his work as magistrate and his great obsession, the building up of his detective-force, the Blind Beak found time to be at the forefront of every charity for poor and destitute children.
‘It is indeed a melancholy truth,’ he had told the youthful offender, ‘which I have learned, that there are in London a vast number of wretched boys like you, ragged as colts, abandoned, skulking in dank alleys. As you grow older, encouraged by the loose girls in your keeping, you will undertake such thieving enterprises of the sort of which you are now accused.’ The boy had uttered no word, but, Fielding had sensed, stood there rigid and unbending, defiant. ‘I will therefore commit you not to Newgate. Instead you will be supplied with food and clothing, then journey to Portsmouth, to serve aboard one of His Majesty’s ships...’ Whatever concluding words he meant to add were checked by a violent interruption from the prisoner himself.
‘I am not for any life at sea. Do you leave me go back to my friends. Let me free, back to St. Giles’. I can take care of myself.’ His shouting reverberated more loudly in the crowded, stuffy courtroom. ‘Devil take your damned charity, I want none of it. Let me be on my own.’
The Blind Beak now knew of a certainty, he was dealing not with some young street-prig, cowed and browbeaten into submission by the cuffings from the police officer who had apprehended him, but instead a bold, resolute spirit determined to give rein to his own will. Even as he reached the end of his brazen outburst he made a sudden dash from the court in a reckless attempt at escape, to be subdued by his two gaolers only after much shouting and blaspheming, kicking and struggling. Stung into impatient anger by such perverse ingratitude in the face of his humane forbearance, Fielding gave way to his choler, there and then reversing his pronouncement and ordering Nick Rathburn to Newgate for the term of three years.
Even as the sentence fell from his lips he regretted what he had done, though the hubbub of general indignation in the court which the boy’s behaviour had aroused now reached audible applause at his decision, but he found it impossible to alter his mind. The prisoner had stood his ground for several desperate moments at the door to shout his defiance. ‘You shall pay for this; I will revenge myself, never fear. You blind monster, you. May your poxy soul roast in hellfire.’ And Fielding recalled how he had warned the gaolers hustling their wildcat-like captive outside:
‘Do you keep a close eye on him, it will be his business to make his escape and yours to take care he shall not.’
To which the boy had flung back: ‘Then let’s mind our own business.’ With this snarling retort he was dragged from the court.
And minded his own business he has, the Blind Beak could not resist observing to himself, as he rose from the breakfast table. His clerk paused in his account of the commotion obtaining at Newgate to marvel, as he always did, at the uncanny way the justice avoided any obstacle in his path, so it was often impossible to believe he had not the normal use of his eyes. He had only once heard Mr. Fielding refer to his disability and that a few weeks ago, in a passing mention to a doctor acquaintance that he had been blind twenty-six years. He was now aged forty-five, and had hardly ever noticed it. ‘It was an accident everyone but myself deemed a misfortune, but the rational delights of reflection, contemplation and conversation soon made me insensible of any loss I had suffered from the want of sight.’ Brushing the crumbs from his waistcoat, Fielding moved with sure-footed ease to the fire, where he bent to warm his pudgy hands, half hidden by the froth of white lace at his wrists. ‘And I a guest at Newgate myself last night,’ he mused half aloud, ‘enjoying an after-dinner cordial with Mr. Ackerman and he quite puffing up the stoutness of his stronghold, dissuading any attempt to perforate it. Do you have inserted in all the newspapers,’ he proceeded, turning from the fire, ‘this advertisement and scores of hand-bills bearing it distributed throughout London.’ The other procured ink, quill and paper from a debris of documents cluttering the nearby desk, and began to write to Fielding’s dictation. ‘Nick Rathburn did break out of Newgate Gaol, where he was imprisoned for thieving, in the night between the fifteenth and sixteenth of October. He is eighteen years of age, of slender height of about five foot ten inches, pale-complexioned with dark hair and eyes and of a character bold and cunning. Whoever will discover or apprehend
him so that he may be brought to justice shall have twenty guineas reward to be paid by Mr. Fielding at his house in Bow Street, Covent Garden.’
The clerk’s quill had barely finished scratching when a murmuring was heard in the street below. At once Bond crossed to the window. ‘The mob heading already for Newgate,’ he said, peering over his spectacles at the people streaming in the direction of the prison. ‘The story of the escape is fast spreading over the town.’
‘Very soon,’ the Blind Beak, who stood at the window listening attentively, said, ‘the ballad-mongers and broad-sheet vendors will be busy crying their wares.’
There came a rap at the door and Bond admitted Mr. Ackerman, tall and pompous of bearing in his high-collared greatcoat of heavy cinnamon-hued stuff.
Refusing an offer of refreshment with grateful thanks none the less, though he admitted to having partaken of no bite of breakfast that morning, he said: ‘Why I have been so neglectful of my stomach, you will know by the startling intelligence which has reached you from Newgate.’ The Blind Beak indicated the advertisement his clerk scrawled which Ackerman read. ‘I followed the route the young blackguard took,’ he said, looking up from the paper, ‘and with the aid of ladders, for indeed his was a perilous progress from the upper leads of the prison-roof to the roof of a house adjoining, I myself, by noting a cracked and broken tile or two, eventually found a garret-window opened, through which he had entered.’ He paused and handed the advertisement back to Bond. ‘The woman of the house, hearing our approach, appeared at her bedroom door — she was in night attire — and hysterically begged me to see her husband whom she declared she had just woken to find beside her in bed.’ Ackerman grimaced. ‘You may think that news of itself, that in London nowadays a wife should wake and find her husband abed with her.’ The clerk smirked, Fielding offered no comment, and the prison governor resumed his serious aspect. ‘He was dead, which perhaps explains the phenomenon,’ he said, ‘murdered.’
The Blind Beak Page 2