The Blind Beak

by Ernest Dudley

  And while the Blind Beak remained silent, abstractedly warming his hands at the fire, the other described how he had interrogated the woman. ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘you will have surmised who is responsible for this foul crime.’

  ‘You mean,’ the clerk said slowly, ‘the escaped felon, Rathburn?’

  Ackerman nodded grimly. ‘He must have awakened the husband, who attempted to intercept him, whereupon the dastardly villain stabbed him to death. And so,’ pointing to the advertisement Bond held, ‘you may alter the amount offered for his apprehension; one hundred pounds being the price set upon a murderer’s head.’

  ‘With whose dagger?’ Fielding interposed quietly, speaking for the first time since the other had begun his graphic account. Ackerman and Bond stared in faint perplexity at the massive, quiescent figure by the fire.

  ‘Doubtless he carried a knife on him,’ Ackerman said somewhat impatiently.

  Fielding’s full lower lip protruded. ‘He was naked. He had, you say, used his clothing as a means of descent from the prison roof. Is it likely he would be carrying a dagger? And then to incur the risk of discovery by returning the corpse — most unfashionably attired for bed, do you not agree, in shirt and breeches — beside his wife, who incidentally was not awakened by her husband or his struggle with his assailant?’

  ‘No doubt she was drowsy with wine,’ Ackerman argued, the note of impatience rising more rapidly in his tone. ‘There were empty bottles and two glasses in the bedroom, and winestains on the carpet.’

  ‘She allowed both she and her husband had been drinking before retiring?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ was the prompt reply. ‘They were a little merry.’

  ‘So the surgeon,’ the Blind Beak murmured softly, ‘should have an opportunity of exhibiting his skill.’ Ackerman and Bond regarding him uncomprehending, he expounded: ‘Examination of the contents of her husband’s stomach will reveal if the woman is speaking the truth.’

  ‘Damn it, Mr. Fielding,’ the other snorted, ‘to waste the sawbone’s time with such tomfoolery. For what reason should she lie?’

  ‘And we know that she did,’ the justice answered, ‘our next step will be to discover the reason. You are at a loss,’ he went on while Ackerman scrowled with vexation and the clerk’s mouth fell a trifle agape, ‘that I doubt young Rathburn is your murderer? He had, you say, entered the house in his desperate flight and would have let no one bar his way. You described with excellent clarity the scene, so it stays in my mind’s eye, the dark staircase down which he must have descended to the bedroom. Circumstances, with unerring aim, point to young Rathburn as the obvious culprit. And my experience in investigating crime is never misled by the obvious; more often that which is ambiguous draws us nearer the truth. Wherefore while we wonder how the suspect came by the dagger, and what occasioned him to dispose of the corpse in so rash a manner, let us follow the example of the ancient prognosticators and divine the message in the victim’s entrails.’

  Meeting Mr. Bond’s glance Ackerman rolled his eyes upwards significantly and crossed to the window. Above the clamour of the coaches and carts, the rattle of carriages and hackneys, shouts could be heard, louder and more frenzied. ‘Young thief broke out of Newgate,’ someone yelled up at several people leaning excitedly out of a window. And other cries rose. ‘Gaol-breaker, called Nick Rathburn... cracked his way out of the Stone Jug... A thief named Rathburn... Broke out of gaol.’ Nick Rathburn’s name was borne up and down like leaves on the autumn wind which set the shop signboards and tavern signs acreaking down Bow Street, round about Covent Garden and Long Acre and beyond. Ackerman turned to the Blind Beak and made as if to argue with him, but instead he shook his head, realizing he would never fathom what deep speculation and immutable ponderings were working behind that black-bandaged, enigmatic countenance. As for John Fielding, he was lost in an attempted analysis of what considerations, what inner promptings, had impelled him to reject the other’s out-of-hand view that Nick Rathburn was guilty of murder. While it went against his principles to condemn without proof, while his instincts, sharpened by practice, had fastened upon the flaw in the evidence: the significance of the dagger, the corpse’s return beside his wife, yet some other underlying compulsion had motivated his opposition to the prison governor’s conclusion.

  Exasperated by the Blind Beak’s mountainous taciturnity, Ackerman could only wave a hand ill-temperedly in the direction of the noisy street. ‘Do you say what you will, Mr. Fielding,’ he declared vehemently, ‘I do wager you any sum that the howling mob will soon be changing their tune, yelling themselves hoarse not over his escape but sending him on his way to Tyburn.’

  1770 — AGED TWENTY-TWO

  Bartholomew Fair

  4.

  Nick Rathburn moved through the press of people crowding close as a barrel of figs about him, one hand engaged in banging the large drum strapped in front of him, while the other held the tiny ankles of Queen Mab, the diminutive figure perched upon his shoulder and holding aloft a gaudy, ribbon-decked banner bearing the garish legend: ‘DR. ZODIAC’S WAXWORKS AND MUSEUM OF WONDERS’. The air was filled with the squeaking of penny trumpets, the beating of other drums, large and small, competing with Nick, the raucous shouts of stall-holders and booth proprietors, the shrill screeches of lottery pickpockets, while the atmosphere of the sultry August evening was heavy with the unwholesome odours of the sweaty multitude mingling with the varied aromas of roast pig, beer and wines wafted from the eating-stalls and taverns and grogshops of Bartholomew Fair.

  It was some four years since Nick’s escape from Newgate and he felt confident no turnkey nor informing fellow convict would recognize him now as the thin, prison-pale youth who had so astonishingly chipped his way out of the Stone Jug. In his out-landish jester’s costume of varicoloured silks, sleeves jangling with bells which caught the admiring eye and ear of all beholders, he stood, two inches added to his height, his frame filled out. His saturnine features were set off by a white streak which had suddenly appeared, no doubt caused by the stamina-sapping rigours of his imprisonment and his exhausting flight to liberty, cutting the centre of his dark hair.

  Immediately after gaining his freedom he had been thankful to lie low as he had planned among the cellars and hovels of St. Giles’ until the hue-and-cry had died down. Reaching his familiar haunts he had met his first blow of disappointment, for, seeking Doll Tawdry, with whom he had anticipated joining forces again, he had been unable to discover her. At last he had received news she had paid the price of so many of her sisters in the same profession and had died in the Lock Hospital, to which she had been conveyed some several weeks before. The shock of Doll’s death caused him completely to change his outlook for the future. He gained no pleasure or excitement from the adulation of the criminal fraternity among whom he moved and who knew him for his sensational escape. In fact, he quickly realized to continue his stay in the Rookeries would be courting disaster. Even if the Blind Beak’s police force failed to seek him out, inevitably some informer skulking in the cellars and flash-haunts would find an opportunity to play the Judas and earn his twenty pounds reward. Amused at reading Fielding’s advertisement, Nick was unaware he had the justice to thank for the fact the price on his head had not been increased to the sinister sum of a hundred pounds, nor had he heard any more concerning the corpse he had left for a crude jest in the woman’s bed. Accordingly he had decided to vanish from the neighbourhood of his past exploits, shifting his ground over the river to Southwark. There he lost his identity in a world of tinkers and fair-folk. A year ago he had obtained his present occupation with Dr. Zodiac.

  Convinced of his security in this life of fake and charlatanism, Nick had decided to stay put until opportunity would present itself when he might venture forth once more, if only to strike in revenge against his accursed enemy, the Blind Beak. Thus with characteristic boldness he had long shut the door of his memory upon Newgate, together with the possibility that he might be dragg
ed back behind its grim walls.

  He was adding his voice to the clamour of his drum, to drown those others about him. ‘This way to the most marvellous waxworks of the age,’ he bawled. ‘See your notorious criminals depicted in lifelike fashion. Feast your eyes on Jamie McFee, the Edinburgh poisoner and his six brides, all most faithfully portrayed in their death agonies. See Captain Hind, notorious highwayman, hung in chains from the gibbet. See the lifelike effigies of Charles the First on the scaffold, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey, their heads on the block, and other historical celebrities.’

  ‘Do not forget me,’ Queen Mab cried, her tiny foot kicking his ear, whereupon Nick shouted the louder:

  ‘See the beauteous Queen Mab,’ inviting the sweating swarm around him ankle-deep in the filth and dust of Smithfield to gaze their fill upon the fairy-attired creature of only three foot six inches in height poised upon his shoulder. ‘Real-life fairy in her daring dance on the tight-rope of death.’ Then giving Mab time in which to bow and smirk at the mob, Nick continued extolling Dr. Zodiac’s more lurid attractions. ‘Death and horror, ghoulish and gruesome — that is what the addle-pates want, my boy,’ the old man always assured him. ‘See the horrid laughing dwarf, who eats fire and swallows flames. See the dog-faced boy. Feast your eyes on Pharaoh’s mummified daughter, all beautifully embalmed and as she was in life in ancient Egypt.’

  He received ample competition from the owners of the booths and stalls, barrows and baskets on his either side, the motley array of ballad-mongers, and costermongers, bullies and bawds, cut-purses and corncutters, tinderbox men and petty chapmen, hoarsely roaring their wares.

  ‘Buy a mouse trap, a mouse trap or a tormentor for a flea,’ a fellow there cried. ‘Buy any pears, very fine pears, pears fine,’ a costermonger called. ‘Have you any corns in your feet or toes?’ another begged to know. Here a tinderbox man with an assortment of trinkets and toys for sale: ‘What do you lack? Rattles, drums, halberts, horses, dolls of the best: A fine hobby-horse to make your son a filter? A drum to make him a soldier? A fiddle to make him a reveller?’ A puppet-show owner described the entertainment he had to offer. Next to him a little twisted woman with baskets of gingerbread and all ignorant that her husband, a thin, grasshopper-thighed man quietly let out the inner room of her booth to passing strumpets and their amorous gulls. Beside her an enormous woman, a mound of fat, offering bottled ale and roast pig. And Nick grinned to hear Nell Nightingale serenading song-lovers with the Delicate Old Ballad of the Ferret and the Coney, while her pickpocket partner, young Tim Coke, busied himself among her audience. There went a madman who haunted the fair, ragged, long-bearded and wild-eyed with a rabble of laughing, mocking followers on his out-of-leather heels.

  Nick and Queen Mab had now gathered quite a satisfactory press of people to follow them to Dr. Zodiac’s booth. Beating his drum and shouting as loudly as ever, Queen Mab smiling and waving invitingly, Nick passed a conjurer’s booth where the conjurer had just begun his performance by blowing his nose upon the people, who laughed heartily at his jest.

  A group of rural sots were elevated to a high pitch of merriment by a female fiddler who, her carcass loaded with more liquor than her legs could carry, behaved herself with much impudence in singing ribald songs in a hiccupping voice. Now came a couple of seamen, just stepped from aboard ship to give themselves a taste of the fair’s delights. Here was a woman very well dressed and masked, wearing a demure appearance in an attempt to belie she was as ready at the beck of any libertine as a porter plying at a street corner. Another strumpet wore blue aprons and a straw hat and raised her voice with much loud bawling of oysters. And all about at the back of the booths, roundabouts turned, swings flew in the air and acrobats and stilt-walkers balanced precariously above a sea of upturned faces.

  Then Nick spied a tall figure, head held high, accompanied by a woman who hung on his arm and was dressed most extra-vagantly, the pair of them the object of all eyes. Nick drawing level, the man glanced in his direction. He appeared to be about forty years of age. His eyes in his dark, handsome face were startlingly bright, their expression bold and disdainful, and Nick saw him glance at Queen Mab, a little smile playing at the corners of his full-lipped mouth.

  ‘Who is that handsome beau?’ he heard an overpainted wench whisper to her escort, a rakish-looking gallant.

  ‘Do you not know? Then had you better watch your skirts. It is none other than Casanova, visiting London for the first time.’

  Nick eyed the more sharply the adventurer whose amours and exploits had excited the interest of all Europe, enviously taking in the magnificence of his apparel. His gaze moved to the woman and he would have paused but that the tiny feet in his ear urged him forward. ‘Why do you stop?’ Mab called down in her high, childish voice. ‘We have a goodly crowd eager for our show.’

  ‘Do you not see,’ Nick muttered to her, ‘it is Casanova with that pretty woman on his arm. What a handsome figure he makes!’

  ‘Never mind who he is or her,’ and Nick caught the jealous rasp in her tone. ‘Beat the drum and tell the crowd about me, the beauteous Queen Mab,’ and she kicked him in the ears again.

  ‘I shouted all about you but a moment since,’ Nick grumbled. ‘You know it is the gruesomeness and the horrors pull them in.’

  ‘It is not so,’ she cried back, her artistic pride and vanity outraged. ‘They come to see me, Queen Mab, and do you not shout about me and loudly, pox on it, I will break the banner over your stupid head.’

  ‘See the lovely and beauteous Queen Mab, real-life fairy, and her most marvellous daring dance on the tight-rope of death...’

  Presently Nick and Mab were returned to Dr. Zodiac’s booth, the throng about them of most varied persons — gallants elbowing yokels, women of the bon ton cheek-by-jowl with wide-eyed serving-wenches, lured on by Nick’s exhortations and Queen Mab’s winsome smiles. Outside the gaily festooned booth, Dr. Zodiac stood upon his platform beside a brazier ornamented to represent a fearsome dragon, from whose mouth the flames spurted. He was an old man, toothless and cadaverous, with a booming voice and long, filthy, lice-matted grey locks beneath a conical wizard’s hat inclined to fall askew. He wore flowing robes of Oriental design, decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, one hand holding a serpent-entwined rod of gilded wood while waving his other in eloquent appeal and persuasiveness, experiencing no qualm at all if, for instance, some freshly perpetrated and particularly atrocious murder was all the talk, in changing Charles into the criminal concerned, with the gallows-rope round his neck.

  Both the dog-faced boy, a pathetic half-witted, disfigured creature and the laughing, monstrously crook-backed dwarf, bought from the gypsies who had permanently carved the clown-like grin upon the child’s face at birth, helped Nick. As for Pharaoh’s daughter, she was the corpse of a young girl obtained from a body-snatcher and whom Dr. Zodiac had succeeded in embalming by injecting the veins with oil of turpentine and camphorated spirit of wine, packing camphor into the abdomen, giving the deceased a life-like tint with carmine injections and the addition of glass-eyes of which there was a plentiful supply. Nick had assisted at this gruesome operation and it had been an experience which had rattled even his iron nerve.

  Of nights Dr. Zodiac slept at the back of the booth, as did Mab. The other two members of the troupe slept where they could, Nick, however, having the important task of keeping one eye open while he slept, watching over the waxworks and the mummy in case of thieves. At first he had found the mute company of wax and corpse hardly conducive to sleep. The figures in the gloom it sometimes seemed to him would move and come to life; he would start and sweat until reassured it was merely his imagination playing him tricks. He was not to be allowed to suffer such awesome moments alone for long, however. After having joined Dr. Zodiac but a few days, Mab, whom he realized had from the first been subjecting him to appraising sidelong glances, appeared on the scene one night to satisfy herself, she explained, the new employee was not en
during an excess of nervous strain as the result of his eerie vigil.

  Mab, a fascinating miniature of a beautiful woman, and sweetly tender face belying her experienced green eyes and vixenish disposition, and who might have been any age to judge by the variety of amorous knowledge she had acquired, was marvellously successful in taking his mind off the still and silent images about him in the dark, so he did not think to discourage her from keeping him company every night following. Underneath her viciousness and colossal vanity he discovered a lonely, innately unhappy creature, so he could not but help respond to her advances, which might have merely amused, then repelled him, with a compassion that went curiously with his nature, and which he took great care to conceal.

  Bearing a basket of mysterious-looking packets before him, Nick went to peddle his wares to the press milling outside the booth. Dr. Zodiac was already launched upon his audience in his familiar exhortation.

  5.

  ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ intoned Dr. Zodiac, startlingly blue, green and orange flames leaping from the brazier as he dexterously slipped a pinch or two of chemicals into the coals, ‘you that have a mind to serve a sound mind in a sound body may here at the expense of sixpence furnish yourself with a packet,’ pausing to wave his serpent in Nick’s direction, ‘which, though it is but small, yet contains mighty things of great use and wonderful operation in the bodies of mankind against all distempers whether homogenial or complicated, whether derived from your parents, got by infection or proceeding from an ill habit of your own body. My assistant,’ Dr. Zodiac continued, with another wave of serpent wand, ‘will move among you so you may avail yourself of this life-time opportunity. Upon opening your secret package, which I beg you not to do until you reach home lest the foul night air destroy its health-giving properties, you will find it contains a number of pills, not much bigger than a garden pea. Yet is this diminutive panpharmica so powerful in its effect and of such excellent virtues that if you have twenty distempers lurking in you, boils, carbuncles, biliousness or eruptive sores, too much wind or too little water, it shall carry them off. At the same time, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, do you wish to use them so, these pills make an excellent application when melted down by the aid of a little heat into a plaster, good against all green wounds, old fistulas and ulcers, pains and aches, in either head, limbs or stomach, sprains, fractures or dislocations or any hurts whatsoever received either by sword, walking-stick or pistol shot, knives or hatchet, hammer, nail or tenterhook, fire, blast or gunpowder, or any calamitous encounter.’