Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  ‘And he admitted it.’

  ‘He took some persuading.’

  She turned from him, sickened. ‘This is your fault,’ she whispered at last. ‘All your fault. If Matt hadn’t become involved with you – if I hadn’t become involved with you – none of it would have happened.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know it?’ His voice was bitter and pain-filled, but she was a long way past any sympathy for him. He dropped into the chair again, sat hunched, elbows on knees, dark hair falling forward across his forehead, shadowing his eyes. The flames leapt and danced in the fireplace, limning the bowed head in light.

  ‘Is there truly nothing we can do?’ she asked of the silence.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Are you familiar, Matt Daniels, with the saying that those born to hang will never drown?

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said. And then: ‘When?’

  His voice rasped. ‘Next Thursday.’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  She opened her mouth to protest, closed it again. What did it matter? What did anything matter? Oddly, the thought brought Michael to mind. She stood up abruptly. ‘I have to go.’

  He looked up at her in tired surprise.

  ‘Pol will be worried,’ she said.

  ‘She won’t expect you back at this hour, surely?’

  She looked at him tiredly. ‘You think she’d expect me to stay?’ She made no attempt to disguise the weary bitterness of her tone.

  He watched her for a moment, his face inscrutable. Then he reached for his coat. ‘I’ll walk you to the cab.’

  * * *

  The silence that fell between them as they walked the lanes of Whitechapel that night lasted into the following morning when Luke came to collect her from Pol’s. It was as if what had happened stood between them like a wall, precluding any possibility of communication. Through the dark hours of an anguished and sleepless night her suspicions of Luke and of his motives had grown and festered. A note to Luke, supposedly not received. Luke’s knife, so conveniently stolen. Luke and Lottie through all the time she had known them. And then, most damning of all, it seemed to her, Fogg dead, executed, and by Luke’s hand, and only his word for the justice of the action. She sat wordless in the jolting cab beside him, unable to bring herself in her anger and distrust to speak, and though she was sure that he sensed what she felt he too said nothing. For the moment anyway, as the hansom rolled along Holborn, past the church of St Sepulchre’s and into Newgate Street itself, the street dominated by the grim granite fortress that was the prison, her every sense, every nerve was taut, strung like wire against the ordeal to come. She had no energy to fight Luke, nor to fling at him the questions that needed to be answered. With dread as they drew near she surveyed the massive, windowless stone walls of Newgate, the forbidding arched gateway.

  ‘They won’t let me come with you to see him,’ Luke said, breaking their strained silence for the first time as they approached the iron-bound door. ‘Visiting is restricted. Even bribes don’t work all the time – it was all I could do to get you in.’

  She nodded. For all the use it was at the moment her tongue might have been cloven to the roof of her mouth. After the early spring sunlight of the street the stone and iron half-light of the prison struck her like the shadow of death. The rank smell of urine pervaded the place; the very walls, chill and grey, seemed to reek of it. Sound was muted – the distant clang of a metal door, a single, smothered shout, the echo of a footstep. It was a different, nightmare world and she felt the force of its hatred and suffering pressing upon her like a physical weight. She heard Luke’s voice, low and persuasive as he spoke to the guardian of the massive gate and, remembering his words of a moment ago, for the first time it occurred to her that they might not let her see Matt – and the despicable, irresistible surge of relief that the thought brought with it almost nauseated her. She was ice-cold, her body taut as a bow, teeth gritted, bones aching as if pressured in a vice. Her bowels grumbled uncomfortably.

  Luke touched her arm. ‘Go with him. I’ll wait for you outside.’

  Numbly she followed the grim-faced uniformed warden along what seemed like endless miles of chill, foul-smelling corridors punctuated by countless clanging iron doors, to be led at last to a small room within which stood something akin to a wooden sentry box, a tiny window in its back, barred and grilled with fine mesh. The silent warden indicated that she should seat herself upon the wooden stool that was set within the box. For the first time then it came to her that she would not of course be allowed to see her brother alone – to touch him, even. She began to tremble violently. Almost she collapsed onto the stool, then hunched her shoulders tightly, clamping her hands together in her lap to still their shaking, fighting for some small armour of self-possession before Matt should appear.

  When he came, if she had not known, she would not have recognized him. A tall, very thin figure shambled to the other side of the grille, heavy, ill-fitting boots dragging upon the floor to the clink of chain. Through the distorting mesh she saw the haggard face, the shorn head, the coarse, arrow-marked clothes that might have been made for a man twice the size. Then the gaunt apparition smiled, and despite the ageing lines and the prison pallor that might already have been the pallor of death, she knew her brother. She put a trembling hand to the grille, as if to touch him through it, though such a thing would certainly have been impossible.

  ‘Don’t touch the grille, Miss.’ The warden’s voice, though sharp, was not unkind.

  She let her hand drop into her lap.

  ‘Well, moi owd gal. Here’s a to-do – eh?’ It seemed to her that even his voice had changed; it was dry and husky, as if he spoke with difficulty. ‘I’d hoped you wouldn’t hear,’ he said, ‘until it was over. I told the Guv’nor not to try to find you.’

  She found her own voice then. ‘How could you? If only I’d been here – I might have been able to help.’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘No, Kit. Not this time. Here’s a mess not even you can fish me out of.’

  ‘But – you didn’t do it! There must be some way to show them?’

  A glimmer of the old, feckless laughter shone in the thin face. ‘Remember where you are – this is Newgate, Kitty – we’re all innocent here, didn’t you know that? Not one of us but isn’t wrongly imprisoned. Isn’t that so, Mr Wilkins?’

  The warder who sat beside him listening nodded, stone-faced.

  ‘But you really are! And we can’t give up—’

  He shook his head and shifted a little on the stool. She saw the man he had called Wilkins stiffen very slightly, watching him.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Leave it, Kitty. Believe me, there’s nothing anyone can do. We have to face that.’

  She stared at him, a wave of helpless misery stilling her tongue.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said, gently, ‘tell me about Paris.’

  She saw then the tears that stood, stubbornly unshed in his eyes. ‘It was wonderful,’ she found herself saying, shakily. ‘Absolutely wonderful. You’d have loved it—’ She stopped, swallowing noisily.

  ‘I heard tell you were a great success?’

  She shrugged a little. ‘They’ve probably forgotten all about me by now.’

  He shook his head. They were watching each other with a strange intensity, eyes fixed each upon the other’s face as if in some communication other than speech. There was a long, oddly speaking silence. ‘Do you remember the beach at Dunwich?’ he asked, suddenly and softly. ‘So wide, and windy, and empty, and free?’

  It seemed to her that the vowels of Suffolk had crept back into his Londoner’s voice. ‘And the birds,’ she said, ‘the gulls, and the kittiwakes—’

  He leaned forward a little and once more she saw his guardian’s wary movement. ‘And your voice, singing in the wind – what was that song that you and Anne were always singing? Something about green willow?
’

  Oh young men are false and they are so deceitful. Her throat constricted. She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

  He sat back. ‘It all seems so very far away.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll go back, I expect, one day,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘Oh, not to the Grange, or to Dunwich – but somewhere like it. The city isn’t right for you.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It isn’t.’

  ‘Wasn’t all that right for me either.’ Again there was an echo of the old, graceless Matt in the words.

  ‘No,’ she said, the word husky.

  He watched her for a moment. ‘Kitty? Will you do something for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t blame the Guv’nor. It isn’t his fault.’

  ‘I think it is,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly hard. ‘And I do blame him. I’ll always blame him.’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t want that.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’

  They fell to silence again, a difficult silence this time. Simply to break it Kitty asked, ‘Is there anything I can do? Anything you need?’

  He half-smiled, bleakly. ‘I’m in prison, Kit. Not hospital. No – there’s nothing I need – nothing they’d let you give me. Don’t worry – I’m not treated badly. The food’s almost decent now they’ve decided to hang me, and I get all the baccy I want. Don’t I, Mr Wilkins?’ he asked, softly.

  Still impassive, the other man nodded again.

  Now they’ve decided to hang me – the words, spoken in a brittle, matter-of-fact tone, hit her like a blow, and she gasped at them. She was shaking uncontrollably, a violent, distressed trembling that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep within her body and which she could not suppress. It was as if a chill of misery, of helplessness, of terror had invaded her very bones.

  ‘—and they make sure that I’m not lonely, too, don’t you, Mr Wilkins? Always someone in my cell, day or night – and lots of visits from parsons and rectors and hymn-singing ladies who want to save my poor, damned soul—’

  The sudden despair that threaded his voice twisted in her like the blade of a knife. ‘Matt!’

  ‘Not even when I die,’ he said, softly bitter, ‘not even then will I be alone. They tell me that soon – soon – there’ll be no more public executions. Soon,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘But not soon enough. Eh, Mr Wilkins?’

  Here was a horror she had not even contemplated. Public execution. She clenched her mind against such abomination.

  He lifted his voice sharply. ‘Promise me something.’

  She lifted her head, struggling with tears.

  ‘Don’t come. Don’t be there. I couldn’t stand that. Promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  In the silence that followed the warder who had brought her said gruffly, ‘Two more minutes.’

  They looked at each other in sudden desperation. Two more minutes? In lieu of a lifetime? She had stopped trying to stem the flood of tears. They flowed disregarded in silence down her ice-cold face, dripped dark as blood onto the soft velvet of her skirt. ‘Isn’t there anything I can do?’ she asked.

  ‘Look after Sally-Anne for me?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘And – the Guv’nor. He needs you, Kitty, though he’d never admit it. What’s happened isn’t his fault—’

  ‘Whose then?’ The words were bitter.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You know what he did?’ she asked, low and violent. ‘You know how he—’ She stopped, glancing at the silent prison officer. Unforgiveable treachery, even in extremes of anger, to betray Luke to these hostile listeners. If nothing else, Matt would die hating her, and she could not have stood that.

  He shot her a fierce, warning look. ‘Yes. I know. He was right.’

  ‘How do we know? We only have his word!’

  ‘That’s good enough for me.’ His voice was even, now. ‘Leave it, Kitty. It’s all too late.’

  ‘You don’t think that he—?’ She could not say it, but she saw from his eyes that he had understood her question.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. Kitty – I was there. You weren’t. Accept what he tells you. It’s what happened.’

  She said nothing.

  He smiled at her, gently. ‘Tell me something – was Lottie right? Were you really hobnobbing with some handsome French aristo?’

  She opened her mouth to lie, automatically. Shut it again. She could not.

  His eyes were curious. ‘Kitty? It doesn’t matter – if you don’t want to tell me?’

  And then it came to her that this was, after all, something she could give him. The truth – and a truth that carried with it hopefully some small grain of comfort, some promise of immortality.

  ‘Time to go, Miss,’ the warder said.

  ‘Wait. Just a moment.’ She leaned to the grille, speaking urgently. ‘Matt – listen – I had a baby. A little boy. He’s dark, and he’s going to be tall, just like you. I called him Michael – after Father. He’s healthy, and he’s wonderful, and I’m going to keep him safe. I’m going to get him away from here, and I’m going to keep him safe—’ She stopped. ‘Michael,’ she said again, seeing his tears and knowing that he could not speak. ‘After Father. He’ll grow up strong and happy, I promise you. He’ll never know any of this.’

  ‘Come along, Miss. Please.’ Surprisingly gently the grim-faced warder took her arm. ‘Time’s up.’

  ‘Matt?’ she whispered, stricken.

  He lifted a hand. His guardian stepped to his side and helped him from the stool upon which he sat. In silence and with no word of farewell he allowed himself to be led away.

  She stood like stone staring after him.

  ‘Can’t stay ’ere, Miss,’ the prison officer said. ‘Won’t do no good. Come along, now.’

  As she followed him back along the oppressive maze of stone corridors she heard in the distance the ominous and heavy clang of a single door shutting.

  * * *

  Two days later, at the gates of Newgate, Matt Daniels was hanged for murder. There was a good turnout to watch the spectacle, and a brisk trade in the penny leaflets that told of the brash young thief’s scandalously wicked road to ruin and his just deserts. The lad bore himself well, the old hands had to admit, though for some a death met with dignity and courage was a disappointment. The spectators were as one that the impending cessation of such edifying entertainment was nothing short of an outrage. Nothing could take the place of a good turn-off.

  Matt Daniels died just one month short of his nineteenth birthday.

  Chapter 4

  (i)

  Kitty wondered, afterwards, that she did not lose her mind that day. After a night entirely without sleep she sat with Pol in a despairing silence, their hands clasped across the scrubbed wooden table in Pol’s kitchen, watching the clock with agonized intensity as the hour grew close. She tried to pray, and found that she could not – her bitterness was so great that it turned any prayer to a savage reproach that could serve no possible purpose. As at last the relentless hour chimed she buried her face in her hands, trying in vain to blot out the picture that seared in her mind, to control a pain that was almost beyond bearing. And then as the morning ticked endlessly past with no message, no sign, she had at last to admit the final truth; no last-minute reprieve had saved her brother from the scaffold. Matt was dead, and in such a manner as to haunt her forever.

  She struggled through the day, automatically caring for Michael, sitting for long hours before the fire, the sleeping baby in her lap, her head filled with the memories that were all she now had of her young brother. That Pol hastily hid the newspaper that Barton brought home she noted but did not question. The tears she wanted to shed refused to come and, denied their relief, she stared dry-eyed and silent into the dying fire. Throughout the day a worried, red-eyed Pol tended her, hovering about her, helplessly offering tea that she could not drink, food that choked her and comfort that bot
h knew was, with the best will in the world, utterly without substance. In the end, however, it was Pol who finally roused her, falling through the door, her face a picture of alarm.

  ‘Kitty – quick! The baby – get ’im out of ’ere! Luke’s comin’ up the street!’

  Kitty lifted a tired head. ‘What?’

  Pol was frantic. ‘Luke! Bart just saw ’im turn the corner! You’d better get the babe upstairs – quick!’

  Kitty jumped to her feet, jolting the child, who woke and gave a small, angry squeal at the sudden movement. Desperately Kitty rocked him: ‘Sh-sh! There, hush, now—’ But the baby’s small face was turning an ominous red and the tiny toothless mouth opened in a roar of rage.

  ‘’Ere – ’urry up – give ’im to me—’ Quick-witted Pol snatched the child from her, wrapped the shawl firmly about him. ‘I’ll take ’im out the back an’ along the alley to Amy’s. Don’t worry. Just get rid of Luke as fast as you can—’ The baby in one arm, she was swooping around the room picking up, one-handed, the detritus of babyhood that littered it – a small silver rattle, a comforter, a long white nightdress.

  ‘But’ – automatically Kitty helped her, gathering the things she had been using to tend the baby and piling them into Pol’s arms – ‘I don’t want to see him. I can’t—’

  Pol, already halfway to the door, paused for a moment, her face grim. ‘You think you got a choice?’

  She was right. Barton’s half-hearted attempts to keep Luke from Kitty were as effective as might be a child’s attempt to deter a tiger from its intent. But at least by the time he came into the room all traces of Michael had been removed, and Kitty sat, rigid and still as stone beside the fire. She glanced at him as he entered, turned her eyes both from him and from the small bundle that he carried and stared into the flames.

  There was a very long silence. She heard him close the door quietly, sensed him move across the floor towards her, tensed herself against his touch.

  ‘Kitty,’ he asked quietly, at last, ‘are you all right?’