The Devil in the Marshalsea

by Antonia Hodgson

  The Devil in the Marshalsea

  Antonia Hodgson

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Antonia Hodgson 2014

  The right of Antonia Hodgson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious or are historical figures whose words and actions are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 77544 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Joanna, Justine and Victoria,

  with thanks.

  CONTENTS

  Historical Note

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Two

  Thursday. The First Day.

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  II) Friday. The Second Day.

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  III) Saturday. The Third Day.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  IV) Sunday. The Fourth Day.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  V) Monday. The Last Day.

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The History Behind The Devil in the Marshalsea

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Conscience makes ghosts walk, and departed souls appear . . . it works upon the imagination with an invincible force, like faith’

  Daniel Defoe, The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos’d, 1729

  ‘Arose about four. In the Park I saw half a Dozen Crows in very hoarse conversation together, but not understanding their Language I cou’d not devise what they were upon, but believe they was agreeing how to divide the Corps of those unhappy wretches that Dye so briefly in this Place’

  John Grano, A Journal of My Life while in the Marshalsea, 1728–9

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Devil in the Marshalsea is set in the autumn of 1727 in London and Southwark, which was generally regarded as a separate town at the time. King George I had died in June. His son, George II, was now king, although he was not crowned until October. People were curious to discover what sort of a monarch he would turn out to be. (A philistine and a buffoon, if we are to believe Lord Hervey, the waspish chronicler of court life.)

  The Marshalsea of 1727 is not the same prison that Dickens depicted so brilliantly in Little Dorrit. This second gaol was not opened until the turn of the 1800s and was situated further down Borough High Street. The original prison had existed since at least the fourteenth century and was set between Mermaid Court and what is now Newcomen Street.

  In 1720 Britain suffered its first great modern economic catastrophe – the collapse of the South Sea Company. Thousands were ruined when the company’s stock plummeted and the devastating effects were still being felt seven years later. The London Gazette of 17–19 September 1727 was filled with commissions of bankruptcy and death notices calling on creditors to confirm any debts owed. (Not everyone was suffering. There was also a page with instructions to peers and peeresses on their coronation robes, detailing how much ermine they could wear.)

  London’s debtors’ prisons were packed – which spelled misery for thousands and a splendid business opportunity for men such as William Acton, head keeper of the Marshalsea. Debtors’ prisons had been common in England for centuries. While the gaols were ultimately owned by the Crown they were privately run for profit. Debtors who had satisfied their creditors would often languish in prison for years because they had run up further debts to the gaol keeper.

  It may seem odd that there was so much money to be made from debtors – until we see adverts for pay-day loans and realise there are still plenty of ways to profit from someone else’s misfortune. Many prisoners were supported by family and friends, or could pawn belongings while they looked for ways to pay off their creditors. Some even ran businesses from inside the prison walls – Sarah Bradshaw’s coffeehouse and Mack’s chophouse being two examples. ‘Women of the town’ were regular visitors. And there was indeed a barber called Trim and – exotically enough – a French fortune teller called Madame Migault living in the Marshalsea in 1727. Debtors’ prisons were meant for containment rather than correction – if you could afford to pay for food, drink and company so be it, as long as the keeper got his cut.

  Dinner and Supper

  A small note to avoid confusion: in the early eighteenth century dinner was usually eaten at around 2 or 3p.m. followed by a light supper later in the evening if needed. All the meals referred to in the novel are based on dishes described in John Grano’s diary written in the Marshalsea in 1728–9. And yes – they really did drink and smoke that much back then.

  Swearing

  They did an awful lot of this, too. All the words used in the book were in currency at the time – flagrantly so. César de Saussure, a Swiss visitor to London in the 1720s, commented: ‘Englishmen are mighty swearers’, and that ‘not only the common people have this unfortunate habit’. And he was not referring just to ‘damn’ and ‘by God’.

  If these swear words seem in any way anachronistic, it is perhaps because they don’t appear in the more familiar novels and plays of the time. A brief – or indeed a long – glance at ‘libertine literature’ such as Venus in the Cloister (1725) confirms that extremely strong language and graphic sex scenes are nothing new. In the coffeehouses of Covent Garden, the slums of St Giles and the debtors’ prisons of the Borough, I think we can safely assume they did not say ‘sugar’ and ‘fiddlesticks’ when there were more colourful choices available.

  PROLOGUE

  They came for him at midnight. There was no warning, no time to reach for the dagger hidden beneath his pillow. They had moved as silently as ghosts, crossing the prison yard and stealing up the dank, narrow staircase while he slept on, oblivious.

  A guilty man should not sleep so soundly.

  He woke to find a cold blade pressed to his throat. They gagged him and bound his wrists before he had the wit to cry out; dragged him so hard from the bed to his knees that the floorboards split and buckled with the force.

  A lantern flared into life, illuminating his attackers. Now, at last, he knew them, and why they had come. He tore frantically at the heavy leather purse tied about his neck for safe-keeping and flung it at their feet, gold and silver coins scattering across the floor.

  The man holding the lantern reached d
own and plucked half a guinea from the dirt, turning it slowly between his fingers. ‘D’you think this will save you?’ He gave a thin smile and tossed the coin back to the floor. Nodded to his accomplice.

  Then they sent him to hell.

  The watchman found the body the next morning, hanging from a beam in the Strong Room, too high for the rats seething and scrabbling in the shadows below. The turnkeys cut him down and laid him out in the yard, away from three Common Side prisoners taken by fever in the night. The captain may have fallen on hard times, but he was still a gentleman.

  The chaplain pointed to the dead man’s battered face and broken body and insisted that the coroner be called at once to investigate. The governor, who’d been drinking with his cronies in the Crown for hours, spat in the dirt and called it suicide – and a pox on anyone who said otherwise. The coroner would rule the same; he’d make sure of it.

  Up in the captain’s room, his friends gambled hastily for his scant belongings before the serjeant took them. Clothes, tobacco, a pound of bacon. A small cooking pot smeared with the remnants of last night’s supper. No money. But that was no surprise in a debtors’ gaol.

  A young maidservant paused on the landing, arms laden with fresh linen. She stood for a while in the shadows, watching the game and the men who played it. She’d learned a long time ago to keep her eyes and ears open. A good secret was better than gold in the Marshalsea – and more deadly than a blade if you used it right. Her eyes flickered to the floor. Strange. Someone had swept the floor clean in the night. She tucked the thought away, like a stray lock of hair beneath her cap, and returned to her chores.

  The killers had swept the floor, but they’d missed one small thing. A coin had skittered across the room in the struggle, coming to rest in a dark corner beneath the captain’s bed. And there it remained as the long months passed, hidden in the dust – a silver crown stained with blood. Waiting to tell its story.

  Waiting for me to find it.

  PART ONE

  ROBBERY

  Chapter One

  ‘You have the luck of the devil, Tom Hawkins.’

  I grinned at the man across the bench. It was a warm September night, I had a full purse for the first time in months and we had just found a table in the most disreputable coffeehouse in London. Life could not be better. ‘It wasn’t luck,’ I replied, shouting over the din.

  Charles Buckley, my oldest friend, shot me a look I had come to know very well over the years: exasperation, disapproval – and a flicker of amusement glowing deep in his eyes. I settled back, content, and lit a pipe. One of my greatest pleasures in life was making Charles laugh when he knew he shouldn’t.

  A serving maid passed close to our table – a pretty girl called Betty with tight black curls and skin the colour of roasted coffee beans. I beckoned her over and ordered a bowl of punch.

  ‘A bowl of coffee,’ Charles corrected. ‘And then home. You gave me your word, remember?’

  I slipped a shilling into Betty’s hand. It felt good to have money again – and to spend it. ‘Coffee. And a bowl of punch. We’re celebrating,’ I said, dismissing Charles’ protestations with a lordly wave.

  Betty arched an eyebrow. There were only two reasons to celebrate at Tom King’s coffeehouse – a win at the tables or a full recovery from the clap.

  ‘I took ten pounds at cards tonight,’ I called out hastily, but she was already gliding through the crowds to the coffee pots hanging over the fire. When I turned back, Charles had his head in his hands.

  ‘What am I to do with you?’ he groaned through his fingers.

  I looked out across the long, low room, breathing in the heady fumes of smoke, liquor and sweat. I would hang up my coat tonight and in the morning my little garret would be filled with the same familiar scents. ‘One bowl of punch, Charles. Just one! To toast my skill at the tables tonight.’

  ‘Skill?’ He dropped his hands. Charles had a pleasant countenance, his features as neatly arranged as a well-proportioned drawing room. It was not a face created for outrage, but he did his best, widening his dark brown eyes a fraction. ‘Skill? You risked everything on the turn of a card! Down to your very last farthing! That is not skill, it’s . . .’ He shrugged, helplessly. ‘It’s madness.’

  I didn’t argue with him. Charles refused to believe there was anything more to gambling than blind luck – in part because he played so ill himself. No use explaining that I had known three quarters of the men in that hot, smoke-filled gaming room – had played against them so many times that I understood their strengths and failings better than my own. No use explaining that even half-drunk I could remember every card that had been played and work out the odds in a flash. To be fair there was some truth in what Charles said – I had taken a terrible risk with that final bet, but I’d had no choice in the matter. My life had depended on it.

  Early that morning my landlord and three other creditors had burst into my room and clapped an action on me for twenty pounds in unpaid rent and other debts. The warrant had given me just one day’s grace to pay enough to satisfy them. If I failed I would be arrested at once and thrown in gaol.

  Little frightened me in those days. I was five and twenty and death seemed a distant, hazy thing. But I knew three men who had been sent to a debtors’ gaol in the last year. One had died of a fever, another had been stabbed in a fight and only just survived. The third had passed through the prison gates a fat, cheerful fellow and emerged six months later a grey, stuttering skeleton. He refused to say what had happened to him and there was a look in his eyes when we pressed him . . . as if he’d rather die than speak of it.

  And so I’d flung on my clothes and run out into the brightening streets to call in every debt and favour I could think of. When that wasn’t enough I’d pawned everything of value, until my room was stripped as bare as a maid on her wedding night. I saved only two items of any worth – my dagger for protection and my best suit for deception. (A little swagger and a few gold buttons will open most doors in London.) My creditors had demanded half what they were owed as proof they would see the rest in good time. As the sun set I counted out what I had made: two guineas and a handful of pennies. Hardly a quarter the sum I needed.

  It was then that I was forced to do what I had been avoiding all day – I turned to Charles for help. We had been as close as brothers at school and at Oxford, but in the last few years our friendship had faltered. My old companion in mischief had become the Reverend Charles Buckley, a civil, sober gentleman who gave afternoon lectures to enraptured old ladies at St George’s on Hanover Square. All of this was well and good, I supposed, until he’d started to lecture me on my own behaviour. I was not an enraptured old lady. I had not seen him for several months.

  Charles lived with his patron, Sir Philip Meadows, in a large house near St James’ Square. It wasn’t a long way from my lodgings but my footsteps were slow and heavy as I walked along Piccadilly. I couldn’t bear the thought of burdening him with my troubles, and worse – I knew he would forgive me for it in a moment. I was on the brink of being ashamed of myself – an uncomfortable feeling.

  Luckily, when I explained my predicament to Charles he scolded me so hard that I quite forgot to feel ashamed and swore at him for being such a damned prig.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, hand me the warrant,’ he snapped and began to read. He gave a grunt of surprise. ‘This is for the Marshalsea. You must know that Sir Philip is Knight Marshal?’

  Must I? I knitted my brows. I tended to drift off when Charles talked about his illustrious patron and his family, except when he mentioned Sir Philip’s two eldest daughters. That always roused me. ‘He owns the gaol?’ I guessed.

  ‘The king owns it,’ Charles replied absently, reading further. ‘Sir Philip administers it in his name. Well – he hires the head keeper . . . my God, Tom – twenty pounds? You owe these men twenty pounds? That’s more than I earn in six months.’ He peered at the warrant, as if hoping the numbers might rearrange themselves into som
ething smaller if he squinted hard enough.

  ‘London is a costly place to live.’

  He gestured at the gold buttons on my waistcoat. ‘It needn’t be.’

  Another lecture. ‘Very well.’ I snatched the warrant from his hands and stuffed it in my pocket. ‘If I promise to dress in brown stockings and drab fustian breeches from now on, will you help me?’

  Charles laughed, despite himself. ‘Of course I’ll help you.’ He pulled an iron box from a high shelf, unlocked it and tipped out a small pile of coins. ‘Will this be enough?’

  I counted it quickly. A little under four pounds. Even if I took every last penny, it wouldn’t save me from gaol.

  ‘I can find more,’ Charles said anxiously. He stole a glance at his belongings, assessing their worth with narrowed eyes. ‘It may take a little while.’

  Ah, now – there it was. Now I felt ashamed. ‘I will borrow this and no more,’ I declared, martyr-like. ‘And you will have it back, Charles – you have my word. By the end of the evening, I hope.’

  I hadn’t been quite that fortunate. Over five straight hours at the gaming tables I had lost and won, won and lost, never quite reaching the ten pounds my creditors had demanded. Charles – who had insisted on accompanying me – paced about, or sat in a corner chewing his nails, left the room, came back, left it again. It grew late and I lost six times in a row, leaving me with a little over five pounds – less than I had arrived with. But I was playing Faro now and in this final game I had built up my stake one card at a time. If I bet on the right card last I would double my winnings.