The Ruthless Rake

by Barbara Cartland

  Men were using words that she did not know the meaning of, but they sounded foul and evil.

  The fact that a new prisoner had arrived in this loathsome place seemed to arouse a sudden frenzy amongst those who were already imprisoned.

  There were shrieks and yells, lewd remarks and a mocking laughter that followed each raucous sally.

  Worst of all there was a terrible stench, which made Syringa feel as though she must faint from the very foulness of it!

  Mingling with the smell of human excrement, the stink of unwashed bodies and raw spirits was the smell of fear.

  With the Bow Street Runners on either side of her, Syringa followed the Turnkey up two flights of stairs. More than once she would have turned and run away blindly and wildly had not the Runners kept their grip on her arms.

  Finally on the third floor the Turnkey rapped on a locked door, which was opened after some minutes by a large blowsy female.

  Her body was swollen with drink, her clothes dirty and her hair was hanging untidily on either side of her face beneath a crumpled mobcap.

  “Can’t a woman get a bit of sleep in this cursed place?” she enquired truculently.

  One of the Runners released his hold on Syringa to draw a guinea from his pocket, which he put in the woman’s hand.

  She looked at the coin for a moment, spat on it and said,

  “Well, that’s different! Them that can pay can come at all ’ours for all I cares!”

  “We’ll leave ’er with you,” the Runner said. “Keep ’er safe.”

  They turned to leave.

  “What’s ’er in for?” the Wardress asked.

  “Robbery and swindlin’,” the Runner replied. “Caught with a watch and purse in her very ’ands.”

  “It’s not true!” Syringa cried.

  “That’s what they all say!” the Wardress snorted. “You’ll ’ave a chance to prove yourself innocent, if you can, to the Judge. Don’t waste your lies on me.”

  She locked the door behind her and walked towards the door of the first cell, through the grating of which a number of faces were watching.

  The Wardress took a key from a number hanging from her waist.

  “Get along now you ’ags,” she said to the women peering through the bars. “Make way for another thief! Better put your valuables away!”

  She laughed coarsely at her joke.

  The smell was almost unbearable and Syringa, looking inside the cell, saw in the not very large room that there were over a hundred women and children huddled together. Some of them were sleeping on the floor, some on bare beds with only a rag as a covering.

  A number of women had bottles raised to their lips or were already in such a state of drunkenness that they were vomiting on the filthy straw.

  They were all of them in a state of dishevelment, half-naked and some appeared to have no clothes on at all.

  The straw on the floor was thick with excrement. In the far corner some women were cooking and the smell of grease and oil mingled with human odours made Syringa feel as if she was suffocating.

  There were two women near the door in the act of stripping a dead child of its clothes.

  They looked up as Syringa stared at them and screamed abuse, though for what reason she could not understand.

  Their cries were taken up by other women and now several reached out their dirty claw-like hands towards Syringa as if they would drag her in amongst them and strip her of her cloak.

  They were so menacing that Syringa shrank back against the Wardress as if for protection.

  “Frightened?” the woman jeered. “Well you can pay for better accommodation if you can afford it.”

  “I can pay?” Syringa asked.

  “If you ’ave the money,” the Wardress replied.

  “But I have – none,” Syringa faltered.

  “Then there’s nothin’ I can do for you.”

  But, as the Wardress spoke, she looked down at Syringa and saw that her cloak had fallen open as she ascended the stairs and the turquoise brooch with its diamond-centred flowers was glittering on her breast.

  “You ’ave jewellery,” the woman said in a different tone. “I might be able to sell it for you if you make it worth me while.”

  Syringa put her hand over the brooch.

  “I cannot do that,” she said. “It’s not mine, it’s only lent to me.”

  “They’ll have it off you quick enough,” the Wardress said roughly. “Make no mistake about that.”

  She gave Syringa a push forward as she spoke as if to fling her in amongst the other women. Their bare arms and dirty hands stretched out towards her.

  Syringa gave a little gasp.

  “I cannot – I cannot – face them, please – give me a room to – myself.”

  The Wardress slammed the cell door and locked it.

  “Take off the brooch and let me see it.”

  With trembling fingers Syringa obeyed her. Even as she handed it over, she wondered distractedly what the Earl would think. His mother’s brooch!

  The jewel she had promised to return whenever he should ask it of her. And now she was selling it to this fat dirty woman because she was too afraid to face the occupants of the cell.

  But she knew that the Wardress had been right when she said that the women would seize it from her the moment she was at their mercy.

  “Seven pounds,” the Wardress said, twisting and turning the brooch in the light from a candle.

  “I am sure it is worth – more than that – ” Syringa began and then felt helplessly that there was no point in arguing.

  “That’ll get you a State apartment,” the Wardress said. “Nice and comfortable after this place.”

  “Then please take me there – at once,” Syringa asked.

  She felt that she could no longer stand in the passage listening to the foul remarks coming from the women prisoners and hearing their ribald laughter.

  One of them was singing a bawdy song and others joined in the chorus shrieking and pointing their fingers as if the lewd words were applicable to her.

  The Wardress opened the outer door and Syringa followed her back onto the staircase.

  Once again she had to run the gauntlet of the men’s cells, but by now their rudeness and their obscenity hardly seemed to penetrate her mind.

  She was too terrified to think, too numb to be conscious of anything save the fat waddling figure of the Wardress moving ahead of her.

  They crossed the courtyard and climbed a flight of wooden stairs to another part of the building. Here it was quieter although there were raised voices behind closed doors.

  The Wardress opened the door of a room, which seemed to Syringa very dark, dingy and airless, but at least it was empty.

  There was a bed with a stained mattress, torn curtains hung over a small window, a threadbare carpet on the floor, a chair and a table.

  “Three guineas for the week,” the Wardress said, “and seven shillings for the bed.”

  “Please take the money from what you owe me,” Syringa said in a low voice.

  She could hardly bear to think of the brooch and what the Earl would say when he knew that she had sold it.

  “You’ll ’ave to pay for the three other beds if you wants it to yourself,” the Wardress said. “This be a four-bedded room and, of course, I knows you would wish to give me a guinea for me trouble. Candles are a shilling and if you want a drink you ’ave to pay for it.”

  Syringa knew that she was being cheated, but somehow it did not seem to matter.

  “I would like a candle, please.”

  “And a drink?” the Wardress enquired.

  “Nothing, thank you,” Syringa said quickly.

  “I’ll bring you your money tomorrow,” the Wardress said. “Maybe it’ll last you your time ’ere.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Syringa enquired.

  “Only that you’re in luck, me fine lady. You’ll get your case ’eard quickly because ’tis the May Sessions at
the Old Bailey. Some ’ave to wait months afore their case be ’eard, money runs out and they’ve nought left to sell, ’ard on ’em it is!”

  “And after I am tried?” Syringa said in a frightened voice, “what will happen then?”

  “You’ll go into the condemned cell.”

  “Condemned!”

  Syringa could hardly speak the word.

  “For a crime like your’s you must expect to be ’anged! A person stealin’ anythin’ valued over a shilling gets the gallows. Why a child of three knows that!”

  Syringa put her hands up to her neck. She felt that her voice was constricted in her throat and she could not make a sound.

  The Wardress did not seem to expect her to speak. She lit a candle from one in the passage and put it on the table.

  Dawn was breaking and a very faint and indistinct light was coming from the glassless window.

  “You’ll get your money in the mornin’,” the Wardress said and, leaving the cell, slammed the door behind her.

  Syringa heard the key turn in the lock.

  For a moment she was unable to move. Then she sat down on the chair and put her face in her hands.

  “Help me, God – help me,” she prayed, her voice hardly above a whisper.

  As she spoke, she saw in the light of the candle a large rat run across the floor and disappear under the bed.

  *

  The Court Room at Old Bailey was filled with a noisy crowd of people all, it seemed to Syringa, with jeering, hostile and ugly faces.

  At first with the Judge and Counsel in their white wigs they seemed to swim before her eyes and she thought that she was going to faint.

  With an effort she held onto the wooden railing in front of her and tried to comprehend what was being said.

  Her head was aching intolerably and her throat was swollen, so she wondered if when the time came for her to plead she would be able to speak.

  She had shivered with cold in her cell when morning brought a chill breeze through the broken window.

  Now in the crowded Court Room she felt as if her skin was burning hot and it was hard for her to breathe.

  “You’re lucky,” the Wardress had said when she had unlocked the cell door.

  Just for a moment Syringa had felt a flicker of hope that she was to be released.

  “Yes, lucky!” the woman went on, looking fatter and dirtier than she had the night before. “Two deaths last night and you’re to take the place of one of ’em. It’s not often a prisoner is taken to the Old Bailey almost before she be settled in, so to speak.”

  “Why did they die?” Syringa asked fearfully.

  “Gaol fever, as you might expect,” the Wardress answered. “Twenty-two last month and more the month afore. There’ll be another epidemic before we knows where we be.”

  “I am not surprised,” Syringa murmured, thinking of the dirt, the stench, the lack of sanitation and the rats.

  “Ah, well, we all ’as to pop off sometime!” the Wardress said, “and it’d be a pleasure to cheat the ’angman.”

  She gave a jeering laugh at her own joke.

  “Now come along. You can tell the Judge you’re innocent and see if ’e’ll believe you. With a face like yours, you might even get away with murder, who knows?”

  Again she laughed and turned Syringa over to the Turnkey, who escorted her and a number of other miserable prisoners past the cell, through the yards and out through the heavily iron-studded door into the wagons that were waiting for them.

  In the wagon with Syringa there were three men in chains, one of whom appeared to be completely dazed.

  There was a woman who kept muttering about her children who had been left to starve when she had been caught three weeks earlier stealing a loaf of bread to feed them.

  There was a boy who was a pickpocket, who laughed, joked and said it was his third time in Newgate.

  Each time he had come before the Judge he had been able to prove that what he had stolen had only cost eleven pence and he had therefore escaped the gallows.

  There were several others, quiet and frightened, dirty dishevelled men and women who seemed too apathetic or too sick to care what happened to them one way or another.

  When finally they were taken into the waiting cells at the Old Bailey, it was to find groups of prisoners from other prisons, very much the same mixture, all waiting apprehensively for their cases to be heard.

  ‘I feel so ill I cannot think,’ Syringa told herself, ‘but I must be clearheaded. I must make them understand that this was all a plot.’

  A plot contrived by whom? The question had repeated itself in her brain over and over again throughout what remained of the night. Who was responsible?

  Had Lady Elaine been acting on the Earl’s instructions? Syringa could not believe that, angry though he had been, he would subject her to such degradation or punish her in such a cruel and heartless manner.

  Yet he could be ruthless.

  She had heard that servants would be dismissed summarily if they did not please him. She knew only too well how harsh he could be, if he did not get his own way.

  Nevertheless whatever he was like, whatever he had done to her, she loved him.

  ‘I love him,’ she whispered to herself, ‘and now perhaps I shall never see him again – he will never know that I had done nothing wrong – nothing that he could really disapprove of.’

  Last night she had wanted to cry and yet the tears would not come.

  Now she felt curiously weak and it was only with the greatest effort that she could prevent herself from sobbing bitterly.

  ‘I must be controlled and restrained,’ she told herself. ‘I must make a good impression on the Judge. He must realise that I am a lady and not a criminal.’

  How could it all have happened? It all seemed unbelievable, a figment of her imagination.

  Lady Elaine escorting her down the back stairs, the actor waiting for her in the coach, the manner in which he had denounced her, the other gentleman arriving with the Bow Street Runners and accusing her of swindling him.

  It could not be true!

  It could not have taken place!

  Syringa put her hands to her throbbing forehead and with an almost superhuman effort forced herself not to panic but to wait calmly, hoping that she looked composed and that her hair was tidy.

  There had, of course, been no mirror in the cell and she had no comb. She prayed that she did not look like the wildly dishevelled and dirty women who had been brought to trial with her.

  There was one who was obviously verminous. She kept scratching her head and her body.

  Another was barely decent, her gown had been torn off her breasts perhaps in an effort to take it from her. But it was hard for Syringa to consider anything except the fact that in a few minutes she would be in the dock fighting for her life.

  She felt as if she was moving through water and imagined that she saw the silver lake at King’s Keep. She was so hot and thirsty that she longed for the coolness of it, but it was no more real than a mirage.

  Almost as if someone had struck her and forced her into a realisation of where she was, Syringa saw that Mr. Daniel Neame was in the witness box.

  He was accusing her of stealing his watch, his purse and his wallet.

  “Where did you meet this young woman?”

  The Counsel for the Prosecution had a deep voice that seemed always to insinuate far more than what he said in actual words.

  “We met in the Argyll Rooms in the Haymarket,” Mr. Neame replied. “She was introduced to me by a friend and, as she made herself very agreeable, I asked her to supper with me. She appeared quiet and decently behaved and it was only when I offered to drive her home and we were actually in the carriage that I became suspicious.”

  “Why were your suspicions aroused?” the Counsel asked.

  “I thought that her hands were over-familiar,” Mr. Neame replied, “and, when we arrived at our destination, I realised that my watch was gone and with it
my purse and a wallet containing notes to quite a considerable sum.”

  “Did you accuse her of theft?” the Counsel asked.

  “I did indeed,” Mr. Neame replied, “but she laughed at me and would have run away had not at that moment another gentleman arrived with two Bow Street Runners. I cannot tell you my relief at the sight of them!”

  “I can well imagine it,” Counsel remarked.

  He turned to the Judge.

  “This, my Lord, concerns the second charge against the prisoner. Have I your Lordship’s permission to ask the other gentleman concerned to step into the witness box?”

  “Agreed,” the Judge said in a bored tone.

  He was a very old man. His face deeply lined and his eyelids drooped wearily as if he found it extremely tiresome to be present during such long drawn out proceedings.

  Mr. Neame stepped down.

  Now the other gentleman, whom Syringa had only seen arriving with the Bow Street Runners, was sworn in.

  “You know the prisoner?” Counsel asked.

  “I do. Her name is Syringa Melton. Some three months ago she was engaged by my aunt, Mrs. Witheringham, to be her companion.”

  Syringa stared at him in astonishment.

  “Your aunt lives in Dorset I believe, Captain Witheringham.”

  “That is true. She has a large and comfortable house, but she is getting on in years and required a young companion to read to her and to attend to her wishes. Miss Melton seemed at the time an excellent choice.”

  “Did you become suspicious of her behaviour?”

  “I did indeed,” Captain Witheringham answered. “I realised that Miss Melton was ingratiating herself into my aunt’s affections and at the same time poisoning her mind against me as her rightful heir.”

  “And what did you do about it?”

  “I kept a close watch on the young woman. My aunt was getting progressively weaker in health and Miss Melton’s hold on her seemed to increase day by day. She persuaded my aunt to give her various trinkets, admittedly not of any great value, but they were undoubtedly jewels and objets d’art that should have gone to her nieces and her nephew.”

  Captain Witheringham paused dramatically and Syringa realised that he too was an actor.