by Ian Weir
“I flew upon him out of the darkness — that’s what I did. I was driven by my greed and wrath.” Her face was grey, but she spoke — she almost chanted — with a strange exalted defiance. “I cut his throat, and the blood stains no other hand . . .”
She broke off and stood trembling, but the look of defiance remained. It made me think of half-mad martyrs, going like bridegrooms to the stake. And was it true, what she was saying? Perhaps it was, after all — except somehow I could not believe it. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong, and had been from the very start.
“What can I do?” I said helplessly.
She seemed to falter just a little, then. A crack beginning to trace along the veneer.
“Go and see him,” she said. “My poor Jemmy. Tell him what they done.”
“I will. I’ll go to Woolwich Harbour.”
“No, not there. Not the Hulks. A hospital, here in London — he’s being moved. A private hospital, to finish his sentence. I don’t know which one. Atherton can tell you.”
“Atherton?”
“It’s been arranged.”
“Wait — Atherton is doing this?”
“Tell Jemmy it’s all right. Proper care — they’ll look after him. No matter what becomes of me.”
Her voice caught at that. The crack was spiderwebbing now; in another moment she must surely shatter like porcelain. I hardly heard what she said next, in the stumbling confusion of my own thoughts.
“D’you think they exist?” she was saying. Speaking so low it was almost a whisper. “The fires. The Devil, and Hell — d’you think it’s real? Cos I do. Look around you — look at the world, and then tell me there ent the Devil. And maybe there’s even God too — only not for the likes of us, Will Starling. For us it’s just the other one — the Devil in Hell, and here in London, and the great fire burning right beneath our feet. But he swears to me it will never come to that. He says to me, ‘Don’t despair.’ And he swears on his life that he’ll look after my poor Jemmy.”
Her eyes were locked on mine. Burning and great in her narrow white face, gazing out from shadow through the bars as if she stood shackled in Hell’s anteroom already.
“You swear to me too, Will Starling. On your soul.”
“I swear. I’ll find where Jemmy is, but — ”
“Swear something else. Swear you’ll see that Atherton keeps his promise. And if he don’t, then you kill him. Understand? You fucking kill him, Will Starling, if I can’t do it myself.”
*
Mr Comrie listened closely as I told him.
“She seems to think he could help her, even now. She seems convinced there’s something he can do. ‘And if he don’t keep his word, then you kill him, if I can’t do it myself.’ That’s what she said to me — exact words.”
“The woman’s half wild with terror, William. She might say almost anything.”
“But she didn’t say almost anything. She said that.”
He was holding the broadsheet report that I’d brought back with me from Newgate. He stared down at it for a moment — the confession, the last despairing dignity of poor Anne Boleyn in the woodblock illustration — then raised his eyes to regard me more keenly than ever.
“What precisely is your accusation?”
I hesitated.
We were in his surgery. He had actually seen two patients today — implements lay disordered on the table, along with a blood-caked length of bandage. Sawdust was strewn to cover the telltale blotches on the floor.
“Go on, then,” he said. “What do you accuse the man of doing?”
And of course Your Wery Umble had no reply. I had nothing at all, nothing tangible, beyond the millstone weight I’d dragged home with me from Newgate — and a conviction hardening by the hour that everything in this dismal matter was amiss, and that Dionysus Atherton’s shadow hung somehow over all of it.
Mr Comrie reached for the bottle. He was dishevelled with it already; another few drinks and he’d be oyster-eyed — but he’d lurch to competence if an emergency came pounding at the door. I’d seen him take off a leg when you’d swear he was too stewed to see. Done in two minutes and sewn up after, neat as nanny at her knitting.
“Is he guilty of arrogance?” he was saying. “Aye. Of pride and self-love and ambition, and worshipping at the shrine of his own golden self. Oh, he’s guilty of those too — God’s mighty swinging bollocks, he’s guilty as sin itself. And the way he has treated you — I can never think of him the same way again, William, knowing how he’s treated you. But a man can be guilty of all this — he can be guilty of all this and more — and still offer kindness to a poor condemned woman and her broken-headed fellow.”
“I think she’s innocent,” I said. “And I think she’s hiding something too. She knows something, Mr Comrie. But she’s willing to take it to the grave.”
He said nothing for a very long moment, and then looked round for a second glass. Seeing none, he reached for the mug used for holding quills. Dumped them out, wiped the mug with a bit of shirt tail, and poured a drink for me — brandy, or thereabouts. We couldn’t afford to be particular, here at Cripplegate.
“She’s bones already, William,” he said at last. “So am I — so are you. We left bones on every field in Europe. The world is built on bones.”
“So I should just let it go. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s one of the options.”
“And the other?”
He took a swallow, and thumped down the glass.
“Get up off your arse, William. Go and do something about it, if you feel so bollocking sairtain. Instead of sitting here and making speeches.”
And still I couldn’t have told you — not on that Sunday night in May, twelve hours before the hanging was scheduled to take place — just why I was so convinced that something terrible was amiss. That some monstrous malignity was at work here, if only I could see it clear; some diabolical clockwork that was ticking Meg second by second out onto the Newgate scaffold. And perhaps the sense of clockwork itself came only later — the growing conviction that a hand and mind were both at work, shaping a pattern from events that still seemed random. Perhaps on that night I felt nothing more than a mighty sorrow, and so made it my mission to save poor Meg when no one else would try. Just as there had been no one else in all the world who would help my friend Danny Littlejohn, on the night when he lay weeping at the Gate.
So I went back to the Three Jolly Cocks. Alf the Ale-Draper was there, and a dozen men I’d asked already, along with a few others. But none of them had seen Meg Nancarrow on the night in question, nor Master Buttons. They’d been elsewhere, or left early, or come late; or they’d been too castaway on daffy to say what they’d seen in the first place. They might all have been as blind as Gibraltar Charley, who had come in from his pitch down the road and now sat in his darkness at a table by the door, with Tim the Real Learned French Dog curled dozing on the sawdust at his feet.
“His name is Buttons,” I said, to a trio of rough men near the fire.
They shook their heads. One of them had a ferret, which poked its head now from the neck of his shirt and then disappeared back within, to the great amusement of all.
“Fair hair,” I persisted. “Wears it in ringlets.”
“Oi! Leave off your pestering.”
Alf the Ale-Draper, calling belligerently from behind the bar. Apparently he’d had sufficient of Your Wery Umble.
“I’m only asking — ”
“And you’ve ’ad your answer, ’aven’t you? Now clear off!”
It had gone nine o’clock; eleven hours remained to Meg. She would be in one of the Condemned Cells now. There were fifteen of these in Newgate, three levels of five, in a block built of stone three foot thick. You climbed up a stairway in the light of a charcoal stove. Nine foot by six foot, and nine foot high. A bench at one end; underneath it a rug, a Bible and a Prayer Book. A window, one foot square, and an iron candlestick fixed to the wall. The Condemned was al
lowed a candle ’til ten o’clock. On the last night, this might be extended.
“Master Buttons — aye, sure enough.”
The voice came from the shadows as I reached the door.
“Henry the Fifth. ‘Cwy God for Hawwy.’”
Gibraltar Charley stared vacantly into space, grinning slightly at the recollection. At his feet Tim opened one ogle, to assess the situation and smoke out if food might be involved.
“You saw him?” I asked in surprise.
“At Drury Lane. Years ago.”
His hand reached out and fumbled upon the table for the tot of spiced rum. He drank, and smacked his lips.
“And then again t’other night. Just outside that door.”
It took me a moment to credit what he was saying.
“The night the Nancarrow girl were here with Cheese,” he said. “Always liked the girl. Never could abide the money-lender. And you ent hearing this from me.”
“Wait. You’re telling me what you saw on Wednesday night?”
He fumbled the mug back onto the table — as a blind man must. It is a hard thing to go through this world in darkness, although compensations exist. Blind men tended to do well as beggars, for instance. Some were said to make upwards of a guinea in a single day, which led the suspicious-minded to query just how blind such beggars might be.
“Buttons were speaking with another party,” said Charley. “Intense conversation. Didn’t hear much of it, but the other party said: ‘We’ll make it worth your while.’”
“And this other man . . . ?”
“Didn’t recognize him. Don’t know the name.”
“Describe him.”
Charley’s milky eyes slid sideways to meet mine.
“Long grey party. Like a wolf.”
*
Master Buttons was known to frequent the Nag and Goose near St Paul’s. So Gibraltar Charley had told me, and I arrived at a dead run. He wasn’t there, and they hadn’t seen him, leastways not tonight. But the Ale-Draper recommended me to a gambling hell by the north end of London Bridge, where they mentioned a gin-shop across the river, near St Saviour’s. He was not there either, but someone had a notion that he lodged farther south, by Camberwell.
Finding the street, I commenced pounding upon doors. Never mind what Odenkirk will do to you, I would tell him; concern yourself with the present moment, and this knife I have right here in my hand. The third door yielded up the keeper of a lodging-house, who hadn’t seen Buttons for nearly a month, but had an address for him. It was all the way out in Bethnal Green, where I arrived as the Watch was crying midnight.
Meg would hear the St Paul’s bell as it counted out the hour. The Condemned were exhorted to spend their final night in prayer and tearful vigil, beseeching God to bring them to true repentance. Meg would not pray — or perhaps she would, after all. Perhaps as the hours stretched on she would drop to her knees and wring out her heart.
Master Buttons was not at the house in Bethnal Green. He’d decamped two weeks earlier, leaving behind a pair of old boots and a week’s unpaid rent. The landlord had information that he might be in Whitechapel, in one of the netherskens around Mitre Square. If I found the villain I should send him word directly, and the landlord would apologize for having flung one of the boots at my nob, as he had done from a first-floor casement upon being awakened by my pounding.
Across the river again, to Whitechapel. But Master Buttons was not at any of the low lodging-houses around Mitre Square, nor along Aldgate High Street or Old Jewry neither, and I went to every pestilential one of them. The last landlord was cursing me as the bell sounded six o’clock. Dawn was a bruise in the eastern sky; London was stirring, and I had failed. Meg Nancarrow was lost.
The crowd would be arriving outside Newgate now. Thirty thousand would come out for a hanging, sometimes even more, streaming along Holborn and down Snow Hill. Meg would begin to hear them through the thick stone walls. A Keeper would arrive at six-thirty to offer her toast and coffee, and at seven-thirty she would be taken from her cell down to the Press Yard. There the Revd Dr Cotton would offer whatever rites she would accept and then turn her over to the Under-Sheriffs of London, who would strike off her shackles and bind her hands before escorting her in procession along Deadman’s Walk, the passage that leads to Debtor’s Door. It opens onto the scaffold, which would have been erected the day before. Mr Langley would be waiting there, and Dr Cotton would intone the Office of the Dead. Perhaps Meg’s anger would see her through the ordeal. Christ, I hoped so.
I dragged myself soul-sick back to Cripplegate at last. As I reached the house, a crow-black tatter detached itself from a shadow. Someone had been waiting for me there.
“They murdered him, you know. The money-lender.”
It was the voice that stopped me dead.
“They’d have murdered me too, and carved me up before the angels in Heaven had time to weep. But I was one step ahead of them.”
A gaunt figure in a ragged cloak, and a pair of mad eyes staring.
“Miss Deakins!” I exclaimed.
“He knew, you see. That’s why he had to die. The money-lender knew about the killings.”
“What killings?”
“The other killings. I have it all noted down, Mr Starling. I have a Ledger — oh, yes indeed — I can find where the bodies are buried. And I can bring him to a Reckoning.”
In the distance, St Paul’s clock was sounding the three-quarter hour.
“Is this true?” I cried. “Or just laudanum and madness?”
“It is the Truth,” said Flitty Deakins, “upon my last hope for my soul.”
I turned then and began to run, as if my own life depended on it.
The Uttermost Extremity of Justice
From a Broadsheet Account
13th May, 1816
An exclamation arose as St Paul’s bell began to strike the hour. The atmosphere had been Festive unto that moment, as if the multitude were gathered for a holiday parade, with entire Families turned out together: lads upon fathers’ shoulders, and wives with babes in arms, while vendors did brisk business selling comestibles and beverages. Others had their vantage from the rooftops and upper windows across the square, where space had been sold for upwards of ten guineas. Now thirty thousand necks craned, and sixty thousand eyes searched out Debtor’s Door.
It opened and the cry went up: “Hats off!” The entire human mass — already pressed so close together as to seem one single organism — pressed closer still, and surged forward in hopes of glimpsing the Procession.
There they were, ascending the steps to the scaffold. Meg Nancarrow in the midst of it, the Fleet Ditch Fury, so small as to be all but overlooked, as if she were an Afterthought added to someone else’s occasion. She wore a black dress, no doubt the finest garment her meagre lot in life had afforded her, as if she were setting forth to attend a funeral. And of course she was; it was her own. A shout of excitement went up, and opprobrium.
She ascended the steps unaided, but reaching the scaffold she faltered, as if her legs would give way at her first sight of the Fatal Noose. It hung there waiting, with Hangman Langley standing gaunt and spare beside it, prepared to carry out his Awful Office. Hands reached to steady her. She continued on, to be positioned upon the drop. As she faced the multitude, those nearest were able to hear the Sheriff ask if she had final words. Her lips moved spasmodically at first, as if none would come. But at length she was heard to cry, in quavering defiance: “Do as you will. Cos that is all the Law there is, in this world or the Next. Remember that, if you should have cause to think of me again.”
The white hood was placed upon her head, at which juncture a disturbance began at the back of the throng. A desperate shouting, which revealed itself as issuing from a Diminutive Youth. Crying that a dreadful Error was being made — that he had New Evidence which bore upon the matter — he plunged into the press of bodies, as if he would by some miracle win his way through to the scaffold and there put a halt to the p
roceedings. But he was swallowed in the multitude, like Jonah disappearing into the maw of Leviathan. Hangman Langley at a signal from the Sheriff released the drop.
There was a groan from the mob, a deep exhalation that came as if from underneath the earth itself, as if some vast block had shifted in the depths, and then a terrible roar arose from thirty thousand Londoners, here to witness Justice Done unto its Uttermost Extremity. The short drop had not broken the neck; the Fury was seen to contort most desperately. Cries of dismay, for the doleful aspects of the Confession had won considerable sympathy already, and this tide rose steadily as the struggle grew protracted. Many in the multitude exhorted the Hangman to go beneath the platform and speed her passage by pulling upon the ankles; the which he did not do, either through indecision, or else a conviction that such suffering was a Meet Reward for her crime, even though the crowd had quite turned against him by this juncture, and there were grounds to fear that Physical Violence might be offered upon his person.
At the very last, a new commotion broke out suddenly at the foot of the scaffold. It was impossible to see clearly what transpired, but subsequent enquiry would establish that the same Diminutive Youth, who had cried out at the commencement of the Proceedings, had by dint of some superhuman exertion wormed his way all through the press of humanity. He lunged forth now, shouting that a Monstrous Injustice was perpetrated, as if he would smite the Hangman and cut down the Murderess, even in her last shuddering instants. But he was set upon with stern vivacity by the Under-Sheriffs, who bore him down and beat him into sanguineous insensibility, even as all struggles of the Fleet Ditch Fury ceased forever in this Mortal Vale, and she passed on to give answer before the Highest Court of All.