The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  The Hangman's Child

  Francis Selwyn

  Series: Sergeant Verity [6]

  Published: 2000

  Tags: Mystery, Historical Novel

  Mysteryttt Historical Novelttt

  * * *

  From Newgate Gaol come sinister rumours of a man to be hanged for a murder he did not commit. To reach America and be lost forever, 'Handsome' Jack Rann must escape the death-cell and pull off the robbery planned by his dead accomplice, Pandy Quinn

  The Hangman's Child

  A Sergeant Verity Novel

  Francis Selwyn

  © Francis Selwyn 2000 First published in Great Britain 2000

  ISBN 0 7090 6683 X

  Robert Hale Limited Clerkenwell House Clerkenwell Green London EC1R OHT

  The right of Francis Selwyn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Typeset by Derek Doyle & Associates, Liverpool. Printed in Great Britain by Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

  To Louis B. Chandler, a salute from another stretch of the trenches

  Author's Note

  Jack Rann's Newgate climb was performed in reality by Henry Williams in 1836. Walker's Cornhill Vaults were entered by Thomas Caseley during the weekend of 4-5 February 1865. James Sargent's micrometer of 1857 is illustrated on p. 157 of Vincent Eras' Locks and Keys Throughout the Ages, Lips' Safe & Lock Manufacturing Company, 1957. With the exception of these debts to reality, the characters and incidents of the present novel are entirely fictitious.

  ONE

  THE HANGMAN'S CHILD

  1

  'Handsome' Jack Rann shivered in the cold May morning of his dream. The windows of tall London house-fronts flamed with summer dawn, where Snow Hill curved up past The Saracen's Head and entered Newgate Street. The rooms of the Magpie and Stump, ablaze with gaslight until dawn, were blank and dark. An aproned potman was clearing the picked carcasses of cold fowl and rabbit, the debris of kidneys and lobsters. Scraps and cigar butts littered the sand of the wooden floor.

  A low anthem of voices rose from the mass of men and women wedged between the walls of Newgate Street. Uniformed constables stood at the rear of the crowd, among the taunts of a dozen stunted and sallow youths. Dandies at the upper windows of the tavern stroked their moustaches and twirled their cheroots. Not a head among thousands turned from the sight before them.

  High in the blank wall of Newgate Gaol was a tiny door, used only on such mornings as this. A temporary black-draped platform stood out from it. Carts carrying posts and planks had rattled up Snow Hill as late as four in the morning to complete the work. The carpenters had erected two black-painted posts on the platform with a stout cross-beam between them. A dark iron chain dangled from the centre of the beam. The hammering died away.

  Last of all, a coach carrying the Sheriff of Middlesex and his guests made its way through the crowd and the doors of the great prison closed behind it. The clock-hands on the square medieval tower of St Sepulchre stood at ten to eight. The onlookers shivered expectantly in the early chill.

  An elderly man, his frock-coat and cloth hat faded by rain and sun, wandered the fringes of the crowd with a tray of pamphlets round his neck. He stared reproachfully at each group, pausing to offer his goods in a mournful chant.

  'A Voice from the Condemned Cell! Being the last confession of Handsome Jack Rann, who suffers today for the barbarous murder of his friend and accomplice, Pandy Quinn. See Handsome Jack in his earliest years, took from his orphan home to be made a climbing-boy! But the poor infant was never taught to shun the broad way leading to destruction! He that had no parents to guide him becomes today the hangman's child!'

  'Hurrah!' shouted a drunken subaltern, his arm round a laughing woman at an upper window. 'Hurrah, then, for Handsome Jack!'

  The patterer glanced up, frowned, and resumed his dirge.

  'Jack being a thief from infancy, the demon that ever haunts the footsteps of the vicious seduced him to spill the blood of Pandy Quinn in a tap-room of the Golden Anchor off Saffron Hill at Clerkenwell, with a cowardly Italian stiletto-blade! See him on the gallows trap! Hear him in his own confession! Printed for six pence with two cuts and a set of verses!'

  At the climax of the old man's chant, the minute hand on St Sepulchre rose to a perfect vertical and the bell of the dark tower tolled eight times. Stillness held the crowd. The patterer with his tray of yellowed pamphlets shuffled on. In the press-yard of the prison, the iron had been knocked from the legs of the fourteen men and women who would now be led out, one by one, to die. Only a husband and wife, who had poisoned their lodger for his clothes, were to be hanged side by side at the end of the morning's ritual.

  The little door opened, high in Newgate wall. A man's head appeared briefly and vanished. He reappeared, distinctive and self-assured in black suiting and dark cravat. A group of young officers on a balcony of the Magpie and Stump jeered him. Their hooting faded into silence. Four more men followed the black-dressed figure in a close group. Jack Rann was russet-suited, like a countryman visiting the city, but with his shirt-collar open for the hangman's convenience. His hands were strapped together in front of him and, as he stood there, he opened his palms once or twice in a helpless little gesture.

  A group of apprentices at the rear of the crowd, their view obstructed, shouted, 'Hats off! Heads down in front!'

  A voice from the platform drifted high across the crowd. The condemned who were still alive and in full health heard the opening of their own burial service.

  'Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live .... He cometh up and is cut down like a flower . . . .'

  In the silence of the great crowd, the governor of the gaol turned to the hangman and consigned the victims to him.

  'Your prisoners, Mr Calcraft!'

  Jack Rann placed himself quietly beneath the beam. The hangman, who had first come alone on to the platform, pulled him round to face the crowd, took a white night-cap from his own pocket and drew it down firmly to cover the murderer's face. The onlookers packing Newgate Street wall to wall held their breath. The executioner stepped back and gave a signal to his assistant below the platform by three taps of his heel on the planking. The wags on the tavern balcony shouted the count.

  'One ... Two ... Three!...'

  Jack Rann, in the daylight of his dream, wondered why he could still see the balcony of the Magpie and Stump when the night-cap was already drawn down to veil the bulging eyes and starting tongue, the portrait of a 'Hangman's Child'.

  While there was time, he cried out that he could still see, that he was also a figure in the crowd, watching himself up there on the gallows trap.

  The bolts of the trap thudded, the hinged wood banged against the frame. The hooded figure felt himself stumble into the dark drop as it opened under him. His cry choked, as he first went down and then shot upwards again, sitting tall and awake on his plank bed in the depth of night. His tongue was sticking out between his teeth, as if in obedience to the dream.

  The sky beyond the barred window was black, yellowed here and there by fire on a dark cloud of London smoke. He was not hanged at all. He had all that to come.

  Jack Rann's heart thumped like a trip-hammer as reason returned. The thud of the trap had been only the warder's hand on the sliding spy-hole as the Hangman's Child cried out in his shallow sleep.

  Then, as at every waking for the last two weeks, his heart's beating filled his breast and his throat with a swelling dread. Eight mornings from now the midnight dream was to be reality. Tomorrow would be the last day allowed for visits. Three days later the warders, who watched the corridor of death-wards, would move into the cells of tho
se whose sentences had been confirmed, for fear they might harm themselves in their despair.

  No one had entered in answer to his cry, such sounds were too common along the death-wards. A warder's voice from the stone corridor said, "e's himself again now.'

  A yellow oil-lamp glimmered through the open slot into the whitewashed oblong of the cell.

  'You still there, 'andsome Jack?' He knew the warder's voice now. William Lupus, the worst of them. 'Dreaming your dreams again? A man'd think you couldn't get there fast enough. Monday week. Then it's "Over the water to Charley" for you, my lad.'

  Handsome Rann lay back under his blanket, hands folded behind his head. He was not handsome, even his nickname was a joke. The narrow head, the starved build, the bony shoulders and the lantern jaw that suggested humorous vacancy were nature's gifts to him. For a while, he had tried to impersonate the gentleman he had never become. The pose had served him well in his trade as thief. But in the previous autumn, Rann and Quinn had trespassed on the preserves of Bully Bragg and the Swell Mob. Not a trick in the world would save him after that.

  It was chance that Pandy Quinn fell first into their hands. A knife had slipped while Pandy was held down for questioning, but Bully Bragg and Strap Mulligan had turned even that accident to profit by casting Handsome Jack as Pandy's killer. A trickster and an artist with a lock, he fitted every item on their bill.

  He shivered, hearing again the voices of the ragged children who ran after the pauper hearse, as it carried the body to the riverside mortuary.

  Tandy Quinn! Pandy Quinn!

  Lived by evil, died in sin!

  Robbed the rich and poor as well,

  Lied on earth, and lies in hell!'

  'You was my friend, Pandy,' said Jack Rann softly in the dark. 'You taught me everything. I could never hurt you.' His murmuring roused the turnkeys.

  'Tell you what, Handsome Jack.' It was Lupus again at the spyhole, the warder whose very name sounded like a disease. 'You was lucky over eating your grub. Sometimes, when a man knows he's to hang, it touches him in the throat. We had a cove as couldn't swallow for fright, not food, not even water. His gullet was that tightened up, getting ready for the noose. So we told him the Home Office was that worried he might famish before the day, they'd agreed to have him beheaded, under some old law. And you know what, Mr Jack? All of a sudden he could eat hearty as a hunter and drink like a whale. Only thing was . . . .' The voice broke into quiet laughter in anticipation of its own good humour. 'Only thing was, Jack, he couldn't put a razor to his gill no more to shave himself. Shy of the blade, he was. You been lucky, Handsome Rann, all things considered.'

  ‘I never so much as touched Pandy Quinn,' Jack Rann spoke quietly again. 'Let alone did I kill him. I never so much as hurt anyone, let alone bled 'em to death. And where would I get one of them Eye-tal-ian blades to do it?'

  But Lupus heard him.

  'You ain't half a caution, Handsome Jack!' he said humorously and slammed the metal spy-hole shut.

  Rann stared up into the darkness, wide awake, fearing what he must dream if he slept again. Close by, St Sepulchre chimed the single hour after midnight. Greyfriars followed it. Then the boom of St Paul's further off.

  The fastidious little brain in the narrow skull assembled facts, divided them and divided them again. After tomorrow he would be allowed no more visitors, no news of the world beyond Newgate's massive walls. Three days more, when his sentence was confirmed, they would set a guard in his cell. Until then, Lupus and the turnkeys would keep a common watch on the block of death-wards from the end of the corridor. There were too many men and women waiting their turn on the gallows-trap for the warders to guard them individually before their date of execution was decided.

  He let out a sigh and blinked at the darkness above him. With the fatalism of a professional thief, he had always known that he would sometimes escape punishment for his crimes and sometimes be punished for those that were not his work. Informers, rivals, and policemen would see to that. This lottery of punishment was the nearest thing to justice in his life. Murder was different, however. The lottery had no right to mark him for death without an explanation.

  Three men watched the death-wards, two at a time. Lupus was the most vindictive. Jessup, the senior man, was stern but not unkind. At dawn on the first day, he had shown Rann how the mattress on the plank bed must be rolled and fastened with a strap after use, the two blankets folded squarely on top of it.

  'And I shan't show you twice, my lad,' Jessup had said. 'You do as you're told and we shall get along like Box and Cox.'

  Listening to the gruff kindness, Jack Rann had almost believed they would not hang him after all. He gave no trouble, not even to a brute like Lupus. Once he had asked a medical officer with whiskied breath what it would be like to die in such a manner.

  'Be a sensible fellow,' the doctor had said, 'and, if the time comes, you'll go sweet as a nut and never feel a hurt. There's nothing to the noose but a wry neck and a pair of wet breeches. A man will piss when he cannot whistle, as they say'

  Never feel a hurt. Pain was defined for him at seven years old, when the parish union apprenticed him as climbing-boy to a master-sweep. It was explained to him that in wider chimneys a boy must hold his position by elbows and knees. The harder his skin, the easier he would find it.

  In front of a hearth that shone white with heat, his master held the child, while the master's wife scoured the skin from his elbows and knees. The strongest brine that the pork-shop could provide was applied to the raw patches before holding them to the heat. Neither his master's promises of baby's sugar-cake nor the cane flourished by his master's wife would check the child's screams.

  Set to work next day, Jack Rann the climbing-boy came down with such blood running from the four sooty joints that the sweep's wife quite thought his kneecaps were hanging off. The dangerous state of his wounds convinced the couple that the amount of brine and the time before the fire had been too little. Rann remembered those weekly rituals as the heat of hell, the sweep growling, the harridan screeching, the child screaming. He thought he might rather be hanged than endure such torment again.

  He dismissed the past and thought again of the future. Tomorrow the watch would include Baptist Babb, the prisoner's friend. Rann had no time for 'uprighters' and 'white chokers', croaking of repentance and salvation. Baptist Babb would save his soul but not his neck. Still, with his quiet Scots voice, the freckled balding head, the heavy skull that caused forehead creases by its weight, Baptist Babb was a figure of interest. A weak link in the chain of retribution.

  He closed his eyes. There was a time after midnight when the great city around him fell silent. The last drunkard had gone shouting homeward and the first cries of the market-traders with the crash of their iron-rimmed wheels on the cobbles of Newgate Street and Snow Hill had not begun. That deep stillness lasted only a little while, but he heard it now.

  Silent as the tomb. The phrase described the great prison at that moment. Newgate was no ordinary gaol. Men and women were not brought here to be judged, only to feel pain or death. They came to be hanged or flogged, according to the pleasure of the court, at one time to be branded or maimed. Yet for that short hour of night, the cursing and the weeping, the anger and the pleading, fell quiet. The massive fortress of despair was briefly at peace.

  Jack Rann listened again. Somewhere close to him he heard a slow but regular drip of water on stone. It held his attention. He frowned and tried to calculate where the drops were falling. With hands still clasped behind his head, he measured the rhythm and counted two drops in every minute. They were falling in the yard outside, dripping from an iron cistern high in the angle of the wall. He was sure of it now. Handsome Jack closed his eyes as he tried to visualize it. Then he smiled at a new thought in the darkness, unfolded his hands, and went to sleep.

  2

  A hollow-cheeked medical officer examined him in his cell next morning. A pale snub-nosed young chaplain followed and talked
of Kingdom-Come. Fingering the white tie of his clerical dress, he avoided the prisoner's gaze, his eyes on the high heaven of frosted window-lights. The chaplain had many visits to make before noon and was anxious to be on his way. Jack Rann watched him and knew what the Home Secretary's clerk had decided.

  That afternoon, Jessup came in with Lupus and Babb behind him.

  'Prisoners' consulting-room, Rann! Look alive!'

  The chaplain had said nothing about a visit. In any case, the consulting-room was kept for interviews with a lawyer or a clergyman, unlike the breath-stained wire grille through which he might have spoken his last words to his family or friends. Jack Rann had no family. Nor would his friends have shown themselves in Newgate. But he had no priest, no lawyer except the compliant hack whose 'poor prisoner's defence' at the Old Bailey sessions had put him where he was now.

  He sat on the plank bed while Lupus locked iron shackles on his ankles and drew out a thin chain to connect these with the steel cuffs on his wrists.

  'Who'd want to see me now?' he murmured, as if to himself.

  'Workhouse missioner,' said Jessup briskly. 'Brought your little girl. One visit you get. This is it.'

  Rann concealed his curiosity. He had no little girl nor a woman who might have been the mother of one. His lust, when it became a trial to him, was soothed by the likes of Maggie Fashion from the Cornhill Mourning Emporium or Miss Jolly, dancer at the penny entertainments of Smithfield or Shoreditch.

  Jessup and Babb waited in the corridor, away from the odours of confinement in the cell. Lupus tightened the shackles on the prisoner's ankles until Rann gave a choked gasp of pain. Lupus looked up and grinned. He shook his head.

  'You ain't half a caution, 'andsome Jack,' he said amiably, tightening the shackles a little more.