The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  At the tall dock gates, off the commercial length of the Ratcliff Highway, a solitary figure sat on a bench by the high wall, a woman in shabby black. The new cooking-tins at her feet marked her as a pauper emigrant preparing for her voyage. The high wooden gates were bolted back against the walls. From the yard came a subdued murmur of many voices. Verity stood in the gateway, feet astride, one hand in the other behind his back, the stance of an officer on duty, scowling a little as he waited for Samson.

  He had done duty at the hiring-yard a dozen times during his surveillance with 'H' Division. The high-walled space divided the steamer berths from a street of tall brick repositories and the attic workrooms of weavers or cabinet-makers. By half-past seven the yard was packed by 2,000 men. Most came from the unpaved alleys of Wapping and Shadwell, the tenement-courts or lodging-houses of Shoreditch and Whitechapel, some from the hovels under river bridges or embankment arches. As they pressed forward to the row of bookmaker-stands, where the 'calling-foremen' were ranged, the very number of faces made it impossible to pick one from another. Still the Private-Clothes Detail made regular visits at the morning call. The yard was a common refuge for thieves and fugitives, even for men who had killed by accident or intent. It was one of few places where a man could get work without a character or a recommendation.

  The first men through the gate were close under the stands where day-labourers might be hired for eightpence or a shilling. The foremen opened their books and began to call names. Verity watched the scuffling and scrambling, the stretching of countless hands high in the air, to catch the caller's eye. Now and then a foreman would look up from his list towards the hungry strugglers and give one of them a nod. The man would break away and join the file of those collecting passes for a day's work.

  As the number of waiting men dwindled, the names were called more slowly, no longer from the books. Men who were left jumped up on the backs of others, lifting themselves above the rest to attract notice. The shouting grew more intense as the chance of work ebbed. The shouts reached the level of a scream. Some called the foremen by surnames or Christian names. Others shouted their own names. Their eyes protruded grotesquely in the fury of their need to work.

  After ten minutes the calling had stopped. The foremen had news of another ship that might need a gang of hands, if favourable wind and tide brought it to a berth. A few minutes later, they closed their books and stepped down. The gangs were complete. Several hundred men must wait until the following morning for their chance to work, eat, and feed such families as they had.

  Verity turned away from a sight he never witnessed without despair on behalf of those who were left.

  'Poor devils,' said Sergeant Samson close behind him now.

  Before Verity could reply, an obscure struggle began in a far corner. One of the foremen was carried off his feet by a rush of labourers whose names had not been called. A group of stalwart onlookers moved towards the skirmish. There was shouting, the foreman stepped free of the melee, the labourers drew back. As Verity and Samson approached, a large smiling man met them.

  'What's the trouble, then, Mr Bragg?'

  Bully Bragg drew the curve of a thumb down the side of his face, as if in a humorous confidence. He swaggered a little, from the width of his hips and the shortness of his legs. With dark hair piled absurdly on his head, he looked like an overweight dandy of a century past, dressed in the suiting of a sporting gentleman. He grinned at them.

  'Trouble? Bit of pushing, Mr Verity. No trouble. Men keen to work. Nothing for 'em just yet, but p'raps later. Dutchman waiting off Gravesend last night for a berth. Some'll get a late shift, if it comes up on this tide. Not that it's to do with me. Bystander, same as your good self.'

  Samson had walked round the far side of the group.

  'Who got hit?'

  There was silence.

  Bragg turned back to Verity, plump hands outspread, the pale softness of his face creased in pure amiability.

  'Bit of harmless pushing, Mr Verity. Little bit of impatience. 'Cos, in reason, men want to work.'

  Verity led Samson away.

  'It ain't the tobacco smuggling that riles me most, Mr Samson, it's the way these poor creatures are treated. Assault on the finances of the Treasury, Mr Croaker says the smuggling is! Not much of the finances of the Treasury bloody come this way! As for Bragg

  'Mr Bragg got nothing to do with the 'iring,' Samson said firmly, 'just 'appened to be here, same as you and me. Don't try it on, my son. It won't work.'

  Verity scowled at him.

  'There's a lot of things I mean to try on, Mr Samson. Such as having a quiet word with Orator Hawkins. He never went to see Jack Rann in Newgate for his 'ealth!'

  Samson groaned as they walked towards the waiting-shed, a wooden hoarding with a narrow sloping roof, running down one wall of the yard. Open to the weather along its side, it was wide enough to provide shelter overhead for a double row of wooden benches, back to back. Men not called by the foremen might wait out the day in the hope of another gang being required, its hands paid fourpence for a late shift.

  "ello, Sloppy Dick,' said Samson cheerily. 'What you been doin' to yourself, then?'

  The young man looked up, a round childish face on a muscular body. He was holding a bloodstained rag to his nose and there was the first colouring of a bruise on his cheekbone.

  'Nothin', Mr Samson,' he said reasonably. 'Bit of a tumble. On'y in fun.'

  'Well,' said Samson understandingly, 'if you was just to tell us all about this fun, p'raps it wouldn't happen again.'

  The young man looked hard at him, as if he had not quite understood. Then his face cleared.

  'Oh, no, Mr Samson! No! Quite definite! Nothing to say! A tumble's nothing. Not as bad as never having me name called again. I mind meself, Mr Samson, and do as told. I can't afford otherwise.'

  "Course you can't,' said Samson encouragingly, 'but you might be treated more respectful if you was to tell—'

  There was a rush past the two sergeants. At the opposite corner of the yard, a foreman had appeared to call an extra gang for the ship that had been off Gravesend. In the distance, the same fight for work began, the same jumping on backs, the same urgent thrusting of arms high above the crowd. This time Sloppy Dick was walking to the wharfinger's gate for his pass to work.

  'Even Sloppy Dick,' Samson said. 'He'll take a noser and a black eye from Bully's men and thank them, rather than he'll say a word against 'em. And if he's told to slip a satchel of tobacco in his shirt, he'll start his nose bleeding again in his hurry to do as asked. And you still fancy Hawkins telling you how to get the noose off Rann and round Bragg instead? You ain't half got some imagination, my son.'

  His duty completed, Verity wished Samson a good morning and walked back the way he had come. Along the wharves from Shadwell to London Bridge the air was first pungent with the vast stores of tobacco, then sickly with fumes of rum. Worse was the stench of hides and the huge bins of horn. Then the day was fragrant with coffee and spice. He picked his way among sacks of cork, yellow bins of sulphur and lead-coloured copper ore. A warehouse floor seemed freshly tarred, where sugar had leaked through great tiers of casks.

  He thought of the Orator. Hawkins cared nothing for Scotland Yard, but he could be made to live in terror of Bully Bragg. Let Bragg believe that his Orator had turned coppers' nark. Mr Bragg had a way with a knife, and Hawkins knew it.

  Thanks to Baptist Babb, Verity knew enough of the Newgate conversation between Hawkins and Rann. Suppose he promised Hawkins to repeat it word-for-word to Bragg, confiding to the Bragg that every helpful word came from Hawkins himself, in exchange for payments from the police informants' fund. Hawkins might yet know fear of a kind unique to Bragg's victims.

  'And that's how we shall have a lever under you, sir,' Verity said to the imagined Orator, loudly enough for several passers-by to turn and stare.

  By sunlit water, he eased his way among men whose faces were blue from carrying indigo, and Customs gaugers
whose long brass-tipped rules dripped with spirit from the casks they had just probed. A group of fair-haired sailors, chattering German, stopped to watch him pass. A black seaman, red-cotton handkerchief twisted turban-like round his head, shouted a greeting. A broad, straw-hatted mate stopped him, offering green parakeets in a wooden cage. With measured stride, Verity passed the steam-wharf moorings, the fancy paintwork of paddle-boxes on the packet-boats for Belfast and Cork, Leith and Glasgow.

  'Brothers, sisters, father, mother, never been a better friend to you than I mean to be, Mr Hawkins,' said Verity to his imagined victim. 'Only say the word, and I'm the man to save you being carved in your own juice, fine as a Michaelmas goose for Mr Bragg's table.'

  Over London Bridge, covered drays with carcasses or barrels of fish rumbled to Smithfield and Billingsgate. Blue-smocked butchers bore trays of meat or cabbages on their shoulders, among street-sellers of pea-soup and hot eels, ginger-beer and Chelsea buns. In the recesses above the stone piers, the destitute had passed the summer night, huddled in formless bundles. They watched the traffic listlessly, staring at a world of which they had no part.

  8

  London Bridge was the first barrier to sea-going ships. Upstream, the river was busy with barges carrying coal, flour, or casks of beer. Their masts and sails were lowered as the oars carried them under the spans of Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, and Westminster. Penny-steamers churned the sparkling water, thin stacks trailing banners of smoke. Pontoons and posts in mid-stream marked the progress of the new bridge carrying the Charing Cross Railway to the north bank.

  Verity paused, scowling, by the pillared brick of the Red Lion Brewery. The ebb tide had uncovered a litter-strewn foreshore at King's Head Stairs. Its stone steps, at which watermen landed passengers from Temple Gardens, were deserted in the morning quiet.

  A group of mudlarks scavenged among the small craft lopsided on the sludge. Their ragged clothes shone with the river's slime, so wet that the garments clung smooth as skin under the black ooze. A few wore dustmen's caps with flaps at the nape. Others had their hair in wet tufts, like black imps of damnation in the Illustrated Family Bible of his childhood. Stooping and pausing, they sifted for scraps of coal, iron, rope and bone. Copper nails which fell from vessels berthed or repaired along the shore were the most valuable item.

  Several lighters lay moored to posts just beyond low-water, among them a deep, iron coal-barge. A wooden cabin built into its stern accommodated the crew. The barge rode high and empty, brown sail furled, its stern swinging heavily in the current. There were hundreds of these vessels, supervised by police boats and excise cutters. They acted as tenders to steamers or gaunt black colliers anchored down-river, bringing cargo cheaply to the heart of Westminster and Southwark.

  Only the master or watchman would be on board until the tide lifted the hull. At low water, it lay twenty feet from the tideline, where the mudlarks on the sleek brown flanks of river soil and in rivulets of sewage sifted the debris of kitchens and factories, slaughterhouses and gas-works.

  Concealed by the corner of a wall, Verity watched the developing drama. The older scavengers had taken to the water, forming a chain several feet apart, from the water's edge to the barge. A tall youth of fifteen or sixteen was chest-deep in the river under the lee of the vessel's side. The lighterman, asleep in his cabin at the stern, had no idea that they were there.

  A figure appeared from the iron hold of the barge, jumping up on the broad gunwale, moving deftly as an acrobat along it. Unlike the muddied imps, she had been rinsed clean by swimming round the far side and climbing up the mooring rope. Her dark hair, drawn back on either side of her forehead, lay in a well-soused tangle on her back. Yet the insolent sun-tanned profile, the sullen mouth and the agile limbs against which her tattered wet dress was plastered were unmistakable.

  Verity had last seen her at the close of petty sessions, the committal of offenders to the Tothill Fields House of Correction in Westminster. Baptist Babb had since identified her, masquerading as Jack Rann's 'Little Girl' in the prisoners' consulting-room of Newgate Gaol.

  'Why, Miss Suzanne!' said Verity softly. 'Though you don't know it yet, you and me shall stitch Mr Hawkins neat as Honiton lace!'

  The robbery of the barge was carried out with quiet professionalism. Lambeth Sue stood on the gunwale above the youth who was chest-deep in the river. She dropped a cloth bundle. He caught it, felt it, then tossed it to the next member of the chain several feet behind him. The bundle sailed and bobbed through the air, hand to hand, until it reached a growing pile of booty on the shore.

  Suzanne vanished, then reappeared, swaying nimbly along the high black side of the iron vessel. A paper package fell into the hands of the youth below. Next a small box, then a tin. Verity's eyes widened at the outrage. This was no scene of innocent mudlarks hungrily scavenging for a few scraps of coal or wood to warm their chilled bodies; these were experienced young thieves, looting the living-quarters of the barge, while its guardian slept.

  He was outnumbered by seven or eight to one. But the heroine of the robbery would be his lever under Bully Bragg. Once she took to the water, it was the easiest thing in the world to cut off her escape.

  At last there was a roar of fury from the barge. Suzanne scrambled on to the gunwale, teetering along its ledge, followed by a burly man in shirt and breeches. Some of his words were lost in the distance and tumult, but a shout of 'Thieving slut!' came clearly to shore. From his hand swung a doubled length of thin rope with which he thrashed the air behind the fugitive, never quite near enough to catch her.

  Though she was nimbler, the lighterman walked the gunwale as easily as the pavement of a street. She leant forward to dive. With a shout of frustration, he swung the rope at her backside. There was a cry and a floundering splash on the far side of the hull. The human chain plunged towards the shore, Suzanne dog-paddling in the rear. The lighterman shouted from the bows to anyone who might hear, as the thieves snatched up their loot from the tideline and ran for the stone stairs.

  She would be the last up the King's Head Stairs by ten or twenty yards, easily intercepted as the rest fled. They came in a rush, panting and laughing. Scattering down College Street, they were lost in the commercial bustle of Belvedere Road. Suzanne trailed well behind. Verity waited, hidden from her as she came under the stone quay and began to climb the steps. When she reached the top, he took her arm from behind and felt her start with shock.

  'A word with you, miss!' he said magisterially.

  She went limp in his grasp, winded and defeated. Alone among the thieves, she was carrying nothing.

  'You needn't be handcuffed, so long as you act sensible,' he said reassuringly. 'You ain't got nowhere to run from here.'

  She responded with a whimper of submission and despair.

  'I'm so 'ungry!' she sobbed.

  'Well,' he said encouragingly, 'if you was to be an evidence against the rest, you might have nothing to answer for.'

  She looked up into his face, wanting to believe in his goodness and his promise. She even drew a little closer as if to confide in him, and then spat with great accuracy into his eye. Half-blinded for an instant, he felt her bony knee come up sharply between his legs.

  'Stinking jack!'

  Then, as she twisted away, there was a rending of cheap cotton. Verity, wiping his eye, held nothing but a wet and slimy rag that had been the sleeve and shoulder of her ragged dress.

  He sprang after her. His hat had gone in the struggle, rolling on the edge of the stone stairs. He would find it later. Like many fugitives, Lambeth Sue underestimated his speed. He cornered her at a riverside wall of the Military Stores. In a pantomime dance, she made to dive past, first on one side, then on the other. Verity stepped left, guessing she would run for the alley on his right.

  She did as he expected. The alley was formed by five storeys of the Red Lion Brewery facing a high wall that protected the unfinished railway bridge. At the top of the brewery wall was a wooden hoist with
iron chains dangling from it. This was a side route into Belvedere Road. But it was the dinner hour and there were no drays entering or leaving the brewery yard. Plate-iron gates had been locked across the alley, turning it into a cul-de-sac. His fugitive was trapped.

  For all her nimbleness, she was winded, hovering with the brick wall behind her, dodging from side to side. In a last trick of her trade, she bolted at him on one side, swerving at the last moment to the other. As she swerved she lost her footing and fell with Verity on top of her.

  That's enough!' he said furiously. 'Ain't you got more sense?'

  A fist hit him on the eyebrow. She panted, clutching at his hair, gathering spittle. He had one arm pinned, her other waving free. He snapped a metal cuff on the captive wrist. Then, to his dismay, the fugitive began to scream. He gripped the arm that was still flailing.

  'Dirty brute!' said a deep voice behind him.

  He did not dare to take his eyes off the captive.

  'Police officer,' he said breathlessly to whoever was standing over him. 'And if I should require your assistance, you'll be legally obliged to render same.'

  'Dirty brute!' said the voice again. Someone scuffed a boot on the ground beside him but he snapped the second cuff on his captive's other wrist and got to his feet.

  A large man in red plush waistcoat and knee breeches, his legs the size of balustrade pillars, stood behind him, feet planted astride and arms folded. A thin companion in a high battered hat was leaning against the brick wall, picking his teeth with a straw. The man in the waistcoat gestured at the kneeling girl.

  'Get those darbies off her, you poxy jack!'

  'You keep out of what don't concern you,' said Verity grimly, 'else there'll be another pair for you.'

  But he was the one now trapped in the alley. With a chill at his heart, he knew there was only one way out.

  'Right!' he said, facing the pair of them, 'oo's first?'

  The man with the straw straightened up from the wall, as if suddenly interested in the exchange. The large man in the waistcoat came forward, fencing for a grip. Verity side-stepped, caught his antagonist's right arm in a lock and spun the man by his own momentum. The large man hit the brick wall with a bellowing gasp. But he straightened up and came back, no more troubled than by falling on a feather mattress. His shoulders were hunched, fists moving. Verity clamped his teeth hard, knowing that a loose jaw more easily becomes a broken jaw.