The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  By seven o'clock Tom and Lady was cosily settled in a nook in the brick wall with a straight view of the proceedings. The jokes and laughter of the crowd filled the air and the throng heaved and swayed and pushed, a dense sea of people far as the eye could stretch. Beyond Tom a man made a wild grab at a drainpipe and tried with all his strength to pull himself up on to a narrow ledge above the crowd but the shopkeeper whose ledge it was had a grip on his legs and had no intention of letting him loose. The crowd was straight away all attention and from all sides there issued shouts of encouragement so ferocious and intent you might've taken them for the Fancy at the pit. The thought made Tom laugh out loud. Above him the windows of the shops began to fill up with people. A fat tailor and his wife sat side by side in the room above the hatters, sipping complacently at cups of tea.

  Meantime a party of traps paced about at the barrier, their faces so blank you'd've thought they were perfectly deaf to the hail of coarse remarks that rained down on them from the pert coster-boys and girls at the front of the crowd. The mob'd grown so dense by this time it was hard to stay on your feet. Tom sharpened his elbows so as they didn't jostle Lady curled up in his arms. He shouldn't've brought her, really, she'd be crushed beneath the crowd's feet in an instant if he set her down, but it seemed only right she be here too. She'd a right to watch him swing as much as anyone and a deal more than most. There wasn't twenty of them gathered here this morning who'd've known the Captain if he came up and shook them by the hand. Lady, now, she'd know him all too well. There was a fresh wound beneath her left shoulder, a ragged curve, dark and livid against her pink skin. He'd bathed it with peppermint water but it still had an angry look about it he didn't like. If the truth were to be admitted, it were that that brought him here as much as anything. Whenever he looked at that wound, or for some reason it came into his head, it gave him a sour boiling ache in his belly. The bastard couldn't just steal her, oh no. He had to try and break her too. If he'd ruined her for the fight —

  He felt the twitch of her ear against his lips as she raised her head to lick his chin. He'd have her back. She'd be one of them dogs immortalized forever in a glass box, held up to all and sundry as one of the greats. For now though it was just the two of them, there to witness the bastard Captain's walk into Eternity. He'd grown soft, he told himself, tightening his arms around her, and despite himself he smiled. Long Arm Tom, older than the hills and soft as butter.

  Once the sheriff's carriages had passed by the time slipped quickly away. As the quarters sounded the crowd began to grow more eager but at the same time quieter, craning and stretching for a view of anything that might indicate the prisoner was on his way. A ladder was brought out and taken in through a side door. Those who had the room raised their arms and pointed and then had the struggle of trying to place them back by their sides. A sole workman put the finishing touches to a beam and was cheered and heckled by the crowd. Above the heaving sea of people windows were slid open and people sprawled out over slates and ledges, all excitement and anticipation.

  And then, at last, the clock began to sound out the hour. Immediately, as though the chimes were a steamer driving its great wheel through the sea of people, the crowd began to bob and sway and a terrible feverish shrieking began to build among the mob. Tom strained his neck. At first there was no movement on the platform. The black scaffold of the gallows huddled all alone on its stand, its back turned on the clamour. It put Tom in mind of a beaten child who dreads himself seen. And then the black prison door opened and a head emerged. The crowd gasped, thousands of mouths breathing in all together. It was as though, along with the breath, they'd sucked in all the noises of the street, so there was almost total silence. The head rose up, and showed itself as the head of William Calcraft, the Newgate executioner. Behind him came the Captain.

  His black suit looked new and the bandage around his neck had the crisp white shine of a gentleman's stock. His wrists were tied in front of him but still he walked as though he swung them by his sides, with the hint of a swagger. He looked out over the crowd, his eyes dazed and screwed up against the brightness of the morning. A few of the coster-boys called out to him but mostly the crowd was quiet, their mouths open. They stared as the prisoner raised his arms together in a gesture Tom couldn't quite make out. There was a murmur through the sea of people then, like a wave. Those near the back craned their necks for a better look. Then the man who followed the Captain pushed the prisoner forward so that he stood directly beneath the beam. Calcraft drew a black cloth from his pocket and pulled it tightly over the prisoner's head and face. There was no pity or softening in the raised faces of the crowd. Instead they rose themselves on to the tips of their toes, their open mouths red and wet, and the sinews in their necks stood out like ropes. It was impossible to hear the words the clergyman mouthed but you couldn't miss seeing how his greedy eyes didn't fit with the solemn set of his mouth. Then the plank was pulled away and Hawke fell. From his elevated spot, Tom saw the executioner's hands reach up from beneath the platform to grip the Captain's ankles and pull them down with a hard tug. The body twitched and bounced and then, heavy as a sack, hung perfectly still.

  The man was dead.

  For a moment the crowd was silent and then the roar filled the place, so loud and jubilant that the very bricks of Newgate seemed to shake in their cold mortar. Tom didn't cheer. But he held Lady's face against his, inhaling her warm blanket smell. He hadn't stopped to take breakfast but all of a sudden his stomach, which had been taken up with complaining to him for an hour or more, no longer felt empty. Instead he felt warm and satisfied, as though he'd eaten a loaf of bread straight out the oven. There'd be many a poor man who'd be happy to know the smell of a dog could fill a hungry stomach, he thought dryly to himself. He was glad Joe wasn't here to see his face. All these years and soft as a girl. Joe'd laugh at that fit to bust and Tom'd never hear the end of it.

  The hangman was joshing around with the dead body now, pretending to shake its hand. The crowd cheered. Tom smiled, burying his face in Lady's coat. It was time he took her home.

  XXXVIII

  Two days later William and Polly left London.

  They took a little money with them. Although some of the Board had questioned its necessity, Lovick had succeeded in securing for William a small settlement that might allow sufficient funds to provide for his family's immediate requirements for the duration of a brief convalescence. It was never suggested that he might once again take up his position with the Board. Indeed, the letter that accompanied the details of the pension made it clear that this act of generosity was to serve not as an indication of a continuing relationship between May and the Commission but instead as a conclusion, the final curtain, as it were, coming down once and for all and with as little fuss as possible upon the entire unhappy episode. Hawke had quickly been replaced and a team of first-rate men assigned to his successor. Despite the scandal, the Commission continued to have the vigorous support of Parliament and of the people of London. Their work would continue without delay. And without William.

  Polly did not attempt to conceal her indignation. The frown lines that had begun to etch themselves into her sallow cheeks darkened and deepened. William had done nothing wrong, she insisted to anyone who might listen. Hadn't the law itself said so? William had been no less a victim of Hawke's wickedness than England himself and, like England, he deserved not punishment but retribution. Thanks to the evil schemings of that monster her husband had been declared insane and locked up. She, who had once had a house and a servant, who had been a respectable woman of some position, had been reduced to a single room in a lodging house where she might take in what sewing she could simply to put food in her children's mouths. At the very least there should be a public apology, an acknowledgement of the terrible wrongs done to William, to them both, and the permission to resume his old position, his old life. Should there not? She wrote in a furious scrawl to Rawlinson, William's old benefactor, but received only a brief reply fro
m his secretary, sending the engineer's best wishes to her husband for a prompt recovery and informing her politely that Rawlinson had the utmost respect for Bazalgette and the Metropolitan Board of Works and that he wished her to know that he supported entirely any conclusions they saw fit to arrive at in this matter.

  When Polly received Rawlinson's letter she slapped at it angrily with the back of her hand, brandishing it at William and demanding he share her outrage, but he only shrugged anxiously and held out his arms. He held her a great deal in the weeks following his release, clutching at her hands whenever she passed him and burying his face in her apron. When she moved about their room his eyes followed her restlessly. He could not bear to be left alone. The landlady permitted use of her kitchen by her lodgers on Sundays and he liked to sit there with her, in a rocking chair pulled up close to the range. He liked it best when she baked bread, even though the baker called daily and there was no need of it. He sat in his chair, his eyes fixed upon his wife and his head full of the smell of it. He could not get enough of it, he admitted to her, the hot floury vigorous aroma of baking bread. He didn't tell her that when the bread was baking there was a respite from the stink of the prison, a stink that seemed to have taken up occupancy in his nostrils and which at night swelled in grey-green clouds of fog to take on monstrous forms that stalked his dreams. Instead he sat in his chair and played like Di with fragments of Polly's dough, twisting and pulling at them so frantically that they turned grey and remained resolutely flat when baked. He looked so solemn and despondent when they came out from the oven that Polly's stern face relented and she laughed, not in giddy peals as she had once laughed but in tight little snorts, as though she had little laughter left in her and wished to eke it out. Then William smiled too. Since leaving the prison-ship he smiled often, twitchy tentative smiles that clutched greedily at their faint reflection in his wife's face. My little milkwort, he murmured longingly, clasping her hands in his and breathing in her sweet musky smell. My most precious milkwort. And she brushed her dry lips across his forehead and for a moment the frown lines eased a little and in her caramel eyes something of the old golden sparkle caught the light.

  He did not cut. He did not dare. He dreamed of it, his fingers closing around the familiar shape of the handle, the silvery flash of the blade as it plunged into his skin, and he felt his heart explode and his blood sing with ecstasy and his spirit cry out in exultation to the sky, but still he did not do it. His eyes followed her around the room, watching the tilt of her shoulders as she crouched to poke the fire, her fingers as they drove the needle in and out of the cloth. He smiled at her, his cautious desperate smiles, and she saw him and she smiled back. If he cut himself she would see. She would look at him with those eyes and she would not smile and his heart would shrivel and his blood would run cold and his spirit would be broken, naked and in chains. Nothing would be left when she was gone, nothing but the dark cold press of fear. He could not cut. He would not cut. He was sane, wasn't he? They had, after all, pronounced him sane. Sane and innocent. The words were as solid and authoritative as stones. They could not be denied. Fears and dreams might prowl in their shadows but fears and dreams were powerless to change the immutable nature of stones. In the meantime, if he moved little and thought less, he could concentrate on holding the bowl of himself almost steady in his lap.

  The day after Hawke was hanged Polly's brother Maurice arrived at their lodgings as arranged. He had a little business he was obliged to conduct in a village only a few miles from Lambeth and so it was agreed that it would save an expense if he brought his empty wagon to transport what few possessions of Polly and William's remained to his house, where the family would stay until their future was decided. Polly went down to the street to meet him, leaving William fretfully watching her from the window. As she greeted her brother the mail coach clattered down the street and a parcel was placed in her hands. She glanced at it and then up to the window. William smiled anxiously back, willing her to hurry. She disappeared from view. A moment later he heard her tread on the stairs, followed by the heavier step of her brother.

  A package for you,' she announced, placing it in her husband's hands.

  William glanced at it. He did not recognize the handwriting. His fingers were clumsy with the string and Polly was obliged to fetch a knife for him, covering the small cupboard with her skirts so that Maurice might not see that she kept the cabinet locked. She was no longer certain it was a necessary precaution but she did it anyway. If William noticed he passed no comment.

  'Here,' she said. He held out his hand for the knife but instead she kneeled in front of him and cut through the string herself, slipping the blade into a pocket in her apron. William unwrapped the paper. The package contained a leather notebook and a short letter, written in black ink in a cramped hand that seemed unwilling to stand upright but at the same time unable to decide whether to slope to the left or to the right. Polly took up the paper.

  'It's from that lawyer,' she said. 'Sydney Rose. It's your botany journal. Now why did you give him that? What earthly use could it've been to him?'

  William shook his head. He had no recollection of giving Rose his journal. It had been months since he remembered last holding it. He weighed the notebook in his hands. Its leather cover, though badly stained, still felt soft and warm to the touch. As Polly directed Maurice towards their meagre heap of boxes she dropped the letter back on his lap. It was very brief.

  Mr May,

  By the time you receive this you will, I am quite sure, be enjoying life once more as a free man. To this day I can hardly trust my own memory of the extraordinary series of events that led to your exoneration. I can only imagine you will thank God for them for the remainder of your life.

  Your obedient servant, &c.

  Sydney Rose

  It was the first time William had heard from Rose since his release. He'd half expected him to be there when they finally let him out of Woolwich. Even now he found it difficult to connect the hand pushed clumsily through the iron slot of the cell door with this compressed and stilted missive. It made him uneasy, though he couldn't have said precisely why. Putting the letter to one side he opened the notebook and flicked through the pages. Polly saw him frown.

  'What's the matter?'

  'The most recent pages, they've all been torn out,' William protested. 'Why would someone do such a thing? All my work, everything I was considering, it was all there. Now it's gone, forever.'

  Polly peered over his head, resting one hand on his shoulder. He clasped it in both of his, pressing it to his lips.

  'Your beautiful botany drawings,' she sighed into his hair. 'Poor love. That's a crime.'

  'Botany? That's flowers, ain't it?' Maurice asked curiously.

  William nodded.

  'So you's a bit of a gardener, then?'

  William shrugged, closing the book.

  'A bit.'

  Maurice turned to Polly.

  'Why didn't you say so, you foolish girl? There's always gardeners needed up the Hall, blokes who know one end of a rose from another.' He turned back to William. 'Her Ladyship's mad keen for it. She's got a hothouse makes the Crystal Palace itself look like a cucumber frame. All the colours of the rainbow her garden is, come June time.'

  'Maurice!' Polly rebuked stiffly. 'William's hardly interested in being a common gardener. He has a profession.'

  Maurice shrugged.

  'Well, all's I'm saying is, you won't want for work down our way if you can turn your hand to a spot of — what is it you call it? — botanizing.'

  'For the love of peace —' Polly snapped.

  She crossed her arms, shaking her head angrily at her brother, but William smiled. He did not notice that Polly frowned at him too, provoked by his silence. He looked at his lap and he smiled. The smile came from somewhere deep inside him and it pressed upwards through the dark winter earth of his chest with the pale determination of a snowdrop. Tinged with green, like seasickness, and fragile as paper.
Galanthus nivalis. The first bloom of spring.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  It was not until I returned to London after four years living in New York City that I realised how much I had missed the sprawling unruly profusion of the city in which I had been born and raised. I also understood, after years of discovering the secrets of another place, how little I knew of London's history, of the stories behind its familiar streets. I had always wanted to write a historical novel and it did not take long to decide that I should focus my research on mid-nineteenth-century London, a time of unshakeable faith in progress, when building was at its apogee and the city was the largest of its kind in the world.

  At first I thought I would find my story amidst the railways, whose pitiless march into the heart of the city displaced so many lives and was to have so profound an effect upon the structure and appearance of the modern city. But the more I read about the railways the more distracted I became by quite another monumental construction, at least as remarkable. In 1860 the price of bricks in London doubled. In large part this was due to the building of structures, such as bridges and stations, required by the railway system, and the cheap back-to-back housing thrown up to accommodate those whom the railways had displaced. But mostly it was because, beneath the pavements of London, another, perhaps even more audacious building project was progressing. An entire network of sewers was under construction, over eighty miles of tunnel that, thanks to the ingenious designs of Joseph Bazalgette, would transform London's drainage system into one of the engineering wonders of the world.

  During the 1830s nearly half of the infants born in English towns died before their fifth birthday. In London, by 1850 a city of two million souls, the statistics were worse still. Epidemics of diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid, and the recently imported cholera swept regularly through the capital. Much of the city's drinking water was taken from the Thames, into which the city's waste was also dumped, turning the river into a huge open sewer. The Victorians believed that disease was spread through 'miasma' in the air, the presence of poisonous droplets evidenced by appalling stench. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Parliament regarded the overpowering reek of the river during the hot, dry summer of 1858 as truly a matter of life and death. Within eighteen days of its first reading they passed the Act to allow Bazalgette's comprehensive works to begin.