The Road to Newgate

by Kate Braithwaite

  “Is that the Fenwick who was hanged with the other priests?”

  “Yes. He was tried with Whitbread and Ireland.”

  “And do you remember anything else about that visit with Godfrey?”

  “No. Should I?”

  I suppress my dislike of him. “Why did you visit him again?”

  “Because Titus had more evidence.”

  “Of the plot?”

  “Yes, of the plot.” Tonge looks at me wide-eyed. “Titus was in the hands of those murderous priests right up until the morning that we saw the Privy Council. I barely saw him through the month of September. We knew that his secret could be discovered at any time, but he had promised to find as much evidence as he could, and was risking his life for his country.”

  I rather think that he was spending his hours in the Fuller’s Rent Tavern sponging off Matthew Medbourne, but there is nothing to be gained by sharing that. “And how did Godfrey receive you that second time?”

  “Very rudely. He was most irritable.” Tonge knocks his teeth together, once, twice, three times, while he considers. “He didn’t ask any questions. Or offer refreshments. I was anxious myself. We had been called before the Council. Our revelations were to be shared with the King and his closest advisors. It was a momentous day.” Tonge’s voice trails away, and I suspect he is no longer seeing Godfrey’s face. Instead, he is remembering appearing before the King and his council, being given lodgings in Whitehall, finally being taken seriously. I doubt there is any point in asking anything further, but I do it anyway.

  “So, the visit was without incident?”

  “Not entirely,” says Tonge brightly. “Titus and Godfrey argued about how Godfrey tied up the papers. Titus was afraid the pages would become disordered. Godfrey lost his temper. He was blustering at Titus all the way to the door. When we saw who was walking down the street towards the house, though, we were all astonished. I remember it precisely.”

  “Someone on Godfrey’s street? Who was it?”

  “Edward Coleman.”

  I’m completely taken aback, and Tonge relishes the fact. “Yes! Can you imagine? What a trick of fate. Titus had just lodged his evidence against Edward Coleman, and there he was, large as life. I don’t think he saw us. He crossed the road and disappeared.”

  “And Titus? Or Godfrey? What did they have to say about Coleman?”

  “Godfrey disappeared back into the house without another word, but Titus? Titus was most disturbed. He believed that the Catholics were following him. He feared that they knew he was informing on them and would set their assassins on him. But by that evening, we were lodging in Whitehall and he was quite, quite safe.”

  The thought of Oates safe and snug in Whitehall is never one that has pleased me greatly.

  “So, do you see him much nowadays then? Titus?” I ask, as I prepare to leave.

  Tonge shakes his head. “Oh no,’ he says. ‘Never at all.” For a moment he looks off into the distance, as if to some brighter space beyond this room. “He is an important man, you know,” says Israel Tonge. “Titus is very busy. I’m very proud of him. Very proud.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  William

  In the weeks after Matthew’s death, Nat’s point of view finds a growing audience. A year or so ago, the air was so full of panic that no-one would listen. But the hysteria of the early months of Titus’s revelations has dissipated. The Observator sells well. Anne’s father writes to her, suggesting that the family may be coming round to her choice of husband. Titus still dines out on his stories and draws crowds when he preaches about the Catholic threat, but there is no doubt his influence diminishes.

  That only makes me more afraid. Any cornered animal will lash out, and I fear for my friend who every day attacks Oates. Nat will not drop this until Titus is disgraced, and the creature will fight that at every step. I want to kill him. I dream of lying in wait outside a tavern door and stabbing him in the neck and chest. But God knows, I am no hero.

  Three priests were hanged on the basis of my false evidence and a tide of prejudice that is only now abating. Matthew is dead. The damage is irreparable.

  Some things, once done, cannot be undone. This is the kind of talk I used to give the boys at school. Second chances are few and far between. Mistakes are made, but we must not let our mistakes define us. We move on. We repair what we can. These are maxims that I have rattled out for years. Now it is my turn to put my own homilies into practice.

  I visit Miles Prance. I know him; I know that he lied for Titus Oates and I understand why. I threaten him. I threaten, as I am sure Titus did, that I will tell his wife about his friends at the Fuller’s Rent Tavern. It is a side of Miles’s life that no wife could ever understand. He is not a bad man. He is only a weak man, like me. I promise that if he tells Nat the truth, we will make sure Titus is too far down the road to Newgate to retaliate. He can take his wife and leave London if he wants to, but he must come clean first. Thank God, the man has a conscience. In many ways, Miles is another of Titus’s victims. He will come to Sam’s Coffee Shop and tell his story to Nat.

  ***

  Miles arrives later than expected, and Nat is agitated. He has high hopes of this interview, but he’s also still angry about the lies Miles told the Privy Council. He has agreed to let me take the lead, but when Miles finally appears, Nat struggles to be civil. There are a few awkward moments. While the coffee boy fills three dishes, we sit in grim silence.

  “Mr. Thompson.” Miles’s voice comes strangled from his throat, and Nat sits back in his chair with his arms folded. “I would like to begin by making you an apology.” He wipes a pale hand across his forehead. “Last year, I was persuaded to take part in… to make a statement… to—”

  “To give false testimony that I was secretly a practising Roman Catholic. Yes, I do remember it.”

  Prance nods weakly. “And it was a false statement, for which—”

  “I hope you didn’t come here just to tell me that, Prance,” says Nat. “I was aware at the time that you were spitting out a stream of lies. I imagine you had a reason, but as William says, what is done is done. I’m still here, after all.”

  “I just wish to offer an apology.” Prance’s lower lip presses forward in the manner of a sulky child, although I told him to expect something like this.

  “What Miles has agreed to come here for,” I say, “is to tell us the truth about the Godfrey trial.”

  “You’re going to tell me that you perjured yourself?” says Nat.

  Prance bites down on his lip, “Yes.”

  “And you will sign a statement to that effect?” I say.

  Prance nods miserably, but Nat brightens like a sky cleared of clouds. “Then you are very welcome here, Mr. Prance,” he says. “And you may consider your apology to me accepted.”

  Prance almost buckles in relief. He has pale, sandy lashes, and when he swallows, thin freckled flesh quivers over his Adam’s apple like plucked chicken skin.

  “Take your time, Miles. Have some coffee.” I say. “Just tell Nat here what you told me. I’ll take notes. Nat, Miles has promised me he will answer any question you have.”

  He needs no encouragement. “When did it begin?” Nat says. “How did you become involved?”

  “I was arrested. One minute, I was arriving at work, the keys to my shop in my hand, the next I was being bundled along by three constables and thrown in a cell in Newgate.”

  Nat and I nod. We know what that feels like.

  “Did they tell you why?”

  “Eventually. They left me alone for three days. There was no window, no bed, just straw and shit to sleep on. You know about the noise there? And the smell?” He shakes himself a little and pushes the candle on the table to one side so that half of his face is in shadow. “At last I was taken to a different room. I was interrogated by Captain Richardson.” Prance’s throat trembles. “A girl, a neighbour’s daughter, had informed on me. She told the authorities that I was away from ho
me in the week that Godfrey was missing. I am a Roman Catholic. That was enough to make me a suspect.”

  “Were you away from home?”

  “Yes. I was miles away from London. Visiting my mother.”

  “Why would this girl inform on you?”

  “I had caught her stealing.”

  “Stealing what? And where?”

  Prance sits up straighter. “I’m a silversmith. A good one. I’ve made pieces for the Queen. When I made something, I liked to take it home to show it to my wife. The neighbour’s girl was forever in the house, gossiping about nothing. She would ask Hannah what I was working on and ask to try things on.” Prance’s nose wrinkles. “Hannah had a liking for her company. I let her try a bracelet one day. She tried to go home still wearing it. Oh, she played it all for a joke; Hannah took the whole thing as forgetfulness. But I knew. I had seen her look at the silver. I caught up with her the next day and told her I knew what she was. She informed on me for revenge.”

  It is a commonplace tale. In the madness wrought across the city by Titus Oates, it was not unusual for neighbour to turn on neighbour, if one was Catholic and the other not.

  “And Richardson? What did he ask?”

  “Very little. He asked me where I was, and I answered him as I’ve answered you. Then he talked. He told me that no-one would believe me. He told me that no-one would support my story. That I’d better start coming up with the truth about what had happened to Justice Godfrey or it would be worse for me than I could imagine. I didn’t even know who Godfrey was, but all the prisoners were talking of it. Anyone who was a Catholic was accused of the murder.”

  “But still,” says Nat, “you gave up Green, Berry, and Hill, to save yourself.”

  “No!” Prance looks horrified, but then a self-disgust that I recognise all to easily washes over his face. “At least, not then.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  Prance looks down at the table. “I was taken from my cell to be charged with secretly attending mass and cultivating Catholic clients. I was a silversmith to the Queen! And they used that against me. The courtroom was busy, even busier outside. I had spent days in the dark in Newgate, and then I was dragged out into sunlight, crowds. We were kept waiting for hours. I saw Titus Oates there, with another man I knew – not from London, but from my home. I thought it was a sign that I still had friends in the world. I begged them to help me and they promised to do all that they could.

  “But when I returned to Newgate, I was taken in front of Richardson again. He said a reliable witness had seen me with the body in Somerset House. I was not even in London! They said the body had been found at the Horseshoe Tavern by Primrose Hill, and that they had witnesses who would say I was a regular there.” Miles breaks off and drains his coffee cup.

  Nat lowers his voice. “Did they torture you?”

  “Little Ease,” Miles says. “Have you heard of it?”

  “No,” says Nat.

  “It’s a hole. Somewhere in Newgate. Somewhere underneath, down one of those stairways. It’s maybe ten feet high. Not wide enough to stretch your arms across. I could sit in it, but only with my knees buckled up to my chest like a snivelling schoolboy. The walls weep. They lowered me in and left me there, in the dark, for days.”

  “Did they feed you? Speak to you?”

  “Oh no.” Miles seems to find Nat’s questions amusing. He sounds slightly unhinged. “After a few days in there, I told Richardson everything he suggested was correct.”

  “Everything?” says Nat.

  “Yes. He explained what was required of me. Implicate Somerset House. Catholics. Make sure Godfrey was strangled, beaten, and stabbed, but make the stabbing later, some kind of afterthought. They would not bring me out of Little Ease until I was ready to tell them everything. That’s how I came to name Green, Berry, and Hill. I knew them. They were Catholics. They knew Somerset House, as I did.”

  “Why three of them, though?” Nat has his hands pressed against his temples.

  Miles laughs then, an ugly bitter squawk. “I thought if I named three of them then they might have more of a chance. Green wasn’t even Catholic. That should have helped him. I thought between the three of them, one would be able to prove they were somewhere else. I thought that between the three of them, my story had to fall down somewhere. But I don’t expect you to believe me.” Miles waves a limp hand across his face and fishes in his pocket for a handkerchief.

  “I don’t know if I believe you or not. Either way, those men are dead,” says Nat.

  There is an edge in my friend’s tone and disgust in his face. I will never be able to tell him the truth about my lie at the priests’ trial. Bile rises in my throat.

  “You have no idea,” says Prance, shaking his head. “No idea what it is like to be a Catholic these days. We are hated. Spat upon. Glared at. Ignored. People whisper behind our backs. Neighbours who once smiled and wave now turn their backs. My business has suffered. My wife is miserable. And we have done nothing.”

  Nat raises an eyebrow but doesn’t respond to this directly. “And was it true that you went to the King and retracted the whole story?” he asks.

  “It was,” says Miles. “But that just bought me another trip to Little Ease. It was so cold down there that I would have cut off my own fingers and toes to stop the pain.”

  I’m unable to look at either of them. None of us, not Nat, myself, or even my poor Matthew, suffered such privations in Newgate. Prance’s perjury can be understood. I cannot say the same of my own.

  I’m so lost in my own dismay and guilt that I almost miss Nat’s next question, yet it proves to be a masterstroke.

  “And why, how even, did they choose you to be their witness?” he asks.

  “It was Oates. He knew I could be manipulated. He promised to help me, and then did the opposite. Moor, too.”

  “Moor?”

  “Yes. Henry Moor. He was Godfrey’s manservant. He’s the man I knew that was talking to Titus at the courtroom that day. They were looking for someone to frame the story the way they wanted it, and there I was. A gift.”

  Nat smacks his hand on the table.

  “Moor,” he declares. “I have Kineally looking for him already, but he has found no trace. Come on, man!” He reaches across the table and shakes Miles’s shoulder. “You say you know him from your home? Well, where is that, damn it? He may be the answer to the whole riddle!”

  “Ely,” says Miles. “That is where you will find him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Nat

  The evening before I leave London to track down Moor, Henry and I spend a quiet hour in Sam’s Coffee House.

  “Like old times,” I say.

  Henry shakes his head. “We cannot live in the past, Nathaniel. You are a better, stronger man since you met Anne. She has been good for you.”

  “You did not always think so.”

  He shrugs and throws me a half-smile. “What do I know of marriage?”

  “You will make sure she is safe while I am away?”

  “Of course. Our man will continue to follow her and watch the house. I will see her in the print shop, and if William does not walk her home, then you know I will.”

  I try for a little levity. “One could argue, you know, that she has also made a better man out of you. Every day, a woman in and out of your shop. I would not have imagined it. Wasn’t there a Henry Broome I once knew who thought a woman in the workplace would be far too distracting? But I suppose she is helpful with feeding the boys.”

  He shoots me a wry look, but then he changes the subject. “What about this link between Godfrey and Edward Coleman? Have you thought any more on that?”

  ***

  Later, at home with Anne, I tell her she has turned Henry from a confirmed misogynist into an ardent admirer.

  “He is like family to me,” she says.

  Family.

  We do not talk of Martha every day, but the loss is always with us. I kiss her hair on the pi
llow next to me. Hopefully, we will have another chance to be a family, although the thought of going through such pain a second time is dreadful. I let my hand run down her body and rest on her stomach.

  “Soon,” she whispers. “Soon, God willing.”

  Again, I kiss her hair and the smell of her diverts my thoughts.

  “Amen to that,” I say.

  ***

  In the morning, she kisses me farewell on our doorstep, and I am pleased to see Henry’s man stationed at the corner, covertly watching the house. William has come to walk me to the coach house, and later he will return and accompany Anne to Henry’s shop.

  He is tense this morning. It’s in the way he walks, in the way he keeps cracking his fingers, in those long, tired sighs of his.

  “Travel safely,” William says, gripping my shoulder so tightly that I wince.

  It saddens me to see how he is changed. Bringing Miles Prance to me, getting him to sign a confession to perjury in the trial of Green, Berry, and Hill, giving me this path to finding Henry Moor and perhaps the truth finally about the death of Sir Edmund Godfrey; none of this progress has helped William. The death of Matthew Medbourne has affected him far more deeply than I imagined. Instead of working his way through his grief, my friend is becoming lost in it.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, climbing into the stagecoach. “I’ll find Moor and see what he has to say for himself. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  But William surprises me by mounting the coach rail and hissing at me. “You must do more than see what he’s up to!”

  “Rest assured, William, that I will do what I—”

  “You must do what it whatever it takes, Nat. Whatever it takes. Choke the truth from him, if you must!”

  What is this? Choke the truth? William is a far more bitter man than he was before Oates took his job and his friend from him. I have not asked him how he persuaded Miles Prance to tell me the truth. But I imagine much unpleasantness.

  “I will do what needs to be done, I swear,” I say. “We nearly have him. It is nearly over.”