Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal

by Francis Selwyn

  In an hour or so more he would have to break off the pursuit and report to Captain Smiles. To have reported what he had so far seen would merely have earned him a reprimand and an instruction to mind his own business for the future. But now they were turning cast. Hurrying after them, Verity saw them arm-in-arm again, approaching a shabbier neighbourhood. He saw a street sign which identified it as Second Avenue. Soon they were among large, decaying houses of red brick with faded green shutters and matching first-floor balconies with roofs of painted tin. Jolly and her escort paused at the corner, where the canopy of a grocer's shop extended over the pavement to posts fixed in the kerbstone. A fly-blown card offering 'Table Board' was lodged at an angle in the adjoining window. A strong odour of smoked fish and the thick fragrance of molasses wafted from behind the piled baskets of vegetables under the grocer's wooden canopy.

  Jolly and the tall young man were engaged in some final and earnest conversation. Then the girl moved quickly, flitting across the rutted street, between the leaning lampposts and the ash-barrels to the large shabby house on the far side. She pulled the bell beside the heavy door, which opened in a moment. As she scuttled inside, the man who had escorted her turned and strode away. Verity, unable to watch both of them, chose the girl. He was unlikely to force the truth from the young man, but he had frightened a confession from Jolly twice in the past and had no doubt that he could do it again. He crossed the street with a determined stride and approached the door of the decayed red-brick house with its green verandah. On the wall to one side of it was an engraved metal plate, 'Asylum of the New York Magdalen Female Benevolent Society'.

  'It never is!' said Verity confidently. 'Not after what I've seen this afternoon. Bloody thieves' kitchen, more like.'

  It was not the easiest of buildings to enter unobserved. Standing back, he looked up at the verandah. There was a light in one of the windows looking on to it, but the other was in darkness. A glance at the darkened ground-floor window revealed that it was barred on the outside but to a man intent on climbing, the vertical iron rails were as good as a ladder. He looked up at the overhang of the verandah, and he knew that it could be done. Whistling softly to himself he walked slowly away for a few yards, waiting until the street should be empty. There were two men in the grocer's store, but they were intent on weighing and packing goods. His chance came in a few minutes and for a space of thirty seconds or so he was sure that he would be unnoticed.

  For all his bulk, Verity's agility was as remarkable as his strength. With hardly a sound, he stepped on to the sill of the ground-floor window, pulling himself up so that he could clutch the highest bar. There was an awkward manoeuvre as he stood on the higher bar with nothing to hold him against the wall but his own weight, until he could reach up and seize the first metal strut of the verandah rail, where it joined the wall. Hanging for an instant by one arm, and then by two, Verity kicked his feet up until he could cross them round a further strut. Praying that the mctalwork had not rusted from its fixtures, he put his strength into the gripping of his feet on the bar, and snatched himself up, hand over hand, until he was diagonally against the verandah rail and could pull himself over its ledge. It had not been an elegant display of acrobatics, but it had been quick and almost silent. With a final heave, Verity's capacious trouser seat and plump legs disappeared over the rail and on to the floor of the verandah itself.

  Cautiously and silently he got to his feet. Somewhere in the rooms facing him, the meek and contrite women of the New York streets shed tears of repentance on the shoulders of a sisterhood of mercy. So, at least, the brass plate by the street door proclaimed to the world. He was still standing there, judging the best and quietest means of entry when, from behind the lighted curtain of the left-hand window, a slurred male voice said, 'Ah, shit! Don't you whore-pokers never deal nothing but twos and threes?’

  There was gruff, pleased laughter from two other men, one of whom said, 'Make a call, soldier, and stop talking from ya ass.'

  Verity's spirits rose with delight. The asylum for fallen women was about to prove richly rewarding. Combined with the story about Jolly being adopted by a charitable married couple, there was every chance that it would have Inspector Croaker out of Whitehall Police Office and back in the artillery.

  As a preliminary, he crept to the lighted curtain and peered through a chink where it had not quite closed. His view was restricted but he could see the back of a man sitting in his shirt-sleeves and the dark hair of a second man on the other side of the table. The shirt-sleeved man belched and fluttered a card down on the table.

  'Deuce!' he said.

  There was a groan of disgust from someone who remained out of Verity's view. Blue-green cigar smoke rose, funnelling upward, above the man whose back was towards him. Glass clinked against glass and there was a splash of liquid.

  The dark head turned and a yellow squirt of tobacco juice shot into the china resonance of a spitoon. The shirt-sleeved man threw down his hand of cards with a light patter. 'Ah, shit!' he said monotonously.

  Silent as a shadow, Verity drew back and moved gently to the next, darkened window. It was closed, but fastened by nothing more than a rather loose casement-latch. He took out his carefully-oiled clasp-knife and slid the blade between the jamb and the window-frame. It was child's play. The loose catch lifted easily and the window swung open. He slid soundlessly into the darkened room. The glimmer of light from the street lamps showed it to be a poorly-furnished sitting-room with heavy mahogany upholstered in horsehair. Verity sniffed the air. Whatever the truth about the New York Magdalen Asylum, it certainly had the familiar smell of such institutional buildings, a steamy carbolic vapour concealing the grosser scents.

  Cautiously he opened the door and stepped out on to a tiled landing with narrow flights of stairs, their bare wood stained the colour of treacle. Below him, the building seemed to be in darkness, but a brass oil lamp was suspended over the well of the stairs and there was a glow of light from the next floor up. A single step creaked loudly under his weight as he moved quickly in that direction, but the noise of the card players in the other room more than covered the squeal of wood.

  The next landing was identical, except that there was a slit of light under one of the doors. From beyond it, Miss Jolly's voice came softly and melodiously in high-pitched song.

  'Oh, the man that has me must have silver and gold,

  A chariot to ride in and be 'andsome and bold

  Verity tried the door. It was unyielding. He inspected the vertical chink of light and saw that it was held on the inside by a tiny bolt.

  'His hair must be curly as any watch-spring,

  And his whiskers as big as a brush for clothing! '

  He crept back across the landing to the point which would give him the longest run.

  'Oh she was beautiful as a butterfly, and proud as a queen . . ,'

  Then he launched himself across the landing at the thin panelling of the door.

  ' Was pretty tittle Polly Perkins of Paddington Gre-e-e-n!'

  The last note of her song rose, shrill and prolonged, as the fastening splintered under Verity's weight. The broken door flew back against the wall and rebounded harmlessly.

  'Right, miss,' he said sternly. 'Now let's have an end of this little caper!'

  Then he paused. The room was as he had expected. Its bare distempered walls were patched by damp, their yellowness blotched by brown and draped with old cobwebs towards the high ceiling, like shot-torn regimental colours hanging in the vault of a garrison chapel. Miss Jolly was in the furthest corner, cowering and immobilized. More precisely, she had just stepped into a tin bowl of steaming water, her pink silk and a flurry of white underwear lying scattered on the uncarpeted floor. Her dark hair was pinned high on her head in the shape of a tall helmet or miniature bee-hive. Her trim gold thighs showed a sheen of moisture, where she had begun to wash herself.

  Oddest of all, she was still wearing her plum-red silk corset, with its array of straps which
might have done credit to a rifleman's webbing. Verity looked at it in astonishment. The wasp-waisted creation was far more suggestive than total nakedness. It covered her neat breasts but only to mould them more sharply and prominently. At the front, it ended in a narrowing v-shape between her thighs, as though deliberately leading the eye to the dark thatch of hair. At the rear, it was cut shorter, arching up over her slim brown waist as if in a calculated display of Jolly's coppery hind cheeks.

  She saw that it was Verity, her alarm changing to indignation in the dark Mine eyes. With a gesture of outrage, however, she covered herself with one hand in front, the other shielding her behind.

  'Now, miss,' he said with quiet insistence, 'don't scream, and don't do nothing that's going to make this worse for you!'

  Her eyes brightened, as though he had suggested the answer to her problem. With no more urgency than in her song, she raised her voice and emitted a soprano monotone.

  'Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h!'

  'You'll get such a seeing-to if you don't stop that!' said Verity furiously. 'All I want is answers to some questions!'

  she stopped, her sharp little nose and lynx eyes a study in scepticism. Then she pitched her voice an octave higher.

  'AH-H-H-H-H-H-H- !'

  There was nothing for it now but to get out while he could. At least he had evidence enough to unmask the New York Magdalen Asylum. That should be a start. There were heavy steps on the staircase. Verity wrenched back the curtains and discovered, to his surprise, that the window had been screwed immovably into its frame. With burly determination he turned to face the adversaries who stood between him and the stairs.

  There were two of them, one he was sure was the man who had sat in the room below with his back to the window. The other he saw, with a rush of gratitude, wore the tunic of a New York policeman.

  'All right, all right,' said Verity, inviting amiability, 'there ain't no cause for aggravation here. I'm a police officer too!'

  He felt for his warrant-card and held it out to the man in the dark blue tunic.

  'Metropolitan Police, London, Private-Clothes Detail,' he said proudly.

  The man in the tunic had a very large freckled face. It creased in an ecstasy of longing, as though he could have loved Verity for this latest revelation.

  'See?' said Verity hopefully. 'An officer of the law.'

  The big man kneaded one fist in his other palm.

  You'se a peeler!' he said gratefully. And he hit Verity with all his strength, the bare knuckles striking into the right hand side of the jaw and month, sending the plump sergeant sprawling. Miss Jolly gave a little squeal of apprehension and delight. No one even looked at her as she stood, clutching herself, in her tin bowl. Verity sat up, tasting blood and feeling a numbness which paralysed half his mouth, as though some terrible injury had been inflicted.

  'N'lissn-me, lissn . . .' he mumbled foolishly, ''m plice-offser

  'A peeler!' The eyes of the man in the tunic were almost moist with gratitude. 'Murderer of Ireland's patriots! Robber of the poor! Defiler of Irish maidenhood . . .'

  Verity scrambled to his feet.

  'You got the wrong man!' he said helplessly. ‘I never been there!'

  'Assassin of Robert Emmet! Butcher of Wolfe Tone!'

  The man in the tunic turned to his companion.

  'Let's finish the bastard before the others come up.'

  The two of them moved forward. From her bath, the girl watched, her almond eyes shining with excitement.

  'Right!' said Verity with a confidence he did not feel. 'You bloody asked for it!'

  He stepped to one side, where the girl's clothes had been discarded and he stooped down in a swift movement of retrieval. In his hand was the 'cage' which she had worn under her crinoline, a series of descending wire hoops suspended by strips of material to spread the dress outward. He ripped the largest hoop from its stitching and let it spring open into a length of steel, long as a rapier and as lethal as a razor. Whipping the air with it, he advanced towards the policeman and the card-player, who now backed prudently in the direction of the door.

  In his mind, Verity planned the route. Down the stairs, into the darkened room, out on to the verandah, and jump.

  There was no time for anything more elaborate. He had just decided on this when there was a slithering sound to one side of him. Across the floor shot the remains of the crinoline cage, tossed by the girl so that it landed just at the feet of the card-player. In a moment more both his adversaries would be armed as he was and his last hope would have gone. As the card-player stooped cautiously, Verity's quivering steel described an arabesque in the lamplight and lashed the man across his hand. To Verity's dismay, the weapon was far more effective than he had imagined. The card-player screamed and fell backwards on his knees, his head bowing up and down in agony, as if in some absurd obeisance. Blood was spattering on to the wooden boards like heavy drops at the beginning of a thunder-storm.

  'Oh God!' wailed the man, his voice rising again to a shriek. 'Oh God in heaven, I'm maimed!'

  There was nothing for it but to finish the business quickly. Verity threw down the rippling wire and advanced on the man in the tunic. He dodged the repeated blow to his jaw, lowered his head and butted his antagonist in the face. The Irishman fell back a couple of steps, blinking away tears of pain, his face now distorted by sudden anxiety. He snatched at Verity's hair, exposing his under-jaw to the force of Verity's right fist which snapped the man's head back with a nauseating click of bone. He followed this by getting the Irishman's head under his arm, 'In Chancery', and running him full tilt into the wall. The skull and the plastered wall met with a crack, the Irishman slithering limply to the floor.

  But now there were three more burly figures in the room. Verity threw himself on the first, the man staggering under the impact and sitting heavily on a wooden chair which crashed like matchwood under their combined weight. Only Verity got up again. He faced his remaining opponents his face glowing and his bull-neck flushed.

  'Lost yer taste for it, then?' he croaked derisively.

  One man jumped at him, and Verity threw him off with his powerful shoulders. He was gathering himself to rush the other man when suddenly a shimmery and agonizing deluge bowed him, choking and blinking. He knew instantly that he had made the mistake of forgetting the girl and being deaf to her soft, barefoot approach. The harsh, perfumed carbolic of Miss Jolly's bath-water was in his throat as he fought for breath, and its sharper agony streamed in tears from his eyes. A numbing blow to the back of his skull brought him to his knees in a drunken daze, so that he was hardly aware of what happened next. Their boots were hammering his spine, but he could barely feel it, the first pain having anaesthetized him to the rest by its numbing impact. Of all that was said by his attackers, he heard only one sentence, treasuring it against oblivion. 'You fat Irish bastud! You got the wrong one!'

  The wrong one. Verity lay half-stunned on the floor of a wagon. Remember, he told himself, the wrong one. Above him was night sky, the tops of buildings, and what looked like balloons illuminated internally by candles and bearing inexplicable messages. 'Bowery Street Rooms.' 'Bespoke Tailors.' 'Oysters in every style.' For the first time since he had entered the Magdalen Asylum, he thought of Captain Smiles. He tried to sit up, but his hands were cuffed behind him and the effort was too great.

  'Smiles!' he bleated hopefully. 'Captain Smiles! Prince of Wales's orders!'

  A boot toed him hard under the lower rib, driving the breath from him.

  'Bastud!' said someone in the darkness.

  At last the wagon stopped and they carried him unceremoniously out, his head hanging backward. A massive granite building with squat pillars, suggesting the portico of an Egyptian temple, rose above him. The tall rectilinear windows, heavily barred, ran almost the entire height of the facade. As the men who were carrying him passed into the shadow of the first hall, their steps echoed lingeringly along the bare vaulted passageways. Then they were in a long narrow interior which
rose like the nave of a lofty cathedral. There were several iron platforms along its sides at varying levels, and iron bridges which crossed from one side to the other. The men dragged Verity to what looked like a small furnace-door. There was a rattle of keys, his wrists were uncuffed and he was dumped down heavily in a pool of water on a stone floor.

  The door closed and the keys rattled again. As though from a great distance he could hear voices, plaintive, weeping, angry and cursing by turns. From time to time there was the slow measured tread of a man walking the length of the hall outside. Then, like iron castanets, keys rattled the length of the platform and stairway railings. Verity recognized the gaoler's inveterate habit of drawing the bunch of keys along the iron struts, as though to comfort himself as well as his charges by breaking the sepulchral silence of the long night. He was assisted in this by a woman's voice, wailing and eerie, and by a man's drunken song. Verity knew little about the prisons of America but he was evidently in one of the most impressive. At least, he thought, it was no worse than that.

  When the first light of the autumn morning lit the small barred window of the cell, it was grey as all light in that place. Working himself up to peer out, Verity could see that all the windows looked out on to a narrow yard, the pitiless prison walls rising so high that the sun never slanted into the cells. In the centre of the yard was the gallows without either a platform or a drop. Presently a slow procession crossed to the structure and a small pinioned man was stood beneath it with the rope round his neck. Verity watched in horror as the preparations were made. The man was left standing on the ground, while his executioner walked behind the gallows and released a cord. A weighted sandbag, at the top of the gallows, plummeted to earth with a soft thud, jerking the pinioned man off his feet and swinging him into the air. He hung almost still, after a few spasmodic struggles, his head inclined as though in acknowledgement of his fault.