The Hangman's Child (2 page)

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.

With Lupus and Babb following him, Jessup leading the way, Rann walked in shuffling steps. At every movement the iron anklet scraped the skin of his bony leg. He clenched his teeth. Now, of all times, he must give no pretext for cancelling the visit.

The low-vaulted prison corridor ran to the centre of the great building. There it was crossed by another, like the nave of a cathedral meeting its transepts. The space where the two stone-paved corridors crossed was a square of four low arches. Joined by wooded panels to waist-height, glass-paned above, they formed the consulting-room.

Prisoner and adviser were divided by a broad oak table, the full width of the room, with chairs on either side. The warders stood several yards outside, respecting the privilege due to a lawyer with his client or a clergyman comforting a sinner. The respect did not extend to turning away their eyes. Nothing would pass from one hand to another, over or under the broad table.

Rann looked towards the glassed-in space and swore to himself. Two figures stood on the far side of the table. Any man with pretensions to charity might offer himself as a workhouse missioner one day and vanish the next. If such a visitor chose to bring a prisoner's child to see him on a magistrate's authority, it was nothing the law could prevent.

Rann knew this missioner as 'Orator' Hawkins, an attorney's clerk dismissed over a probate embezzlement. It was not brought to court for the sake of the firm's name. Hawkins had been Bully Bragg's mouthpiece for the past two years. Rann wondered what a lord of the Swell Mob like Bragg could want with him now.

The visit would not have been difficult to arrange. Bragg boasted of two or three justices among the clients of his 'French Introducing House' off Drury Lane. No magistrate would doubt the good offices of such a figure as Hawkins. The close cut of dark hair, the precise lines of formal suit and pearl-grey choker, the kid gloves, gave him the air of a fashionable preacher from a Kensington or Marylebone chapel. The broad forehead diminished to a narrow trimly bearded chin, the small and high-pointed ears were like architectural features. At closer range, the light-blue eyes were hooded and dead. They held steady while the 'Orator' read a man his sentence of execution on Bully Bragg's behalf.

The 'Little Girl' was a figure of dark but rather sullen good looks who appeared by her dress to be about sixteen. A slim and agile figure, she was costumed in a plain mourning-gown of black merino wool. The dark hair usually worn down her back was entirely contained in the lining of a black hood. Her cheap gown and bonnet resembled the uniform of an orphanage or workhouse. No doubt she had snatched at sixpence or a shilling from Bragg to act the part of a snivelling child.

Rann knew this vision of hardened prettiness and dispassionate brown eyes as Suzanne Berry or 'Lambeth Sue', one of the mudlarks who scavenged at low tide between Westminster and Southwark. Boys and girls collected coal, wood, bottles, bones and rags for the 'dust contractors'. By dark they stole from the barges moored at wharves above London Bridge. Most girls with Suzanne's prettiness were soon apprenticed to an adult pickpocket or sold themselves for their 'fancy-men' to sailors or dockers in the raucous streets of Wapping or Shadwell. Someone had soaped and scrubbed her well for her present appearance.

Prisoner and escort entered the glassed-in space, where Hawkins dry-washed his hands, anxious to proceed with his duty.

As the warders went out and Jessup closed the door, Hawkins raised his right hand, two fingers together in an ambiguous sign of greeting or benediction. He thought better of the gesture and lowered his arm. Suzanne glanced quickly at Rann, then lowered her face and sobbed a little into a folded handkerchief. Rann guessed it was fright at the place she found herself in. He scowled at Hawkins.

'So what does Bragg want? If I was to see anyone, I'd as soon have had Mag Fashion or Miss Jolly. I was to have one visit. What use are you to me?'

Hawkins dropped his voice. 'Don't shout! They may hear you through the glass.'

Rann shifted his chains and stood awkwardly at his side of the table. Hawkins sat opposite. Suzanne kept her profile hidden in the dark hood. Yet her brown eyes watched the man who was to die, staring as if at a fairground freak.

'Let them hear,' said Rann with soft contempt. 'You think I'd help Bragg? Or you? Bragg's voice is all you are, my son. When he talks from his backside.'

Hawkins' face changed as little as if Rann had not spoken. The insults were like blows deflected or received with meek indifference. He looked at the prisoner like a head clerk surveying a bankrupt tradesman.

'Mr Bragg is sorry for the situation in which you find yourself, Mr Rann. Truly so. But he has a proposition which may be to your advantage.'

Rann stared at him. He spoke slowly, as though to the feebleminded.

'Eight days from now, I'm to be stretched. You think Bragg knows different?'

Hawkins' bony nose tightened, as if catching some prison odour. 'Mr Bragg can do nothing about that.'

'Do nothing!' Rann hoped the warders could hear him but he

doubted it. 'Bragg's the reason I'm here! Him and Policeman Fowler swore my life away. I want to know why. Even if I'm to be stretched, I've a right to know why. I didn't put a knife in Pandy Quinn. I couldn't a-done. I'd nothing to cut him with.'

'Jury thought otherwise,' said Hawkins suavely. 'End of the case.'

The fetters jangled as Rann shifted forward a little.

'You listen,' he said.
‘I
got a message at the Three Tuns in Hatton Garden. Come to the Golden Anchor in Hatton Wall, off Saffron Hill, quick-sharp. Pandy in a tap-room fight. When I went in, Pandy was bleeding on the floor. Someone cut him, well before that. All they needed was me. Bragg and his boy, Moonbeam, jumped me from behind a door. That old bastard Catskin Nash wipes me with blood off something. They pushed me down on Pandy. Held me till Flash Fowler come from upstairs, where he so conveniently happened to be with one of Bragg's girls. Now you tell me why.'

Hawkins looked quickly aside at the warders, who assumed expressions of indifference, and then back at Rann.

'Now you sit down and listen, Handsome Rann. Your brief had his say down the sessions. No one believed you then, no one believes you now. As for no knife, that's where you're wrong. Since yesterday, my friend, you're trussed tighter than a sirloin for the skewer. They found the knife you say you never had.'

The impossibility briefly knocked the fight from him. He sat down awkwardly and glanced warily at Hawkins and the girl, dark eyes flicking side to side.

'How could it be found?'

'By looking,' said Hawkins calmly. 'Policeman Fowler was called by the man that found it. Yesterday morning. Down a drain on Saffron Hill. Just below Hatton Wall and the Golden Anchor. Where you run out and dropped it the minute after you cut Quinn. Mr Fowler never stopped looking for it, being anxious to see justice done to all concerned. Hurtful things having been said in court about Mr Bragg and Moonbeam and poor old Mr Nash. Hurtful allegations about the police too. But Charley Fowler found your Italian cutter down a drain on Saffron Hill. Twenty yards from the Golden Anchor, where the slop must've carried it.'

'Then he put it there himself!' said Rann furiously.

'Whether he did or not, Handsome Rann, he's believed, and you're not. And Mr Bragg and Moonbeam, and their witness Mr Nash, are believed now, for all your slanders. And it's certain-sure what'll happen to you. You'll be confirmed for the rope in a day or two. So, you want to hear Mr Bragg's proposition or not?'

Rann said nothing. For the first time since his trial, he felt sick with fear. It was not the promise of the rope - he had always expected that - it was the care taken by his enemies to destroy him that took his strength away. Hawkins drew a gold hunter from his pocket and checked the time.

'Bragg and Flash Fowler swore my life away,' Rann said helplessly.

For a moment he feared he might weep. Hawkins' mouth tightened.

'You had Pandy's blood all down your shirt.'

'Course I had. How should I help it? Me held down on him by Bragg and Moonbeam, while Catskin Nash wiped it everywhere!'

'And before he died, Pandy told Policeman Fowler you stabbed him,' Hawkins said firmly. 'After that you were bound to swing.'

'Gammon!' said Rann in quiet anger. 'All Pandy Quinn said when I was standing there was, "My hat! Oh, my hat!" like he was surprised at something. Then he said, "My hat'll be the death of me!" And that was all.'

'His hat?' Hawkins looked up at him, impatient no longer. 'What about his hat?'

'How should I know? Even Policeman Fowler didn't know at the inquest. Twice that useless brief of mine asked him, and he didn't know. I was Pandy's friend. He wouldn't say I stabbed him when I never did.'