The Last Days (11 page)

In the middle of the previous century, public hangings had been moved from the open spaces of Tyburn to the more confined areas surrounding Newgate and, indeed, other prisons in the city, in the hope that this might restrict crowd sizes and turn the events themselves into more sober occasions. This hope had not come to pass; what had happened instead was that the same multitude now thronged into the narrow streets surrounding Newgate on hanging days, at a risk to themselves and others. Pyke’s own father had found this out, to his cost. Old Bailey was a street of ghosts. Pyke thought about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who had died in these environs, either inside or outside the prison walls, and of the throng who went there to witness people hang. He did not believe such people did so either to be entertained or reminded that the justice system worked. Watching another man die was essentially a way of clinging on to what little humanity you had left that had not been taken away by the city.

As he approached her, Pyke waved to attract Emily’s attention.

‘This is a surprise, Mr Pyke, and a very pleasant one.’ They shook hands as etiquette demanded and she smiled warmly, revealing dimples on either side of her mouth. Up close, her teeth were a brilliant white and in the weak morning sunlight her hair, which sat just above her shoulders, glistened. She made a comment about the weather, pointed out that it was cold enough for them to see their own breath, and said, ‘Imagine how it must be for those inside the prison without access to heat.’

Though his grooming regime consisted only of shaving on every third day, changing his outfit weekly and his underwear twice weekly and bathing irregularly, he found himself self-consciously arranging his hair in some imaginary mirror.

‘I am about to visit the quadrangle allocated to the female prisoners. Perhaps you would care to accompany me?’

The last thing Pyke wanted to do was witness the squalor and misery endured by Newgate’s unfortunates, but he found himself accepting her invitation. She seemed pleased by his decision and later, once the formalities had been taken care of and they were standing in a small courtyard inside the prison, she told him their society had been trying to impress upon the Ordinary and the gaoler the nature of their responsibilities to the prisoners. The gaoler should visit all parts of the prison and see every prisoner on a daily basis and the Ordinary should perform a daily religious service and visit the sick. Of course, this did not happen. She laughed bitterly.

Pyke said Foote was more famous for his powers of consumption than for his pulpit oratory. This time her laugh seemed almost flirtatious.

The prison was smaller than Pyke had remembered but its fortress-like buildings, cramped together in an almost piecemeal fashion owing to the lack of space, and the sheer granite walls that stood guard over the maze of concealed courtyards and passages inside the prison, revived his fear of confined spaces.

It was a crisp day but the washed-out blue sky was not visible, even from within the prison’s open courtyards, so steep were the walls and so cramped were the buildings. From within the blocks and wards, Pyke could hear the shouts and wails of the prison’s inhabitants.

He tried to imagine what it might be like, to be held in such a place, with no access to the outside world.

Emily seemed entirely at ease in their surroundings. She explained how the prison was laid out. She pointed to the north side where the debtors were housed and explained that they lived in relative comfort. They were visited by vendors who hawked newspapers and tobacco, potmen who sold pints of beer and local merchants who brought with them cold joints, fish and mince pies. The condemned, she explained, occupied the press-yard side of the prison. There were two dozen rooms and fifteen cells to accommodate eighty or ninety prisoners, many of whom were likely to be granted a reprieve or have their sentence commuted to transportation. Emily said children as young as twelve mixed freely with sodomists and murderers.

In the press yard in front of the condemned wing, she pointed to a large movable scaffold. Pyke had spotted it already. The condemned man stood on a false floor with a noose around his neck, she explained, and on the executioner’s signal, it dropped, leaving him hanging in the air.

Pyke said he had seen many executions and that their pointless barbarity never failed to shock him.

‘Really?’ she said, squinting, even though the sun could not penetrate the interior of the prison. ‘I would’ve imagined that their violence might have appealed to your baser instincts.’

‘And what baser instincts might those be?’

This time Emily blushed. ‘Perhaps the ones that endow you with such self-confidence.’

‘You think my confidence to be unfounded?’

‘Not unfounded,’ she said, looking away, half-smiling. ‘But I fancy you wield it as one might a weapon.’

‘What sort of a weapon?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, still affecting a smile.

‘A rapier, perhaps?’

‘I was thinking more of a bludgeon.’

‘Ah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Then perhaps you are mistaking confidence for heavy-handedness. For I would not consider myself to be confident.’ He waited to catch her stare. ‘Especially not around you.’

She looked away quickly. ‘In any case, I would have imagined punishment better suits your world than reform.’

‘Quite,’ Pyke said, grinning now. ‘Let’s return to the safer subject of barbaric violence.’ He made to wipe something from his eye. Above him, a crow was circling in the small patch of sky still visible from within the prison walls. ‘Just because I believe the only way of subduing any power is through the exercise of a greater power doesn’t necessarily mean I find such a state of affairs appealing.’

‘That’s quite a bleak view of human nature, isn’t it? The weak being torn apart by the strong and the strong being torn apart by the stronger.’

Nodding, despite himself, he found her instinctive grasp of his position impressive. He had never tried to have a similar conversation with Lizzie.

‘I would’ve thought that description perfectly fits what’s happening inside this prison.’ Pyke pointed towards the condemned block.

‘But that’s exactly it,’ she said, excited. ‘At present, that’s how these unfortunates are treated and so they act as animals. Wouldn’t you?’ Her eyes glistened with enthusiasm. ‘But what if they were treated differently? What if they lived in separate cells, had access to proper clothes, hot food, time to exercise and read, a routine, bedsteads provided for them? Might they act in a more humane way themselves?’

‘You believe people are essentially altruistic?’ Pyke tried to keep scepticism from his voice.

‘Call me simple-minded but I believe that a tendency for goodness exists within all of us. Even you.’ Then Emily did something that surprised him: she threaded her arm through his and said, ‘Come with me. I’ll show you the quadrangle allocated to women.’

All Pyke said was, ‘I would not have called you simple-minded. ’

She did not release his arm.

The space for female prisoners awaiting trial was limited to two cells and two large wards. Something like three hundred women and children were crowded into these rooms. The fact that the female prisoners were now overseen by a female gatekeeper was the result of pressure exerted by their committee, Emily explained, as the gatekeeper led them along a thick-walled passage to one of the two main wards. From the entrance, and protected from the ward by iron bars, Pyke watched the scene in front of him with fascination and horror. He counted ninety or a hundred people crammed into a room no larger than Sir Richard Fox’s office. Some wore rags. Others were naked. The only warmth in the ward was provided by the inhabitants themselves. They huddled together in small groups. The smell of unwashed bodies and stale alcohol made him want to gag. A little girl, no more than ten, caught his eye. Her lackadaisical body and hollow stare spoke of a hopelessness that seemed so all-encompassing he had to look away. These were the human dregs, criminals perhaps but with their own explanatory tales of woe and despair, and Pyke didn’t want to be among them - to have to see and smell them.

‘Though it might seem hard to believe, considerable improvements have been made since Mrs Fry first visited here fifteen years ago. There’s now better ventilation and lighting, fixed bed places, a new dining room and dining tables, an enlarged infirmary and a new wash house.’

Pyke said he had seen enough.

Outside in the yard, Emily said, ‘When we talked at the hall, I got the impression you thought all reformers to be either petty meddlers or well-meaning tyrants wanting to transform the world in their own image. What we are trying to do here is rather small. Desks for the condemned, the removal of rubbish once a week.’

Pyke admired her forthright nose and hazel eyes. Emily did not seem out of place inside Newgate’s walls. She was part of this world and, in a strange way, it suited her.

‘Perhaps not you,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘but others have grander visions.’

‘And what’s wrong with grand visions?’ she asked, quickly. ‘Even to me, Newgate isn’t just a prison. It’s a word that’s become synonymous with a whole system of justice, a barbaric and arbitrary one in which the educated and privileged escape punishment because of who they are and who they know and the poor are killed regardless. You asked me why I did this. Let me ask you a question in return. Is it right or fair that one prisoner should have a good flock mattress, a double allowance of provisions, an endless supply of ale and prostitutes when required, while another, equally deserving prisoner is beaten, abused, starved and left to die?’

Pyke waited until he had her full attention. ‘People who can’t help themselves come from all ranks and stations. Even aristocratic families.’

Her surprise registered before her anger and she recoiled from him, as though he had slapped her. ‘Men always imagine power is tied only to social class,’ she said, recovering some of her composure.

‘You mean, your father’s power is more a product of his masculine position?’

‘Is that such a surprise to you? That men like my father have been shaping the world to fit their needs for centuries?’

‘Including who is defined as sane and insane?’

Emily’s expression hardened. ‘Don’t presume to speculate about my family, Mr Pyke.’

‘I was referring only to your father.’

‘Your point is made,’ she said, trying to appear unaffected. ‘And I commend you on your skills as an investigator, though I was not in any doubt as to your . . . abilities.’ She smiled coldly.

Outside the prison, on Old Bailey, Pyke said, ‘If I said that’s just the way of the world, the fact that some prosper, yes, because of their inheritance but also because they’re ruthless or committed or just plain lucky, while others wither and die because they aren’t, would you think me hard-hearted?’

She touched his forearm and pulled him into her stare. ‘Is that you, Pyke? Are you ruthless and committed?’

‘I would hope so.’ He shrugged. ‘But I also believe we live or die ultimately according to the whims of chance.’

‘But what about those who aren’t ruthless or lucky? What happens to them?’ Her face was flushed with energy. ‘When you see pain and injustice, can you really just walk away?’

What she said caught him by surprise and he pulled away because he didn’t want her to see that he was capable of being moved.

Waiting for her footman to pull down the steps up to the carriage, Pyke asked her what she had been arguing about with her father during his visit to Hambledon. At first, she did not seem to know what he was talking about. Her eyes dulled a little and she seemed to withdraw into herself.

Emily shook his hand and while doing so pulled herself towards him and whispered, ‘People aren’t always who you imagine them to be.’ Her breath felt hot and sticky against his ear. ‘That applies to you and me as well.’

As she climbed up into her carriage, Emily was assisted by her servant, a young woman with a plump figure and a full, round face. Briefly, Pyke and the servant exchanged a glance, and in that moment Pyke was left with an uncomfortable sense they had met somewhere before, though he could not remember where or when this might have been.

 

Renovation work on number four Whitehall Place had already started, a sign perhaps that Peel was more than confident about his chances of forcing the police bill through Parliament. It was a sturdy, imposing three-storey red-brick building with ornately carved arched windows on the ground floor.

Pyke had perused the morning papers and all the editorials seemed to agree: the St Giles murders made the case for a centralised, uniformed police force even stronger. But the same editorials had not been so kind to the proposed Catholic Emancipation Bill. Only the Chronicle called for caution and circumspection and urged its readers to wait and see what the police investigation revealed. Others failed to denounce the wave of anti-Catholic violence that was sweeping the city and demanded, in varying tones of outrage, that the Catholic relief bill either be abandoned or put on hold until people had had the time to reflect on the situation. One had even called for Catholics to be forcibly converted to Protestantism or thrown out of the country. Pyke had read a letter in The Times written by Edmonton in which the old man had called upon his ‘fellow countrymen’ and ‘brother Protestants’ to ‘stand forward and defend our Protestant religion and constitution’ from ‘disgraceful attacks’ by ‘Tory turncoats, papal agents and lovers of Rome’.

Pyke found himself wondering how such sentiments would affect his investigation.

Finding the main entrance boarded up, he wandered around the side of the building, along a narrow passage leading into Great Scotland Yard, and tried the door that led into the old watch house.

Almost at once, he found himself confronted by the same surly man whom he had encountered at the lodging house. Pyke said that he wanted to see Charles Hume and was told, curtly, that he would have to wait a long time. The man explained there had been an important development in the St Giles murder investigation but he did not reveal what it was and Pyke did not ask.