The Secret River (8 page)

The next day word went round the yard that a man called William Biggs, accused of stealing two ducks, value twenty-five shillings, had that day told the court that he was as innocent of the crime as the child unborn, and had been acquitted. In Newgate Yard, with the murmured stories of injured innocence all around them, the idea caught on like cholera.
As innocent as the
child unborn
, Thornhill heard the man next to him muttering.
I am
a soldier, I had just come off duty, there was others in the house besides me, I
am as innocent as the child unborn
.

He added it to his own story as he rehearsed it to himself.
I
made the lighter fast meaning to come back later to unload, I am as innocent as
the child unborn
.

~

The court of the Old Bailey was a bear-pit. Down in the well of the court there was a great curving table full of crow-like barristers in their black gowns and their grey periwigs, and standing humbly around them the mass of witnesses waiting to be called, and the ushers lounging against the panelling.

On the next layer up, the jury men sat along one wall, four by four, packed into dark-panelled pews, too far away to make out their faces in the dimness of this vast space. Opposite the judge, the witness was pinned into a little box with his back to the light coming in from the high windows.

Those tall white windows, full of light, were cousins to the ones at Christ Church. They showed, if Thornhill had doubted it, that the judge was gentry, the same way God was gentry.

Above the witnesses a mirror tipped the daylight from the window full onto their faces. By that cold dull light, that gave faces a metallic look, the judge and jury could peer into the soul of the person on the stand. Behind the witness there was another, smaller mirror, and a man in a periwig like the barristers’ with an inkwell and a big ledger in front of him, in which he wrote down each word.

That was almost the worst of it, that anything anyone said, be it never so false or condemning, was there forever, with no margin of forgetfulness where human mercy might step in.

Way up near the ceiling were the public galleries, cut off from the court by a high wall of panelling and columns that held the restless public in behind them. He stared up, hoping to find Sal, but could only see a vague restless mass of people. Now and then an arm dropped down in front of the panelling or there was the flash of a shawl flung over a woman’s shoulders. He saw a straw hat bent down over a head by means of a scarf tied under the chin. Sal had a hat she wore that way, and perhaps that tilt of the head was hers as she craned past others to see down into the court.

He heard a distant cry, a woman’s voice. Was it calling,
Will!
Will!
and was that her arm waving to him?

It was, he thought, and he loved her for it. As the prisoner at the bar he did not dare call back. That would be as bad as calling out in church. In any case, she was in the other world, the one he was leaving. She was dear to him, but down here he was on his own.

He stood up in the prisoner’s dock, a high pedestal where he was on display as if naked to the whole court. His hands were tied hard behind his back, forcing him to bow his head. He kept trying to straighten up, to look his fate in the eye, but the pain in his neck forced him again to hunch. Up so high, he could feel the rising vapours of those below him in the court: all those bodies encased in their clothes, all those chests breathing in and out, and all those words, passing around through the air.

He was struck by the power of the words. There was nothing going on in the court but words, and the exact words, little puffs of air out of the mouth of a witness, would be the thing that saw him hanged or not.

It took him some time, when he was first pushed up onto his pedestal, to see the judge behind his carved bench: a tiny grey face, dwarfed by his full-bottomed wig, by the layers of his robes, by the lapping collar with the gold edging, until there was no trace of the human within.

~

Mr Knapp, the lawyer who had been assigned to speak for him, was a languid sort of a gent, and Thornhill held out no hope from that quarter, but Mr Knapp surprised him. Mr Lucas had said his piece, and then Knapp was speaking to him, in a weary sort of way, so that Thornhill did not at first realise he had found something of a chink:
I understand you, Mr Lucas, to have said it was a very
dark night, and therefore the only opportunity that you had of knowing who
was the man, was that it was the voice of Thornhill?

But Mr Lucas saw where this was going and coughed into his fist before saying stiffly,
I knew him by his person, when I got to him
, and Mr Knapp still seemed to pay no attention, asking casually,
But you
knew him only by his voice?

A man with his sights set on the gold chain of office was not going to be confused by any half-asleep barrister and Lucas answered crisply,
I believed that the person I saw in motion was the prisoner
,
and when I got to him, I knew him to be the prisoner at the bar
.

Now Thornhill was fully listening, and for the darkness of the night he began to give the greatest thanks. Knapp set a little trap, saying,
That is, in other words, you knew Thornhill when you got up to him?
But Lucas coughed again, shifted, rubbed an eye, could see the problem advancing towards him.
I identified him by his voice repeatedly
before
, he said impatiently. Mr Knapp shot back, giving him no
time to think,
From that you were led to
suppose it was Thornhill—you
were not certain of it until you came up, and found that it was so?

Lucas was too clever to be caught. He gripped the counter in front of him, sunlight falling across his shoulders and the eerie light of the mirror full on his face. When he spoke he seemed to be reading off the dust eddying in the shaft of sun.
I did not hear
any voice at the time the wood was in motion. At that time, if I had been
asked, I could not have sworn to the person of Thornhill
. He paused to pick his way between the words, then went on very steady and slow as if spelling something out for one of the Robs of this world:
I can now swear that one of the persons that I saw, when the wood was in
motion, was Thornhill, that I could not then swear to. When I got near him
,
that person was Thornhill, and I never lost sight of him, because I saw the
very person that was moving the wood was Thornhill
.

Even Mr Knapp could find no chink in that masonry of words.

When it was Yates’s turn, Thornhill saw how unhappy he was. He kept glancing across the well of the court at him, squinting against the light from the mirror, his big white eyebrows moving up and down, his hands busy fiddling with the edge of the counter in front of him as if to fiddle away so much trouble.

Mr Knapp looked up at the far-off ceiling as he said,
You had
no opportunity of observing the face of the man—it was much too black a
night to observe countenances?
He was almost speaking to himself.

Yates began to smooth the counter as if stroking a dog.
It was,
I allow
, he said.
I will speak by the voice, the shape and make of the man
.

And now Mr Knapp came to life, snapping out his words so Thornhill could see how Yates cringed.
What, speak to the shape and
make of a man on a dark night?
Poor Yates began to bluster.
I do not say
that I can
, he said,
unless I was particularly well acquainted with him
. His bushy eyebrows were a semaphore of distress as he floundered on.
I do not mean to say directly I can, or cannot speak to the facts in this case
.

Down at the witness table in the well of the court, Mr Lucas stared up at him. Even from the prisoner’s bar, Thornhill
could see the beads of sweat appearing on Yates’s domed forehead. Mr Knapp insisted,
It being a moonless night, you cannot make out
that you knew him by shape and make?
Thornhill thought, are those little words, shape and make, going to be the difference between life and death?

Poor Yates, glancing from Lucas to Thornhill, began to mutter and stutter.
I should be sorry to say anything that is an untruth
, he said, but Mr Knapp had no mercy, and kept coming on.
That was
a hasty speech, that you knew him by shape and make? You mean that you
could not?
And now Yates was broken, uncertain of all his words, continually glancing at Mr Lucas.
I was in the act of closing with this
man
, he mumbled.
It was impossible but I must know him from his
speaking to me. I knew him by his voice
.

He glanced quickly at Thornhill.
I might have hastily spoke about
his shape and make
, he said, and then stood stiff as a bit of wood with his hat squashed under his arm, the wan light from the mirror falling full on his face, furrowed with misery.

~

The moment where Thornhill was allowed to tell his story was upon him so abruptly that he found the words he had gone over with Sal had evaporated from his mind. He could only think of the start of them, saying
I tied up the lighter meaning to come back to her
later
, and he knew there was more, but what was it?

He found himself staring at Mr Lucas as he blurted out,
Mr
Lucas knows there is no lighter on the river can come to her
, but even as the words left his mouth he knew they had nothing to do with the case at hand, and he called out desperately,
I am as innocent as the child
unborn
, but the words had no meaning after so much rehearsal.

In any case the judge, way up behind his bench, was not listening. He was shuffling papers together and leaning sideways while someone whispered in his ear. Lucas was not listening either, his hand feeling for the watch in his pocket. Thornhill saw the
silver lid spring open, saw Lucas glance at the face of the watch, press it closed again, tweak a nostril with thumb and forefinger. His own words, which had sounded with such conviction in Newgate Yard, fell hollow and were swallowed up.

Now the judge was fiddling with the black cap, sitting it carelessly on the long grey wig so it hung over one ear. He began to speak, in a thin high voice that Thornhill could barely hear. Down in the body of the court one of the lounging ushers, a corpulent gent in a bulging dirty white waistcoat, caught sight of someone he knew across the room and made a mincing wave and a little smirk. A barrister fiddled with the grubby ruffles at his neck, another got out his snuff-box and offered it to his neighbour.

It seemed the court could scarcely be bothered to listen as William Thornhill, in the time between two heartbeats, was found guilty and sentenced to
be taken from this place and hanged by the neck
until you are dead
.

He heard a cry, from the public gallery or from his own mouth he did not know. He wanted to call out, I beg your pardon, Your Worship, there has been some mistake, but now the turnkey was grabbing him by the upper arm, forcing him down the steps, and through the door into the tunnel that led back to Newgate. He turned his head towards the public gallery. Sal was up there somewhere, but invisible. Then he was back in the cell with the others, but without his story, stripped naked of his tale of injured innocence, stripped of everything but the knowledge that his moment of hope had been and gone, and left him now with nothing ahead but death.

~

Sal came to see him in the condemned cell. Even her footsteps on the bare wooden floor told him that she had not given up. Behind the carefree girl he had married there was another person, he saw now with some wonderment: no girl, but a woman. Her humour
had not been extinguished, only darkened and thickened by this other thing that had always been there waiting to be needed: a stubborn intelligence as unyielding as a rock.

She had been making inquiries, she said. Had asked around, found out what a man did who was condemned to die.
It is letters
,
Will
, she told him.
You send letters up the line is how it works
. There was a chilly briskness to her, although he saw that she found it hard to meet his eye, as if afraid she would see something there to break her resolve. Despair, he was learning here, was as contagious as fever, and as deadly.
You got to get that creeping Jesus to write to Captain
Watson
, she said.
No good me trying, I don’t know them sorts of words
. She did not look into his face, but reached across the table and took his hand, squeezed it so hard he felt her bones.
Today, Will, not a
minute later
.

He trusted her, and went to the man she meant, a man whose legs were twisted and wizened and who crept from cell to cell. If a person had any item of value about him that he was prepared to part with, this man would write any kind of begging letter he wished.

He gave the creeping cripple his thick woollen greatcoat. It was like cutting off an arm, for without it he would never live through a lighterman’s winter again. But it was a good coat, worth a good letter. And he would never be a lighterman again, unless this man could write the letter that might get him out of this place.

When the cripple had done, he read it out to him.

It was as if written by Thornhill himself to Captain Watson, his regular from Chelsea Stairs, the only man of standing Thornhill knew. It told how sorry Thornhill was for what he had done, how it was the first offence, and how earnestly he prayed to God to be spared. It enumerated Thornhill’s dependants, his idiot brother, his sisters all alone in the world, his helpless wife and babe, and another on the way in his wife’s guiltless belly.

Thornhill held the paper in his hand, staring at the black
loops and swirls of the cripple’s clerkly hand, so different from Sal’s careful letters. He could not make sense of any of them. To his eyes these were nothing more than marks such as a beetle might make, crawling through a puddle of porter spilt on a table. He despaired that his life depended on such flimsy things.