Jack Cloudie

prison — the everyday ruin of a common family — compared to the greatest robbery that the capital had nearly seen? And one attempted by the forgotten scrapings of its gutters.

‘The undeserving poor …’ pontificated the judge from his high wooden plinth. A light mist of dust fell from his elaborate wig to be sucked into the pneumatic tubes below where the clerks were sending and receiving reports in between tapping away on the keys of their punch-card writers.

There was a chorus of clanking chains behind Jack as the other members of the gang were pushed to the rail, the public and the newssheet illustrators getting their first look at the felons on trial. The newspapers had no doubt paid a good few pennies to the court officials to ensure that Boyd’s crew would stand there long enough for them to make the drawings that would adorn the late editions of the day’s newssheets.

‘Moral degeneracy …’ the judge growled.

Jack glanced around for their lawyer, who strode forward towards the advocates’ bench. It didn’t look as if things had gone well for the gang in the main hearing. The one Jack hadn’t been allowed to attend while the learned silks argued back and forth, in case the felons’ pauper-like appearance prejudiced the jury. Too many women whose delicate sympathies might have been aroused if they’d been allowed to see the fresh cheeks of the young pickpockets and street thieves who were hauled up in front of the capital’s courts.

‘All results of the failure of the undeserving poor to accept their duties as citizens of the Kingdom, results which are evident all around us,’ sounded the judge. ‘In those so feckless that they have wrongly concluded that the poorhouse rather than paid work should be their employer. And for those too worthless to accept even the generous regime of the workhouse, there are always the pockets of their fellow citizens to pick, the windows of good people’s houses to lever open!’ The judge banged his gavel and pointed it angrily towards the gang. ‘The statutes issued by parliament prevent me sending a message to the slums that would be properly understood. Otherwise, have no doubt that, despite your age, I would have all of you standing on the gallows rather than facing transportation to the colonies.’

Jack breathed a sigh of relief. Thank the stars that the liberal-leaning party of the Levellers was still in government in the House of Guardians.

‘But!’ boomed the judge, his hawk-like nose sniffing in disdain, ‘for the ringleader of this foul crime, I thankfully still have available the option of exercising the middle-court’s full discretion.’

Jack glanced over to where Boyd was standing defiantly, his large frame bearing his chains as though they had been tailored for him. Unlucky for Boyd. Well, at least the publicity concerning the trial would mean there would be a couple of well-wishers in the hanging-day crowd who would bribe the executioner’s attendants to jump up and pull on Boyd’s boots if the rope didn’t break his neck clean after he dropped through the trapdoor. Goodbye Boyd, I would say it’s been nice knowing you, but I’m not that good a liar.

The judge lifted up the small square black cap that those condemned to death were forced to wear while waiting in Bonegate jail. ‘Bring the ringleader forward to receive his cap.’

There was a murmur of sympathy from among those watching on the public seats, a few women tossing their handkerchiefs through the line of constables keeping order. Jack stared at them with contempt. This was real life, not a romantic tragedy put on for the mob’s benefit. Jack’s look of contempt turned to astonishment and then to panic as the guards behind him seized his arms and dragged him out beyond the prisoner’s stall. Pushing him in front of the judge. Me? It’s not me, you idiots!

‘Jack Keats,’ said the judge, glaring down, ‘you have corrupted the benefits of your early training at a guild school to foul ends, leading the ill-educated criminal poor of the Sungate slums on a wicked attempt to undermine, nay, to plunder the hard-earned wealth of those who have chosen to prosper through work rather than squandering their gifts.’

‘I didn’t!’ shouted Jack, pointing back at Boyd still on the prisoner’s stand. ‘I wasn’t the leader. It was him.’

‘Your cowardly lies will not save your neck,’ warned the judge, his eyes narrowing. ‘The members of your gang have all named you as the leader of this wicked enterprise.’

Jack stared back shocked at the ranks of the gang he had followed into the basement vaults of Lords Bank. The young criminals who had been incarcerated together with the threatening bulk of Boyd, while Jack had been locked in solitary confinement inside a security cell designed for those who might be able to work mischief on its transaction-engine lock. Boyd was gazing back coolly at Jack, while Maggie and the others couldn’t even meet his startled eyes.

‘Maggie!’ Jack pleaded. ‘Please, tell them-’

‘Silence!’ thundered the judge. ‘It would be clear to a simpleton which among you had the education, knowledge and skills necessary to break into the vault of Lords Bank. The rest of these gutter-scrapings standing before me do not possess such ingenuity. Dear Circle, man, you’re the only one of them that even has his letters.’

‘It is clear. To a simpleton,’ muttered Jack.

He had been betrayed by all of them, even Maggie. Royally rogered. Jack would have been beaten to death if he hadn’t gone along with Boyd on the robbery, but it seemed now as though he was going to meet his maker anyway. Family, you could only ever trust family. Who were his little two brothers in the poorhouse going to rely on when he was gone? The thought gnawed at Jack’s heart as painfully as his sudden death sentence. People like Boyd, that was who they would fall in with on the streets. Repeating my errors and ending up in a courtroom like this in a few years’ time. Failed them, I’ve failed them.

The guards pushed Jack down to his knees, ready to receive the black cap. The whole courtroom appeared to freeze with the unreality of the occasion. What a dramatic scene this would make for the front of the Middlesteel Illustrated News. A lone figure, bent down to receive the swift mark of Jackelian justice, the judge in his dark robes like a figure from mythology on his high perch. The judge who was about to pass down the black cap to a clerk’s outstretched hand when a court reader stood up to discreetly interrupt him. The clerk was whispering in the judge’s ear and pointing to the corner of the public benches where a man was sitting alone. Jack’s eyes widened. He knew the man sitting on the bench. He had seen those piercing eyes before. The ginger hair. But not the clothes, a large military-style cloak that hid almost all of the man’s body. Where have I seen your face before?

‘It appears,’ announced the judge, ‘that in this case the state has elected to exercise its rights under the articles of impressment.’ Reluctantly storing the black cap back under his perch, the judge looked over the contents of the scroll that had exited the clerk’s transparent vacuum message pipe. ‘However,’ the judge fixed the ginger- haired man on the bench with a steely glare. ‘This impressment order merely suggests the service of the Royal Aerostatical Navy as a suitable sentence, rather than expressly dictating it.’

The ginger-haired man stood bolt upright in anger as if he had been well defied, his cloak a second shadow behind him.

Returning his gaze to Jack, the judge glared down at the young thief. ‘There was a time when the RAN used to be a fit service for gentlemen, and you sir, will never be a gentleman. It pains me to see how in this matter, like so many others, times have changed for the worse. It is therefore the express wish of this court that your life impressment is to be served with a punishment battalion of the New Pattern Army. They may be able to flog some of the criminal tendencies out of your hide before you are required to shed your worthless blood in the service of your nation. Now, officers of the court, kindly remove this lowly piece of gutter-scum from our sight.’

Drawn up from their seats, the mob in the court were in a state of near riot at the unexpected turn of events, and Jack was pulled away to the shouts of frantic questions being hurled down at him by newssheet writers, the repeated banging of the judge’s gavel, the yells of sentences of transportation being passed on the remaining members of the gang. Jack was almost overwhelmed by the stench of the jostling crowd, some laughing at him, some spitting and shouting obscenities, others calling out encouragement and trying to press small gifts of waxpaper-wrapped food into his hands. He got a brief glimpse of the dark cloak of the mysterious figure who had brought news of this bizarrely unexpected intervention in the trajectory of his decline, and then he was on his confused way down the cold damp tunnel and back to the holding pens.

It wasn’t the hangman who would be coming to collect Jack now; it was the army and a death almost as certain, if not quite as immediate.

Jack sat with his back against the cold stone wall of the cell. Before he had seen one, he had always expected a cell to be small, cramped and damp. Well, one out of three isn’t bad. All the damp you could wish for. But the cell was closer to one of the poorhouse’s large chambers where make-work was