provisions. A certain sum of money was settled on their future offspring by trust. I don’t know if the wife had doubts about Edmonton’s character even then but, at the time, he wasn’t in any position to dictate terms. You see, Lord Edmonton was by no means a member of the landed gentry in those days. He was only titled as a result of his connections with Tories like Eldon and Winchelsea.’ Godfrey tapped his nose. ‘The old man, it would appear, has little power to prevent his daughter from doing what she damn well likes with her income and, I’m told, it’s driven him nearly to the point of apoplexy she has chosen to use it in the manner she has.’
Pyke thought about Emily Blackwood and the violent argument with her father he had overheard. But he was also preoccupied by something else, something that had been on his mind for the entire day, something that related to the living arrangements of the deceased and their missing cousin.
First thing in the morning, he would pay a visit to number four Whitehall Place and examine what had been removed from the lodging house.
SEVEN
But the following morning, Pyke found himself standing outside the entrance to Newgate prison, waiting for Emily Blackwood to finish a conversation she was having with the Reverend Arthur Foote. Though he had walked past the prison, just a short distance from his gin palace, on numerous occasions since his visit to Hambledon Hall, this was the first time he had come across Emily. Pyke stared up at the building’s blackened stone-clad exterior.
There were other prisons in London but Newgate remained the most notorious. In the past, Pyke had visited the interior of the prison, mostly in order to elicit information from convicts, and found it to be a depressing but unremarkable place. Others, however, did not share his ambivalence. To them, the prison would always represent a system of justice that was as brutal as it was unfair.
They were standing almost directly outside Debtors’ Door, from where condemned men and women emerged on the day of their execution and began their last journey to the scaffold. Pyke watched Foote shuffle across the street in the direction of the King of Denmark pub, a cabman’s watering hole that occupied a three-storey tenement building directly opposite the prison.
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
