Pyke put the bottle to his lips and did not stop imbibing the fiery liquid until he had to pause for breath.
Outside in the yard, he poured two buckets of icy water into a metal bath tub. As he submerged himself in the water, it felt as though his chest might collapse but, gasping for air, he took a bar of soap in one hand and, splashing icy water over himself with the other, he started to scrub himself: his face, his neck, his armpits, his torso, his hands, his groin, his legs, between his toes. He took another bucket of water and tipped it over himself, rinsing off the suds. He rubbed himself dry with a cloth and, picking up the bottle and putting it again to his lips, took another gulp of gin.
Upstairs he dressed in a dark jacket, plain shirt, trousers and boots and returned to the bedroom. He found the knife, a large hunting knife with a jagged blade, on the floor next to the bed. Having wiped it with the same muslin curtain he’d used to clean himself, he placed it carefully in his pocket.
Later, it struck Pyke that if it had not been market day and the street outside had been empty of livestock, they might have caught him. As it was, one of the constables dispatched to arrest him screamed at someone to clear a path through the street, and Pyke looked out of the upstairs window and saw them through the fog: ten or more men wearing tall hats, forcing their way through a stationary herd of cattle.
Even with these men bearing down on him, Pyke knew that he could not leave George to either perish in his bed or suffer some as yet unknown fate; perhaps a slow, painful death in a lunatic asylum. Ascending the stairs to the old man’s garret three at a time, he could feel some of the horror of what had happened begin to hit home. Lizzie was dead. She had been slaughtered in her own bed, while he lay beside her. Briefly, as he knelt beside his old friend, he imagined trying to rouse him from his slumber to explain what had happened, the pain that news of his daughter’s murder would cause, and he felt momentarily overcome by anger, bitterness and his own grief. But he could not afford to indulge these sentiments: men were coming to arrest him for the murder. He did not have time to wake George and talk to him and he did not need to do so. Pyke already knew what his old friend would ask him to do and without another thought he clamped George’s jaw closed with one hand and pinched his nostrils with the other.
He had planned to count to twenty but did not need to go past ten.
Back in his own room, he collected what little money he could find, tumbled down the stairs, let himself out into the back yard and from there into the alley at the rear of the building. Finding an open cesspool, he wrapped up the knife in the muslin curtain and dropped the whole bundle into the dirty water. He heard shouting as the constables forced their way into the gin palace.
A freezing fog had enveloped the whole of Bartholomew’s Field, the site of Smithfield market, making it all but impossible to tell which direction over the treacherous ground he was heading and, advantageously to him, all but impossible for the ten constables to pursue or even locate him. There were other constables attached to the market, appointed by the Corporation of London to regulate practices, but Pyke was not concerned about them; though it was only seven in the morning, they would be ensconced in one of the taverns that bordered the market enjoying their second or third ‘rum hot’ of the day.
Below him the ground was hard but slippery. The usual ankle-deep mulch of manure, rotten animal flesh and faeces had frozen solid, a boon as far as Pyke was concerned because it lessened the smell, but it meant the ground was not easy to walk across. In such conditions, he had seen people slip under the hoofs of frightened cattle and lose their lives. The slow-witted drovers did whatever they could, beat their animals with sticks and rods, gouged their eyes and squeezed their genitals, but they were rarely able to control beasts that were already well used to their cruel practices. When this happened, all one could do was look away and make out that the screams of terror were those of cattle rather than human beings. Afterwards, if the bodies were not at once attended to, they were snatched by the resurrectionists.
Around him through the fog, Pyke could see that cattle and sheep were pouring into the field from every direction. The bleating and lowing of terrified beasts were matched by the barks issuing from the frothing mouths of the drovers’ dogs. Herds of long-horned cattle jostled for position among mounds of quivering animal flesh with Highland oxen. Visibility was less than ten yards and, perversely, was not helped by the drovers’ hand-held lamps, which did little more than transform the fog into an impenetrable wall of white.
The cattle were arranged into smaller circles and between each circle was a pathway for pedestrians and a wooden handrail. Clutching the rail, Pyke followed the path until he was able to make out the faint silhouette of St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Surrounded by ramshackle buildings and the many narrow alleys and courtyards that made up the area to the east of the market, Pyke looked behind him to make sure no one had followed. He was still drowsy from the laudanum he had unknowingly imbibed and numb from the gin. Instinctively he knew he would need hard currency, but apart from this his mind was blank. Pyke knew, of course, that he was still in a state of shock, but he didn’t have the time to indulge such feelings. He also knew, despite the fog and the early hour, that he was well known in these parts and if news of the murder spread he wouldn’t last more than a few hours without being spotted and perhaps lynched.
In Field Lane, a steep, poorly ventilated street that backed on to the sewage-ridden Fleet Ditch, he bought a smock frock, some corduroy breeches and an old hat from a street trader for two shillings and changed into his new clothes in a narrow back alley behind the Old Red Lion tavern. Two young girls, carrying a pail of milk between them, hurried past him and giggled to one another.
In the Old Red Lion, he procured a pen and a scrap of paper from one of the pot boys and scribbled a note to Godfrey Bond, instructing his uncle to collect as much hard currency as he could manage, and meet him on the south side of London Bridge at midday.
He didn’t want Godfrey arriving in a thieves’ den like Smithfield or Field Lane carrying a large sum of money. He wanted their meeting place to be public, safe and identifiable, somewhere that even Godfrey would know how to find. And should Godfrey be followed, it was important that Pyke had his route of escape planned. In this scenario, Pyke would see anyone who was following his uncle and would be able to slip off into the labyrinthine streets that surrounded Southwark Cathedral.
Taking a half-crown from his pocket, he placed it into the pot boy’s hand and explained that if he successfully delivered a note to a Mr Godfrey Bond in person, then Bond would give him a whole guinea for his efforts. The boy looked down at the coin in his hand and gave Pyke a toothy grin. Pyke told him Bond could be found at number seventy-two St Paul’s Yard, and if he was not there the boy was to go to the George Inn on Camden Place. If not there, then the Castle in Saffron Hill, or the Blue Boar in Holborn, and if Godfrey was not in either of those places, the boy was to look for him in the New Wheatsheaf at the top of Ludgate Hill or the Privateer on Wellington Mews.
The boy squinted at him and grinned. ‘I take it this friend of yours likes to take a drink.’
But stupidly, Pyke had not thought to take into account the fog, which had thickened throughout the rest of the morning, so that by the time he heard the Southwark bells, less than a few hundred yards away, chiming midday, he could barely see his own hands and feet, let alone the towering cathedral. The fog was thick but patchy, and as it swirled around him he caught glimpses of the new bridge, which was being built alongside the old one, wooden scaffolding supporting the giant granite arches, and beyond that, disembodied masks of tall ships bobbed up and down in the choppy waters like ghostly apparitions. It was bitterly cold, and his new clothes had left him desperately exposed to the elements. He dug his hands into his pockets and scanned the faces of those walking towards him across the old bridge for any sign of his uncle. The fog momentarily cleared and he saw Wren’s mighty dome appear in the distance and then vanish, as though by a malevolent act of conjuring.
The bridge itself was, literally, falling down. There were no houses or shops on it, as there once had been - they had long since been demolished - and more recently the cobbled surface had been widened, to accommodate more traffic, but these changes had not made the bridge any more secure. The fact that a new bridge was being constructed was a testament to its decrepitude. The creaking arches, which housed waterwheels and supported the main crossing, had been badly damaged by the last big freeze, when the river had completely iced over.
Pyke could hear the giant waterwheels turning beneath him, sucking up the river’s dirty water and pumping it across to both banks for human consumption. No wonder people existed on a diet of gin and beer and did not even think about drinking water they knew to be polluted.
Figures appeared ten or twenty yards ahead of him out of the fog. A city clerk hurried past him clutching a
