They both continued to stare at the two bodies, half-expecting them to begin to move again. But they would not. The dosage, even if they had taken just one mouthful of the drink, had been enough to stop their hearts beating in their chests.
‘And you be thinking it might stop the trial?’
Ann nodded. ‘If they can’t testify, then there’s no case,’ she answered, hoping to goodness that she was right. ‘Let’s get them changed, so that, if anyone sees them, they won’t have the same appearance.’
James grunted, opened up his canvas bag and tipped two uniforms onto the floor.
‘What be these?’ Ann said, holding one up to view.
‘All I could be finding at short notice,’ he answered, avoiding her gaze. ‘Two men’s outfits you be saying to get… and that be what I did get.’
‘It will have to do,’ Ann acknowledged, beginning to remove Jonas Blackwood’s trousers.
‘Do it really be needed to change their costume?’ he asked, reluctantly, and with some difficulty, dropping down to the floor beside Nightingale.
Ann spoke as she worked. ‘These men will have been seen lots of times. When they don’t go back to Bow Street someone will come looking for them with a description of what clothes they were wearing.’
‘But we be about to be hiding them beneath a lot of old sacking! What devil be looking in the back of my cart?’
Ann shrugged. ‘What about at the other end? When we’re unloading them? They need to look like two drunk…coastguard officers, not two dead men wearing all this,’ she said, gesturing to the growing pile of Jonas’s clothing, ‘the very clothes what they left London wearing.’
James snorted, but carried on undressing Nightingale’s corpse.
Twenty minutes later, James cautiously opened the tradesmen’s entrance to the inn. ‘Right,’ he whispered into the room.
They needed now to move swiftly, which would not be an easy feat, given that she and a one-legged man had to transfer two hulking great dead men into the back of a cart, unseen. She had paid a vagrant to book the private room and so far, nobody had seen her or James Carter here.
Ann placed her hands under Jonas’s armpits and began to drag his dead weight through the doorway and outside. Ann dropped the body down and climbed onto the back of the cart, which James had brought practically to the door.
With some difficulty, James stooped down on his crutch and picked up Jonas’s right arm for Ann to reach. Then, with both of them heaving, the body was slowly hauled up inside the cart.
Ann hurriedly pulled a sack over Jonas, then jumped down from the cart, sweating profusely. She entered the private room once again and dragged the other officer outside in a similar fashion.
Within ten minutes, the bodies of the two Principal Officers had been concealed below a layer of hessian sacks in the open cart, and the horse began to pull it away into the night.
Ann sat in the rear of the cart with a piece of sacking pulled up to her chin. The realisation of what she had done struck on her when she felt the press of cold flesh against her leg. With a nauseating shudder, she yanked up her knees.
Ann closed her eyes and closed her mind for the long journey back to Hythe.
The following evening, shortly after closing the bar, Ann poured herself her second pint of rum and water, enjoying the warm lift which it provided, as she sat down beside the hearth and breathed out. It was a lengthy exhalation, which seemed a partial release in itself of all that was burdening her mind.
Beside her, a hot fire was in the process of devouring great chunks of chopped oak.
She gazed through the vaulting flames to the new brick wall behind it, which now separated the two bars. Last night, upon their arrival back from Ramsgate, James Carter had applied his trade and spent the whole night building a dividing wall with a cavity suitable for the perpetual interment of Jonas Blackwood and Thomas Nightingale.
Ann bit her lip, as she mulled over her actions. She could justify them, to herself at least, provided that what she had done had spared the Aldington Gang from the gallows. Specifically, that it could prevent Sam from having to leave.
She thought, with a profound sense of regret, of her little boy, sound asleep upstairs. She did not know down which of the many potential paths in front of her the course of life would now run, but one thing that she did know, was that William was destined never to know his father. She could never even tell William about him or supply him with the simplest of detail—his name—for she did not know it herself; it was one of two men who stood on either side of the giant chasm called the law.
She sipped more from her drink and cried. As the hot painful tears ran down her cheeks, she realised that it had been the first time that she had cried since her mother had died.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1st February 1827, Maidstone, Kent
Despite the freezing temperatures and dusting of snow outside, the inside of the court was unbearably suffocating. Ann loosened her red shawl, struggling to draw breath in the airless room, thick with the odour of dozens of people wanting to be present when the judgement was passed down on the now infamous Aldington Gang. Ann had travelled up to Maidstone several days ago, taking a seat in a private wagon amongst thirteen strangers, all keen to be present at the closing of this famed trial. She had feigned sleep for much of the journey, in order to avoid the almost continual chatter about the smugglers and what would become of them. If the men’s fate had lain in the
