she woke Sandman as she screamed and beat on the windows. She finally broke a window and began to clamber out, then Sandman heard a grunt, a stifled cry and heard her slump back. 'What happened?' he asked.
'Nothing that need trouble you,' Berrigan said. Berrigan, Sandman and Sally slept on the grass, guarding Mackeson and Billy, though there was no fight left in either man for they were confused, frightened and obedient. They reminded Sandman of a French colonel his men had taken captive in the Galician mountains, a bombastic man who had whined and complained about the conditions of his captivity until, in exasperation, Sandman's own colonel had simply freed the man. 'Bugger off,' he had told him in French, 'you're free.' And the Frenchman, so terrified of the Spanish peasants, had begged to be taken captive again. Mackeson and Billy could have walked away from their tired captors, but both were too scared of the strange village and the sheer darkness of the night and the daunting prospect of finding their own way back to London.
'So what happens now?' Berrigan asked Sandman in the short summer night.
'We take her to the Home Secretary,' Sandman said bleakly, 'and let him pick over her bones.'
It would do no good, he thought, but what choice did he have? Somewhere a dog barked in the darkness and then, as Berrigan kept watch, Sandman slept.
CHAPTER NINE
It was just after dawn when the main door of Newgate Prison was eased open and the first pieces of the scaffold were carried out into Old Bailey. The fence that surrounded the finished scaffold was fetched out first and part of it was placed halfway across the street to divert what small traffic went between Ludgate Hill and Newgate Street this early on a Sunday. William Brown, the Keeper of Newgate, came to the main door where he yawned, scratched his bald head, lit a pipe, then stepped aside as the heavy beams that formed the framework of the scaffold's platform were carried out. 'It's going to be a lovely day, Mister Pickering,' he remarked to the foreman.
'Be a hot one, sir.'
'Plenty of ale over the street.'
'God be thanked for that, sir,' Pickering said, then turned and stared up at the prison's facade. There was a window just above the Debtor's Door and he nodded at it. 'I was thinking, sir, we could save ourselves a deal of trouble by putting a platform under that window. Build it there for all time, see? And put a hinged trap there and a beam over the top and we wouldn't needs to make a scaffold every time.'
The Keeper turned and stared upwards. 'You're talking yourself out of a job, Mister Pickering.'
'I'd rather have my Sundays at home, sir, with Mrs Pickering. And if you had a platform up there, sir, it wouldn't obstruct the traffic and it would give the crowd a better view.'
'Too good a view, maybe?' the Keeper suggested. 'I'm not sure the crowd ought to see the death struggles.' The present scaffold, with its screened flanks, meant that only the folk who rented the upper rooms immediately opposite the prison could see down into the pit where the hanged men and women choked to death.
'They see them struggle at Horsemonger Lane,' Pickering pointed out, 'and folk appreciate seeing them die proper. That's why they liked Tyburn! You got a proper view at Tyburn.' In the old century the condemned were taken by cart from Newgate to the wide spaces at Tyburn, where a permanent scaffold of three long beams had stood with embanked seating all around it. It had been a two-hour journey, punctuated by stops where the tavern crowds obstructed the roads, and the authorities had detested the carnival atmosphere that always accompanied a Tyburn hanging and for that reason, and in the belief that executions outside Newgate would be more dignified, they had demolished the old triangular scaffold and with it eliminated the rowdy journey. 'I saw the last hanging at Tyburn,' Pickering said. 'I was just seven, I was, and I've never forgotten it!'
'It's supposed to be memorable,' the Keeper said, 'else it won't deter, will it? So why hide the death throes? I do believe you're right, Mister Pickering, and I shall pass on your suggestion to the Court of Aldermen.'
'Kind of you, sir, kind of you.' Pickering knuckled his forehead. 'So it's a busy day tomorrow, is it, sir?'
'Just the two,' the Keeper said, 'but one of them is the painter, Corday. Remember him? He was the fellow who stabbed the Countess of Avebury.' He sighed. 'Bound to attract a fair crowd.'
'And the weather will encourage them, sir.'
'That it will,' the Keeper agreed, 'that it will, if it stays fine.' He stepped aside as one of his wife's kitchen servants hurried down the steps with a tall china jug to meet a milk-girl carrying two lidded pails on a shoulder yoke. 'Smell it, Betty,' he called after her, 'smell it! We had some sour last week.'
The platform's frame was slotted and pegged into place while the cladding for the sides and the black baize that swathed the whole scaffold were piled on the pavement. The Keeper tapped out his pipe against the door's black knocker, then went inside to change for morning service. Old Bailey had little traffic, though a few idlers vacantly watched the growing scaffold and a half-dozen choirboys, hurrying towards Saint Sepulchre's, stopped to gape as the heavy hanging beam with its dark metal hooks was carried from the prison. A waiter from the Magpie and Stump brought a tray of ale pots to the workmen, a gift from the tavern's landlord who would keep the dozen men well supplied all day. It was traditional to provide the scaffold makers with free ale, and profitable, for the presence of the gallows would mean a glut of customers next morning.
In Wapping, to the east, a chandler unlocked his back door to a single customer. His shop was closed, for it was Sunday, but this customer was special. 'It looks like being a fine day tomorrow, Jemmy,' the chandler said.
'It'll bring out the crowd,' Mister Botting agreed, edging into the shop past hanging swathes of ropes and dead-eyes, 'and I do like a crowd.'
'A skilled man should have an appreciative audience,' the chandler said, leading his guest to a table where two twelve-foot lengths of hemp rope had been laid ready for Botting's inspection. 'One inch rope, Jemmy, oiled and boiled,' the chandler said.
'Very nice, Leonard, very nice.' Botting lowered his face and sniffed the ropes.
'Like to guess where they're from?' the chandler asked. He was proud of the two ropes that he had boiled clean, then massaged with linseed oil so that they were pliable. Afterwards he had lovingly fashioned two nooses and spliced an eye in each bitter end.
'Looks like Bridport hemp,' Botting said, though he knew it was not. He just said it to please the chandler.
And the chandler chuckled with delight. 'Bain't be a man alive that can tell that ain't Bridport hemp, Jemmy, but it ain't. It's sisal, it is, hawser laid sisal.'
'No!' Botting, his face grimacing from its nervous tic, stooped for a closer look at the rope. He was instructed to buy only the best new Bridport hemp and his bill to the Court of Aldermen would indeed demand repayment for two such expensive ropes, but it had always offended him to waste good rope on gallows scum.
'It came out of the halliard barrel of a Newcastle collier,' the chandler said. 'West African shoddy, at a guess, but boil it, oil it and give it a light coat of boot blacking and no man could tell, eh? A hog apiece to you, Jemmy.'
'A fair price,' Botting agreed. He would pay two shillings and indent nine shillings and ninepence for the two ropes, then slice them after they had served their purpose and sell off the pieces for whatever the market would bear. Neither of the men to be hanged was truly notorious, but curiosity about the Countess of Avebury's murderer might drive the price of Corday's rope up to sixpence an inch. There would be a fat profit, anyway. He tested that the noose of one rope would tighten, then nodded in satisfaction. 'And I'll be wanting some strapping cord,' he went on, 'four lengths.'
'I've a butt of Swedish lanyard all ready for you, Jemmy,' the chandler said. 'So you're still lashing their hands and elbows yourself, are you?'
'Not for long,' Botting said. 'Thank you!' This last was because the chandler had poured two tin mugs of brandy. 'They had a pair of aldermen at the last swinging,' Botting went on, 'pretending they was just there for the entertainment, but I knows better. And Mister Logan was one of them, and he's a good enough fellow. He knows what's necessary. Mind you, the other one wished he'd stayed away. Emptied his belly, he did! Couldn't stand the sight!' He chuckled. 'But Mister Logan tipped me the wink afterwards and said they'll give me an assistant.'
'A man needs an assistant.'
'He does, he does.' Jemmy Botting drained the brandy, then collected his ropes and followed the chandler to a barrel where the lanyard cording was kept. 'Nice easy job in the morning,' he said, 'just two to top. Maybe I'll see you there?'
'Like as not, Jemmy.'
