Dawn came early. The clouds shredded, leaving a pearl-white sky laced with the frayed brown streaks of coal smoke. London stirred.
And in Newgate there would be devilled kidneys for breakfast.
CHAPTER TEN
Sally's horse, a gelding, had fallen lame just after Sunday's nightfall, then Berrigan's right boot had lost its sole, so they tied the gelding to a tree, Berrigan scrambled onto the back of the third horse and Sandman, whose boots were just holding together, led the two girls' horses. 'If we don't return all the horses to the Seraphim Club,' Sandman remarked, worrying about the beast they had simply abandoned, 'they could accuse us of horse thieving.'
'They could hang us for that,' Berrigan retorted, then grinned, 'but I wouldn't worry about it, Captain. With what I know about the Seraphim Club they ain't going to accuse us of anything.'
The remaining three horses were so bone tired that Sandman reckoned they would probably have made faster progress by leaving them behind, but Meg had resigned herself to telling the partial truth and he did not want to disturb her by suggesting she walk, especially after she began complaining again, saying her chickens would be eaten by the foxes, but then Sally had begun singing and that stopped the whining. Sally's first song was a soldier's favourite, 'The Drum Major', that told of a girl so in love with her redcoat that she followed him into the regiment where she became the drum major and escaped detection till she took a bath in a stream and was almost raped by another soldier. She escaped him, the officers discovered her identity and insisted she marry her lover. 'I like stories that end happily,' Berrigan had remarked, then laughed when Sally began her second song, which was also a soldier's favourite, but this one was about a girl who did not escape and Sandman was somewhat shocked, but not too surprised, that Sally knew all the words, and Berrigan sang along and Meg actually laughed when the Colonel took his turn and failed to perform, and Sally had still been singing when the robin redbreast pounced on them from behind a hollow tree beside the road.
The patrolling horseman suspected that the four bedraggled travellers had stolen the three carriage horses, in which he was not far wrong, and he faced them with one of his pistols drawn. The gun's muzzle and the steel buttons on his uniform blue coat and red waistcoat shone in the moonlight. 'In the name of the King,' he said, not wanting to be mistaken for a highwayman, 'stand! Who are you? And where are you travelling?'
'Your name?' Sandman had snapped the question back. 'Your name, rank? What regiment did you serve in?' The redbreasts were all men who had served in the cavalry. None was young, for it was reckoned that a young man would be too amenable to temptation, and so steadier, older and well-recommended cavalrymen were hired to try to keep the thieves off the King's highways.
'I ask the questions here,' the redbreast had retorted, but tentatively because there was an undeniable authority in Sandman's voice. Sandman might be in dusty, crumpled clothes, but he had plainly been an officer.
'Put the gun up! Quickly, man!' Sandman said, deliberately talking to the redbreast as though he was still in the army. 'I'm on official business, authorised by Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, and this paper bears his seal and signature, and if you cannot read then you had better take us right now to your magistrate.'
The redbreast carefully lowered the flint of the pistol, then slid the weapon into its saddle holster. 'Lost your coach, sir?'
'Broke a wheel thirty miles back,' Sandman said. 'Now, are you going to read this letter or would you rather take us to your magistrate?'
'I'm sure everything's in order, sir.' The patrolling redbreast did not want to admit that he could not read and certainly did not want to disturb his supervising magistrate who would, by now, have sat down to a lavish supper, and so he just moved his horse aside to let Sandman and his three companions pass. Sandman supposed he could have insisted on being taken to the magistrate and used his letter from the Home Office to arrange another carriage or, at the very least, four fresh saddle horses, but that would all have taken time, a lot of time, and it would have disturbed Meg's fragile equanimity, and so they walked on until, well after midnight, they trailed across London Bridge and so to the Wheatsheaf where Sally took Meg to her own room and Sandman let Berrigan use his room while he collapsed in the back parlour, not in one of the big chairs, but on the wooden floor so that he would wake frequently, and it was when the bells of Saint Giles were ringing six in the morning that he dragged himself upstairs, woke Berrigan and told him to stir the girls from their beds. Then he shaved, found his cleanest shirt, brushed his coat and washed the dirt from his disintegrating boots before, at half past six, with Berrigan, Sally and a very reluctant Meg in tow, he set out for Great George Street and the end, he hoped, of his investigation.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Lord Alexander Pleydell and his friend, Lord Christopher Carne, almost gagged when they entered the Press Yard for the smell was terrible, worse than the reek of the sewer outflows where the Fleet Ditch joined the Thames. The turnkey who was escorting them chuckled. 'I don't notice the smell no more, my lords,' he said, 'but I do suppose it's mortal bad in its way, mortal bad. Mind the steps here, my lords, do mind 'em.'
Lord Alexander gingerly took the handkerchief away from his nose. 'Why is it called the Press Yard?'
'In days gone by, my lord, this is where the prisoners was pressed. They was squashed, my lord. Weighted down by stones, my lord, to persuade them to tell the truth. We don't do it any longer, more's the pity, and as a consequence they lies like India rugs.'
'You squeezed them to death?' Lord Alexander asked, shocked.
'Oh no, my lord, not to death. Not to death, not unless they made a mistake and piled too many rocks on!' He chuckled, finding the notion amusing. 'No, my lord, they just got squashed till they told the truth. It's a fair persuader to a man or woman to tell the truth, my lord, if they're carrying half a ton of rocks on their chests!' The turnkey chuckled again. He was a fat man with leather breeches, a stained coat, and a stout billy club. 'Hard to breathe,' he said, still amused, 'very hard to breathe.'
Lord Christopher Carne shuddered at the terrible stench. 'Are there no drains?' he enquired testily.
'The prison is very up to date, my lord,' the turnkey hastened to assure him, 'very up to date, it is, with the proper drains and proper close stools. Truth is, my lord, we spoils them, we does, we spoils them, but they is filthy animals. They fouls their own nest what we give them clean and tidy.' He put down his billy club as he closed and bolted the barred gate by which they had entered the yard that was long, high and narrow. The stones of the yard seemed damp, even on this dry day, as though the misery and fear of centuries had soaked into the granite and could not be wrung out.
'If you no longer press the prisoners,' Lord Alexander enquired, 'what is the yard used for instead?'
'The condemned have the freedom of the Press Yard, sir, during the daylight hours,' the turnkey said, 'which is an example, my lords, of how kindly disposed towards 'em we are. We spoils them, we do. There was a time when a prison was a prison, not a glorified tavern.'
'Liquor is sold here?' Lord Alexander enquired acidly.
'Not any longer, my lord. Mister Brown, that's the Keeper, my lord, closed down the grog shop on account that the scum was getting lushed and disorderly, my lord, but not that it makes any difference 'cos now they just have their liquor sent in from the Lamb or the Magpie and Stump.' He cocked an ear to the sound of a church bell tolling the quarter hour. 'Bless me! Saint Sepulchre's telling us it's a quarter to seven already! If you turn to your left, my lords, you can join Mister Brown and the other gentlemen in the Association Room.'
'The Association Room?' Lord Alexander enquired.
'Where the condemned associate, my lord, during the daylight hours,' the turnkey explained, 'except on high days and holidays like today, and those windows to your left, my lord, those are the salt boxes.'
Lord Alexander, despite his opposition to the hanging of criminals, found himself curiously fascinated by everything he saw and now gazed at the fifteen barred windows. 'That name,' he said, 'salt boxes. You know its derivation?'
'Nor its inclination, my lord,' the turnkey laughed, 'only I suspects that they're called salt boxes on account of being stacked up like boxes.'
'The salt b-boxes are what?' Lord Christopher, who was very pallid this morning, asked.
'Really, Kit,' Lord Alexander said with uncalled-for asperity, 'everyone knows they're where the condemned spend their last days.'
'The devil's waiting rooms, my lord,' the turnkey said, then pulled open the Association Room door and ostentatiously held out his hand, palm upward.
Lord Alexander, who took pride in his notions of equality, was about to force himself to shake the turnkey's hand, then realised the significance of the palm. 'Ah,' he said, taken aback, but hurriedly fished in his pocket and
