A Spectacle of Corruption (5 page)

“And you suspect that Greenbill Billy is behind the notes?”

“Could as likely be as not. I’m in Yate’s gang, and I know he don’t go for that sort of thing. He’s a good man, that Yate. Young he is, but smart as a pig running from Bartholomew Fair, and he seems to want to do right. And he’s got the prettiest wife I ever saw. I wouldn’t mind a wife like that, let me tell you. I’ve seen her look at me once or twice, too. I know I’m a bit older than Yate, but I still have some charms that the ladies glance to. Stripped to the waist, I look like a young man, and it wouldn’t surprise me if so pretty a girl didn’t sample the wares away from her husband, if you take my meaning.”

Feeling we had somehow lost our way, I attempted to bring him back on course. “Perhaps I should have a word with Greenbill, then.”

Littleton snapped his fingers. “That’s the thing I propose. He likes to spend his time at a tavern called the Goose and Wheel, off Old Gravel Lane, near the timber yard. I ain’t saying he’s the one who sent the note, mind you, but there’s a good chance that, if he didn’t, he knows who did.”

“Have you told all of this to Mr. Ufford?”

He winked at me. “Not so much of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said in a whisper, “Ufford is a horse’s arse, that’s why. And the less he knows and the scareder he is and the more he goes bum-firking from this place to that, the more he gives me ale and bread and a coin here and there. I’ll be honest with you, since I don’t want you hearing this elsewhere and thinking ill of me. I told him not to bring you in. I said it was because the Church don’t need no Jews to do its business, but the real reason is that I don’t want him to get his mind put at ease too quick. It’s bad for my belly. This here is winter, and there ain’t no work for the quays porters. I keep food and drink in me—and only just enough to keep off death—by catching rats off the docked ships. It’s a disgrace that a porter with a badge like me is so reduced. Now, Ufford came to me and asked could I help him, and he offered me money and food, and these clothes he gave to me too. Milking his udders is a might better than catching rats, and I don’t want to see that well dry up too fast, you understand, though he seems now to feel like he done for me all he need to and I should dance for him like a Mayfair puppet.”

“I understand you.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a shilling, which I handed to him.

“Well, now,” he said, with a monkey’s grin of strong yellow teeth, “this is as much as a fellow could ask for. I think you may have found yourself a friend, friend. If you’re so inclined, I could take you to the Goose and Wheel myself and point out Greenbill to you. He ain’t no friend of mine, and I wouldn’t want him to see me there, but I can point you all the same. Provided you buy me something to drink once we’re there.”

This matter began to have the taste of something I could complete within a day or two, and that was exactly what I needed to help return me to the rhythms of my work. “I’d be most grateful,” I told Littleton. “And if this Greenbill turns out to be our poet, or leads me to him, there will be another shilling in it for you, sure enough.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” he told me. He then took his empty pewter mug and placed it in a small sack by the side of his chair. “ ’Twere mine, once,” he explained. “Or one like it.”

I shrugged. “I can assure you I have no concern for any mugs you might take from Mr. Ufford’s kitchen.”

“Right kind of you,” he said. He reached across the table to my half-full mug, drained it, and placed it with the other in his sack. “Right kind of you indeed.”

CHAPTER 3

O
NCE JUDGE ROWLEY
had pronounced my conviction, I knew I would not be permitted to return to the relative comfort of my room on the Master’s Side—a privilege that had cost dearly but had been worth the coin to keep me away from the dangerous masses of the prison. But no matter how much money he has at his command, any man condemned to hang must reside in the hold, the particular part of the prison designated for such unfortunates, whose ranks I had now joined. While I understood I would not be enjoying the most comfortable of accommodations, I had no reason to anticipate the gravity of the judge’s intentions. When we arrived at the cell in the dark of Newgate’s hellish cellar, one of the turnkeys ordered me to hold out my wrists for shackling.

“For what reason?” I demanded.

“For the reason of preventing escape. The judge has ordered it, so that’s what gets done.”

“For how long am I to be shackled?” I demanded.

“Until such time as you are hanged, I believe.”

“That is six weeks away. Is it not cruel to shackle a man for six weeks without cause?”

“You should have thought of that before killing that spark,” he told me.

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Then you should have thought of that before being nabbed for doing what you didn’t do. Now, hold out your wrists. You needn’t be what they call conscious, I might point out, or without a blow to the head, in order to be shackled right and proper. I’ve a mind to knock you if you don’t do as I say, so I can tell my boys I exchanged blows with Ben Weaver.”

“If trading blows is your plan,” I offered, “then I shall take your offer willingly. But somehow I think you haven’t a fair exchange in mind.” With the gifts given by my pretty stranger clutched tightly in my palm, I held out my wrists and allowed this blackguard to shackle them together. Next, I was made to sit in a wooden chair in the center of the room. Here my legs were bound together in a manner similar to my wrists, but these shackles were attached by a chain to a staple rising from the floor. I had only a few feet of slack with which I might hobble about as best I could.

Once the turnkeys left me there, I had an opportunity to examine my surroundings. The room was not overly small, some five feet wide and ten feet long. It offered no more than the chair on which I sat, a rough mattress, barely in reach of the chain, a very large pot for my necessary business (its size suggesting that it would be emptied none too often), a table, and a small fireplace, now unlit despite the cold. At the very top of one wall was a small and exceedingly narrow window that just peeked above the ground layer. It permitted only a few rays of daylight to penetrate, but this was hardly an escape route, as a cat could not squeeze its way through those slits. There were two windows of a much larger kind that overlooked the hallway, though still not large enough to permit a man to pass.

I breathed in deeply to sigh, an act I regretted at once, for the air was exceedingly unwholesome and stank of condemned bodies nearby as well as those who had long since passed through. It smelled of chamber pots in need of emptying and those in need of being mopped. It smelled of vomit and blood and sweat.

The sounds were of no more comfort. I could hear the nearby clicking of rat claws on the stone floor and the scrape in my ear of the lice that had not given me a moment to adjust to my new surroundings before latching onto my person. Somewhere in the distance a woman sobbed, and perhaps a bit closer: drawn-out laughter, treacly with madness. My closet was, in short, a dark and desolate place, and the turnkeys had not left me alone for more than a minute or two before I began plotting my departure from it.

I am no master of escapes, but I had broken into a goodly number of houses in my younger days, after my career as a pugilist had been forced to a period by a leg injury. I therefore knew a thing or two about the use of a lockpick. I took the device that the pretty stranger had pressed into my hand and held it in my palm, as though its weight could tell me something of its utility. It did not, but I was determined that the lady’s efforts should not be in vain. True, I had no ideas of who she might be or why she should have gone to such lengths to aid me, but I thought it better to address those matters after I was free.

I therefore set myself to the task of digging into the lock of my shackles. My wrists being manacled together, I had none of the dexterity a housebreaker enjoys, but I had not the fear of being happened upon either, so with careful application I was able to insert the pick into the lock and feel out the mechanisms. It took some time to be able to find the spring, and more time to activate it, but I managed to trigger the release, and in less than a quarter hour too. What a glorious sound, the muted snap of metal upon metal, and the musical slackening of the chains! My hands were now free, and after rubbing my wrists for the few moments that I indulged in this new liberty, I began work on my feet.

This was slightly more difficult because of the angle, because in just fifteen minutes what little light graced the room had begun to fade, and because my fingers had begun to grow tired from such precise labors. But soon enough I was entirely free of my chains.

There was little enough reason to rejoice, however. Though I could now move around my cell at liberty, I could go nowhere, and if my state of release was discovered I should find myself in a worse position than that in which I began. Now I would have to work quickly. I looked around my cell in the growing darkness. The onset of evening would be an advantage, of course, providing cover for my actions. It nevertheless increased my feeling of melancholy.

Why had such a thing happened to me? How could it be that I was now condemned to hang for a crime I never committed? I sat down and put my face in my hands. I was on the verge of weeping, but then I at once chastised myself for giving in to despair. I was free of my chains, I had tools, and I had strength. This prison, I declared to myself with spurious determination, would not detain me long.

“Who’s that over there, clanking around so?” I heard a voice, thick and distorted, through the walls of the prison.

“I’m new,” I said.

“I know you’re new. I heard you come in, didn’t I? I asked who you were, not about your freshness. Are you a fish or a man? When your mama set a steaming cake before you, you wanted to know if it was seed or plum, not when she first started to bake it.”

“My name’s Weaver,” I said.

“And what do they have you for?”

“For a killing in which I took no part.”

“Oh, that is always the way, isn’t it? Only the innocent end up here. Never been a man condemned who done what they said. Except me. I done it, and I’ll say so like the honest man I am.”

“And what do they have
you
for?”

“For refusing to live by the law of a foreign usurper, is what. That false king on the throne took away me livelihood, he did, and when a man tries to take it back, he finds himself thrown in prison and sentenced to hang.”

“How did the king take away your livelihood?” I asked, without much real interest.

“I was in the army, don’t you know, serving Queen Anne, but when the German stole the throne, he thought our company too Tory in its tone and had us disbanded. I never knew nothing but soldiering, so I couldn’t think of how to make my living but by that, and when I couldn’t do that no more, I had to find another way.”

“That way being?”

“Riding out on the highway and stealing from those what support the Hanoverian.”

“And were you always quite certain to rob only those who support King George?”

He laughed. “Perhaps not so careful as I might have been, but I know a Whiggish coach when I see one. And’s not as though I never did try to make my living in honest ways. But there’s no work to be found, and people are starving upon the street. I was not about to be one of those. Anyhow, they nabbed me with a stolen watch in me pocket, and now I’m to hang for certain.”

“It is a small crime,” I told him. “They may prove lenient.”

“Not for me, they won’t. I made the mistake of being taken in a little gin house, and the constable what took me heard me raise a toast to the true king just before he dragged me away.”

“Perhaps that was unwise,” I observed.

“And the gin house was called the White Rose.”

The entire world knew that the white rose was a symbol of the Jacobites. It was a foolish place to be arrested, but men who broke the law were often foolish.

I knew that support for the Chevalier was common among thieves and the poor—I had many times been in the company of men of the lower sort who would gladly raise a bumper in the name of the deposed king’s son—but such toasts were generally not taken very seriously. Men such as this, who had lost their army positions after the Tories had been purged, often took to robbing the highways and smuggling, joining gangs of other Jacobite thieves who told themselves that their crimes were but revolutionary justice.

As I write this memoir, so many years after the events I describe, I know I may find some readers too young to remember the rebellion of ’45, when the grandson of the ousted monarch came close to marching upon London. Now the threat of Jacobites seems no more serious than the threat of bugbears or hobgoblins, but my young readers must recollect that, in the days of which I write, the Pretender was more than a tale to frighten children. He had launched a daring invasion in 1715, and there had been numerous plots since to return him to the throne or stir up rebellion against the king. As I sat in prison, a general election loomed upon us, the first to take place since George I acceded to the throne—so this election was widely seen as one that would determine how much the English had come to love or hate their German monarch. It therefore seemed to us likely that at any time we might be subject to an invasion in which the Pretender would take up arms in order to reclaim his father’s throne.

The Jacobites, those followers of the son of the deposed James II, saw this moment as their finest opportunity in seven years to retake the throne for their master. Outrage toward the ministry and, less openly, toward the king had been running hot ever since the collapse of the South Sea Company stock in the fall of 1720. As the Company sank, so too did the countless other projects that had taken root in the seemingly fertile soil of soaring stock prices. Not just a single company but an entire army of companies had been destroyed in an instant.

As wave after wave of financial ruin crashed upon our shores, as riot from food shortages and low wages kindled like dry straw in a drought, as men of great wealth lost their fortunes in a flash, discontent with our foreign king’s government rose and overflowed. It was later said that in the months following the bursting of the Bubble, the Pretender might have ridden into London without an army and found himself crowned without the loss of a drop of blood. That may or may not be the case, but I can assure my readers that I have never before or since seen hatred toward the government as volatile as it was in those days. Greedy Parliamentarians scrambled to screen the South Sea Company directors—that they might better screen their own profits from the Company’s stock fraud—and the crowds grew angrier and more vicious. In the summer of 1721 a mob descended upon the Parliament itself to demand justice, an unruly throng that dispersed only after three readings of the Riot Act. With an election imminent, the Whigs, who controlled the ministry, realized that their grasp on the government might be loosening, and it was widely believed that if the Tories could return a majority, King George would not remain our monarch long.

I write now with a political understanding I did not possess at the time, but I knew enough of the public resentment toward the king and his Whig ministers to understand why this thief’s political inclinations should have reflected so ill on him. Thieves and smugglers and the impoverished tended to lean toward the cause of the Jacobites, whom they saw as dashing outcasts like themselves. After the Bubble burst, and more men than ever before were struggling for bread, thieves and brigands began to appear in unprecedented numbers.

“It is very hard,” I told him, “that a man should be hanged for saying what men have always said.”

“I think so too. It is not as though I’ve killed anyone. Not like you.”

“I haven’t killed anyone either,” I said. “Not anyone for whose murder I’ve been charged, at any rate.”

At this he laughed. “The name is Nate Lowth,” he said. “What did you say your name was again?”

I stood up now. This Lowth, with all his chatter, seemed to help me find the fire I needed to act. I walked over to the windows that looked out on the hallway. There were bars, of course. I examined each one to see if it might be loose.

“Weaver,” I called over. “Benjamin Weaver.”

“Sod me!” he shouted. “Benjamin Weaver the fighter in the cell next to me. Isn’t that the most rotten luck in the world?”

“How so?”

“Why, on hanging day, when a man can shine his brightest, no one will give a fig for poor Nate Lowth. They’ll all be there to see Weaver swing. I’ll just be a mere tidbit to whet their appetites.”

“I intend not to make myself conspicuous,” I told him.

“I appreciate your neighborly gesture, but it may not be in your hands. They’ve heard of you, and it’s your end they’ll want to gaze on.”

None of the bars were so loose as I would like, so I picked up the file that the woman had given me and reexamined the metal that blocked my path. The bars were too thick to saw through. It would take me all night and more, and I had no intention of being in my cell when the sun came up. Instead, I began to chip at the stone around the bars. The metal of the file was strong enough that it did not bend or snap. I used a blanket to muffle the sound as best I could, but the icy crack of metal on stone still echoed through the hallway.

“What’s that noise?” Nate Lowth asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him between blows. “I hear it too.”

“You lying heathen,” he said. “You’re making a break for it, ain’t you?”

“Of course not. I honor the law above all else. It is my duty to hang if told to do so.” I had now removed an inch or two around one of the bars, and it was considerably loosened, though I could not yet tell how far it descended or how long I would have to continue my labors.