Anticipation (5 page)

‘I think you must know I refer to your brother the judge, sir.’

‘I think I must know that you do.’

Why is it that a man will scrabble so to save his body from exterior discomfort, but give not a single thought to the greater dangers that assail it from within? It’s most frustrating. Harry has long since despaired of the minds of common men, but from Benjamin Berkeley he’d expected more.

On the other hand, this arm of the family business is well established. And he has recently seen a fine house in Blackheath that Violet would love.

(Number 19 Montpelier Row. It really is lovely. Neoclassical, white and grand, its pillars harking back to the Asklepieion, to Galen and Hippocrates, that oath which Harry, being a surgeon, never took. In another century, I’ll sit across from it, on the grass of the heath, eat an egg sandwich and wonder what I wouldn’t give — or take — to own it. Feel the wriggle of Harry under my skin.)

‘I hope you won’t think me too vulgar,’ says Berkeley, ‘if I tell you that in spite of my present difficulties, I remain a very wealthy man.’

‘I’ll know you to be a thief and a convict, whatever you may say.’

‘As you wish.’

Harry, who has been playing this game since his days as a young surgeon in Newgate, sighs. ‘I don’t see what good you think my brother can do you, since you’re already here. What is it you want? Do you hope for an early berth to Norfolk Island?’

‘My hopes,’ begins Berkeley, and stops. He stares at Harry, a look my great-great-grandfather often sees on the face of a patient waiting for the knife. ‘My hopes are not for me.’

‘I see,’ says Harry, and this time he does. No man in England could not, unless he was deaf as the lad in the corner, and without sufficient wit besides to read the papers. ‘You fear Lady Greene will hang.’

Berkeley flinches.

‘You wish her sentence to be commuted. It is not impossible.’ Harry, his disappointment fading, looks at the Last Highwayman’s face and considers the matter more kindly. ‘And then, perhaps, if you were both to be transported to New South Wales, how much the better!’

‘No,’ says Berkeley quickly. ‘That’s not what I want.’

‘No?’ Harry is quite hurt. ‘What do you mean, man? Eight years and you’d both be free, all your sins forgotten.’

‘It would break her.’ Berkeley raises his manacled hands as far as he is able. ‘She’s not like me.’

Harry watches him bend his head to his hands and wipe his eye.

‘She should have thought of that,’ my great-great-grandfather says, ‘before she pulled the trigger.’

Kitty Greene in a June dawn. A haze of slinking foxes and parting lips and hemlock and blonde hair. Her skin silky sweet as cream and her mouth like a little plum. Ben Berkeley loves her, then and now, as only a man of truly great heart can love a stupid woman. And he has not the slightest doubt that what has happened is his fault.

On the lowest deck of the
Repel
, he turns his cheek into his hammock. Were it not for him, nothing would threaten her neck but the weight of Sir Dolly’s diamonds, and the three of them — Kitty and Dolly and he — would not be where they are now. In Newgate, awaiting the pleasure of snag-nailed gaolers and the court. Ten feet below Epping Churchyard, a pistol ball lodged in the heart. And suspended here, amid the farts and nightmares of three hundred condemned souls.

Kitty Greene this December night, scratched and bruised and
shaking like a whippet. Her white skin turning blue with cold and pinches and her mind in terror of the noose. Ben is laying out no small fortune to make sure this isn’t so. He has paid for blankets and kindness, chicken pies and lemonade and linen sheets and a feather bed. But this shivering Kitty won’t let him be.

‘Dolly, look! He’s just as they say in the papers!’ said Katherine Greene, the very first time she saw the muzzle of Ben’s pistol. ‘A gentleman robber as in the olden times. Turpin and Malory. Gentleman Jim.’ And reaching out for the hand Ben offered, she missed the carriage step and fell against his arm.

‘Aye, and he’ll hang like ’em, too,’ muttered Sir Adolphus, not too loudly — though indeed, had he shouted, Ben still would not have heard him.

‘I’d like to see your face,’ she said. Was it that? Some such words. Later, he remembered more clearly the weight of her breasts and the feel of her skin beneath his hands as he helped her off with her pearls.

‘Perhaps you will,’ he whispered. Because that’s the sort of thing they do, the men in poems. They lose their hearts in the dark.

Before they have followed their mistress’s coach for a week, and know the gold of her hair and the blue of her eyes and that no celestial simile is worthy of such beauty. Before they risk their necks on a note without a second’s anguish. Before they wait, and wait, in Epping Forest, for that first private interview at which many pretty things could be said, and are, perhaps, but hero and heroine both know their purpose there, and it’s the rhythm beneath the poem, the metre of their blood.

‘I like your face,’ she said, her mouth pouting so prettily it always made him want to pop something inside.

He doesn’t remember that it was Kitty’s idea to steal the diamonds.

How they glittered, there in the woods! Facets of yellow autumn moon at her ears and throat, red torchlight and silver stars. Old Thompson too slow and Garrick too drunk to reach for the guns.

He was watching her reach up, behind her neck, to undo the clasp. He should have been watching Dolly. What man likes to be robbed twice?

Three shots in the dark. The first barrel of Dolly’s musket passed through the sleeve of Ben’s cape. The second barrel went through the carriage floor — Sir Dolly being, by that time, dead. In the window behind her husband, Kitty, blood-spattered, one earring still on, a smoking pistol in her hand. Servants whiter than the moon.

How could he leave her?

‘They’ll tell on us,’ she said.

‘No,’ Ben Berkeley lied. ‘No one will find us.’

Dependent, all, now on the will of Hang’em Harding, God rot his purulent thieving soul.

‘It’s impossible,’ says Harry to Ben Berkeley. ‘I’ve made your enquiry. But it’s as I told you — she will be convicted. There’s no judge on earth who could let a murderer go free.’

‘Lady Greene must not be convicted.’

‘You cannot make your wish so by repeating it! If you must plead for miracles, do so to God, for he alone can help you.’

Berkeley is silent.

Harry shakes his head. ‘Hang it all, man’ — an unfortunate choice of expression, he realises too late — ‘all of London knows she’s guilty, never mind the jury.’

‘She’s innocent. When the jury look at her, they’ll see.’

It’s true, Harry reflects, that no jury likes to hang a pretty woman. But in the case of Lady Greene, they will have no choice.

‘She shot her husband in the back. Before witnesses,’ he reminds Berkeley.

‘One remaining witness,’ corrects the prisoner, ‘other than myself. And I say that it was an accident. That she was aiming over Sir Dolly’s shoulder, at me.’

‘Yes, yes, man, I know your story. But the coachman tells a different one, don’t you see?’

‘The jury must not hear him.’

Harry can’t help but laugh. ‘Indeed, that would be better for you!’

‘His testimony,’ says Berkeley, quite seriously, ‘should not be admitted.’

‘You don’t say! On what grounds?’

‘Thompson’s wits have left him. He can no longer order events in his mind. There are three asylum doctors who will swear it.’

‘Can you think of no simpler way,’ Harry asks in wonder, ‘to effect the old man’s silence?’

‘Perhaps.’ Berkeley sighs. ‘But I wouldn’t have an old man suffer for being faithful. He wants to be true to his master. He’s mistaken, that’s all.’

‘A costly mistake for you!’

‘But one I have means to pay for.’

Harry presses the tips of his fingers to his mouth. He crosses his ankles, left over right, then right over left again. He can hear a guard shouting out on the dock. The clink of picks breaking rock. Further off, the whump of the gunners testing cannon.

‘The risk —’ He stops. Berkeley has an odd look in his eye.

Harry thinks of stepping out, alone, in front of a flying carriage. One musket — one pair of eyes — against two, or three, or more. The greater gamble Berkeley is making with his life right now does not occur to my great-great-grandfather. But Harry has no doubt that he and the Last Highwayman are made of different stuff. That somewhere, in the peculiar pattern of their nerves, the form of their organs, the chemistry of their blood, their physiologies diverge.

‘The risk,’ he continues at last, ‘is very great.’

‘Then I beg you, sir, to consider the reward that will outweigh it!’

Harry pictures the house in Montpelier Row. He remodels its study, adds to its walls the pair of pearl-handled pistols he’s had his eye on. Sadly, the equation is still wanting.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, with some truth, ‘but I’m afraid there really is no — what is it, man?’

Berkeley is turning an odd shade of grey. He sways forward, pulled down by the weight of his chains.

‘Sit!’ orders Harry, quickly providing a chair. ‘You have pain? Where?’

‘My chest.’ Eye to eye now, the man fixes him with a look of panic.

‘One moment!’ Retrieving his stethoscope from the desk, Harry opens Berkeley’s shirt and applies the instrument to the robber’s chest. A fascinating discordance makes its way up the wooden tube to his ear.

‘A leech, man!’ he cries, gesturing as well as he can with his free hand at his assistant, who, with that sixth sense of the deaf, has turned to face the commotion.

As the blood flows, Berkeley’s breathing eases, and a little colour returns to his lips. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he asks in a low voice. ‘Am I dying?’

‘Maybe. It’s hard to say.’

‘I felt …’

‘What did you feel, man? Tell me!’

‘That my heart had run amok. Thrashing away like a carriage horse gone mad in its traces. And my lungs would not fill.’

‘Ah!’ Harry pulls the robber’s lower eyelid down. It is now a satisfactory pink.

‘Ah?’

‘Berkeley, you have an abnormality of the heart. That much is certain. I’ll do my best to help you. But further investigation is required. There are theories we might prove, experiments, tests to determine its true nature.’

‘Experiments, sir?’

‘Don’t be alarmed.’ Harry laughs. ‘I don’t intend to drill holes in your head! Although,’ he continues, thinking aloud, ‘opening up a section of rib might well prove efficacious. If we could only see the heart …’

‘Such tests,’ says Berkeley, who is looking very pale again, ‘would carry great risk, would they not?’

‘What is risk, man? This is science!’

Berkeley looks at him thoughtfully.

‘You are in good hands,’ eager Harry assures him. ‘The pathology of criminal dysfunction has been the study of my life.’

‘We each have our passion, then,’ says the robber, slowly. ‘Yours is science. Mine you already know.’

Harry blinks. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You can’t mean to trade your consent to treatment for my assistance in the other matter? That you would refuse my professional help — throw away your health — your life, probably — if I don’t arrange the matter of Lady Greene?’

Berkeley shrugs. ‘Your treatment doesn’t seem to promise a cure. And as for my life’ — he glances around him — ‘it’s no longer so sweet to me that I couldn’t bear its loss.’

Harry’s feet are shocked into stillness. In all his years as a prison surgeon, he has never heard a proposal so outlandish. He rocks forward, and back.

‘Say for a moment,’ he suggests, ‘that it were to be done.’ He rests his chin on the knuckles of both hands, considering Ben Berkeley. ‘Then you would give your consent — your written consent — to whatever investigations … tests … I might wish to perform?’

For a moment, grey-lipped Berkeley returns his stare. Then he nods.

Harry sits back. ‘Leave it with me, then. I’ll see what I can do.’