The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner (4 page)

“Number four, Bow Street,” Morton called out, and settled back in the seat. He closed his eyes and felt that odd sensation, as though sinking, that lack of sleep brought on during moments of respite. He remembered the hackney-coach driver he'd spoken with earlier, and wondered again what Ralph Acton had been hiding.

Morton drifted into an odd dream where he wandered
lost through dim, ruinous alleys, noisome and narrow. Wraith-like inhabitants lurked silently in the shadows, eyes sunken and hostile—and fixed on him.

The Runner awoke as the carriage rocked to a stop. The facade of the Bow Street Magistrate's Court loomed out of the gloom. A figure loitering on the stair stepped out into the faint morning light.

“Morton?”

Morton pushed the carriage door open. “Yes, come along, Jimmy. We've something to see to.”

The coach swayed as the newest Bow Street Runner pulled himself aboard and settled opposite Morton in a dissonant squeaking of carriage springs. In the faint light Morton could barely see his young colleague, but his great bulk could be sensed. Morton rather liked Jimmy Presley: a costermonger's son, strong as an ox; someone you'd like to have at your side if things got roiled. But Jimmy was still finding his way, still coming to understand he had some decisions to make about the kind of officer—and the kind of man—he wanted to be. It was to this end that Morton had arranged their morning's outing.

Presley leaned forward a bit, out of shadow, and in the soft grey light appeared even younger than his twenty-some years: broad-faced and boyish.

“Have we a profitable bit of business lined up?” he asked, and smiled.

“Profitable? Perhaps. But not in the usual sense.” Presley raised an eyebrow.

“Have you ever been to a hanging, Jimmy?”

The young man's voice faltered a little. “Nay, Morton, I've not. Nor ever wished to.”

“Well, that is about to change. We're off to Newgate to see those sad cullies, the Smeetons, dance on air for
their sins.” Morton eyed his companion. “Mr. Townsend did me the favour of taking me to witness the hanging of the first criminals I ever nabbed. ‘Best to see what your efforts have wrought, Morton,’ he said. ‘If you haven't the stomach for it, then you'd better find yourself another trade.’ It is a part of your education that I thought George Vaughan might neglect.”

Vaughan was another Runner, and apparently Presley's mentor at Bow Street.

Jimmy Presley said nothing, but turned away from Morton, toward the window where the city of London was emerging from the dark of night into the grey of day.

Some distance from Newgate they were forced to continue on foot; the crowds were too thick for the coach to make progress. Morton cast his gaze up at the watery overcast, and wondered if the sky would shed tears for the Smeetons, and any other unfortunates who would come out the “debtors' door” that day.

Morton noticed that Presley carried his baton, the gilt top gleaming in the dull light. “I'd put that out of sight,” Morton said, nudging him. The older Runner had his own baton tucked away in a pocket inside his greatcoat.

Presley looked a bit surprised, but slipped his baton into his belt and pulled his coat over it. They jostled their way along Newgate to within sight of the prison. Here the crowd grew very dense, and Morton and Presley had to force their way forward.

“Look to your purse, Jimmy,” Morton warned in a low voice.

“Here?”
Presley turned toward Morton, wondering if the older Runner was practicing on him.

“Oh, aye. Within sight of the hangman.”

A few paces farther on, Jimmy waved a hand down
the street. “Look at them! There must be ten thousand, if there's a man.”

“Twenty-five, even thirty thousand, it's said.” Morton pointed up Ludgate Hill, past St. Sepulchre's Church. “Not so many years ago they had a panic here—no one knows what set it off—but when all was said and done nigh on thirty people had been trampled to death: men, women, and children. Scores more lay injured. But the very next day the crowds were back—just as large—as though it hadn't happened at all. Oh, they're great admirers of our work, Jimmy.”

This did not elicit even a smile from Presley.

Morton nodded to the houses lining the street across from the blind edifice of the prison. There were people sitting high up on the roofs. “Two sovereigns it would cost you for such a view.”

“Nay!” Presley protested.

“It's the truth. Three guineas to watch from a window.”

Pie-sellers and grog men began their bark, and a low, continuous rumble rose from the crowd pressed into the street before Newgate Prison.

Earlier, dray horses had pulled the wheeled gallows into position and carpenters and their assistants had set the posts in place and erected barriers around the black-draped base.

At a quarter of eight the City Marshall made his slow way on horseback through the pressing masses. Following on foot were the officials of the prison, the court, and the police. Immediately, parents began passing their children forward over the heads of the crowd so that they would be assured of a view.

Morton and Presley were still some way off, but their height allowed them to see. The younger Runner drew a
long breath, and looked around, as though searching for a means of escape. It was a cruel thing Morton was doing, dragging this young man to such a spectacle.

The chimes of St. Sepulchre's started to sound the hour, and were answered by the dim ringing of the solitary bell deep within the walls of Newgate. The black debtors' door swung open and a party emerged onto the platform.

“Hats off! Hats off!” people began to cry, not out of respect, Morton knew, but so that no one's view should be blocked.

Before the sombre party came the Ordinary clergyman, in full canonical dress.

“There he is,” Morton said softly to Presley. “The man who enriches himself by publishing the
Calendar
.” The clergyman used his privileged position to record—or invent—an endless stream of lurid last confessions. “The man in the dandy green jacket is Calcroft, the hangman. See the flower in his buttonhole? He says that as he's not an undertaker he won't dress like one. Oh, he's a rare wit, he is.”

People in the crowd began to shout and jeer; Calcroft tipped his hat to them. Behind the hangman came his assistants, conspicuously bearing ropes, then the warders, and between them, heads bowed and hands bound, a man and a woman.

Presley straightened, his attention entirely focused now.

During the brief course of English justice, and the few days of their incarceration, the Smeetons had changed utterly. Where they had been but forty years of age when Morton and Presley apprehended them, they appeared sixty now. They shuffled forward, bent and ruined, faces pale as new-quarried stone. Morton could
see the woman's cheeks glisten, but there was no sound of sobbing above the hush of the crowd. The man and woman came before the clergyman—like bride and groom, Morton thought.

Just as the nooses were to be set in place, the man took a step forward and raised his head. Morton saw despair written there, but defiance as well, and anger.

“Here's a pleasant diversion for you,” the condemned man hurled out, “watching old Caleb Smeeton and his good wife hang! Thieves, you think us!” He paused and Morton thought the man would break down, but he went on, strangely calm. “But how did those fine Bow Street men know where to nab us? Just where to be, and at what hour? Our ‘friends’ helped them, now didn't they?” he bitterly answered his own question, and glared out at the crowd. “Friends like
you
…

“Aye, one of our own peached on us… the same as told us about the panney, and what hour the owner would be away. The friend who said, ‘It'll be safe, sure. Take your wife to help! Never mind she don't want to. Take her!’ And her a God-fearing woman, who'd ne'er do such a thing for all her life!” He glanced over at her, and she met his eye, tears still slipping silently down her face.

The crowd was hushed as well. This was one of the reasons they came—to hear what the condemned would say, though often they were disappointed and the criminals uttered not a word, or were too distraught to speak. But Caleb Smeeton had a kind of guileless loquacity, and even Morton found himself listening without his usual scepticism.

“A fool they took me for!” Smeeton went on. His head dropped a little. “And a fool I was. But not so simple as I can't see now what was done to me. My so-called
friends were closer to Bow Street than to me—” One of the warders had come forward and took hold of the man's arm. As he was pulled back, Smeeton raised his voice for the first time. “Well, take pleasure in your forty pounds, George Vaughan!” he shouted. “And you, lily-white Henry Morton! You murder a virtuous woman today! You too, Jimmy Presley, you murdering bastard!”

Morton felt Presley flinch beside him, and heard both their names called out in fury on all sides, mixed in with cries of rage against the hangman and the judges, and, over and over, against the despised Runners from Bow Street. The noose was dropped over Smeeton's head and the crowd boiled in indignation, cursing and shoving the constables who held them back from the gallows. Morton and Presley were pushed and jostled this way and that, as though they stood in a surging surf.

White hoods were drawn over the heads of man and wife; the nooses inspected a final time. The woman collapsed suddenly, her knees giving way, and she was suspended by her neck a moment, before the warders pulled her up. But she was only on her feet an instant before the traps were sprung, and the two figures fell. And hung, silently, side by side.

Presley stood mute, staring raptly at the slowly spinning bodies. It was long over. Morton reached out and tugged his coat sleeve.

“Come along, Jimmy,” he said softly, feeling, himself, both sorrow and guilt.

Half-reluctantly, the young man turned away, and they pushed through the crowd, which was suddenly abuzz with chatter, and even laughter. But neither Morton nor Presley shared in this odd sense of release.

They went quite a distance before a hackney-coach presented itself. Morton quietly gave the driver the address of the Bow Street Magistrate's Court, not wanting anyone in the crowd to hear.

The two Runners settled themselves into the poorly padded seats, not saying a word. Morton wondered if Presley was cursing him silently. The young man had pulled his baton from his belt and now sat with it across his knees staring at it quietly.

The older Runner tried to recall what he'd felt toward Townsend the morning they had made this same journey. He'd not felt anger, that was certain, but then he'd respected Townsend enormously, and still did. He wasn't quite sure that Presley held him in the same regard.

The boy had to see it,
Morton told himself. This was how the criminal classes were kept in check. And how the Bow Street Runners made their living—from rewards for convictions. And some of those convictions led to hangings—too many, some thought. Not near enough, others insisted.

Presley leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He remained like that for some time, his big hands rising to cover his face a moment, and then falling away.

“It's an ugly business, Jimmy,” Morton said solicitously.

“Aye. There they were alive one minute, and dead the next. Limp as rags…”

“I was talking about our business: thief-taking.”

Presley reached back and knocked on the small sliding door that separated them from the driver. “I'll step down here!” he called out, and then to Morton, “I'll walk the rest of the way.”

A
t the Bow Street Magistrate's Court Morton
began asking around to discover who had interrupted Glendinning's duel, and was surprised to learn it had been Presley, accompanied by George Vaughan.

Morton found the two Runners with their faces buried in copies of
Hue and Cry
and
The Morning Chronicle
. As he dropped his gilt-topped baton into the umbrella rack beside theirs, the two looked up and nodded.

“ 'Tis a leisured life these Runners live,” Morton said.