Rebels and Traitors (73 page)

Alice’ picked her way through the tangle of unpaved lanes and alleys, stepping over piles of litter and runnels of nightsoil, while keeping an eye out for people throwing slops from the teetering tenements above. Nobody seemed to observe her. The dark, filthy courtyards seemed deserted, though she knew better than to feel secure here. Any unguarded moment could have pitched her into worse trouble than she had left behind. She pulled in her skirts and scurried past East Smithfield, where some of the most degraded brothels in London huddled, although the neat lines of little houses had once been pleasant dwellings occupied by hardworking hatters and shoemakers. Now the clothes they once made, so worn they barely held together by threads, were sold second, third or fourth hand in Rosemary Lane. That was where the public executioner lived, the man who had lopped off the heads of Strafford and Laud, or so turnkeys were wont to tell the children at the depot. And he will come for you too, if you give us any trouble!’ It was a fetid little street crammed with sour taverns and totters’ stalls, where Alice’ managed to sell for a penny what she had stolen from the depot. Before leaving the lane, she carried out a swift piece of stall-robbery and fled with a tattered hood that would help to disguise her.

She went west. So she entered the City, by chance reversing the processional route which Thomas Rainborough’s cortège had taken earlier that day. The streets remained subdued. Unsure where to turn, she began a long walk that would bring her back towards the Strand and Covent Garden where she had worked her way in misery before. This time she turned off, reluctant to be spotted again by the man who had lured her. Instead, she slipped into the disreputable alleys around Giltspur Street, north of the Old Bailey.

She survived there for six months. Time had no meaning for her, days, weeks and months slipping by as once again she deteriorated. She heard they beheaded the King, but the tentative start of the Commonwealth meant little at gutter level. Then, since the life of the dirt poor stayed unchanged by the absence of monarchy, one day she walked into a house where a maid had left a door open; she stole a silver charger, which was a felony. When she tried to fence the plate, a thief-taker informed on her; she was brought, spitting protests, before a particularly dyspeptic magistrate. It was her first mistake, so she hoped to get off with a fine and a whipping. Transportation to the colonies was a possibility that made her smile grimly, since she had escaped it once when she was spirited. But her manner was so defiant, she was despatched to Newgate Prison under sentence to be hanged.

She knew what to do; she pleaded her belly’. Examined physically by a jury of matrons’, to check her story, she was pronounced genuinely pregnant. She was as surprised as they were. This would save her life until she came to term; she had no idea how long that would be, having no sure way to tell which of the casual couplings with lawyers’ clerks and muffin boys that she had engaged in when particularly desperate for money had resulted in a baby.

It was born. It died. Still in prison, she disposed of the evidence secretly and for a while longer pretended she was still pregnant, mocking up a convincing bump as she had done in her short career of highway robbery. So she clung on in Newgate, a desperate jail where every staple of life, even a place near the fire, had to be paid for either with money or some base favour to the jailors. Prisoners were denuded of an entry fee on first arriving, then fees for food, for bedding, for clothes, even a release fee if they were pardoned or transported. Also, the longer she stayed, the greater the risk she would catch fatal jail fever.

Eventually she could no longer delay fate, but had to face her penalty. She made no attempt to bribe the jailor or his turnkeys, nor even to petition for the pardon that many obtained. Now friendless, she had nobody to bring in food or arrange an escape. Gone were the days when she could have sent for the proceeds of past robberies to pay her way out of trouble. She had no money to hire a ‘knight of the post’ to give false evidence and save her with an alibi. She sank into dreary acceptance that she was going the gallows. It was as if she no longer cared.

Then, at the last moment, she met Priscilla Fotheringham. Known in those days as a cat-eyed gipsy’, Priss was a pockmarked, beaten-up Scot from the lowest seam of deprivation, already an experienced prostitute, who was about to become a bawd, keeping her own notorious house. Alice’ overheard her cackling with two other whores who were inconvenienced by a spell in jail for robbery. They were laying plans to enliven the new Commonwealth with efficient and lucrative new pleasure-palaces. In years to come it would be said that Priss, and these two equally famous madams called Damaris Page and Elizabeth Cresswell, had shared a cell and plotted a Venetian-style courtesans’ guild, with subscriptions. They planned to hire resident doctors to prescribe contraception, perform abortions, restore virginities and cure venereal disease. They would have scriveners to write letters and draft bonds, which were a bawd’s main means of controlling her girls, since they imposed enforceable penalties for debt. As well as the normal battery of pimps and doorkeepers, or hectors, there would be specialist barbers to shave the girls’ pubic commodities in the exotic Spanish style. A painter would draw erotic art to inspire patrons. And it was alleged that this prison council of working women also decided to link Priss Fotheringham’s house to another legendary establishment: the Last and Lyon at Smithfield, otherwise known as Hammond’s Prick Office, where the whores indulged clients with oral sex — another foreign innovation that raised eyebrows and therefore cost a great deal of money — each girl having first demonstrated her skills on Hammond’s own readily available jockum.

Little of this heady future was apparent in those early days in Newgate. But even as a depressed prisoner in that hellish jail, Priss Fotheringham had manoeuvred access to the few comforts available. Despite her woeful appearance, she maintained links to the outside and could access funds. The usual grubby mystery attached to her background. She was listed as a spinster, though married perhaps twice, not bothering to wait until the first syphilitic husband died before taking a second. When one husband beat her up, she ran away with a halberdier from the Artillery Ground, until he spent all her money and abandoned her. She had been trained in her mother-in-law’s brothel in Cowcross Street, a filthy area of Finsbury where she became a hard-working exponent of the normal horizontal trade — though due to become famous for much more curious gymnastic skills.

She for her part immediately saw in Alice’ a likely wench who was in need of kindly mentoring. Recruiting girls to the trade was a basic brothel skill. She fed the downcast mite a bowl of gruel, strengthened it with a slug of sack and quickly extracted her entire history. Discovering — with a dramatic cry of joy — that during her service in Tinker Fox’s garrison this girl had been taught brewing, Priss Fotheringham revealed that her own release was imminent, expected any day; Priss had made arrangements of a traditional kind with the jailor. Upon regaining her freedom, she intended to open a refurbished alehouse called the Six Windmills by Finsbury Fields; it was previously known as Jack o’ Newbury’s, when according to her it had had a bad reputation that she intended to redeem. It was very well placed, alongside the Artillery Ground where the Trained Bands drilled.

They work up a thirst?’ asked the snivelling wench.

‘Well, let’s say they get up
something…
’

In no time Priss recruited Alice’ to be sprung from prison for a new life — doing honest work with malt and hops in the brewhouse of an allegedly respectable travellers’ rest.

It was in fact the unique retail establishment that would be known to history as Mother Fotheringham’s Half Crown Chuck Office.

‘A man!’ exclaimed Valentine. After long hours of travel he had been hunched and silent, but what he saw made him excited.

‘Oh, I think he is dead.’ Tom, equally fascinated, scrambled to the side of the cart and stared ahead.

Until now they had both been extremely subdued. They were frightened that their mother, the only other person in their world, had been devastated by trouble which she avoided explaining. But children rapidly recover when given a new interest.

‘Do not look!’ instructed Juliana, though her words would make them do it. She tried to whip up the horse: useless. The beast, a cast-off of the Pelhams, had taken them to Colchester and was bringing them back, but it was pulling a cart laden with her possessions and what remained of her father’s, a load it considered an outrageous imposition. It went only at its own pace.

‘Boys, don’t look!’
She was prepared for them to see death. She meant, if he is alive, do not meet his eyes. Do not court trouble. Please, do not let us be drawn into a situation that I cannot manage …

As they passed, the horse took fright at the figure lying in the hedgerow. It dragged sideways with a pathetic whinny and crashed the cart against the bushes at the opposite roadside, so the only solution was to rein in. Fortunately when it slowed to a halt, they were yards beyond the man. All three looked back.

They were in a peaceful country lane. Like so many places, its hedges had not been tended for years. There were long gaps. To either side was English rough pasture, with tall clumps of rusty sorrel among the rank grass. Nothing grazed there. After the floods, it would be soggy underfoot; if she let the boys down to piss, they would come back with muddy shoes and kick slime over her skirt. Dead vegetation was caught among brambles. Great black rooks stalked around the pastureland as if they owned it.

‘Stay here!’ Too late. Three-year-old Val had already slid from the cart, legs straight, skidding on the seat of his britches. Once on the ground, he felt he had the better of his mother. He strolled back, slowly, showing only a little caution. Tom, who was older and more worldly wise, stayed at her side. The person in the hedge had not moved, yet Juliana felt reluctant to call Val, afraid to arouse the man’s attention.

The horse became agitated in the traces. She could not entrust the reins to a child; handling this dreadful creature was almost beyond her own strength. ‘I have to stay here. Thomas, fetch your brother.’

Tom jumped down like a cricket and was off down the lane. Wrong decision, Juliana decided wryly; now I have lost both of them. They were good children, but when they failed to see logic in her orders, they defied her with a casual ease that Tom for one had learned from their father. That was even though they hardly knew their father.

‘He is not dead,’ she heard Tom’s clear voice, telling Val. How could he tell? Heavens, the man must have stirred, or looked at him. ‘Though he is close to it. He has a red coat — he is one of
them.’
Val took his brother’s hand as Tom addressed the man formally: ‘Where are you going, sir?’

The figure spoke. He spoke so that even Juliana, struggling again with the recalcitrant horse, heard his destination.

‘London?
We
are going to London!’ Tom exclaimed. It was not an offer of assistance; he knew better, as his glance back to his mother confirmed. Thank you for the consultation, Juliana thought. The horse settled. She twisted in her seat, still clutching the reins as she half-stood so she could see over their mounded luggage.

‘He might hurt us,’ Val told his brother wisely.

‘Not much!’ Tom retaliated.

It seemed true. The man lay exhausted, obviously sick or wounded. She could see no bandages. Nor could she make out blood, or any of the terrible wounds soldiers suffered. Like the sick and exhausted people she had seen at Colchester, he must be simply failing from neglect and hunger. Colchester was a long way behind them now, but it was possible he too had come from there.

Juliana wanted the boys safely back with her. So much misery had crushed her lately she was unable to abandon another sufferer. Like all people who have little, she was too close to thinking
What if this were me?
Therefore she heard herself call out grudgingly, ‘You will experience a jolting, if you ride with us. But if you can climb in unaided, we will take you to the city gate.’ She had set her conditions. Neither she nor her boys would touch him. He would stay well behind them, crammed among their baggage, where if he was as helpless as he seemed, he could not harm them.

‘Tom, Val; come back here now’ Eager to see what would happen, they came scampering. She pulled them up in the front with her. They waited.

The man had roused himself. With difficulty he stood upright. He wore, half unbuttoned, what had once been the uniform coat of the Parliamentary army, though the cloth was dark with use and the red colour had leached from its dye. He fumbled with a small bundle, his snapsack. One step at a time, he came to the cart. He had days’ of matted beard-growth. The snaggles of hair sticking out from under his hat were filthy though he was fair, apparently. Juliana cursed herself for not having considered whether he had weapons, though he appeared unarmed.