The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose (31 page)

This chamber was about a quarter the size of the other and the king stood within it on a raised dais, a minister to each side of him reading from the Bible in a constant sing-song. Ten patients stood in a line before them.

Nell and Eliza took their places at the back and watched as each of the patients approached in turn. The king laid a hand on their head and the other on the afflicted part and said a few words. A medal of some sort was placed about the patient’s neck – which Nell said was of angel-gold and could be sold on afterwards. The ten patients being touched and led off, a basin of water was brought in for the king to wash his hands, then another ten people appeared.

Nell coughed loudly.

‘I see you, Mistress Gwyn,’ the king said, ‘but you’ll have to wait your turn to be touched.’

Nell pulled her cloak back to indicate her belly. ‘’Tis certain, sire, that you have already touched me!’

The ministers looked scandalised and the king hid a smile. ‘I’ll speak to you very soon, Nelly.’

Another half-hour went by before the king called for a break and, while Eliza sat waiting, he and Nell went off into an inner sanctum.

Nell was away only ten minutes or so, and when she returned her face was grave. She didn’t speak until they returned to the carriage.

‘The king says he’ll try to obtain a reprieve for Claude, but we’re not to hope for one,’ she said.

‘Did you say that it was Claude Duval who –’

‘I did,’ Nell nodded. ‘I told him that he owed his life to Duval.’

‘And what did he answer?’

‘He said that whatever Duval had done for him didn’t excuse the fact that he was a highwayman and villain. He said,’ Nell went on sadly, ‘that law and order must be maintained.’ She put out a hand to take Eliza’s. ‘I fear that he’ll hang, Eliza. There’s nothing more we can do to help.’

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘And we’re to ’ave seats right in front of the scaffold, you say?’ Old Ma Gwyn was very pleased with this news.

Nell nodded. She’d been crying, Eliza could see, and her face was pale under the rouge she’d applied, but her spotted veil hid the slight swelling of her eyes.

Eliza had been crying too, but had not, she thought, managed to hide the results as well as Nell, for her nose was red and her eyes ached. She looked at herself in the Venetian mirror in the hall as they waited for the carriage and adjusted her hat so that its veil fell across her face. She wasn’t wearing black, for Nell had insisted that the three of them should wear their best, most beautiful clothes.

‘We must look as if we are going to a wedding, not a hanging,’ she’d said the night before. ‘I’ll wear my crimson wool suit, and you, Eliza, must wear your russet dress and embroidered jacket. I want Claude to see that we’ve dressed in our very best for him.’

Even Ma Gwyn had been prinked up for the occasion, and her unruly shape had been shoe-horned first into a commodious bodice and then a grey linseywoolsey suit with a frilly white jabot at its neck. Her footwear, unfortunately, let her down, for her
packhorse-sized feet were encased in boots which had been tied around with great raggedy squares of sacking to protect them from the mud.

Ma Gwyn and her boots, Eliza thought as they travelled to Newgate prison, seemed to take up most of the carriage, for that lady was sitting four-square in front of the window and blocking out most of the space and all of the light. Nell, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion, had drawn down the blind on her side of the carriage, but Ma Gwyn was waving to people in the street from her window – and had twice spotted someone she knew and insisted that the carriage stop so she could pass the time of day.

‘Ma, ’tis not a party we’re attending, ’tis a hanging,’ Nell said as they travelled down Fleet Street accompanied by a great number of other carriages, sedans and hansom cabs.

‘’Tis a great and special ’anging and an opportunity for mixing with the ’igh and mighty,’ Ma agreed. ‘And for making all sorts of deals,’ she added in an undertone.

Nell looked at Eliza and sighed.

‘I was thinking of a waxworks show,’ Ma went on. ‘A model of Monsewer Duval and ’is ’orse, and maybe a couple of wax well-ter-dos crying at the wayside. I could ’ave it up and going by next week.’ A sly look passed across her face. ‘I was wondering, my sweeting, if you could use yer good offices to obtain the great man’s clothes for me.’

‘No, I couldn’t!’

‘Pity. Still, I’ll try for them meself.’ The old lady waved merrily to someone outside and then an indignant look crossed her face. ‘I’ve ’eard that the
Tangier Tavern is trying for ’is body. They wants to embalm it and put it on show there.’

‘That would be
very
unseemly!’ Eliza protested.

‘That’s just what I said,’ said Ma. ‘For they don’t know ’ow to do these things with taste and discretion, whereas if
I
’ad ’im I’d put on a most
hexcellent
show.’

It was not possible, they soon found, to get anywhere near Newgate Prison. The hanging procession was to leave from here, so the road outside was clogged with people who’d either come to catch a last glimpse of the highwayman or to sell refreshments, and carriages jostled for space with pastry-cooks crying gingerbread, fishsellers selling dried hake and milkmaids leading cows.

‘Been like this since five o’clock this morning!’ a footman on a neighbouring coach informed them.

‘Oh-ay,’ Ma nodded approvingly. ‘There’s a mint o’ money to be made today.’

‘What if there was a last-minute reprieve?’ Eliza asked Nell suddenly. ‘How would the message get through?’

‘A
reprieve?
’ Ma echoed, clearly distressed at the idea.

Nell shook her head. ‘There won’t be,’ she said. ‘The king tried – he spoke to Sir William Morton himself – but told me that he could do no more.’ She sighed. ‘And anyway, he’s gone to Windsor races today and won’t be available for the signing of reprieves.’

As they waited, the tumult about the prison grew greater and Eliza could now hear a faint cry from the
prisoners within its walls.

‘Claude Du-val!’ they chanted as they banged their metal cups on the bars and stamped their feet. ‘Claude Du-val! Claude Du-val!’

Nell spoke to her mother. ‘I thought Rose and Susan were coming in the carriage with us today?’

‘Lawks, no, girl. Susan will be out begging. She always does very well at an ’anging.’ She paused and smiled proudly. ‘She ’as ’er new carbuncle on today.’

Eliza didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this, so she closed her eyes and waited for the hour of ten to strike. At that time the doors of the prison would open and Claude Duval would begin his journey across London to be hanged at Tyburn.

Her attention, however, was soon drawn back to the moment.

‘’Ere, I just remembered,’ Ma said, nudging Eliza violently, ‘I ’ad two people in the tavern last week asking about you.’

‘About me?’ Eliza asked, startled.

‘That’s right. Came up to me right boldly and started asking questions. I didn’t give ’em no answers, of course.’

‘Oh, that’s good.’

‘Leastways, not until they paid me.’

Eliza looked at her anxiously. ‘What did they want to know?’

‘Well, they knew I’d rescued you from Clink, and they knew you’d played the mermaid. They wanted to know other stuff – where you come from and who you mix with – that sort of stuff.’

Eliza felt her spine prickle with fear. Someone was spying on her. Someone knew that she’d helped
Claude Duval …

‘I hope you didn’t give away anything, Ma,’ Nell put in sharply.

‘Very little,’ she said. ‘Not for what they paid. For sixpence I gives very little.’

As ten o’clock struck there was an expectant murmur from the crowd and Eliza, peering over Ma’s shoulder from the carriage window, could see that the heavy gates of the jail had been pushed open. A moment later a series of carts came into view led by the City marshal on horseback, and he and his sheriffs began to clear a path through the crowd, causing several carriages, including Nell’s, to be moved to one side until the procession had passed. A cart pulling a man along backwards on a wooden hurdle came directly after the sheriffs.

‘’E’s committed treason, then,’ Ma informed everyone around them. ‘And ’e’ll be dead afore ’e reaches Tyburn,’ she added as the people in the street started pelting him with all manner of rotten vegetables and not a few dead cats and dogs.

A small cart containing four other condemned prisoners came next: three men and a woman carrying a swaddled child in her arms, and then at the last, to a great uproar of laments and shouts from the crowd, came the cart holding Claude Duval.

Eliza let out a long sigh on seeing him.

‘Oh, he looks
very
fine,’ Nell said, giving a sigh of her own. ‘He is a most fiendishly handsome man.’

‘What’s ’e wearing?’ asked Ma Gwyn, trying to peer over their shoulder. ‘In case I need to know for the waxworks.’

‘A white silk jacket over emerald shirt and waistcoat,’ Nell replied, ‘and he has high leather boots and his highwayman’s hat and mask.’

‘Does he look afeared?’

‘He does not!’ said Eliza. ‘There are ladies giving him their
mouchoirs
and throwing flowers into the cart, and he’s smiling at them and blowing kisses.’

Nell’s carriage not being able to get close to his cart, they followed behind as part of the long procession going slowly down Snow Hill towards Fleet Ditch, with crowds lining the roads all the way. At St Sephulchre’s Church the procession stopped and a churchman rang a handbell twelve times and urged all those condemned to die to pray for the salvation of their souls. He handed white flowers and a cup of red wine to each prisoner before the procession went on.

During the last portion of the route along the teeming Oxford Road the crowds were at their most disorderly, and once a surging mob made Nell’s coach rock so much that they feared it would be overturned. At some point on this last portion of the journey there was also, they heard later, an armed attempt to free Duval, but owing to the large number of sheriffs present the would-be liberators were thwarted.

Until Eliza saw it, she hadn’t been able to imagine the size and scale of the triple tree at Tyburn, the mighty structure, which – as Ma Gwyn cheerfully reminded them – could hang fifteen persons at once. Now as she took her place on the viewing stand erected for the occasion, the three-armed edifice rose before her, large and terrifying. She glanced anxiously back towards the City, praying that she’d see a lone horseman
galloping up the road with a document under his arm. Perhaps some high and mighty lawman would step in, perhaps it was not too late for someone to hand over a princely sum which would save Duval …

The fellow who’d committed treason was, as Ma Gwyn had predicted, dead on arrival at the gallows, but the cart containing the other four prisoners circled the area one last time and then drew up in front of the triple tree amidst mingled shouts of abuse and cries of support. The young woman carrying the child kissed it, again and again, and then, with tears falling down her face, gave it to an older woman standing alongside. As Eliza watched, appalled, the hangman climbed into the cart with the prisoners and fitted the hanging nooses over their heads. He gave the order for the cart to move forward, its driver whipped up the horses and it went off at a smart pace, leaving the four prisoners swaying on the end of their ropes. Eliza screwed her eyes up tightly and turned away.

When Claude Duval’s turn came a few moments later, the roar of the crowd rose to a crescendo and, as his cart was manoeuvred into position under the gallows, a woman ran forward and flung herself on to it, sobbing, and was hauled off by the hangman. Another left a nearby carriage and made as if to go towards him, but fell in a graceful faint before she’d taken as many as six steps. Many of the women in the crowd were crying and others were turned away as if they couldn’t face the scene.

Eliza stared down the roadway once more, but there was no single traveller on a desperate mission of mercy. Claude spoke to the crowd, but his words were drowned out by sobs and cries. His speech would
survive, however, for Eliza could see that what he was saying was being inscribed by two men beside the scaffold.

A church minister spoke a few final words to him; Duval bowed low to the crowd – and, Eliza thought, seemed to see her and Nell in the crowd and wave to them. The hangman fitted the noose around his head. As the order came to move the horses forward a great moan came from the assembled crowd and Eliza gripped Nell’s hand and closed her eyes. When, some moments later, she was brave enough to open them again, Claude Duval’s body was swinging, lifeless, on the end of a rope.

There had been no reprieve.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

That evening, Eliza stayed within her own room, keeping very quiet. She was immensely sad about Claude Duval, but also concerned about the unknown persons who’d gone to Ma Gwyn’s tavern enquiring for her. She’d seen many posters that day asking for information about Claude Duval’s collaborators, and feared that at any moment someone might hammer on the front door and march her off to Newgate Prison. Perhaps naturally, then, when Mrs Pearce came to say that there was a gentleman caller waiting in the drawing room, she thought that moment had come.

‘He can’t want me. Where’s Mistress Gwyn?’ Eliza asked.

‘Gone in the carriage to see Mistress Behn,’ said the housekeeper. ‘I told him that, and he said he’d like to see you instead.’

‘Is he … does he look like a sheriff or a constable?’

‘Not at all,’ said Mrs Pearce. ‘He looks a fine young gentleman.’

A fine young gentleman, Eliza thought, did not sound like someone who’d come to drag her away, and she went downstairs and, going into the drawing room, found Valentine Howard gazing admiringly at the half-naked Lely portrait of Nell which was now
hanging over the fireplace.

Eliza dropped a curtsy, going pink as she remembered their last conversation.

‘Forgive my intrusion,’ he said, giving a brief bow, ‘but I come with some urgency and would ask you to give your mistress a message.’