Francis Selwyn - The Hangmans Child: A Sergeant Verity Novel

The Hangman's Child

A Sergeant Verity Novel

Francis Selwyn

Francis Selwyn 2000 First published in Great Britain 2000

ISBN 0 7090 6683 X

Robert Hale Limited Clerkenwell House Clerkenwell Green London EC1R OHT

The right of Francis Selwyn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Derek Doyle & Associates, Liverpool. Printed in Great Britain by Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

To Louis B. Chandler, a salute from another stretch of the trenches

Author 's Note

Jack Rann's Newgate climb was performed in reality by Henry Williams in 1836. Walker's Cornhill Vaults were entered by Thomas Caseley during the weekend of 4-5 February 1865. James Sargent's micrometer of 1857 is illustrated on p. 157 of Vincent Eras' Locks and Keys Throughout the Ages, Lips' Safe & Lock Manufacturing Company, 1957. With the exception of these debts to reality, the characters and incidents of the present novel are entirely fictitious.

ONE

THE HANGMAN'S CHILD

'Handsome' Jack Rann shivered in the cold May morning of his dream. The windows of tall London house-fronts flamed with summer dawn, where Snow Hill curved up past The Saracen's Head and entered Newgate Street. The rooms of the Magpie and Stump, ablaze with gaslight until dawn, were blank and dark. An aproned potman was clearing the picked carcasses of cold fowl and rabbit, the debris of kidneys and lobsters. Scraps and cigar butts littered the sand of the wooden floor.

A low anthem of voices rose from the mass of men and women wedged between the walls of Newgate Street. Uniformed constables stood at the rear of the crowd, among the taunts of a dozen stunted and sallow youths. Dandies at the upper windows of the tavern stroked their moustaches and twirled their cheroots. Not a head among thousands turned from the sight before them.

High in the blank wall of Newgate Gaol was a tiny door, used only on such mornings as this. A temporary black-draped platform stood out from it. Carts carrying posts and planks had rattled up Snow Hill as late as four in the morning to complete the work. The carpenters had erected two black-painted posts on the platform with a stout cross-beam between them. A dark iron chain dangled from the centre of the beam. The hammering died away.

Last of all, a coach carrying the Sheriff of Middlesex and his guests made its way through the c rowd and the doors of the great prison closed behind it. The clock-hands on the square medieval tower of St Sepulchre stood at ten to eight. The onlookers shivered expectantly in the early chill.

An elderly man, his frock-coat and cloth hat faded by rain and sun, wandered the fringes of the crowd with a tray of pamphlets round his neck. He stared reproachfully at each group, pausing to offer his goods in a mournful chant.

'A Voice from the Condemned Cell! Being the last confession of Handsome Jack Rann, who suffers today for the barbarous murder of his friend and accomplice, Pandy Quinn. See Handsome Jack in his earliest years, took from his orphan home to be made a climbing-boy! But the poor infant was never taught to shun the broad way leading to destruction! He that had no parents to guide him becomes today the hangman's child!'

'Hurrah!' shouted a drunken subaltern, his arm round a laughing woman at an upper window. 'Hurrah, then, for Handsome Jack!'

The patterer glanced up, frowned, and resumed his dirge.

'Jack being a thief from infancy, the demon that ever haunts the footsteps of the vicious seduced him to spill the blood of Pandy Quinn in a tap-room of the Golden Anchor off Saffron Hill at Clerkenwell, with a cowardly Italian stiletto-blade! See him on the gallows trap! Hear him in his own confession! Printed for six pence with two cuts and a set of verses!'

At the climax of the old man's chant, the minute hand on St Sepulchre rose to a perfect vertical and the bell of the dark tower tolled eight times. Stillness held the crowd. The patterer with his tray of yellowed pamphlets shuffled on. In the press-yard of the prison, the iron had been knocked from the legs of the fourteen men and women who would now be led out, one by one, to die. Only a husband and wife, who had poisoned their lodger for his clothes, were to be hanged side by side at the end of the morning's ritual.

The little door opened, high in Newgate wall. A man's head appeared briefly and vanished. He reappeared, distinctive and self - assured in black suiting and dark cravat. A group of young officers on a balcony of the Magpie and Stump jeered him. Their hooting faded into silence. Four more men followed the black-dressed figure in a close group. Jack Rann was russet-suited, like a countryman visiting the city, but with his shirt-collar open for the hangman's convenience. His hands were strapped together in front of him and, as he stood there, he opened his palms once or twice in a helpless little gesture.

A group of apprentices at the rear of the crowd, their view obstructed, shouted, 'Hats off! Heads down in front!'

A voice from the platform drifted high across the crowd. The condemned who were still alive and in full health heard the opening of their own burial service.

'Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live .... He cometh up and is cut down like a flower....'

In the silence of the great crowd, the governor of the gaol turned to the hangman and consigned the victims to him.

'Your prisoners, Mr Calcraft!'

Jack Rann placed himself quietly beneath the beam. The hangman, who had first come alone on to the platform, pulled him round to face the crowd, took a white night-cap from his own pocket and drew it down firmly to cover the murderer's face. The onlookers packing Newgate Street wall to wall held their breath. The executioner stepped back and gave a signal to his assistant below the platform by three taps of his heel on the planking. The wags on the tavern balcony shouted the count.

'One ... Two ... Three!...'

Jack Rann, in the daylight of his dream, wondered why he could still see the balcony of the Magpie and Stump when the night-cap was already drawn down to veil the bulging eyes and starting tongue, the portrait of a 'Hangman's Child'.

While there was time, he cried out that he could still see, that he was also a figure in the crowd, watching himself up there on the gallows trap.

The bolts of the trap thudded, the hinged wood banged against the frame. The hooded figure felt himself stumble into the dark drop as it opened under him. His cry choked, as he first went down and then shot upwards again, sitting tall and awake on his plank bed in the depth of night. His tongue was sticking out between his teeth, as if in obedience to the dream.

The sky beyond the barred window was black, yellowed here and there by fire on a dark cloud of London smoke. He was not hanged at all. He had all that to come.

Jack Rann's heart thumped like a trip-hammer as reason returned. The thud of the trap had been only the warder's hand on the sliding spy-hole as the Hangman's Child cried out in his shallow sleep.

Then, as at every waking for the last two weeks, his heart's beating filled his breast and his throat with a swelling dread. Eight mornings from now the midnight dream was to be reality. Tomorrow would be the last day allowed for visits. Three days later the warders, who watched the corridor of death-wards, would move into the cells of those whose sentences had been confirmed, for fear they might harm themselves in their despair.

No one had entered in answer to his cry, such sounds were too common along the death-wards. A warder's voice from the stone corridor said, "e's himself again now.'

A yellow oil-lamp glimmered through the open slot into the whitewashed oblong of the cell.