The Bride of Newgate Page 6

  If he swallowed a deep draught now, it would revive him and drive away the horrors. On the other hand, it would almost certainly send him drunk to the gallows. He would stumble and reel, pierced by the ridicule of the mob who came to see him die: an object of repulsion even to himself.

  “It is not fitting,” he said, and smashed the bottle on the stone floor.

  Immediately he regretted it. The brandy splashed out into mud and straw wisps. “You fool!” he said, as though all lost opportunity went with it. But it was done now, and he could go quietly.

  The wards of Newgate were already awake, and so noisy that they blotted out other sound. He would not hear the singing that would begin, at any moment now, from the crowd assembled in Old Bailey.

  The cold minutes moved on. He could not count them or even estimate them. Over his head the window sent down a slanting shaft of light; as it whitened, it showed the full squalor of the dungeon. His imagination had already compared it to living inside the stomach of a toad.

  “Charity!” he said contemptuously. All the lost, impossible wishes rose up again.

  To meet Jack Buckstone with sabers, face to face, on firm green turf!

  To meet Caroline Ross, and humble her as no woman had ever been humbled!

  To find the murderer of Frank Orford, and see that person in the condemned cell!

  Even, once more, to see Dolly Spencer ….

  Suddenly, with a wish he had thrown away and despised, he longed for nothing more than ordinary soap and water, to wash himself. To meet his death like this, he saw with clarity, was as bad as to go mouthing and drunken. Last night he could have had soap and water. Now it was too late.

  At that moment hurrying footsteps crossed Press Yard outside. Someone, surprised at finding the cell door even a shaving of an inch open, flung it wide and glanced in. The newcomer was Mr. Hubert Mulberry, that somewhat eccentric lawyer who had credited Darwent’s account of the murder.

  “Mulberry,” the prisoner whispered.

  The newcomer made no reply. Breathing hard, fat and unwieldy, he moved forward until his face was under the narrow, harsh beam of light from the window. He wore an old brown surtout, and his neckcloth was disarranged. A soiled white hat, emblem of the present-day man of law as opposed to the old school, was cradled in his arm. His somewhat bloated face, with the spikes of grayish-brown hair plastered against the forehead, wore an expression Darwent had never seen there and never expected to see.

  Mr. Mulberry cleared his throat.

  “I bring great news,” he said after a long pause. In a low voice he added: “My Lord Marquess.”

  Chapter V

  Recounts the End of a Champagne Breakfast

  “MAKE WAY, THERE!” SHOUTED Joseph Eldridge, the Chief Turnkey, and leaned out of the window above the Main Gate. “Make way, d’ye hear?”

  His words were lost, whirled away in the tumult of the crowd below.

  In a large cleared square before debtors’ door, they had driven the usual iron posts into the ground between the cobbles, and strung a heavy chain between each of the posts like an oversized prize ring. Into that protected space they would push the scaffold, wheeled and rumbling, after withdrawing the horses.

  Six City militiamen, with Brown Bess muskets and fixed bayonets, guarded the chains from inside. A dangerously frightened horse, ridden by a frightened young trainband captain, reared up and clattered down in menace to the guards.

  “No bayonets ’less you have to!” The Chief Turnkey whistled into a wind. “No bayonets!”

  For a good reason, the crowd this morning were delirious. A dead cat, humorously thrown among them, bounced from hand to hand above women’s caps and men’s half-crushed hats.

  Though the newspapers had not yet appeared, especially the Times with its full dispatch dated at Waterloo by Lord Wellington and its casualty list as well, the report of the great victory had already spread.

  It was a time for ecstatic rejoicing, a time for taking liberties with the lady who stood next to you in the crowd, a time to sing “Lillibulero,” “The British Grenadiers,” and “Down to Hell with Boney.” More spectators, on the sloping tiled roofs of the houses opposite, waved their arms in tune.

  The Chief Turnkey made a last violent effort,

  “Make way for the scaffold!”

  This time the words had a ripple. And many voices roared back.

  “Where’s the scaffold?”

  The Chief Turnkey, exasperated, turned round to a tall, thin, nervous jailer whom he knew only as Jamy.

  “Well, where is it?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Langley says it’s ready, sir. But there’s no orders from the Sheriff.”

  “No orders from the Sheriff?”

  “No, sir.”

  The dead cat danced and traveled. “Boney!” cried somebody. The dead cat, flung high in the air, immediately became Boney. At the window the Chief Turnkey took a double-cased silver watch from his waistcoat pocket.

  “Eh, well,” he muttered, “they’re happy now.” His eyes moved up from the watch, and saw Miss Caroline Ross and Sir John Buckstone—much closer than a stone’s throw away—at the upper window of the Red Horse Tavern opposite.

  Against the harsh dawn, the upper floor of the “Red Horse” showed candlelit windows, with a glimpse of white linen and silver, for a breakfast party of the nobs. Ten or a dozen persons were in the long room. But only Miss Ross and Sir John, who had visited the Chief Turnkey in his lodgings last night, now stood at the window.

  Even if there had been no uproar in the street, the Chief Turnkey could not have heard what they were saying. But gestures were eloquent.

  The lady had now discarded her gray hooded cape. She was in a white satin gown, and stretched out bare arms toward the street in a kind of ecstasy.

  Sir John leaned toward her, said something, and laughed.

  “Yes! I almost forgot!” the lady seemed to agree.

  With her right hand she touched the third finger of her left hand. She drew off—a ring, of course—and held it invisibly between two fingers. Then, with a delicate gesture, she threw the ring out into the crowd.

  Her lips shaped the word, “Gone!”

  “Mr. Eldridge, sir!” struck in the hoarse voice of Blazes, at the Chief Turnkey’s elbow. “The Sheriff’s compliments, and he’s got new orders.”

  “New orders?”

  At almost the same instant, in a condemned cell east of where they stood, Mr. Hubert Mulberry looked down at Richard Darwent, and waved his arms in the air as he gave some account of the great victory in Belgium.

  “Curse it, Dick!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see they can’t hang you now?”

  There was a long silence. Darwent opened his mouth, and shut it again.

  “No, don’t talk.” Mr. Mulberry made a peremptory gesture. “I’ll talk. I always talk.”

  He turned his fat back to Darwent, as though about to assume a disguise, and then swung round again.

  “The battle was fought on Sunday, June 18th. D’ye follow me? No remark! Yes, or no?”

  Darwent nodded.

  “You may have heard a report, Dick, that two of our lads tried to signal the coast of Kent that same night? And somebody died of heart ailment when the message wasn’t plain?”

  Darwent shook his head. But Caroline Ross, now lifting a glass above a plate of cold ham at the “Red Horse,” could have told him it was true.

  “That somebody,” said Mulberry, “was your uncle.”

  Darwent attempted to say, “I am sorry,” but the words stuck in his throat.

  “And you wondered where I was last night, didn’t you? Old Bert Mulberry, raised as a charity boy and teaching himself Latin like a beetle crawling up a wet wall! Anyway, I’ll tell you. I was at the Times office, bribing a friend o’ mine to get a list of the killed and wounded.”

  Mr. Mulberry tossed his white hat into the wall niche, from which it bounced and fell. Taking from the pocket of his surtout a folded piece of paper, h
e opened it and read.

  “‘Captain the Viscount Cray, 1st Foot Guards. Killed.’” His voice chopped off the words, like a butcher with meat. “‘Ensign Lord George Mercer, 95th Rifles. Killed.’“ He crumpled up the paper. “Both your cousins. Both dead.”

  “They were better men than I am.”

  “Don’t say that. Never say it about anybody. Try to use fair play, and a man lands in trouble—like you. You’d care to know, I daresay, how all this affects your trial for murder?”

  “Yes!”

  “When were you tried and condemned? On what date?”

  “The 19th of June. You must know that!”

  Mr. Mulberry squatted down in front of him, leering.

  “Dick, that trial was illegal.”

  “Why?”

  “Damme, man, on the 19th you were the Marquess of Darwent! And a peer of the realm—eh?—can’t be tried for murder except before the House of Lords.”

  Again there was silence, while Mr. Mulberry chuckled.

  “When they do try you,” he went on, pointing his finger “they’ll acquit you as quickly as it takes to call the roll, from the junior baron upwards. “Not guilty, upon my honor!” They’ll more than acquit you; they’ll cheer you when they’ve done with it. D’ye guess why?”

  Out of nowhere Darwent remembered a remark the Rev. Horace Cotton had made.

  “The House of Lords,” he muttered, “fights tooth and nail for the privilege of the duel …”

  “Eh, and don’t they!”

  Darwent choked in a senseless kind of mutter. “But there wasn’t any duel! Frank Orford was murdered!”

  “And who’s to know that, Dick, except you and me? We can’t change the defense now. And we shouldn’t, bully, if we could. I’ll acquit you.”

  Mr. Mulberry, slapping his thigh appreciatively, almost fell over backwards. Then he stood up. His beefy, bloated face, with the bleared yet very shrewd eyes, became somber again. Taking a snuff-box out of his pocket, he thoughtfully tapped his finger on the lid.

  “Steady, Dick!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “D’ye think I can’t see what’s in your eyes, every time you look at that door? Lose your fears! They’re not coming to hang you. And why?

  “Now who would dare,” added Mr. Mulberry, “to pull my Lord Ellenborough out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning? I would. The writing’s in his own fist, and the Sheriff of Newgate’s got it now. Today I go before the same noble gentleman, the Lord Chief Justice. I ask for your indictment to be removed, by a writ of certiorari, into the court of the Lord High Steward: that’s to say, the House of Lords. Meanwhile, we have someone in to strike off these fetters of yours …”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dick! Dick!” Mr. Mulberry took a huge pinch of snuff, only a little of which reached his nose-while the rest flew wide on his neckcloth and yellow-striped waistcoat as he sneezed. “Haven’t you heard you can live as comfortably at Newgate, on the State side, as in the Clarendon Hotel?”

  “No!”

  “Ay; well, you can. A private room, with a valet. Your rivals from a cookshop. Weston, the Regent’s own tailor, to cut your coats. And I daresay”—here Mr. Mulberry’s thick lips made a grimace—“you’ll want a bath a day?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “A new fashion,” the other said moodily, “and I don’t like it. Howsoever! You can live like that until your trial. All things are possible, even in Newgate, if you have money.”

  “And … have I money?”

  “Money? Boney’s teeth! What d’ye say to a hundred thousand a year? —Hold up, Dick! Don’t hang your head like that!”

  “Forgive me. I was …”

  “And you have more,” said Mr. Mulberry, taking snuff, “that I envy you, Dick, almost to disliking you. Stop; I don’t mean that. But I was a charity boy; I can respect an old name, if it is an old name.”

  Mr. Mulberry was a fierce Jacobite, though this issue had been dead for sixty years. His views of the House of Hanover, though from a different side, were those now being freely expressed by many republicans. Even for the old King, George the Third, mad and deaf and nearly blind, he had no sympathy.

  “In the Holy Land, near to five hundred years ago, your banner was raised beside Lionheart’s own.” More snuff flew wide. “What’s bloody Hanover against that?”

  “I … I only …”

  “Stand up, man!” said Mr. Mulberry. “Who cares a fornication if you’re weak? Stand up”

  Richard Darwent stood up.

  “The world’s at your feet, lad; and no more gammon about fair play. Is there any person you want to befriend?”

  “Dolly! Where’s Dolly?”

  Mr. Mulberry hesitated and studied him, again tapping the lid of the snuffbox.

  “She’s not at the theater, as I’ve told you a hundred times. She’s not at her old lodgings. But find her; and befriend her in no niggard way! —Or is there anyone who’s used you badly? Anyone you hate with heart and soul?”

  Darwent’s expression changed. Mr. Mulberry had said these words as the Rev. Horace Cotton, his face radiant with relief after hearing the news that there would be no execution, appeared in the open doorway. The Rev. Horace, hearing the lawyer’s grating voice, stopped short.

  “Then hit back,” snarled Mr. Mulberry, “and have no mercy!”

  Clang smote the bell of the clock at St. Sepulchre’s, on the first stroke of five. The ensuing strokes quivered over Newgate Prison, over Old Bailey outside its Main Gate, and were heard with aching distinctness in a long room on the upper floor of the Red Horse Tavern.

  Caroline Ross and Jack Buckstone, with an almost empty room behind them, stood at one window and looked down into what seemed an eerily empty street.

  The crowd had melted away. Half a dozen City militiamen, removing the bayonets from their muskets under the direction of an officer on a quiet horse, alone remained.

  The street was strewn with orange peel and empty bottles; a dead cat lay there, and some torn articles of feminine wearing apparel, together with bits of food and a man’s shoe. Some one, from the lodge above the arched leaves of the Main Gate, had kept shouting a few words. And the crowd, after a brief hostile demonstration, struggled away by twos and threes.

  “Too happy about Boney,” growled Jack Buckstone, “to wallop out with a riot. Pity, that. Might have been some good sport.”

  “But what did the man say?” Caroline kept insisting. “The man who spoke above the gate over there?”

  “Can’t tell you, m’dear. Couldn’t hear. But, gad, now! Why pretend you don’t understand? Your husb—”

  “Sh-h!”

  But, as Caroline glanced round quickly, she saw there was no fear of being overheard. Her guests—the men with groans or curses, the women with sighs or twitters of disappointment—had already stumbled downstairs. The long table, its rush-bottomed chairs pushed back and its tapers flickering in mine host’s best pewter candlesticks, showed a ruin of china and glasses.

  One last guest, Mr. Jemmy Fletcher, remained face downward across the table, dead drunk and snoring. His fair hair trailed out. His brocaded cocked hat, an article of evening dress so often carried under the arm that it was called a chapeau de bras, lay in the butter dish. Young Mr. Fletcher’s snores rose loudly against the intense hush of morning.

  Both Buckstone and Caroline abruptly spoke in louder voices.

  “The fact is, m’dear,” Buckstone told her coolly, “your husband’s had a what-d’ye-call-it. A reprieve.” Caroline’s blue eyes were … no, not yet apprehensive.

  From her wrist now dangled the white fan she had carried at the Chief Turnkey’s lodgings. She opened it, and began to fan herself despite the dull cold.

  “But he will be hanged?” she asked. “Of course?”

  “Can’t say, m’dear. Pity we couldn’t have asked that lawyer fellow to sit down at table. Still! Got to draw the line somewhere.”

  “No doubt.”

/>   “Do you remember what Mildmay said, when some dashed confounded nobody offered Harry the use of his carriage? ‘How kind of you!’ says Mildmay; ‘but pray, sir, where will you sit? Up behind with one of the footmen?”

  Since he was alone with Caroline, Buckstone permitted himself to smile. He even threw back his head and laughed loudly, competing with the snores of Jemmy Fletcher. Then he grew serious.

  “You’ve done a bad night’s work, m’girl,” he observed with critical detachment. “It’d be a rare jape, wouldn’t it, if they pardoned your dear husband and set the scum free? Still! It’s no affair of mine.”

  Dismissing the matter, he strolled round to the other side of the table. He picked up a candlestick. For a few moments he found entertainment in tilting it and dropping tallow grease on the drunken man’s hair. Caroline watched him, fanning herself harder.

  “Jack!”

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “Do you hold any friendly feelings toward me, Jack?”

  “M’dear!” protested Buckstone, lifting a wrinkled forehead. “Dash it, didn’t I ride all the way from Oatlands to be with you?”

  “Then you promise not to sneer if I make a—a somewhat ridiculous confession?”

  “Sneer?” repeated Buckstone. “Damme, now!” It would have astonished him if you had told him he was not one of the most agreeable men alive.

  “Then you promise not to sneer? Or tell it of me at Almack’s?”

  “Rot my guts if I do!”

  “This condemned man,” said Caroline, still plying the fan. “I must own I found him … somewhat fascinating.”

  She had made a mistake. The whole emotional temperature of that room altered, while sodden Jemmy Fletcher emitted a long gurgle of a snore. Buckstone set down the candlestick with a thump.

  “Like ’em filthy, don’t you?” he asked coolly.

  “When I first set eyes on him, I thought him the most repulsive creature alive. Presently I heard his voice, and looked at his eyes. Oh, this is stupid! Yet even you, Jack, must have observed that he spoke like … like …”

  Buckstone was almost amused. “Like a gentleman?” he suggested dryly.