Behind the Sun (3 page)

At the time of Harrie’s incarceration, there were about one hundred and fifty female prisoners in Newgate, from bright-eyed young girls of eleven or twelve to toothless crones bent almost double with age, all jammed into five wards. Some women had little ones with them and infants still on the breast; many of these children would remain with their mother for her entire sentence, perhaps years. There was no separation at all of inmates — tried were mixed in with untried, debtors with felons, minor offenders with murderers, the insane with those awaiting transportation.

During her first six days in Newgate, Harrie had spoken to almost no one. Though a member of the class referred to as the labouring poor herself, she considered her station to be above the women with whom she was sharing a cell, albeit by only a couple of rungs, and she was shocked at their crude and rough behaviour and by the utter squalor of the environment. Her cellmates appeared almost accustomed to living in such horrible conditions; indeed she was discovering some of them had been inmates of, or in and out of, Newgate for years.

This morning, crouched on her mouldy rope mat, she clamped her hands even more firmly over her ears. Mad Martha was in full flight: on and on it went, the old woman’s cackles and moans and off-key singing echoing off the cell walls, a constant irritant to all
but Martha herself, who was oblivious to the agitation she was causing. The wardswoman had already belted her once and now Harrie felt an overwhelming urge to do the same.

She poked her fingers so far into her ears it hurt, but it was hopeless. Someone would murder Martha soon, she was sure of it, and when it happened she wouldn’t be sorry at all.

At a great rattling of keys Harrie stood and moved towards the door, desperate to escape out into the courtyard, but when it opened the turnkey wasn’t alone — beside her stood the big red-haired girl, whom Harrie hadn’t seen since she’d been taken away four days ago for kicking and swearing at a warder.

‘Morning all!’ the girl announced, her cheerful face glowing as though she’d been up with the lark and out for a morning perambulate around Hyde Park, followed by a hearty breakfast of pork sausage, fried potatoes and batter pudding.

‘
Eeee!
’ Martha shrieked, her filthy hands flying up in the air. ‘The red devil!’

‘Get your things, Martha,’ the turnkey said, her plain face wearing its perpetual scowl. ‘You’re being shifted.’

‘Shifted! Shifted! Shifted!’ Martha spun round, the rags of her dress flicking out around her scabby, bare legs. ‘No, I won’t be! I won’t be shifted! Martha likes it here!’

The turnkey sighed. ‘Come on, Martha, you need some time in solitary. Before someone does you a proper injury.’

‘No!’ Martha thrust a dirt-encrusted finger at Friday. ‘
She
wants to steal me place.’ She turned again and pointed towards an empty corner. ‘
And
me fine things. The
king
give me that card table, you know!’

‘Right, Martha, that’s enough.’

The turnkey moved towards Martha, who retaliated by whipping up her tattered skirts to display straggly grey pubic hair above the sagging, blue-veined skin of her emaciated thighs. A hideous rotting fish smell wafted from her, making Harrie gag.

Grasping Martha’s arm, the turnkey yanked her towards the door. The old woman began to scream and kick, in the process knocking over the bucket they’d all been peeing in during the night.

‘You know she’s got the women’s cancer,’ someone said as Martha was dragged outside. ‘Be dead soon.’

Someone less kind remarked, ‘Good riddance. Stinking old bag o’ bones.’

Harrie waited until Martha and the warder had gone, then escaped out into the pale, cold sunlight, hugely relieved to exchange the fetid miasma of the ward for the sharp, smoke-tainted morning air. She crossed the yard to the pump, worked the handle and splashed freezing water over her face. Desperate for a proper wash but too embarrassed to undress, she held open the neck of her blouse, cupped water in her hand and had a go at her armpits, soaking herself in the process.

‘Poor old bat, thinks I’m the devil incarnate,’ a voice said.

Harrie turned around; it was the girl with the copper-coloured hair, a small leather pouch clamped under her arm and a tin in her hand. Opening it, she took out a cake of tobacco and sliced off two slivers with a small knife, realised she didn’t have enough hands, swore, and crouched, setting everything on the ground.

‘I’m not,’ she went on, addressing the dirt, ‘despite what some people say.’ Crumbling the tobacco flakes until they’d achieved a satisfactory consistency, she poked them into the bowl of her clay pipe, then rummaged around in the pouch. ‘Bear with me. Won’t be a mo’.’

Harrie watched, fascinated.

Producing a tiny compendium, the girl stood, took out a Congreves match and struck it against the attached strip of sandpaper. The flame flared hugely, singeing her hair. Managing to swear roundly and light her pipe at the same time, she drew on it and coughed until her eyes watered. She coughed again, then hoicked and spat.

‘Beg pardon. I’m Friday Woolfe. And you should cheer up, because it could be worse. And don’t bother with the bathing, love. Everyone in here stinks to high heaven.’

‘How could it be worse?’ Harrie said, a little more rudely than she meant to. What did this girl know about her situation? She was clearly all right herself, if she could afford to buy tobacco and proper matches.

‘Well, you could be swinging on the end of a rope.’

Harrie looked at Friday Woolfe. She was a good four inches taller than Harrie, with strong, round arms, a neat waist and full breasts, pale, lightly freckled skin and glorious, wild, copper-coloured hair. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say. And I don’t mean to be cheeky, but Friday’s quite an odd name.’

Friday Woolfe looked contrite and uncomfortable, as though the first were an emotion she rarely bothered with. ‘Sorry. It’s my mouth. Sometimes it opens and things just come out. It is odd, my name, isn’t it? It’s after St Frideswide.’

Harrie, absurdly relieved that someone was actually being civil to her, said in a rush, ‘I stole a bolt of cloth and some embroidery thread from a shop. Do you think I
will
swing?’

Friday gave her a long, contemplative look. ‘You’ve not been up before, have you?’

‘Up where?’

Friday rolled her eyes. ‘Well, that answers my question. Up in front of the judge.’

‘No, never.’

‘Then it’s hard to say what you’ll get. But you won’t go to the gallows — not for shoplifting. Not since about five years ago, anyway. What’s your name?’

Harrie felt faint with relief. Her toes were going numb and she stamped her feet. ‘Harrie. Harriet Clarke.’

Friday laughed, a loud guffaw of amusement. ‘Harrie. I like that. Well, like I said, it’s hard to say, and I couldn’t guarantee anything,
but you’ll probably get sent to New South Wales. You must know about that?’

Harrie nodded. Her father’s older brother had been transported in 1817.

‘Unless you’ve done a murder as well?’

‘A murder? God help me, no!’

‘Then it’s likely to be the boat.’

They moved aside as a fight broke out between three women arguing over a pack of cards.

‘You don’t think I might just get a year in here? Or in Brixton, perhaps?’ Even to Harrie’s own ears the question sounded hopelessly naive. And it didn’t matter where she was incarcerated, of course — her mother and the children would still be deprived of her income. But at least if she stayed in England she might still see them occasionally.

‘Sometimes it’ll all just turn on whether the judge had a good dinner.’ Friday drew hard on her pipe, creating clouds of unpleasant smoke. ‘I’d be hoping for the boat if I was you. A year in an English prison’ll wring the life out of someone like yourself the same way hanging will, only a lot slower.’

Harrie wasn’t sure if she’d just been insulted or not. She didn’t think so, but said anyway, ‘What do you mean, “like yourself”?’

‘Well, look at you. You’re not exactly flash mob, are you? I’ll bet you’ve even got a nice, proper job. I can tell: you’ve got really clean, smooth hands.’ Friday looked down at her own — not dirty, but rough, and with fingernails bitten to the quick. Harrie saw there were three small stars tattooed on the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

‘Are you?’ Harrie asked, surprising herself. ‘Flash mob, I mean?’

Friday gave an ambiguous shrug. ‘Yes and no. I’m not in a crew. I work for myself but everyone needs contacts. I’m on the town,’ she added, anticipating the question.

Harrie wasn’t shocked. It wasn’t against the law. ‘But why are you in here?’

‘Oh, I robbed a customer,’ Friday said breezily. ‘I’ll be on the boat for sure. For life, I expect.’ She laughed again. ‘This isn’t my first offence.’

Harrie stared at her. ‘How can you laugh about it?’

‘Because you have to, don’t you?’ Friday scratched her armpit. ‘So what
do
you do, when you’re not thieving?’

‘I’m an assistant sempstress. Or I
was
. I did a bit of fancywork, too. Lace and embroidery and the like.’

‘An orrice weaver? See, I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘No, I don’t make the lace; that went out to piece-workers. I just design the patterns. I do all the embroidery, though. Well, I
did
, before this.’

But Friday seemed to have lost interest in Harrie’s specialist skills. ‘You fixed for everything you need in here?’

Harrie shook her head, acutely conscious of her face turning red. She had nothing. She had left everything behind for her mother.

‘Money?’

Burning with embarrassment now and struggling to blink away hot tears of self-pity and bitter regret, Harrie looked up at the sky. It was low and a bright, dirty white and it made her feel dizzy. She wondered if it might snow.

Finally she admitted, ‘I was the only one bringing anything into the house.’ Here it comes, she thought, she’s just going to laugh again.

After a while, Friday said, ‘I’ll see you right.’

Harrie’s mother came to visit her after ten days, bringing her a fresh bap and two cold saveloys Harrie knew she couldn’t spare, but she ate them anyway, she was that desperate for something tasty.

‘The food’s awful, Ma,’ she said through the railing in the visitors’ passage. ‘There’s usually enough of it, but it’s stirabout and hard bread and smelly, fatty mutton soup.’

‘Then you eat them saveloys now, love,’ Ada Clarke said. ‘They’ll only be stolen if you don’t.’

That was true.

As Harrie ate, Ada watched, her eyes brimming with tears. She didn’t want to ask but she couldn’t help herself. ‘Why did you do it, Harrie? Did you not think about getting caught?’ The hard ‘c’ in the last word was too much for her raw throat; she raised her hand and coughed hackingly, wiping bloody phlegm onto a streaked cloth.

The lines that misery and pain had etched into her mother’s pallid face were plain to see and Harrie would have given anything to erase them. But now, because of what she’d done, she’d only made them worse.

‘I don’t know, Ma. I thought perhaps…’ She trailed off: it seemed so pointless to be talking about her grand schemes now.

Ada waited, but Harrie remained silent. ‘Have you heard when you’re to go to trial?’

Harrie shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if the bill of indictment’s been drawn up yet. Then it has to go before the Grand Jury. I’ll get a trial date after that.’

‘But only if it goes that far,’ Ada said.

Wordlessly, they looked at each other; they both knew it would.

‘Will you come? When it’s time?’ Harrie asked.

‘I don’t know, love. I’m not sure I could bear hearing it if, well, if it’s to be the worst.’ Ada slipped her bony hand through the rails and cupped Harrie’s cheek. ‘All you can do is pray. The little ones send their love. But whatever happens, you won’t be coming home soon, will you?’

Not trusting her voice, Harrie shook her head again, kissed her mother’s palm, and hurried away before Ada could see her tears.

December 1828, London

‘Ready?’ Sarah Morgan asked.

Her colleague, Thomas Ratcliffe, peered through the displays in the window into the shop and nodded.

Sarah laid a gloved hand on Tom’s arm and they entered the small, elegant haberdashery, the bell over the door announcing their arrival. The shopkeeper didn’t even look up, too busy watching what he clearly suspected were three hoisters, milling about in front of his counter overtly eyeing a display of carved bone awls and needle cases, ivory thread waxers and gilded crotchet hooks. To one side stood a well-dressed, middle-aged woman carrying a beaded reticule and a wicker shopping basket, a look of consternation growing on her plump, pink face.

‘Good morning, madam,’ Tom said, doffing his hat to her.

The woman took in Tom’s smartly cut trousers, coat of black superfine and beautifully folded starcher and Sarah’s elegantly plumed hat and heavy velvet cloak, and her face sagged with relief.

‘Oh dear,’ she whispered hoarsely, and gestured towards the shop’s other occupants. ‘I think there may be some unpleasantness.’

‘Stand back, please, madam,’ Tom commanded, stepping between the woman and the ill-smelling, raggedly dressed wretches crowding the counter. ‘Elizabeth?’ he said to Sarah.

Sarah took the woman’s elbow and drew her gently out of the way. Tom approached the counter, prodded the nearest of the three with his cane and said loudly, ‘I’ll thank you to leave these premises at once.’

‘No, we’re doing our shopping,’ the young man replied, his hands thrust defiantly into the pockets of his filthy corduroy trousers. With him were another man and an undernourished girl wearing a grubby, patched dress and a shawl so worn the pattern was no longer discernible. Their sour unwashed smell filled the shop. Behind Tom, the woman with the shopping basket discreetly lifted a scented handkerchief to her face.

Tom raised his cane again, its silver knob glinting. ‘I said get out! Go on, be off with you!’

The shopkeeper found his voice. ‘That’s right. Go on, clear off or I’ll call the watch.’

‘We’ve not done nothing,’ whined the girl, her hair hanging around her face in greasy hanks.

‘
Out!
’ Tom roared, and lunged at them.

The three held their ground for no more than a second, then raced for the door, jerked it open and set the bell ringing madly. They shot out into the street and disappeared.

‘Lord above, the
cheek
of them!’ the woman said, fanning her face weakly with her handkerchief. ‘I feel quite faint. I was
convinced
I was about to be robbed!’

Sarah took her hand and led her to a chair near the counter. ‘You rest awhile. You’ve had a dreadful fright. We all have.’

‘I’m still reporting it,’ the shopkeeper grumbled. ‘Damned beggars and thieves, coming into my shop bold as you please. Begging your pardons, ladies.’

‘Yes, quite right. It’s thoroughly unacceptable,’ Tom said. ‘In fact, allow us to do that for you. Come, Elizabeth, we’ll go straight to the watch house now.’

‘Thank you,’ the woman said. ‘Lord only knows what might have happened if you hadn’t arrived when you did.’

If the shopkeeper was offended by the implication that he couldn’t defend his own premises, he knew better than to show it. He inclined his head at Tom. ‘Aye, thank you, sir. Much appreciated.’

‘You’re welcome. Good day,’ Tom replied, and held the door open for Sarah.

They walked swiftly along Bond Street, turned into Brook Street, ducked across Hanover Square, then onto Oxford Street where they hailed a cab. The driver baulked at the Seven Dials address, but reluctantly agreed after Tom bunged him an extra two shillings.

Inside the cab, Tom said, ‘So? Show me.’

Sarah looked at him, debating whether to risk concealing any of it from him. Probably not this time: none of it was worth it. He didn’t trust her and was watching her closely, but that was all right because she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone. She loosened the cords on her reticule.

‘Her purse, which has —’ she opened it and had a quick look ‘— three ten-pound notes, maybe six five-guinea coins, some silver and a few coppers.’ She closed the purse and dug deeper into her bag. ‘Two rings, one engraved gold and one set with a sapphire. It’s small, but it’s a nicely cut stone. And a silver snuff box with a topaz set into the lid.’ She eased it open. ‘With a broken hinge. Perhaps she was on her way to a silversmith.’

‘Not bad,’ Tom said with grudging appreciation. He extended his hand. ‘I’ll hold on to all that. ’Til we divvy it up.’

Sarah dropped everything back into her reticule. ‘I think it’s safer in here. At least until we meet up with the others.’

Tom stared at her, his hard, dark eyes under their heavy brows giving nothing away. He was a handsome man in a swarthy sort of way, but he held no appeal for Sarah. She knew him far too well. She stared back until finally he looked away. It might have been petty, but it felt to her like a tiny victory.

They rode in silence until they reached Earl Street and the driver rapped on the roof of the cab; Sarah and Tom had barely alighted before he cracked his whip and urged the horse on again. Sarah didn’t blame him, Seven Dials was no place to loiter, it being an extension of the dreaded St Giles rookery. She would be safe with Tom, however — no one ever got away with stealing from him. Not in the long run. And Seven Dials was her home; she knew its people, its rhythms and moods, and its dangers.

Thousands of people — the unemployed, criminals, low-class prostitutes and the poverty-stricken — lived crammed into the crumbling, rotting tenements of Seven Dials and St Giles. The tall houses, jammed together and divided into as many rooms as possible by unscrupulous landlords, resembled beehives, galleries added on front and back over the years to accommodate more and more tenants, windows broken and stuffed with rags or covered with boards, one water closet and one hand pump per hundred residents. Outside every door lay stinking pools of human waste thrown from carelessly aimed piss pots. Narrow alleys and wynds bored through the buildings like wormholes, undermining already decaying foundations and trapping filth and smells, terminating in nothing more than walled courts deep as wells and filled with decades of accumulated rubbish and ash. Hundreds of dogs roamed freely, defecating everywhere and feeding on refuse, and countless skinny, scrofulous cats crept silently about or perched on walls and window ledges in the thin winter sun. The lodgers themselves rarely strayed from the rookeries except to buy whelks and oysters, or watercress, or pennie-pies and baked potatoes from street vendors, there being no cooking facilities at all in the tenements. At all hours talking and shouting and laughter could be heard — and screams and drunken swearing and the slamming of rickety doors.

Here Sarah was anonymous, and that was the way she liked it. No one asked where she had come from and no one cared what she did with her time. The rent was cheap, her neighbours personable if
rowdy and, if trouble followed her home, she could disappear into the warren of tenements like one of the millions of rats that scuttled incessantly through the hallways and galleries.

They crossed the crowded circus with its traffic and stalls and vendors to St Andrew’s Street, then turned into a cold, narrow alleyway, the sun completely occluded by tenements leaning in on both sides. The sparsely laid cobbles underfoot were slimy with moss and filth overflowing from an open drain trickling through the alley and, as always, Sarah watched where she placed her feet. They ascended a set of dilapidated steps and entered the first floor of a soot-encrusted brick and stone building. Sarah unlocked the door to the room she’d been renting for the past three months; Tom pushed past her, sat down on one of two mismatched wooden chairs and made himself comfortable.

‘They could be hours,’ he grumbled as he removed his hat and threw it at Sarah’s bed.

The room was dark. The glazing in the window had long gone and Sarah had paid someone to fashion a wooden shutter over the empty frame; this she opened to let in some light and air to chase away the ever-present smell of mould and decaying plaster. It was a miserable little space but at least she could afford it to herself. On her left two families lived in one tiny chamber and on her right were an extended family packed into a room no bigger than her own. Sarah was aware that the matriarch, Rosina, supported the household by illegal coining — at night the air was sharp with the telltale smell of hot metal — and the noise of her neighbours on both sides talking, laughing, squabbling and generally going about their lives was barely dampened by the disintegrating walls.

Rosina’s family, she also knew, were in trouble. They owed three months’ rent and when the youngest child had died three days earlier, the bailiffs had come and seized the body and would not release it until the debt had been paid. The hallway had been tainted with the smell of heated lead and pewter ever since.

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘They’ll be wanting their pay.’

‘Empty your bag,’ Tom said, gesturing at Sarah’s reticule. ‘I want to count that money.’

Sarah tugged off her gloves, found the woman’s purse, rings and the snuff box, and laid them on the blanket covering her mattress. While Tom was greedily examining everything, she removed her pretty hat and placed it carefully in its box, making sure the ostrich plume wasn’t bent or crushed, and slid it beneath the bed. She’d paid for the hat box but not the hat. That had been damned tricky to pinch and had involved house-breaking, of which she wasn’t fond, and she didn’t fancy stealing another one. She took off her cloak with its detachable, sable-trimmed winter hood, sponged a few patches of mud off the hem, and laid it out on a wide length of muslin. This she rolled into a large sausage and draped over the vacant chair. She must get a good leather suitcase one of these days for storing her nice things — rookery rats ate anything. Beneath the cloak she wore a skirt and bodice of slightly lesser quality, bought from the tallyshop.

She glanced at Tom, who was attempting to force the sapphire ring onto his little finger, swearing as it jammed against his knuckle.

She rinsed a fresh cloth in cold water from a jug and stood in front of a small looking glass on the wall. Aware that Tom was watching her now, she wiped away the powder on her face until the scar on her cheek was revealed. She knew he was smirking — she could feel it — and her stomach clenched in a spasm of loathing for him so intense she felt momentarily sick. He had laid into her one night in a fit of rage, after discovering she’d kept something back after a day’s work. It had been a tiny opaline perfume bottle, a pretty little piece she’d fallen in love with, but despite its value Tom had broken it just to spite her; he had hit her so hard the ring he wore on his right hand had split her cheek. His mark would be on her forever and she knew he took a quiet, proprietal pleasure from that. More than once since then she’d imagined killing him,
just so she wouldn’t have to look at his mean, smarmy, handsome face again. Instead she focused on doing extra jobs on the quiet and keeping the profits for herself.

She stared at her reflection in the glass, at the sallowness of her skin and the shadows beneath her eyes, then sighed and rinsed out the cloth, the rice flour clouding the water. If Tom hadn’t hit her she wouldn’t have to trowel the stuff all over her face every time they pulled one of their ‘toff’ capers, but real ladies, women of breeding and manners, didn’t go about with ugly scars on their phizogs, so cover it she did.

Behind her Tom said, ‘They should be here by now. I don’t think they’re coming.’

Sarah ignored him. They would come — they needed the money as desperately as she did. She had to get out of this business, she really did. She’d already done six months in Newgate and knew very well if she was to be picked up a second time no judge would be so lenient. She was seriously considering going back up north. Not back home, not back to Leeds and her father, especially not now that her mother had gone. But perhaps to Birmingham, where she was sure she would find work. And far enough away so that this time Tom wouldn’t find her. She’d slipped away before but had only gone to Spitalfields, which, looking back now, hadn’t been very far at all; and he’d come after her and convinced her to return to work for him with promises of more money. She’d been so stupid. There hadn’t been any more money, of course, and he’d beaten her again and kicked her so hard he’d broken one of her ribs. But that was before she’d done time in Newgate. She’d learned a lot in Newgate.

She had a trade, a good one, though she hadn’t been able to find employment in London since she’d lost her first job. But the fact she’d completed a skilled apprenticeship might encourage someone to take her on at something, even if it wasn’t what she’d trained for. She would have to lie about her time in gaol, though. Most importantly, she had to save enough money to actually get away
from London and Tom, which she almost had. She thought about the jar of coins and notes hidden in a cavity in the wall near the door, careful not to let herself even glance in that direction for fear that Tom might read her mind. He could smell money, she was sure of it. There was a lot there already, but she wanted more than just enough to get by on until she found work — she wanted enough to make her feel
safe
.

She crossed the room and emptied the bowl of dirty water out of the window.

‘Here they come,’ she said, spotting three ragged figures traipsing along St Andrew’s Street.

Tom gave an uninterpretable grunt. A few minutes later Sarah let them in.

‘You took your time,’ Tom said.

‘Unlike yerselves,’ the older of the two men remarked pointedly as he unwound the tattered scarf from around his neck. ‘Some of us didn’t have the brass to get no fancy cab.’

Tom took his booted feet off Sarah’s bed. The swag had disappeared from it before she opened the door. He dug into his jacket pocket, retrieved some of the stolen money, and tossed six one-shilling coins onto the blanket.

Sarah hated this part. It was so demeaning. They all worked for Tom — no one had any illusions about there being any sort of partnership — but why he couldn’t hand his colleagues their pay like the toff he pretended to be, she was never sure. Humiliating the decoys — and her — gave him a sense of power, she supposed. He relished being the flash man because he thought it set him apart from the rest of them, though it didn’t. His hands were just as dirty.