Birdcage Walk (38 page)

When he had thought about his last morning—and he had, many times during the last weeks—George had imagined it would be sunny. He had thought of waking up to find honeyed sunlight pouring into his cell, the guards already awake and in a jovial mood, the stones warm under his feet as he dressed for the last time. He had thought the fine weather would make it seem unreal—too nice a day for so grim an event—and therefore more bearable.

His first mistake was in expecting to sleep the night before it. He supposed he must have drifted off for some of the time because a number of disjointed dreams had come to him. Most of them were dark and full of awful, discordant noise, but one, the last, was different. In it, he had been outside, lying on his back with nothing to see but a huge sky draped with wisps of fast-moving cloud. He could feel the prickle of summer-dry grass beneath his body but he was quite comfortable, cradled by the warm earth.

When he woke from this, a dawn as thin and grey as gruel was seeping into his cell. That the dream was just that; that there was no field he could lie in, idling away the day because there were countless others ahead, made him feel more despairing than he had yet. Unable to keep still as panic rose in his chest, he got up, the flagstones damp and icy underfoot. Crossing to one of the barred windows he looked out, craning his neck to see a small portion of sky. He found he could see barely see the upper windows of the prison. A thick fog had already descended and seemed to thicken and swirl even as he watched. In each breath of it he could taste cold salt water. It wasn’t one of the dirty yellow fogs London was accustomed to; a good wind had blown this one straight down the Thames from the east.

Just then a movement on the periphery of his vision made him start. A small blackbird had alighted on the top of a high wall to the right of George’s window. Its orange beak was a dash of bright colour in the drab day. As George watched, it wasn’t still for an instant, its senses alert to sounds and movements George wasn’t aware of. He hoped it would hop closer to his windowsill and, for a few minutes, he kept as still as he had with his father on the marshes. But the blackbird stayed where it was until, quite abruptly, it took flight, quickly disappearing into the folds of fog that hung over Newgate.

When he turned round the guards were still asleep. He knew the execution was to take place at nine, so that meant he had perhaps three hours left. It was hard to tell what time it was with the sky so wreathed in mist. There was already some noise echoing through the prison’s uninsulated corridors; the clang of gates and the scrape of stubborn locks. George went over to the hard wooden chair he had been permitted to keep after Booth’s last visit. On it he had arranged his sketchbook, some letters and the few other items he had been able to keep with him.

He had got his watch back the previous evening, when Reynolds had told him of the Home Secretary’s decision. Sitting back down on the bed, he buffed the back of watch’s case with a corner of his blanket. It was scratched and would only shine up so much. He cursed how careless he must have been with it, a present from his father for his sixteenth birthday. It had been his father’s before him and George remembered that his first thought on receiving it was that it was too large and old-fashioned. He gripped it now, the shape and weight of it in his hand so familiar, but its soft tick more insistent than he remembered.

The following hours passed uncomfortably quickly, George glancing often at his watch, believing that he could see the minute hand glide faster and faster around the face. His breakfast of coffee and bread and butter seemed to be of a better quality than usual, the butter spread thicker than he ever had at home and the coffee almost aromatic. He couldn’t force much down, though. The bread got stuck in his throat, despite the grease on it. He gulped down the hot coffee gratefully enough, though. The burning sensation on his tongue gave him something else to think about.

At half past eight, the chaplain arrived. He looked as though he was expecting George to send him away and hovered in the doorway for half a minute, his fingers anxiously working at the bible he clasped. Eventually George nodded towards him and he came over to stand by the bed. He remained quiet while one of the guards fetched him a chair, and George suddenly realised he was glad of the company. Good manners told him he should say something.

“Is it just me today, then?” he asked, smiling ruefully as the panic inside threatened to overwhelm him again.

The chaplain smiled sadly and patted George’s knee. “Yes. I’ll stay with you, if you’ll let me.”

“I feel as though time is going too quick, and yet I want it to be over too,” said George in a rush.

The chaplain nodded and waited for George to speak again.

“I didn’t do what they say I did, you know,” he said, his voice loud and urgent enough to make Horwood and the other guard glance over. “I would say now, wouldn’t I, if I had? It wouldn’t make no difference to say it now, when I am going to be dead in an hour. I could ask you for God’s forgiveness if I confessed. But I didn’t do it so I can’t. I didn’t kill Lottie. I loved her, you know.” He hung his head and covered his face with his hands. It was difficult not to scream.

When he had recovered himself enough to take his hands away and look up, the chaplain was looking quietly back at him. George couldn’t read his expression, but it made him feel a little calmer so he continued to hold the older man’s gaze. George wanted to ask him if he believed his story but decided not to. He didn’t want to despise anyone else, not now.

There was still a quarter of an hour left when Horwood got to his feet. He nodded solemnly at George.

“It’s time now.”

The chaplain helped George to his feet, his grip surprisingly strong and warm. The other guard, whose name George had never found out, made to take his other side, but Horwood frowned at him until he stepped back.

“He won’t give us any trouble,” he said. “Will you, George?”

The use of his first name distracted George for a moment and, before he knew it, he was being led down Birdcage Walk and out into the open yard, the chaplain’s right arm now around his shoulders, his left still gripping George’s wrist. The fog seemed to wrap itself around them as they crossed the yard and when George looked down at his sleeve there were a thousand pinpricks of moisture beading on its fabric.

“Horwood, where will my family be?” he suddenly cried.

The big guard turned and pointed into the mist. “Just over there is where they wait,” he said. “If you took the walls down they wouldn’t be too far away.”

George looked in the direction Horwood had pointed and there, atop a different brick wall, was the same blackbird he’d seen at dawn. Even through the opaque air he could make out the gloss on its tar black feathers. As he watched, it took to the air once more and flew over George’s head. Though it had disappeared into the fog again, it must have landed somewhere close; George suddenly heard its flute-like song pierce the thick air.

They reached a large shed. The execution shed, George realised. Even Sam hadn’t known much about it; it was the one of the few places in Newgate he hadn’t seen, or been told about second-hand. Inside, the bricks had been painted a grubby white, a livid green moss staining it in places. In the centre of the shed, otherwise empty of furniture or ornamentation, were the gallows.

To George they looked a little bit like goal posts, with two struts pointing upwards and another, longer length of wood across the top. The illusion was spoiled by the pulley hanging from the centre of the top beam, through which the rope for the noose would be threaded. Below it lay the wide pit, its doors closed. To one side was the lever that would open them in a few short minutes.

Apart from his two guards and the chaplain, who remained close, George didn’t recognise any of the other men there. An older man, smartly dressed, he took to be the governor of the prison. He stood next to the prison doctor, who George knew from his arrival at Newgate. A couple of guards he had never seen before had gone to close the large double doors behind him. The other two men, not dressed in uniforms and barely older than himself, he could not account for, until he saw what one of them held. It was a coil of rope and he was winding it slowly around one of his elbows in a figure of eight.

“That’s James Billington’s son, William,” said Horwood softly to the other guard. “You can smell the drink on him from here.”

Even as he was led towards the gallows, where Billington began the pinioning process, George half expected a reprieve to come. It was only as he felt the rope go around his neck, the rough feel of it exactly as he’d imagined all those weeks ago, standing near Annie’s house in the pouring rain, that he knew he was finished. He glanced up to the ceiling of the dank shed, its rafters strung with heavy cobwebs, and thought he could hear the trill of the blackbird above. He wished he could see the sky.

* * *

It wasn’t even half a minute after the drop that Newgate’s doctor approached the gallows and its creaking rope. He checked his watch.

“Twenty-five seconds,” he said. “That’s the quickest yet.”

June, 1904

All that was his had been placed in a single cardboard box. Cissy stared at it until her father spoke, making her flinch.

“It won’t bite you, love. Open it up. Go on.”

She removed her gloves first, laying them out on the table and resisting the urge to smooth the soft kid with her fingers. The lid came off too easily, as though it should have been paired with a larger box. Inside there wasn’t very much. The familiar red sketchbook, a perfectly round blot of ink staining its leather. The watch with its scratched and dented case, its hands stilled. A couple of clean, frayed handkerchiefs. A pile of envelopes, their fronts blank and their flaps unsealed. Cissy placed them carefully down on the table and checked the box; there was nothing else.

They had received the box that morning without any warning. It weighed almost nothing and had been carelessly tied up with parcel string. Neither Cissy nor her father had thought such a thing existed. Mr. Woolfe had requested his son’s effects after that fog-bound day in 1902 but had been sent away, told they were lost.

Newgate had been closed a few weeks later, its remaining prisoners transferred to Pentonville, and the Woolfes had tried not to think about the place again. When they talked of George, which was often, it was in reference to happier times, when Newgate had been nothing but a city landmark, albeit a grim and forbidding one. They had been told by Mr. Booth that its long-planned demolition had begun a week earlier; it could only be assumed that the box had been found when the prison’s contents were stripped out.

Cissy picked out the envelope at the bottom of the pile of unposted letters and pulled out its single sheet of paper. The new clock on the mantle sounded very loud in the silence of the room. Before she started to read the words written in cramped black ink, she looked up to meet her father’s gaze. He looked levelly back at her and nodded, almost imperceptibly. When she spoke, her voice was clear and didn’t tremble.

Newgate Prison, 5th April 1902

Dearest Lottie,

My thoughts are very disordered tonight so I will not make much sense, I fear. This will be my last letter, though that sounds as if I had written you dozens, when it has only been a few.

I have spent the last three weeks in a condemned cell on the ground floor of the prison, not high up as I was when I wrote before. When I came here, after my trial, I was given some new writing materials, but have found myself unable to do more than sketch and sleep and walk up and down Birdcage Walk when the guards tell me I must. Perhaps it has been fear of them seeing what I write to you, and laughing at me over it, that has stopped me before tonight.

When I came down here first, one of the guards, a large fellow named Horwood who is kind despite his rough ways, saw the letters I already written to you and asked who they were meant for and why I didn’t ask to have them posted. He said he would do it for me if my family wouldn’t take them. I just shook my head and said nothing and he thought I was being unfriendly. I couldn’t say to him that they couldn’t be posted, that the girl they were meant for couldn’t receive them where she was, lying cold in the ground.

It wasn’t Horwood but Reynolds who came in just now to tell me the news. I will hang tomorrow after all, it seems that no good has come of Mr. Booth’s appeal. You know nothing of any appeal, of course, nor my trial and the sentence that was handed down at it, but it doesn’t much matter now. Each day since the appeal was lodged, I have been waiting for this news. Now it has come, it is almost a relief, though one that has turned my limbs to lead. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to be on tenterhooks for almost three weeks but I’ve jumped, my heart in my mouth, at the arrival of every visitor and every tray of food for the last nineteen days. I am sure that the Home Secretary must have a great deal to worry about besides George Woolfe, but I didn’t think he would wait until the very last evening.

As a condemned man, though one who had some small hope in his belly until ten minutes ago, I have been allowed more visits than before. Cissy and my father have come every day, and even Annie came once. I’m glad you can’t see her though, she is almost unrecognisable from her old self since you were taken from her. My father you wouldn’t recognise either, though for happier reasons. He has come quite out of himself during this bad business and, if there’s one thing I feel glad about, it’s that he and I have got back something of our old ways with each other. He is the father I remember from my boyhood, when I thought the world of him, and he of me. Along with you and Cissy, I will think of him tomorrow morning, when I am taken from here for the last time.

I wish I could write on and on, to fill these final hours and take me right through the night and out into the morning, but there’s not much more I can think to say. Perhaps I will be wrong in my beliefs, after all, and I’ll see you again tomorrow, Lottie. It is a comfort to me that you know I didn’t do what the most of the world thinks I did.

Your loving George.

Cissy tucked the letter back into its envelope and sighed shakily, her cheeks wet with tears. Her father had turned his face towards the bay window, where the sunlight was filtering in through a pair of pretty net curtains.

“We can read the rest later, can’t we, dad?” she said, getting to her feet and smoothing out her skirts. “It’s time we got going.”

Mr. Woolfe got up carefully and held out his arms. “Come here to your old dad for a minute.”

Cissy went to him and they were quiet for a time, the ticking of the clock no longer strident but soothing in the bright room. The house wasn’t large—a tall man could have walked its width in three strides—but it had its own door and it was in a nice street, where people had placed boxes of flowers on the window sills and the curtains were as frothy and pristine as Cissy’s own. The combined associates of Mrs. Drew and Mr. Booth had ensured that Mr. Woolfe’s birdcages were now sold in a handful of west-end shops, where they fetched far more money than they had in the markets near Hoxton.

Cissy, who was learning how to make cages from her father, now only went to the market during the warmer months. Every other Saturday she retraced her brother’s steps to Highbury and the Drews’ house, where Clemmie took great pride in sharing her paints and brushes with the younger girl. In the small, deft watercolours Cissy had made, Mrs. Drew and Clemmie agreed that she showed some of George’s talent.

When they were properly attired, Cissy fussing over the father as she once had over the brother, they set off into the sunshine. The journey wasn’t a long one, and the bus arrived at their stop almost as they did. They reached Newgate Street in less than twenty minutes. Cissy shivered as they approached what was left of the huge granite edifice, its stones blackened by soot, and Mr. Woolfe pulled her to him.

The last time they had been there, Cissy had barely been able to tell where the prison ended and the sky began. When the black flag had been slowly hoisted just after nine o’clock, the death knell ringing out as it went up, it had been too weighed down by the fog’s moisture to catch the breeze and flap. Instead it had hung there limply, in a horrible parody of the event it marked.

Two years on and a different crowd had gathered on the corner where the Woolfes now stood, just as crowds had gathered many times before to see the black flag raised. In earlier years they had come together in their thousands to witness the execution itself. Now they came to see the old gaol fall. A collective exclamation went through them as another section of wall toppled inwards, the dust as it landed rising up to meet the clear blue sky. Cissy watched it, trying to follow the plume as it dispersed outwards across the city. Mr. Woolfe squeezed her arm and turned to go. Cissy was about to follow when she hesitated, glancing back up to where the trail of dust had been. There was nothing left of it now and, but for a couple of birds gliding high on a current of warm air, the perfect sky was empty once again.