The Masters of Bow Street Read online

  She stared at him, covering her woman’s breasts with her child’s hands and half crouched so that the old woman scolded: ‘Stand straight, you ingrate! Don’t pretend a man’s never set eyes on you before.’

  ‘Leave her be,’ Jacker said, and the firelight made his face look half saint’s, half devil’s; filled her with hope and chilled her with fear. ‘Give her a cloak,’ he ordered. ‘Give her some food, and bring her to me.’

  She had known so many men but had never before known gentleness, or the softness of a feather bed, or the lingering of kisses on her lips and places of such rare intimacy. And afterward, back in the room where she had been bathed, a meal with beef sirloin that he cut from a huge piece on a turning spit, bread, cheese, cabbage, ale, and a cake with whipped sweet cream. A fantasy.

  The whole of London, perhaps the whole of England, knew her now; the girl who had enticed so many rich men into her embraces and into Jackson’s ruthless clutch; the girl who had made them so easy to blackmail. The woman who had grown more cunning and skilful in all the ways of her sex had never married and yet was forever Frederick Jackson’s woman. The woman who had grown in stature as he had grown in wealth and notoriety, laughing at her fears and scoffing at the threats of those who hated him.

  ‘Hang Jacker? Never fear, my love, they’ll never hang me.’

  Perhaps - perhaps they would not have brought him here and placed the noose about his neck and listened in awed silence as a legend prepared both to die and to grow stronger; perhaps it would never have come to pass - but for John Furnival.

  John Furnival, also, was surely here today.

  She did not know for certain because she had not set eyes on the big, honey-blond man with the near-yellow eyes and the massive strength, and yet she felt quite positive. He would not miss this day of triumph, after twenty years of conflict between him and Jacker, a conflict already fierce when Jacker had plucked her from the cobbled lane and taken her to Loxley Yard, near Gray’s Inn and the fields, and claimed her for himself.

  Most of the other condemned men were quiet now. One was calling on his nearby friends and relatives to rescue him; one, dressed in rich brown velvet and green shoes and hat, was tossing halfpence among the crowd, where the old and the young scrambled for them. Throughout Jackson went on talking in that carrying voice; it was as if he believed that for as long as he could talk, so he would defy the noose and the hangman and the men who had sent him here.

  ‘. . . among you here today are many thief-takers, justices, constables, each and every one of them more corrupt than I. Guilty of more crimes. Pariahs living off the people, living off you, the good, honest English people. . .’

  A man near the platform shouted: ‘He’s right!’ Another, from the midst of the crowd, roared: ‘Hang them all!’ Roars of approval came from a dozen places; close to the platform a surge of people was carried forward, threatening, and from all parts of the crowd came cries of:

  ‘Cut him down!’

  ‘Free him!’’

  ‘Save Jacker!’

  ‘Hang the thief-takers.’

  From close by John Furnival, who stood with only three of his own paid officers, there came other cries, deeper and more menacing:

  ‘Hang Furnival.’

  ‘Kill Furnival.’

  ‘Kill the devil.’

  ‘Hang him - kill him - cut his throat - cut off his head.’

  Now the cry ‘Hang Furnival’ became a chant, taken up not in two or three, not in a dozen, but in a hundred places. Men and women turned to see him as he towered above their heads, the timid began to move to a safer distance, the bold ones cursed and screamed at him, while Frederick Jackson’s ruffians forced their way through the crowd towards him, ugly and menacing, harsh-voiced with hatred. The crowd divided to let them through. From the fringes many ran so that they could watch with greater safety while the cut-throats and the highwaymen, the thieves and the murderers, who got their living from Frederick Jackson or else were protected by him, pressed mercilessly on towards Furnival.

  A small company of soldiers stood by the gallows, with the sheriff in charge of the executions, splendid in their bright-green uniforms and cockaded three-cornered hats, muskets grounded, sun glistening on long, narrow bayonets.

  John Furnival saw the ruffians coming from all directions, saw the people near him scatter, knew how deeply they were afraid, knew that his aides would stay by his side even if they were cut to pieces trying to defend him. He had anticipated some such attack and had made arrangements with the sheriff. If it were possible, he desired to win this confrontation unaided; such a victory would be of great value in the future. Unless the sheriff ordered in the troops, few if any of the citizens of London would dare to help; most would prefer to see him hacked to death so as to be able to tell their children and their children’s children of the hideous sight they had seen on the day Frederick Jackson and John Furnival had died.

  He stood tall and aloof, as if impervious to any danger, and with great deliberation took out his golden snuffbox and placed a pinch of snuff on the back of his left hand. In his ears the chant was ringing: ‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’

  Slowly, he raised his left hand to his nose and sniffed delicately, an almost feminine gesture in so big a man. As the snuff went up his right nostril a single shot rang out, so sharp and clear that it echoed high above all other sounds, even the chanting which drowned the words spilling from Frederick Jackson’s lips.

  Furnival’s movement had been his signal to the sheriff and the shot had frightened off those who would have attacked him.

  Jackson was still haranguing the crowd.

  ‘. . . these are the guilty men, who batten on the poor, who drag the harmless whores into their courts and charge them for plying their trade, who. . .’

  Suddenly, he stopped, for relatives and friends climbed into the carts to bid the condemned farewell, while the executioner and his assistants finished fastening ropes around the necks of those about to be hanged, then thrust them towards another huge cart over which the gibbet hung. Weeping and wailing now took over, drowning the voice of the Prison Ordinary, now chanting psalms, but nothing stopped the sellers or the performers among the crowd.

  When the executioner covered the eyes and the faces of the condemned with black caps, Jackson kept trying to speak again but failed. The chaplains and the visitors were driven off, and then the executioner thwacked the horses fastened to the cart and they dashed away. There, kicking on the empty air, were seventeen human beings, soon to die. On the instant, some relatives pulled at the hanging bodies to hasten death, one belabouring a swinging man’s breast with a heavy stone to stop the heart from beating.

  Jackson hardly moved; no doubt the executioner had been well paid to make sure his neck was broken.

  The crowd’s attention switched now from the gangs forcing their way through to Furnival towards the victims, and there came a deep sigh, as if each person present drew in a breath at the same moment.

  Eve Milharvey uttered a gasp and buried her face in her hands. James Marshall stared at the swinging man as if mesmerised by the sight. Ruth Marshall, for whose husband’s death this man had died, watched with swollen eyes in a face drained of colour, then slowly lowered her head and locked her fingers in silent prayer.

  The soldiers looked on impassively. The Reverend Sebastian Smith, a small, plump and mild-looking man, invoked his God in tones which only those close by could hear for all whose souls had departed this earth.

  ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on this man, Thy creature, spare him the fires of hell, take him to Thy bosom. . .’

  His voice and all other sounds were drowned in the fresh chanting, in the noise of movement, as Frederick Jackson’s men fought to get at Furnival.

  ‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’

  Furnival had not moved.

  He raised his left hand again and sniffed the biting snuff into his left nostril, and almost on the instant there was a bark of command.

  �
��Quick - march.’

  And from the direction of Hyde Park, from main roads and narrow side streets, came large numbers of dragoons, marching with their muskets at the ready. Furnival, as Chief Magistrate of Bow Street, had arranged their presence, rare at Tyburn, because he had been alive to the possibility of riot after Jackson’s death, or even before. The tramp, tramp, tramp of feet now echoed to the chanting, while from the crowd more of Furnival’s hired men moved with military precision and formed a ring around the magistrate.

  Furnival looked towards the groups of men who had come to kill him. A stone struck his left shoulder but he did not appear to notice.

  ‘Go home, all of you,’ he called. ‘Go home and hold your wake and you’ll have nothing to fear this day. Stay and make more trouble and I’ll have every one of you in Newgate within the hour.’

  Another stone glanced off his arm.

  A man growled: ‘We’ll kill you one day.’

  ‘But not today,’ said Furnival, and he turned his back. ‘Go home.’

  Not a single man approached him further; and as the men who had come to kill dispersed among the crowd so did Furnival’s men, watching for the more blatant pickpockets; and as the minutes passed, the festive air, which had been everywhere before the hanging, began to return; laughter came in spontaneous gusts; the sellers of food, of gin and of ale, those who offered all the fun of the fair, began to do a roaring trade; men and women and some children sprang up as if from the ground carrying sheaves of single printed sheets. These were the forged or fictional stories, some based on things Jackson had said in prison, but few cared to wait for the official one the Ordinary would produce tomorrow morning.

  ‘Last speech and dying testament of Frederick Jackson, his very words, from first to last, only twopence. Read all the things you couldn’t hear because of the din. Jacker’s own words, words you’ll never forget.’

  And others hawked more newssheets and bills, whilst a few, with furtive air, began to offer pieces of the rope taken from Jackson’s neck; if genuine, each piece would fetch several pounds.

  ‘Death speech of Jonathan Wild, not a word missing, printed on special paper, only one penny.’

  ‘Who’ll buy The Daily Courant? Read all about the ‘orrible things that ‘appen in the Fleet. . .’

  And so they went on, raucous and never-ending.

  At one spot, eating hot pies and drinking lemonade, one family group was busy reading aloud pieces from the confessions while another was arguing amiably.

  ‘Tyburn’s the best place, I tell you,’ one man declared.

  ‘I like Newgate better; you don’t have so far to walk,’ the woman argued.

  ‘What’s the matter with Putney, then, or Kennington? You can take a coach to the gallows and watch everything without moving out of your seat.’

  Others of the party began to join in, some preferring the hangings in the Old Kent Road and Wapping, some showing a liking for those outside a shop where a thief had been caught and summarily tried.

  ‘There’s a book I read,’ the first man said, ‘calls London the City of the Gallows. The author says you can’t come into London by road or by the river without passing some.’

  A child, running, fell and began to cry and all thought switched from hanging to the scratches on his knee.

  John Furnival, with his three close attendants, walked through the thinning crowd towards Tyburn Pike, where his carriage was waiting. As he neared a little mound which commanded a good view of the hanging, a lad dressed neatly in tweed breeches, a jacket which reached halfway down his thighs and a shirt with ruffles at cuffs and neck ran forward. His slouch cap, of hogskin, was pulled over his left eye. He wore heavy boots, patched at the toes, with thick nails already wearing thin. Before Furnival realised what was happening, the lad took his hand and pressed it to his lips. For a moment the magistrate stood still, aware of the cool lips and the upturned face and the dark curls and touched to emotion because of the lad’s fervour; something stirred in his memory, too, but before the vision grew clear, the boy turned and ran, choking back tears. Furnival strode on, pointed out by hundreds, until suddenly he saw a woman in a dark-grey cloak and black bonnet standing in his path and staring at him.

  Again he stopped abruptly. The three men also stopped and put their hands to their pistols and looked about but no one who threatened danger stood nearby, unless the woman hid some weapon beneath the cloak she wore as a disguise.

  Furnival said, ‘If you need help, Eve Milharvey, come to me.’

  ‘I’d sooner ask help of the devil,’ she said. ‘I hope you die in agony, John Furnival.’

  She turned and walked away at a good pace, head held high, eyes still blazing with the hatred she had for the man who had hounded down her lover.

  No one followed her or recognised her. She was near the creaking cart on which they were now taking Jackson’s body away, drawn by two heavily built farm horses, when she saw a boy. Had she seen him only full face she might not have been so startled or so sure who he was. His profile allowed no doubt at all; the high forehead and the dark curly hair; the hooked nose; the deep-set eyes which might have been carved from marble; the full lips, seen even from where she stood as bow-shaped and beautiful, lips more rightfully a woman’s than a man’s. And the square, thrusting chin, too large in comparison with his other features, making him jaw-heavy, as his father had been. She had seen him once before and recognised him as James Marshall.

  His father had worked as a court officer for John Furnival, and had been one of three who had gone to arrest Frederick Jackson for a robbery he had planned and helped to carry out. Jackson might have escaped from that charge of robbery, although some of the stolen silver and coin was still in his home, the home in Loxley Yard to which he had taken her nearly twenty years ago.

  But he could not escape the charge of murder. And he had shot Richard Marshall through the heart, not knowing two other of Furnival’s men had been outside the door, waiting to pounce on him when he came hurrying out.

  And now here was James Marshall, watching the body of the man who had killed his father as it shook and shifted in the death cart.

  And she, Eve Milharvey, felt no deep stirrings of compassion for him, even though she saw no hatred in his eyes but only tears.

  He turned blindly, passed her, and ran towards Hyde Park and the turnpike there. Soon he was swallowed up in the crowd and she hurried and caught up with the people following the body, some walking alongside the cart as if they would be pallbearers. Some she knew; among them were the most vicious and cruel of the scoundrels who had looked up to Frederick as their leader.

  A question which had often been in her head seemed now to burst inside her. Why had he led them? Why had a man of such calibre placed himself at the head of an army of brutes? What had driven him to the cruelties she knew he had committed when with her he had always been gentle and kind?

  The horses’ hooves and the iron wheels clattered over the gravel, the ungreased hubs groaned in a journey to the burial place she had bought for him, just as she had bought the body and the clothes from the hangman, whose property they became. Most bodies were purchased by friends or relatives who could afford them; a few by the Surgeons’ Hall. Once there the surgeons would seize upon them in their greedy thirst for the knowledge which only fresh dead bodies could give. At least she could save Jacker that indignity. No one recognised Eve as she walked with her head bowed, the frills of her black bonnet drawn low over her forehead. Gradually, thoughts blurred and almost died away, but one remained: that more and more of the men who owed Jacker their lives and their livelihoods dropped out of the procession, a cortege fit for a caricature by Hogarth. Some stopped at a grogshop for a penn’orth of gin; some saw a face or a pair of eyes or a low-cut revealing dress and followed it.

  Outside the tavern in St. Giles the hangman himself was auctioning pieces of rope, and even young girls were buying pieces and fondling them, putting them to their cheeks or down their bosoms. From
inside, the sound of drunken revelry was at its height and the words of the song which Jacker himself had sung came clearly into the street, making Eve catch her breath.

  ‘He stopped at The George for a bottle of sack,

  And promised to pay for it on his way back!’

  Once, near the open space of Lincoln’s Inn, where lawyers lived and worked, she saw a boy and thought mistakenly for a moment that it was young Marshall. And once she saw a man with hair the colour of John Furnival’s, but a smaller man, large enough to remind her of her hatred of the magistrate but not, in her grief, to make it blaze to life.

  2: TWO FURNIVALS AND WORD OF OTHERS

  John Furnival sat well back in his carriage and took the jolting with inward protest but outward calm as the two well-groomed horses and the four iron-banded wheels ran over the cobbles towards the Strand and the narrow streets beyond. He preferred this route when not in a hurry or anxious to travel secretly, for fear of giving notice to his forthcoming victims that he was on his way. The coachman, knowing his whims, took him into the great piazza of Covent Garden, where stood the big houses built by the Duke of Bedford, who had spared no expense to make this the heart of fashionable London.

  But this whole area had lost much of its quality. Between here and Bow Street sleazy brothels and thieves’ dens, gaming houses and wooden lean-tos and sheds had been built in once-spacious roads, making hiding place for thieves, assassins and criminals of every kind. Even the Ordinary of Newgate had complained of the danger of the area.

  There were good spots, nevertheless, still guarded by private retainers, a kind of militia which could in emergency work together. John Furnival was able to have a stronger force than most, needed if he were to carry out his work as magistrate efficiently, because he was wealthy in his own right and chose this way of spending much of his money, helping to clear London of crime.