Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [78]
“Get on with it!” Pitt snapped. The thought of a hundred thousand people milling around, pressing close to see a man hanged, was revolting. He knew it was true; it was even regarded as something of a sport by a certain set. Someone owning a room with a view over the front of Newgate could rent it out for twenty-five guineas for a good hanging. People would picnic with champagne and delicacies.
What is there in death, he wondered, that is so fascinating—in someone else’s agony that is acceptable as public entertainment? Some sort of catharsis of all one’s own fears—a kind of propitiation to fate against the violence that hangs over even the safest lives? But the idea of taking pleasure in it made him sick.
It was raining gently when the cabbie dropped him outside the great rusticated front of Newgate Prison.
He identified himself to the turnkey at the gate, and was let in.
“Who did you say?”
“Maurice Jerome,” Pitt repeated.
“Goin’ to be ’anged,” the turnkey said unnecessarily.
“Yes.” Pitt followed him into the gray bowels of the place; their feet echoed hollowly on the stone. “I know.”
“Knows something, does ’e?” the turnkey went on, leading the way to the offices where they would have to obtain permission. Jerome was a man under sentence of death; he could not be visited at will.
“Maybe.” Pitt did not want to lie.
“Mostly when you got ’em this far, I likes to see you rozzers leave them poor sods alone,” the turnkey remarked, and spat. “But I can’t stand a man wot kills children. Uncalled for, that is. Man’s one thing—and there’s a lot of women as can ask for it. But children’s different—unnatural, that is.”
“Arthur Waybourne was sixteen,” Pitt found himself arguing. “That’s not exactly a child. They’ve hanged people less than sixteen.”
“Oh, yeah!” the turnkey said. “When they’d earned it, like. And we’ve ’ad ’em in the ’ouses o’ correction for a spell, for being a public nuisance. And more than one in for spinnin’ ’is top in the marketplace. Set a lot o’ people a mess o’ trouble. ’Ad ’em in the ‘Steel’—down Coldbath Fields.”
He was referring to one of the worst jails in London, the Bastille, where men’s health and spirits could be broken in a matter of months on the treadmill or the crank, or the shot drill, passing iron cannonballs endlessly from one to the other along a line till their arms were exhausted, backs strained, muscles cracking. Picking oakum until the fingers bled was easy by comparison. Pitt made no reply to the turnkey—there were no words that would suffice. The Bastille had been like that for years, and it was better than it had been in the past; at least the stocks and the pillories were gone, for any difference that made.
He explained to the chief warder that he wanted to see Jerome on police business, because there were still a few questions that should be asked for the sake of the health of innocent parties.
The warder was sufficiently aware of the case not to need more detailed explanation. He was familiar with disease, and there was no perversion known to man or beast he had not encountered.
“As you wish,” he agreed. “Although you’ll be lucky if you get anything out of him. He’s going to be hanged in three weeks, whatever happens to the rest of us, so he’s got nothing to gain or lose either way.”
“He has a wife,” Pitt replied, although he had no idea if it made any difference to Jerome. Anyway, he was answering the warder out of the necessity for appearance. He had come to see Jerome from a compulsion within himself, a need to try one more time to satisfy his own mind that Jerome was guilty.
Outside the office, another turnkey led him along the gray vaulted corridors toward the death cells. The smell of the place closed over him, creeping into his head and throat. He was assaulted by staleness, a dirt that carbolic never washed away; by a sense that everyone was always tired, and yet could not rest. Did men with the knowledge of certain death—at a given hour, a given minute—lie awake terrified lest sleep rob them of a single instant of the life left? Did they