Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [144]
There was nothing to say to one another. No comment on the hurly-burly of the wharf, where piles of goods were being loaded and unloaded into ships. They didn’t react to casks of wine and spirits being rolled over the cobblestones, nor to the shouts of porters and dockers, nor even to half a dozen horses being led nervously on to a ship.
The long voyage from Cape Town had restored their health, and the horrors of past imprisonments had begun to fade. But as they waited to be taken to Newgate, which by reputation was the hardest and cruellest prison in the whole of England, all of them were struggling to control their fear.
The cart didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon, and it was only once they were in it, trundling slowly away from the frantic activity on the wharf, that Bill broke the silence.
‘I’d forgotten what horse shit smelled like,’ he exclaimed, as their cart joined a throng of others carrying goods along a narrow road between tall, grimy warehouses.
‘It smells like Dublin,’ James retorted, giving an exaggerated loud sniff. ‘Do you think if we asked the driver nicely he’d take us to an ale house?’
Mary half smiled at their show of bravado. She knew they were every bit as scared as she was. She had finally made it to London, the place she’d dreamed of since she was a child, but it wasn’t in her dream to see it from the back of a prison cart, or to die there, dangling on a rope.
Yet despite the knowledge that Newgate lay at the end of the cart ride, all five of them found much to distract them on the way there. The streets, whether wide and elegant or narrow and dingy, teemed with people from all walks of life. Ladies in silk gowns and fancy hats, on the arms of gentlemen in wigs and frock coats, strolled nonchalantly past blind beggars, drunken slatterns and bare-footed street urchins. It was pandemonium, carts and carriages charging along at breakneck speeds, strident-voiced street vendors offering everything from fly-blown meat pies to posies of flowers. There were organ grinders and men playing tin whistles and fiddles. She saw market porters carrying huge tottering piles of baskets on their heads, a fresh-faced dairy maid with pails of milk supported on a yoke across her shoulders, and a bow-legged man with his hands clenching live, fluttering chickens by their claws.
The shops were as diverse as the kinds of people who passed by them. One sold nothing but silverware, the next displayed great pink hams, pheasants and rabbits laid out on white marble slabs. A milliner’s selling hats that could surely only be worn by royalty, and then in complete contrast a shop with mountains of secondhand boots and shoes.
Mary could hardly believe that women could go out on the streets wearing such low-cut gowns, displaying their breasts for the whole world to gawp at. Yet they appeared to be ladies of quality, for all had a soberly dressed maid or footman with them. In Plymouth only a whore would show so much naked flesh.
The clamour, dirt and evil smells ought to have shattered Mary’s long-held illusions that it was the city of miracles. But until she saw Newgate, some hours after they’d left the docks, she was still clinging to them, expecting that any moment she would be rescued.
But no rescue came. The bony horses even picked up a little speed at the sight of Newgate’s forbidding grey stone walls, relieved perhaps that they could now shed their heavy load.
Suddenly all those stories Mary had heard back in Sydney Cove of public hangings at Tyburn Tree, where huge crowds gathered to watch as if it was a sideshow in a fair, took on a new and