The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [34]
Pyke thought about Emily Blackwood and the violent argument with her father he had overheard. But he was also preoccupied by something else, something that had been on his mind for the entire day, something that related to the living arrangements of the deceased and their missing cousin.
First thing in the morning, he would pay a visit to number four Whitehall Place and examine what had been removed from the lodging house.
SEVEN
But the following morning, Pyke found himself standing outside the entrance to Newgate prison, waiting for Emily Blackwood to finish a conversation she was having with the Reverend Arthur Foote. Though he had walked past the prison, just a short distance from his gin palace, on numerous occasions since his visit to Hambledon Hall, this was the first time he had come across Emily. Pyke stared up at the building’s blackened stone-clad exterior.
There were other prisons in London but Newgate remained the most notorious. In the past, Pyke had visited the interior of the prison, mostly in order to elicit information from convicts, and found it to be a depressing but unremarkable place. Others, however, did not share his ambivalence. To them, the prison would always represent a system of justice that was as brutal as it was unfair.
They were standing almost directly outside Debtors’ Door, from where condemned men and women emerged on the day of their execution and began their last journey to the scaffold. Pyke watched Foote shuffle across the street in the direction of the King of Denmark pub, a cabman’s watering hole that occupied a three-storey tenement building directly opposite the prison.
In the middle of the previous century, public hangings had been moved from the open spaces of Tyburn to the more confined areas surrounding Newgate and, indeed, other prisons in the city, in the hope that this might restrict crowd sizes and turn the events themselves into more sober occasions. This hope had not come to pass; what had happened instead was that the same multitude now thronged into the narrow streets surrounding Newgate on hanging days, at a risk to themselves and others. Pyke’s own father had found this out, to his cost. Old Bailey was a street of ghosts. Pyke thought about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who had died in these environs, either inside or outside the prison walls, and of the throng who went there to witness people hang. He did not believe such people did so either to be entertained or reminded that the justice system worked. Watching another man die was essentially a way of clinging on to what little humanity you had left that had not been taken away by the city.
As he approached her, Pyke waved to attract Emily’s attention.
‘This is a surprise, Mr Pyke, and a very pleasant one.’ They shook hands as etiquette demanded and she smiled warmly, revealing dimples on either side of her mouth. Up close, her teeth were a brilliant white and in the weak morning sunlight her hair, which sat just above her shoulders, glistened. She made a comment about the weather, pointed out that it was cold enough for them to see their own breath, and said, ‘Imagine how it must be for those inside the prison without access to heat.’
Though his grooming regime consisted only of shaving on every third day, changing his outfit weekly and his underwear twice weekly and bathing irregularly, he found himself self-consciously arranging his hair in some imaginary mirror.
‘I am about to visit the quadrangle allocated to the female prisoners. Perhaps you would care to accompany me?’
The last thing Pyke wanted to do was witness the squalor and misery endured by Newgate’s unfortunates, but he found himself accepting her invitation. She seemed pleased by his decision and later, once the formalities had been taken care of and they were standing in a small courtyard inside