The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [35]
Pyke said Foote was more famous for his powers of consumption than for his pulpit oratory. This time her laugh seemed almost flirtatious.
The prison was smaller than Pyke had remembered but its fortress-like buildings, cramped together in an almost piecemeal fashion owing to the lack of space, and the sheer granite walls that stood guard over the maze of concealed courtyards and passages inside the prison, revived his fear of confined spaces.
It was a crisp day but the washed-out blue sky was not visible, even from within the prison’s open courtyards, so steep were the walls and so cramped were the buildings. From within the blocks and wards, Pyke could hear the shouts and wails of the prison’s inhabitants.
He tried to imagine what it might be like, to be held in such a place, with no access to the outside world.
Emily seemed entirely at ease in their surroundings. She explained how the prison was laid out. She pointed to the north side where the debtors were housed and explained that they lived in relative comfort. They were visited by vendors who hawked newspapers and tobacco, potmen who sold pints of beer and local merchants who brought with them cold joints, fish and mince pies. The condemned, she explained, occupied the press-yard side of the prison. There were two dozen rooms and fifteen cells to accommodate eighty or ninety prisoners, many of whom were likely to be granted a reprieve or have their sentence commuted to transportation. Emily said children as young as twelve mixed freely with sodomists and murderers.
In the press yard in front of the condemned wing, she pointed to a large movable scaffold. Pyke had spotted it already. The condemned man stood on a false floor with a noose around his neck, she explained, and on the executioner’s signal, it dropped, leaving him hanging in the air.
Pyke said he had seen many executions and that their pointless barbarity never failed to shock him.
‘Really?’ she said, squinting, even though the sun could not penetrate the interior of the prison. ‘I would’ve imagined that their violence might have appealed to your baser instincts.’
‘And what baser instincts might those be?’
This time Emily blushed. ‘Perhaps the ones that endow you with such self-confidence.’
‘You think my confidence to be unfounded?’
‘Not unfounded,’ she said, looking away, half-smiling. ‘But I fancy you wield it as one might a weapon.’
‘What sort of a weapon?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, still affecting a smile.
‘A rapier, perhaps?’
‘I was thinking more of a bludgeon.’
‘Ah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Then perhaps you are mistaking confidence for heavy-handedness. For I would not consider myself to be confident.’ He waited to catch her stare. ‘Especially not around you.’
She looked away quickly. ‘In any case, I would have imagined punishment better suits your world than reform.’
‘Quite,’ Pyke said, grinning now. ‘Let’s return to the safer subject of barbaric violence.’ He made to wipe something from his eye. Above him, a crow was circling in the small patch of sky still visible from within the prison walls. ‘Just because I believe the only way of subduing any power is through the exercise of a greater power doesn’t necessarily mean I find such a state of affairs appealing.’
‘That’s quite a bleak view of human nature, isn’t it? The weak being torn apart by the strong and the strong being torn apart by the stronger.’
Nodding, despite himself, he found her instinctive grasp of his position impressive. He had never tried to have a similar conversation with Lizzie.
‘I would’ve thought that description perfectly fits what’s happening inside this prison.’ Pyke pointed towards the condemned block.
‘But that’s exactly it,’ she