The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [82]
The card game was taking place in the cellar beneath the taproom. It was a stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and even though it was July, a turf fire smouldered in the grate. Above them, in the taproom itself, the fiddle-playing had started up and the resulting foot-stomping caused flecks of dust and plaster to rain down on the makeshift card table. On the floor was spread a generous layer of butcher’s-shop sawdust. As he introduced the other two players, Archie Tait, a former pugilist who owned a small whisky distillery, and Bill Campbell, who taught moral philosophy at the Academical Institution, Arnold himself took no notice of the disturbance. Lining the walls around the cramped room were a motley assortment of hangers-on: shipyard builders and brick-field labourers in working clothes, with dirty fingernails, drinking Dublin stout from chipped pots, staring with silent envy at the small pile of money gathered on the table.
As he sat down on a wooden chair, Pyke glanced up at the shaking ceiling and said, ‘Dancing without women.’ No one reciprocated his smile.
‘You’ll excuse our unfamiliarity with your more sophisticated tastes,’ Arnold said, pouring himself a fresh glass of whisky. ‘We’re hard-working folk, not necessarily inured to the effects of alcohol like the rest of Ireland. But you see, tomorrow is a holiday, a celebration to commemorate smashing the papists, and so we’re giving our moral diligence a rest for the night.’ With feigned sentiment, he held up his whisky glass. ‘A toast to King Billy.’ A murmur of approval rippled around the room, followed by a chink of ale pots. Pyke left his own glass on the table.
‘Ye don’t care to join us in a drink?’ The ex-pugilist stared at him fiercely. He was an ugly man made uglier by the visible scars of his former profession.
Pyke picked up his glass and poured its contents down his open throat. That seemed to satisfy the gathered crowd, if not the pugilist.
Campbell laughed nervously. He was unctuous but appeasing. ‘So what do you think of our wee town, Mr Hawkes?’
Pyke told him that, so far, he’d found it cold, wet and dreary. Campbell smiled genially but Tait and Arnold met his flippancy with stony faces.
‘It’s a liberal Presbyterian town,’ Campbell said, ‘or at least it used to be, back when people read Paine and Franklin as avidly as they did Knox and Calvin. Of course, the Anglicans always held the purse-strings, still do’ - he glanced nervously at Arnold - ‘but for a while, at least, people were calling us the northern Athens, with their tongues only half in their cheek. These are darker times, though. The good Reverend Henry Cooke will soon have us dressing in sackcloth and reading nothing but the Good Book. Wouldn’t that be a good thing for all of us, John?’ His tone dripped with sarcasm.
Arnold shrugged and picked up the playing cards. ‘As long as the mills continue to make a profit and the papists are kept on the rack, the Reverend Cooke can say or do what he likes.’ He turned to Pyke and said, ‘We were playing Primero. I’ll presume ye have enough money to cover whatever debts you accrue.’ He cracked his knuckles and began to deal the cards. ‘As you might readily believe, things could turn ugly for folk who canna settle their debts.’
Pyke lost steadily over the course of the following hour but limited his losses to a few pounds by betting frugally and folding often. Quickly, the other players came to regard him as an irrelevance. Even Arnold seemed to relax his guard.
They talked in clipped sentences about people they knew in a way that was designed to exclude him. When it was his turn to deal, Pyke used the opportunity to slip himself an additional card, the six of clubs, which he dropped into his lap and, later, shunted up his sleeve. Even the onlookers had ceased to notice him.
Now slightly drunk, Arnold