The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [89]
Later, as Pyke wrapped his arms around Megan, he was vaguely aware he was using her in some undefined manner. But such was his own nocturnally magnified sense of melancholy that he couldn’t help himself. As he pressed himself against her and kissed her ear lobe, he could not tell whether or not her murmurs were signs of grudging approval.
It was still raining the following morning. Billowing clouds clung to the peaks of the hills that ringed the town and dumped their rainwater on to an already saturated landscape. Still, the streets were choked with ordinary people going about their daily business and dead-eyed groups of males silently congregating on street corners carrying brickbats, knives and even swords. It was a Catholic district, Megan had told him, and some of the men there were fixing themselves up for a fight with the Orangemen who were planning their own twelfth of July celebrations. On one corner, men wearing red ribbons attached to their coats were gathering together piles of bolts and half-bricks. On another, someone was scribbling ‘No Cooke’ on the wall in chalk.
Barrack Street was thronging with uniformed soldiers and armed police dressed in dark green. It was also crowded with slow-moving traffic. The sound of horses and carts rattling over the uneven cobbles was drowned only by the excited chatter of a thousand conversations; shopkeepers told their customers in hushed tones about the shooting; road sweepers swapped embellished tales of murder with anyone who cared to listen. Everyone was nonplussed and excited by the news of Arnold’s death. The question that most people seemed to be asking was: had the mill owner been killed by papists? If nothing else, the shooting promised to further spice up an occasion already made fraught by Catholic emancipation.
Disguised as a mill labourer, Pyke moved carefully but unhindered through the crowds. At his heel, the dog panted with excitement. Megan had left by the time he awoke. He found the clothes next to him. Briefly he wondered whether she would be angered by the money from the card game that he had left for her, and whether he had done so in order to appease his own guilt.
While he ate his breakfast, an undistinguished meat pie, he watched as an older man wrapped a leather grip around one end of a four-foot brickbat. Alongside him, soldiers, shopkeepers and ruffians mixed uneasily on the narrow pavements. The cobbled street was awash with manure. From hand-held barrows, vendors sold fruit and fresh fish.
At the end of Barrack Street, Pyke turned on to Durham Place and the neighbourhood deteriorated further. Pigs, sheep and goats roamed freely in and out of brick terraces, whose makeshift windows were constructed from hessian sacks. Underfoot, the track itself was flooded with human effluvia and water that had broken the banks of the nearby river. The whole area seemed to be ripe for a cholera epidemic. From gloomy doorways, men and women dressed in ragged clothes stared at him without smiling and talked to one another in hushed voices.
The previous night, Megan had told him Sandy Row was so called because, at one time, the tidal waters of the Lagan had met the fresh waters of the Blackstaff to form a small sandy cove where mill workers had once washed their clothes. In the cold light of day, however, it was hard to detect any such cove. The area surrounding the river was boggy: an unclaimed scrub of land between two warring communities. A few slovenly thatched cottages hovered in the shadows of the giant linen mill. Farther back along the road, a group of mill workers attacked an unarmed coal carrier. A soldier looked on without interest, making no effort to intervene, even when the coal carrier fell to the ground clutching his knife-wounded belly.
Ahead of him, on the other side of the bridge, he could see more terraced houses. A crowd had gathered outside one of the terraces and someone was addressing them from a first-floor window. Pyke could not