The Fiend in Human Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  A HANGING AT NEWGATE

  Soho

  1 - Camden Town

  2 - Fleet Street, west of Ludgate

  3 - Sewell’s rooms, off Bruton Street

  4 - The Falcon

  5 - Deverley Lane, off Floral Street

  6 - Plant’s Inn

  7 - The Haymarket

  8 - The Holy Land

  9 - Near Waterloo Bridge

  10 - The Holy Land

  11 - Chester Path

  12 - The Fidelium

  13 - Coldbath Fields

  14 - The Haymarket

  15 - Coldbath Fields

  16 - The Falcon

  17 - Coldbath Fields

  18 - Camden Town

  19 - The Grove of the Evangelist

  20 - Camden Town

  21 - Near Leicester Square

  22 - Camden Town

  23 - Off St Giles High Street

  24 - The Crown

  25 - Plant’s Inn

  26 - The Holy Land

  27 - The Grove of the Evangelist

  28 - The Haymarket

  29 - The Grove of the Evangelist

  30 - The Falcon

  31 - Plant’s Inn

  32 - Outside Plant’s Inn

  33 - The Falcon

  34 - A Room above Plant’s

  35 - Chester Path

  36 - The Falcon

  37 - The Grove of the Evangelist

  38 - The Crown

  39 - Plant’s Inn

  40 - Cannon Street Road

  41 - Plant’s Inn

  42 - The Crown

  43 - The Holy Land

  44 - Sewell’s rooms, off Bruton Street

  45 - Beak Street

  46 - The Holy Land

  47 - The Crown

  48 - The Holy Land

  49 - Newgate Gaol

  50 - Chester Path

  51 - New Oxford Street

  52 - The Grove of the Evangelist

  53 - The Crown

  54 - The Falcon

  55 - Telegram, SS Europa

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt gratitude to my editors from three countries: Anne Collins (Canada), Hope Dellon (USA) and Oliver Johnson (UK), and my agent Helen Heller, for their insight, support and friendly advice. Couldn’t have done it without them.

  Nor could this book have been written without the collaboration of Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) who wrote London Labour and the London Poor.

  And I wish to acknowledge my wife, Beverlee, who puts up with a lot.

  A HANGING AT NEWGATE

  Notes While On The Town

  by

  Edmund Whitty, Correspondent

  The Falcon

  LONDON, 11 May 1852

  For the better part of Monday 10 May the vicinity of Newgate Prison took on the aspect of a seasonal fair. Beginning at nine the previous evening, pilgrims crowded onto the square, past the abattoirs of Snow Hill and the approaches from Newgate Market, while surrounding streets echoed with the heavy boots of the great unwashed. Some came by rail, some by cart, still more on foot, from Hackney, Newham, Greenwich and Hammersmith, as well as the extremities of Greater London (Stinking Lane, Pie Corner), where the potteries, ironworks and slop shops, as though commanded by the chimes of St Sepulchre, disgorged their working poor for an unscheduled treat.

  After all, what could provide a better tonic for the oppressed human spirit, than to witness the fate of one more wretched than oneself?

  Cold fowl and cigars, pickled onions in jars

  Welsh rabbit and kidneys – rare work for the jaws

  And very large lobsters with very large claws

  And there is McFuze and Lieutenant Tregooze

  And there is Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues,

  All come to see a man die in his shoes!

  Few retired to rest that night and all were too excited to sleep, passing the hours over draughts and cards, rattling the dice box while indulging in insulating potations, those who drank deepest jarring the night air with chorus after chorus of that depressing anthem for a hanging: ‘O My! O My! Think I’ve Got to Die!’ Among them wandered enterprising businessmen, renting out the last of the better positions: Beautiful prospect! Excellent situation! Favoured view!

  As a professional your correspondent was permitted to observe the proceedings from a privileged position opposite and above the gallows, from which viewpoint the quality gather to take in the spectacle at £10 per seat. Indeed, the two young gentlemen beside us, Oxford men with an eye for the ladies and a patrician taste in cigars and brandy, seemed to regard the spectacle as existing purely for their own edification and amusement.

  Below, more frugal enthusiasts paid in discomfort what their pocketbooks could not afford; as early as two in the morning they took up their posts, stubbornly withstanding the pelting rain through six weary hours. Haggard and pinched they appeared by morning, especially the wretches accustomed to the airless factories and unwholesome abattoirs, with starved cheeks, toothless jaws and a moist milkiness of the eye. Not that the fellmongers, the glue-renderers, the carpenters and shoemakers appeared any more hardy or vigorous.

  None the less, never did a more willing audience assemble to witness the most extreme penalty England has to offer the public other than a drawing and quartering – and the latter, while still a sentencing option, has not been performed in fifty years.

  To the chagrin of my two lusty companions, few females honoured the company with their presence, only a few gaudily dressed kept women with skin like peeled fruit, their more foresighted escorts having procured their company as an enjoyable prelude and epilogue to the coming event.

  As a trickle of pale sunlight appeared between the clouds and over the slate of the eastward rooftops, an impatient throng could be discerned monotonously tracing the outline of a circle six persons deep, as though working a treadwheel, backed by the shadow of Newgate, their faces selfconsciously gloomy in keeping with the enjoyment of sorrow. Within this moving wall of woe, children disported in the first rays of the sun, like drab butterflies, mistaking the aroma of gin for flowers.

  No matter their physical occupation, every mind in the square turned in the same direction: to imagining the event to come, to savouring the knowledge that such horror was about to be inflicted upon somebody else.

  In a few moments the clock of St Sepulchre will chime, and he will ascend the scaffold steps to the drop, a temporary machine connected to the wall of the prison by means of iron hooks; where a rope will be drawn through a chain and around his neck; and when the Chaplain pronounces the dreadful words, In the midst of life we are in death, Executioner Calcraft, as dusty and as dependable as death itself, will draw the pump-like handle, release the bolt, and a carcass will be all that remains of a man named Christopher Walden. Thereafter, the body will be cut down, to be interred an hour later within the walls of Newgate, dignified by neither coffin nor shroud, covered with lime and water, then buried and the ground smoothed so that, within the shortest time possible, the Fiend in Human Form – this week’s edition at any rate – will have been erased from the face of the earth, like a mistake in spelling.

  And yet as a regular spectator of such public offerings at Newgate of a Monday morning, your correspondent cannot but wonder whether a second Fiend is brought to life by the elimination of the first – a Fiend unconfined to the material remains of Christopher Walden, free to spread and drift like the black smoke from surrounding chimneys, to be inhaled by the population as a whole.

  Not that the earth will be any the poorer for Walden’s absence.

&nb
sp; Swell, fraud, corrupter of any misfortunate with whom he came into discourse, our man stands condemned for a brutal murder, under circumstances which your correspondent must refrain from repeating, by order of the Chief Magistrate of London. Let it suffice to note that Walden’s hanging is an eventuality akin to a long-standing infection laying claim to a voluptuary.

  Yet again one wonders where the malignancy stops. In what society does such a Christopher Walden encounter a person of the rank of Arlington Fogg, an in such circumstances? What explanation exists that might entirely remove this blot to the legacy of Arlington Fogg? Like blood on bed-sheets, the stain will remain. A frisson of scandal to heighten the coming drama and to entertain the throng, while business is transacted for profit.

  First come the refreshment peddlers, with food and drink made from putrid ingredients or adulterated with toxic substances. Next come the flying patterers and balladeers, to market their similarly unwholesome chronicles at five pence a page. In decades previous, when a man was condemned on Friday and summarily hanged on Monday, there was no time to prepare and print a ‘Last Confession’; now the condemned man is given at least a week’s grace and sometimes two – and a commercial opportunity is born.

  Prominent among these merchants of false news stands an author promoting a work entitled The Sorrowful Lamentation of William Ryan, Otherwise Known as Chokee Bill, an account distinguished by its utter disregard for the fundamental requisites of journalistic veracity, a work of fiction in all but name, whose unabashed purpose is to exploit the macabre achievement of its principal (in comparison to which Christopher Walden is a Piccadilly pickpocket), and the public dread it inspired, to lucrative effect.

  As the clock at St Sepulchre tolls in measured monotony, somewhere within those walls the door of a death cell is flung open and the condemned prisoner, freshly shaved, wearing the suit of a bridegroom and a pair of white Berlin gloves, sets upon his bleak promenade down the dimly lit passage to an elaborate iron staircase leading to the basement, down which he trips with exaggerated vigour, like a schoolboy at playtime.

  But now he stops and the false bravado disappears, as a door opens and reality greets him with the watery light of morning.

  From the open door to the machine is not greater than a hundred and fifty feet, which distance he covers as though in a trance, stiffly, arms strapped to his sides by means of leather belts. At each corner of the scaffold stands an official dressed in black, bearing a long wand in one hand, like an inquisitor in some medieval exorcism. Upon seeing the prisoner, the crowd lets out a low moan, punctuated with cries of Down in front!

  The Chaplain reads aloud the solemn service for the Burial of the Dead. As the procession reaches the ladder, the voice falters and quavers appropriately.

  The prisoner climbs the ladder, to be met at the summit by Mr Calcraft – who, before acquiring his current post, flogged boys for a living. Above his dusty beard, the executioner’s facial pores appear to have been pricked repeatedly with pointed sticks.

  Now the cries of the multitude shrink as though for want of air, to the dreamy murmur of a sea-shell; now one’s ears throb with the unnatural silence, broken by the drone of the Chaplain who prays for the departing sinner, and by the incongruously amorous patter of pigeons, fluttering across the pavement and nestling on surrounding eaves.

  Now the Chaplain pauses in his reading, as though advancing a final plea for mercy from the Almighty. Now he whispers an inaudible question to the condemned man, to which the latter replies aloud, with a measure of impatience: ‘I have nothing to say to you, Reverend. Thank you for your interest.’

  Now Christopher Walden, of his own accord, steps into the centre of the trap, under the beam. He pauses, blinking rapidly as though in unaccustomed light, his face shining as pale as a candle. A smile appears at the corners of the lips, together with a slight shrug of the shoulders, as if in dismissal of some blunder, as though to say, Not to worry. It doesn’t matter now.

  Now his face grows puzzled, perhaps uncertain whether what is happening around him is genuine or imagined. The bell tolls inexorably. The people bend forward with tightened stomachs and straining eyes. Now the hangman grasps the rope – Walden bends his head to assist him. Now the noose is slipped over, and the head returns to its former upright position; the prisoner moves his neck about like a man with a tight collar. Now the hangman hurries to the ladder – but then remembers something he has forgotten. He returns to the drop and places the cap, which resembles a too-large night-cap, upon the patient’s head.

  ‘God bless you. Goodbye,’ says the patient in a husky voice, extending one pinioned, fin-like, white-gloved hand. In response, the hangman takes the hand and shakes it as though it were the normal way. Now the white cap is pulled over Walden’s face; the pointed edge moves with his rapid breathing.

  The executioner descends the ladder to take position beneath the drop.

  Now the bolt is drawn with a metallic click. Down falls the drop with a dull crash, and a man falls through the opening, elbows thrown out, fists clenched. Now the body spins below, where the hangman seizes the legs and pulls. One knee bends spasmodically upward, as though attempting to hop over a wall.

  The chest heaves convulsively. The close-fitting white linen cap takes on a momentary, peculiar strain, as if a bag of blackberries has been bruised, which quickly sags into its normal contour and its natural hue.

  After a moment the hangman looses his hold so that the body spins more slowly, until it comes to rest, a shapeless, dead thing, lit by the morning sun.

  From the seats of the quality, applause.

  Notes in Passing: Your correspondent salutes the bracing egalitarian spirit which has overcome some of the most fashionable households in London following published concern at the availability of over-the-counter poisons – especially arsenic and strychnine – in the light of the Redding case. About the estate of Lord Throttle, for example, Her Ladyship having previously made such a scene at Bishop’s over the pudding, it is now the custom that servants be served before, and not after, their betters, and from the same cooking-pot as well.

  Lord Throttle’s servants have never eaten better.

  Soho

  A pity the discovery was made so soon after breakfast, thinks Mr Macklin while holding the long coat-tails of the younger policeman away from the mess, holding them out to either side as if carrying the bridal train in church.

  ‘Gone queasy, have we, Mr Dick? Nasty, was it?’

  ‘Oh dear Jesus,’ moans the younger man while wiping his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘Hideous, it was. She were like a … a piece of …’ Whereupon the mental picture returns, producing a renewed heaving, as more of Mr Dick’s breakfast splashes upon the cobbles.

  ‘If you sees a little brown ring pop out,’ says Mr Macklin, ‘that is your arsehole.’

  ‘Very good, Sir. Very nice indeed.’ Having cleaned his face, Mr Dick fumbles for the top hat he cast aside in the emergency, Mr Macklin releases the coat-tails, and the two policemen contemplate the narrow strip of pre-dawn Prussian blue in between the surrounding rooftops, considering what is to be done.

  ‘Just a bit of humour, Mr Dick, no offence meant. I had not realized this were your first. Be assured, you’ll get quite used to it.’

  In this dirty and disreputable part of the city, at this silent hour when even the horses are asleep, this is the time and the place for it, thinks Mr Macklin, this is when you find them. And yet it always comes as a surprise, always they catch a man off guard, as though, like their assailants, they have been waiting for the right moment.

  ‘She were … sliced, is all I can say. Carved, like your Christmas goose.’

  ‘An unseemly comparison, Sir. No need to bring Christmas into it.’

  ‘Look at her for yourself then.’

  ‘Only if necessary, Mr Dick. Tell me one thing: were there a scarf?’

  ‘A scarf, Sir?’

  ‘Were she choked with a scarf?’

  ‘There were
no neck to choke, Sir. There were no place to put a scarf, if you get my meaning.’ Pissing against the wall, at first he had thought it was a pile of bloody rags beside him, so far had it strayed from the appearance of a human being. By the time he bent down close enough with the torch to see what it was, he could smell cheap lavender, and then he knew.

  ‘I do not think strangulation had anything to do with it, Sir. He would not have gone to the effort if she were already dead.’

  ‘Very good, then, let us be back to the shop before first light, and I shall send out Mr O’Malley with the cart, to remove it. Or dump it in the Thames, if the morgue is full.’

  ‘Sir, the woman has been murdered. She did not do this to herself.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Mr Dick.’

  ‘We must make a full report. The murderer must be apprehended.’

  ‘Oh, is that so? And where do you propose we begin? Shall we ferret out the twenty or so gentlemen our judy there may have serviced this once around the clock – the nameless clerks, sailors, drapers, not to mention your fellow Peelers getting a bit for free? On the night after a hanging, business is brisk. Or perhaps we should begin with her toff, whoever he may be, who may have become tired of her, for that is all it takes with that sort. Or her whoremaster, with rent owing and the need to set an example for others. Or her fancy man, alive with drink and jealousy. Or a rival judy over the Devil knows what. And while we comb the district from Haymarket to Soho, and Soho to Leicester Square, let us send a team of inspectors to her home village, wherever that may be, to interrogate the families she has disgraced by her own ruin.