Gallows Thief

Sandman backed into the corridor to escape the smell of the unemptied night bucket in the cell. He wondered if he was being naïve, for he found Corday curiously believable. ‘You painted in Sir George’s studio?’ he asked, not because he cared, but because he wanted to fill the silence.

‘No,’ Corday said. ‘Her husband wanted the portrait set in her bedroom, so I did it there. Have you any idea how much bother that is? You have to take an easel and canvas and chalk and oils and rags and pencils and dropcloths and mixing bowls and more rags. Still, the Earl of Avebury was paying for it.’

‘How much?’

‘Whatever Sir George could get away with. Eight hundred guineas? Nine? He offered me a hundred.’ Corday sounded bitter at that fee, though it seemed like a fortune to Sandman.

‘Is it usual to paint a portrait in a lady’s bedroom?’ Sandman asked in genuine puzzlement. He could imagine a woman wanting herself depicted in a drawing room or under a tree in a great sunlit garden, but the bedroom seemed a very perverse choice to him.

‘It was to be a boudoir portrait,’ Corday said, and though the term was new to Sandman he understood what it meant. ‘They’re very fashionable,’ Corday went on, ‘because these days all the women want to look like Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte.’

Sandman frowned. ‘You confuse me.’

Corday raised suppliant eyes to heaven in the face of such ignorance. ‘The sculptor Canova,’ he explained, ‘did a likeness of the Emperor’s sister that is much celebrated and every beauty in Europe wishes to be depicted in the same pose. The woman reclines on a chaise longue, an apple in her left hand and her head supported by her right.’ Corday, rather to Sandman’s embarrassment, demonstrated the pose. ‘The salient feature,’ the boy went on, ‘is that the woman is naked from the waist up. And a good deal below the waist, too.’

‘So the Countess was naked when you painted her?’ Sandman asked.

‘No,’ Corday hesitated, then shrugged. ‘She wasn’t to know she was being painted naked, so she was in a morning gown and robe. We would have used a model in the studio to do the tits.’

‘She didn’t know?’ Sandman was incredulous.

‘Her husband wanted a portrait,’ Corday said impatiently, ‘and he wanted her naked, and she would have refused him, so he lied to her. She didn’t mind doing a boudoir portrait, but she wasn’t going to unpeel for anyone, so we were going to fake it and I was just doing the preliminary work, the drawing and tints. Charcoal on canvas with a few colours touched in; the colours of the bed covers, the wallpaper, her ladyship’s skin and hair. Bitch that she was.’

Sandman felt a surge of hope, for the last four words had been malevolent, just as he expected a murderer would speak of his victim. ‘You didn’t like her?’

‘Like her? I despised her!’ Corday spat. ‘She was a trumped-up demi-rep!’ He meant she was a courtesan, a high-class whore. ‘A buttock,’ Corday downgraded her savagely, ‘nothing else. But just because I didn’t like her doesn’t make me a rapist and murderer. Besides, do you really think a woman like the Countess of Avebury would allow a painter’s apprentice to be alone with her? She was chaperoned by a maid all the time I was there. How could I have raped or murdered her?’

‘There was a maid?’ Sandman asked.

‘Of course there was,’ Corday insisted scornfully, ‘an ugly bitch called Meg.’

Sandman was totally confused now. ‘And, presumably, Meg spoke at your trial?’

‘Meg has disappeared,’ Corday said tiredly, ‘which is why I am going to hang.’ He glared at Sandman. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m making it up. But there was a maid and her name was Meg and she was there and when it came to the trial she couldn’t be found.’ He had spoken defiantly, but his demeanour suddenly changed as he began to weep again. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked. ‘I know it does. It must!’

Sandman stared down at the flagstones. ‘Where was the house?’

‘Mount Street,’ Corday was hunched and sobbing, ‘it’s just off …’

‘I know where Mount Street is,’ Sandman interrupted a little too sharply. He was embarrassed by Corday’s tears, but persevered with questions that were now actuated by a genuine curiosity. ‘And you admit to being in the Countess’s house on the day she was murdered?’

‘I was there just before she was murdered!’ Corday said. ‘There were back stairs, servants’ stairs, and there was a knock on the door there. A deliberate knock, a signal, and the Countess became agitated and insisted I leave at once. So Meg took me down the front stairs and showed me the door. I had to leave everything, the paints, canvas, everything, and that convinced the constables I was guilty. So within an hour they came and arrested me at Sir George’s studio.’

‘Who sent for the constables?’

Corday shrugged to suggest he did not know. ‘Meg? Another of the servants?’

‘And the constables found you at Sir George’s studio. Which is where?’

‘Sackville Street. Above Gray’s, the jewellers.’ Corday stared red-eyed at Sandman. ‘Do you have a knife?’

‘No.’

‘Because if you do, then I beg you give it me. Give it me! I would rather cut my wrists than stay here! I did nothing, nothing! Yet I am beaten and abused all day, and in a week I hang. Why wait a week? I am already in hell. I am in hell!’

Sandman cleared his throat. ‘Why not stay up here, in the cells? You’d be alone here.’

‘Alone? I’d be alone for two minutes! It’s safer downstairs where at least there are witnesses.’ Corday wiped his eyes with his sleeve. ‘What do you do now?’

‘Now?’ Sandman was nonplussed. He had expected to listen to a confession and then go back to the Wheatsheaf and write a respectful report. Instead he was confused.

‘You said the Home Secretary wanted you to make enquiries. So will you?’ Corday’s gaze was challenging, then he crumpled. ‘You don’t care. No one cares!’

‘I shall make enquiries,’ Sandman said gruffly, and suddenly he could not take the stench and the tears and the misery any more and so he turned and ran down the stairs. He came into the fresher air of the Press Yard, then had a moment’s panic that the turnkeys would not unbolt the gate that would let him into the tunnel, but of course they did.

The porter unlocked his cupboard and took out Sandman’s watch, a gold-cased Breguet that had been a gift from Eleanor. Sandman had tried to return the watch with her letters, but she had refused to accept them. ‘Find your man, sir?’ the porter asked.

‘I found him.’

‘And he spun you a yarn, I’ve no doubt,’ the porter chuckled. ‘Spun you a yarn, eh? They can gammon you, sir, like a right patterer. But there’s an easy way to know when a felon’s telling lies, sir, an easy way.’

‘I should be obliged to hear it,’ Sandman said.

‘They’re speaking, sir, that’s how you can tell they’re telling lies, they’re speaking.’ The porter thought this a fine joke and wheezed with laughter as Sandman went down the steps into Old Bailey.

He stood on the pavement, oblivious of the crowd surging up and down. He felt soiled by the prison. He clicked open the Breguet’s case and saw it was just after half past two in the afternoon; he wondered where his day had gone. To Rider, Eleanor’s inscription inside the watch case read, in aeternam, and that palpably false promise did not improve his mood. He clicked the lid shut just as a workman shouted at him to mind himself. The trapdoor, pavilion and stairs of the scaffold had all been dismantled and now the tongue-and-groove cladding that had screened the platform was being thrown down and the planks were falling perilously near Sandman. A carter hauling a vast wagon of bricks whipped blood from the flanks of his horses, even though the beasts could make no headway against the tangle of vehicles that blocked the street.

Sandman finally thrust the watch into his fob pocket and walked northwards. He was torn. Corday had been found guilty and yet, though Sandman could not find a scrap of liking for the young man, his story was believable. Doubtless the porter was right and every man in Newgate was convinced of his own innocence, yet Sandman was not entirely naïve. He had led a company of soldiers with consummate skill and he reckoned he could distinguish when a man was telling the truth. And if Corday was innocent then the fifteen guineas that weighed down Sandman’s pockets would be neither swiftly nor easily earnt.

He decided he needed advice.

So he went to watch some cricket.

2 (#u20afc9b5-4e9e-56e7-a87a-b0e45ac90a58)

Sandman reached Bunhill Row just before the city clocks struck three, the jangling of the bells momentarily drowning the crack of bat on ball, the deep shouts and applause of the spectators. It sounded like a large crowd and, judging by the shouts, a good match. The gatekeeper waved him through. ‘I ain’t taking your sixpence, Captain.’

‘You should, Joe.’

‘Aye, and you should be playing, Captain.’ Joe Mallock, gatekeeper at the Artillery Ground, had once bowled for the finest clubs in London before painful joints had laid him low, and he well remembered one of his last games when a young army officer, scarce out of school, had thrashed him all over the New Road outfield in Marylebone. ‘Been too long since we seen you bat, Captain.’

‘I’m past my prime, Joe.’

‘Past your prime, boy? Past your prime! You aren’t even thirty yet. Now go on in. Last I heard England was fifty-six runs up with only four in hand. They need you!’

A raucous jeer rewarded a passage of play as Sandman walked towards the boundary. The Marquess of Canfield’s eleven were playing an England eleven and one of the Marquess’s fielders had dropped an easy catch and now endured the crowd’s scorn. ‘Butter-fingers!’ they roared. ‘Fetch him a bucket!’

Sandman glanced at the blackboard and saw that England, in their second innings, were only sixty runs ahead and still had four wickets in hand. Most of the crowd were cheering the England eleven and a roar greeted a smart hit that sent the ball scorching towards the field’s far side. The Marquess’s bowler, a bearded giant, spat on the grass then stared up at the blue sky as if he was deaf to the crowd’s noise. Sandman watched the batsman, Budd it was, walk down the wicket and pat down an already smooth piece of turf.