River Thieves (8 page)

Peyton said, “What’s happening up at the house, Joseph?”

Reilly pulled the stick free of the carcass and used his thumbs to break the sternum, then tore the torso along the spine with his bare hands. He offered the piece in his scarred hand to the younger man. “You and that lass are close, John Peyton?”

“Close enough.”

“Close enough to —”

“No,” Peyton said flatly.

Reilly nodded. “Is she close to anyone else you know of?”

“There’s just myself and father,” Peyton said and he stopped himself before he took the thought any further.

Reilly leaned away from the fire to rest on an elbow, as if he wanted to step back from the conversation, shift it in some other direction. “I expect the morning will answer what questions you have. No sense making yourself sick with it tonight.”

They ate in silence a while then and Reilly put a kettle of snow on to boil water for tea. Peyton chewed his food sullenly. The dry flesh tasted like a mouthful of sand.

After he’d poured them both a mug of tea, Peyton said, “Is it true what I’ve heard about John Senior?”

Reilly laughed. “I can’t begin to guess what you’ve heard.”

“Did he beat that old Indian to death with a trap-bed?”

“I’ll bet you two good oars,” Reilly said, “you heard that from Dick Richmond.”

“What difference does it make where I heard it?”

“Sometimes it makes all the difference in the world.”

“Did he do it, Joseph?”

The Irishman gave a long sigh and scratched at the hair over his ear. “That was before my time on the shore,” he said.

Peyton stared into the fire. He shook his head slowly.

Reilly said, “John Senior’s never told you how he came to take me on, has he?”

Before London hangings were moved to Newgate, the official procession to the gallows at Tyburn ran through Smithfield into the heart of Reilly’s neighbourhood, St. Giles, an area of the city densely populated by Irish immigrants. From there it moved through St. Andrews and Holborne and on to the Tyburn road. The City marshall led the parade on horseback. Behind him the undersheriff headed a group of mounted peace officers and constables armed with staves on foot. Behind these came the carts carrying the condemned men, who sat on their own coffins and were accompanied by a prison chaplain. More constables marched on either side of the carts.

Thousands of people lined the streets and the procession stopped often to allow the condemned men to speak with friends and family, and sometimes to drink mugs of ale and spirits carried out to them from taverns on the route. Women threw flowers and fruit into the carts and ran into the street to touch the hands of the men being conveyed to their deaths. The pace was stately, almost celebratory. It was as if the procession was wending its way to a church for a royal wedding. The condemned men were presented with a pair of spotless white gloves to wear. Some of them spent every shilling they had to their names on their hanging clothes and they were ferried through the streets in linen waistcoats and breeches trimmed with black ferret, in white cloth coats and silver-laced hats, in white stockings, in silk breeches.

Tens of thousands of spectators made their way to Tyburn, arriving on foot and horseback and in coaches. They thronged the cow pastures around the gallows, climbed ladders, sat on the wall enclosing Hyde Park. People fought for places on a scaffold at the bottom of Tower Hill. Entrepreneurs brought carts and sold vantage points above the heads of the crowd.

The condemned were escorted onto the gallows where they were given permission to address the crowd. Some spoke directly, others gave a prepared statement to the prison ordinary who accompanied them. They cursed the law and the country that condemned them or expressed remorse and regret for their profligate ways or commended their souls to the care of their Lord Jesus Christ. Reilly said, “There was one in particular, a tall rawney-boned fellow, he’d a dark scar across his throat like he’d already been hung. He said ‘Men, women and children, I come hither to hang like a pendulum to a watch for endeavouring to be rich too soon.’”

A handkerchief was raised and lowered to signal the opening of the trapdoor for that sudden drop, the wrenching sickening pop of the rope snapping taut. The body turning slowly on its line, the fine clothes visibly soiled with urine and faeces. They were left hanging there half an hour to ensure the completion of the sentence and after the dead men were cut down the sick were escorted up to touch the corpses for luck and health. A withered limb could be made whole by setting it upon the neck of a hanged man. Women unable to conceive a child would stroke the hand of an executed felon against their bellies to make them fruitful.

Peyton said, “You’ve seen this?”

“More times than I care to remember.” Reilly fed more green wood to the fire.

“Why would anyone want to touch a corpse like that?”

Reilly shrugged. “A dead man is an awful thing to look upon. It’s the relic of a thing gone forever from the world. And that’s as close as most will ever get to touching something holy.”

“I don’t see how all this relates to your working for my father.”

Reilly looked up, surprised. “You’re an impatient pup then.” He smiled across at Peyton. “Where are you for now? You’ve got something pressing to get to?”

Peyton shook his head no.

“Fair enough,” Reilly said. “I’ll come to your father directly.”

But he hesitated then and Peyton could see he was weighing things in his head, that there was a risk involved. The fire gave off a steady hiss, like the sound of a downpour of rain on still water.

He was born in St. Giles, Reilly told him, although his parents were both from Ireland and he was raised Irish, surrounded by Irishmen, and never thought of himself in any other way. Most of the people he knew in the community worked on the waterfront, or in shops along the streets as butchers, apothecaries, wholesalers of cloth, grocers. His father worked as a lumper on the cargo ships on the Thames, but his vocation was stealing from the English. Each night at low tide the river thieves made their way onto the East India ships at anchor. Reilly’s father employed his three sons in bailing provisions into the black strip — bags painted black to make them less visible in the darkness — once the casks were pried open. The bags were
handed off then to lightermen in flatboats or to mudlarks who waited in the low-tide silt of the river and carried the booty to fences in Alsatia. They could identify the stolen goods just from the smell of it rising through the cloth bags, sugar or indigo, coffee beans, ginger, tea.

Reilly and his brothers also received training from their mother who was an accomplished pickpocket. She went to churches in an elaborate outfit with fake arms sewn to a remarkably large pregnant belly that concealed her hands and she lifted jewellery, pocket watches and money from the people sitting on the pew to either side of her. No one suspected the mother-to-be whose hands were in plain view and had not moved from her belly through the entire service.

She taught her sons to remove rings from a person’s fingers as they shook hands, to lift bills or snuffboxes from the pockets of men standing behind them in a crowd. They all became proficient in these sleights of hand but Reilly himself had a talent for it. His mother expressed her delight in his abilities the way other parents fawned over a child’s predisposition for drawing or mathematics. Like most gifted children, he was embarrassed by his facility and wished at times to be free of it altogether.

The clandestine nature of his family’s enterprises troubled him. He could see that even the Irish in St. Giles harboured ambivalent feelings about them. He wanted to live
differently
, though he never expressed that wish in words. When he wasn’t picking pockets at Bartholomew Fair or public hangings, he worked at the Smithfield butcher shop, a job he’d found without consulting his parents. They seemed deeply disappointed in him, as if he had betrayed his country.

Peyton heard an odd note creeping into Reilly’s voice, a dimness, a filtered quality. He seemed to have lost the thread of the story and was simply reminiscing.

Hanging days, he said, were the best of times for pickpockets — a large unruly crowd accustomed to jostling and shoving for position, a distant spectacle that held the audience’s rapt attention. They talked of it among themselves with careless anticipation: a hanging was to morris, to go west, to be jammed, frumagemmed, collared, noozed, scragged, to be invited to the sheriff’s ball, to dance the Paddington frisk, to be nubbed, stretched, trined, crapped, tucked up, turned off. A hanged man, his father used to say, will piss when he cannot whistle.

Reilly shook his head. He could see now there was an odd symmetry to the event, men about to be twisted at the end of a rope for thieving and dozens of others like them moving surreptitiously among the crowd, relieving the spectators of their valuables. A tax on their entertainment. A down payment on future attractions.

“You understand I’m not proud of it now,” Reilly said. “I was just a lad.”

“My father knew this when he hired you?”

“Same as I’m telling you now.”

“What happened, Joseph?”

“Bad luck, I guess,” Reilly said. “Bad luck all around.”

It was the first hanging of the new year, two men convicted of stealing money and alcohol from a tavern, a young Irish servant who had killed his master in retaliation for a beating. The weather appropriately sombre, a morning of fog and freezing drizzle. No real fall of rain but the threat of it in the air all day. That cold winter smell of wet iron. It was the worst sort of
weather for a thief, people bundled under layers, their coats buttoned tight and held at the collar. Reilly managed to lift a silver snuffbox, a handful of shillings, a gold repeater watch.

He found his brothers once the hanging was concluded and people slowly came back to themselves in the fields, setting their hats tight to their heads, pushing their hands into pockets. As they were leaving the grounds, Reilly was taken by the shirt collar and the hair from behind. A large well-dressed man with a round face and surprisingly tiny mouth began bellowing he had caught the thief that had stolen his pocketbook, dragging Reilly towards the gallows where the constables stood. His younger brothers hung off the man’s arms and coat, Reilly yelling at them to get away.

“You hadn’t stolen a pocketbook,” Peyton said.

“No odds in the end. He’d heard me speaking Gaelic, I expect, which is evidence enough in the eyes of some. I managed to sneak the snuffbox and shillings to my brothers before the constables took note of us and they ran off. But I had the watch on my person, which he claimed as his own once it was turned out. There were holes in the lining of my coat that left my hands free when it looked like they were tucked away in my pockets. They’d found a thief, no question. There hardly seemed a point to whether it was him I’d robbed or not.”

Peyton listened to Reilly with a growing sense of unease. He could feel the story’s dive into calamity, its tragic narrative careening towards his father where John Senior would set it aright as easily as he’d piss out the fire in a tobacco pipe. The thought was profoundly disagreeable to Peyton. He had heard Cassie moaning through the door of Reilly’s tilt when Annie
Boss came outside to send them away and the memory of that sound came to him again in the darkness.

There were eight men in the docket for sentencing and the sentence was repeated eight times.
The law is that you shalt return from hence, to the place whence thou camest, and from thence to the place of execution, where thou shalt hang by the neck till the body be dead! Dead! Dead!
When his turn was called, Reilly held the wooden rail of the docket to stay on his feet. He broke into tears and wept uncontrollably as the sentence was pronounced and the weeping most likely saved his life.

“Commuted to branding and deportation to the colonies out of consideration for my age and my obvious display of contrition,” Reilly said.

“Branding?”

Reilly held his scarred hand up in the light of the fire. “Now we’re getting to John Senior,” he said. “Patience rewarded.”

He was brought to a public square where criminals were punished in the stocks. He was placed face down and constables tied his hands firmly to a wooden post. A small crowd gathered around him in an almost prayerful silence, as if he was about to be baptized. After the charge against him and the sentence were read aloud, the letter
T
was burned into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand with a red-hot iron. At first there was a nearly painless shock, like jumping into icy water. Then the ache crawled into the bones of his hand, then his arm, then his entire right side. He felt as if one half of his body was radiating light. Glowing.

He was held in a prison ship on the Thames for seven months. Transportation to the American colonies was suspended after the revolution and a suitable replacement was still being settled
on. Some of the men on Reilly’s vessel had been aboard four years and more. The ship was filthy with vermin and rats and so overcrowded that prisoners were regularly freed on the condition they would go voluntarily into exile.

Within six weeks of accepting this plea bargain Reilly was in St. John’s, penniless, walking from stagehead to warehouse to stagehead, looking for work. He was turned away each time and sometimes chased off by men wielding staves or fish forks if the brand on his hand was noted. Finally he was forced to go from table to table in the grog shops above the waterfront, begging for food, his hand wrapped in a dirty square of cloth to hide his mark. So many men intoxicated to the point of senselessness, he could have robbed them blind. He was tempted over and over and more strongly with each turned head, with each sloppy imprecation to bugger off, with the occasional whispered proposition to suck someone’s cock for a shilling.

And that’s where he found John Senior sitting alone with a bottle of rum, just in from Poole and waiting for a berth to the northeast shore. He nodded casually as Reilly approached him, almost as if he’d been expecting someone of his description. He didn’t say a word when the boy began to tell him how he arrived in St. John’s three days past and had eaten only scraps he’d managed to steal from dogs in the street in that time. Reilly took his silence as an invitation to carry on and he did so, impulsively unwrapping his hand to show the stranger his brand. He talked about his life in England until he ran out of things he could think of to say, while John Senior sat listening impassively, as if he’d paid good money for this story and was determined to take in every word. His peculiar stillness Reilly chose to interpret as a show of sympathy and instead of asking
for food or spare change he asked for work, cleaning fish or cutting wood or shovelling cow shit from a byre, he didn’t care what it was or where. He stood there then while John Senior considered him.