The House Of Smoke (33 page)

I laboured nervously but within ten minutes had removed enough bricks to discover a row of iron bars sunk into the floor beyond the wall. They were set less than a foot apart. And there were many of them.

I sat and stared. This was the worst imaginable setback: bricks and bars – beat one and the other stops you.

I was about to replace the wall when I had an interesting thought. Screws would only put bars over a weak spot. A place they feared a prisoner might have a real possibility of escaping from. And they would only brick it up
as well
if indeed that spot were extraordinarily weak.

I lay on the floor and peered into the gap. It was too dark to see, so I stretched a hand into the hole and felt around. It was cool and damp; thick dirt and a familiar smell oozed from the gap.

Soot.

I pulled my hand out. It was black, and stank of burned coal and wood. My heart leapt. It was, as I had hoped, the foot of a chimney. I stood up, backed away and looked at the wall. There was no visible sign of a stack being there. Then I remembered that I had been put into this stinking old part of the prison because of the overcrowding and the fact that all the other condemned cells were filled to bursting. Romantically, I imagined that this was Jack Sheppard’s chimney and that I was but a shimmy away from freedom.

Looking at the shape of the room, it was apparent it had once been twice the current size. That would account for why the ceiling was only half an arch – the other half must have been in the room to my right.

Judging from the decayed mortar, I guessed the division had been made fifty or more years ago. There were many tales about the history of Newgate – how it had been built in the twelfth century, ruined during the Great Fire, rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth century, set ablaze again by the Gordon rioters in 1780 and patched up ever since. In short, the gaol might well not be as secure as it seemed.

I sat and positioned myself in a way that enabled me to put my feet against two of the exposed bars. I wrapped my hands around one in the middle and pulled.

It was solid.

I pulled again. Jerked hard. Shook the bar with all my might and finally felt a little play between bar and stone. If I put in long hours with the nail and then used more brute force, there was a chance of moving it.

But not that morning.

The patch of black at my window was now light grey. The sky steadily on its way to becoming some form of morning blue.

I replaced the wall then took pieces of torn newspaper that I used for the shitting pot, soaked them in water, rubbed them in dirt and pressed then around the bricks to fill the gaps.

At first glance it would pass as mortar but would not bear close scrutiny. If this were to be my escape route then I needed to use it in the very near future.

Doctor Reuss diagnosed Elizabeth’s condition as ‘shattered nerves’. He prescribed several courses of mild opiates but she became increasingly reluctant to take them. When she did, they only left her listless and even more maudlin.

She would go days without speaking and weeks without even venturing outside the cottage. Most nights I would wake to find her crying in the room where Molly had slept. She seemed to derive no comfort from me covering her with a blanket and lying with her until morning. Each dawn brought renewal of my dim hope that this might be the day we turned a corner.

The professor often visited and tried his best to raise her from the gloom. He would sit in a chair alongside her, take her hand and reminisce about the life they had both known before I had come along.

When all the tinctures and tonics had failed, Moriarty insisted on attending her himself and using his powers of phrenology to reveal where in her brain the depressive problems persisted.

He made Elizabeth sit bolt upright on a chair and spent nigh on an hour combing his fingers through her hair. Occasionally he would break off to refer to several diagrams that showed skulls labelled with descriptions of what he called ‘cerebral controls’. He interrogated her extensively on how she felt, as he prodded and probed different pressure points.

When he was done, he took me aside and urged that thrice a day I gently rubbed the top and back of her head, because beneath it lay the source of self-esteem, which he reasoned had been badly damaged by Molly’s passing. He showed me vital sections close to the very centre of her skull that he called ‘the Fonts of Hope’ and said these should be massaged at least three to five times a day ‘without fail’.

I obeyed his instructions assiduously. And even though Elizabeth seemed to derive some comfort from it, I cannot in all honesty say the practice had any lasting effect on her demeanour.

I found myself wondering if there would ever be a spark of light in our darkness, or was this awful creeping death that consumed Elizabeth God’s punishment for my sins? Was not the loss of our sweet and innocent child payment enough for the squalid, sinful lives I had ended?

I bowed my head, for I knew it was not. My soul stank of the sulphurs of hell. Elizabeth was doomed and so was I. There was a pistol in the draw of a desk in the corner of our main room. I found myself sitting with it and a glass of whisky. For a full hour, and half a bottle of the fiery liquid, I contemplated ending both our miserable lives. But I had neither the courage nor complete despair to do it. Instead, I sank to my knees and prayed to a God that certainly had no reason to listen.

Throughout this long and dreary day, my eyes never left the patch of stagnant light pooled on the floor by the window bars. For once, I was impatient for it to disappear. Night-time meant fewer turnkeys, the cover of darkness and a fresh chance to use my precious sliver of steel to try to break through the bars that stood behind that damned wall.

It was late afternoon when the sun finally sank and the insipid pool of light in my cell evaporated. A supper of stale bread, watery stew and a mug of cold tea followed. I ate quickly and waited to be ‘locked down’, enduring what remained of the day. Keys jangled in locks. Voices called down galleries. Screws completed their chores and settled into noisy rounds of cards and tittle-tattle.

I made my move. Feverishly, I gouged out both the real mortar and the fake that I had made with paper saturated in dust. I took away all the loosened bricks and, as I had done the previous night, stacked them along the wall so they might be slid quickly back into position if necessary.

Seated on the floor, I gripped an exposed bar with two hands and pulled with all my strength. At the same time, I planted both feet on adjacent ones and pushed with the might of a kicking mule. I felt like a human arrow pent on a crossbow.

The bars did not shift.

I rocked them as hard as I could. Sweat beaded on my brow. Sinews pulsed and strained down my arms. Still the iron would not give up its congress with the stone. I concluded that my efforts were too close to the floor to have an effect and I needed to try higher up the bars, at what might be a weaker point.

There was still no movement, and my strength was ebbing away.

I dropped to the stone floor and worked furiously with the nail, jabbing around the base where the bar met the ground, then I repeated all the pulling and straining exercises. To no avail.

I got to my feet, stepped back as far as my leg irons would allow, ran at the bar from the side, slid and kicked it with the flat of my foot.

I felt enough ‘give’ to be encouraged to repeat the attack, and the bar loosened. I thumped it several more times and it began to rattle.

Keys jangled in my lock; I froze.

A screw shouted through the door, ‘What’s all that noise? Is it you, Lynch?’

There was no time to move the bricks back into position. If he opened up then I was done for.

‘It
is
me. I am as mad as hell and letting off steam. So you just open that door you piece of prison shit and come in here, so I can vent my anger on you.’

‘Fuck you, Lynch! We’ll all be drinking ale when they get round to popping your head in a noose.’ He banged the door and moved on.

I stayed as still as possible, listening to his feet click down the landing, and made sure he was gone before I took so much as a peek through the newly bent bars into the hole in the wall next to me.

For a moment, I wondered if he would come back, maybe with some other screws, to teach me a lesson. Or would he steer well clear, prefer a quiet life to one that could end up in serious injury?

I gambled on the latter.

One of the bars had bent. Better still, it had broken the stone where it had been set. I worked on it with the nail. Ground out all I could around the metal. Pulled hard. Pulled left, right, backwards and forwards. Stone splintered away.

Excitedly, I grabbed the bar and heaved it towards me. Got to my knees and pulled with every ounce of effort I had left. Unable to do more, I sat back and looked at the result.

It was bent as far as it would go.

I crawled to the bars, twisted my head and angled my shoulders.

I could fit!

It was tight, but I could get through.

Quickly, I shuffled back and used the nail to pick the lock on my leg irons. Then I stuffed my pockets with the booty I had taken from Father Deagan’s bag and returned to the exposed chimney.

Iron and brick had been defeated. Wind whistled down from the outside world. Somewhere up there in the darkness above my head lay freedom. Never had I so longed to be outside in the stinking, foul air of London Town.

I worked my way back inside the hole, leaned against a wall and pushed my feet against the bricks opposite me. By keeping my hands at my side and pressing hard on the wall, I was able to inch my way slowly upward.

Tired and panting, I stopped, for fear of falling. Rain fell on my face – glorious, glorious rain! One drop, two drops, then many. A delicious downpour. It renewed my muscles and I moved on.

Progress was painful and slow. At times my hand or foot slipped on the soot-covered walls and I feared a back-breaking drop to the stone below. The climb was hard and I was not as strong as I used to be. Prison slops had sapped muscle from my frame. The higher I got the weaker I grew.

I saw moonlight, felt the cold breeze of unchained air and more of that heavenly rain. But only through a slit. I could see now that the chimney had been blocked off, except for a small rectangle. I ran my fingers around the hole. It was much less than a foot wide and not two feet in length. I could get a hand and arm through, but that was all.

After a minute or so, my fingers found some purchase and I was able to pull down on the end of the block.

Nothing gave.

I grabbed the stubborn stone with both hands, took my best grip, released my feet from the side of the chimney and dangled recklessly free.

Not even my weight would dislodge it.

I swung back into my braced position, feet planted against one wall, back firmly against the one opposite; I pulled and pushed on the block, but to no avail. My energy was spent. There was nothing more I could do for now. With heavy heart and exhausted limbs, I climbed back down.

Soaked and saddened, I replaced each and every brick as best I could. I used the last of the toilet paper to fill the wall cracks. Once my leg irons had been replaced, I endeavoured to wash my hands, face and hair but the water in the bowl almost instantly turned black as ink.

It was then that I realised I was not only covered in an unmovable amount of soot, I also stank of it. The smell was ingrained in every pore. I felt it in my eyes, tasted it in my throat. Not even the most stupid of the screws would fail to notice the smell of the chimney on me and in the room. In fact, it would only be a matter of time before they came into the cell. They would smell it down the corridor and then, like dogs, they’d track down the source.

My bowels rumbled at the thought of the kicking they would give me. And I dared not imagine the delight they would derive from discovering my attempted escape.

I worked out there was only one thing that could be done: a shocking act that would baffle them and at the same time afford me one more chance to scale that chimney.

Christmas and the winter of ’98 glumly passed with no difference in Elizabeth’s mood; the spring and summer of ’99 followed suit. She had moved only from black to grey and at times, it seemed her melancholia had become even worse than in the weeks immediately following Molly’s death.

Moriarty and Alexander decided it was time for their annual escape to the home they kept in New York – a last retreat before the onset of winter. They were in the habit of travelling White Star from Liverpool and were excited that some new ship promised to land them in America in less than six full days.

As usual, Sirius travelled with them as protection, leaving Surrey and I to look after whatever ‘urgent jobs’ needed dealing with in Britain and Europe. Since my daughter’s death and Elizabeth’s depression my former lover and I had grown a little closer again. I should stress that by ‘closer’, I mean in the sense of friendship, rather than anything physical. Time, it seemed, had healed the wounds inflicted at the end of our relationship and Surrey had even ‘looked out’ for Elizabeth whenever I had to travel to perform my duties. It was with some sadness then that I learned soon after Moriarty’s departure for New York that she had to leave Derbyshire for business in the northernmost part of England and would be gone for perhaps a month. The following week was the second anniversary of Molly’s passing and I was anxious about the emotions it would arouse.

My fears were well-founded. When the dreadful moment came, Elizabeth cried throughout the day. The only time she spoke was while visiting Molly’s graveside. The words she uttered cut me to the quick: ‘I forgive you, Simeon, but the good Lord may never do so.’

That night we lay together in bed and though I held her, I knew her heart and mind were not with me. They were in the cold soil of our child’s grave.