Читать книгу The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh - James Tucker - Страница 7

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ONCE Rashleigh and his ward-mates were locked up for the night, they spent the time much as they would have done in some favourite tavern, drinking, singing, gambling, and tale-telling. Porter was permitted by the regulations, but bribery and corruption made it easy to introduce into the ward all brands of wine and spirits, which, in such circumstances, were drunk to excess whenever the quantity was adequate. Over their liquor the hardened criminals related their exploits with the pride peculiar to their kind, and the beginners in crime were eager in their initiation, and longed for freedom principally to seek opportunities of equalling or excelling the feats of their hard-drinking preceptors. Raw shop-lads, awaiting trial for peculations from their masters’ tills, sat at the feet of old offenders, and listened agog to the stories of the rich rewards which came from a career of plunder. Decent youngsters were in this fashion easily misguided into desiring a life of lucrative villainy, abandoning for ever in their minds any thought of returning to a law-abiding existence.

Day followed day, its programme unvarying. Attendance at prayers in the morning, hours spent in loitering purposelessly through the day, with songs, yarns and drinking in the evenings. The approach of the Sessions, however, steadied the inmates of Smugglers’ Ward. There was much to be done. They had counsel to fee, attorneys to instruct, and defences to draw up. Rashleigh’s acquaintance with the law made this occasion one of golden opportunities. He was engaged to write letters, prepare statements and plot the course of cross-examination of dangerous witnesses. He was well paid for these services, and was able not only to fee counsel for himself, but also to fit himself out in decent clothes in which to attend the approaching trial. He was shrewd enough to realize, however, that his chances of acquittal were practically nonexistent. Thomas Jenkins and the hackney coachman, who had been concerned with him in the robbery, had told stories which were corroborative and conclusive, and he realized that his hopes were further minimized by the fact that the Crown, in finding him guilty, would automatically prove their case against the very troublesome Jewish fence who had received and paid for the stolen plate. The police had for years been waiting for an opportunity to arrest this man, and the establishing of Rashleigh’s guilt was all they needed now in order to seize the chance which his accidental arrest had put into their hands. Nevertheless, with the shadowy hope that mocks despair, he prepared his defence with all the skill he had, and waited for the opening of the Sessions, at which the destinies of four hundred unfortunates were to be determined.

The dreaded day came when the Sessions began, and Rashleigh watched with increasing amazement the light way in which the returning prisoners took their sentences. Scarcely a man showed any sign of regret, remorse or concern, as they came back from their ordeal by trial. Men who had received less than seven years’ transportation were as gleeful as if they had been acquitted, and those who had been sentenced to a flogging, jested about the mere ‘teasing’ which they were to receive from the lash. Seven years’ transportation he heard referred to, with a laugh, as a ‘small fine of eighty-four months,’ and even those sentenced for fourteen years, and for life, seemed to treat their doom as a jest. Looking on, it made him shudder to hear those who had received the death sentence comment upon their fate as though it were some obscene and brutal joke to look forward to a hanging.

The day came when, by the calendar, Rashleigh knew that his turn had come. He turned sick with fear as he found, on examining the list, that several housebreakers were to be tried in sequence on the same day. He waited his turn in a frenzy of despair as, one after another, his comrades in crime came back, all doomed to death. He could not even pretend to join in the laugh which greeted the sally of one man, that ‘They were celling them all, like bloody bullocks, to the knackers,’ — meaning to the condemned cell. There had been a dangerous outbreak of burglary in London during the past winter, and it was obvious that the citizen jurors meant to put a stop to the crime by allowing no suspected offender to escape.

At last Rashleigh’s turn came to stand in the dock, an amusing spectacle for the crowded spectators, who behaved with scanty consideration for the dignity of the Court. The lawyers made a show of examining their briefs, and the trial began.

Ralph Rashleigh was indicted by that name for having on a certain day and date, set forth in the arraignment, with force and arms feloniously broken into and entered the dwelling-house of Westley Shortland, Esq., in the night-time, and for having therein stolen, taken, and carried away, a large quantity of silver plate, his property, contrary to the statute and against the peace of Our Sovereign Lord the King, his crown and dignity; the indictment being interlarded with a vast number of other legal phrases. To this, of course, he pleaded ‘Not guilty,’ and put himself upon his trial. A jury was now empanelled, and the advocate for the prisoner having declined to challenge any of their number, the case proceeded. The learned Counsel for the Crown, after an eloquent exordium, in which he dwelt at great length upon the many daring depredations recently committed under cover of the night upon the properties of the peaceful and well-disposed inhabitants of the town, proceeded to give a sketch of the case in question, as he had been informed it would be proved in evidence, and he wound up by reverting to the skilful and adroit manner in which the robbery had been perpetrated, at the same time charitably requesting the jurymen to dismiss all prejudices from their minds and try the case solely by the statement of the witnesses. Nevertheless, he gave it as his private opinion that the prisoner at the bar was a scoundrel of the deepest dye, steeped in crime to the very lips. The evidence of Mr. Shortland’s butler was now taken; he swore that having obtained his master’s permission to pay a visit to a sick friend for a day or two, he had collected the whole of the plate under his care and safely locked the articles in the pantry on the night in question. A female servant next deposed to finding the pantry locked up, but all its valuable contents missing, on the following morning, and the approver then completed the whole case by giving a clear and detailed story of the manner in which the prisoner and himself had actually committed the crime in question. His evidence was sustained by that of the hackney coachman, who had also been admitted to give testimony on the part of the Crown, and though Rashleigh’s counsel most cunningly cross-questioned both these witnesses, and elicited from Jenkins in particular the admission that he had been a thief from his earliest youth, and of his having been actively engaged in the commission of every species of crime during a period of twenty-five years, yet the damning fact of the want of any regular or honest mode of livelihood on the part of Rashleigh rendered all efforts abortive, and after a brief pause the jury, without retiring, found Ralph Rashleigh guilty of the crime of burglary.

The atmosphere of the court became suddenly tense with morbid expectancy: the dramatic moment had arrived. The Recorder addressed the prisoner in a silence broken only by his voice. Ralph did not hear the sentences preambling the words of his doom. Only when the awful formula ‘and hanged by the neck until you be dead’ was spoken, did he realize that the sentence which he had dreaded had actually been passed upon him. A shiver ran through his frame, and then his consciousness seemed to be drugged. The court became unreal as a scene in a dream. Under the guidance of a warder he walked like a somnambulist from the dock, scarcely seeing the people on the crowded benches whose eyes preyed upon his misery. Still realization did not come as he meekly followed the warder down the gloomy passage from the Sessions Hall to the jail yard. He smiled foolishly at Tyrrell when the man asked him what luck he had had, and left it to the turnkey to provide the answer with the word ‘Cells,’ which he shouted to the officer waiting to receive prisoners sentenced to death. He smiled again at Tyrrell’s words of encouragement as his ward mate shook his hand, and the significance of the small packet which he found himself grasping at the end of the handshake entirely eluded his stunned intelligence. Scarcely knowing that he held the packet, he suffered the turnkey to hurry him along through yards and passages, until they reached the great ward where the condemned men were housed during the day.

It was still only the third day of the Sessions, yet there were over forty men, most of them young, already herded together under sentence of death by hanging. They greeted Rashleigh with loud cries of ‘Fish, oh!’ — ‘One more in the net!’ and asked him what particular crime had been his.

‘Crack,’ he replied, bewildered by the high spirits of his questioners.

‘There’s twenty-eight of us now,’ said one, ‘all jugged for housebreaking.’

‘The scragsman [hangman] will make a rare haul out of us,’ cried another: a sally which was greeted with roars of laughter, as if to jest about their coming end was to touch the very apex of humour.

During the midday meal Rashleigh sat next one of his late companions in Smugglers’ Ward, speculating upon the probable number of those condemned who would actually be hanged. It was well known that after each Sessions a certain proportion of the sentences were commuted to transportation, but so haphazard appeared to be the method by which the lucky ones were selected, that it was impossible to speculate who among them all would escape hanging. Tales were told of authentic cases in which hardened criminals with a long record of offences were allowed to escape and young thieves were hanged. These stories had the effect of still further depressing Rashleigh, whose anticipations were darkened by complete hopelessness.

He managed to keep despair at arm’s length during the afternoon by joining in the gambling and singing in which the bolder and less imaginative spirits indulged, and keeping his eyes averted from the spectacle of the few miserable creatures who paced gloomily up and down the ward, muttering and groaning in fear.

At night the prisoners were broken up into threes and led to the dormitories in which they were to sleep during the short remainder of their lives. The cells were twelve feet by eight, containing three rude bedsteads, on each of which were two rugs and a straw mattress. It was already dusk, and as no artificial light was provided, Rashleigh and his two cell-mates lay down to sleep in the falling darkness. It was only now that the awfulness of his position made its full impact upon his imagination, and he hid his head beneath his rugs as if to hide himself from the terrifying thoughts which whirled through his brain. In despair he began to consider suicide, thinking out one means after another, yet abandoning them as they occurred to him. Suicide was succeeded by the hope of escaping from the prison, and he revolved the problem in his mind as the peals of a neighbouring clock recurred hour after hour and found him sleepless. This reminder of time’s passing brought more vividly before him the realization that his hours on earth were actually numbered, unless ——. Hope leapt in his heart as he remembered that there was a chance — a good chance, he told himself fiercely — of being reprieved and transported. At last he began to sleep fitfully, only to be tormented with dreams more devastating to his peace than his waking terror. He dreamt of a funeral bell tolling for his execution; accompanied by the priest, he reached the scaffold, ascended to the platform, and saw below and around him the mocking faces of a sea of spectators; he felt the cold rough hempen rope touch his neck, felt the anguish of the eternal moment of the drop, and, as in his dream he struggled against strangulation, the pain was so intense that he awoke to find himself bathed in cold sweat and his limbs numbed. He lay crushed by the dread of the dream, fighting against the thoughts which assailed him, praying for the day to dawn.

As soon as he heard sounds of movement in the passage outside, he sprang from his pallet bed and paced the small floor until the turnkey came to lead him and his two companions in duress to the day ward. Light of day and the cheerful company of his fellows reassured him.

By the time the Sessions had ended there were altogether sixty-five men in the condemned side, all under sentence of death. At first the days passed in slow monotony and the nights in terror, akin to that of the first night, but gradually Rashleigh became mentally calloused to the anticipation of the dreaded prospect ahead of him, and began to plan seriously to escape. He discovered that his cell was on the outer wall of Newgate, and broached his scheme to his two night companions. One of them was too apathetic and miserable even to want to escape, but the second man was enthusiastic. The two of them, therefore, began operations that same night, with the two files which had been in the parcel which Tyrrell had pressed into Rashleigh’s hand, and a piece of iron about two feet long which had once been the handle of a frying-pan. This was sharpish at one end and served as a chisel.

Choosing a place behind their beds, they began laboriously to scrape the mortar from the joints between the stonework of the wall, carefully collecting the dust into their pockets and throwing it among the ashes of the fire in the morning when they went into the day ward. In three nights they had loosened enough stonework for their purpose, but on removing the ashlar blocks, they were chagrined to find that there was a timber framing on the outside of the wall. They replaced the stones and made new plans to cope with this new difficulty. Next day they purloined two sharp tableknives, which they notched into the semblance of saws with their files, and sharpened the teeth as well as they could. Also they bribed a turnkey to procure them a phosphorus box and a piece of candle. On examining the partition next night, they found that it was simple weather-boarding such as is used to finish the gable ends of a roof.

That night they succeeded in their task of cutting away a sufficiently large hole to enable them to crawl out. They found that the hole debouched under the apex of a roof abutting on to the prison, and there was nothing to prevent them climbing through on to the joists of the garret. Once there, they set about removing the tiles from the roof. Freedom already seemed to be theirs when, in his eagerness to reach up, Rashleigh’s companion slipped from the joist and crashed through the lath and plaster of the ceiling of the room below. The next thing he knew was that he was sprawling on the bed of an old woman, who had instantly awakened and was shrieking ‘Rape! Fire! Murder!’ at the pitch of her voice, despite all the efforts of the man to pacify her and explain his intrusion.

Rashleigh, motionless as a rock, listened to this, and to the sound of hurrying footsteps which proved that the household had been aroused. Under cover of the noise, he crept over to the hole in the ceiling and peeped through. He saw the door burst open and half a dozen men and women, mostly in night attire, rush into the room. His companion, immediately the door was opened, bolted past his would-be captors and plunged down the stairs. Above the chatter of voices in the room beneath his feet, Rashleigh heard the sound of a struggle on the stairs, and judging from this that his friend had been captured, he thought it best to make his escape on to the roof. Nerved by despair, he tore away battens and tiles, and scrambled through the hole he had made. In his panic he missed his hold on the roof and began to roll at everincreasing speed down the steep slope. His expectation of sudden and violent death when he should pitch over the roof edge to the ground below, was disappointed. The jerk which he was expecting occurred, but instead of dropping through space, he found himself gasping in icy water. He struck out to swim to the edge of this roof reservoir, and clutching the parapet wall, climbed out on to it. The pitchy darkness prevented him from knowing how far from the ground he was, and also made any attempt at exploring the roof extremely perilous. There was nothing for it but to sit where he was astride the wall, and wait for dawn. During the hours through which he sat soaked to the skin and almost frozen, Rashleigh had leisure in which to regret ever having attempted to escape. Compared with his predicament the rough comfort of his prison seemed like luxury.

Light came at last, and Rashleigh saw at once that there was small chance of escape. He was on the top of a flat unbroken wall, and the flagged courtyard at its foot was over forty feet below his precarious perch. His only method of concealment was to jump back into the water, though even there he could be seen from the roof. He was just as securely imprisoned as he would have been in the strongest cell in Newgate. So hopeless was his position, that he began almost to hope that someone would see him, and this hope was realized so suddenly that he nearly pitched to the ground with the violence of the start he gave.

‘Ha, my fine fellow!’ cried a gruff voice, and gripping wildly at the wall, Rashleigh looked up and saw a turnkey holding a carbine to his shoulder, sitting at the foot of a chimney-stack. ‘You’re there, are you?’ taunted the turnkey. ‘Well, you’re safe enough where you are; and we’ve got your pal, too.’

‘Don’t shoot me!’ cried Rashleigh, alarmed at the sight of the unwavering barrel pointing towards him.

‘You keep still and I won’t,’ rejoined the turnkey. ‘But move an inch, and I’ll topple you over full of lead.’

Someone now observed him from below. A ladder was brought and, descending it, Rashleigh was at once seized and hustled back to prison. After a week on bread and water in a dark cell, he was heavily ironed and allowed to join his fellows in the day ward.

The ensuing days passed without incident until one afternoon during the fifth week after the Sessions the prisoners were taken early to their cells and the doors closed upon them. In a little while the sound of cell doors opening and closing, and the voice of the prison chaplain, warned the men that the critical hour had come at last.

Death or reprieve — which?

This question drummed in the mind of every man. Rashleigh stood, his breath coming quickly, until the cell door opened to admit the Sheriff in his official dress, and the chaplain in his robes. His breath caused a fluttering sensation in his throat as he listened to the Sheriff addressing one of his cell-mates.

‘William Roberts, your case has received His Majesty’s most gracious consideration, but your frequent previous convictions and the circumstances of peculiar atrocity with which your last crime was accompanied, utterly preclude the possibility of mercy being extended to so hardened a criminal. You must therefore prepare to expiate your offences on the scaffold. You are ordered for execution in fourteen days from the present.’

While the unhappy man struggled against completely breaking down before the irrevocable destruction of his last gleam of hope, the chaplain addressed him with a homily on the need for prayer and repentance, which the fellow seemed not to hear. Rashleigh, fear tightening his heart-strings, watched his rolling eyes and his ineffectual struggle to speak, with a fascination that had no sympathy in it: the dread of the moment for his own fate had stunned all feelings of altruism. He was not kept long in suspense. The Sheriff addressed him and his remaining cell-mate jointly, pompously announcing that, in the exercise of his Royal prerogative of mercy, His Majesty had graciously been pleased to spare their lives, but that to vindicate the insulted laws of his realm, they must prepare themselves to be transported for the remainder of their lives as criminal exiles in a distant land, and nevermore to set foot upon the soil of England.

Another homily from the chaplain, impressing upon the two prisoners the necessity of falling on their knees and giving thanks to God for sparing their most unworthy lives, was interrupted roughly by Rashleigh’s companion.

‘If ever I do pray to God,’ he said fiercely, all his hate and defiance of society concentrated in his voice, ‘it will only be to beg that I live to see you hanged, you prayer-mumbling, sanctimonious old swine, taking pleasure in hitting at poor b——s when they’re down. Go to hell!’

The Sheriff failed to suppress a smile as he followed the angry cleric out of the cell.