Blood Diamond: A Pirate Devlin Novel (4 page)

‘We should try Marshalsea first. That is the seafarers’ gaol.’

Dandon nodded as he chewed and resumed his walk. ‘I would think that should be the place to start indeed. Is it far?’ he offered the pottle to Timms, who declined.

‘Not far enough. Filthy degenerate place. It is over the bridge I am afraid. Three miles by carriage it will have to be.’

‘And there are other gaols?’

Timms gave a laughing snort. ‘That is most certainly the case. Most certainly and most notably Fleet and Newgate which are close to each other. At a good stride it would take us half an hour or more.’

Dandon raised his voice as he began to weave through the increasing bustle and traffic of pedestrians and pedlars, and as they approached more nearly the city wards. London was coming out for the night.

‘Then perhaps we should cover those first, Mister Timms, rather than crossing the river only to come back on ourselves again.’

‘Quite so. I would concur,’ Timms gasped at a trot just as Dandon came disgustedly to the bundle of paper wedged into the bottom of his cone where the rest of the cherries should have been. He tossed it away. ‘And they say
I’m
a pirate?’ But the street was not listening and he dashed now, Timms struggling to keep up while trying to avoid being cut down by the flying rush of coaches and people.

East. At half a run. East into the city. To the very proscenium of cruelty.

Chapter Three

‘The Hellish noise, the roaring, swelling and clamour,

the stench and nastiness, an emblem of Hell itself.’

From
Moll Flanders
. Daniel Defoe.

Jonathan Wild had his office, which was also his lodgings, at the Cooper’s Arms on Old Bailey itself, almost opposite the sessions house. This gave weight to his authority and some confirmation to those victims of theft and robbery in need of his services that Wild, so literally close to justice, was the man for them. Jon Wild was now a paragon of enterprise and fortune. Long gone the pimp, house-breaker and debtor he had once been.

Now he had the law on his side.

A few years past, the gentlemen of justice, so exhausted and exasperated by the prolificness of crime in the city, had passed a law to make the receiving and selling of stolen wares a crime in itself.

This single enactment had ruined the daily trade of many a housebreaker and pawnbroker in the narrows and districts and it was in starvation that Wild had alighted on his plan.

Maybe if it had only been for his own good nothing may have come of it; but he rallied his darkest minions around him and gave out his scheme. Those whose bellies were hollow and filled only with clay biscuits, who looked only towards the compter for relief, saw their future again, Jon Wild their master.

If the buying and selling of stolen candelabras and watches were illegal then why not simply sell them back to the ones they had been liberated from?

‘How?’ his brothers cried.

‘Simple, I tells you!’ Jon Wild stood on the stage of an inn down Cock Alley at Cripplegate before a crowd of beggars.

‘I set up shop that I can find anything for anybody. I tells it to the constables and marshals and magistrates, bold as brass, for ain’t I a thief myself and knows them criminals all?’

For a price, dependent on the value of the items, Jon Wild appeals to the victim to give him a few days to scratch around. He swears he has a parade of rappers, quick-talking informants who will spill their guts for a penny. Something will turn up, he tells them. The trick is that Wild already knows the whereabouts of the article, for the man who’d taken it has shown the shiny thing to him, of course.

A split of the ransom means the gentleman has his precious articles returned, and Wild is smart enough to have no stolen goods on his premises as searches by more suspicious authorities are made. And if the thief demands more coin for his trouble?

‘
Why, look sir, not only do I have your goods again but here is the man that took it. We’ll hang him together. Of course he would say I was in on it with him, sir. He’s trying to switch my neck for his
.’

And, as is reasonable, Wild would keep good records of those who came to him in their woe. Records that could be used to map London. A volunteered map of who had the choicest property.

Wild was shrewd. It had not gone unnoticed to him that London had begun to put more stock in paper than weight and glitter and it was far easier to lift a gentleman’s pocket-book than his furniture.

Pieces of paper could hold a man’s entire fortune. Nowadays, when the quality turned up at his offices, they did not bemoan their wife’s sobbing over some lost stones. Instead they sweated and begged and paid handsomely to get back their precious paper. The madness of the South Sea stock, where the fortune could change in hours, made his customers even more desperate. Jon Wild capitalised, and the fees for his services for finding certificates went far above that of a sedan chair or diamond necklace.

The genius of the man was to not deny his station or past. He had been there. He was one of them. He knew all the dregs and could wring them dry, and to keep them in his pocket he would occasionally take one of them before the beak and see him hung, and his children orphaned, just to show those who had elected him to his purpose the power he held over their very lives.

Puzzled by the sudden increase in highway robbery and house-breaking, the courts asked Wild what could be done. He motioned that the fee for finding the stolen goods needed to be increased as his rappers had gotten greedy now his enterprise was successful. They failed to connect that his success rate had increased along with the burglaries. They nodded and quadrupled his fees. After all, he did deliver them so many villains.

That very morning, for instance, he had brought into Newgate a thief and murderer no less. One John Coxon who had killed one of Wild’s own assistants when they had tried to take him. Wild had already been to Paternoster to report it – the power of the press one of his most useful tools.

He sat at his table, in his doorway afore his stairs, his door always generously open to the street so his people could see him and doff their hats as they passed. There he counted the sailor’s money in full view. He could leave his purse on the doorstep overnight if he wished.

The leather bag was a strange mixture of coin from every realm, cast in gold and silver, the waft of sand and rum on some of it, some broken into small change. He weighed it in his hand. This was either all a man possessed or a taste of what he promised.

He sat back and thought on the body now lying in the hold across the street in Newgate at the corner alongside the sessions house. He did not notice his assistant George Wattle bounding towards him.

‘Jon! Jon!’ He blocked Wild’s sight of the grim prison stones. George had been at the taking of the sailor, had pulled a knife, seen his partner killed. They had not spoken of Arthur since.

While Wild divvied up their coin George had been sent to the sessions house to see if there were any warrants against their latest taking, or at least any that could fit. Nailed to a wooden board inside the entrance were the reward notices for highwaymen and those notorious pirates who had not taken the king’s grace and therefore defied pardon. George waved one such black framed bill at Wild.

‘It’s him, Jon, look! That sailor!’

‘What you rattling, George?’ He took the page. On it was the visage of a young man with black hair and no beard. His height, known ships, known familiars and known crimes. A long list. ‘Could be anyone.’

‘See there though, Jon! Says he was the ungrateful boy of Cap’n John Coxon! He called himself Cap’n Coxon!’

That was there, sure enough. It would make sense that the pirate might assume a name and the description duly fitted better in Wild’s eyes.

‘Patrick Devlin, eh? The Pirate Devlin.’ He jiggled the bag in his hand.

All a man possessed or a taste of what he promised.

‘What’s a pirate doing in my city, George?’

‘I don’t know about that but he has five hundred pounds on his head! Five hundred, John!’

Wild had not looked at the price.

‘Bah! That’s what makes you, you, George, and me, me. I say again. What’s a pirate doing in my city? Lot of risk for him here. Take an awful deep purse to bring him in for something. And this here bag is nothing compared to what he might have. In mind or in box.’

‘But five hundred, Jon!’

Wild leaned back and watched his street, passing an eye up to the prison. ‘We’ll go see him after dark, when it’s quiet. See what he has to say. And if nothing else we still got five hundred on him.’ He stretched out, saw a rosier future ahead. ‘If he dies tonight or next week I’ll still be a hero. Fetch us up a pie, George. And some beer. I got business to think on.’

To be belayed and hammered unconscious is not a perfect slumber by any measure. A few minutes at most of blackness and the rest, particularly if one is dragged along and has the noise and smells of Wapping as a background, is a grey watery world of dreaming and pain as reality forces itself back.

Voices jumble, sounds clang like bells, and all the victim feels is a sleep that promises to come but will not, and the gnawing of his toecaps and ankles dragging on cobblestones as the crowd filtering past takes sport in his sorrow.

It is even some comfort, then, to be dropped onto a bed of straw over oak planks, for some sleep must surely arrive now. But the pain galloping around the head like a dancing Pan pricks the tormented awake to enjoy his painful tune.

Devlin eased up on an elbow and surveyed the last corners of the damned.

A stone room laid with planks for a floor, studded with ringbolts to tether ankles. One barred window, high in the wall and narrow as a post-hole, lets in August and the fading twilight. The walls are made up of blocks of stone like the last room gladiators see before the arena; and perhaps in truth the chains that fastened men to the floor had been wrought by the same hands, for the gaol made up the last Roman remnant of the city’s east wall. It was the bailey of old that once ringed Londinium and gave the street alongside the gaol its name. God had burnt it down once already but the Devil still had his need and Newgate rose again.

Charles II had the gaol rebuilt as a priority after plague and fire heralded the end of the world, when prisoners had lain like fat flies upon the carts.

Sir Richard Whittington and his cat saluted the inmates, with the pious figures of Liberty, Peace, Security and Plenty bowing to justice at his feet. The session house stood next door. Newgate, Old Bailey and Giltspur spread like the points of the cross, with Tyburn anchoring it three miles away to the west. Eight hundred turns of the cartwheel to the rural setting of the hangman’s tree.

Devlin looked about. Grey, green and black, an etching of doom. A dark smell of the butcher’s apron and effluence strange to a man now used to the brilliant vermillions and blues of the Caribbean and the wash of light, fresh-born every morning, that removed the stain of tobacco and rum from one’s lungs. That air full of salt, boucan allspice smoke, fruit and promise.

This was grey. A grey sketched by the suicidal artist. This was stone and damp and death. This was London. He had left it once, the pores of its burnt walls reeking of gin and rotten oranges, fish and filth. He tugged at the manacles around his ankles. Fettered to the floor. This was not a London that Devlin wished to see. It was the London of his past, the one he had run from when he was skinny and poor with murder hanging over his head. No, not good for an Irishman to be found with a dead body. That had been old man Kennedy. Ten years ago. A long ten years but still remembered somewhere, for sure, somewhere an Irishman could still be hung just for his voice and of that he was certain. There was the son, Walter Kennedy, whom Devlin had shared lodgings with, alongside the father. Walter favoured house-robbing over the work that Devlin and the father shared at an anchorsmith’s. The house had not been peaceful. Devlin returned one night to find the old man laid on the table with a dirk standing in his chest. He had only a few seconds to run with what he could gather. Just as bad to report a death as be caught with the knife in your hand. All that a world away now.

He lay in the Lodge, the area on the south side where prisoners were divided into debtors or felons and within those two groups again divided into who could pay for their stay and ‘garnish’ and who could not.