Gallows Thief

'It's all right, Miss Hood.' Sandman fumbled for his watch. He was sweating. 'What's the time?'

'Saint Giles just struck half after eight,' she told him.

'Oh, my Lord!' Sandman could not believe he had slept so late. He had nothing to get up for, but the habit of waking early had long taken hold. He sat up in bed, remembered he was naked and snatched the thin blanket up to his chest. 'There's a gown hanging on the door, Miss Hood, would you be so kind?'

Sally found the dressing gown. 'It's just that I'm late,' she explained her sudden appearance in his room, 'and my brother's brushed off and I've got work, and the dress has to be hooked up, see?' She turned her back, showing a length of bare spine. 'I'd have asked Mrs Gunn to do it,' Sally went on, 'only there's a hanging today so she's off watching. Gawd knows what she can see considering she's half blind and all drunk, but she does like a good hanging and she ain't got many pleasures left at her age. It's all right, you can get up now, I've got me peepers shut.'

Sandman climbed out of bed warily for there was only a limited area in his tiny attic room where he could stand without banging his head on the beams. He was a tall man, an inch over six foot, with pale-gold hair, blue eyes and a long, raw-boned face. He was not conventionally handsome, his face was too rugged for that, but there was a capability and a kindness in his expression that made him memorable. He pulled on the dressing gown and tied its belt. 'You say you've got work?' he asked Sally. 'A good job, I hope?'

'Ain't what I wanted,' Sally said, 'because it ain't on deck.'

'Deck?'

'Stage, Captain,' she said. She called herself an actress and perhaps she was, though Sandman had seen little evidence that the stage had much use for Sally who, like Sandman, clung to the very edge of respectability and was held there, it seemed, by her brother, a very mysterious young man who worked strange hours. 'But it ain't bad work,' she went on, 'and it is respectable.'

'I'm sure it is,' Sandman said, sensing that Sally did not really want to talk about it, and he wondered why she sounded so defensive about a respectable job and Sally wondered why Sandman, who was palpably a gentleman, was renting an attic room in the Wheatsheaf Tavern in London's Drury Lane. Down on his luck, that was for sure, but even so, the Wheatsheaf? Perhaps he knew no better. The Wheatsheaf was famously a flash tavern, a home for every kind of thief from pickpockets to petermen, from burglars to shop-breakers, and it seemed to Sally that Captain Rider Sandman was as straight as a ramrod. But he was a nice man, Sally thought. He treated her like a lady, and though she had only spoken to him a couple of times as they edged past each other in the inn's corridors, she had detected a kindness in him. Enough kindness to let her presume on his privacy this Monday morning. 'And what about you, Captain?' she asked. 'You working?'

'I'm looking for employment, Miss Hood,' Sandman said, and that was true, but he was not finding any. He was too old to be an apprentice clerk, not qualified to work in the law or with money, and too squeamish to accept a job driving slaves in the sugar islands.

'I heard you was a cricketer,' Sally said.

'I am, yes.'

'A famous one, my brother says.'

'I'm not sure about that,' Sandman said modestly.

'But you can earn money at that, can't you?'

'Not as much as I need,' Sandman said, and then only in summer and if he was willing to endure the bribes and corruption of the game, 'and I have a small problem here. Some of the hooks are missing.'

'That's 'cos I never get round to mending them,' Sally said, 'so just do what you can.' She was staring at his mantel on which was a pile of letters, their edges frayed suggesting they had all been sent a long time in the past. She swayed forward slightly and managed to see that the topmost envelope was addressed to a Miss someone or other, she could not make out the name, but the one word revealed that Captain Sandman had been jilted and had his letters returned. Poor Captain Sandman, Sally thought.

'And sometimes,' Sandman went on, 'where there are hooks there are no eyes.'

'Which is why I brought this,' Sally said, dangling a frayed silk handkerchief over her shoulder. 'Thread it through the gaps, Captain. Make me decent.'

'So today I shall call on some acquaintances,' Sandman reverted to her earlier question, 'and see if they can offer me employment and then, this afternoon, I shall yield to temptation.'

'Ooh!' Sally smiled over her shoulder, all blue eyes and sparkle. 'Temptation?'

'I shall watch some cricket at the Artillery Ground.'

'Wouldn't tempt me,' Sally said, 'and by the by, Captain, if you're going down to breakfast then do it quick 'cos you won't get a bite after nine o'clock.'

'I won't?' Sandman asked, though in truth he had no intention of paying the tavern for a breakfast he could not afford.

'The 'sheaf's always crowded when there's a hanging at Newgate,' Sally explained, ''cos the folk want their breakfasts on their way back, see? Makes 'em hungry. That's where my brother went. He always goes down Old Bailey when there's a scragging. They like him to be there.'

'Who does?'

'His friends. He usually knows one of the poor bastards being twisted, see?'

'Twisted?'

'Hanged, Captain. Hanged, twisted, crapped, nubbed, scragged or Jack Ketched. Doing the Newgate Morris, dancing on Jemmy Botting's stage, rope gargling. You'll have to learn the flash language if you live here, Captain.'

'I can see I will,' Sandman said, and had just begun to thread the handkerchief through the dress's gaping back when Dodds, the inn's errand boy, pushed through the half-open door and grinned to discover Sally Hood in Captain Sandman's room and Captain Sandman doing up her frock and him with tousled hair and dressed in nothing but a frayed old dressing gown.

'You'll catch flies if you don't close your bloody gob,' Sally told Dodds, 'and he ain't my boman, you spoony little bastard. He's just hooking me up 'cos my brother and Mother Gunn have gone to the crap. Which is where you'll end up if there's any bleeding justice.'

Dodds ignored this tirade and held a sealed paper towards Sandman. 'Letter for you, Captain.'

'You're very kind,' Sandman said, and stooped to his folded clothes to find a penny. 'Wait a moment,' he told the boy who, in truth, had shown no inclination to leave until he was tipped.

'Don't you bug him nothing!' Sally protested. She pushed Sandman's hand away and snatched the letter from Dodds. 'The little toe-rag forgot it, didn't he? No bleeding letter arrived this morning! How long's it been?'

Dodds looked at her sullenly. 'Came on Friday,' he finally admitted.

'If a bleeding letter comes on Friday then you bleeding deliver it on Friday! Now, on your trotters and fake away off!' She slammed the door on the boy. 'Lazy little bleeder. They should take him down bleeding Newgate and make him do the scaffold hornpipe. That would stretch his lazy bloody neck.'