“Well, that’s … that’s quite a story,” said I.
“Wait, I ain’t done yet,” said he, catching a deep breath or two. “Anyways, I resigned. Ben Bailey and Sir John took me on here, and I wasn’t working this job more than a month when the Lord Lilley house was robbed, and about two days after that, who should I run into drinking away on Bedford Street but Johnny Skylark, who now wants to be known as John Abernathy, which he swears is his rightful name. I can’t say as I was surprised to see him. First of all, he was a Londoner, and a thief must know a city well to work in it proper. And there was this about that raid on the Lilley house. It was exactly like the ones he and his crew carried out some years before when he was caught and given transportation for the term of his natural life.”
“Except for one thing,” said I. “There was a man murdered.”
“So there was, and I’ll talk about that in just a bit. So, as I say, I wasn’t so surprised when I met him right there. I was surprised, though, that he knew so much about what had happened to me — that I’d been more or less drummed out of the regiment, and that I was now a constable with the Bow Street Runners — but he did. He as good as admitted that it was him and four of his chums, including one from the Burnham plantation, who did the robbery at Lord Lilley’s. And he wound up asking me if I had a good place to dorse. ‘Why don’t you come live with us in the Dutchman’s castle?’ he asked me, and I told him I’d have to think about that, might get in the way of my work as a constable. But he said no. ‘The two might go right well together. Meet me here tomorrow.’
“So I went to Sir John with it, and he said that I ought to go and be his spy. That didn’t appeal to me much until he reminded me of the porter who’d been shot dead without a plea.”
“And he, himself, was wounded that night in St. James Street,” said I. “It must have been Abernathy.”
“Oh, it was,” said Constable Patley. “You damn near scared him to death shootin’ back. He didn’t expect that. And then there was the three troopers who was pulled off their horses. I knew all those boys. I should have. They was in my platoon. They got their throats cut. If it wasn’t him did it, it was him ordered it. So you can see, I didn’t have much of an argument with myself on this question of spying for the law. The funny thing was, Johnny never had a doubt I was with him, because I’d had a shot at him and missed out of friendship back there in Jamaica. He even explained away the murder of the porter at Lord Lilley’s. He told me that just by luck that fella turned out to be one of his old robbery gang, the one who bore witness against him and sent him off to Jamaica. Just settling old scores, he said. For some reason, it was important to him that I think well of him.
“I don’t know how much good I was as a spy. You seemed to get more information than I did. About all I could do was say yea or nay to what you’d dug up. But Zondervan paid me in sovereigns, and there were things that the Dutchman wanted to know, like how many constables there were at Bow Street, who was in charge. Y’see, he couldn’t really believe that a blind man could run things the way Sir John did. What they really wanted to know was who and how many they might meet in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury Square. So, naturally, we knew that the next house they raided would be in Bloomsbury. Sir John told me what to tell them, so it was just a matter of waiting them out.
“But I’ll tell you, young sir, I might still have had a bit of feeling for John Abernathy left in me, for I knew what he’d escaped from, and I knew what such mistreatment can do to a man. But when I found out he’d killed that poor pregnant girl, that ended it between me and him. I saw he’d become like a mad dog, and so like a mad dog, he was shot down.”
“I have a pair of questions,” said I.
“Ask them,” said he.
“Why did Abernathy’s robber gang always do their work in blackface?”
“Because Johnny said one thing he learned working on the plantation was that whites can’t tell one black man from another. All they see is the color of the skin. And besides, one of the gang really was an African; Osili was his name. He angered me by wearing my Dragoon s coat on that second raid. Had a fondness for it, he did. He used to study himself in the looking glass wearing it, when he could.”
“He was the one died of his wounds there at Lord Mansfield’s?”
“He was the one.”
“Just one more question. Did I hear you aright when you gave the name of the plantation where you were that last year as ‘the Burnham plantation?’ ‘
“That’s the one. That’s the name. It was a Welshman, getting on in years, who owned it and operated it. But he married a widow with four children. I heard his own son was living in London. You don’t, by any chance, know him, do you?”
I never gave Mr. Patley s question a frank answer. Indeed, whether out of consideration or cowardice, I never mentioned to Robert Burnham what I had learned from the constable. As for what became of those taken into custody on that grand night, all were hanged for theft, with the exception of Mistress Pinkham, who was given transportation to the North American colonies, and Mr. Collier, who in return for his testimony against Mr. Zondervan was generously given but a year in Newgate Gaol. The captain and crew of the Dingendam were held for near a month while the ship was searched thoroughly, and all but Lady Lilley’s jewels were found aboard the vessel. The maritime court tried to decide what laws had been broken, but finally, after repeated protests by the Dutch ambassador, the captain and crew were allowed to depart in their vessel. I happened to hear that John Abernathy’s body, pulled from the Thames, was claimed by a woman for burial. Though I have no certainty of it, I have always assumed that it was Maude Bleeker who saw him to his last resting place.
Thus do things change, lives end, people come and go. Only, it seems, do the laws of our country and colonies remain static. The contradiction as regards slavery remains unchanged. The Somerset case was continued until autumn as the Lord Chief Justice wrestled with it. In the end, it bested him. Though Mr. Somerset, the former slave, was given his freedom, the decision came in such a way that it changed naught but that. It remains for Parliament to remove that cancer upon the body politic.