‘The path you have chosen leads but one way,’ he said, eventually.
‘At least I have chosen it, sir,’ I replied, frowning at the familiar lecture. We had been locked in this same argument for years – ever since I had first dared to challenge him.
He propped his head in his hand, rubbing his forehead. ‘Foolish boy,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘This is not your choice. It is the devil guides you now; you have let him into your soul, with your drinking and gambling and debauchery. With your lies. I thought… I thought you had changed. You deceived us all, Thomas.’ He turned from the fire at last. He looked exhausted, his face gaunt and grey. For a moment I felt sorry for him – and ashamed for what I’d done. If I could just explain. If he would only listen.
‘Father…’
‘I thank God your mother is not alive to see this day.’
My mother. He should have known not to mention her. I don’t know how I stopped myself from striking him. We fought with words instead; accusations that left no chance for forgiveness, no possibility of return. I was a selfish, wilful child, set upon a one-way path to damnation. He was a cold-hearted hypocrite who dared to lecture me when he had married his own mistress. And worse. We both said much worse. The accusation that had always lurked in the shadows of every conversation, brought into the light at last. Which one of us was responsible. Which one of us had broken my mother’s heart.
‘Go, go, live your godless life,’ he called down the stairs as I stormed out of the vicarage for the last time, my sister Jane watching silent and ashen-faced. ‘And when you’re alone and penniless, rotting in a debtors’ gaol, do not come begging to me.’
And now his prediction had come to pass. I cursed the memory, spat the bitterness away and walked out into the prison.
The Marshalsea is an old gaol – centuries old. Its buildings are a peculiar hodgepodge, some brick, some timber, set in a quadrangle around a cobbled yard close to an acre in size. There were perhaps two dozen prisoners outside that first morning, men and women, some walking up and down in a distracted fashion, others talking and smoking and laughing, as if they had chanced to meet in the street. I watched them quietly in the shadow of the Lodge, settling my nerves and waiting for the best moment to step into the arena.
The Lodge gate was the only way in and out of the prison, unless you were suicidal enough to try scaling the walls. To my left was a two-storeyed timber house with bright yellow curtains and a low wooden fence about the door – the governor’s house, I discovered later. A tree shaded the windows – the only one in the prison and a mangled, sickly thing at that. Beyond the governor’s lodgings this west side of the prison was given up to a high wall crowned with iron spikes, where men played rackets.
The north wall was much longer and began with a terrace of three rundown houses. These, I learned, were the prison wards, with twenty large rooms in all. Most cells were occupied by at least three men – often twice or even three times that. The best rooms were at the front on the first floor; they were larger, and looked out into the yard. I could see a few pale faces at the windows, men smoking and drinking or staring dejectedly into thin air.
At the end of these three terraced buildings was a tall, narrow house, kept in a much better state than its neighbours. The turnkeys’ lodgings took up all of the ground-floor rooms while the prison chapel lay on the floor above, with a large window facing the yard. What God made of the view below I couldn’t say.
At the end of this north row stood a handsome brick building, five storeys high and wider than all its neighbours put together. It seemed to look down its nose at the rest of the prison, like a duke forced to live cheek by jowl with his peasants. A small crowd sheltered beneath its long, colonnaded porch, watching a game of backgammon.
On the far east wall lay a final block of prisoners’ quarters, meaner than those by the governor’s lodgings, with a sagging roof and cracked windows.
In short, it was not St James’ Palace; it was not even Soho. But there was a tree, and a game of backgammon, and no one was being murdered, as far as I could see. Indeed it reminded me of my old college, save for the iron spikes, and the hot stink of sweat and shit in the air. (Not that Oxford had been fragrant – all those old dons and lazy students cramped together, with no women to remind them to wash.) I straightened my jacket, stood a little taller, and strode into the yard with as much confidence as I could muster.
Then I turned to the south wall.
It stood twenty paces to my right, towering high above my head and stretching all the way down the long southern side of the yard like the armoured spine of some terrible beast. I had assumed it was the edge of the gaol, but now I looked more carefully, I was not so sure. There was a small, heavily barred door a little way down its flank and I had the sudden, intense suspicion that I was lucky to be on this side of it.
As I moved closer I found myself caught within its chill shadow and the hairs on the back of my neck began to rise. Unlike the rest of the prison this wall was kept in excellent repair, solid and sheer. It would be near impossible to climb without a rope. I placed my hand against the stone; it felt smooth beneath my fingers, and cold as a corpse. I shivered. Was it my imagination, or was there another scent here, beneath the general filth of the prison? A thick, rotten stench, almost like…
I staggered back, my hand across my mouth.
‘You’ve smelled death before, then?’
I spun round to see a man of middling age sitting on a bench by the Lodge, smoking a pipe. There was a bottle resting at his side, and a tattered leather journal stuffed with loose papers and tied with a black ribbon. He was well-featured – handsome, even – but he cut an eccentric figure, still dressed in his banyan and a matching red velvet cap. The nightgown trailed along the cobbles as if it had been cut for a taller man, and he had been forced to roll up the sleeves. At first glance the effect was almost comicaclass="underline" the absent-minded gentleman scholar, unshaven, unkempt, wrapped up in his thoughts. I had met enough of those at Oxford; he had the clothes and bearing just right but his expression was too sharp – dark eyes watchful and alert under heavy black brows. He must have been sitting there for some time, studying me. Indeed, now I thought of it, he could well have heard my argument with Cross, and my exchange with Mrs Roberts.
I bowed, cautiously, and introduced myself.
He plucked off his cap and gave a deep, satirical bow in return. ‘And what a pleasure to meet you, Mr Hawkins,’ he said, the way a wolf might declare itself pleased to meet a small, trembling fawn. ‘Samuel Fleet.’
I blinked. His name seemed familiar somehow. ‘Do I know you, sir?’
A secretive smile spread slowly across his face. He stuffed his journal and his bottle somewhere deep within his robe, and tapped the stem of his pipe against my chest. ‘You need a drink,’ he said. And then he clapped me round the shoulder and pulled me away from the wall and its long, cold shadow.
The Tap Room stood to the right of the Lodge, as if it knew a man would always need a drink as soon as he entered the prison, and had decided to lie in wait for him there. It sold all the drink you would find in a regular tavern for twice the cost and half the taste. Wherever the profits had gone, it was not on the furnishings; the cane chair backs needed mending and the tables were infested with woodworm. One sharp sneeze and the entire room would collapse into splinters. The floor was sticky with spilt beer, the air tainted with the stink of cheap candles – pig fat, by the smell of it. Thank God for the thick fug of pipe smoke or it would have been unbearable.