When Gods Die

He had no blanket, not even a thin pallet to absorb some of the cold rising up from the stone floor. Here in Newgate, such luxuries as food and bedding had to be purchased. If it weren’t for the hap-hazard charity of benevolent societies and various philanthropically minded individuals, the poorer prisoners would starve. Many did.

Pushing up from the vermin-ridden straw, Tom stood and walked away from the crooning temptation of that voice. The room was no more than twelve by fourteen feet, and crowded with some fifteen to twenty men and boys. One of the boys couldn’t have been more than six. He lay curled on his side in a corner, his fair hair matted and dirty, his grimy face streaked with tears. Every once in a while he’d start crying for his mother until one of the men would kick him and tell him to be still.

Tom went to press his face against the bars. For a moment, he squeezed his eyes shut and felt himself sway on his feet.

He hadn’t dared close his eyes through all the long, dark hours of the night. Not that he could have slept, anyway, what with the fear and the rustling of the rats and the cold that seemed to sink all the way to his bones. And then there were the screams. The screams of the despairing, the mad, the sick and dying, mingled with the plaintive cries of women being taken by force.

The turnkey rented them out by the hour, one of the other boys had told Tom. Some of the women were probably willing enough—they’d learned long ago to sell their bodies to survive. But even when they weren’t willing, they were given no choice.

He’d seen them dragging one girl across the yard. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, her flailing arms showing pale and thin in the sputtering light of a torch, her dark eyes wild in a small, tight face.

“Psst. Boy…”

Tom kept walking.

He’d tried to get the beadle who’d hauled him here to send word of what had happened to Viscount Devlin, but the big man had only laughed at him and called him Captain Bounce. Then the gaoler had emptied Tom’s pockets so he couldn’t even pay someone to take a message to Brook Street.

He paused again beside the bars looking out onto the yard. He kept trying to imagine what his lordship would think when Tom never showed up. Would he assume Tom had simply run off? He wouldn’t really think that, would he?

Surely he would know something had happened to Tom. He’d go looking for him. But he would never think to look here. At least not at first. Tom had heard some of the other prisoners talking. They said there was a session scheduled for tomorrow. A boy could be condemned one day and hanged the next. It didn’t happen all that often. Mostly the sentences were commuted to transportation. But it did happen. Tom knew.

He felt the walls begin to close in on him, pressing close and heavy. He sucked in a deep breath and the smells of the place overwhelmed him, the stench of excrement and sweat, sickness, and fear. Fear of gaol fever, fear of the whip and the hulls on the Thames. Fear of the hangman’s noose and the surgeon’s knife.

“Help me, Huey,” Tom said softly, sinking to his knees. It was a kind of a prayer, he supposed, although he wasn’t sure Huey was any place he could hear, let alone help. Did all thieves go to hell, even if they were only thirteen years old? “How did you stand it? Oh, God, Huey. I’m so sorry.”

And he pressed his face against his knees and wept.

Chapter 44

The Physic Garden lay just north of the Thames at Chelsea. It was an old apothecary garden, said to date back to the seventeenth century, if not before. Kat herself had never been there, but she could understand how its gently curving walks and nearly deserted order beds would make an ideal meeting place, where spymaster and spy could come together and linger without arousing suspicion.

Once, she might have looked forward to this rendezvous with a certain flush of anticipation. She’d enjoyed it, that tingling sense of exhilaration that comes from living always on the jagged edge of danger. Once, she’d had nothing to lose but her life. That was no longer true.

She drove herself to the gardens in her phaeton and pair, with her groom, George, sitting up beside her. “It’s hot today,” she told him as she reined in at the West Gate. “Do what you can to keep them cool.”

Holding a sapphire blue silk parasol aloft to shade her complexion from the sun, she entered through the West Gate and turned toward the pond rock garden. It was cooler here. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of the lime trees overhead, bringing her a medley of sweet scents, of sunbaked rosemary and exotic jasmine and freshly scythed grass.

She wandered for a time between neat beds of roses. At one point she spotted an aged gentleman, his back hunched, his weathered skin darkened by years beneath a tropical sun. But he made no move to approach her, and in the end she lost sight of him admidst a planting of distant shrubs.