The Masters of Bow Street Read Free Page A

spilling from Frederick Jackson’s lips.
    Furnival’s movement had been his signal to the sheriff and the shot had frightened off those who would have attacked him.
    Jackson was still haranguing the crowd.
    ‘. . . these are the guilty men, who batten on the poor, who drag the harmless whores into their courts and charge them for plying their trade, who. . .’
    Suddenly, he stopped, for relatives and friends climbed into the carts to bid the condemned farewell, while the executioner and his assistants finished fastening ropes around the necks of those about to be hanged, then thrust them towards another huge cart over which the gibbet hung. Weeping and wailing now took over, drowning the voice of the Prison Ordinary, now chanting psalms, but nothing stopped the sellers or the performers among the crowd.
    When the executioner covered the eyes and the faces of the condemned with black caps, Jackson kept trying to speak again but failed. The chaplains and the visitors were driven off, and then the executioner thwacked the horses fastened to the cart and they dashed away. There, kicking on the empty air, were seventeen human beings, soon to die. On the instant, some relatives pulled at the hanging bodies to hasten death, one belabouring a swinging man’s breast with a heavy stone to stop the heart from beating.
    Jackson hardly moved; no doubt the executioner had been well paid to make sure his neck was broken.
    The crowd’s attention switched now from the gangs forcing their way through to Furnival towards the victims, and there came a deep sigh, as if each person present drew in a breath at the same moment.
    Eve Milharvey uttered a gasp and buried her face in her hands. James Marshall stared at the swinging man as if mesmerised by the sight. Ruth Marshall, for whose husband’s death this man had died, watched with swollen eyes in a face drained of colour, then slowly lowered her head and locked her fingers in silent prayer.
    The soldiers looked on impassively. The Reverend Sebastian Smith, a small, plump and mild-looking man, invoked his God in tones which only those close by could hear for all whose souls had departed this earth.
    ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on this man, Thy creature, spare him the fires of hell, take him to Thy bosom. . .’
    His voice and all other sounds were drowned in the fresh chanting, in the noise of movement, as Frederick Jackson’s men fought to get at Furnival.
    ‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’
    Furnival had not moved.
    He raised his left hand again and sniffed the biting snuff into his left nostril, and almost on the instant there was a bark of command.
    ‘Quick - march.’
    And from the direction of Hyde Park, from main roads and narrow side streets, came large numbers of dragoons, marching with their muskets at the ready. Furnival, as Chief Magistrate of Bow Street, had arranged their presence, rare at Tyburn, because he had been alive to the possibility of riot after Jackson’s death, or even before. The tramp, tramp, tramp of feet now echoed to the chanting, while from the crowd more of Furnival’s hired men moved with military precision and formed a ring around the magistrate.
    Furnival looked towards the groups of men who had come to kill him. A stone struck his left shoulder but he did not appear to notice.
    ‘Go home, all of you,’ he called. ‘Go home and hold your wake and you’ll have nothing to fear this day. Stay and make more trouble and I’ll have every one of you in Newgate within the hour.’
    Another stone glanced off his arm.
    A man growled: ‘We’ll kill you one day.’
    ‘But not today,’ said Furnival, and he turned his back. ‘Go home.’
    Not a single man approached him further; and as the men who had come to kill dispersed among the crowd so did Furnival’s men, watching for the more blatant pickpockets; and as the minutes passed, the festive air, which had been everywhere before the hanging, began to return; laughter came in spontaneous gusts; the sellers