The Fatal Tree by Jake Arnott

Author:Jake Arnott [Arnott, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2017-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Then one lightmans I awoke and my humour had lifted. I rigged myself and went out, padding it up through the Hundreds as if willed by some new purpose. At peep of day I crossed into the piazza as the market was coming to life. Sun-ruddied country girls bringing their goods from Daisyville in barrows. Carts of apples, cherries and plums, flowers and herbs arranged on stalls. It was one of those bright blue mornings when all seems well in Romeville. Life would go on, I thought, whatever happened to me.

I dupped into Moll King’s for a dish of coffee. All at once my head was clear, sharpened by some edge of urgency I could not yet fathom. I had to do something, but what? I turned to Tawny Betty and asked her what day it was. It was a Thursday, she told me, though she did not know the date. Some cull looked up from his newspaper and pattered that it was the 13th of August and it was then I twigged that the sessions had started. Jack might already be on trial.

I piked it all the way through Holborn to the Old Bailey and made my way through the push that was gathered in the sessions-house front yard. Here prosecutors, witnesses and quod-culls mingled with the idle crew of spectators that come to tout the gape-seed that passes for justice. And there were hackney-scribblers, ballad-mongers and those wretched affidavit men that wear wisps of straw in their shoe-buckles to advertise that they will swear false evidence for the right price. Beyond was the spiked wall of the bail-dock, where the prisoners are kept chained and waiting for their trial. I tried to tout for Jack there amid the noise and confusion.

Above us all, the upper court was lined with grand columns, the judges’ bench, the jurors’ partitions, the balconies for court officials, like a huge puppet-booth, with its pulcinellos dressed in fine wigs and fur-trimmed gowns. As I arrived a case was being heard against a cove from Stepney who pleaded guilty to filching a quantity of scrap iron. He was sentenced to be glimmed in the paw.

Then Jack was called up to appear. As he climbed to the dock in the middle of the vast Justice Hall he looked small and meek, much like the boy apprentice I had first touted in the Black Lion.

‘It’s the prison-breaker!’ someone called in the yard.

His glaziers brightened a little at this recognition but he was still like a child lost in that vast hall of justice. I felt such pity for him and a deep love that touched my own loss. Poor Jack did not even know that our child was gone. All we had now was each other. I knew that I would try anything to save him.

The clerk read out the indictments. The first, of breaking the house of William Philips and stealing diverse goods, was quickly dismissed, there not being sufficient evidence against the prisoner. The second,

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