The Hangman's Child by Francis Selwyn Read Free Book Online

children knelt by a sweet stall, gambling with marbles for 'Albert Rock' and 'Boneyparte's Ribs'.
    A uniformed policeman was talking to an aproned coster-girl with her horse-pail of ice, as she scooped out lemonade the colour of soap-suds, "ere's your coolers! 'aypenny a glass! 'ere's coolers!' The policeman, his hands folded on the truncheon behind his back, smiled and spoke close to her ear. Rann guessed they could not yet have missed him from his cell.
    The cries of the market rose like a protective screen. He saw a donkey-cart coming slowly up the curve of Snow Hill from Farringdon Market. Behind the driver was a pile of empty, slatted flower-boxes and sacks. Rann moved forward and breathed a fresh earthy smell of potatoes as the wheels rumbled past him. The carter had made his deliveries and was on his way from the city, possibly
    south but more likely east, to market-gardens and fields beyond Bethnal Green.
    The tail-board was down. Rann walked quickly after it, jumped and swung himself up to sit at the end of the cart without the driver knowing or needing to care. It was so neatly done that a coster holding a haddock on a toasting-fork laughed and called out to him, "ooray for that! Let him laugh who wins!'
    Rann waved back, like a man without a care. They would forget him more easily for that. Yet as the cart followed the prison wall of rough-hewn stone with its windowless recesses, he felt a terror of Newgate greater than when he hung from the spikes of its cheveau-de-frise.
    Like a man in a dream, he saw Greyfriars and Christ's Hospital with its Bluecoat boys, the golden cross and upper dome of St Paul's above the roofs. To one side on the tail-board lay the empty potato sacks. A fool would have crept under them and hidden but Jack Rann knew better. He was concealed by the crowds and by his covering of soot more surely than by all the sacks ever made.
    As the cart rattled eastwards, shaking and bumping, he felt the scales tilt to his side at last. He had never had his likeness taken by a camera. The only people who might recognize him were those who knew him before the death of Pandy Quinn, or Flash Fowler and those who had arrested him, or the court that had tried him, or the warders who had guarded him. They were not a hundred people in London's two million, but in time they might be enough. Yet, so long as he moved fast, perhaps only betrayal could hang him now. He pictured Miss Jolly, timid shopgirl and lynx-eyed dancer of the penny entertainments. Maggie Fashion, mannequin of the bereaved at the Mourning Emporium. Such young women would die for Handsome Jack more surely than another man might do. And, if the moment came, they might more easily destroy him.
    Turning his head to glance down Cheapside, he saw the pillared spire of Bow Church, the gilt-figured clock that hung above the pavement, the Sultan Cafe with its sign that 'Smoking-Rooms May be Hired by Private Parties', dark little shops that sold snuff or tobacco, vintners with racks of green bottles displayed on the pavement. Square-paned windows caught the sun at a dozen different angles.
    Beyond the Royal Exchange, the cart entered Cornhill. Not a head in the well-dressed crowds turned to look at him nor at the donkey-cart that carried him. In a city of a million fires and chimneys, there was no more common sight than a sweep on a cart-tail beside sacks that might soon be filled with soot.
    Behind its plain brick fronts, Cornhill belonged to the wholesale premises of goldsmiths, jewellers, watchmakers and tailors. In its pillared banks, the wealth of the city slept undisturbed. Here and there rose a more splendid facade, canopied and balustraded with red brick and stone facing.
    They passed Sun Court, a courtyard of Tudor brick within the arch of Walker's Vaults. Pandy Quinn's legacy. Jack Rann looked away, as if the passers-by might read the secret in his eyes. He gazed instead at the reflections of the vaults in the display windows of Trent's Cornhill