The Edge of the Crowd. Ross Gilfillan

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СКАЧАТЬ and tendered the ferryman sixpence, more than the fare he might expect and which he offered in the certain knowledge that other frustrated travellers would soon be competing for his custom. The man shook his head and nodded to the gentleman with him. ‘I am already commissioned,’ he said, shielding a match set to his short pipe.

      Hilditch looked upwards to the bank and saw the crowds on foot and heard drivers cracking their whips and yelling at teams of horses as they strove to extricate themselves from the tangle of traffic and turn about. Cold, wet and quite fatigued, he was in no humour to be carried along as part of a swollen mob that flowed like a second river towards the bridge at Westminster and decided instead to wait beneath the arches until the confusion above had been cleared or he could secure a place aboard some river craft. The ferryman offered no further conversation but the man in uniform turned to him and said, ‘It ain’t that there’s no room, sir, but I’ve a van full of prisoners bound for the Tench stuck in the traffic half a mile back. I’d as soon get ’en safe across before the alarm is raised, so I’m come ahead to secure a boat. However, if you don’t object to such company I’m sure Charlie will take your tanner.’

      ‘If it pleases the gentleman,’ grunted the other.

      Soaked to the bone by the enfilading volleys of wind-blown rain, they awaited the arrival of the prisoners with their own heads hung like the Calais martyrs. The sky was now shrouded in the most dismal grey, the advance guard of a summer storm which was quickly upon them. Now, instants of dazzling illumination relieved the obscurity, flashing upon the turbulent waters and petrifying all movement. Here was a rearing horse ossified as equestrian art; there, by the Middlesex shore and dramatically delineated, a keeling sailboat stopped dead before a many-towered and brooding fortress. A blinding blue streak fixed the ferryman with his pipe pulled from his mouth, his thin lips open as if he were about to deliver himself of some profound observation regarding the river and its part in the lives of men.

      Not knowing how long he might have to wait in this miserable condition, Hilditch again attempted to engage the ferryman in conversation. Among the reports already published in the Morning Messenger he had several accounts of interviews with those who earn their bread on, or beside, canal and river. He had noted the particulars of lightermen, coal-heavers, bargees and lock-keepers and transcribed the prattle of the scavenging mudlarks who waded in filth as they hunted for scraps of coal and rope, iron and ships’ nails or any water-borne refuse with which they might turn a penny.

      Recently, the river had invaded his dreams and disturbed his sleep. In a dismal shed by the Limehouse stairs he had seen the ravages it had wreaked on the body of a woman of indeterminate age and appearance. The lighterman who had recovered the cadaver and who was now awaiting its collection and his own small reward had recounted tales of other luckless souls plucked from the depths or discovered caught among tangles of rubbish by the banks. A young boy in gentleman’s clothes; a woman tied to her two children; such a number of young girls, most likely ruined, who had come to the river to find their release. Henry Hilditch would as soon leave behind this river and the disturbing thoughts that it provoked.

      His eyes were raised towards the Middlesex shore but his mind was in his lodgings at Somers Town, to which he would now repair. He was thinking that he would certainly allow himself a reviving glass of brandy, when the gaoler spoke.

      ‘A fellow might take it for a French fortress,’ he observed. ‘For I’ve seen such when I was working the steam packets.’ He extended a braided cuff and pointed across the river at the low and massive shape of the Millbank Penitentiary. The Tench squatted by the shore, faint gleams showing in its conical towers which rose from corners like candles on a cake. ‘You can’t get the compass of it at this vantage,’ said the gaoler, ‘but there’s a thousand cells within those walls. They do say there are three miles of corridors and I believe it. I’m up and down them all day long. Working the Tench goes terrible hard on the feet.’

      ‘I’m sure it does,’ Hilditch said. ‘It’s not a job I should care to do. Nor one that I suppose any man could?’

      ‘Never a truer word spoken, sir,’ said the gaoler, with enthusiasm. ‘The management of miscreants isn’t a calling that suits everybody. It’s my opinion that you must be born to it.’

      ‘I wonder how you came to be doing such a thing,’ Hilditch remarked, innocently, thinking that he could yet salvage something of this night.

      ‘Ah, sir, now, there lies a story,’ he said.

      ‘I should be interested to hear it,’ Hilditch said, quickly. The gaoler offered his hand and gave his name as Farrel. Hilditch explained the nature of his own business and Farrel said that he would be happy to oblige him with a full account if Hilditch thought it might be useful. He listened with unfeigned attention as Farrel began to explain the origins of his employment with the National Penitentiary at Millbank.

      ‘I used to think I arrived there by a curious route but now I wonder if it wasn’t the most direct. My father was a debtor – never out of debt, nor often out of the Fleet or the Marshalsea gaols. He was an imprudent man, my father, a city broker’s clerk who acquired tastes above his station and paid for them every so often in quod.

      ‘He was in and out of gaol like a thief in a pocket. Somehow we got by, but at last he acquired a debt that we couldn’t pay off if we lived to be old. He had borrowed a large sum and gambled it upon a very uncertain venture. After that, there seemed no end to our struggling. My mother had been a Herefordshire farm girl before she met my father and wasn’t suited for such occupations as might be found here. She took to the drink. She couldn’t cope, not at all.

      ‘She beseeched my father to do something. Had he no friends in the city and what about his relations in Northumberland? It seemed that something might still be done for him but the trouble, as even I could see, lay with my father. Once behind a turned key he had no cares nor responsibilities, no need to hide from dunning bailiffs and creditors. You could say that being in prison freed him – all he needed were a few pennies for a glass of grog and he was a happy man.

      ‘He appeared not to care that his family were now in poor straits and there was never enough on the table to feed me and my sister Margaret. My mother ate less as she drank more. We sold everything. Best clothes, second best. Shoes, coats, cooking pots, knives and forks. My mother was the pawnbroker’s best customer. One day she went to pop the kitchen chairs and didn’t come back.

      ‘I never told no one she was gone. For one thing, I always thought she would come back, but also I was fearful we might be sent to the workhouse, where Mo would go to one place and me to another. So I kept quiet and took it upon myself to bring my sister up. For a half year or so we got by. I fell in with a band of street arabs who scavenged Covent Garden when the costers were setting up their stalls and garden produce was falling from the wagons. We were always chased and sometimes beaten but I generally came home with a cabbage for the pot. Other days Mo and I took potato sacks and went foraging for fuel on the dust heaps. In all this time I never visited my father. I couldn’t gauge what he might do – he might report us for our own good. We left the house when the quarterly rent became due and for a while we had a decent enough crib in the basement of a collapsed warehouse. The cellar itself was still sound and it was dry if it wasn’t warm.

      ‘However, someone found us out and moved us on. We spent the next few nights under the arches and sleeping in doorways. Mo come down with the ’flu and out of desperation, I resolved to visit my father and to find out the true state of his case. If there was indeed no hope of his release then I would have to set about something more than stealing cabbages.

      ‘I found him in the prison snuggery, drunkenly regaling the inmates with song. He would have made a fine street patterer because he could talk and sing well enough to keep himself in lush, even in prison. On that first visit his mind was dulled to СКАЧАТЬ