When Gods Die

Chapter 43

The screams were starting to get to him. The screams and the never-ending drip, drip, drip of water.

Tom drew his knees up against his chest and hugged them close, his teeth gritted against the shivers that ripped through his body. Outside, the sun might shine warm and golden from a clear June sky, but here within the dank, filth-encrusted walls of Newgate, all was darkness and damp and the bone-chilling cold of perpetual winter.

“You there. Boy.”

The seductive whisper was close. Tom turned his face away and pretended not to hear.

“The offer’s still open. Tonight. Five shillings.”

The man had never exactly said what he wanted Tom to do for those five shillings, but Tom was no flat. He knew. His empty stomach heaved.

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.