The Hangman's Child Read Online Free PDF

implacable sheen of granite. Somehow, the poor devil had got up the angle of the corner to ten, almost twenty feet. He was not halfway to the top, where the razor-honed steel of a cheveau-de-frise would cut his hands to pieces. Defeated, beyond all help, he braced himself in the angle while they watched from below. His strength and resolve failed. He fell back down the shaft on to the stone paving. Perhaps he thought they would never hang a man shattered by the impact.
    An hour later, crying in pain, the bones of his legs splintered, he was carried to the noose on a chair, jeered by the crowd for his lack of pluck. Rann thought of the poor fellow in the cold air of early morning and shuddered.
    A water drop, heard in the quiet night but scarcely audible now, fell by his foot. He kept his head down and smiled. Only when he reached the far side of the sunless yard did he lean his back against the wall. He gazed up at the city sky and knew the dice had rolled. Other men might allow a day or two for making plans. For Handsome Jack, it was now or never.
    Suppose, somehow, he could climb the polished height? Fifty feet above the ground, twenty feet higher than the roof of the death-wards whose wall formed one side of the airing-yard, the revolving cheveau-de-frise ran round the granite. There was no way over it, under it, or round it. It was a stout wooden pole set with unbroken lines of razor-edged steel blades that would slice off the fingers that clutched it. The blades on the inner side came so close to the wall that they almost scraped the surface. No man would get between them and the slippery stone.
    The device revolved freely. Sometimes in the night he had heard a distant mouse-screech of metal as the wind caught the blades. Even if there were gloves thick enough to clutch its razor fineness, the steel would revolve downwards at the first touch, throwing him fifty feet on to the paving below.
    The builders had done their job well. What then? There was a wooden support for the cheveau-de-frise, running round the wall several feet below it, set as thick with spikes as a hedgehog's back. A man would skewer his hands or tear his fingers on it but he might hold there. Even then, he would still be below the cheveau-de-frise with no way past it.
    Small wonder that the condemned looked at such fortifications and trusted instead to a reprieve. But when the reprieve was refused, a death-watch entered the cell and all hope was gone.
    As he gazed upwards, a seagull glided across the brightening sky and the clocks began to strike. Rann thought of the ocean, the sea-bells that warned of rocks, and longed for such freedom as the white bird's.
    How would a man with nothing but the clothes he wore climb fifty feet of sheer, polished granite? Until that was accomplished, the cheveau-de-frise and the support with its iron spikes scarcely mattered. Small wonder that his gaolers allowed him to 'air' as much as he pleased.
    Like the gleam of a steel-tipped arrow, the morning light struck another falling water-drop. It vanished into the dampness of the paving in the far corner of the yard. High in that narrow corner angle, the commissioners had installed an iron cistern. When Newgate was modernized it acquired a fresh-water supply. Rann measured the height to the cistern with his eye and thought it nearer forty feet than thirty-five. Ten feet more and there was the spiked support rail. A few feet further and the blades of the revolving cheveau-de-frise blocked all progress. Ten feet above that, if a man had wings, he would still find himself marooned on a high wall in the centre of the prison.
    He walked another circuit, trailing his hand on the chill of smooth granite. Where the cistern had been installed, the surface was a little grazed. No more than that. No toehold, no fingertip crevice. Shoe-leather would slip like a skate on ice. In case they were watching him, he walked on. Only one substance might cling to that lightly grazed surface.