The Hangman's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

Shoe-leather would never do it.
    Rann had no wish to be the fourth man crippled by Newgate's walls but his heart beat faster. The judge at his trial, a cadaverous, thin-blooded amateur of pain, had killed all hope of reprieve. Tomorrow, perhaps today, they would put a guard in his cell.
    He stood upright from the wall. Before the mackerel sky had cleared to summer blue, he would be free - or he would be dead.
    The sooner the better. He walked back into the cell and listened. The warders might be in the passageway, though he could not hear them. Lupus and Jessup exchanged little conversation. He sat down on the wooden bed whose mattress he had rolled at dawn and whose blanket he had folded. The spy-hole was shut. Slowly, in case they were watching, he unlaced the stiff prison boots, drew them off, and eased his insteps with his hands. It was not the act of a man planning an escape; only a fool would attempt it in bare feet. As it happened, Rann had known all his life that it was the one way in which it might be done.
    He listened and still caught no sound. Perhaps they were not there. With each death-ward so securely locked and bolted, there must be times when neither guard was present.
    He drew a deep breath, walking slowly and barefoot into the shadow of the yard. Speed would come presently. In the course of his life he had grown wise in the ways of officials and authorities. Escape from Newgate was known to be impossible. Therefore, if Lupus or Babb unlocked the cell and saw him neither in there nor in the yard, the warder would first suppose that he had been taken away by higher authority. The delay while they checked might give him his chance.
    From the tight corner of the granite walls, above which the cistern hung, he could see the cell interior through the open door. If they entered in the next few minutes, he was done for. Better to wait until they had come and gone - or go now? Go now! Go now!
    His skull rang with the thought like a bugle-call.
    He thrust his back into the angle of the wall, hands behind him, testing and moulding against the slight roughness of the stone, grazed by the installation of the cistern above.
    He raised his left leg, braced one bare foot and then the other against the adjacent side of the narrow corner. The softer soles and heels of his bare feet moulded themselves to the surface as boots would never do. Rann had known the knack of it for almost thirty years. For all their cleverness, his captors never considered that the orphan thief had first been a sweep's boy. To climb with hands behind him on one surface, bare feet on the other, body pressed into the corner, was one of the oldest tricks of childhood's trade. The twisting and distortion of the body in such angles made cripples of those who outlived their childhood. Jack Rann had saved himself from that. Put up factory chimneys and domestic flues, he had climbed at last to the very top of an engineering stack, slipped down the far side, and left his master-sweep for an apprenticeship in picking pockets.
    Another deep breath of courage. The moulded suction of the hands and feet held him in the corner of the wall, his feet clear of the ground. His heart stopped as a foot slipped. He lost purchase and found himself standing again. He began once more, lost footing on glacial granite, and tried a third time. Lodged in the narrow corner, he moved one hand cautiously upwards behind his back, took the pressure on it and slowly moved the other. The art of the feet was to move them like claws, one by one. Inch by inch, he was climbing now. The yard was three feet below him at a guess, the cell door still unopened. His hands sweated but held. The York paving was four feet down ... five ... and six. Once he thought he heard the metal ram of a key in a lock. Pressing the bruised granite with all his strength he waited motionless, as though this would make him invisible, but he heard no more. It was another cell, not his. His might be next.
    The art