Free River Thieves by Michael Crummey Page A

its way to a church for a royal wedding. The condemned men were presented with a pair of spotless white gloves to wear. Some of them spent every shilling they had to their names on their hanging clothes and they were ferried through the streets in linen waistcoats and breeches trimmed with black ferret, in white cloth coats and silver-laced hats, in white stockings, in silk breeches.
    Tens of thousands of spectators made their way to Tyburn, arriving on foot and horseback and in coaches. They thronged the cow pastures around the gallows, climbed ladders, sat on the wall enclosing Hyde Park. People fought for places on a scaffold at the bottom of Tower Hill. Entrepreneurs brought carts and sold vantage points above the heads of the crowd.
    The condemned were escorted onto the gallows where they were given permission to address the crowd. Some spoke directly, others gave a prepared statement to the prison ordinary who accompanied them. They cursed the law and the country that condemned them or expressed remorse and regret for their profligate ways or commended their souls to the care of their Lord Jesus Christ. Reilly said, “There was one in particular, a tall rawney-boned fellow, he’d a dark scar across his throat like he’d already been hung. He said ‘Men, women and children, I come hither to hang like a pendulum to a watch for endeavouring to be rich too soon.’”
    A handkerchief was raised and lowered to signal the opening of the trapdoor for that sudden drop, the wrenching sickening pop of the rope snapping taut. The body turning slowly on its line, the fine clothes visibly soiled with urine and faeces. They were left hanging there half an hour to ensure the completion of the sentence and after the dead men were cut down the sick were escorted up to touch the corpses for luck and health. A withered limb could be made whole by setting it upon the neck of a hanged man. Women unable to conceive a child would stroke the hand of an executed felon against their bellies to make them fruitful.
    Peyton said, “You’ve seen this?”
    “More times than I care to remember.” Reilly fed more green wood to the fire.
    “Why would anyone want to touch a corpse like that?”
    Reilly shrugged. “A dead man is an awful thing to look upon. It’s the relic of a thing gone forever from the world. And that’s as close as most will ever get to touching something holy.”
    “I don’t see how all this relates to your working for my father.”
    Reilly looked up, surprised. “You’re an impatient pup then.” He smiled across at Peyton. “Where are you for now? You’ve got something pressing to get to?”
    Peyton shook his head no.
    “Fair enough,” Reilly said. “I’ll come to your father directly.”
    But he hesitated then and Peyton could see he was weighing things in his head, that there was a risk involved. The fire gave off a steady hiss, like the sound of a downpour of rain on still water.
    He was born in St. Giles, Reilly told him, although his parents were both from Ireland and he was raised Irish, surrounded by Irishmen, and never thought of himself in any other way. Most of the people he knew in the community worked on the waterfront, or in shops along the streets as butchers, apothecaries, wholesalers of cloth, grocers. His father worked as a lumper on the cargo ships on the Thames, but his vocation was stealing from the English. Each night at low tide the river thieves made their way onto the East India ships at anchor. Reilly’s father employed his three sons in bailing provisions into the black strip — bags painted black to make them less visible in the darkness — once the casks were pried open. The bags werehanded off then to lightermen in flatboats or to mudlarks who waited in the low-tide silt of the river and carried the booty to fences in Alsatia. They could identify the stolen goods just from the smell of it rising through the cloth bags, sugar or indigo, coffee beans, ginger, tea.
    Reilly and his