Free River Thieves by Michael Crummey Page B

brothers also received training from their mother who was an accomplished pickpocket. She went to churches in an elaborate outfit with fake arms sewn to a remarkably large pregnant belly that concealed her hands and she lifted jewellery, pocket watches and money from the people sitting on the pew to either side of her. No one suspected the mother-to-be whose hands were in plain view and had not moved from her belly through the entire service.
    She taught her sons to remove rings from a person’s fingers as they shook hands, to lift bills or snuffboxes from the pockets of men standing behind them in a crowd. They all became proficient in these sleights of hand but Reilly himself had a talent for it. His mother expressed her delight in his abilities the way other parents fawned over a child’s predisposition for drawing or mathematics. Like most gifted children, he was embarrassed by his facility and wished at times to be free of it altogether.
    The clandestine nature of his family’s enterprises troubled him. He could see that even the Irish in St. Giles harboured ambivalent feelings about them. He wanted to live
differently
, though he never expressed that wish in words. When he wasn’t picking pockets at Bartholomew Fair or public hangings, he worked at the Smithfield butcher shop, a job he’d found without consulting his parents. They seemed deeply disappointed in him, as if he had betrayed his country.
    Peyton heard an odd note creeping into Reilly’s voice, a dimness, a filtered quality. He seemed to have lost the thread of the story and was simply reminiscing.
    Hanging days, he said, were the best of times for pickpockets — a large unruly crowd accustomed to jostling and shoving for position, a distant spectacle that held the audience’s rapt attention. They talked of it among themselves with careless anticipation: a hanging was to morris, to go west, to be jammed, frumagemmed, collared, noozed, scragged, to be invited to the sheriff’s ball, to dance the Paddington frisk, to be nubbed, stretched, trined, crapped, tucked up, turned off. A hanged man, his father used to say, will piss when he cannot whistle.
    Reilly shook his head. He could see now there was an odd symmetry to the event, men about to be twisted at the end of a rope for thieving and dozens of others like them moving surreptitiously among the crowd, relieving the spectators of their valuables. A tax on their entertainment. A down payment on future attractions.
    “You understand I’m not proud of it now,” Reilly said. “I was just a lad.”
    “My father knew this when he hired you?”
    “Same as I’m telling you now.”
    “What happened, Joseph?”
    “Bad luck, I guess,” Reilly said. “Bad luck all around.”
    It was the first hanging of the new year, two men convicted of stealing money and alcohol from a tavern, a young Irish servant who had killed his master in retaliation for a beating. The weather appropriately sombre, a morning of fog and freezing drizzle. No real fall of rain but the threat of it in the air all day. That cold winter smell of wet iron. It was the worst sort ofweather for a thief, people bundled under layers, their coats buttoned tight and held at the collar. Reilly managed to lift a silver snuffbox, a handful of shillings, a gold repeater watch.
    He found his brothers once the hanging was concluded and people slowly came back to themselves in the fields, setting their hats tight to their heads, pushing their hands into pockets. As they were leaving the grounds, Reilly was taken by the shirt collar and the hair from behind. A large well-dressed man with a round face and surprisingly tiny mouth began bellowing he had caught the thief that had stolen his pocketbook, dragging Reilly towards the gallows where the constables stood. His younger brothers hung off the man’s arms and coat, Reilly yelling at them to get away.
    “You hadn’t stolen a pocketbook,” Peyton said.
    “No odds in the end. He’d heard me