Free The Hangman's Child by Francis Selwyn

wished Samson a good morning and walked back the way he had come. Along the wharves from Shadwell to London Bridge the air was first pungent with the vast stores of tobacco, then sickly with fumes of rum. Worse was the stench of hides and the huge bins of horn. Then the day was fragrant with coffee and spice. He picked his way among sacks of cork, yellow bins of sulphur and lead-coloured copper ore. A warehouse floor seemed freshly tarred, where sugar had leaked through great tiers of casks.
    He thought of the Orator. Hawkins cared nothing for Scotland Yard, but he could be made to live in terror of Bully Bragg. Let Bragg believe that his Orator had turned coppers' nark. Mr Bragg had a way with a knife, and Hawkins knew it.
    Thanks to Baptist Babb, Verity knew enough of the Newgate conversation between Hawkins and Rann. Suppose he promised Hawkins to repeat it word-for-word to Bragg, confiding to the Bragg that every helpful word came from Hawkins himself, in exchange for payments from the police informants' fund. Hawkins might yet know fear of a kind unique to Bragg's victims.
    'And that's how we shall have a lever under you, sir,' Verity said to the imagined Orator, loudly enough for several passers-by to turn and stare.
    By sunlit water, he eased his way among men whose faces were blue from carrying indigo, and Customs gaugers whose long brass-tipped rules dripped with spirit from the casks they had just probed. A group of fair-haired sailors, chattering German, stopped to watch him pass. A black seaman, red-cotton handkerchief twisted turban-like round his head, shouted a greeting. A broad, straw-hatted mate stopped him, offering green parakeets in a wooden cage. With measured stride, Verity passed the steam-wharf moorings, the fancy paintwork of paddle-boxes on the packet-boats for Belfast and Cork, Leith and Glasgow.
    'Brothers, sisters, father, mother, never been a better friend to you than I mean to be, Mr Hawkins,' said Verity to his imagined victim. 'Only say the word, and I'm the man to save you being carved in your own juice, fine as a Michaelmas goose for Mr Bragg's table.'
    Over London Bridge, covered drays with carcasses or barrels of fish rumbled to Smithfield and Billingsgate. Blue-smocked butchers bore trays of meat or cabbages on their shoulders, among street-sellers of pea-soup and hot eels, ginger-beer and Chelsea buns. In the recesses above the stone piers, the destitute had passed the summer night, huddled in formless bundles. They watched the traffic listlessly, staring at a world of which they had no part.
    8
    London Bridge was the first barrier to sea-going ships. Upstream, the river was busy with barges carrying coal, flour, or casks of beer. Their masts and sails were lowered as the oars carried them under the spans of Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, and Westminster. Penny-steamers churned the sparkling water, thin stacks trailing banners of smoke. Pontoons and posts in mid-stream marked the progress of the new bridge carrying the Charing Cross Railway to the north bank.
    Verity paused, scowling, by the pillared brick of the Red Lion Brewery. The ebb tide had uncovered a litter-strewn foreshore at King's Head Stairs. Its stone steps, at which watermen landed passengers from Temple Gardens, were deserted in the morning quiet.
    A group of mudlarks scavenged among the small craft lopsided on the sludge. Their ragged clothes shone with the river's slime, so wet that the garments clung smooth as skin under the black ooze. A few wore dustmen's caps with flaps at the nape. Others had their hair in wet tufts, like black imps of damnation in the Illustrated Family Bible of his childhood. Stooping and pausing, they sifted for scraps of coal, iron, rope and bone. Copper nails which fell from vessels berthed or repaired along the shore were the most valuable item.
    Several lighters lay moored to posts just beyond low-water, among them a deep, iron coal-barge. A wooden cabin built into its stern accommodated