The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner Read Online Free Page B

them. Behind the hangman came his assistants, conspicuously bearing ropes, then the warders, and between them, heads bowed and hands bound, a man and a woman.
    Presley straightened, his attention entirely focused now.
    During the brief course of English justice, and the few days of their incarceration, the Smeetons had changed utterly. Where they had been but forty years of age when Morton and Presley apprehended them, they appeared sixty now. They shuffled forward, bent and ruined, faces pale as new-quarried stone. Morton couldsee the woman's cheeks glisten, but there was no sound of sobbing above the hush of the crowd. The man and woman came before the clergyman—like bride and groom, Morton thought.
    Just as the nooses were to be set in place, the man took a step forward and raised his head. Morton saw despair written there, but defiance as well, and anger.
    “Here's a pleasant diversion for you,” the condemned man hurled out, “watching old Caleb Smeeton and his good wife hang! Thieves, you think us!” He paused and Morton thought the man would break down, but he went on, strangely calm. “But how did those fine Bow Street men know where to nab us? Just where to be, and at what hour? Our ‘friends’ helped them, now didn't they?” he bitterly answered his own question, and glared out at the crowd. “Friends like you …
    “Aye, one of our own peached on us… the same as told us about the panney, and what hour the owner would be away. The friend who said, ‘It'll be safe, sure. Take your wife to help! Never mind she don't want to. Take her!’ And her a God-fearing woman, who'd ne'er do such a thing for all her life!” He glanced over at her, and she met his eye, tears still slipping silently down her face.
    The crowd was hushed as well. This was one of the reasons they came—to hear what the condemned would say, though often they were disappointed and the criminals uttered not a word, or were too distraught to speak. But Caleb Smeeton had a kind of guileless loquacity, and even Morton found himself listening without his usual scepticism.
    “A fool they took me for!” Smeeton went on. His head dropped a little. “And a fool I was. But not so simple as I can't see now what was done to me. My so-calledfriends were closer to Bow Street than to me—” One of the warders had come forward and took hold of the man's arm. As he was pulled back, Smeeton raised his voice for the first time. “Well, take pleasure in your forty pounds, George Vaughan!” he shouted. “And you, lily-white Henry Morton! You murder a virtuous woman today! You too, Jimmy Presley, you murdering bastard!”
    Morton felt Presley flinch beside him, and heard both their names called out in fury on all sides, mixed in with cries of rage against the hangman and the judges, and, over and over, against the despised Runners from Bow Street. The noose was dropped over Smeeton's head and the crowd boiled in indignation, cursing and shoving the constables who held them back from the gallows. Morton and Presley were pushed and jostled this way and that, as though they stood in a surging surf.
    White hoods were drawn over the heads of man and wife; the nooses inspected a final time. The woman collapsed suddenly, her knees giving way, and she was suspended by her neck a moment, before the warders pulled her up. But she was only on her feet an instant before the traps were sprung, and the two figures fell. And hung, silently, side by side.

    Presley stood mute, staring raptly at the slowly spinning bodies. It was long over. Morton reached out and tugged his coat sleeve.
    “Come along, Jimmy,” he said softly, feeling, himself, both sorrow and guilt.
    Half-reluctantly, the young man turned away, and they pushed through the crowd, which was suddenly abuzz with chatter, and even laughter. But neither Morton nor Presley shared in this odd sense of release.
    They went quite a distance before a hackney-coach presented itself. Morton quietly gave the