Chapter One

1843

Windsor, New South Wales

Time is long in this place. A day here is a slow thing like a great bird that passes over you without beating its wings. I see them sometimes, the eagles, when I’m working in the paddock. If I don’t look up, they’re just silent shadows moving over ridges on the dry ground like black ripples. I think they love being in that pale sky the same way I love my days beneath it. I start work early in summer, and before the sun brushes the treetops on the boundary fence I’m back inside, in the cool of the dairy. Today, there’s honeycomb in a bowl needs scraping into the stone jar. Eight shit-tipped eggs in my basket, a chook half-plucked and a breakfast loaf already rising under a damp cloth. Here, there are no church bells ringing the hours to hurry me along. No ladies in fine gowns looking down their noses at the dust on my skirt and the patches on my sleeves. In all my years, I’ve never felt the touch of velvet. There wasn’t much call for it on the streets of London where I grew up, but it cannot be as soft as the smooth press of the cow’s rump against my cheek when I lean in every morning to milk her.

The first day I came to Windsor, I climbed up on the donkey cart and pulled myself onto the flat roof of the stable, stood tall and looked out with my hand shading my eyes. I wanted to be sure I could see the Hawkesbury. It’s deeper and wider than the Fleet but it flows just the same, knows where it’s going. Never pauses. Without a river near me, I couldn’t truly call any place home. The cottage is a wooden building, set on stumps to lift us above winter flooding. Garden all around, with paths between the rows of planting just wide enough to pull the small barrow through. There’s a dirt yard in front where we keep the goat. Three paddocks. An outdoor kitchen, the barn, the dairy and the pig pen at the back. I sit on the veranda of an evening, watching night lay herself down on the field that stretches between the house and the lapping water. This farm is all I want to see of the world. I need nothing new. There is no yearning left in me.

I am old now but I have it still in my head and my heart, that other life, like garden pickings at my fingertips, and I pluck what I wish. This day, that day, their colours travel through the years bright as wildflowers. I remember places, people, feelings too. Sometimes things come back to me without invitation; I see a certain colour or a noise startles me and then fear crawls on my skin again. This morning, a neighbour called to ask if I’d let her have half a pound of my best butter in return for a bowl of strawberries and some pickled lemons and the sound of knuckles rapping on a wooden door was enough to hurl me back in time and across oceans. I was a young woman again, in London, on the day the beadles came for me.

One o’clock it was, when they knocked – sudden and loud. I was busy in the kitchen at the back of Mr Brooke’s shop, blacking his boots. Spit and polish. Spit and polish. Watching the clock and saying the numbers as time trickled along. My mother didn’t know how to read but she taught me numbers before I was seven and she made a good job of it. One o’clock it was, I’m sure. I answered the door myself.

The two of them stood there with a look on their faces like a hoarfrost come in August. Mr Raymond was a stranger to me and I didn’t like him, with his beady eyes – even then I knew a weasel when I saw one – but I’d had dealings with Mr Jones before. A kind man. I must go with them, Mr Jones said. A serious matter. When I think of his expression now, I know what he was watching for, the way he looked straight at me, but if he saw a shadow of guilt at that moment, it was imagined. The constables are the arms of the law in every parish but the beadles are its eyes and ears. They can change the course of a life with a word whispered or a word written. I was so afraid at being told to go with them, I didn’t even get to wondering what they might want with me. I said I’d get my hat right away if my employer would give me leave. Mr Jones told me to go upstairs and clean my hands first, of the boot blacking.

I knew all the streets around the printer’s shop by St Paul’s Cathedral because I worked there and I knew Clerkenwell like the lines on my own hand but the roads between the two were unfamiliar so I followed where the beadles led. We did not talk but Mr Raymond spoke once. ‘Watch that one, Henry,’ he said. ‘She’s a slippery trull if ever I saw one.’

I felt myself sickening as we walked, each step taking me nearer to Clerkenwell. Three weeks is a short time, you might think, but every hour I’d spent at Mr Brooke’s had seemed a long, happy lifetime. I was becoming something new, polished like an old silver teapot, shiny again. But when we reached Clerkenwell Green, I felt the past growing on me like tarnish. Perhaps it’s a foolish notion, but I think we leave something of ourselves behind us as we come and go, our memories left like peelings dropped by the wayside, dead skins of a day that’s done with. All around me I could see moments I didn’t even know I’d discarded. Here, the soft days, the best of me. There, the days begrimed, the worst of me.

As we stepped out and waited for a gap between the carts and carriages, I saw a phantom of myself. She ran across the street, that girl, that Sarah Evans, in all her true colours. So young, then. I watched her knees kick up ahead of her just before she tumbled and I heard her voice – my voice call out so clear as she fell. ‘I did not do it!’

We crossed over by the Session House and I wondered why God would make it so easy for men to build such a straight, honest-looking thing to harbour all that’s crooked and dark and evil. I recalled the smell of the place, how they washed the floors with vinegar to hide the odour of mould and rotten air, so sharp it watered my eyes that day when I stepped up into the court. That was a long time before but it came back to me again as I followed Mr Jones into Clerkenwell Close, and the bread with butter I’d eaten at breakfast heaved up into my throat. We turned the corner and I heard the mob before I saw them, gathered like a buzzing swarm on the church steps.

Mr Jones pulled me through a doorway into the Crown Tavern. ‘There’s a child,’ he said. ‘The body’s in the church vault. A boy. Drowned.’

That was when I understood why the beadles had come for me. The beating of my poor heart stopped.

‘Not safe to try and pass through ’em while they’re so lively,’ said Mr Raymond and he laughed silently with his shoulders, up and down, up and down. We went out through the back door of the tavern and made our way tiptoe across the graveyard. I could no longer hold myself up but they pulled me along, told me to hush and to hurry. I remember counting the steps up to the side door of the church. Numbers are safe. Unchanging. Numbers hold you, keep you still. Twelve steps. Nothing had changed in the church since the last time I was there. Things of great beauty all around, placed high to be seen above the wooden walls of the box pews. Plump cherubs, flaming urns and a dove descending. Words on the walls, painted prayers I couldn’t read and, higher than everything else, the arms of King George. I know that royal picture well, with its lions and lilies, because I carried its small likeness with me for years. Kept it safe, wrapped in cotton, always close to me. Just in case.

‘It’s down in the cellar.’ Mr Raymond pushed me to the stairway.

Oh, I did not want to go there. I did not want to see.

March, 1813

Clerkenwell, London

The stone floor of the crypt was patterned with four slabs of light from windows set partly below the level of the street outside. Six thick pillars supported a huge, vaulted ceiling of red bricks shaped into curves, making half-moon shadows that flickered as a cold draught moved over the candle lamps. Piles of dark, dusty objects leaned against every wall – books and boxes, wooden boards and rusting iron candle holders, broken chairs and fat rolls of moth-eaten fabric – but the only piece of furniture was a table in one corner, softly lit by the window above. On it was a small wickerwork coffin like an open basket with a handle at each end.

‘Good day to you, Mr Jones.’ The gravedigger touched his head where his hat would have been under different circumstances.

‘Has the body been disturbed?’

‘It’s been washed. I took off the cap and a blue handkerchief round the waist.’

Something moved in the dark corner behind the table – a woman, edging herself into the light. She was as round as a cooking apple and wrapped thickly in a woollen shawl.

The gravedigger caught a drip from his nose on his coat sleeve and beckoned her. ‘Tell the beadle what you know, Mrs Blakey.’

She didn’t need asking twice. ‘I heard the mother was living at a chandler’s shop so I guessed ’twas Sarah Evans. She lodged with me till a few weeks back. I came as soon as I could. I’m here to help the poor woman.’ Her words froze in the icy air of the cellar, breath curled white.

The gravedigger coughed and took a step forward himself. ‘She says she gave a piece of silk to the mother, to make the cap.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the coffin. ‘Last time she saw the lad he was wearing that hat and that cap.’ He was standing right in front of Mrs Blakey now but she would not be silenced easily and bobbed out from one side so that her face appeared beneath his arm.

‘Sarah was about to leave my place to work for a printer, but she couldn’t take both the children with her. She talked of putting him in the workhouse but worried what would become of him. The night she came home without him, she told me she’d been to the parish. They gave her some papers to take up to St Pancras where he was born and she left him there. They were sending him to the country the next day, I believe.’ She reached into the coffin and picked up the little silk cap.

The gravedigger scowled at her over his shoulder.

‘Mr Jones?’

‘What is it, Clayton?’

‘There was another woman here earlier. Swore to me she gave Evans the hat and the shoes. Knew them at once, but the tale Evans told her was different. Something about giving the boy to a doctor at the workhouse.’

Mr Raymond spoke for the first time. ‘Well, there we have it. All twisted up in her lies. Guilty as sin.’

Jones raised his hands against the cold air and glared at all of them. ‘Enough! We’re not here to be jury and judge!’ He turned and looked behind him at Sarah Evans. Her eyes were half-closed, flickering. ‘We must get this done now, and quickly.’

As Jones pulled Sarah gently towards the table, the gravedigger shifted his weight from one numb foot to the other and looked at the clock.

‘Murderess!’ The voices outside were growing louder as each minute passed. ‘Hang her!’

Raymond pulled his coat more tightly around him. ‘If we don’t get her away soon, there’ll be trouble.’

‘That’s not my George.’

It was not what they were expecting to hear.

‘Look again. You must be sure.’

‘I am sure. That’s not him.’

‘Look, it’s the same silk I gave you.’ Ann Blakey pushed the wrinkled object into Sarah’s hand. ‘The border’s the same, and the selvedge. We sat by my fire and I told you to sew it like this.’

‘That’s not his cap. And he wasn’t wearing it that day. I took it off.’

‘Sarah dear, you know these are his things. You must tell the truth now. They’ll see your innocence and find whoever who did this.’

‘They’re not his clothes. It’s not George.’

Someone forced her fingers around small, wet things. One drip of water fell and then another, dark splatters on the pale stone slabs. She turned over the tiny shoes in her hands and said nothing.

‘The mob’s warming up.’ Jones reached down to a piece of sackcloth under the table and placed it gently across the coffin. ‘If there’s anything you wish to say, now’s the time.’

Sarah put one arm out to steady herself and moved sideways to the wall. As she leaned back against its chilled dampness, she looked at Jones for the first time since entering the vault.

‘That’s not my son.’

‘Mrs Evans, you must be truthful. It’ll be for the best. Three weeks ago, you went out with your son but you came home alone. What did you do with him?’

‘This isn’t George’s hat. I took the old band off and put a ribbon around, much broader than this.’

‘But where is he? Is it true you had him sent away?’

‘I didn’t send him to the country. He went to live with my aunt in Brompton.’

Jones sighed. ‘D’you think it’s likely your aunt would come all the way from Brompton to drown a child in the New River?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was slipping slowly down the wall, a little further with each word.

‘I’ll believe you’re speaking the truth till I know otherwise. Where exactly does your aunt live? What’s her name?’ He took a stub of pencil from his coat pocket and a small piece of paper, a note from Mrs Jones about purchasing bacon. Kneeling now on the floor, Sarah looked lifeless, blue-lipped from the cold. He smoothed the crumpled sheet against the nearest pillar, dabbed the pencil on the tip of his tongue and wrote as she spoke, catching only a few of the words but they were enough: BROMPTON – Aunt, Miss Evans, lodges at No 14 or 15 or 16 – House facing ye Church

‘If your aunt lives there as you say, I’ll find her.’

New sounds joined the angry clamour outside. Heavy boots on the stone steps of the church. A man shouting. For a moment, all was quiet. Something soft smashed and stuck against the window near Jones’s head and a cheer went up as it dribbled in wet, brown lines down the glass.

‘Move back!’

‘That’s the constables arriving. Take her to the tavern and ask for the room at the back. Get up, Mrs Evans. You’ll have to wait at the Crown. The mob will tear you apart if they get their hands on you now.’

Jones took a hackney coach to Brompton and walked the streets, knocking on doors for an hour and a half. He talked to the churchwarden, the baker, the apothecary and the mayor. When he arrived back at the tavern, his prisoner was already at the magistrates’ office for questioning. As he dodged the carriages on Clerkenwell Green, he felt his knees buckle and he was forced to kneel for a moment in front of the Session House. ‘Foolish old man!’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and shook his head slowly as he spoke again to the stone steps in front of him, more loudly this time. ‘Should know better by now. Never look for the truth on their faces. Truth is as devious as any lie.’ Jones grasped the railing and pulled himself up again with a groan. Passers-by glanced sideways at him as he walked away.

The magistrate’s fire at the Hatton Garden police office had been well stocked with coal all day and Jones began to steam gently as soon as he walked through the door. He let his woollen coat slide from his shoulders as he perched sideways on a rough-hewn pine stool, one foot braced for balance. As he spoke, he looked right into the eyes of Sarah Evans.

‘You might’ve saved me the trouble. You knew full well I wouldn’t find your aunt.’

The magistrate coughed and dipped his pen, tap, tap, against the inkwell’s china rim. ‘Mr Jones? The hour’s already late. Your report.’

‘I looked all over Brompton. I enquired everywhere for the aunt but there was no such person. No such house opposite any church with the numbers Mrs Evans gave me.’

The examination was a long one and by eight o’clock the mob outside had grown to three hundred. The magistrate curled thin lips across crooked teeth and sucked at the inside of his cheeks, thinking.

‘If we don’t protect her, she’ll never make it to trial. A mother that would murder her own child, for God’s sake … Jones, fetch the constables, twelve at least. Armed with swords. She needs an escort.’

‘Where to?’

‘Coldbath Fields Prison.’

By the time he arrived home that night, Henry Jones recognised the feeling that had brought him to his knees in full view of the crowds on Clerkenwell Green. It was regret, not for the wasted journey but for the wasted years. After all that had gone before, all he had tried to do, Sarah Evans had come to this.

‘I heard you were committed last night but I didn’t believe it.’ Martha Lightning was standing awkwardly just inside the door of Sarah’s cell. It was more like a coffin than a room, six feet by eight, the flagstone floor arched higher at the centre for drainage. There was only one place to sit, a wooden shelf attached to the far wall, three planks in the shape of a shallow trough. Its thin straw mat and soiled rug reeked like a tripe stew. ‘Yet here you are, in Coldbath Fields once again.’ Martha’s chin wrinkled then wobbled as tears spilled onto her cheeks. The two women met in the middle of the small space and clung tightly together, rocking gently.

Sarah pushed Martha back by the shoulders. ‘Look at you! I hardly know you, dressed so fine.’ She ran her hand down black galloon ribbons stitched in stripes on bright merino wool. ‘A gift from the soldier you told me about?’

‘It’s called willow green – he says it’s the colour of my eyes. Only a junior officer and he’s still with his wife but I … Life takes us where it will.’

‘Is he kind? That’s what we used to wish for. Nothing more.’

Martha grasped Sarah’s hand in her own. ‘I saw the child, this morning. I know it can’t be dear George, but where is the poor little mite?’

Silence filled the space between them, like a stranger suddenly entering the room.

When Sarah spoke, she turned away. ‘He went to live with my aunt.’

‘But your aunt’s dead these ten years.’

‘There’s another, one I never spoke of.’ Sarah’s voice had become a hoarse whisper.

‘Then I’ll go and fetch him! I’ll bring him back with me and show him to the magistrates.’

Sarah did not answer. She was dropping slowly, hunched forward until she was half-kneeling on the narrow bed. She curled herself tightly against the wall.

‘Let me help.’ Martha had begun pacing but there was no room to walk, just three steps across the width of the cell and three back again. ‘I have money for a hackney coach. I’ll go now and you’ll be out of here by morning.’

‘No!’

Martha stared at her skirt, pressing away a crease that was not there. ‘These stories you’ve been telling, they make things worse. We’re old friends, close as sisters. You must tell me the truth.’

A spray of icy rain showered onto their heads from the glassless window above them, its iron bars so thick that the sky was a grey lattice, no more than pinpricks of light.

‘I can’t. Don’t ask again.’

A deep, guttural scream came from the other side of the brick wall. A heavy door slamming. Someone running and then laughter. When Sarah spoke, Martha barely heard her.

‘Watch over Billy for me. Keep him safe. He’s with Melloughby Tatam, the nurse that was looking after him in St John Street. And say nothing. Please!’

‘Now I understand.’

Heavy footsteps sounded on the hard floor of the corridor outside the cell, long strides growing closer.

‘You’re right to be afraid but you’ll end up on the gallows if you don’t tell the truth.’

The turnkey appeared at the cell door as Martha gently wiped tears from Sarah’s cheek with her thumb. ‘We must help ourselves as women always have.’

‘Time’s up. Out, now.’ The turnkey’s hand encircled Martha’s forearm, fingers gripping fiercely as he slammed the cell door behind them. He coughed loosely, aimed a spit of foamy yellow against the wall and wiped his chin against his shoulder as he turned the key in its lock.

In the days that followed, Henry Jones walked with Sarah Evans in the yard at Coldbath Fields. Each time he saw her she was thinner in body and spirit. Was she receiving the allowance of bread and broth? She would not say. Had she been given a light at night? Was she put in a room with a fire each day for an hour, as required? She always said nothing.

He had hoped she might decide to tell the truth before things went any further, to untangle the knot of lies she had already told. It was simply not possible that, on the night George disappeared, she had given him to the parish and also handed him over to a doctor at the same time as sending him to live with an aunt who did not exist. Any judge or jury in the land would see at once that she had told different stories to different people but Jones still did not understand why she had displayed her deceit so clearly.

Friends and neighbours came to tell their stories and the evidence against her grew to pages of testimony but Sarah still refused to admit the boy was hers. A woman came to visit her, left a bag of beef tarts and fresh linen then asked to see Jones, saying she was the housekeeper at the printer’s where Sarah had been working. ‘Be sure to write this down,’ she said. ‘I wish to say Mrs Evans is a good mother and I’m sure George is living. She told me he was going to live on a farm. Next time I saw her, I asked her if she’d heard news and she told me he’d arrived there with the other children and was happy.’

On her fourth night in Coldbath Fields, Sarah sent Jones a message saying she wanted to make a new statement. He guessed what had changed her mind: the body taken from the river was to be buried the next morning. Whatever had been stopping her from telling the truth, it was not enough to keep a mother from letting her son be laid in the earth without a name.

It was late and Jones was already in his nightshirt but he dressed quickly and was at the prison within the hour. She was sitting at a small table in the porter’s lodge.

‘The child found in the river. He is my boy, George Evans. I knew him the moment I saw him in the vault. He’s my dearest—’

The sobs that came from her then were movement not sound, silent spasms that lifted her body and threw it back, again and again, until she could no longer speak at all. Jones had known for many years that it was possible to die from grief and there was nothing he could do for the woman but stay with her and wait.

Later, he called for pen, ink and paper. She told him it had all been lies, everything she had said before, and by the light of a sputtering candle in her cell, she told him a different story.

Walking home through deserted streets, Jones shook away the drizzle that pooled in the brim of his hat and wished he could discard just as easily the feeling that Sarah Evans was still not telling the whole truth of the matter. He sat in his elm rocker all night, watching the bright journey of the crescent moon over the city. Justice was going along as it was supposed to, but the uneasiness of it itched at him. There would be no witnesses called to defend her. If anyone said anything that put Sarah Evans in a good light, it could help, but who would speak up for her? It didn’t feel right but it was the way of the law. As he stared at the damp-mottled rug at his feet, Henry Jones wondered for the first time in his life if the law was right.

He ate a kipper for breakfast at eight, smoked a pipe and went back to Coldbath Fields to take Mrs Evans to the magistrate. The next part of his job was a simple thing, a list of rules and regulations; there were no more decisions to make. All he had to do was stand at her shoulder, watch to make sure things were done correctly and sign his name to record that her final statement was voluntary. It was her last chance to speak before the trial. He read the words to her, dipped the pen, put it in her shaking hand.

‘I cannot.’

‘It’s alright. Just make your mark.’

She held the bone handle awkwardly between fingers and thumb. It hovered above the paper. A single drop of black ink splashed across his own signature. He pointed to the right place.

‘A cross will do. Just here.’

It was no longer safe for her to walk on the street so they returned to the prison in a closed carriage with an armed constable sitting next to the coachman for their protection. The blinds were down and Jones scanned her blank face for a small, bright flicker of truth or a passing shadow of the deception she was concealing, but he saw nothing.

In the darkness, it seemed easy to ask his question.

‘Are you at peace?’

‘Don’t disturb yourself on my part,’ she said. ‘I’m easy now I’ve spoken the truth.’

It was a short drive and they heard the prison bell ringing for chapel as the horses slowed on the sharp turn from Coldbath Square. The constable stamped his foot three times above their heads, the sign that they were arriving at the gate.

‘Mr Jones? Will you answer me one question?’

There was a yell as the driver jumped down into a deep puddle.

Jones nodded. There was very little time.

‘When they take George from the vault today, will they bury him with his name? Will they write it in the book?’

The carriage door opened and she was pulled roughly away before he could answer, the constable on one side and the prison porter on the other.

A week later, Jones was sitting alone in the turnkey’s room at Coldbath Fields. He was there to escort Sarah Evans to Newgate, the prison next to the Old Bailey courtrooms. If she was found guilty at the trial, one of its ancient, filthy cells for condemned prisoners would be the last place she would see on Earth. He looked up at the barred window where a red sky showed that evening was on its way. A handful of coals barely glowing in the grate offered no heat at all when he pushed his feet towards it. The room was five times the size of the cell where Mrs Evans was being held but it still made him feel uneasy. He had come to dread going to the prison they called ‘the English Bastille’. The air trapped in its small square rooms and shoulder-wide corridors tasted used and thin as if it had already been breathed in and out by many others before him. He knew the dark cell below ground they called the ‘Black Hole’ was still in use even though the new governor denied it even existed.

Thick stone walls muffled the sounds of the world outside but the prison’s noises filled every space: chains against stone, timbers thudding, human wails and whisperings. He had been a beadle of St James’s for thirteen years and his job was to focus on duties of charity, but the reality was that overseeing the parish workhouse and receiving prisoners brought in by the night watchmen meant a constant attack on his conscience. The Jones family had been among the poorest in Clerkenwell for four generations. Every investigation, every prisoner was connected in some way to his own past. Each time he gave evidence at their trials, his personal loyalty to that small community was weighed in a painful balance between heart and duty and he had never felt the burden of it as heavily as he did on his visits to Sarah Evans. Henry Jones was getting old and losing patience with men in expensive wigs who rattled keys and talked about law while they lined their own pockets with the profits of corruption.

He pulled his chair closer to the fire. The thick, blue, woollen beadle’s coat with its red and gold–laced trims was an itchy inconvenience in summer but for most of the year he was glad of its warmth and the heavy flapping at his ankles. As he leaned over and held his hands closer to the flickering coals, he wondered how long it would take the turnkey to fetch Mrs Evans from her cell. A brown rat appeared cautiously from somewhere behind one of the cupboards, lured out by the silence or perhaps by the crusty remains of a rabbit pie on the table.

‘Thirteen years, my small friend. A long sentence for any man, don’t you think? Tonight, I’ll write a letter of resignation.’

Mrs Jones would weep and ask how they would keep themselves, and he had no answer, but his work was using him up. The last few weeks had left him wondering if he was a good man at all. In his dreams he was being visited by the memory of a girl called Polly for the first time in thirty years, still as young as she was before. He had been thinking again about how different things might have been if the world had turned a little more slowly on a certain day. If Gabriel Evans, a burly Irish skinner with a wide smile, had not come to town.

Jones told himself he had always tried to do what was right, to use the rules and the law and never to allow himself the indulgence of seeing her mother’s face when Sarah stood in front of him asking for help but, truly, after so many years, he was no longer sure he had. But the past was done with and it was not his job to drag it all up, not now. The past could not help her.

He watched the door and wondered how she would be, so close to the end.

The rat was sitting upright, boldly nibbling the pastry crust. Its black eyes stared at him, unblinking, two jet-stone beads. Jones sighed. He heard her leg irons before the door opened and so did the rat, back under the cupboard in one leap. She was behind the turnkey but he could smell the prison on her, the sourness of the place where she had been sleeping. He signed some papers and a few minutes later they were making their way slowly along the narrow corridor from the lodge to the front yard, her chains rattling with each step as the turnkey pushed her forward. Dusk had become night and a flat layer of fog from the house fires of Clerkenwell was already floating pale against the sky. It would be just a fifteen-minute journey, in an unmarked coach for her safety.

When Sarah spoke, her voice cracked like old wood: dry, too long unused. ‘I’m not afraid of Newgate. I was there once before. D’you remember, the first time we met? So many years ago.’

He had been in the shared cells where the Newgate prisoners lay crowded together on straw, waiting for their hearings – petty larceny, vagabonding and breaking the peace – but there were other places there he did not want to see. The jailers would find somewhere suitable for a woman accused of drowning her own child. She would be resting her head in Hell before the day’s end.

As the door was locked and the coachman picked up his whip, Jones knew the next time he would see Sarah Evans would be at her trial in the Old Bailey. Her final declaration would be read to the court and all the world would hear the story she had told him at the last minute, the dark tale she swore was the truth.

He walked the long way home but the journey did not shake off the uneasiness he had felt since he heard that name again.

Thomas Aris.