Black Jack by Leon Garfield (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1968)

There are many queer ways of earning a living; but none so quaint as Mrs. Gorgandy's. She was a Tyburn widow. Early and black on a Monday morning, she was up at the Tree, all in a tragical flutter, waiting to be bereaved. 

Sometimes, it's true, she was forestalled by a wife or mother; then Mrs. Gorgandy curtsied and withdrew - not wanting to come between flesh and flesh.

But, in general, she knew her business and picked on those that were alone in the world - the real villainous outcasts such as everyone was glad to see hanged - to stand wife or mother to in their last lonely movements. And even after.

It was the after that mattered. Many and many were the unloved ones weeping Mrs. Gorgandy had begged strangers to help her cut down as they ticked and tocked in the diabolical geometry of the gallows.

"Oh, sir! The good God'll reward you for your kindness to a mint-new widder! Ah! Careful with 'im, sir! For though 'e's dead as mutton, mortal flesh must be respected! Here's 'is box! Mister Ketch!" (To the hangman.) "Mister Ketch, love - a shilling if you goes past my house with the remains. Seven Blackfriars Lane, love."

Then, her sad merchandise aboard, Mrs. Gorgandy would lift up her skirts and, with a twitter of violet stockings, join her "late loved one" on his last journey but one.

His last journey of all would not yet have been fixed on; Mrs. Gorgandy had yet to settle with any surgeon who'd pay upwards of seven pounds for a corpse in good condition.

And so to the hanging of Black Jack on Monday, April fourteen, 1749.

A vast ruffian, nearly seven foot high and broad to match, who'd terrorized the lanes about Knightsbridge till a quart of rum and five peace officers had laid him low.

"Poor soul!" had sighed Mrs. Gorgandy when she'd learned of Black Jack's coming cancellation. "When there's breath in you, you ain't worth two penn'orth of cold gin; yet your mint-new widder might fairly ask fifteen pound ten for your remainders. And get it, too!"

She must have been at the Tree all night, for first comers saw her already propping up a gallows' post against the rising sun like a great black slug.

"It's me 'usband, kind sir! Wicked, shocking sinner that 'e's been! But me dooty's 'ere to see 'im off and decently bestowed. Will you 'elp a poor widder-to-be, dear sir? For 'ee's that 'eavy, 'ee'd squash me flat! Oo'll 'elp?  Oo'll 'elp?

So she went on while round about her the crowd grew, and soon her sobby voice, though never stilled, was lost in the general hub-bub of Tyburn Monday.

Smith by Leon Garfield (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1967)

He was called Smith and was twelve years old. Which, in itself, was a marvel; for it seemed as if the smallpox, the consumption, brain-fever, jail-fever and even the hangman's rope had given him a wide berth for fear of catching something. Or else they weren't quick enough.

Smith had a turn of speed that was remarkable, and a neatness in nipping down an alley or vanishing in a court that had to be seen to be believed. Not that it was often seen, for Smith was rather a sooty spirit of the violent and ramshackle Town, and inhabited the tumbledown mazes about fat St. Paul's like the subtle air itself. A rat was like a snail beside Smith, and the most his thousand victims ever got of him was the powerful whiff of his passing and a cold draft in their dexterously emptied pockets.

Only the sanctimonious birds that perched on the church's dome ever saw Smith's progress entire, and as their beady eyes followed him, they chatted savagely, "Pick-pocket! Pick-pocket! Jug him! Jug-jug-jug him!" as if they'd been appointed by the Town to save it from such as Smith.

His favourite spot was Ludgate Hill, where the world's coaches, chairs and curricles were met and locked, from morning to night, in a horrible, blasphemous confusion. And here, in one or other of the ancient doorways, he leaned and grinned while the shouting and cursing and scraping and raging went endlessly, hopelessly on - till, sooner or later, something prosperous would come his way.

Comrades for the Charter by Geoffrey Trease (Brockhampton Press 1934)

Dark and lonely are the Black Mountains, as befits their sombre name. From afar off, in the pleasant orchard-lands of Herefordshire, or on the wooded hilltops which hem the River Wye, you see this huge mass of earth and rock sprawling under the sky like some stranded sea-monster. On a rainy-day, you can hardly tell which is mountain and which the cloud above.

Dark and sombre, too, was the year 1839. Dark with the misery of the people, starving upon tiny wages to make a few rich men even richer, toiling sixteen hours a day so that those few rich men might sit idle.

Victoria was newly Queen. In London the bands blared, the flags flew, and the gentry trotted their beautiful horses in the park.

In England at large there was no music but the hum of machines, No flags streamed in the breeze - only the long streaks of foul smoke, belched from the factory chimneys. The people owned no palaces with proud turrets mounting to the sky. Their only towers were the same chimney-stacks and the skeleton structures of the pithead, with their great wheels turning to send men into the depths.

Over England and Wales rose the murmur of the people, faint yet forbidding, like the rumble of approaching thunder. But the Queen and the Parliament, deafened by the bands and the choirs and the opera choruses, heard nothing.

Yet the storm was coming . . . 

John Diamond by Leon Garfield (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1980)

I ought to begin with the footsteps; but first of all I must tell you that my name is William Jones and that I was twelve years old when I first began to hear them.

I have two older sisters, Cissy and Rebecca, and a mother who was born a Turner, and I have an Uncle Turner to prove it.

But the story is about my father, chiefly.

He was a tall, handsome man, with his own hair, his own teeth, and, in fact, with nothing false about him.

I think he was rather proud of his appearance, and not a little ashamed to have a son who wore his clothes like a footpad and tied a cravat as if he'd been badly hanged. Those, by the way, were his words; but not in public as I was, after all, his son.

Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease (1940)

I asked, weren't we taking the pistol, or anyhow the long, murderous-looking pike which has hung across our broad kitchen chimney ever since I can remember? I was disappointed when my father whispered, "No," and more than disappointed—in fact, I felt mad—when Tom said, in that sneering superior way that elder brothers have:

"What do you think this is, kid—a raid against the Scots? Or do you fancy you're marching against the Spaniards?"

I was glad it was pitch dark in the kitchen where we stood whispering. There wasn't a glimmer from the fire, though that fire has never gone out in my lifetime, nor for a few years before that. But, as usual, mother had covered it with slabs of black, damp peat before we went to bed, and it wouldn't show a gleam till morning, when one poke would stir it into a cheerful blaze.

I was glad it was dark, so that Tom couldn't see my face. I was getting tired of the way he made fun of me