Category: Historical Fiction Publisher: WH Johnson
ISBN-10: B005FCDJJM
Copyright: 30 July 2011
A young girl and an ex-army officer are hunted by a murderous gang in early 19th century England.
Murders in a bleak winter in the early years of nineteenth century England, a time of cold, rain and snow, when typhus takes lives and work is scarce, when there is little comfort for anyone. And the Winter Hunt is on, beginning with the search for the homeless seventeen-year-old Kitty Wallace, wanted by both the authorities and a fearsome criminal gang. when Will Peel, a cashiered army officer, steps into this mix of mayhem and murder, the pair must flee for their lives across a grim landscape. The author takes the reader into a dark world of sordid inns and public houses; to dank prisons, workhouses and squalid tenements. and then there are the characters who people this adventure tale: the menacing convict Skimmington, the astute magistrate Mr Prout, the quack doctor Mr Sawsby, the mysterious Mr Heselton and that coolest of killers, the monstrous Teddy Kellett. The author is a historian with a particular interest in the crimes and criminals of the period. Several of the incidents in.the story are based on actual events.
Excerpt
And so on this miserable morning, at no later than eight-fifteen, Mr Prout finds himself knocking at the huge gate of Mainton prison.
‘Mr Prout, sir,’ says the man who opens the door to him. ‘Good to see you, sir.’
Such a greeting does nothing to assuage the banker’s irritation. Mr Prout has never cared for Turnkey Royle with his leery eye and his unshaven chin.
‘Up here?’ he asks pointing at the stone stairway on the outside of the main building.
‘Up there, sir,’ he is told. ‘In the old pantry. As usual, Mr Prout, eh?’
Oh yes, the old pantry. As usual. Mr Prout knows that room well enough. He has interviewed hundreds of men and women in there in one or other of his capacities, either as magistrate or as banker. It has not been a pantry in all of Mr Prout’s time coming to the prison. It has probably not served that function for the past hundred years but the name has stuck.
Royle leads him up the slope to the main door. As soon as it is opened Mr Prout is assailed by the stench to which after all these years of regular visiting he has never quite become accustomed. A sour, pungent, all-searching stink of people, of drains, of the ‘offices,’ which seem to him to somehow soak into his flesh, his hair, his very bones. And for hours after leaving, the reek of the place will linger on him and his clothes. He will never become used to it.
Nor will he ever accustom himself to the shouts, the curses, the screams in that great echoing place. At whatever time, the earliest hour of the day or the latest of the night, he has been called to the prison he has to steel himself against the unceasing clamour.
‘Here we are then, sir,’ the turnkey says, ushering him into the old pantry with its sweating walls, stained and encrusted with years of grime. And here behind an ancient table sits a man, his wrists manacled, his ankles shackled. His arm has been bandaged. ‘He had a graze last night but the doctor says it’s nothing,’ Royle explains.
‘And he is…?’ Mr Prout asks of another turnkey, Hull, standing in the shadowy corner on the other side of the room.
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