Jack, Knave and Fool by Bruce Alexander Page B

vote.”
    “There is the matter of money,” I said. “Both Sir John and Mr. Bilbo felt that with an additional scholar …”
    “We’ll speak of that later, shall we?”
    Bunkins had an especial destination in mind for our stroll that morning. When I heard what it was and what awaited us there, I was reluctant to accompany him. It seemed, as he told it, that a sewer man had made a gruesome discovery in the Fleet up near the Holbourn Bridge. He had taken it direct to Mr. Saunders Welch, High Constable and Magistrate of Holbourn, rather than to Sir John at Bow Street. It was found in such a place as might have been thought to be Westminster, yet he went to Saunders Welch in hope of some reward, for just as Mr. Welch was free with his fines, he was known to bestow rewards for items brought to him which were of criminal interest. The sewer man — Bunkins did not know his name, nor was it of importance — received a bounty of ten shillings. And now that object had been placed upon exhibit in St. Andrew’s Churchyard.
    I listened —patiently, I believe —as we trudged upon our way. Yet at last, in exasperation, I demanded to know the nature of this grim object whose worth had been placed at ten shillings.
    “What is it?” said I. “What are you taking us to see?” “Some poor cod’s napper. Not the rest of him, just his napper!” Had I understood Bunkins aright? I thought myself fluent in his flash cant, yet here was a bit of intelligence so startling that I thought it best to ask for confirmation in plain speech. “You mean a head?” I questioned. “A human head?”
    “Ain’t that what I’m tellin’you? They got it there stuck up on a pole for all to see. Welch is ready to put out another ten shillings to him who can say sure and certain who it is. I hear there’s a lot of lookin’ goin’ on.”
    “Curiosity seekers attracted by a disgusting spectacle,” said I primly. “Naw, not a bit of it,” said he. “They’re reward seekers, is what they are.” “Well, I for one will have none of it. I’ll go with you to the churchyard, but I shall wait for you without the gates.”
    “Do it your way. I’ll not nap the bib cause of it.”
    I was cross with him, silent, sulking —and he with me —as sometimes happens between chums. Why must he so often descend to the level of the mob? I asked myself. Of course he had not the advantages of family I had had — never knowing his father, barely remembering his mother, out on the street to shift for himself since he was s child. Still, he had advantages aplenty these past two years, now nearly three. He lived in fair luxury there on St. James Street and wanted for nothing — certainly not the ten shillings he might gain by identifying the poor man whose head was spiked upon a pole in St. Andrew’s Churchyard. He went merely for the oddity of it,
    I was reminded of the time when first I had walked with him from the Strand into Fleet Street. Having passed that way a number of times before and noticing nothing unusual, I was quite unprepared when he stopped me there at the Temple Bar gate and called my attention to the two skulls hung high above on pegs, rattling in the wind. He laughed at my disgust and told me that there had once been meat upon them, but the birds had long ago picked them clean. These were, I later learned from Sir John, all that was left of the heads taken from the traitors of 1745. Originally there had been four up there — or was it five? Sir John was unsure. In any case, all but two of the skulls had blown down or perhaps simply crumbled and crashed to the cobblestones. “I know not,” Sir John had said, “if such a display discourages traitorous acts. I am certain, however, that it comes near to justifying them.” I myself have ever after had a particular loathing of decapitation as a means of execution. At least when a man is hanged, his body is buried whole.
    Yet it would not do to sulk too long, nor to play high and mighty with