Chapter Text
I guess I should start at the beginning, I mean it's not like I got anything else to do while I wait in here with the two wardens for company over the next week or so, just to make sure I don't rob everyone of the spectacle of Madam Justice doing her duty by topping myself.
Got to admit that I find this whole situation quite humorous, the wardens look blinking terrified as if they expect me to either make a break for it or suddenly keel over and die. At least they granted my request and allowed me the use of some paper and ink, no doubt they are wondering what on earth a cove like me could be writing about in such an earnest fashion.
Well I'm writing about the only thing in this world that truly know...myself, conceited maybe but this manuscript will help answer one or two questions that have been puzzling folks down at the Yard for a while
And before you all ask.
Am I afraid of dying?
No.
Now lets get on with my little story, shall we.
Hate to disappoint the bleeding heart brigade that like to think people like me are what we are due to our up bringing. In my case at least that couldn't be further from the truth, sure there were times when life got hard for one reason or another but there was never any cruelty or lack of love not even towards the end when I was forced by circumstances that I caused to leave the family home.
Suppose I should introduce myself really, I was born Reginald Sinclair Blood back in 1848 to a honest and devout, hard-working couple Mortimer and Angela Blood.
My old man had fought first for King then Queen and country, reaching the rank of Colour Sergeant and for his troubles the Army gave him the boot in '57 when the damaged done by being struck by shrapnel from cannon fire during the Crimean War didn't heal quite as well as everyone had hoped and left his back and side quite scarred. After some 23 years of service he was pensioned off with the meagre sum of one shilling, threepence, ha'penny a day to live off, which isn't a whole lot when you have to feed a growing family
For 18 long months he fought to regain his health and while he was recovering my mother took in washing and the mending of clothes just to keep us all out of the workhouse or even worse. I can remember her sat at the kitchen table well into the small hours working on some of the finest dresses I've seen, her skills at sewing rivalled those of the Jews down the road.
This was something my father never allowed himself to forget and it was the prime reason that he worked a little too hard once he was able, he felt that it was his duty to repay mums kindness for keeping things afloat while he recovered enough to find work on the East India Docks
We had a good size family not too many that we were struggling to feed them all unlike some hereabouts and so I found myself the middle child in what ended up being five children, the twins Clarissa and Charles were my elders while Fred and Sylvia were the youngsters of the family.
Unfortunately this idyllic family picture was shattered when Sylvia got real ill as a baby and didn't live much beyond her 4th birthday, that was back in '58 and I was but ten years old.
After her death things got real tough for us for a while as my old lady she got sick in the head, the doctors said it was a breakdown brought on by the death of her youngest child and that my mother was blaming herself for not being able to halt the inevitable. In the end it got so bad that our dad had to have mother committed to an asylum and we never did get to see her again, well not until we put her in the ground a few years later.
The act of having to commit his loving and ever faithful wife broke my fathers heart and his spirit more-so, I swear a huge part of him died that day when he returned from the asylum alone having left mother behind at the hospital, he'd taken her out on the premise of buying her a new bonnet.
The Gothic Romantic's like to talk about the living dead and such, well I've seen it first hand and there isn't nothing noble or romantic about seeing a grown man walking the earth when he's dead on the inside and just waiting for the sands of time to run out.
My father tried to visit her as much as he could over the few years before she finally succumbed to what ailed her and found that sense of peace that only the dead ever know.
Each and every visit was another nail in his own coffin and he would return home looking like he was carrying the woes of the world upon his shoulders, then of course he turned to the only thing he could.
The drink.
At first he would just get drunk to the point where he got all melancholy and he would sit by the fire sobbing while clutching that blasted bonnet he had bought her, while he whispered words that he had never got around to saying to her face.
Then as time went on especially after mother died, he would on a night after he had finished work sit in the front parlour and drink himself into oblivion and quite often it was little Fred and I that would end up dragging him off to bed. Poor Freddie, he doted on the old man and it tore him up more than anyone realised. Never knew all this would prove such a catalyst for events later on.
As for the rest of my siblings,
Charlie was an odd one really, all he ever did was read and keep himself to himself so no one was surprised when he announced that he was joining the seminary and taking up the priesthood directly after mother passed away. What did hurt father though was that he dropped the family name and took mothers maiden name as his own, to the old man it was if Charlie was ashamed of him and the rest of us, the old man never saw it that just perhaps Charlie was honouring mother's memory either way it doesn't matter any more, not after all these years.
The last I ever saw of Charles was when he attended fathers funeral, he just stood there all silent and never even bothered to say a few words, which I had expected since he was a man of the cloth.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Now where was I…oh aye, Sylvia died when I was ten and my mother was finally committed to the asylum roughly a year later.
While it was bad and painful at times the old man admirably took up the reins of being both father and mother with the help from Mrs Collier who lived a few doors away, she'd lost all her family to the typhoid and cholera years previously and so she became a much loved Auntie and I swear to this day that I've never tasted a finer apple pie than the ones she baked.
Father was strict in so much that he made us do chores and read the bible every night but by no means was he cruel or unloving and I can recall quite a few times when I'd be caught red handed doing something I shouldn't be, that he would plead then admonish me and finally deal out the odd trashing if needed, though you could clearly see it pained him to do so and he never hit me or anyone else more than was needed to get the point across.
Lost count of the number of times after telling me off that he would spend an hour or so lost deep in prayer, begging the good Lord for forgiveness because he had raised his voice or the rare times he raised his hand to me.
You see by then I was already twisted, through no fault of my parents or anyone else in my family. At an early age I'd discovered that I was fond of pain, both inflicting and having it inflicted on me and so I would lay traps hoping to capture any unwary animal with the intentions that I might grab a few precious moments of bliss before being discovered and taken to task and then punished for my sins.
Shame really that no-one noticed that I never once shied away from the birch or the belt. It's hard to describe the feeling I got as a child and once I was approaching manhood well the effect on me was startling at first, but then it was welcomed and I would go out of my way to either injure myself in some minor way or force my father into physically punishing me by doing something that I knew was sinful and thus earn a beating however small.
The way my body responded to a broken arm or a trashed backside, oh my face was red all right but not from the pain either if you get my meaning.
Unfortunately youthful exuberance nearly cost me my freedom and a young female friend her life and while I would have enjoyed a term inside a gaol it was under advisement from my father that I joined the army as a boy soldier aged 16 rather than possibly end up facing the noose at some point since I was already starting to run with what is called the "wrong crowd"
He hoped and prayed that whatever was troubling me would be forced out and that like so many times before the army would take the boy and turn him into a man.
And then, well that's when the fun really began.