Sleep eluded him, occupied as he was over who would care for them, and how. He had just managed to doze when the St. Sepulchre’s bellman tolled the bell, droning his all you that in the condemn’d holds do lie, prepare you, for to Morrow you shall die, &c., which started him awake. He was no violent man, never once (I thought that a clever touch), but the St. Sepulchre’s bellman might have gotten him up to it that night.
Surprising himself, he fell into a short, dreamless sleep, undisturbed by further bells or revelations. He was awakened by the Ordinary, whose priestly services James knew he would indeed require, so James spared him as he had the bellman. The Ordinary told James what to say, and exhorted him to be loud about it, so that our Saviour could hear him over the Tyburn mob. James’ heart was nowhere but with Jennie and the children, and he doubted he would have the faculties to remember the Ordinary’s instructions, but he dutifully assented to his instructions, and accepted the appropriate rites, miserably and already in abject terror.
You get the gist. I then told the story of James’s life – something I would have done at least briefly for a notorious condemned, but never for an unemployed barber.
Never in any fights or trouble, not even in the East End alleys where he and the other weaver’s sons played all hid and lummelen – active games, no naughts and crosses, no draughts. Orphaned at 12, then apprenticed to a barber; the barber died when James was 16, and James could not afford a new premium; James subsisted by cleaning up, collecting bets and performing odd-jobbery for a vile “sportsman” who operated an underground bear baiting theatre. He met Jennet Magnon, a weaver’s daughter, which inspired James to leave the “sporting life.” At 19, James found a barber whose apprentice had left him with three years left in his indenture; James pledged five years in exchange for a reduced premium, to be paid over time. James and Jennie had two boys before James’s new barber died, leaving James with dismal prospects once again