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486 Words
In the dark right-wing alley of the Old Bailey’s building there was the entry of Newgate Prison.
He commanded the driver to stop but the driver made a stop and his voice reached him.
“It’s here, sir.”
“I’ll walk. You wait for me at Ona’s.”
Walking to the entrance he knocked on the door.
As a small window opened a winced face replied, “What do you want? We cannot take any
foreigners during these hours of night.”
“Just open the door.”
“Insolent.” But he opened the door. “Yes?”
Gysbert stepped into a dim entranceway and put the servant apart. Robert, robbed of a slack
garment, smelling alcohol, appeared.
“What is the call, sir?”
He handed him the royal letter. “You’ve a second to release Mademoiselle Micheline
Purcell.”
He read the letter under the dying flame of the candle and with those stormy features of his
face, a kind of repulse in front of the one had given the letter to him, he ambled to a metal door in
the end of the hallway and came into a dark corridor as voices of agony filled each step. In the
middle of this inferno, a female voice, which through full of sadness, yet in full of hope trying to
touch a merciful heart, a hand to kissing it might bring a humble love, went to van Laan’s arm,
and even in those emotional states, he could not see anything until the quaint man opened the bar
door of this filthy cell to his right. A slap smell of human putrid odor made van Laan shook his
head angrily.
“Give me light here.”
A body, almost naked, lay on the wet floor covered with her own excrement and vomit and
those black rats appeared from her. Van Laan killed as many rats as he could, and his charm
appeared to revolve from him.
“Oh, Marcy God!”
Gysbert van Laan could not control his disappointment. He thought he could but he could
not, and he started hitting him with the open fists, striking him every part of his fat body and for a
moment the jail man made a silent gesture from his own cowardice to stop the beating but he was
petrified by the rainy of fists reaching him as he was looking at the angry gentleman from the floor.
Van Laan kept beating him until his assistant Gerwin Kroes crossed before him and spoke with
him.
“Magnus! Magnus!”
He stopped. He peered at his assistant, and then looked back at the man, sparsely on the
floor, terrified with pain and fear.
“If she dies, I don’t need any royal letter to kill you, animal.” To Gerwin. “How did you
find me?”
“I asked Gudrik when I delivered Rhys to him.”
- Writer
