The Masters of Bow Street (2 page)

But she had been born in a cottage behind a row of brothels in Westminster and her world had been one of filth and lust and brutality, of stealing from a man who had her willing mother pressed against a wall. At twelve she had known men and what they wanted and what they did. At thirteen she had found herself, alone, in a dark alley, on the edge of her world, surrounded by leering drunken men who all wanted their way with her and from whom she could not run because they hemmed her in while they peered at the black spots on thrown dice to decide who should take her first.

There was hardly a crime Frederick Jackson had not committed, hardly a savagery or brutality he had not exulted in, except one.

He had never taken a woman against her will.

He had succoured her.

His voice now was not loud, but was as clear as it had been on the night he had come upon her and the seven men tormenting her. She had not seen or heard him, heard only the triumph and the roar of the man who had ‘won’ her first, who pushed the others away from him and sent them, muttering and grumbling, to wait; a great hulk of a man whose weight would crush her. Already, he had one hand beneath her petticoats and another easing himself free of his breeches to take her.

A man had spoken in a quiet but carrying voice: ‘Release her, Matty.’ And when the man in front of her had taken no notice, had just fumbled and had nearly fallen on her, the stranger had called: ‘If you want to lie with a woman again, Matty let her go.’ And she had seen his face above the hulk’s shoulder and his hand on the big man’s arm. Suddenly, she had seen the winner stagger, had heard him swear, had seen him turn to strike the man who had dared to interfere.

‘Gawd!’ he breathed. ‘Jacker!’

On the instant all lust seemed to vanish from him; he turned and ran at a shambling gait towards the end of the alley. And all the others had gone. She was alone with one man who now stood looking at her from the height of at least six feet, as if studying every feature closely in the light of a fading torch. He put out his right hand and cupped her chin in the crutch between thumb and forefinger, slowly turning her face from left to right. At last, when she was facing him, he let her go.

‘Are you a whore?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered in a voice he could hardly hear.

‘Speak up, girl!’ His tone hardened as if her timidity angered him.

She drew a deep breath and answered more clearly, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘An honest whore,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Do you work for Moll Sasson or anyone else?’

‘No - no, sir.’

‘Speak up, girl!’

‘No!’ she almost shouted, not from courage or boldness, but out of fear. Moll Sasson controlled this area; nearly every prostitute paid her for both introducing customers and for protection against certain kinds of perverts.

‘Then whom do you work for?’

‘I - I work for myself,’ she answered.

‘A chit of a girl like you? Don’t lie to me.’

‘I am not, sir. I swear it, I work for myself.’

‘No bully? No twang?’

‘I’m nobody’s moll,’ she insisted, and her voice grew stronger, drawing some courage from the man. ‘I’ll take a man standing or I’ll take a man lying down but I won’t take his pouch and I won’t have a bully to take it
or
to protect me.’

‘Upon my soul, I’m inclined to believe you,’ he said, and laughed again. ‘Don’t you know what Moll Sasson would do to you if you were caught working on her territory?’

‘I - I wasn’t working here, sir. They set on me. They know I’m always alone.’

‘I can believe that too,’ he said, and took her arm, turning her towards the nearer end of the lane. ‘You take my advice. Never work on Moll’s territory. She’ll do a lot worse to you than those drunken oafs would have done; a breastless woman’s no pleasure to them. Where do you live?’ he added abruptly.

‘Where do you live?’ The meaningless question echoed inside her head.

In the gutters, in the alleys, in the taprooms and the brothels, in the fields, in a barge upon the river, in a warehouse, in a coal house; anywhere she could lay her head. Bent and crooked over the troughs or tubs outside in the bitter-cold courtyard, in the sewers with the rats.

The man stared down at her and she dared to look up at him.

‘Who are your customers?’ he asked.

‘Whoever comes by,’ she said.

‘Faugh!’ he barked. ‘You stink. When did you last have a bath?’ he asked her. ‘When did you wash all over?’

‘In May,’ she told him with near-eagerness. ‘In the river by the meadows at Chelsea.’

‘In May! Three months ago!’ He looked at her as if with new disgust, and she did not know what had displeased him. Suddenly he demanded: ‘Whom do you belong to?’

And she replied; she could hear her voice now, even fancied there was a ring of pride,
pride
in those days of such squalor.

‘Myself,’ she said. ‘I told you, sir.’

‘Speak up, girl. Whom do you belong to?’

‘I belong to
myself,
sir.’

‘M’God!’ he said in a voice which was half filled with laughter and at least touched with respect. ‘I believe you do.’ After a while he went on: ‘Will you come with me?’

‘Yes - yes, sir,’ she replied meekly. ‘If I please you.’

Cobbled lanes and cobbled streets, like the cobbles she stood on now, bare feet slipping, sore toes hurting, while he walked as if he were a king and it did not occur to him that she could not keep up such pace. Past dim-lit inns and dark closed houses, past decrepit old watchmen leaning on the poles they could scarcely carry, past a carriage and two horses close to Moll’s, past a flaming torch outside a bank, along a narrow lane to a flickering oil lantern over a doorway. She knew the place and now she knew him and could understand why her molesters had disappeared so quickly and without protest at his approach; why the man he had called Matty had released her so swiftly.

Up the narrow wooden stairs into a room twice as large as any she had even been in, along a passage with other rooms leading off. A woman, an old woman, saying: ‘Yes, Jacker, yes, Jacker, yes,’ obeying him literally, taking Eve into a small room which struck warm from a huge fire over which two caldrons of water shimmered and steamed, ordering her in a high-pitched voice to do just what he had already ordered.

‘Fill the bath . . . take off those filthy clothes . . . throw them on the fire. Throw them on the fire, you brat, or I’ll throw you onto it!’

Her only clothes.
She dragged the heavy hip bath from a corner; she placed her hands at her skirt, which was loose at her tiny waist, while the heat stung. ‘Off with your clothes!’ Suddenly the old woman was on her, acting with much more strength than she seemed capable of, skirt off, petticoat, shift. She was being whirled about, hardly able to keep her balance, and in despair saw the hag throw her clothes into the fire where they blazed with blinding light.

How she had cried!

Copper pans full of hot water, cold water, mixed and bearable on her fair skin, heat from the fire, pain from a scrubbing, everywhere, everywhere; and suddenly, quiet and stillness, a chill blast from the door as it opened and Frederick Jackson came into the room.

She stared at him, covering her woman’s breasts with her child’s hands and half crouched so that the old woman scolded: ‘Stand straight, you ingrate! Don’t pretend a man’s never set eyes on you before.’

‘Leave her be,’ Jacker said, and the firelight made his face look half saint’s, half devil’s; filled her with hope and chilled her with fear. ‘Give her a cloak,’ he ordered. ‘Give her some food, and bring her to me.’

She had known so many men but had never before known gentleness, or the softness of a feather bed, or the lingering of kisses on her lips and places of such rare intimacy. And afterward, back in the room where she had been bathed, a meal with beef sirloin that he cut from a huge piece on a turning spit, bread, cheese, cabbage, ale, and a cake with whipped sweet cream. A fantasy.

The whole of London, perhaps the whole of England, knew her now; the girl who had enticed so many rich men into her embraces and into Jackson’s ruthless clutch; the girl who had made them so easy to blackmail. The woman who had grown more cunning and skilful in all the ways of her sex had never married and yet was forever Frederick Jackson’s woman. The woman who had grown in stature as he had grown in wealth and notoriety, laughing at her fears and scoffing at the threats of those who hated him.

‘Hang Jacker? Never fear, my love, they’ll never hang me.’

Perhaps - perhaps they would not have brought him here and placed the noose about his neck and listened in awed silence as a legend prepared both to die and to grow stronger; perhaps it would never have come to pass - but for John Furnival.

John Furnival, also, was surely here today.

She did not know for certain because she had not set eyes on the big, honey-blond man with the near-yellow eyes and the massive strength, and yet she felt quite positive. He would not miss this day of triumph, after twenty years of conflict between him and Jacker, a conflict already fierce when Jacker had plucked her from the cobbled lane and taken her to Loxley Yard, near Gray’s Inn and the fields, and claimed her for himself.

Most of the other condemned men were quiet now. One was calling on his nearby friends and relatives to rescue him; one, dressed in rich brown velvet and green shoes and hat, was tossing halfpence among the crowd, where the old and the young scrambled for them. Throughout Jackson went on talking in that carrying voice; it was as if he believed that for as long as he could talk, so he would defy the noose and the hangman and the men who had sent him here.

‘. . . among you here today are many thief-takers, justices, constables, each and every one of them more corrupt than I. Guilty of more crimes. Pariahs living off the people, living off you, the good, honest English people. . .’

A man near the platform shouted: ‘He’s right!’ Another, from the midst of the crowd, roared: ‘Hang them all!’ Roars of approval came from a dozen places; close to the platform a surge of people was carried forward, threatening, and from all parts of the crowd came cries of:

‘Cut him down!’

‘Free him!’’

‘Save Jacker!’

‘Hang the thief-takers.’

From close by John Furnival, who stood with only three of his own paid officers, there came other cries, deeper and more menacing:

‘Hang Furnival.’

‘Kill Furnival.’

‘Kill the devil.’

‘Hang him - kill him - cut his throat - cut off his head.’

Now the cry ‘Hang Furnival’ became a chant, taken up not in two or three, not in a dozen, but in a hundred places. Men and women turned to see him as he towered above their heads, the timid began to move to a safer distance, the bold ones cursed and screamed at him, while Frederick Jackson’s ruffians forced their way through the crowd towards him, ugly and menacing, harsh-voiced with hatred. The crowd divided to let them through. From the fringes many ran so that they could watch with greater safety while the cut-throats and the highwaymen, the thieves and the murderers, who got their living from Frederick Jackson or else were protected by him, pressed mercilessly on towards Furnival.

A small company of soldiers stood by the gallows, with the sheriff in charge of the executions, splendid in their bright-green uniforms and cockaded three-cornered hats, muskets grounded, sun glistening on long, narrow bayonets.

John Furnival saw the ruffians coming from all directions, saw the people near him scatter, knew how deeply they were afraid, knew that his aides would stay by his side even if they were cut to pieces trying to defend him. He had anticipated some such attack and had made arrangements with the sheriff. If it were possible, he desired to win this confrontation unaided; such a victory would be of great value in the future. Unless the sheriff ordered in the troops, few if any of the citizens of London would dare to help; most would prefer to see him hacked to death so as to be able to tell their children and their children’s children of the hideous sight they had seen on the day Frederick Jackson and John Furnival had died.

He stood tall and aloof, as if impervious to any danger, and with great deliberation took out his golden snuffbox and placed a pinch of snuff on the back of his left hand. In his ears the chant was ringing: ‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’

Slowly, he raised his left hand to his nose and sniffed delicately, an almost feminine gesture in so big a man. As the snuff went up his right nostril a single shot rang out, so sharp and clear that it echoed high above all other sounds, even the chanting which drowned the words spilling from Frederick Jackson’s lips.

Furnival’s movement had been his signal to the sheriff and the shot had frightened off those who would have attacked him.

Jackson was still haranguing the crowd.

‘. . . these are the guilty men, who batten on the poor, who drag the harmless whores into their courts and charge them for plying their trade, who. . .’

Suddenly, he stopped, for relatives and friends climbed into the carts to bid the condemned farewell, while the executioner and his assistants finished fastening ropes around the necks of those about to be hanged, then thrust them towards another huge cart over which the gibbet hung. Weeping and wailing now took over, drowning the voice of the Prison Ordinary, now chanting psalms, but nothing stopped the sellers or the performers among the crowd.

When the executioner covered the eyes and the faces of the condemned with black caps, Jackson kept trying to speak again but failed. The chaplains and the visitors were driven off, and then the executioner thwacked the horses fastened to the cart and they dashed away. There, kicking on the empty air, were seventeen human beings, soon to die. On the instant, some relatives pulled at the hanging bodies to hasten death, one belabouring a swinging man’s breast with a heavy stone to stop the heart from beating.

Jackson hardly moved; no doubt the executioner had been well paid to make sure his neck was broken.

The crowd’s attention switched now from the gangs forcing their way through to Furnival towards the victims, and there came a deep sigh, as if each person present drew in a breath at the same moment.