The Masters of Bow Street (55 page)

There was another man in London who had been savagely opposed to the bill, one Todhunter Mason, a young man who had become the leader of a powerful gang of thieves and cut-throats at least as deadly and dangerous as the Twelves of earlier years, and in some ways much more menacing to society. For whereas the earlier gang leaders arid the most notorious thief-takers had been commonly known, many boasting of their achievements in the manner of Jonathan Wild, and had satisfied themselves with a small band of ruthless followers, Mason kept his own part secret, using members of his gang to organise thieves, receivers of stolen goods, coiners, prostitutes, everyone who was on the wrong side of the law. He saw the possibility of controlling most of the criminals of London by offering them help, hiding places when on the run, a ready market for whatever they stole, and organised attacks on the Bow Street Foot Patrols to make sure there was little danger for robbers when they broke into houses or held up carriages.

The son of a now prominent member of the City who did not know he existed and of a Lincolnshire girl long since dead, he had clung to life through the horrors of an orphan childhood, living by his wits, often within an ace of the gallows but never caught. He knew the conditions of London as few knew them. Although only twenty, he was familiar with all the thieves and their doxies, and he had a good, clear mind which was never bothered - and why should it be? - by a twinge of conscience. He did not know how he had come by the name Todhunter but his other name, Mason, had been given because for several years he had lived in a rat-infested shack in a stonemason’s yard near the river.

He could not know that he and Sir Douglas Rackham made an identical resolve after the defeat of the police bill: to make sure that no others would be presented.

‘There is one aspect of the bill I would like to think more upon,’ James told Benedict a few months later, when they were together in the Rialto Coffee House on the Adelphi terrace, overlooking the river on a blustery day when wind whipped the surface to anger. ‘And that is the provision which would separate the justices from the police. When I first heard of it I was appalled, but the more I consider it the greater its attraction.’

‘There isn’t a justice in England who would agree with you,’ Benedict reminded him.

‘I think the ferocity of their opposition gave me most cause to think,’ said James. ‘What have they to lose, Ben? Simply money? As justices administering the law they would get salaries and some allowances, as they do now, and in the course of time, no doubt more. They would lose some of the more arduous tasks and more irksome responsibilities, yes, but would such losses in themselves create such a furor?’

After a pause, Benedict picked up his mug, drank deeply, and said in a musing voice, ‘Could you imply that they might also lose their power?’

‘What else but power, or authority? They should have sufficient with administering the law, but as things are they are responsible for the police, the constables, the keeping of law and order, the keeping of the King’s peace. Should that really be under the control of those whose task it is chiefly to say whether the law has been broken, and if it has, what punishment shall be meted out?’

‘I confess this aspect has never occurred to me,’ said Benedict.

‘Nor to me until now. But - Well, I will consider the issue very deeply,’ James declared. ‘Because inherent in this may be the root cause of opposition to a police force. It may be that the truly honest opponents do not want to feel that the justices should be given power over a wide area. The success of Bow Street has always seemed to me proof of the value of such a force, but if it means accepting more widespread authority for certain justices, then can one be so surprised at the adamancy of the City? I tell you, I have come to believe that before a police force is established in London the cause of the opposition from the City must be found and removed. Timothy McCampbell-Furnival made it crystal clear that the City would actually mobilise its guards and constables if its self-government were threatened.’

‘I once quoted a City alderman as saying that “no greater alarm would have been caused if a torch had been set to the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House,”’ Benedict said slowly.

‘So the rich reject a police force to maintain the law, whilst condemning charity to the poor and thus making crime inevitable,’ said James. ‘Ben, I recall wondering how we could win and I came to the conclusion that we must find a way of introducing the police so that the leaders of the City will not object. The rest of the opposition will probably melt away if once they agree.’

‘What you are really saying is that you desire to create a police force the City would support - or even, if it had the wit, wish to create.’ Benedict laughed. ‘To James Marshall all things are possible! Meanwhile, I came agog with other news before you took my breath away with this. The Dublin Parliament is said to be considering Pitt’s bill for itself. Now there is irony, Jamey - more law and order in Ireland than in old England.’ When they had finished laughing at such improbability, Benedict went on: ‘James, there is to be a special banquet for newspapermen on the ninth of July.’

‘On the ninth of July, this year and every year, I am irrevocably engaged,’ replied James. ‘It is Mary’s birthday, and we celebrate the day as if it were the birthday of everyone in the family. And the next is one of unusual importance because all the grandchildren are coming. Grandchildren, Benedict! Where have the years gone to? How quickly they have passed. But they’ve been happy years, and I have been truly blessed in having Mary for a wife. If I could only bring Pitt and his Ministers to their senses, I should be well satisfied.’

When he reached The House by the River that night, about his usual time, he saw a lathered horse outside and sensed the urgency of the messenger who, judging from the warmth of the horse’s neck, had come within the hour. He did not recognise the young man who came from the house, but from Mary’s expression, just behind the man, he could tell the news was bad.

‘I deeply regret it, sir,’ the young man said. ‘I am assistant to Doctor Leonardi at Saint Giles, and I come with grievous tidings.’

Before the man uttered the next words, James felt sure that his mother was dead.

Ruth had seemed well and happy when he had last seen her, and the news struck James deeply.

One of the infants brought to St. Giles for succour had been suffering from smallpox. Ruth Marshall Furnival, who had first handled the child, insisted that only she could nurse it through the illness; and she herself had suffered the fever in its most virulent form. The messenger, away at the time of the tragedy, had been told at a distance what had happened and where to come with his tidings.

The infant was recovering, he reported. No one else had been infected, and both Henrietta and her husband, Dr. Leonardi, were distressed but well.

No one must visit the house for at least two weeks, and long before that time Ruth Furnival would have been devoured in flames kindled in a pit dug into the hillside beyond St. Giles.

Slowly the gap left by his mother’s death began to lessen, partly due to Benedict Sly, who would hustle James out to see a cricket match at the new ground opened by a Yorkshireman named Lord or would send him two tickets for the Drury Lane Opera House or to Covent Garden Theatre with a note saying: ‘Edmund Kean is magnificent in this’ or ‘You will never forget Sarah Siddons’ performance, I promise you’. So James would take Mary to the theatre and afterward to supper. She sat enthralled at the performances; he really believed she enjoyed playgoing more than any other outing.

Occasionally, too, she relished a day at the races, for the sake of the picnic and the great crowds and the side shows which never ceased to make the children ecstatic. James viewed the colourful scene more realistically.

‘One hundred thieves were there to every constable, watchman or peace officer,’ he remarked in disgust when they left a racecourse in July. ‘If the King had been here the story would have been very different.’

Almost three months to a day after making this remark he was walking along Whitehall towards Parliament when he heard the trotting of horses and some sporadic outbursts of cheering, which told him the State Coach was approaching with the King inside. Then suddenly a roar came from thousands of throats as a group of men burst out of side streets and doorways, throwing bricks and trying to rock the coach and push it over.

‘The guards managed to keep the crowd at bay; they say the King was purple in the face when he reached safety, offered a thousand pounds for the arrest of those involved, and harangued the magistrates to keep better control of riots,’ Benedict reported.

Would no one ever understand that a strong force of peacekeepers, of policemen trained to deal with crowds, was the only sure way to control such outbursts and the drunkenness? thought James bitterly.

Half the fires - perhaps more - were caused by drunken men knocking over lamps or striking flints carelessly.

‘Let me show you why,’ said Benedict Sly one day, when James was taking him on a quick tour of the City and nearby. Here and there was a good brick building, but for the main part they were wooden buildings, dry as tinder. And in some streets every other house was licensed to sell alcohol.

‘You know,’ James remarked as they turned a corner in High Street, Shadwell, ‘they are dreadful places. And yet, compared with the days when you and I were young, much has improved. There are fewer slums, less utter destitution—’

‘Stop talking like a Tory,’ growled Benedict as the carriage pulled up and two boys rushed to take the horse, one of them filthy and in, rags, one almost clean.

‘Good morning, Mr. Marshall.’

‘Good morning, sir!’

James touched the dirty head as well as the clean one.

Inside the coffee house they entered were the usual advertising posters, more crude than those in the City and West End, but tables, chairs and floor were scrubbed and the newspapers were clean. A little pot-bellied man came forward, smiling a welcome.

‘Good morning, Mr. Marshall. What is your pleasure?’

‘Coffee, Dan, just coffee - eh, Ben?’

‘I wouldn’t object to a steak pie,’ Benedict said.

‘And coffee and a steak pie for Mr. Sly.’

The pot-bellied man went off and James turned back to Benedict.

‘You have just seen Daniel Ross, one of the few trading justices in London who won’t accept a share of reward or blood money, and I would as soon see him at one of the police offices as any magistrate I know.’

Ross had obviously heard the remark as he passed on the order to a young waitress, and he came to the table and drew up a chair.

‘Wouldn’t have one of those jobs for a fortune,’ he declared. ‘Not for a fortune. Do you know what those magistrates have to do, gentlemen? Judge and jury in a hundred cases a week - it’s only the serious ones like murder and high treason and fraud they send on to the Sessions. Why, they have to decide if a man’s guilty and pack him off to jail - summary jurisdiction, they call it, don’t they?’

He paused when three mugs of coffee and one hot pie in a pottery dish were placed on the table, then, as Benedict ate and James drank, he went on:

‘And they’ve got to license public houses, issue search warrants, frame orders to parish officers, and decide such matters as parish removals, the billeting of soldiers, applications for admission to workhouses or for other assistance, and hundreds of other problems. And if that’s not enough, they’re the heads of the police in the district. No, sir, none of that’s for me. I like to sleep at night.’

‘I have a belief that you do sleep,’ Benedict said.

‘Fair to middling, sir, fair to middling, if I don’t start worrying. Why, it couldn’t snow on Saint Paul’s Churchyard without flakes falling on one thief in every two.’

‘If you feel like this, why are you a trading justice?’ asked Benedict.

‘One simple reason - very simple. If I wasn’t here there would be someone else a lot worse.’

When the two men left the coffee house the two boys were waiting in a light drizzle, still watching the horse.

Benedict Sly said unbelievingly, ‘How do you find such characters, James?’

‘I keep my eyes open,’ James replied. He gave each boy a penny, then, pausing before the filthy one, he asked, ‘Is your father still in Marshalsea Prison?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the boy replied brightly. ‘He keeps going in and he keeps coming out, sir.’

As this dialogue was taking place, the door of a shop next door opened with the loud clanging of a bell and a big, bearded man with a peg leg stood in the doorway, grinning. The small window was crammed with odds and ends from ships breakers’ yards, and as they drew nearer, Benedict saw that the shop itself was even more crowded; there was scarce room to move.

‘Well, I’ll be blowed down, sir, I’ll be blowed down if it ain’t the Prime Minister himself,’ Peg Leg said. ‘I bin hoping you’d come, sir, come upon a find I did.’ He lowered his great voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘Coins, m’lud, coins from an old ship sunk in the estuary. Come and see, Mr. Prime Minister.’ He winked behind thick curly eyebrows at Benedict Sly and went on: ‘Glad to know you sir. Glad to make the acquaintance of any of the Prime Minister’s friends. And if he isn’t the Prime Minister then he ought to be, sir, that’s what I say.’

The shop stank with mildew and wood rot, but here and there a polished brass rail or a clean hurricane lamp, a ship’s wheel or a pair of lamp holders, showed brightly from fresh burnishing against light from candles at the back of the shop, which gave an eerie effect. Stepping over rusty metal, old ropes, rotting wood, rotting sailcloth and canvas, Peg Leg at last reached a corner where a cupboard was fastened with a huge padlock. He opened this with a rusty key, then took out a box of coins and held them up to a candle.

‘There they be, Mr. Prime Minister. Old Roman coins if you ask me.’

‘They are no more Roman than they are ancient British, and you are well aware of it,’ replied James. He poked among the coins, picked out two or three, examined them through a glass he took from his pocket, and then said, ‘They are Dutch, I think, Polycarp - old Dutch, perhaps. I don’t know their value. I’ll give you two pounds for them all or take them away and put them in “Mr. Londoner” and give you half what I get for them.’