The Masters of Bow Street Read online

Benedict said, ‘Have you a copy of these proposals?’

  ‘I have, sir - held against your return.’

  ‘I will use it at the earliest opportunity,’ Benedict promised.

  ‘Pause a moment,’ James demurred, drawing the gaze of both men. ‘Are they confidential, David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then if they appear in The Daily Clarion will it not be obvious that you supplied them to the newspaper? Would not Sir John feel that he had been betrayed?’

  ‘I know not, nor do I care.’ Winfrith glared at James, fire smouldering in his eyes. ‘The time has come when some greater effort must be made to secure public support. If I sacrifice my livelihood trying to ensure that, is it any great matter?’

  ‘You are a very great matter to us,’ James replied soothingly.

  ‘Ben, will you publish or will you not?’ demanded Winfrith.

  ‘David, I will publish if I believe it good,’ Benedict Sly promised.

  ‘Then I will go to court and get the copy now,’ Winfrith declared. He abruptly strode out of the room, his movements jerky and ill-controlled.

  Meeting him in the passage, Mary spoke to him but he scarcely replied, and as his footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs she came into the living room. She had brushed her hair and had changed into a full-skirted dress of peacock-blue taffeta. James caught his breath at sight of her, for this was one of the moments when she looked her loveliest.

  ‘What troubles David?’ she asked, looking accusingly at Benedict. ‘You did not anger him, did you?’

  ‘If anyone angered him it was I, but without the slightest intent,’ James assured her, explaining what had happened. ‘I do believe that, whatever he says, if he were to leave Bow Street he would break his heart.’

  ‘And I declare that if he doesn’t, that court will kill him,’ Mary replied soberly. ‘How Sir John can sit in such an odoriferous place day in and day out I shall never know. It should be pulled down and another built, or at worst closed for a week and fumigated.’

  ‘Have you such an intimate acquaintance with the court?’ inquired Benedict.

  ‘I will have no impudence from you, sir! On occasions I have to go in. Should I allow some innocent child to be sent to Newgate for want of a witness to her character? And if I did not, then the stink of James’s clothes when he spends a day there would tell me all I need to know.’

  James, smiling, said, ‘I am made to change all my clothes when I come from court.’

  ‘It would be a savage hurt for David should he leave the court and have nothing more to do with his life’s work, but I believe he could do admirable service for The Daily Clarion as well as for Bow Street men if he would join our staff,’ Benedict said. ‘For The Daily Clarion is growing,’ he added, unable to keep the pride out of his voice. ‘During the six months I have been away our daily circulation has risen by nearly a thousand, so that it is now over three thousand copies a day.’

  ‘Remarkable!’ James exclaimed. ‘Why, that must be more than either The Daily Courant or The Public Advertiser - more even than The London Advertiser.’

  ‘It is not far short of the total sale of them all put together,’ gloated Benedict. ‘And we anticipate higher sales yet. We are to move to larger premises in Fleet Street itself, James.’ He took a few moments to indulge his evident satisfaction, then went on in a more sombre tone. ‘But nothing could bribe David away. He must be dismissed or else leave of his own accord before he would even consider taking work with The Daily Clarion.’

  ‘Even then he would regard it as charity,’ Mary said.

  ‘Couldn’t you influence him, Mary?’ asked Benedict.

  ‘Most certainly I could try,’ Mary replied.

  David Winfrith’s health and general condition had worried James for some time, for David had few comforts, if any, returning home after his burdensome day’s work to a wife who was no help to him. Instead of having a meal prepared, she might well be sitting in a corner staring blankly at a cold fireplace.

  ‘I have some coffee already in the making,’ Mary said, reading his thoughts, ‘and I have pasties and tarts heating.’

  She stood up and the others heeded no telling that she had heard David returning on the stairs, and he would be more likely to eat well before he left if the others also ate. As he drew closer to the rooms he was taken by a lengthy fit of coughing.

  ‘We must get him away from Bow Street,’ Benedict Sly remarked quietly.

  ‘Did you ever try to separate a mother from her babe?’ asked James resignedly.

  When David came in he was obviously weak from the coughing bout, and for a while he was content to sit in a large hide-covered armchair while Benedict read aloud through the ‘simple and yet so exceptional a plan’ presented by John Fielding to the government.

  There was utter silence when at last Benedict stopped, his voice hoarse. Without speaking, James poured him some beer in a pewter tankard.

  Unexpectedly it was Mary who broke the silence, saying, ‘This must prove to be the best story you have ever written or The Daily Clarion has ever published, Ben.’

  ‘I shall earnestly try to make it fit for the best set of proposals ever made for the safety of London.’ Benedict drank, put down his tankard, and looked hard into David’s eyes. ‘Unless David would be prepared to write it for me.’

  ‘I, man?’ David gasped. ‘Where do you think I would find the time?’

  ‘I only know that no one could present this better.’

  For a few moments all four were very still, until slowly a glow lit up David’s face, encompassing every feature. But, as slowly as it had come, the glow faded.

  ‘It is not possible,’ he declared. ‘There is no time. And Sir John would recognise my style on the instant. I do not wish for an open breach with him. He may suspect that I released this to you, but he would be sure if I were to write it. In any case, you undervalue your own ability, Ben. You are the journalist, not I!’ As if to ease any awkwardness he asked, ‘Is there more coffee, Mary?’

  Mary handed him another cup at once, hot from the hob, and talk became more general.

  When at last David and Benedict rose to leave it was nearly ten o’clock, an hour when James and Mary were usually abed, for both would be up at five o’clock, Mary to make a good start with her household work before preparing breakfast, James to go through correspondence and other matters he would have attended to tonight but for their guests. Neither he nor Mary had as much help as they needed, but this was not because of the expense, for in his ten years in London he had greatly prospered, but because each enjoyed working, although Mary now had kitchen maids as well as help with the children during the evenings.

  For increasingly long periods during the day she would be out, working for this charity or that, and she spent three mornings a week organising charity appeals at the lying-in hospital, where constantly increasing numbers of working-class mothers were delivered with no charge. Although this and other hospitals had been built by great philanthropists and had substantial foundations, the poor crowded so thickly into the wards that the costs were far higher than anyone had dreamed.

  When Mary saw the silent, dirty crowds waiting for admission, she wondered how they lived. At least two in ten of London’s people were so poor that they were likely to die at the onset of any illness, having little resistance to disease. At least a hundred thousand did not know what a satisfying meal was like. Was there any wonder, Mary often asked herself, that crimes seemed to multiply as fast as the mould in the rotting piles of vegetables, fruit and manure, the open sewers and cesspits?

  Each man in his own way rebelled against these things. But whereas both Benedict and David discussed their feelings freely, James schooled himself not to show his emotions to others, controlling them so well that even Mary was sometimes taken by surprise when he exploded with anger over some injustice. She remembered a few weeks back when he had returned from Bow Street after giving evidence as to the character of a youth accused of robber
y which he was sure the lad had not committed.

  She could still picture the scene as he had described it, at great length and in passionate words: The youth of seventeen in the dock; Charley Green, son of one of the porters at Covent Garden market. He had gone to the Three Turks, an alehouse in a narrow street off the Strand, to have a draught of ale at the end of his day’s work. A thief-taker had slipped a sleeping potion into his tankard, then murdered a Mr. Hepburn for his gold, placing two gold pieces on Charley’s person, to be found there when the lad awoke. Charley, who had no recollection of what had happened, protested his innocence in vain. And thus the thief-taker had both the gold he had stolen and his reward for apprehending Hepburn’s supposed assailant.

  ‘God damn, their misbegotten stinking souls!’ James had railed. ‘When are the politicians going to realise that until a peace-keeper is paid enough to make sure he isn’t open to corruption we shall have dozens - hundreds - of innocent lads like Charley Green convicted of murder and theft?’

  He had tossed and turned in bed all that night and had for several days been moody and depressed, trying desperately to find a way of saving Charley Green. The magistrate had committed the boy for trial at the Sessions at the Old Bailey, and there was just a chance that some defence evidence would be forthcoming, but none had come up so far. All Green said was that he could remember going into the alehouse where he repaired every Friday and Saturday night to spend the tips he had received on his day’s portering.

  He had also remembered seeing a young girl sleeping at the door of the alehouse, Jane Wiseman, and James had searched for and found her, but she could not recall where she had been on the night of Hepburn’s murder. Most nights she went onto the streets and had a man or two, then went and spent the sixpence they gave her on food and drink.

  She was thirteen.

  She had run away from a Lincolnshire farm to come to the golden streets of London Town.

  On the day when Charley Green was hanged at Tyburn, with seven others condemned for theft, one for stealing bread and another for taking coal from a barge on the Thames when the river had been frozen over, James Marshall had been among the crowd.

  He often mingled with the onlookers on hanging days, as Mary knew well.

  At first she had been worried as well as puzzled by the macabre pilgrimage, believing that it brought back vivid memories of the day when as a boy he had watched Frederick Jackson hang. It was almost as if he went to gloat over the man struck down by vengeance, but that was completely foreign to everything else she knew about him. She had never ventured to ask him why, for on those occasions he was strange and different.

  The hanging of Charley Green made a deep mark on him and she knew that he regarded it as a personal failure. Since then he had been more often at Bow Street and had worked with unflagging energy for any accused about whose guilt there seemed to be the faintest doubt, driving himself sometimes to a point of exhaustion in the effort to discover one of the suspected conspirators who had committed perjury. Once such perjury was proved, the magistrate would dismiss the charge, and twice in the past month he had saved the life of accused persons, one a boy of sixteen.

  One day, Mary was sure, James would talk freely to her.

  Meanwhile, she went about her own work and left word where she would be so as to be at hand whenever he needed her. They had been continent for so long now that occasionally it crossed her mind that he might have a mistress, perhaps even a serious love affair, but nothing in his manner ever suggested illicit happiness. He appeared bowed down by burdens within himself.

  ‘Mary, I shall accompany Benedict to his rooms,’ James said on the night when David Winfrith had burst out with such outraged feeling. ‘I may walk back alone, but be sure I shall use only well-lighted thoroughfares and do not be troubled if I am late. You go to bed, wife.’

  She smiled at him, outwardly untroubled.

  ‘Indeed I will, Mr. Marshall!’

  ‘Such obedience!’ declared Benedict. ‘You must tell me how you contrive to keep your wife in such subjection.’

  ‘The obedience is born in the wife, sir, not imposed by the husband,’ retorted Mary, and when she saw James laugh she felt a lift of her heart; obviously Benedict’s return had cheered him up.

  She watched them from the window walking along the Strand, thrust her anxiety for his return aside and went into the kitchen.

  The scullery maid was upstairs in her tiny room, otherwise this apartment was empty but for Mary and the children. James had recently taken a second adjoining shop, together with three floors above it, for the activities of ‘Mr. Londoner’, and doors had been knocked in the walls to make more living and sleeping accommodation. Moreover, there was a narrow staircase at the back leading to a yard and a rabbit warren of alleys beyond, so that the children could come and go by day without disturbing James.

  She heard a movement on the back stairs.

  Her heart jumped and she stared across the kitchen at the door, left ajar the better to hear the children should they cry. It would be a boy coming or going from the maid, she reassured herself. The girl was well on the way to losing a respectable job and becoming a prostitute. Nothing Mary had said, so far, had affected her.

  The noise was repeated, just outside the door.

  Thanks to John Fielding’s persistence and thoroughness one or two reliable constables were always in the Strand, where their very presence could avert trouble.

  ‘Who is there?’ she called, her heart thumping.

  No one spoke but the door opened wider and David Winfrith came slowly forward. There was a wild expression in his eyes as he slammed the door so hard Mary was afraid the children might wake. But no cry was made and no alarm was raised.

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘What is it? Is everything all right at home?’

  He said, breathing very hard, ‘I can’t go home.’

  ‘But David—’

  ‘I tell you I can’t go home,’ he went on fiercely. ‘I can’t go back to a wife who is a living death, to a house which is a den of accumulated filth and to a fire that is always cold and dead, no fit place for me or the child. Mary, I tell you I can’t go back!’

  She did not speak, realising that no attempted persuasion would help him, but she went forward, holding her arms out. As he came to her, stumbling, she felt his thin body quivering, and felt him racked with sobs. For a while they stood without moving, she not knowing what best to do, until she began to stroke the back of his head and his short hair. She behaved as she might with a troubled child, soothing him in his distress and seeking a way to help. He felt so thin and light against her that she longed to lift and put him to bed, knowing how much he needed sleep. But if she did so, his dignity would be sorely hurt, and this was not a time when he should be hurt more.

  Slowly, slowly, she became aware of him as a man.

  He was pressed tight against her bosom and she had not realised that as he had wept or as she had moved to ease her position, the top button of her dress had come undone; and she had changed hurriedly tonight and had not put on a petticoat. Suddenly, he began to kiss her between the breasts, as if he were in overwhelming need of her. He found words which at first she did not hear but which gradually took on clarity and substance.

  ‘It is a year since Sarah and I have lain together, a year of torment! . . . Mary, Mary, you don’t know, you cannot know, how I have come to love you. . . Mary, darling Mary, don’t turn me away, I beg you. Don’t turn me away, I need you so much.’

  There was not only desire but there was unsuspected strength in him.

  And there was weakness in her, and more loneliness in the nights than she had dreamed there could be, sleeping by James.

  There was the strength of passion in him.

  ‘Mary, Mary!’

  His lips sought hers and crushed them, and suddenly they lay upon the couch, and she felt herself responding to him, unaware of shame or anything but a fierce surge of passion and, on an instant, utter stillness.
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  He lay upon her, and he was crying.

  She did not remember what they had said or how long it had taken them to dress, or even how he had looked when he had reached the door and turned momentarily towards her.

  But when she was in the great four-poster bed she was still aware of him, and she was saying over and over to herself in a shocked way: ‘Why should I want him? Why should I want him?’

  And she, too, began to cry.

  22: THE DECISION

  ‘Jamey,’ Benedict Sly said as they reached the narrowing of the Strand, ‘you are very quiet tonight. In fact I would say that the only one of us who was truly himself was Mary.’

  ‘Mary is always herself,’ James replied.

  They stood on a corner waiting for a lull in the succession of carriages and sedan chairs coming from the two great theatres. The Strand was alive with people, the alehouses were lit with more flares than one could count, and the clatter of iron wheels, iron-tipped boots and horseshoes was turned into a cacophony by a group of drunken sailors coming from Charlie Wylie’s new coffee house.

  A Bow Street man, carrying a pistol, rode fast along one side, recognised by only a few. His manoeuvres caused a temporary halt in the flow and James and Benedict were carried over the road with a flood of people who had been waiting to cross.

  ‘If no way is found to control the traffic, it will become as great a problem as crime,’ Benedict observed. ‘This is five or six times greater in volume than it is in New York.’ They reached the comparative quiet of Fleet Street and he changed the subject smoothly. ‘What is on your mind, Jamey?’

  ‘David,’ James replied. ‘Also Sir John Fielding and Bow Street. And these accursed politicians. One day—’

  ‘If it isn’t Benedict Sly back from the colonies!’ a man called from the doorway of a coffee house, dimly lit both inside and out. James knew him as the editor of a new daily newspaper which had appeared in London during the past months.

  ‘Ben, you’re back at the right time,’ the man called out again. ‘You must have a nose for news; you’re a sly one!’