by William King
I had helped her out of a problem she was having back when I was a Runner and we had stayed in touch for she made a useful informer. Sarah hung around on the edges of that vast underworld of criminals, petty and otherwise, who find their women among the class to which she belonged.
“Mr Brodie,” she said. “I’d like a word.”
I shrugged her hand off my arm as if I had been accosted by an importunate beggar. Although it was unlikely that anyone could see us in the gloom I did not need them to notice our connection.
“Not here, girl,” I said. “I’ll see you in the Ten Dogs in a quarter hour.”
She looked as if she wanted to say something more but then nodded and vanished into the mist and shadows. I gave her a few minutes to lose herself from sight and then I followed.
The Ten Dogs was a glittering gin palace, all plate glass and gas glow, halfway between Bow Street and the rookeries from which she had come. As with all such places the brightness of its gas lights was in direct proportion to the shadows of the streets surrounding it. The common room was full of people drinking and smoking. A large crowd of men dressed in ancient finery and battered top hats leaned against the bar and joshed and joked. Bands of women gossiped with increasing loudness as they got drunker. Groups of two or three children between the ages of five and nine sat at the small tables and drank their gin and puffed their pipes, for all the world like miniature adults in their toping and smoking. Sitting in a small booth in a far corner, chatting with a couple of rough local characters was Sarah.
I strode over, and loomed over them. They turned and looked at me, belligerently for a moment, and then took in my size and the fact that I was not frightened of them. I was at least a head taller and I probably weighed as much as both of them put together. I didn’t smile, I didn’t scowl, I just stared. I could see a little fear creep into their expressions as they came to the obvious conclusion that I was either a bully or a pimp. Slowly, with nervous smiles, they backed away and made their way to the bar, where they ordered gin, drank it down quickly and edged further away before ordering another.
“Lord, Mr Brodie, I see you haven’t lost your charming manners,” said Sarah. “You always did have a way with you.”
“I didn’t ask you here so you could look for new business, Sarah,” I said, staring at her hard, until her glance was downcast at the table. She reached up to her left hand and played with a lock of that long blonde hair, a gesture that combined the innocent with the erotic as it was no doubt intended to do.
“You didn’t ask me here at all, Mr Brodie. I came of my own accord.”
A barmaid came and I ordered two gin-and-waters. Sarah had drunk hers down before she spoke again.
“I wanted to talk to you away from here because it might not be safe, Mr Brodie. That’s why I approached you in the street.”
“Are you in some sort of trouble again, Sarah?”
“No, Mr Brodie, but I think you are.”
“Why’s that?”
“Do you remember a lad called Billy Tucker? You got him transported must be ten years ago.”
“I know you don’t, Sarah. You were not around these parts at the time.”
“But I know all about it. He’s been saying as he’s going to have you, Mr Brodie. He’s going to put you in your grave.”
I thought about Tucker, a quick smart boy with a cheeky smile and a twinkle to his eye. I found it hard to imagine him harming anybody and I said so.
“Australia changed him, Mr Brodie. He’s not a nipper anymore. He’s a man grown and a bad one. You can see it in his eye.”
“You’ve met him then?”
“I talked with him in The Rat’s Nest last night when he was looking for company and I listened to him say what he was going to do to a Runner name of Brodie, and I believed him too. He was drunk and quite loud about it and a lot of people in the company heard.”
“I can look after myself, Sarah.”
“I know you can but Tucker’s bad to the bone, and he’s got some worse friends; Dainty Dave Smedley and Tiny Brooks.”
“Big Tiny?”
“The same.”
“Sounds like he’s gone into the housebreaking line.” I wondered if they could have been the gang who worked over Brighton House. Tiny was big enough and not averse to the use of fire arms, and Dave had always been fond of a knife and of threatening women with it too. If it were the case, this was not going to be a promising line of inquiry.
“That and other things. They’ve knocked a few people on the head and took their blunt.”
She did not seem to be spinning me a tale. I placed a sovereign on the table and said, “Thanks for the warning, Sarah. I’ll be careful.”
The coin disappeared. At the small table two of the children had started to fight. One of them pushed another off his stool. The assaulted party, not more than eight years old by my guess, just lay there stupefied, too drunk to get up and make a fight of it despite the encouragements of some of the men and women, possibly the parents, who egged him on.
“Is there anything else you want, Mr Brodie?” she asked flirtatiously.
“I’m looking for information Sarah,” I said. “There’s a gold sovereign and maybe more in it for you if you can help me get to the bottom of something.”
“Well,” she said, looking sly, “what sort of information would you be looking for, Mr Brodie.”
“I’m looking for some robbers, did a place outside town, a place called Brighton House.”
“What sort of job was it?” She was all attention now. A sharp girl Sarah was. I told her.
“That was specialist work,” she said. “Not many coves around who could have done that. A gang so well armed and well organised. I can only think of about six and two of them has been transported, and one is in Newgate prison.”
“That still leaves three,” I said. “And I’m sure a few more will occur to you once you’ve given it some thought.”
“There’s Billy and his boys but I doubt you would want to talk to them.”
“I would talk to the devil himself if it would earn me money, Sarah.”
“They might not want to talk to you socially, if you know what I mean.”
“Anybody else?”
“Diamond Bob Hawke and his mob.”
“Diamond Bob’s mother died and he’s went down to Southampton for the funeral.”
“Could be a put-up. To put the hounds of the scent...”
“Bob wouldn’t lie about his mother’s funeral. Anything else but not that.”
“Well, there’s Bart Tobin, he and a couple of girls I know are getting friendly down in Seven Dials.”
“That’s good to know. Let me know if you hear anything else.”
“I’ll keep my eyes and ears open,” she said with a saucy grin. She leaned forward and placed her hand on top of mine. “You’re a well favoured man Mr Brodie. I’ve always liked you. We could be good to each other, you and me.”
She seemed genuinely attracted to me, and perhaps she was, I could never tell. It was part of her job and her charm to be able to make men think she felt that way about all of them. No man likes to be made a fool of about such things.
Gently I pulled my hand out from under hers. “Not here, Sarah.”
“I know you are a respectable man, Mr Brodie.” She said it with only the slightest trace of irony, and that might have been the gin talking. She looked up at me and there was something like anger in her eyes. “They say you killed a man once, Mr Brodie, beat him to death with your own hands, threw him off a roof. They say he gave you that scar and you paid him back for it hard.”
“Do they?”
“They say it was Billy Tucker’s brother.”
“People say a lot of things, Sarah. Only some of them are true.” She understood without needing to be told that she had taken this matter as far as it was going to go. Like I said, a sharp girl Sarah was.
I asked her if she would like me to walk her part of the way home. She sho
ok her head so I shrugged and walked out into the night.
I felt it then as you sometimes do, that tugging sensation that tries to pull you back into a public bar. There are people, particularly in the temperance societies, who claim not to understand what draws folk back again and again into the gin-palace. They say it has to be the handiwork of the Devil. They are wrong.
I know what it’s like to walk out of the beery warmth and light into the cold foggy street, to exchange the sound of laughter and camaraderie, no matter how artificial, for the sound of people begging for alms or trying to sell you some small thing so they can find a bed for the night, sometimes that small thing being themselves.
It is like stepping out of sunshine into a shadowy courtyard, or from a crowded highway into a haunted graveyard. Of course, people want to go back into the light and the company. They don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts about themselves and what they once had and what they have lost. They don’t want the time or the space to think about all the bad things they have done and regret. They don’t want to see how mean and petty their lives are.
I turned my collar up against the chill and walked back through the crowded alleys. People left me alone. They mostly do.
I walked back to Bow Street and from there made my way to my rooms in the teeming old courts behind the Strand. I said good evening to the hall porter and let myself in. The children must have started running as soon as they heard the key in the lock for they were upon me in a moment, a storm of hugs and greetings and questions.
“How was your day, father?” asked Donald my eldest, with all the mature politeness of his ten years.
“Dolly says hello,” said Rachel, his little sister, looking up at me wide-eyed, and waving her doll’s right hand with her little fingers. She coughed and that worried me. She had been very sick last winter and there was a chance that the illness might return.
I disengaged myself from them, said hello to Dolly, and led them, one under each arm, into the sitting-room. Old Mrs Marshall, my housekeeper, was sitting there with her knitting, and she raised her bulky form from the chair with a groan as I entered. “Leave your father be, children. He's been at work all day. He must be tired. Leave him alone, I say.”
There was some irony in her voice and she sniffed the air theatrically. She could smell the gin palace on me. She reminded me of my grandmother when she did that, plump, grey hair in a bun, black-dressed, respectable as a Kirk Elder.
“It's all right, Marshall,” I said. “There's still a little life left in me yet.”
“So it would seem, sir.” She sniffed again and made her way to the kitchen to prepare the evening meal.
I took a seat in the armchair by the fire, lit a new rushlight and placed it in the holder, added some coal from the scuttle and let the children babble away, telling me of their lessons, small problems and delights.
I learned that Dolly wanted a pony, that Donald had learned to divide, and that there was a new picture book in the window at Mr Beadle's Bookshop that Rachel liked. They took turns to talk as Mrs Marshall prepared the evening meal. I gave them more attention than I would give many clients and for a few moments I managed to forget the cruel world outside my door.
When the table was set, with crockery and forks and knives, with bowls containing beef stew and dumplings and plates with bread and butter, we took our seats. According to ritual, both children waited in silence until I said Grace and gave them permission to eat and then set to with a will.
It felt strange to be at table with my family with the smell of the gin palace on me. I did not like to come home reeking of booze and tobacco but sometimes I had no choice. I ate fitfully and Mrs Marshall fixed a beady eye upon me. She obviously had her suspicions about what I had been up to.
I pretended not to notice and studied the children as they ate. It was their good fortune to favour their mother rather than me. They had her light brown hair and brown eyes and pale open features. They had a full measure of her beauty too. From me, Donald had got his height and his thin lips. There was something of the structure of my face in their's as well but that was about all that I could see.
Donald was reading some penny blood at the table, a tale of Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard or another of those romantic rogues. I suppose I should have stopped him but I could not bring myself to do so. How could I? He saw me reading the things often enough and I was not quite hypocrite enough to tell him that what was good for me was bad for him.
When I was a boy back in Scotland the Kirk Elders called works of fiction the Devil’s Bible. Their irrefutable logic was that all stories were lies and that lies had no place in the hearts of honest men. At the time I was too young to tell them that some fiction contains truth of sorts. They would have beaten me for it anyway. The Good Lord knows I was beaten enough for other things.
“Must you read at table?” asked Mrs Marshall, deciding that if I would not do my parental duty she would do it for me. For a servant she had a way of getting above herself sometimes.
“Sorry Mrs Marshall,” said Donald, closing the well-thumbed chapbook. “I had just reached an exciting part. Jonathan Wild has captured Jack, and thrown him in the cells. It looks like poor Jack Sheppard might be hung.”
“And serve him right too,” said Mrs Marshall. “He's always going around robbing people.”
She was quite the pious old hypocrite. I had caught her reading the same books herself when she thought no-one would notice. She was particularly fond of the Newgate Calendar.
“But he only robs those who deserve it,” said Donald.
“Have you ever heard of such a thing, Mr Brodie--robbers who only steal from the rich?” I could have said that usually the rich are the only people who have anything worth stealing but it would not have been true. You see the poor stealing from each other all the time in the rookeries.
“Robin Hood,” I said. Mrs Marshall tossed back her head in disgust. I was supposed to be setting an example to the lad.
“I mean now, in our time, in London.” I stroked my chin to give the impression I was seriously considering it. Donald was watching me wide-eyed and hopeful. I shook my head, sorry to dash his romantic dreams. His face fell and Mrs Marshall looked triumphant.
“You see, Donald. Listen to your father. He should know, after all he was a Bow Street Runner.” She folded her arms, her point proved beyond all argument.
“Jack Sheppard didn't live in our time,” said Donald. “He lived in the last century and so did Jonathan Wild. Things were different then.”
Mrs Marshall nodded her head sagely. “Those were different times. Those were wicked times. When rakes wandered the street and no respectable woman was safe.”
“What's a rake?” asked Donald, eyes bright with curiosity or perhaps mischief.
“Never you mind, dear. They were bad that's all you need to know.” Mrs Marshall's face had flushed a little, as if she realised she'd said too much and that not suitable for the ears of children.
“I know what a rake is,” said Rachel with a sweet smile. Mrs Marshall was shocked. I looked at her sternly, as if to ask what she had been teaching my children when I was not there.
“It's what gardeners use to sweep up leaves. Why are they bad, Mrs Marshall? And why did they wander the streets?” You could see the childish vision of an army of garden implements drifting around the roads and alleys of London light up her face.
“She did not mean that kind of rake, you silly thing,” said Donald. “She meant another kind.”
“And I suppose you know what kind?” said Mrs Marshall. “That's what comes of letting you read those bad books.”
She nodded her head in a way that compressed her double chins and made her look something like a turtle. She answered my stern look with one of her own, letting me know and no mistake, that if the children had been learning bad things the fault was mine and not hers.
“Father, Donald called me a silly thing,” said Rachel. She looked as if she was going to cry and
she started to cough. I hoped that she was doing it to win sympathy, for she’d learned to play on it when she was ill, but I feared that she was not acting.
“Your sister is not silly, Donald,” I said.
“And that sort of cheek is another thing you get from reading those books,” said Mrs Marshall.
“I didn't mean to be rude,” said Donald. He did not sound very contrite. “The words just came out.”
“Tell your sister you're sorry, Donald,” I said.
“I'm sorry, Rachel, I don't really think you're a silly thing.” His voice was sullen. He did not like being made to apologise. There was silence around the table then save for the sounds of eating, and shortly it was time for the children to go to bed. As they always did, they said goodnight to Mrs Marshall, and to me, and then to the miniature of their mother that sat upon the mantelpiece and that was all we had to remember her by.
After I'd seen them to the room and listened to them say their prayers, and after they'd come out to say goodnight again, and then again, I sat down by the fireside with a glass of gin and hot water. Mrs Marshall drew her chair up and clicked away with her knitting needles, in a way that signalled her intention to talk.
“Mrs Smith says business is awful bad,” she said. “She said her uncle read it in the papers at the coffee house that the factories up North are closing down and the railways are laying men off. Not that closing factories would be a bad thing -- I think -- they're hideous smelly places by all accounts. But the poor souls that work in them need the money.”
All of it was true. We were in the absolute pit of the worst business depression anyone could remember. Whole families starved in the streets of the richest city in the world and the roads were filled with ragged folks desperately moving from town to town in search of work. The poor houses were turning people away -- which tells you something, for paupers do not exactly fight to get into them and pick oakum. The streets were full of talk of Chartism and riot and revolution. If you believed some people the Apocalypse was just around the corner. For many, blasphemous as it might seem, the Day of Judgement might have been an improvement.