'Ikey Solomon, or is it Solomons? Notorious forger chap. Arrested several days ago for counterfeiting, it seems he got away with a fortune in sham Bank of England notes, devil of a mess, what?' Wilson concluded.
'Really?' said Ikey in bored tones. 'I've been abroad, you see. Now, I am aware you do not have much time, so I shall be brief. I wish to lodge a letter of credit with you from the Birmingham City and Country Bank and require you to transfer these funds to the First Manhattan Bank on New York Island.' Ikey withdrew an expensive leather folder from the interior pocket of his frock coat and placed it on the desk in front of him.
Nathaniel Wilson opened the leather folder and quickly examined the documentation, his eyes seeking the letter of credit. He was immediately struck by the large amount of money involved. His time would not be wasted, as the bank's commission from the transfer transaction would be considerable. It was therefore in a much more respectful manner that he conducted the remainder of the negotiations and verifications.
Not more than twenty minutes later, with the Coutts amp; Company certificate of deposit safely in the folder, and with effusive assurances from the banker of the utmost of service available at any future occasion, Ikey was escorted by Coote down the red-carpeted stairway with its brass banister, across the hall of polished marble, through the imposing doors and down the steps to where Abraham and Moses Julian waited beside the carriage. Ikey paused as Abraham held open the carriage door for him and handed Coote a sovereign.
'Good day to you, Coote,' he said in his newly acquired accent.
'Bless you, sir,' the old man replied warmly. 'It's been a pleasure.'
The notorious luck of Ikey Solomon had once again held. With a pinch more, a soupcon of the same, he was on his way to America.
In his mind there formed yet another conclusion which he was most hard put to ignore any longer.
It was Hannah who, on both occasions, had betrayed him.
The thought of Hannah's betrayal brought Mary to Ikey's mind, Mary who had not betrayed him when she could have turned King's evidence and given witness most damaging to his case and, by so doing, spared herself the boat.
Ikey now felt a rare and genuine pang of conscience within his breast. Mary was in Newgate, incarcerated in a dungeon cage with a dozen other foul wretches and he had made no attempt to acknowledge her presence. This sharp stab of guilt almost immediately transformed itself into a surprising softness of feeling for Mary. It was an emotion not altogether different to the crisis of feeling which had overcome him in the coach to Birmingham. Ikey wondered in some panic whether there was a connection between the interior of coaches and his soft-headedness, for he was possessed suddenly by a compelling need to send fifty pounds to Mary so she might ameliorate the rigours of her transportation and be supplied with the necessities required on the troublesome and dangerous voyage to Van Diemen's Land. He would urge Abraham to seek her out in Newgate, acquaint her of his good wishes and give her the money as a token of his great esteem.
Ikey was uncertain as to whether this generosity came about because of the tender feeling for Mary which had come so overwhelmingly and unexpectedly upon him, or whether he wished only to ensure the continuance of his luck by putting right his bad conscience towards her. He knew only that he felt compelled to comply with this strange dictate which otherwise made no sense to his head and yet seemed so powerful to his heart. He told himself, though to no avail, that he was being foolishly generous with a gesture which could show him no future profit as he would not, in the further course of this life, see Mary again.
This last thought left Ikey in a surprisingly melancholy mood, for he realised how the routine of his life had been brought undone and how much a sustaining and pleasant part of it Mary had become.
This further onrush of sentiment led to an even more surprising gesture than the money Ikey told himself he had effectively thrown away. In fact, so foolish was the new thought that he feared some mischievous golem had possessed him. Around his neck he wore a gold chain from which was suspended, in the exact size and weight of gold in a sovereign, a medallion which commemorated the battle of Waterloo, and which carried a likeness of the Duke of Wellington on one side and a crescent of laurel leaves on the other. Nestled in the centre of this leafy tribute, fashioned in a small pyramid of words, was inscribed: I Shall Never Surrender Ikey, shortly after his release from the hulk in Chatham and while working with his uncle, a slops dealer, that is to say a dealer in workmen's and sailor's clothes, had won the gold medallion at a game of cribbage from a sergeant in the Marines. It had been won fair and square and also while Ikey was legitimately employed, a conjunction of events which was never to occur again in his life, and so the medallion was a significant memento and had come to assume an importance to him. He always wore it under his woollen vest, where the warmth of its gold lay against his scrawny chest unseen by any other. Like the tattoo of the two blue doves on his arm, which, as a young man, had signified his secret and now entirely forsaken hope that one day he might find his one and only true love, the Wellington medallion was his special talisman.
At each narrow escape from the law or at the hands of the various people who would harm him, he had come to think of it more and more as the reason for his luck. Now he decided that if his luck should hold to the point when later that very night he would slip aboard a cargo vessel bound on the rising tide for Denmark, Mary should have his Wellington medallion.
Ikey, having determined this course of action, tapped on the roof for the coach to come to a halt, whereupon he bade Abraham come and sit beside him in the interior. As the coach moved on towards the docks he told Abraham in great detail what he was to do and say to Mary, his speech punctuated with a sentimentality Abraham had not thought possible in the man he knew Ikey to be. Ikey then took the medallion from about his neck and handed it, together with fifty pounds, to the young tailor to deliver to Mary.
In truth, it must be supposed that the concerns of the past few hours had greatly affected Ikey's mental state, for at the moment of this decision, if he had paused to consult his head and not pandered to the susceptibility of his heart, it would have declared him insane.
Ikey was giving Mary his luck.
Chapter Sixteen
Mary had been cast into a communal cell in Newgate to await her sentencing. Charged before a magistrate for running a bawdy house and with moral corruption, she was bound over in Newgate to await trial at the Old Bailey.
She had good reason to hope that her sentence might be a lenient one. Prostitution and earning a living off prostitutes did not generally earn the penalty of transportation. Indeed one might venture to say that 'moral corruption' was a fair description of the institution of the State itself.
The hard times which followed the Peninsular War against Napoleon, the effects of factory-produced cotton from Manchester on the wool and silkweaving cottage industries, and the migration of the Irish to England during the famines, created untold misery in the rural population. Their desperate migration in search of work caused calamity in the cities and, in particular, London, where among the poor prostitution, though not officially stated as such, was looked upon as a legitimate occupation for women who would otherwise be destitute, reduced to the workhouse or left to starve.
Mary had every reason to feel confident that she would receive perhaps as little as three months and no more than twelve months. Prior to her trial she had been approached by a City police officer to turn King's evidence against Ikey. But she had not implicated him, insisting that their relationship had been one of great circumspection and that he was merely her landlord.
Mary had invested ten pounds of her limited resources on a lawyer and hoped that the judge would see through the hypocrisy of her arrest, or, in any event, judge her most leniently. The lawyer, too, was confident and assured her of a speedy trial with, at most, a short sentence.
'Why, my dear, there is every chance that the judge has himself enjoyed the tender ministrations of yo
ur young ladies and behind his worship's wig and po-faced visage he bears you nothing but goodwill!' He was pleased that so simple a case to plead had earned him so generous a fee, for had Mary claimed hardship, he would happily have taken a case so free of conjecture for half the amount she had paid him.
It was therefore a shock beyond any imagining when Mary, arraigned before a judge she did not recognise at the Old Bailey, listened in increasing consternation to the clerk of the court. He, having read the original indictment, paused and informed the judge that the prosecution wished to add a further two charges, requesting the court's permission to do so. The judge agreed to add a further two counts and issued the warrant returnable immediately.
Mary listened in horror while the new charges were read out: 'That the accused had wilfully and maliciously killed the pet cat of Miss Maude Smith, nanny to the house of Sir James Barker of the King's Road, Chelsea. Furthermore, and in the second indictment, that she did steal a book, to wit, Gulliver's Travels, loaned to her through the negotiations of Thomas Bishop, the butler to Sir James, who had sought the co-operation of his master to make his private library available to the accused.'
Mary's lawyer immediately entered a plea asking that the two additional charges be set aside for a later hearing, pointing out that his client had not been apprehended for either supposed crime.
The prosecution then presented a warrant for Mary's arrest and the judge agreed that it be served on her within his court, whereupon he ruled that both new charges could be included with the original indictments and that they could be heard concurrently.
In discovering the details of Mary's background Sir Jasper Waterlow had proved himself a clever detective. At the same time he had met Hannah's conditions without the need for complicity with a member of the bench. While the charge of running a bawdy house was unlikely to receive a sentence of transportation, this was not the case with the new charges.
It was during the hearing of the second set of indictments that Mary's life came suddenly and irrevocably unstuck. Despite her desperate pleas from the dock that she had not put a hand on the ageing, nose dripping, fur shedding, pissing, fur ball vomiting Waterloo Smith and, furthermore, that the book, Gulliver's Travels, had been a parting gift from Thomas Bishop himself, it soon became obvious that she had no hope of being believed by the court. Both Nanny Smith and Thomas Bishop appeared as witnesses for the Crown, and while Nanny Smith was triumphant in her testimony, Bishop spoke quietly with downcast eyes throughout the hearing.
Whether the judge was a cat lover or a bibliophile, or both, is not known, but he seemed to be strangely agitated by the evidence he had heard. Before pronouncing sentence he saw fit to deliver, to the increasing delight of a cackling Nanny Smith, a lengthy address on Mary's moral turpitude.
'I find myself unwilling to grant leniency in this case before me, as it strikes at the very heart of civilised behaviour. It is common enough in the assizes to confront a person, a yokel who may have stolen a sheep, or pig or poached game, a fat pheasant or a clutch of partridge eggs, from his master's estate. Heinous as these crimes may be, it can be argued that the poor wretch may have had need of the flesh of these beasts or birds to feed a hungry family. While his be no less a crime in the eyes of the law, it is one which, in some instances, is worthy of our compassion, if not our mercy.'
The judge sniffed and looked about the court, finally allowing his eyes to rest again upon Mary. 'A sheep or a pig or a game bird, though valuable to its owner, is seldom an object of great love unless it be a champion.' He paused and looked about him as though he were delivering his message at the Lord Mayor's Banquet. 'But a cat? A cat is another matter. A cat to its owner can be an unquestioning and loyal friend when no other may exist. That the cat in question, so brutally disposed of in this case, was an object of great love and comfort to its owner is not, for one moment, to be doubted.' He looked across at Mary again. 'You did cold heartedly and with malice aforethought do away with one Waterloo Smith, a cat owned by the plaintiff, Miss Maude Smith.' He wagged an admonishing finger at Mary. 'This court cannot take lightly such a callous and deliberate action to bring about the death of one of God's innocent creatures.' The judge paused and glared at the jury, who had previously found Mary guilty. It was as if he felt that guilty was probably not sufficient, that perhaps they should have pronounced her 'Very guilty' or 'Guilty beyond normal guilt'. He turned again to Mary. 'You have been found guilty and I choose therefore to sentence you in exactly the same way as if you had stolen and killed a prize sheep, or bull, or pig, or poached a brace of pheasants from the country estate of an honest gentleman.'
The judge brought his gavel down as though he were about to pronounce sentence, but, in fact, the judicial hammer was intended to serve only as a punctuation. Warmed to the task of castigation, he now continued: 'As to the second charge against you. You found yourself in a position of great privilege in the home of Sir James Barker who, due to the kind interceding on your behalf of his butler…' The judge paused to look at his notes, 'er… Thomas Bishop, it was agreed by Sir James that you should have the full use of his considerable library. In this one magnanimous gesture he was, in effect, opening up to a mere servant girl, if I should not be mistaken a laundry maid, the whole sublime world of literature and learning. It appears that you did not with honesty and a full heart, mindful of the great privilege accorded you, take advantage of this opportunity. On the contrary, in the face of such remarkable generosity, you chose instead…' he paused, searching for the correct words. 'You who have shown intelligence enough to have mastered reading and writing, to plunder this depository of knowledge by stealing from it one of its most precious jewels!'
The judge now brought his gavel down three times and in an even more sonorous voice than he had previously employed picked up his written judgment and commenced to read it.
'Mary Klerk, also known as Mary Abacus, it be therefore ordered and adjudged by this Court, that after having served three months in Newgate Gaol in accordance with the previous judgment of this court, you be transported upon the seas, beyond the seas, to such as His Majesty King George IV, by the advice of his Privy Council, shall see fit to direct and appoint, for the term of seven years!'
The judge's gavel rose up and went down upon its block one last time. The sound of it reverberated around the dusty, close-smelling and largely empty courtroom, and Mary's life was once again plunged into the darkest despair as she was manacled and led from the dock to the public cells, the 'bird cages' in the dungeons of Newgate Gaol. For Mary it was a descent back into hell.
It was her companions, those women with her in the cage, against whom she knew she must needs take the greatest care. There were few who would not tear her eyes out for the promise of a tot of gin and, in their drunken state, when the candles burned down, she would need to constantly defend herself against the groping hands that would possess her. At night, the grunting, panting cries of the fornicating women intensified when the younger women were seduced or raped by the larger 'bull whores' who owned the darkness.
Mary attempted to keep to herself, occupying one small corner of the large cell which contained eleven others. She had been placed with prostitutes who had been caught at various crimes – thieving, drunkenness and destroying public or private property. At the approach of a drunken woman Mary would reveal her blackened talons and snarl. But it soon became apparent that she could not remain separate. In a gaol cell it is the strong who rule and the weak who must be made to submit. The time would come, Mary knew, when she would be subjected to the needs of the strongest in the cage. Mary waited until her fellow inmates were drunk and distracted and then she bribed a turnkey to have a tinsmith visit her.
She instructed him to make four brass rings half an inch in breadth which fitted tightly to the topmost knuckle of the second and third fingers of each hand. Mary then told the tinsmith to fashion from each band a metal talon, sharpened to a point and arched, an inch beyond the extremity of each finger, to giv
e the effect of four vicious nails. The tinsmith delivered them the next day, demanding an extortionate price in return for his speedy workmanship. But he had created weapons for her hands most fearsome to behold and Mary was happy to pay.
Mary attached the lethal hooks to her fingers and saw that they fitted well, then she placed them in the pocket of her pinny. The final meeting with the tinsmith had taken place in the morning before eight of the clock while her cell mates still slept, snoring and blubbering and often shouting in some nightmarish dream, unaware of her newfound protection. She knew that they would soon awaken and scream for water to quench their parched tongues and cool their throbbing brows. She was now ready to make her presence felt.
Mary paid the turnkey twopence for a large bucket of water and a ladle which she placed in the corner beside her. The water was their daily entitlement, an allowance of three gallons for each communal cell. The turnkeys demanded payment for it, although it was intended that it should be free. There was very little that came free in Newgate, and starvation was as much a cause of death within its walls as was gaol fever or brutality. If the twopence was not paid the turnkey would sell the bucket of precious water for a penny to an adjacent cage or, if there was no hope of gain, place it at his feet and piss into it before handing it into the cell.
Mary waited for the first of the women to wake up. It was Ann Gower, who couldn't remember when she hadn't been on the streets. She was probably still in her thirties but the effects of gin and her brutal life had left her looking twenty years older. Two of her front teeth were missing and matted brown hair hung over her eyes, which she was now in the process of knuckling in an attempt to clear her head of the gin she'd swallowed the previous night.
'Water, where's water?' she mumbled, as she stumbled over to the bars of the bird cage. Grabbing them she shouted, 'Bring the fuckin' water!' The shrill sound of her own raised voice caused her to hold her head and groan in agony.
The Potato Factory Page 28