Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (5 page)

Mr Chadwick called out to the woman, “How many children have you?”

“Four,” she replied.

“Have you lost any?”

“Five, and one more given over by the doctor.”

Where are they to go, these wretches, reared in the dark and the dirt? Whither those dispossessed by the advance of Progress? How can we purge our metropolis of this fearful multitude? For, after all, nobody can be held responsible. In the Great Battle for Life that every day confronts us, there are bound to be casualties. Suffering and Evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of. Diseases are nature’s way of separating the grain from the chaff.

We must be thankful for small mercies. Let us reflect that, despite the continuing fevers afflicting thousands across the capital, nobody of significance has yet died.

INFERNAL SCHEMES & RESURRECTIONS

From these filthy ashes, at least an occasional phoenix rises. George Shillibeer gave us the omnibus thirty years ago. Undercut by the London General Omnibus Company, with their modern fleet packing in passengers, old George has resurrected his ailing business. Shillibeer passengers will henceforth travel alone and always arrive “late”. The demand for funeral services is always on the increase.

***

Letter to Roxton Coxhill, Received Late 1859:

To Roxton Coxton Foxton Bloxton and friend:

We take your foul act as a declaration of war.

Your loathing servant,

..............

(signed in unintelligible symbols)

***

THE WILDERNESS

Writing my report for Wardle was an ordeal. Why did I suffer so over it? I had written reports galore during night shifts, but this was a far cry from those simplistic charges. This was a mystery. A report for Scotland Yard had to be more weighty, surely. More accurate; more brilliant.

That night I wrote my text, and rewrote over and again. I would frequently finish a long passage with a sense of triumph, only to be appalled when I sat back to check it over. Not only were my sentences poorly constructed, full of solecisms and non-sequiturs, but I seemed to be recording irrelevant details, or obvious ones. I would comb through, pick out the few phrases worth salvaging, and begin again.

I may not be a fluent stylist, but I am careful with details. I knew from my work with watches that one cog misaligned may throw an entire mechanism off-kilter. Besides the facts, I limited myself to the most clear-cut deductions: that the man who had beguiled the night porter was surely the saboteur; that, contrary to appearances, the body was placed there already lifeless; that the saboteur was therefore still at large. Why the corpse was placed there, I refrained from speculating. I also restrained myself from labelling Hunt’s behaviour as odd, reluctant to give in to personal opinion; but I tried to leave no doubt that he was to blame for the clock having fallen. Nor did I mention the Worms’ help.

Late on the Thursday afternoon I found my way down to Scotland Yard, exhausted. I was disgruntled to find Wardle out, on special duty at Windsor. I reluctantly left the precious document, copied over in my neatest hand, with his assistant, a sour-faced sergeant called Jackman. Later that evening, my Superintendent called me in to check if I had dealt with “that other business”. I was elated to know that Wardle had indeed had a word, as promised.

After delivering the report, I heard nothing.

What did I expect? Compliments from on high? A sensational trial? I was not so naïve. Yet I had carried out the tasks entrusted me. I thought I had made a good impression. As weeks turned into months, with still no word, I found myself going over and over my actions of that night. Where had I erred? Had I given away information that should have been kept secret? Was it inappropriate to engage the Worms’ help? Perhaps I should have been sceptical of Simpson’s revelation, confiscated the ward book, taken the matron’s details.

I scanned the press. I saw only one piece about the spout, which seemed less concerned with the facts than with trumpeting its author’s ill-founded opinions. The HECC launched their shares on the market with some fanfare, though no sign of that whiskery Royal Seal. There was little mention of “the second sharpest mind in the country”. Instead a Superintendent Foley in Wiltshire stole the limelight, solving the Road Hill House killings. Such sensations set the country alight momentarily. Then everyone returned to Mr Dickens’ magazine, protesting how moving was his
Tale of Two Cities
, and how significant, though I wished it had been a Tale of Two Pretties or Two Ditties, as it had no jokes like his old books, leastways none that I could understand.

Nights were the worst. As a junior officer, I spent two months out of three on night duties, sometimes at the desk, with the fire always aglow, but more often freezing my socks off down at my fixed post by Holborn. At least, with my woollen underclothes, I was accustomed to the Edinburgh winters. The poor souls passing me by seemed never to have seen the like of it. The winter was so bitter, sometimes they cried out with the cold. If a poor roustabout stole scraps of timber to try and keep his family alive, they all ended up in the House of Correction. Meanwhile a toff who stole a cab, knocked over a girl and lamed the horse could laugh off the charges, secured from scandal by his bank balance and fine friends.

I coughed and spluttered through the palpable fogs. Glossop, nose raw from sneezes, told tales of other officers: the Superintendent’s rheumatic pains, Plympton’s bilious attacks, Rout’s fistula. The whole city had the ague.

Those months after the spout hardened me to London life. A restless, hungry feeling ate away at me, not just from the din and the stink and the fevers. How little my life had changed. If I was lonely, I had brought that loneliness with me. If I was disappointed, it was because I had entertained unreasonable hopes. I had come south expecting London to amaze me. I soon learned that few of the streets were paved with gold, and that to grasp one opportunity demanded a multitude of sins.

I remember one night-reveller fondly. Mr Wetherell was brought in by a publican as a suspected gentleman thief, having offered the entire establishment drinks on the house. In fact, he was celebrating his early retirement from the underwriting trade.

I dismissed the publican, and Mr Wetherell told me how he had found his business increasingly fraudulent and deceitful.

“Insurance,” he said, “is a form of corporate gambling whereby the little man loses everything and the big fish get away unscathed.”

We passed the wee small hours toasting his leaving – his hipflask held a finer malt than mine – until he left for the morning train.

I foolishly mentioned his story to Glossop. The carrot-haired northerner regarded me strangely. Previous to this, he had considered me “holier than thou”. Now he looked at me with admiration.

“Bloke did you the handsome, did he?”

“What?”

“Doing the handsome, Yard Boy. Greasing the palm. No shame in that. Common practice, especially with gentlemen. Half a sovereign in’t nothing to ’em.” Thenceforth, he would flash me complicitous grins, thinking I had descended to his level.

In the late spring, I was sent to fix the clock at the Cold Bath Fields House of Correction. The warden was strangely fond of boasting how Coleridge had immortalised the place:

As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw

A solitary cell.

And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

For improving his prisons in hell.

I somehow found myself signed up for charitable visits to an inmate with the unfortunate name of Josiah Bent. Rather than chat about his rehabilitation, Josiah preferred instructing me in the ways of London’s underclasses. He was a night-soil man: that is, he collected the excrement stored by the needy in cellars to sell as fertiliser. His trade, first ruined by guano imported from South America, was banned in the reforming fervour of the Fifties. Josiah worked on. What else could he do? Now he was in the jug for it, and his family destitute.

Josiah spoke in the dialects used by lowlifes to avoid being understood by “straight” folk. He tried to teach me to “roker Romany”, mixing cadgers’ cant, the argot and thieves’ Latin.

“Suppose I want to ask a codger to share a glass of rum with me,” he would ask, “what should I say?”

I scratched my head. “Erm, would you like a big bass drum?”

“Too straight, my friend, too straight.” His eyes lit up, as he imagined himself back in a dockside tavern. “I should do better saying, Splodger, let us share a Jack-surpass of finger-and-thumb. And what might the splodger reply?”

I knew the parlyaree for good. “I might reply, Bona!”

“You might.” Josiah nodded unconvinced. “Or you might say, It’s on doog, Josiah, on doog.”

“No good!” I translated, pleased with myself for spotting the backslang.

“Yes. The esilop have lifted my tol–”

“The police have taken my lot.”

“– and I ain’t got nanty dinarly to my name.”

“What?”

“Nanty dinarly. C’mon, my friend!”

“No money?”

“That’s it, my friend. ‘Don’t worry, Scotland,’ I’d say. ‘I’ll shout you a top of reeb and don’t think of it. Now, let us return to the subject of the sixty orders of prime coves.’”

These were my lessons on the underworld trades. Grave-robbers I had heard of. As a small child, whenever I was caught by my father playing on the street in front of our house, he fell to yelling at me. Beyond our gate lurked demons, goblins and trolls. The devil himself! How would father feel then, mother gone and me infernally kidnapped? “D’ye hear, Campbell?” he would say. “The De’il will tak ye awa’ and ye’ll ne’er be met with agin.” I realise now the old man was afraid. In a city of medical students desperate for corpses, a smothered child was a tidy alternative to midnight digging. Edinburgh was famed for resurrectionists and bodysnatchers.

When Josiah spoke of these trades beyond my ken, his voice thrilled, as if he were reciting Shakespeare. “Smashers, swigsmen, coiners and bloods. Dubsmen, cadgers, footpads and cloak-twitchers! Omitting neither patterers nor merry-andrews, which ain’t crimes but might as well be. Then there’s your mudlarks, down the Thames at low tide, like magpies scouting for valuables. The grubbers does the street drains and culverts, and toshers the same down the sewers.”

Toshers? “Mr Shuffler, the tosher,” the matron had said. Perhaps I should not have told Josiah about my brush with high crime, but it slipped out before I considered that. The spout left him none the wiser, but his eyes lit up when I described the clock with its workings removed.

“Churching jack, we call that,” he said nostalgically. “Common ruse. Remove the ticker’s insides. Some rum clocky gives it a fresh ridge – that is a new casing – then you can lumber the thimble – pass on the goods – without fear that some charpering feint will sell you up the flue. Quality loge will fetch a fine price any day of the week.”

Walking home that night, I considered dropping by the Free Hospital. I could check the ward book, send Wardle more details. It might be significant who had brought Shuffler in, or who had removed the corpse. Yet it seemed a kind of desperation, and I kept my peace.

When I finally mustered the courage to ask the warden about the injustice of Josiah’s imprisonment, he burst out laughing. Josiah Bent was inside because he had beaten and robbed an old widow. Somewhat ashamed of myself, I stopped visiting.

THE THEFT

A matter of days later, I sat on the early watch, head in my hands. It had been foolish to leave Edinburgh; I had given up my solid career as clockmaker’s apprentice for a vapid dream.

Then the constabulary gate creaked.

My old home in Edinburgh had an iron gate just like the constabulary’s. My father hated to be distracted; it was for my inability to concentrate that he was always upbraiding me. After my mother died, it fell to me to peek out the window whenever the gate creaked. Were it a customer, I would make myself presentable, quick as a flash, and invite them in. It was a task I hated, and I grew to hate that creak.

It was a taller, leaner Worm who summoned me that morning, swinging the gate in that irritating manner. He had grown up an unreasonable amount in those six months, and he seemed more guarded – or perhaps just weary. “Long time, no vader, Watchman.”

I enquired after his company, the Euston Square Worms, thinking he’d be pleased I had remembered his patter.

“We don’t call ourselves that no more,” he frowned. “Sore point, but thanks for asking. Companies is old hat, you see. Co-operative ventures, that’s where the future lies. Anywise, you’re wanted at the Yard. The old cove.”

“Wardle?”

“The same,” he grinned.

I nodded slowly, trying to overcome my surprise. “One thing, Worm,” I said. “How was it you that knew me, that first night?”

“Simple. All those watches you fixed? It was me delivered them.” He doffed his cap as if to take his leave, then thought better of it. “Before you charper off, old cove, I’ve a query of my own. That hydrollah-rolical gaff, mind. What did the old crocus have to say about the corpuscular, if you get my word?”