Murder in Grub Street (25 page)

“Of course she deserves that, poor soul. There is ample money for it from that fine I exacted from John Bilbo.”

“I feel an awful guilt for this, Sir John. ‘Twas I who lodged her there at Half Moon Passage.”

“You thought it best at the time,” said he. “You did no wrong.”

We walked along in silence a good long way, taking the turn onto Charles Street, which put home in sight.

Then said Sir John by way of summing up, “You did right to tell me, Jeremy, and right to insist. There are times one must brush aside defenses, even my own.”

“Thank you, sir. I, uh, trust you had a pleasant evening with Mrs. Durham before you were called away to the fire?”

“Too brief, Jeremy,” said he, “far too brief.”

The next morning it was necessary for Mrs. Gredge to rouse me from bed, which she did in a manner none took gentle and most accusing. Put before you, dear reader, the possibility of being brought of a sudden to a wakeful state by a voice that shared qualities of the magpie and the screech owl. To be sure, she did not always sound so, but when she raised her voice in a scold, the Devil himself could not have bested here.

“Jeremy! Jeremy!” she squawked. “Up with you
now!
You know your first duty in the morning is to light the stove for me. Now do it ere Sir John’s breakfast be late.”

“Oh, Mrs. Gredge,” I moaned, “could you not light it yourself? You did so for years before I came.”

She shook me rudely.

“I’ll have none of your sauce, you lazy boy. Get yourself out of bed this minute!”

She was right, of course. It was my duty to build and light the cook fire each morning. This required me to be the first out of bed, which usually caused me no difficulty whatever. Yet on this particular morning, having first waited for Sir John half the night, then attended him at the fire during the remainder, I found it altogether difficult to rouse myself to the task.

I pulled on my breeches as Mrs. Gredge hovered in the doorway. I knew that she would not leave until I was clear of the bed and on my feet. So with a great effort I thrust up from the bed and launched myself into a new day.

It did not take long to satisfy Mrs. Gredge. The fire flamed cheerfully. She put on a kettle for tea and brought out the bread and butter. But as she sliced at the loaf, she found new grounds for complaint.

“Now, Jeremy,” said she, “I’ve a practiced hand at boy raising, and as it seems to me, you’ve a problem still, a bit of fog floating about in your head. For this I see two principal reasons. First, you ought not to have waited up late for Sir John. And second, you did not eat proper last night. Had you ate some of my stew, you would have sure been fortified against this day, ready to meet the morning, so to speak. Now, we can do naught about the first, but as for the second it is not too late to make amends. And so, Jeremy, I put it to you: Would you not have some stew for your breakfast?”

How could I refuse such an offer? I assented, and she switched pot for kettle on the fire. As it warmed, she skimmed fat from the top; that tempted me a bit more. And as it began a-bubbling, and I caught the full fragrance of it, I put behind me all thought of the sights and smells of the Raker’s barn and offered my bowl to be filled. I was that hungry due to last night’s fast that I ate it all, savoring the goodly chunks of meat along with the rest, and wiping my bowl clean with a thick crust of bread. By the time I had finished, I was quite willing to concur with Mrs. Gredge: I truly believed it to be the best stew that ever she had cooked.

Yet ere I had come to the end, and to that conclusion, Sir John descended the stairs and, guided by his nose, found his way to the stewpot.

“Good God, Mrs. Gredge,” said he, “what sort of breakfast banquet have you prepared?”

“Nothing more than what was left over from yesterday’s dinner,” said she. “Jeremy was feeling poorly, and so what he failed to eat last night, I fed him this morning.”

“Is there a bit in the pot for me?” he inquired most timidly.

“There is always a plate for the master of the house,” said she.

And on that she made good, heaping a bowl full from the pot and serving it forth with certain pride. Sir John ate with great relish, and having finished, let forth a mighty belch of satisfaction.

“What a treat!” said Sir John. “Lamb, was it not?”

“Young mutton—or so Jeremy said.”

“And so I was told by the butcher,” said I. Mr. Tolliver it was, and he had sold me the cut on Saturday at a good price.

“Well, that poor lamb forged his papers of majority, I vow, and has been eaten for his punishment. A grand stew, Mrs. Gredge — though I trust we must return to rashers and dripping tomorrow?”

“If it be your wish. Hen’s eggs are ever so dear.”

“It would not do to eat so well every day. We’d not give proper appreciation to the extraordinary then. Stew for breakfast — remarkable, eh, Jeremy? But what’s this I hear? Feeling poorly last night? You showed no signs of that at the fire.”

“I fear my appetite was quite destroyed by my visit to the Raker’s,” said I.

“Quite understandable,” said he. “But I have investigative work for you today of a more agreeable sort.”

My heart leaped within me. “And what is that, sir?”

“You are known in Grub Street, somewhat by reputation. I recall that the late Mr. Crabb invited his colleagues and competitors in to witness your skill at setting type—wanted them to know what a prodigy he had engaged as apprentice. Is that not as it was?”

Had I boasted so to him? Probably I had. “Yes, Sir John.”

“Do you recall the names of those present?”

I thought a moment. “There were three he’d invited. I have the names of two — a Mr. Trimble and a Mr. Ingold.”

“Two is better than none. Visit them, Jeremy. Make it that you seek to apprentice yourself but wish extraordinarily favorable terms. They saw what you could do as a typesetter. Claim that you are a journeyman in skill and wish a briefer period of apprenticeship than is customary. Does this sound convincing? Well, make it so. But this is just to gain entry and open discussion. Try to get them to speak of Mr. Crabb — his business practices, his enemies, et cetera. We need a fuller picture of him. For now I mean to proceed on the assumption that Mr. John Clayton is innocent of all or any of the murders, and that he gave us a full and accurate account of what he remembered. Yet he remembered so little that can truly be of help to him or to us!”

“I believed him,” said I, “for what that be worth.”

“Make no mistake — it is worth a good deal to me. Yet to the Lord Chief Justice in court it would be worth nothing at all.” He fell silent a moment. “Oh, and there is one thing more. The two journeymen who were employed by Crabb — each has gained employment with a different printer. One of them, Isham Henry, the fellow who gave witness against Clayton, has gone to work for that same Mr. Boyer whom I want you to visit, in any case. The other journeyman—what was his name?”

“Tom Cranford — I got on quite well with him.”

“Well, I know not how much help Henry will be. He seemed set against Clayton and was a strange sort, it seemed to me. Your man Cranford, however, should be sought out early. Find out what he has to say of his former employer. His present employer is a Mr. Dodsley, bookseller, printer, and publisher, also of Grub Street. Look for him there. Now, can you remember all that?”

“I can, sir.”

“But it would not do to set out too early. Complete your tasks for Mrs. Gredge. Then you will be free to spend the day at it. Keep your ears open. Ingratiate yourself. Spend, if need be. You will be reimbursed.”

It made me feel right strange to find myself in Grub Street again. I had not been there since that terrible night on which the Raker reaped his rich harvest of bodies. Earlier, on my visits to the establishment of Ezekiel Crabb, I had grown to like the street a little. Though I liked it not that I might be separated from Sir John, I had admitted to myself somewhat grudgingly that if that must be, then I could do no better than live and work in a place in which the trade was in books and pamphlets. There was ever a minority of the gentry and the scholarly among those who crowded the street. They came to search the shops for the latest in learning, the cleverest in novel entertainments. Thus it was that despite its somewhat shabby appearance, Grub Street maintained an air of respectability — nay, more, a sense of the great world that I had hoped to find when I made my sad journey to London but months before.

There were booksellers, printers, and publishers situated on the street; often, as in the case of Mr. Crabb’s enterprise, the three in one. I came upon his establishment, all boarded up it was, quite early in my visit to Grub Street, for I had.traced the route to the street that I knew best, the one I had followed back and forth whilst my apprenticeship was arranged. A notice was posted upon the door to the effect that the premises had been closed until turther notice by order of Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Court. Who would want to enter into a place where such terrible deeds had taken place? Pillagers, perhaps, or those whose warped curiosity might draw them in to gape at the places where the blood oi the victims had dried dark upon the floor.

On either side of the Crabb enterprise, which was housed in a fair-looking structure, there were mean lodging houses where, I had been told, impoverished writers and printers of unsteady employment made their homes. Up and down the street were respectable eating places and taverns where such as these could eat and drink their fill for so many pence. So one might say that on this street the high and low met and mingled, and all put value on literary work and its production, if only as a means of livelihood. I knew that I could have lived and worked in such surroundings, yet actually now to be of aid to Sir John Fielding on a matter of such grave import as this investigation lent an importance to my young life I could in no wise have envisioned earlier.

We are slaves to our circumstances to a degree that I had heretofore never realized. My father, had he lived in London, might well have been as grand and successful a man as Ezekiel Crabb. In which case, I had further ruminated, he might be equally dead. Either pelted in the stocks, or hacked by a murderer’s axe, what did it matter?

Albert Ingold had little to say to me. Why I should have remembered his name and not the third of that group of admirers, the one who yet remained nameless to me, I could not fathom. For there was Mr. Ingold in his office, thin and reserved as I had remembered him, allowing that yes, he remembered me and it was true that he had been much impressed by the display I had given ol my ability at typesetting, but he had no place for me in any case. No, not even if I were capable of doing the work of a journeyman printer — as, no doubt, with a bit of training I could do. He would keep me in mind, however, and should he hear of one who was in need of one such as me, he would of course be happy to recommend me. Why not come by again in a fortnight, and he might have a name to offer? With that, he rose, indicating that my time with him had ended. When I tried to question him then as to who could possibly be so angry at Mr. Crabb as to wish him and his whole family dead, I received a most curious response. “Whatever punishment Ezekiel Crabb received,” said Mr. Ingold, “you may be sure he brought upon himself.” He took me by the arm and walked with me to the door — nay, he pushed me through it. I could think of nothing to say that might buy me permission to stay and ask more questions, and so I thanked him for his time and left.

This work of gathering information was none too easy, I concluded. When I had seen Sir John at work with witnesses, he had often come at them with the full of his force—which was considerable. When I recalled how he had made Lord Goodhope’s butler squirm and sweat, how he had ultimately gotten from him what he wished to know, I could only envy him. I could only wish that I, too, had such force at my command. But I had not. I had neither the force of his personality nor the force that attached to his office as magistrate. What was it he had advised? “Keep your ears open. Ingratiate yourself.” That sounded easy enough, did it not? Yet I had tried with Mr. Ingold and had nothing to show for it.

Thus I thought as I stood, somewhat bemused, outside the establishment of Albert Ingold, bookseller and publisher. Grub Street seemed a little less welcoming than before. Where was I to go now? I ambled up the street, looking for the offices and shop of Mr. Trimble, and came instead to those of Mr. Matthew Dodsley. It was Tom Cranford who worked there, and in truth I had got on well with him when I met him at Mr. Crabbs. Perhaps I might do better with him. I would try, in any case.

I entered the shop all meek and mild, with a sweet, boyish smile upon my face. The place seemed to be set out in about the same way as Mr. Crabb’s. Which is to say, the bookshop was at the front of the building, occupying perhaps a third of the ground floor, or even less than that, for there was an office looking out upon it — no doubt Mr. Dodsley s. Yet when I was approached by a young man and asked, all suspicious, what business I had there, it was not for Mr. Dodsley I inquired, but rather for Tom Cranford.

“And what will you with him?” demanded the young bookseller.

“To talk to him only,” said I. “I am come from the Bow Street Court, and I have information of the Crabb matter, sir.” Both statements were true, yet they implied more than they said. “If you would but ask him to come forward from the print shop?”

“The Crabb matter?” Of a sudden, he was much interested. “You mean the massacre? Well, tell it me, and I shall pass it on to him.”

He leaned forward, expecting me to whisper. But in that he was disappointed, for I continued smiling and shook my head most regretfully.

“That I cannot do,” said I, “for I was charged to speak only with Mr. Cranford.”

“Charged? By whom?”

“Why, by Sir John Fielding, of course, who is the magistrate of the Bow Street Court.”

“I know damned well who he be! Freddy?” he called to the other young man present in the ground-floor front. “Freddy, keep an eye on this fellow, will you? I must fetch someone from the back.”

And so he left me. I busied myself a-browsing through the books which were there in great supply, displayed on tables and shelves of the little shop. I found that newly published third volume of Tristram Shandy mentioned by Dr. Johnson. I picked it up eagerly, determined to judge for myself if it be worth reading.

Freddy rushed over to me and snatched it from my hands.

“Do not touch the stock unless you have money to buy.”

“How do you know I have not?”

“Show me then.”

“I need prove nothing to you.”

With a great show of pride I adjusted my coat, turned, and walked to the door. There I stood, arms folded, returning stare for stare. I did not like this Freddy, nor did I think much better of his partner who had gone to the rear to seek out Mr. Cranford. I raged bitterly within at the indignities a lad of my years was forced to endure. When, in the future, I did have the money to buy books, I promised myself I would not spend it here. No, not even to put Freddy in his place.