and buxom woman whose onset of middle years she combated with an excess of concupiscence and a minimum of attire.
I entered Bawdy Moll’s in the early afternoon; the place was then far less inhabited than in the busy nighttime hours, when impoverished men sought refuge from their lives in pints of gin sold for almost nothing. A penny or two was enough to transport the most miserable of sods to a painless realm of drunken oblivion. In the afternoon, however, the shop served a more sporadic sort—perhaps the petty thief or pickpocket seeking refuge from a job turned sour, the beggar who had chosen to surrender his pennies for drink rather than food, or the out- of-work laborer who preferred to face a senseless stupor rather than a heartless London that would care not a whit for his starvation.
There were also the visitors who came each Monday and Thursday to see the bullbaiting. On other days one could find a variety of different exhibits to be seen in Hockley-in-the-Hole. In my younger years, I had been one of them, for before I had taken to fighting exclusively with my fists, I had been part of a troupe of sword-fighters who demonstrated for paying crowds the noble art of self-defense. Such things are no longer seen today, but as a young man I had marched about the city amidst a troop of fighters clad in our poor and tattered estimation of military uniforms, drums a-beating, while boys passed around handbills detailing the thrills of our shows. During my days sword-fighting at a ramshackle outdoor theater near Oxford Street, I would risk life and limb with another man as we demonstrated our daring skill with our swords, each of us trying to best his opponent without doing him any serious harm. Despite our efforts to spare one another, I was usually bloodied and covered with cuts by the end of a performance, and I have many a scar upon my body to testify to these exploits. When the theatrical manager asked me if I wished to earn my bread by fighting with fists only, I confess I was delighted at the prospect of so painless an employment.
I suppose I was prone to reminisce about those awful times, but the gin house quickly reminded me of what life engendered in that part of town. Bawdy Moll’s had few windows, for her patrons had no wish to see the world around them, and they had less of a wish for the world outside to look in. I braced myself against the stink as I saw Bawdy Moll, who stood behind the counter talking excitedly with a haggard-looking cutpurse whose name I knew but whose acquaintance I had never sought. They both hovered over a pile of papers that from where I stood I recognized as tickets for the illegal lottery that Moll, like so many tavern-owners in that part of the city, ran from her place of business. The drawings were always biased, rigged, and small, and the revenue from them added handsomely to Moll’s purse.
Moll wore her hair high, in a grotesque parody of the ladies’ fashion. Her dress opened wide at the neck to reveal an ample if withered bosom, and the paint upon her face bespoke a woman who believed these artificial and conspicuous colorings had power not to deceive but to blind, for her skin put me in mind of bark ready to drop from the tree. Grotesque as she was, Moll was well loved, and she frequently provided me with valuable news of back streets and thieves’ dens.
Upon my entrance the cutpurse looked up from his conversation with Moll and scowled. I heard the words “Weaver the Jew,” but I could discern no more. It was often hard for me to ascertain my status among such men. I had friends within the armies of prigs, but I had enemies too—and I knew that their master, Jonathan Wild, encouraged no fellowship between their ranks and me. I assumed this man to be a fellow who took Wild’s advice to heart, for as I approached Moll he finished hard his pint of gin—throwing back a quantity that should have caused a healthy man to lose his senses—and stalked into the dark shadows of the gin house where there were always piles of straw for the poor and the desperate to crawl into and sleep off their poison.
“Ben Weaver,” Moll called out as I approached, as always speaking more loudly than she needed. “A glass of wine for ya, then, me ’andsome spark?” Moll knew enough that I would not partake of gin, and I accepted with good humor a glass of her vinegary wine, of which I sipped only enough to be polite.
“Good day to you, Moll,” I said as she rubbed my arm with a leathery hand, her sausage-like fingers clinging absently to me. There was no getting what one wanted from this woman without indulging her need to feel desirable. “I trust your pleasant company keeps your business healthy?”
“Aye, business is brisk. A penny a glass is a small business, it is, but counting the coins is a fine enough occupation, I reckon.” She gently pulled at the tie of my hair. “How many of them would it take to buy yer company, I wonder?”
“Not many,” I said with a smile that would have been unconvincing in a better-lit room, “but I find I have little time at the moment.”
“Yer always a busy man, Ben. Ye must make time for yer pleasures.”
“My business
“That’s right unnatural,” she assured me with a coo.
“What news,” I responded, as though it were the perfectly correct response to her amorous oglings, “have you heard upon the street?”
I cannot claim to be astonished that the first news upon her lips was of Jemmy’s death, for word of a murder spread like the French pox in London’s dark quarters. “ ’E was shot dead, ’e was. You knew ’im?”
“I met him but briefly,” I told her.
“ ’E wasn’t much, I reckon, but ’e ’ardly deserved to be shot like a dog, such as ’e was. Like a dog.” She scratched her head. “ ’E wasn’t much smarter’n a dog, though, was ’e? And vicious too, with a taste for young girls—young, I say—whether they would or no. Now that I think on it, gettin’ ’imself shot down was just the thing for a bastard like ’im.” She shrugged at her own observation.
“Who shot him?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.
“ ’Is ’ore,” she leaned forward and spoke in what I can only describe as a shouting whisper. “Kate Cole’s ’er name. Jemmy and Kate kept a buttock an’ twang together, but if anyone was to shoot anyone I would have thought ’e’d ’ave done ’er in, not t’other way, for she ’ad a few other coves what she kept, and she even spent a night or two with Wild ’imself.”
“She was Wild’s whore?”
“Well, who ain’t? I won’t say I ’aven’t ’ad a tumble with the great man meself, but Jemmy was a man quick with his anger, and if Wild’s to keep his prigs in line he oughtn’t to make them want to kill ’em. All’s the more wonder that ’e done what ’e done.”
“And what has he done?” I asked.
“Why ’e’s ’peached ’er, ’e ’as. Wild turned ’is own ’ore in. Now I’ve seen ’im do it many a time and often with a prig what ’e couldn’t trust no more, but to ’peach a woman what you’ve swived not a week before shows a lack of”—she fumbled for a word—“manners, I should think. Now the poor lass is sittin’ in Newgate. How long before she gets what all women get there, I wonder? All those men there, looking for distraction. I got it sure enough in my day.”
My innards writhed as I listened to Moll’s cackling speculations, for if Kate had been arrested she would have no reason not to speak of my involvement. It was true that though she had no idea who I was, she did know what I had been after, and if she had only the slightest grain of cunning she would know that the goods I had sought were the key to her surviving the next hanging day.
“What does Kate have to say about all this?”
“I should ’ardly know.” Though I could see little humor in the question, Moll burst into an uproarious laugh that sounded to me like a seagull’s cry. “I suppose ye better go down to Newgate and ask ’er yerself what opinion she has of the matter.”
Such was my intention. So, doing my best to conceal my panic before Moll, I made some small chat with her for a little while, pretended to seek information on a house broken into, and then made my first convenient escape.
FIVE
I COULD MUSTER no considerable surprise to learn that Jonathan Wild had ’peached Kate, for profiting from the conviction of his own creatures was no small part of the key to his fortune. It was said that he held a book with the name of every felon in his employ, keeping count of numbers as though he were a merchant or a trader as much as a thief. When he believed one of his prigs to be withholding goods, he put a cross next to the name, indicating that it was time to hand the poor sod over to the courts. Once the prig was hanged, Wild put a second cross next to his name, and so the thieves of London now held the expression of
