sleeved waistcoat, or a pair of well-worn boots from a secondhand shoe dealer in Dudley Street. Ikey couldn't abide new shoes or even new hose and preferred his stockings to be well darned at the heels and knees. Only his great coat was purchased new, made bespoke of the finest wool to his own precise instructions with a hundred concealed pockets, the whereabouts of which required an exacting layout memorised in his mind.
In fact, this coat represented the very nature of Ikey Solomon. He, himself, was a hundred pockets, each concealing hurt: some contained past abuse, some inadequacies and some were stuffed with deformities of thought. In others past injustices rattled, yet other pockets contained abnormalities and social obscenities. A host of pockets were filled with past woundings which rubbed raw against insults, hatreds and peculiar malice. Ikey carried all the sins and bitter blows, pocks and pits of his wandering kind in the pockets of his mind. They became the total of who he was, the whole, concealed by a cloak of indifference to the outside world.
The sole importance of money to Ikey was protection. Money bought sycophancy and this passed well enough for respect. Money kept those who would destroy him at a proper arm's length. Money was the lining of the protective coat which concealed him from a dangerously cold and malevolent world.
For Hannah no such problem of concealment with a metaphorical garment existed. Her loathing of Ikey was the centre of her everyday preoccupation, and his accumulation of wealth her single reason for their coupling. Hannah saw Ikey as a servant to her ambition, and his wealth the means to purchase the social aspirations she so earnestly desired for herself, and for the futures of her six children. She had invested in Ikey as one might in the cargo of an opium clipper, and her expectation was for a handsome end profit.
Chapter Nine
Two days later Hannah received a very discreet messenger sent by the Upper Marshal of the City of London, Sir Jasper Waterlow. The messenger, a small, polite man in a frock-coat and top hat, somewhat too big for his head, stated that Sir Jasper wished to see her on a matter to her great advantage. She was naturally filled with apprehension though it did not occur to her to refuse his request, especially as the messenger had gone to great pains to assure her that she was not under arrest. She was to present herself at the Blue Wren coffee house in Haymarket on the following day, at precisely two o'clock.
Dressed in her Sabbath finery and having purchased a new best bonnet in the latest style, she pulled up at the Blue Wren, her barouche, hired by her father for the occasion, arriving at the coffee house door at precisely the appointed hour.
She announced herself to the surly proprietor, who took her cloak and ushered her to a small room to the rear of the premises where Britain's senior policeman, Sir Jasper Waterlow, waited for her. He neither rose from his chair nor took her hand at her entry. His expression was most acidic, as though the task at hand caused a sour taste in his mouth. Hannah thought this appropriate enough, expecting no different from the law.
Sir Jasper pointed to the remaining chair, there being but two upright chairs and a small table in the room. 'Sit, Mrs Solomons. I know you are aware of who I am, so I shan't introduce myself. Ceilings in such places have ears and the walls act as veritable trumpets for the deaf.' Then he added, 'It is not one's custom to be seen or heard in such an establishment and so I shall come directly to the point.'
The Upper Marshal of London was a small man though with a markedly large egg-shaped head. Its surface, including his chin, was quite free of hair but for three separate places: a very handsome black moustache curled and waxed at the ends, his eyebrows, equally dark and shaggy to the extreme and a pair of elaborate side whiskers which appeared to have been hot tonged and curled to resemble two dark tubes. They rested upon his jowls as though convenient handles to lift his over-sized head from his exceedingly narrow shoulders. His eyes were tiny, almost slits and his lips so narrow and straight that they suggested themselves as a single bluish stripe under his moustache. Indeed, had it not been for the large unlit cigar clamped between them, his mouth might have gone unnoticed. The only feature not yet remarked upon was his nose. It seemed a creature of independent life, large, bulb-shaped and wart-textured, and all together of a purplish hue. It sat upon his smooth, pink face like a conglomerate of several noses, where it twitched and snorted and seemed to wiggle continuously as though in great disagreement with the circumstances in which it now found itself.
This large head with its impatient, alienated nose was attached to a small, thin, short-legged body not more than five feet one inch in height. However, seated as he was with the cloth of his breeches pulled tight at the front, Hannah's practised eye observed that he carried the bulge of a surprisingly large engine for so small a man.
Sir Jasper was dressed in a dark cutaway coat above pale trousers and elegant boots, the heels of which were higher by a good two inches than might be normally supposed to be correct for the fashion of the day. A white silk choker finished off what Hannah knew to be the street uniform mostly favoured by men of the upper classes. Finally, Sir Jasper's very tall top hat had been placed with its brim uppermost on the small table between Hannah and himself, so that to observe the Upper Marshal she was forced to slightly crane her neck and look past the black hat's brim.
'So, madam, you are the spouse of the notorious criminal, Ikey Solomons?'
'Solomon, sir, it don't 'ave an 's',' Hannah corrected him, her heart fluttering at the presumption. Then she looked slightly bemused. 'Married yes, but as to criminal, not that I knows of, sir.' She drew a breath and then continued, 'Me 'usband, Ikey, 'as served 'is time, one year in Newgate and then on a hulk at Chatham. After six years 'e received the King's pardon.' Hannah paused again. 'Since then one or two small offences in the petty sessions, but nuffink what you might call notorious or criminal, if ya knows what I mean, sir?'
The officer sighed, 'Mrs Solomons, do not treat me like a simple-minded Bow Street runner or you could find yourself implicated in this unfortunate business.'
'And what unfortunate business is that?' Hannah asked politely, maintaining her calm.
'Forgery, madam! Defrauding the Bank of England by the printing of large denomination counterfeit notes of astonishing artistry to be passed through European banks and exchanged for foreign currency, and then reconverted to English currency again, though this time as the absolutely genuine article!'
'Me 'usband can do that?' Hannah asked, incredulously. 'Me 'usband can make money out o' scraps o' paper?' She shook her head. 'You 'ave the wrong man, sir, me 'usband is but a poor jeweller what makes a small and 'onest profit from sellin' o' betrothal and weddin' rings and bright little brooches for servant girls, shop assistants, country folks and the likes!'
'Ha! And how, pray tell, does he come to own the salubrious premises in Bell Alley?'
'Salubrious? 'Ardly that, sir, modest 'ouse to say the least. An uncle in Chatham, a slops dealer by trade, who passed away, Gawd rest 'is soul, a good man, sir, who left me 'usband a small legacy what we used to buy the 'ouse for rentin' purposes to decent folk. Our own little nest egg against 'ard times.'
'A modest house? Decent folk? A bawdy house in partnership with a well-known madam. A high-class establishment fitted out at great cost and with a printing press of the latest design in the basement, a nest all right, a nest of vipers!'
He pointed his unlit cigar at Hannah. 'Mark you carefully, we have arrested… ' He hesitated and then removed and unfolded a small slip of paper from a pocket in his waistcoat. 'Damned silly names these Froggies… ah yes, Van Esselyn… Abraham Van Esselyn, a notorious forger whose services do not come cheaply, and who is not paid in the currency his nimble hands create, but with the real thing!'
The nose on Sir Jasper's face looked at Hannah in a decidedly smug manner. Then, without so much as a moment's warning, Sir Jasper pushed back his chair, rose and banged his fist down on the table, causing the top hat upon it to jump and wobble, then fall to its side.
'Damn you, woman! Do you take me for a complete fool? I will have the truth, do you hear me!'
At first Hannah thought it must all be a mistake. They had somehow confused her own brothels with an imaginary one in Bell Alley. After all, Bob Marley, whom she had commissioned to report on the aftermath of the raid, had said nothing of a brothel at Bell Alley. But the information on Abraham Van Esselyn was perfectly correct. And who was the woman who ran the fashionable brothel which now seemed to exist at the Bell Alley premises?
Hannah needed time to gather her wits and to conceal her surprise at Sir Jasper's astonishing news. There was more going on at Bell Alley than she knew about. She told herself that if some other woman, with an eye to her husband's considerable fortune, was trying to gain his good favour, both this whore and Ikey would be made
