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 your 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,
