Paternoster-row, conversing as usual about nothing in particular.
The next day I set about observing the daily round of entrances and exits at the Abode of Beauty. In due course, I saw what I was looking for.
The late-morning drizzle had slowly thickened into rain. All around, the city thundered and roared. At every level of human existence, from the barest subsistence to luxurious indolence, its inhabitants crossed and re-crossed the clogged and dirty arteries of the great unsleeping beast, each according to his station – trudging through the murk and mud, insulated in curtained carriages, swaying knee to knee in crowded omnibuses, or perched precariously on rumbling high-piled carts – all engrossed by their own private purposes.
Though it was not yet midday, the light seemed already to be failing, and lamps were burning in the windows of houses and shops. It is a dark world, as I have often heard preachers say, and on that day the metaphor was made flesh.
I had been standing in Regent-street for some time, and was somewhat aimlessly glancing into the window of Messrs Johnson & Co.,* thinking that perhaps I might make a present to myself of a new hat, when I saw the reflected image of a woman in the glass. She was about thirty years of age and, passing just behind me, had stopped before the Abode to look up at the luridly painted sign above the door. She hesitated, and then proceeded on her way; but she had taken only a few steps when she stopped again, and then returned to the door of the establishment.
She had an open honest face, and was wearing a fine pair of emerald earrings. I immediately stepped forward to prevent her entering. She looked momentarily shocked, but I swiftly persuaded her to move away from the door. This was my first lesson in boldness, and I learned it well. I also found, to my surprise, that I possessed a natural persuasiveness in such situations and quickly gained the confidence of the lady, who agreed, after we had retired a little way down the street to discuss the matter, to fall in with my plans.
A few minutes later, she re-entered the establishment and immediately requested a bath, taking off her clothes and jewellery in an adjoining room, as Mrs Bonner-Childs had done. Having observed that Madame Mathilde was the sole person within the premises at that moment, I had entered behind my accomplice and, waiting a few moments for her to enter the bath chamber, had the satisfaction of surprising Madame in the act of helping herself to the lady’s emerald earrings.
We exchanged a few words, with the result that Madame appeared to see the error of her ways. She lived exceptionally well from the Abode of Beauty, and could not risk prosecution, which I assured her would now be a simple matter to accomplish.
‘A mistake, sir, a simple mistake,’ she said plaintively. ‘I was just on the point of puttin’ them away for safety – like the girl did with the other lady’s, only I wasn’t aware at the time that she’d done so …’
And so on until, at last, she produced Mrs Bonner-Childs’s jewellery, with much self-pitying hand-wringing, and fervent promises to send the girl packing who had been so thoughtless as to hide away the items without telling anyone.
Mr Tredgold expressed great satisfaction that the matter had been resolved so quickly and quietly, without recourse to public prosecution, and Mr Bonner-Childs promptly settled a substantial bill from the firm for services rendered, a satisfactory portion of which was remitted to my account at Coutts & Co.
I must also mention, briefly, the later case of Josiah Pluckrose, as being illustrative of the more unpleasant side of the work I undertook for Mr Tredgold, and for other reasons, which will later become clear.
He was a common sort of man, this Pluckrose; a butcher from a long line of butchers, who had managed to amass a good deal of capital by means that Mr Tredgold described, in a whisper, as ‘dubious’. He had given up the art of butchery at the age of twenty-four, had done a little boxing, had worked as a waterman and as a brush- maker, and had then, miraculously as it seemed, emerged from the mire as a
Tall and thick-set, with reptilian eyes and a livid scar across one cheek, Pluckrose had a wife who had previously been in service at some great house or other, and whom he had treated abominably during the short period they had been married. One day in the autumn of 1849, this poor lady was found dead – beaten around the head in a most terrible way – and Pluckrose was arrested for her murder. He had previously engaged Tredgolds on a number of business matters, and so the firm was naturally retained as the instructing solicitors for his defence. ‘An unpleasant necessity,’ Mr Tredgold confided, ‘which, as he has introduced a number of clients to the firm, I do not think I can avoid. He protests his innocence, of course, but still it is all a little distasteful.’ He then asked me if I could possibly see any way round this particular ‘little problem’.
To be short, I did find a way – and, for the first time since I began such work, it went a little against my conscience. The details need not detain us here; the case came on in January 1850; Pluckrose was duly acquitted of the murder of his wife; and an innocent man later went to the gallows. I am not proud of this, but I discharged my office so well that no one – not even Mr Tredgold – ever suspected the truth. Good riddance to the odious Pluckrose, then.
Or so I thought.
With the business of Madame Mathilde, in February 1849, began a life of which I could have had no conception only six months earlier, so alien was it to my former pursuits and interests. I soon discovered that I had a distinct talent for the work that I was called upon to undertake for Mr Tredgold – indeed, I took to it with a degree of proficiency that surprised even my self-assured nature. I gathered information, establishing a network of connexions amongst both high and low in the capital; I uncovered little indiscretions, secured fugitive evidence, watched, followed, warned, cajoled, sometimes threatened. Extortion, embezzlement, crim.con.,* even murder – the nature of the case mattered not. I became adept in seeking out its weak points, and then supplying the means by which the foundations of an action against a client could be fatally undermined. My especial talent, I found, was sniffing out simple human frailty – those little seeds of baseness and self-interest which, when brought to the light and well watered, turn into self-destruction. And so the firm would prosper, and Mr Tredgold’s seraphic beam would grow all the broader.
London itself became my workshop, my manufactory, my
From the heights to the depths, from brilliant civility and refinement to the sinks of barbarity, from Mayfair and Belgravia to Rosemary-lane and Bluegate-fields, I quickly discerned its lineaments, its many intertwining natures, its myriad distinctions and gradations. I watched the toolers and dippers,* and all the other divisions of the swell mob, do their work in the crowded affluence of the West-end by day, and the rampsmen† at their brutal work as the shadows closed in. I observed, too, with particular attention, the taxonomy of vice: the silken courtesans brazenly hanging on the arms of their lords and gentlemen; the common tails and judies, and every other class of gay‡ female. Each day I added to my store of knowledge; each day, too, I
