Pickpocket's Apprentice

PICKPOCKET’S APPRENTICE

In Which a Juvenile Delinquent Is Brought to Justice

October 1798

London

The large clock mounted on the wall above the magistrate’s bench had long since struck five. Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun pronounced sentence on his last case of the day and rose from the bench, congratulating himself on a cleared docket and thinking with eager anticipation of the dinner that his wife, Janet, would have waiting for him at home.

Before he could head for the door, it opened to admit a stiff autumn breeze and a young man of about five and twenty who wore the blue coat and red waistcoat of the Bow Street Foot Patrol. As if further proof of his identity were needed, he hauled by the collar of a shabby gray coat a scrawny individual who appeared disinclined to bear him company.

“Have you a moment before you go, Mr. Colquhoun?”

Resigning himself to congealed roast beef and cold potatoes, the magistrate sighed and turned toward William Foote, the newest member of the Night Patrol.

“Yes, Mr. Foote, what is it?”

Foote shoved his captive forward, all the while maintaining his grip on the miscreant’s collar. “I caught this little thief stealing in Covent Garden.”

Thief the fellow might be, but Mr. Colquhoun would hardly call him “little”; he was every bit as tall as Foote, who was not a short man himself. Mr. Colquhoun might have pointed out this discrepancy, had he been less impatient for his dinner—and had he not at that moment got a better look at the alleged thief’s face. In spite of his height, Foote’s prisoner was hardly more than a child—a skinny lad with a tangle of dirty brown curls hanging down to his shoulders, and arms far too long for the sleeves of his threadbare coat. A lad, moreover, with a slightly crooked nose whose nostrils were caked with congealing blood, and a rapidly swelling left eye which would no doubt be black by morning.

“He was resisting arrest,” Foote put in hastily, as if aware of his magistrate’s appraisal of the boy’s injuries. “I had to subdue him.”

Mr. Colquhoun leaned forward to frown at the lad from beneath bushy eyebrows liberally sprinkled with grey. “What’s your name, boy?”

The boy’s chin came up, and he returned the magistrate’s gaze unwaveringly, his brown eyes reflecting defiance and hostility not unmixed with fear. “John.”

Foote shook the youth by his collar, in much the same way that a terrier might shake its quarry by the scruff of the neck. “You’ll answer Mr. Colquhoun proper, my lad, or you’ll get another taste of my fist!”

The magistrate raised a restraining hand. “That’s enough, Mr. Foote.” To the boy, he added, “Well, John, do you have another name?”

The lad hesitated a moment before answering. “Pickett, sir. John Pickett.”

“And how old are you, John Pickett?”

“Fourteen.”

“Where do you live?”

The boy shrugged. “Here and there.”

Mr. Colquhoun scowled, an expression that had caused men far older than John Pickett to quake in their boots. “Answer me, boy! Where do you live? Who are your parents? Your mother? Your father?”

“My mum’s dead, I guess, or else run off. My pa is—gone.”

“Dead, do you mean?”

Again that shrug, an attempt at nonchalance belied by the fear reflected in his brown eyes. “Near enough as makes no odds.”

“And your name is Pickett, is it?” The magistrate’s eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. “Your father wouldn’t by any chance be Gentleman Jack Pickett?”

“Oh, wouldn’t he?” retorted the boy, and received another shake from Mr. Foote for his insolence.

Gentleman Jack Pickett, thought Mr. Colquhoun. One of the most elusive criminals in the rookeries of St. Giles and Seven Dials. But his luck had finally run out, and the elder Pickett was now on a ship to Botany Bay. And he, as magistrate, should know; he’d sentenced the man himself. What he had not known was that the elder Pickett had left a son, a fourteen-year-old boy who was now forced to fend for himself in the only way he knew how—the way he had no doubt learned, so to speak, at his father’s knee. Mr. Colquhoun looked at the boy more keenly, trying to discern the face beneath the blood and bruises. The younger Pickett, conscious of the magistrate’s gaze upon him, reached into his pocket, extracted an apple, and bit into it with a defiant air which gave Mr. Colquhoun to understand that the boy’s unlawful possession of the apple was the reason for his presence in Bow Street—and that, if he was going to hang for it in any case, he intended to enjoy his ill-gotten gain first
.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” It was more in the nature of an accusation than a question.

“Less than a fortnight ago,” Foote put in. “I told you last time that he’d be back. He’s rope-ripe, this one. Best string him up now and save the hangman the trouble later, if you ask me.”

Mr. Colquhoun acknowledged this advice with a nod. “Thank you, Mr. Foote. If I want your opinion, I’ll be sure to ask for it. In the meantime, I suppose we’d best clean up the mess you made of young Mr. Pickett’s face. Fetch a wet cloth. No, the boy is not going to escape,” he added, anticipating Foote’s objection.

With obvious reluctance, Foote released his hold on his captive’s collar. His cold blue eyes shot the boy one last look of loathing before he took himself off.

Mr. Colquhoun leaned back in his chair and regarded the thief. “Now it remains only to decide what we are to do with you, Mr. Pickett.”

“You mean—you’re not going to have me hanged?” The boy’s hostility dimmed somewhat, leaving wariness and imperfectly concealed hope.

“I have a constitutional aversion to hanging children.”

“I’m not a child,” John Pickett declared mulishly. “I’m—”

“Fourteen years old,” the magistrate said, nodding wearily. “Yes, so you said. A veritable Methuselah, in fact. Tell me, Mr. Pickett, when you said you lived ‘here and there,’ you spoke no less than the truth, didn’t you?”

He looked down at the floor, apparently studying his oversized feet with great intensity. “Moll—Pa’s woman, that is—she threw me out after Pa was shipped off. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? When a woman’s looking for a new man, she don’t want her old man’s son cluttering up the place.”

Mr. Colquhoun might have made several highly unflattering observations regarding the sort of female who would banish her
de facto
stepson to life on the streets, but he wisely refrained from voicing them, assuming—quite correctly—that the young Pickett would take offense at any suggestion that he was incapable of looking after himself, his present dilemma notwithstanding. Mr. Colquhoun could not remember the exact date on which he had ordered the elder Pickett dispatched to Botany Bay—criminals and their sentencing tended to run together after awhile—but he was fairly certain that it would have been at least a month ago, and very likely more. And for all that time, this lad had been on his own, scavenging for his food and sleeping God only knew where. It was a miracle the boy hadn’t awakened one morning to find himself dead with a knife between his ribs.

“Ah, there you are,” he said to Mr. Foote, arriving at that moment with a dripping cloth and a sullen expression. “Give that thing to our young friend here, and let him clean himself up. All that blood is enough to put me off my feed.”

Mr. Foote watched in barely concealed impatience as the boy took the wet cloth and dabbed gingerly at a nose that was almost certainly broken. John Pickett completed this operation in stoic silence; Mr. Colquhoun suspected the boy’s pride would not allow him to give Mr. Foote the satisfaction of seeing him wince or hearing him groan. Upon completion of this task, he laid the bloodstained cloth on the magistrate’s bench and regarded Mr. Colquhoun warily.

“Very well, Mr. Pickett, if you’ve finished, we’ll be on our way.”

Mr. Foote no doubt spoke for both of them when he asked, “What do you intend to do with him, sir?”

Mr. Colquhoun regarded Foote with raised eyebrows, giving the man to understand that he found the question impertinent. “It is past my dinnertime, Mr. Foote. Mr. Pickett and I are going to find something to eat.”

With this pronouncement, he took the boy’s arm and led him from the Bow Street office to a public house on the corner of Bow Street and Long Acre. While he had still not decided what was to be done with young Mr. Pickett, he told himself this was a reasonable place to start. It was, after all, hunger which had led the lad to steal in the first place, and until the hunger was satisfied, the inclination toward thievery would remain; the demands of an empty belly far outweighed even the most basic points of law. Once inside the tavern, Mr. Colquhoun chose a table near the fire, laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and pushed him onto a chair.

A stout man behind the bar came hurrying forward to greet them. “Welcome, sir, and, er, sir,” he said, glancing uncertainly at the magistrate’s unusual companion. “What can I get for you?”

“Coffee for me, and—” Mr. Colquhoun hesitated, trying to recall what his own son had drunk at a similar age.

“Blue Ruin,” put in the youth.

“That stuff rots your insides,” Mr. Colquhoun informed him, scowling.

“I’ve been drinking Blue Ruin since I was seven!” the boy informed him indignantly.

“Yes, well, that was your first mistake.” On the other hand, the lad’s broken nose probably pained him dreadfully. Something to deaden the ache might not be amiss, but
not
the cheap gin that was the scourge of London’s underclass. To the barkeep he added, “Coffee for the boy, too, with cream and sugar and a drop—but only a drop, mind!—of brandy.”

He added a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheddar to the order and, upon learning that cold ham was to be had, asked for this as well. When it was brought to the table, he stifled a sigh for the roast beef that he might have had for dinner, then broke off a slab of bread and cut a slice of cheese from the wedge. Young Mr. Pickett observed this operation with longing in his eyes, but made no attempt to follow suit.

“Well?” the magistrate prompted him. “Are you going to make me eat all this by myself?”

Pickett looked up at the magistrate with utter bewilderment writ large upon his expressive countenance. “You mean—it’s for me?”

With exaggerated precision, Mr. Colquhoun looked first in one direction, then in the other. “I don’t see anyone else at the table.”

The boy needed no further urging. He set to with a will, stuffing food into his mouth until his cheeks bulged.

“No one’s going to take it away from you, child,” the magistrate said, not unkindly. You’d best slow down before you make yourself sick.”

John Pickett said something unintelligible around a mouthful of ham, but made no visible attempt to slacken his pace.

Mr. Colquhoun found himself thinking of his own son, recently embarked upon his first year at Cambridge. James’s table manners (or lack thereof) had frequently been the despair of his mother, who claimed he ate as if he didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. Now, as he watched the junior Pickett shoving the leftover pieces of bread into his pockets, Mr. Colquhoun realized that Janet’s complaint was no more nor less than the truth where this boy was concerned.

“Tell me, Mr. Pickett,” he said slowly, as a half-formed idea began to take shape in his brain, “if you had the means of earning an honest living, if you could have a place to sleep at night and food you didn’t have to steal, would you still engage in thievery?”

The boy shot a resentful glance in the general direction of the Bow Street office. “And give that fellow a chance to finish rearranging my face? Not hardly!”

“I might be able to call in a favour and place you somewhere as an apprentice, if you’re not afraid to work. But,” he added, bending a fierce look upon his young protégé, “you’ll have to stay out of trouble, mind you! If you turn up in Bow Street again accused of theft, you’ll not find me so lenient.”

“N-no, sir,” Pickett stammered. “I mean, yes, sir.”

Having won this commitment (although, given the boy’s paternity, Mr. Colquhoun had to wonder how much his word was worth), the magistrate ran through the various friends and acquaintances he had collected over the course of a long and varied career. At last he settled on one Mr. Elias Granger, a prosperous coal merchant. In the days before he had become a magistrate, Mr. Colquhoun had used his considerable knowledge of commerce and industry to assist the fledgling entrepreneur in launching this enterprise. And while in those early days Mr. Granger had delivered the coal himself, it stood to reason that he would have delegated the grimier aspects of the business to underlings as soon as he could afford to hire others to carry out the more menial tasks. Surely he could be persuaded to repay an old debt by finding a place for one more person in his employ
.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Have you finished, Mr. Pickett? Good! You and I are going to pay a call.”