The Great Train Robbery (12 page)

Agar recalled that Willy presented “a ghastly aspect, most fearsome,” and he added that “he was bleeding like a stuck saint,” although this blasphemous reference was expunged from the courtroom records.

Pierce directed the swift treatment of the man, who was barely conscious. He was revived with the vapors of ammonium chloride from a cut-glass inhaler. His clothes were stripped off by the women, who pretended no modesty but worked quickly; his many wounds were staunched with styptic powder and sticking plaster, then bound with surgical bandages. Agar gave him a sip of coca wine for energy, and Burroughs & Wellcome beef-and-iron wine for sustenance. He was forced to down two Carter’s Little Nerve Pills and some tincture of opium for his pain. This combined treatment brought the man to his senses, and enabled the women to clean his face, douse his body with rose water, and bundle him into the waiting dress.

When he was dressed, he was given a sip of Bromo Caffein for further energy, and told to act faint. A bonnet was placed over his head, and boots laced on his feet; his bloody prison garb was stuffed in the picnic basket.

No one among the crowd of more than twenty thousand paid the slightest attention when the well-dressed party of hangers-on departed Mrs. Molloy’s boarding house—with one woman of their party so faint that she had to be carried by the men, who hustled her into a waiting cab—and rattled off into the morning light. A faint woman was a common enough sight and, in any case, nothing to compare to a woman turning slowly at the end of the rope, back and forth, back and forth.

It is usually estimated that seven-eighths of the structures in Victorian London were actually Georgian. The face of the city and its general architectural character were legacies of that earlier era; the Victorians did not begin to rebuild their capital in any substantial way until the 1880s. This reluctance reflected the economics of urban building. For most of the century, it simply was not profitable to tear down old structures, even those badly suited to their modern functions. Certainly the reluctance was not aesthetic—the Victorians loathed the Georgian style, which Ruskin himself termed “the
ne plus ultra
of ugliness.”

Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the
Times
, in reporting that a convict had escaped from Newgate Prison, observed that “the virtues of this edifice have been clearly overstated. Not only is escape from its confines possible, it is mere child’s play, for the fleeing villain
had not yet attained his majority. It is time for this public disgrace to be torn down.”

The article went on to comment that “the Metropolitan Police has dispatched groups of armed officers into the rookeries of the town, in order to flush out the escaped man, and there is every expectation of his apprehension.”

There were no follow-up reports. One must remember that during this period, jailbreaks were, in the words of one commentator, “quite as common as illegitimate births,” and nothing so ordinary was really newsworthy. At a time when the curtains of the windows of Parliament were being soaked in lime to protect the members against the cholera epidemic while they debated the conduct of the Crimean campaign, the newspapers could not be bothered with a minor felon from the dangerous classes who had been lucky enough to make a clean getaway.

A month later, the body of a young man was found floating in the Thames, and police authorities identified him as the escaped convict from Newgate. It received barely a paragraph in the
Evening Standard
; the other newspapers did not mention it at all.

After his escape, Clean Willy was taken to Pierce’s house in Mayfair, where he spent several weeks in seclusion while his wounds healed. It is from his later testimony to police that we first learn of the mysterious
woman who was Pierce’s mistress, and known to Willy as “Miss Miriam.”

Willy was placed in an upstairs room, and the servants were told that he was a relative of Miss Miriam’s who had been run down by a cab in New Bond Street. From time to time, Willy was tended by Miss Miriam. He said of her that she was “well carried, a good figure, and well-spoke, and she walked here and there slow, never hurrying.” This last sentiment was echoed by all the witnesses, who were impressed by the ethereal aspect of the young woman; her eyes were said to be especially captivating, and her grace in movement was called “dreamlike” and “phantasmagorical.”

Apparently this woman lived in the house with Pierce, although she was often gone during the day. Clean Willy was never very clear about her movements, and in any case he was often sedated with opium, which may also account for the ghostly qualities he saw in her.

Willy recalled only one conversation with her. He asked, “Are you his canary, then?” Meaning was she Pierce’s accomplice in burglary.

“Oh no,” she said, smiling. “I have no ear for music.”

From this he assumed she was not involved in Pierce’s plans, although this was later shown to be wrong. She was an integral part of the plan, and was probably the first of the thieves to know Pierce’s intentions.

At the trial, there was considerable speculation about Miss Miriam and her origins. A good deal of evidence points to the conclusion that she was an actress. This would explain her ability to mimic various accents and manners of different social classes; her tendency to wear make-up in a day when no respectable woman would let cosmetics touch her flesh; and her open presence as Pierce’s mistress. In those days, the dividing line between an actress and a prostitute was exceedingly
fine. And actors were by occupation itinerant wanderers, likely to have connections with criminals, or to be criminals themselves. Whatever the truth of her past, she seems to have been his mistress for several years.

Pierce himself was rarely in the house, and on occasion he was gone overnight. Clean Willy recalled seeing him once or twice in the late afternoon, wearing riding clothes and smelling of horses, as if he had returned from an equestrian excursion.

“I didn’t know you were a horse fancier,” Willy once said.

“I’m not,” Pierce replied shortly. “Hate the bloody beasts.”

Pierce kept Willy indoors after his wounds were healed, waiting for his “terrier crop” to grow out. In those days, the surest way to identify an escaped convict was by his short haircut. By late September, his hair was longer, but still Pierce did not allow him to leave. When Willy asked why, Pierce said, “I am waiting for you to be recaptured, or found dead.”

This statement puzzled Willy, but he did as he was told. A few days later, Pierce came in with a newspaper under his arm and told him he could leave. That same evening Willy went to the Holy Land, where he expected to find his mistress, Maggie. He found that Maggie had taken up with a footpad, a rough sort who made his way by “swinging the stick”—that is, by mugging. Maggie showed no interest in Willy.

Willy then took up with a girl of twelve named Louise, whose principal occupation was snowing. She was described in court as “no gofferer, mind, and no clean-starcher, just a bit of plain snow now and then for the translator. Simple, really.” What was meant by this passage, which required considerable explanation to the presiding magistrates, was that Willy’s new mistress was engaged in the lowest form of laundry stealing. The better echelons of laundry stealers, the gofferers and
clean-starchers, stole from high-class districts, often taking clothes off the lines. Plain ordinary snowing was relegated to children and young girls, and it could be lucrative enough when fenced to “translators,” who sold the clothing as secondhand goods.

Willy lived off this girl’s earnings, never venturing outside the sanctuary of the rookery. He had been warned by Pierce to keep his mouth shut, and he never mentioned that he had had help in his break from Newgate. Clean Willy lived with his judy in a lodging house that contained more than a hundred people; the house was a well-known buzzer’s lurk. Willy lived and slept with his mistress in a bed he shared with twenty other bodies of various sexes, and Louise reported of this period, “He took his ease, and spent his time cheerful, and waited for the cracksman to give his call.”

Of all the fashionable sections of that fashionable city of London, none compared to the spongy, muddy pathway in Hyde Park called the Ladies’ Mile, or Rotten Row. Here, weather permitting, were literally hundreds of men and women on horseback, all dressed in the greatest splendor the age could provide, radiant in the golden sunshine at four in the afternoon.

It was a scene of bustling activity: the horsemen and horsewomen packed tightly together; the women with little uniformed foot pages trotting along behind their mistresses, or sometimes accompanied by stern,
mounted duennas, or sometimes escorted by their beaus. And if the spectacle of Rotten Row was splendid and fashionable, it was not entirely respectable, for many of the women were of dubious character. “There is no difficulty,” wrote one observer, “in guessing the occupation of the dashing
equestrienne
who salutes half-a-dozen men at once with whip or with a wink, and who sometimes varies the monotony of a safe seat by holding her hands behind her back while gracefully swerving over to listen to the compliments of a walking admirer.”

These were members of the highest class of prostitute and, like it or not, respectable ladies often found themselves competing with these smartly turned-out demimondaines for masculine attention. Nor was this the only arena of such competition; it occurred at the opera, and the theatre as well. More than one young lady found that her escort’s gaze was fixed not on the performance but on some high box where an elegant woman returned his glances with open, frank interest.

Victorians claimed to be scandalized by the intrusion of prostitutes into respectable circles, but despite all the calls for reform and change, the women continued to appear gaily for nearly a half-century more. It is usual to dismiss Victorian prostitution as a particularly gaudy manifestation of that society’s profound hypocrisy. But the issue is really more complex; it has to do with the way that women were viewed in Victorian England.

This was an era of marked sexual differentiation in dress, manner, attitude, and bearing. Even pieces of furniture and rooms within the house were viewed as “masculine” or “feminine”; the dining room was masculine, the drawing room feminine, and so on. All this was assumed to have a biological rationale:

“It is evident,” wrote Alexander Walker, “that the man, possessing reasoning faculties, muscular power, and courage to employ it, is qualified for being a protector;
the woman, being little capable of reasoning, feeble, and timid, requires protecting. Under such circumstances, the man naturally governs: the woman naturally obeys.”

With minor variations, this belief was repeated again and again. The power of reasoning was small in women; they did not calculate consequences; they were governed by their emotions, and hence required strict controls on their behavior by the more rational and levelheaded male.