The Masters of Bow Street (42 page)

He paused for breath and James was tempted to remark, ‘I perceive you are out of temper!’ or some such, but stopped himself in time. Instead, he asked carefully, ‘What has distressed you so, David?’

‘Distressed? I am livid with rage! If I had the necks of any one of the stinking sons of harlots here, I’d squeeze the breath out of them! Do you know what those demagogues at the Palace of Westminster have done? They’ve told John Fielding they are not likely to continue their support. There have been many complaints, especially from the City merchants, about what we are doing at Bow Street. Here, for a few paltry pounds, we are giving the whole of the metropolitan area within the tollgates freedom from criminals, for the first time we have armed men who will give chase the moment crimes are reported, for the first time citizens realise it is worth reporting all robbers and suspicious events quickly. And the government heeds a few City merchants who say we are driving criminals into the City! It is monstrous!’

He stopped short as Mary entered the room, then told her what had happened, this time speaking with more reserve.

‘Possibly the government’s mood will pass. Certainly The Clarion will come out strongly against the Lord Mayor’s proposals.’

‘Perhaps among The Clarion’s readers there will be some to help,’ Mary suggested. ‘I must confess there are times when I almost wish Henry Fielding had spent more time writing novels than coping with crime. I declare I have never been more entertained than by Tom Jones.’

‘Then it is time Jamey found a better way to entertain you,’ David declared, his expression clearing. ‘Perhaps he could take you with him while he pelts the Duke of Newcastle with rotten oranges.’

Despite having had ample opportunity, it was a fact that James had never had a love affair of any kind. Although occasionally he was stirred to interest by a young woman, he had felt no sense of urgent physical need, and although he had often been sexually aware of Mary, he felt a deep obligation not to take advantage of her friendship in any way. Yet the more he saw of her, the more he enjoyed her company.

Since the shooting affray he had become aware of a sense of loneliness. And he now had financial independence. The business, widely known as ‘Mr. Londoner’, was making a substantial profit, and James suddenly realised that not only could he afford far greater comfort than he now permitted himself, he could also afford a wife and children.

Suddenly it came to him that Mary might have no desire to marry - or to marry him. Conceited fool, he told himself, what makes you so desirable?

From that moment on he could not wait to ask for her hand.

On the next occasion that Mary visited him, he was so nervous that at first she was puzzled. It was a cold night, a wind was howling, and her cheeks were rosy and her eyes were bright as she spread her hands towards the fire. He did not believe she had ever been more attractive, and he knew that he had never been more tongue-tied. He went down on one knee to take off the big overshoes she wore, and quite suddenly he was on both knees, holding her hands tightly and peering up into her face. Still his jaws seemed locked.

Very slowly she bent down until their eyes were level, and she smiled and said gently, ‘How can you expect words to come when you are looking up at someone far less worthy than yourself?’

‘Less worthy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you mad, Mary? Why, you are worth - you are worth—’

Words stuck in his throat again, but he could see that her eyes were glowing, and he knew what her answer would be before he asked the question.

Huskily he said, ‘Mary, I love you.’

‘I love you, sir,’ she replied.

But he hardly heard her as he blurted out, ‘I - I beg you to marry me.’

‘I shall not find it difficult to do so,’ she declared.

‘Now!’ he cried, suddenly understanding and wild with delight. ‘Soon!’

‘As soon as you wish and can,’ she replied gently, ‘and if you are sure you really desire me for a wife, or indeed really desire a wife at all. Or—’

He kissed her to silence.

He kissed her until he was almost dazed with joy.

He was more aware of her than he had ever been, and that no doubt was why, later in the evening, when it was nearly time for her to leave and after they had eaten fine mutton chops and mint jelly and fried suet pudding, he said, ‘Mary, I - I confess to some embarrassment.’

‘With me, Mr. Marshall?’

‘With you, Miss Smith!’ He touched her hands, and then with a boldness he had not known before, he stepped behind her and placed his hands on her bosom and drew her to him, so that they were close together. ‘I can say this best without looking you in the eye. I shall probably be disastrously inadequate on our wedding night.’

‘Inadequate,
sir?’

‘I can think of no better word. I—’ He swallowed but made himself go on. ‘It has never been - I have never - Oh, damnation, where is my courage? I have never known a woman, Mary!’

She stood very still and he felt for a few moments that he had disappointed or troubled her, but slowly she gently pressed his hands and said in a voice soft at first but gradually gaining strength, ‘And I have never known a man, Jamey. So there will be two of us in the same—’

‘Bed!’ he cried.

‘Bed!’ she echoed. Then she drew away from him and said in a trembling voice, ‘If I stay longer, I shall not be able to say on our wedding night what I have just said.’

‘Provided we do not have to wait too long—’

‘Jamey,’ she said, ‘I would like ours to be a very simple ceremony, performed by my father and with only close friends as witnesses. Will that hurt you? If my father had a church of his own it would be different, but I do not think he will ever have one again and’ - mischief forced its way through her brief sadness - ‘that would mean too long a wait.’

‘As soon and as quick as you wish,’ he replied.

Because Timothy was in the north of England, visiting relatives at Newcastle, only the Weygalls, David Winfrith and Benedict and Nicholas Sly were at the wedding. James had sent a brief letter to his mother and Henrietta and another to Francis Furnival, saying that when they received the missive he would have taken a wife and asking all three to come to visit them as soon as could be arranged.

After the ceremony they paid a brief visit to the home of Paul and Mathilda Weygalls, then went directly to the rooms over the shop in the Strand. Already James had moved up another flight of stairs, to a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed large enough for a dozen people.

‘Jamey,’ Mary said, ‘I think we shall find that we know most of what we need to know already.’

‘Absorbed as we have lived?’ he asked, with forced lightness.

‘Absorbed into our mind as we have lived! For instance, I can assume from what your hero Henry Fielding has made clear in his novels that a bold bride would come to the bed undraped.’ Soon she said, ‘Whether ‘tis fair that the woman should always lie beneath the man I do not know.’ Still there was laughter in her.

‘Somewhere in my readings I have absorbed the notion that it is not always so.’ Happiness and eagerness and apprehension affected James. ‘Even as I lie here, doing nothing, I have a stirring in my loins.’

‘What a strange euphemism!’

‘It has Biblical precedent, ma’am.’ His breathing was shorter now, and he kissed her, then drew back, and in the movement was closer to and even more aware of her. ‘But for tonight I’m happy enough to accept your judgment,’ he said, and gently began to stroke her breasts until suddenly, incredibly, she said in a voice he could hardly hear, ‘Arise, Sir James.’

‘What did you say?’ he began - until he was aware of the gentleness of her hand on him and of so overwhelming a desire for her that all else was forgotten.

They did not go out of London for the week which followed their marriage and James took Mary to the City, where - to his astonishment - she had never been. The contrasts appalled yet fascinated her: the magnificence of St. Paul’s and the Tower of London side by side with dilapidated alleys and buildings; the once great houses now grown over with grass and lichen, next to broken-down brothels with young girls old before their time anxiously waiting at the shabby doors and windows.

‘I confess I am glad we shall not live in the City,’ Mary said at the end of their visit. ‘But this is a week I shall never forget, my love. A happy, happy week.’

Their first child was born on the eighth day of October, 1756. He was named James, and they called him Jimmy.

The child put the seal on their marriage, which drew them very close yet kept neither from individual activities, and James spent as much time at Bow Street as ever.

There was no end to John Fielding’s energy or determination, and as James watched him in court, he realised the absolute importance of this one man: but for Fielding and his handful of loyal workers, criminals might well have taken over the whole of the metropolis.

More and more James understood the vital need for a larger, fully professional peacemaking force.

To his deep satisfaction, no one agreed with him as much as Mary.

‘It is a remarkable thing,’ David Winfrith pronounced, sitting on a carved oak chair in the Marshalls’ living room. ‘They will not give John Fielding enough money, they will not give him men, they will not give him moral support for whatever that is worth, but they will give him a knighthood.’

James Marshall, on one knee beside young Jimmy, now five years old, who was struggling with a set of building bricks, looked up sharply.

‘No man deserves the accolade better,’ James declared.

‘No man knows better what he deserves,’ said Winfrith. ‘The letter to the Duke of Newcastle in which Fielding suggested that giving him this knighthood would increase public respect for him was a stroke of genius.’

‘You mean he asked for the honour?’ Mary, coming in from the kitchen, with a baby in her arms, was so surprised that she missed a step.

‘That he did,’ replied Winfrith. ‘And if I know John Fielding, he will shortly write to say that a man who has been knighted by His Majesty must keep up appearances and no where could money be better spent than on Bow Street Court and the Bow Street Runners.’

‘Runners?’ Mary echoed.

She sat down beside James, the child in her arms suckling contentedly. From the kitchen beyond came a shrill cry from their middle child, three-year-old Charles. The Weygalls’ eleven-year-old girl was playing with him, but Charles was not the easiest child to amuse.

‘Runners they are and Runners I should like them to be called, though they’re still known as Mr. Fielding’s men,’ said Winfrith. ‘But men or Runners, today we have two less than we did seven years ago.’

‘And fewer highway robberies and footpads,’ James remarked.

‘That is the bitter irony of what is happening,’ Winfrith said tensely. ‘Mr. John - Sir John! - works miracles with the six men he has. Imagine, six men to keep the peace of the whole of London at a cost of less than four hundred pounds a year! And because the incidence of crime is kept low, the government insists that the system is a great success.’

‘And so it is,’ a man said in a deep voice from outside the door.

‘Ben!’ exclaimed Mary. ‘I did not know that you were back.’

‘Truth to tell I hardly knew myself.’ Benedict Sly laughed. He peered at the child and patted Mary’s shoulder affectionately. ‘So there is young Dorothy. Bless my soul, how time flies. It seems only a few days since it was Master James you were nursing and - let me see - it must be all of five years.’

The past five years had been eventful and dangerous ones for Britain, with savage defeats abroad.

Of the three men, Benedict Sly had aged the least in appearance, despite a bushier black beard, which now gave him a fearsome appearance. He had put on no weight, and despite a long coach journey, his eyes were alert and his expression was bright. He had been to the Americas to see at first hand what had happened there since the French had been defeated in Canada and the northern colonies. His friends had known that he would soon be back but had not realised it would be so quickly.

David Winfrith had aged in appearance not five but nearer fifteen years. His face was deeply lined and his hair, once fair, was now almost white. Anxiety and anger, the loss of two of his three children in a smallpox epidemic, and the effect of this on his wife, whom the shock had turned simple-minded, had contributed much towards this ageing. The rank air of the Bow Street courtroom, long hours of work on meagre pay, insufficient food, and recurrent attacks of jail fever caught from prisoners had been responsible for the rest. Although his suit was shabby and his plain waistcoat and cravat badly spotted, the piercing blue-grey eyes were unchanged. But there was a sharp edge to his voice as well as to his temper.

James Marshall was little changed. At thirty-two he was fuller at the jaw and middle, but still lean and upright. Years had made his chiselled face more, not less, handsome. He had not known a moment’s regret at marrying Mary and indeed had little cause for sadness except for David’s ill fortune. He had tried, and so had Mary, to help with money, but David’s spirit of independence had grown fiercer along with age and the difficulties of his condition.

‘If I take charity from a friend,’ he would say, ‘I lose a friend.’

It was useless to argue with him.

The bitterness he had shown a few minutes earlier faded in pleasure and excitement at seeing Benedict Sly, who was taking off his coat in the warm room. Mary took the children into the kitchen, leaving the men on their own.

‘’Tis an excuse for wine,’ James declared; he kept wine for his friends but was himself adamantly teetotal. He poured the amber-coloured liquid into deep goblets and his two visitors were drinking when Mary came in with a platterful of biscuits and rock cakes. She had really brought these for David, James reflected, watching Winfrith hold back until Benedict had taken one.

Benedict finished his wine before speaking in a graver tone than he had used thus far. ‘I will do an editorial on America now I am back. But my first article will be to congratulate Sir John Fielding on his knighthood.’