The Masters of Bow Street (8 page)

Thirty watermen plied their little wherries for hire, and the calls of ‘Eastward Ho!’ and ‘Westward Ho!’ were forever hovering on the river.

No law denied a man the right to build on the side of his property, or atop it, or beneath it, and so those who feared the law added rooms and shops, encroaching onto streets already narrow; and attics were built with narrow wooden stairways and sometimes only ladders, making such firetraps as London had not seen even before the Great Fire, which some old people could remember.

London’s burning, London’s burning.

Bringing different dangers were the cellars, dug into the gravel beneath the city, where damp rose and struck at the bones and joints of young and old, rats and other vermin thrived, and the seeds of the great plague festered until some special set of circumstances caused them to erupt into epidemics so fearful that the death carts could come again to the narrow streets. These ghettos, or rookeries, had narrow passages and connecting doors used to harbour thieves on the run from the law.

So London spread both up and down and at the seams until she swelled like a human being whose lungs were bursting.

The young novelist Henry Fielding, already stirred by a deep social conscience, said bitterly of the Charlies, who kept their slothful watch:

They were chosen out of those poor old decrepit people who are from their want of bodily strength rendered incapable of getting a living by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of His Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed villains.

In the cellars or the attics of grogshops the drunks lay in their stupor on bales of stinking straw; soon they would wake and stagger to the taproom and buy their penn’orth of gin so as to drink themselves back into oblivion. Much of the gin was bad, for all of it was illegal under the hated Act of 1736. Despite the public whipping ordered for all caught drinking gin, few tried seriously to enforce this, and none succeeded. In open defiance of the law, seven thousand quarters of wheat out of London’s yearly importation of twelve thousand quarters was used for alcohol, not one per cent of which was licensed.

The sober workmen slept.

The night watchmen, who were old and scarcely capable, dozed in their watchhouses.

The thieves slept as morning drew near. The whores and the good women slept with the same peace.

Lisa Braidley and Eve Milharvey slept, and so did the Reverend Sebastian Smith, next to his buxom wife and in a room apart from their five children, with whom the Marshall children sometimes played.

Even Dick Miller slept; and, exhausted by both tears and fright, so did Lilian Foster, by her husband’s side.

Only one of the Furnival family did not sleep well that night. She was Sarah McCampbell, sister of John and William and crippled Francis, Anne and Cleo. Recently widowed, she and her three children, two girls and a boy, were staying with Cleo while an apartment was being made ready for them. That night she lay awake, tossing and turning in the great four-poster bed, thinking of her husband; thinking, also, of her children, and in particular of her son Timothy, already a favourite with his aunts and uncles.

All of this family except John lived in various houses and flats in Great Furnival Square, built not far from Tyburn Lane and Hyde Park; then it had been two miles outside the limits of the metropolis but now most of the space was built up with fine squares and streets with easy access to Piccadilly and to Westminster. When the Square and the arches and the colonnades had first been built, there were many who had called it Great Furnival’s Folly. On the south side was the great house, taking up the whole of that side of the Square and facing a garden planned by Giacomo Leoni, the famous Italian who had laid out the gardens for the palaces of kings and noblemen. In this verdant garden grew trees and shrubs and flowers, roses such as never appeared on London streets; and there were gravel paths for the nursemaids to push their charges and all who had authority to walk.

By night and by day there were six middle-aged watchmen in the garden and the surrounding streets, armed with staves and with pistols and muskets close at hand. There were also six younger watchmen inside the great house, almost a museum, where the grandfather and the father of John and his brothers and sisters had lived. To the east and west were individual houses for members of the family. In one, William and his wife and seven children lived - five girls and two boys. In another lived Francis and Deborah and their two pale and puny children. Anne, oldest of the sisters, lived in another house with her husband, Jason Gilroy, whose banking and trading business had merged with the Furnivals’ on marriage. Gilroy travelled extensively in India and farther east, and Anne lived the life of a widow with her two children, boy and girl twins now aged fourteen. Next door to Anne was Cleo, long married to Robert Yeoman, Member of Parliament for one of the City constituencies. Two of their daughters were already married to young men who, if they chose, could each play a leading part in the growth of the great enterprises which had come to be known as the House of Furnival. Cleo also had a daughter aged seven and two sons, one slightly older and the other younger than Sarah’s son Timothy.

The Furnival family had first come to prominence in Queen Elizabeth’s day, with William, a banker. His oldest son, John, a man of great strength of will and unbounded ambition, had brought the business enterprises to great power, had built Furnival Tower House, so near the Tower of London, had even built some docks across the river and, of course, had created Great Furnival Square. Largely because of substantial loans he made to the Court he had been knighted.
His
oldest son, John the Second, had extended all the enterprises, and of his male children - John the Third, William, and Francis - had expected most of John the Third.

At first these expectations promised well. John the Third travelled the world, came to know the vast Furnival empire, and made a report of great detail and value to his father and brothers. Then he had simply stated his intention of withdrawing from business, taking his inherited money with him, and becoming a justice of the peace for Westminster. Nothing had dissuaded him.

There had never been a justice like him, for he could afford to keep peace officers and far more court officials, had great personal courage, and was incorruptible. He had become the scourge of London’s criminals; with a dozen like him, he might have cleansed the City and Westminster of crime. Certainly he tried without ceasing. When he had left the business he had also left his house in Great Furnival Square. By inheritance his, it was now occupied by poorer relatives; he did not keep even one room for his own use.

Here in Furnival Square and in nearby streets hundreds lived, but none who was not a Furnival, a relation of the family, or working for one or the other of the businesses.

It would have been difficult to find a square better kept or more attractive to the eye.

Three miles away, in the heart of the City of London, close to the Tower and with its warehouses fronting the river and St. Catherine’s Docks, were the Furnival offices, substantial and comparable with the biggest business houses, designed by Colin Campbell, whereas Furnival Square had been designed by the first John Furnival, working with a builder who had been one of those who had helped to build the Covent Garden piazza. Here were the head offices of all the Furnival businesses, from banking to shipping, importing and exporting; there were few branches of commerce with which Furnival and Sons was not associated, either directly or indirectly. Here, in Furnival Tower House, there was a private force of guards, or peace officers; and in the hundred years of its existence, none had ever been caught in the attempt. They had been taken to the mayor and to aldermen, to justices at the Guildhall and the Mansion House, from where they had been committed to the Sessions in Newgate or Bailey Street. No matter what the trade, or from whence it came, the Furnivals were involved. At first they had been discreet, often buying small companies, such as shipping merchants, small coastal shipping lines, small banks, and wholesale distributors who brought in the food from all of England as well as from distant lands. They owned farms in Scotland and Wales as well as in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, from where cattle and sheep were driven to London’s markets. There were Furnival-owned dairy and pig farms in Norfolk, herds of which crowded the rutted, muddy roads; they had farms in East Anglia, coal mines at all the strategic points for shipment to London by sea. They owned drays and carts in and near London, and had gradually extended their trade until, in the previous generation, it had been impossible to hide the enormous size of their trading empire. In the same year, 1705, they had founded the third of the great fire insurance companies; a year later, the land on which Great Furnival Square was built had been bought - then virtually worthless farmland.

No one knew how much their businesses were worth; but now they could compete openly with the great ducal landowners, with families that had been wealthy for centuries.

This, then, was the Furnival empire, controlled wholly by the family, with John the one ‘rogue elephant’ who would not conform to traditions created by his forefathers. And in all of the houses in Great Furnival Square people slept safe in their beds.

Soon London stirred.

Long before dawn the journeymen were on their way to work, leaving narrow doorways and lanes, stepping over piles of yesterday’s filth, stepping over some old sot who, not knowing it, had drunk himself to death on the day of Tyburn’s frolic.

And they stepped over foundling babes, some stark naked and blue with cold or even stiff with death before the light of day shone upon them, some bundled up in rags or blankets, perhaps sleeping, perhaps crying, all left by girls often no more than twelve or thirteen; the warm ones left by their mothers in the despairing hope that
one
child at least would be picked up and fondled and perhaps wet-nursed by a mother in desperate need of the relief of milk from her breasts, suckled, and cared for and even - loved.

The great Foundling Hospital, with a royal charter, was in preparation because of the unyielding persistence of Captain Coram. Dukes and earls were to be on its board of Governors; some even said the Prince of Wales, the Minister of State and the Archbishops would be, also. But so far, it was only an empty patch of wasteland near Holborn Garden.

James Marshall began his day at six o’clock, arriving only minutes later than Morgan, his employer, a good enough man as men went and a member of the Reverend Sebastian Smith’s congregation at St. Hilary’s, a small church soon, it was said, to be pulled down. Morgan was a true believer, who had taken James on because he had promised well and his mother needed help. For sixpence a day James laboured from six in the morning until eight or nine o’clock at night, delivering groceries as well as vegetables and fruit to the big houses nearby, to inns, dining rooms, coffee houses, brothels, and wherever food was needed.

Morgan professed to have great hopes of the boy. He might one day rise to a position behind the counter of this shop so redolent of spices, coffee and tea.

It was James himself who had thought of making a yoke, like an ox’s, and stringing larger bundles to it so that they equalled, as well as balancing baskets on his head and pushing the two-wheeled cart, so heavily laden when he set out that it was all his young muscles could do to shift the wheels.

But shift them he did - even on that morning.

It was grey and overcast, with a spit of rain in the air, enough to make one’s clothes damp, one’s hair wet and the cobbles slippery, so that it was difficult to guide the cart. Alone, seen by hundreds and noticed by none, he started the cart moving and was soon at the Bell Hotel, where a porter was waiting to unload; next he made several calls in Covent Garden piazza, going to back entrances and seeing none of the fading splendour.

By nine o’clock this round was done, and he pushed the empty cart through heavy rain, finding it almost as difficult to control as when it had been full. He was given a cup of thin vegetable soup and was then loaded and sent off again, this time towards Holborn. Horses and carriages splashed mud over him and the canvas sheet covering the packages in the cart and the yoke and baskets, making progress much slower and more difficult. Most of the people at the roadside were bowed against the rain; many brought their capes from their shoulders and covered their heads. The wooden posts driven along the road to separate horse-drawn vehicles and horses from those who walked were bent and broken because of so many accidents. Close to Newgate Street a solitary rider, going much too fast, swung into the path of a coach-and-four coming from Holborn. The driver tried to swing his horses away but the near-side front wheel crunched into one of the posts and a horse squealed as it banged a knee against another post. The rider went on, ignoring the shouts of the driver and passers-by. A crowd soon gathered. At the fringe a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, with a skeletal face and huge, hungry-looking eyes, darted forward and snatched at the packages beneath James’s canvas, but a man saw him and cuffed him away.

‘Thank you, sir,’ James said gratefully.

‘They’re thieves before they can walk,’ the man growled. ‘You be careful with your master’s goods, boy.’

‘Be sure I shall use my best endeavours, sir.’

Wherever he went during the next two hours he was haunted by that skeletal face, the hungry eyes, and the venom in the voice of the man who had prevented him from being robbed. Passing a grocer’s shop in Holborn there was a roar of ‘Stop thief!’ and the boy, the same one, came racing out of the shop, the owner or his man rushing after him, but stopping as the rain struck him like a wall of cold water. The little thief got away, hugging a loaf.

The big man shook his fist and roared: ‘If I catch him he’ll hang as sure as my name’s Jack Roberts!’