Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

‘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 pseudo -gentleman, with a house in Weymouth-street, and more than a few pennies to his name.

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 study , to which I devoted all my talents of application and assimilation. I sought to master it intellectually, as I had mastered every subject to which I had turned my mind in the past; to tame and throw a leash round the neck of what I came to picture as the Great Leviathan, the never-sleeping monster in whose expanding coils I now dwelled.

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 extended my own experience of what this place – unique on God’s earth – could offer a man of passion and imagination.

I have no intention of laying before you my many amorous adventures; such things are tedious at best. But one encounter I must mention. The female in question was of that type known as a dress-lodger. §It was not long after the affair of Madame Mathilde, and I had returned to Regent-street to look again at the wares of Messrs Johnson & Co. She was about to cross the street when she caught my eye: well dressed, petite, with a dimpled chin and delicate little ears. It was a dull, damp morning, and I was close enough to see tiny jewels of moisture clinging to her ringlets. She was about to join a small group of pedestrians on a swept passage across the street. On reaching the opposite pavement she stopped, and half turned back, fingering an errant lock of hair nervously. It was then that I saw an elderly woman, crossing the roadway a few yards behind her. This, I knew by now, was her watcher, paid by the girl’s bawd to ensure that she did not abscond with the outfits provided for her. Girls such as she were too poor to deck themselves out in the finery required to hook in custom, like the sharp bobtails of the theatre porticos and the Café Royal.

I began to follow her. She walked with quick steps through the crowds, sure of her way. In Long Acre, I drew level with her. The business was swiftly concluded, her watcher retired to a nearby public-house, whilst the girl and I entered a house on the corner of Endell-street.

Her name was Dorrie, short for Dorothy. She had become what she was, she said afterwards, to support her widowed mother, who could now find no regular employment of her own. We talked for some time, and I found my heart begin to go out to the girl. At my request, she took me, with her watcher still a few paces behind us, to a cramped and damp chamber in a dreary court hard by. Her mother, I guessed, was only some forty years of age herself, but she was bent and frail, with a harsh wheezing cough. When I saw the evident signs of perpetual struggle and weariness on her face, I was immediately put in mind – though the cases were very different – of my own mother’s constant labours, and the toll that they had taken on her.

Almost without thought on my part, an arrangement was made. I never regretted it. For several years, until circumstances intervened, Mrs Grainger came two or three times a week to Temple-street, to sweep my room, take my washing away, and empty my slops.

As she entered of a morning, I would say: ‘Good-morning, Mrs Grainger. How is Dorrie?’

‘She is well, sir, thank you. A good girl still.’ And that is all we would ever say.