The Potato Factory (37 page)

The usher knocked on Nathaniel Wilson's door, the two rapid knocks required to indicate a bank employee of inferior status to the occupant.

'Come!' the banker called.

Wilson looked up as the elderly usher opened the door and observed that he was carrying a salver.

'What is it, Coote?' he said with annoyance. 'I was not aware of any appointment at this hour.'

'No, sir, gentleman says he's from Germany.' Coote placed the salver containing Ikey's card on the desk. 'He requests an urgent interview, sir.'

Wilson reached for the card with obvious distaste. Ikey's card was well printed on expensive board and, in the manner of a man confident of his position in life, it contained no detail other than a name and address.

Herr Isak Solomon 114 Bunders Kerk Strasse, Hambourg

Nathaniel Wilson looked up at Coote. 'German Jew?'

'No, sir, English. Well spoken, proper gentleman.'

Nathaniel Wilson threw Ikey's card back into the tray. 'You will inform Mr Isak Solomon that I shall see him, but that I regret it must be a short interview as his appointment comes as an unexpected but not entirely convenient pleasure.'

Coote returned shortly with Ikey and Nathaniel Wilson rose from behind his desk to greet him. 'Ah, Mr Solomon, are you aware that the name Solomon has much been in the news lately?' He offered his hand to Ikey. 'Indeed a coincidence, what?'

Ikey removed his pigskin gloves, then his top hat and placed the gloves within the interior of the hat and gave it to Coote together with his cane, deliberately keeping the banker waiting. 'Oh? And why is that, Mr Wilson?' he replied in an incurious voice as he moved forward and finally took Wilson's hand, barely touching it before releasing it again.

'Ikey Solomon, or is it Solomons? Notorious forger chap. Arrested several days ago for counterfeiting, it seems he got away with a fortune in sham Bank of England notes, devil of a mess, what?' Wilson concluded.

'Really?' said Ikey in bored tones. 'I've been abroad, you see. Now, I am aware you do not have much time, so I shall be brief. I wish to lodge a letter of credit with you from the Birmingham City and Country Bank and require you to transfer these funds to the First Manhattan Bank on New York Island.' Ikey withdrew an expensive leather folder from the interior pocket of his frock coat and placed it on the desk in front of him.

Nathaniel Wilson opened the leather folder and quickly examined the documentation, his eyes seeking the letter of credit. He was immediately struck by the large amount of money involved. His time would not be wasted, as the bank's commission from the transfer transaction would be considerable. It was therefore in a much more respectful manner that he conducted the remainder of the negotiations and verifications.

Not more than twenty minutes later, with the Coutts & Company certificate of deposit safely in the folder, and with effusive assurances from the banker of the utmost of service available at any future occasion, Ikey was escorted by Coote down the red-carpeted stairway with its brass banister, across the hall of polished marble, through the imposing doors and down the steps to where Abraham and Moses Julian waited beside the carriage. Ikey paused as Abraham held open the carriage door for him and handed Coote a sovereign.

'Good day to you, Coote,' he said in his newly acquired accent.

'Bless you, sir,' the old man replied warmly. 'It's been a pleasure.'

The notorious luck of Ikey Solomon had once again held. With a pinch more, a
soupcon
of the same, he was on his way to America.

In his mind there formed yet another conclusion which he was most hard put to ignore any longer.

It was Hannah who, on both occasions, had betrayed him.

The thought of Hannah's betrayal brought Mary to Ikey's mind, Mary who had not betrayed him when she could have turned King's evidence and given witness most damaging to his case and, by so doing, spared herself the boat.

Ikey now felt a rare and genuine pang of conscience within his breast. Mary was in Newgate, incarcerated in a dungeon cage with a dozen other foul wretches and he had made no attempt to acknowledge her presence. This sharp stab of guilt almost immediately transformed itself into a surprising softness of feeling for Mary. It was an emotion not altogether different to the crisis of feeling which had overcome him in the coach to Birmingham. Ikey wondered in some panic whether there was a connection between the interior of coaches and his soft-headedness, for he was possessed suddenly by a compelling need to send fifty pounds to Mary so she might ameliorate the rigours of her transportation and be supplied with the necessities required on the troublesome and dangerous voyage to Van Diemen's Land. He would urge Abraham to seek her out in Newgate, acquaint her of his good wishes and give her the money as a token of his great esteem.

Ikey was uncertain as to whether this generosity came about because of the tender feeling for Mary which had come so overwhelmingly and unexpectedly upon him, or whether he wished only to ensure the continuance of his luck by putting right his bad conscience towards her. He knew only that he felt compelled to comply with this strange dictate which otherwise made no sense to his head and yet seemed so powerful to his heart. He told himself, though to no avail, that he was being foolishly generous with a gesture which could show him no future profit as he would not, in the further course of this life, see Mary again.

This last thought left Ikey in a surprisingly melancholy mood, for he realised how the routine of his life had been brought undone and how much a sustaining and pleasant part of it Mary had become.

This further onrush of sentiment led to an even more surprising gesture than the money Ikey told himself he had effectively thrown away. In fact, so foolish was the new thought that he feared some mischievous
golem
had possessed him. Around his neck he wore a gold chain from which was suspended, in the exact size and weight of gold in a sovereign, a medallion which commemorated the battle of Waterloo, and which carried a likeness of the Duke of Wellington on one side and a crescent of laurel leaves on the other. Nestled in the centre of this leafy tribute, fashioned in a small pyramid of words, was inscribed:

I

Shall

Never

Surrender

Ikey, shortly after his release from the hulk in Chatham and while working with his uncle, a slops dealer, that is to say a dealer in workmen's and sailor's clothes, had won the gold medallion at a game of cribbage from a sergeant in the Marines. It had been won fair and square and also while Ikey was legitimately employed, a conjunction of events which was never to occur again in his life, and so the medallion was a significant memento and had come to assume an importance to him. He always wore it under his woollen vest, where the warmth of its gold lay against his scrawny chest unseen by any other. Like the tattoo of the two blue doves on his arm, which, as a young man, had signified his secret and now entirely forsaken hope that one day he might find his one and only true love, the Wellington medallion was his special talisman.

At each narrow escape from the law or at the hands of the various people who would harm him, he had come to think of it more and more as the reason for his luck. Now he decided that if his luck should hold to the point when later that very night he would slip aboard a cargo vessel bound on the rising tide for Denmark, Mary should have his Wellington medallion.

Ikey, having determined this course of action, tapped on the roof for the coach to come to a halt, whereupon he bade Abraham come and sit beside him in the interior. As the coach moved on towards the docks he told Abraham in great detail what he was to do and say to Mary, his speech punctuated with a sentimentality Abraham had not thought possible in the man he knew Ikey to be. Ikey then took the medallion from about his neck and handed it, together with fifty pounds, to the young tailor to deliver to Mary.

In truth, it must be supposed that the concerns of the past few hours had greatly affected Ikey's mental state, for at the moment of this decision, if he had paused to consult his head and not pandered to the susceptibility of his heart, it would have declared him insane.

Ikey was giving Mary his luck.

Mary had been cast into a communal cell in Newgate to await her sentencing. Charged before a magistrate for running a bawdy house and with moral corruption, she was bound over in Newgate to await trial at the Old Bailey.

She had good reason to hope that her sentence might be a lenient one. Prostitution and earning a living off prostitutes did not generally earn the penalty of transportation. Indeed one might venture to say that 'moral corruption' was a fair description of the institution of the State itself.

The hard times which followed the Peninsular War against Napoleon, the effects of factory-produced cotton from Manchester on the wool and silkweaving cottage industries, and the migration of the Irish to England during the famines, created untold misery in the rural population. Their desperate migration in search of work caused calamity in the cities and, in particular, London, where among the poor prostitution, though not officially stated as such, was looked upon as a legitimate occupation for women who would otherwise be destitute, reduced to the workhouse or left to starve.

Mary had every reason to feel confident that she would receive perhaps as little as three months and no more than twelve months. Prior to her trial she had been approached by a City police officer to turn King's evidence against Ikey. But she had not implicated him, insisting that their relationship had been one of great circumspection and that he was merely her landlord.

Mary had invested ten pounds of her limited resources on a lawyer and hoped that the judge would see through the hypocrisy of her arrest, or, in any event, judge her most leniently. The lawyer, too, was confident and assured her of a speedy trial with, at most, a short sentence.

'Why, my dear, there is every chance that the judge has himself enjoyed the tender ministrations of your young ladies and behind his worship's wig and po-faced visage he bears you nothing but goodwill!' He was pleased that so simple a case to plead had earned him so generous a fee, for had Mary claimed hardship, he would happily have taken a case so free of conjecture for half the amount she had paid him.

It was therefore a shock beyond any imagining when Mary, arraigned before a judge she did not recognise at the Old Bailey, listened in increasing consternation to the clerk of the court. He, having read the original indictment, paused and informed the judge that the prosecution wished to add a further two charges, requesting the court's permission to do so. The judge agreed to add a further two counts and issued the warrant returnable immediately.

Mary listened in horror while the new charges were read out: 'That the accused had wilfully and maliciously killed the pet cat of Miss Maude Smith, nanny to the house of Sir James Barker of the King's Road, Chelsea. Furthermore, and in the second indictment, that she did steal a book, to wit,
Gulliver's Travels,
loaned to her through the negotiations of Thomas Bishop, the butler to Sir James, who had sought the co-operation of his master to make his private library available to the accused.'

Mary's lawyer immediately entered a plea asking that the two additional charges be set aside for a later hearing, pointing out that his client had not been apprehended for either supposed crime.

The prosecution then presented a warrant for Mary's arrest and the judge agreed that it be served on her within his court, whereupon he ruled that both new charges could be included with the original indictments and that they could be heard concurrently.

In discovering the details of Mary's background Sir Jasper Waterlow had proved himself a clever detective. At the same time he had met Hannah's conditions without the need for complicity with a member of the bench. While the charge of running a bawdy house was unlikely to receive a sentence of transportation, this was not the case with the new charges.

It was during the hearing of the second set of indictments that Mary's life came suddenly and irrevocably unstuck. Despite her desperate pleas from the dock that she had not put a hand on the ageing, nose dripping, fur shedding, pissing, fur ball vomiting Waterloo Smith and, furthermore, that the book,
Gulliver's Travels,
had been a parting gift from Thomas Bishop himself, it soon became obvious that she had no hope of being believed by the court. Both Nanny Smith and Thomas Bishop appeared as witnesses for the Crown, and while Nanny Smith was triumphant in her testimony, Bishop spoke quietly with downcast eyes throughout the hearing.

Whether the judge was a cat lover or a bibliophile, or both, is not known, but he seemed to be strangely agitated by the evidence he had heard. Before pronouncing sentence he saw fit to deliver, to the increasing delight of a cackling Nanny Smith, a lengthy address on Mary's moral turpitude.

'I find myself unwilling to grant leniency in this case before me, as it strikes at the very heart of civilised behaviour. It is common enough in the assizes to confront a person, a yokel who may have stolen a sheep, or pig or poached game, a fat pheasant or a clutch of partridge eggs, from his master's estate. Heinous as these crimes may be, it can be argued that the poor wretch may have had need of the flesh of these beasts or birds to feed a hungry family. While his be no less a crime in the eyes of the law, it is one which, in some instances, is worthy of our compassion, if not our mercy.'