The Potato Factory (10 page)

Ikey now had the premises in Bell Alley working to his complete satisfaction. He hated waste and now he had turned every inch of space to profit - the cellar turning out counterfeit notes and, in daylight hours, printing handbills and pamphlets; the centre of the house supplying the physical and fantastical needs of bankers, lawyers, judges, magistrates and toffs in general; the attic serving as a counting house and storage for the rich fruits of his nocturnal harvesting.

Ikey was well pleased with himself. There remained no chinks in his emotional armour and he had kept Mary at his side by involving her in two of these activities. The forgery he shared with his wife Hannah and not with Mary, who did none of the bookwork involved.

Ikey had also persuaded Hannah never to venture near the premises at Bell Alley as implication in the forging of high denomination banknotes led to the death penalty. Ikey pointed out, though unnecessarily, that if they should both go to the gallows, all their property confiscated, their children would be alone and destitute in a cruel and uncaring world. Hannah needed no further encouragement to stay away. In this way Hannah was completely unaware of the existence of a high-class brothel at the Bell Alley address nor was she aware of Mary, the second woman in Ikey's life.

Though Ikey hated Hannah, she owned half of his ready fortune. That is, his convertible wealth, the gold sovereigns and ingots, silver and precious stones, for Ikey believed in liquid assets of the kind you could pack into a smallish space when you beat a hasty retreat. They shared everything equally by means of each of them only knowing a half of the combination to the safe they kept under the floorboards in the pantry of the Whitechapel house, so both were required to be present to open it and neither could escape with the contents without the co-operation of the other.

This was an agreement Ikey had foolishly made in earlier years when he had first been released from a prison hulk and the money taken from Hannah's bawdy houses had supplied the cash he needed to start up in the fencing business. Hannah had insisted on the basis that if Ikey was arrested again he might, under duress, reveal the combination to the authorities or various villains. He now regarded it as the single most foolish thing he had ever done, but Hannah had been unrelenting in her insistence that the practice be continued. Ikey comforted himself that while this prevented him from stealing the contents some day and deserting his wife, Hannah was placed in the very same predicament.

Mary took to the standing upright part of her profession handsomely and developed clear ideas of how she would conduct her role as mistress of a whorehouse to the gentry. She successfully persuaded Ikey that they must go first class with no corners cut and create an establishment second to none in London.

She furnished the house much like the Chelsea one she'd been chased from after the aborted affair with Bob Marley, though with a distinctly oriental flavour she'd observed in a picture of a salon in the window of a printing shop and which she persuaded the proprietor to sell to her. Mary spared not a penny in making the premises in Bell Alley grandly ostentatious with a front parlour lavishly done out in silks and rare carpets as well as erotic statues showing every form of human copulation. Many of the statues were painted in gold and bedecked in coloured ostrich feathers to make a dazzling display of erotica.

Ikey was a rich man, a very rich man, but not one given to spending it upon others. But persuaded by Mary that the best of London's professional and commercial society would beat a path to her door, or more correctly between her expensive linen sheets, where they would be attended by the most skilled and beautiful young courtesans in return for large amounts of money, he opened his purse to the fullest. At the same time he allowed that Mary should owe him thirty percent of the total cost of refurbishing, to be paid off from her future brothel earnings.

Mary was delighted. For the first time she was in control of her own life and she did not regard Ikey's terms as onerous. On the contrary, she was aware that she owed him a great debt and was determined that she would repay it with the utmost loyalty. Ikey was the first person who had shown her the least charity and she would never forget this. A great deal would happen in the course of this strange partnership, some good and much bad, but Mary would never deny that Ikey had been the means of her salvation.

In Mary's bawdy house Ikey could take vicarious pleasure in observing the high and the mighty at work through a peephole in the ceiling. He found it ironic and immensely pleasing to think that one day he was bound to stand trial before a bewigged and scarlet-robed judge and have the image recalled of this same m'lord, without breeches, fat belly wobbling, rogering one of Mary's plump little pigeons.

Mary's establishment made Ikey feel clean and respectable and even somewhat superior for the first time in his life and he grandly imagined himself a member, if only by proxy and proximity, of London's professional classes. Indeed, it gave him the greatest possible satisfaction that it was lawyers, judges, magistrates and bankers who became Mary's regular clients, the very men who, throughout his life, had caused him so much anxiety.

For Ikey it was money well spent and soon it was money most easily earned as men of the bench and at the bar and in the city knocked discreetly at the scarlet door of Mary's Bell Alley brothel.

For the most part Mary's clients shared two characteristics: the sprightliness and easy randiness of youth had long passed, though the memory of it remained bright as a sunlit morning. They came to Egyptian Mary's, as it became known, to attempt to relive the past while indulging any current fantasies.

The story of Mary's missing hands, often told with great conviction, added greatly to her fame and customers believed that many of the sexual fantasticals available to them stemmed originally from her time spent in the mysterious orient. Mary took to wearing a turban of multi-coloured silks which did nothing to dispel the rumours and added greatly to her mystique.

Mary taught her girls the use of belladonna to lift their spirits and to enter with enthusiasm into the many bondages, recitations, titivations, dressing ups and stripping downs, spankings, pretendings, offendings, excitements, oral, anal, frontal and often curiously banal, which her ageing, mostly pot-bellied, clientele required. They learned to be extravagant in their compliments and the most inadequate sexual performance was built to high praise so that the ageing participant left Egyptian Mary's convinced of his renewed and awesome virility.

There were three things not on offer at Egyptian Mary's but which could be procured at any other London brothel. Mary did not trade in little boys or girls or in young men.

This was not because Ikey had any morality in regard to the exploitation of children or whoresons, but Mary did. She loved children and each day at noon the brats would be at the scullery door for soup and bread which she had cooked up in a steaming cauldron so that she would feed fifty or more. Though she took care not to show them more than a rough affection, she longed to take the smaller children into her arms and hug them. Street children, she knew from her own experience, were feral animals and must be treated as wild creatures that would always bite the hand that fed them. Mary expected nothing from them and somehow they knew she was their friend, and even perhaps that she loved them. She earned their loyalty slowly with food and some physic and an occasional dressing for a cut or yellow ointment for their eyes, and they repaid her with gossip. Should a constable appear to be snooping there was always a child at the back door to alert her.

Though a new client might occasionally demand the services of a child or a young boy, a common enough request in almost any London brothel, Mary would refuse him and often in the process offend some high-ranking toff. London Town was swarming with starving urchins who would go with anyone for twopence or a plate of toasted herrings. There was no class in that sort of rough trade which was more for the likes of Hannah to supply, which she did without compunction. Mary had no trouble convincing Ikey, who wanted no close attention from the law paid to the premises on Bell Alley and he knew, better than most, that children cause trouble when grown men of the middle and upper classes are involved.

Several hours past midnight, long after the customers had been gratified, satisfied, slumbered, sobered and finally put into carriages and sent on their way, when the clicking of Mary's abacus beads ceased and the accounting books were made up in straight lines and neatly squared columns, Ikey would arrive.

He would come in from his vile night abroad where he received and paid and argued and bartered for stolen property in dimly lit taverns and tap rooms, brothels, flash-houses, netherkens and thieves' kitchens and it was usual for him to drop into the Pig 'n Spit where he passed some time at the ratting. His life was populated by all manner of villains, thieves, swell mobsmen, flash-men, touts, pickpockets, pimps, itinerant criminals and scallywags. His last call before returning to Egyptian Mary's was always within the great St Giles rookery, known in the vernacular as the 'Holy Land', to a decaying building long vacated by its original occupants. Here he unlocked the door and in darkness crept up a set of rickety stairs to the very top where the damp and decay had not yet fully penetrated.

Within this building resided a gang of carefully chosen urchins, street children who had been trained to Ikey's ways and who did his bidding. The youngest of them were stock buzzers or smatter haulers, stealers of silk handkerchiefs known as kingsmen which, as was the fashion with toffs, were conveniently carried protruding from the coat tail. Ikey would pay ninepence each for these, though some were worth as much as three shillings when later sold in Rosemary Lane.

Ikey was always on the look-out for a talent, a boy with fingers light enough to make a tooler. A tooler was the most elite of the pickpockets, a planner and plotter, a boy with brains, daring and courage. At any one time Ikey hoped for four toolers in the making and two fully blown and working at the top of their trade. A great tooler could go on to be a swell mobsman, though most, even some of the best, got their hands to shaking from too frequent imbibement of gin or brandy or found their minds preoccupied and numbed to action by the fear of being caught and transported.

Tooling was where the real money lay in the art of pickpocketing and it required four boys, the tooler himself, a stickman and two stalls and, if available, up to four urchins to transport the goods from the scene of the crime as quickly as possible.

The first stall would go ahead, scanning the crowd for members of the law or even a group of workmen or a large shop boy who might give chase to a thief in return for the prospect of a reward. The second stall was on duty between the tooler and the stickman and was generally a larger boy who was required to impede the progress of any person in too hot pursuit of the stickman, who was the first to receive the article from the tooler and get the transportation of the lifted goods under way. The tactics followed were to set a pattern, a routine worked by Ikey until it became second nature to the boys.

Choosing a victim was a task not taken lightly, for the tooler was trained to observe human nature in the smallest detail, to watch the mannerisms of a chosen quarry, how each talked and walked and where they placed their hands, with whom they conversed and where they stopped. Ikey would demand patience and careful selection. A pogue taken from a dizzy shop-girl containing one silver shilling carried the same penalty at law as a dumby lifted from a rich toff stuffed with Bank of England longtails and jingling with gold sovereigns. A garnet brooch deftly unclipped from the bombasine blouse worn by a nanny earned a gaol term or transportion no different to the neatest unclipping of a diamond pin from the silk bodice of a duchess.

'It's quality we's after, lads. To be sent abroad for the lifting of a tin brooch is a sin of character what can't never be recovered from. A gentleman's gold 'unter or a diamond pin, now that's a lay worthy o' true respect!' Ikey would pause, taking in the eager faces around him. 'We does not sell ourselves cheaply, my dears. Tooling is a most ancient and noble art and we are artists. Our fingers play as lightly upon a purse or dumby, diamond clip or gold yack as the fingers o' the greatest virtuoso alight upon the ivories of a harpsichord at a concert in 'onour of the King 'imself.'

Sometimes a promising quarry would be watched for days until the tooler knew precisely how and where to make the pull. A lady might be taken while shopping in the afternoon, this  being regarded as light-fingered practice for the more meaningful tooling of toffs and gentlemen during the evening to come. ' 'Umans is all predictable, observe the pattern and you know the mark,' Ikey would repeat ad nauseam to his dirty-faced pupils.

Ikey seemed never to tire of the training of these small boys. He started with them very young, not older than six or seven, for it was his belief that the lad who had not mastered the grammar of his art by the time his voice broke seldom reached any high degree of competence. He even taught them to cheat skilfully at the game of cribbage, for he understood that they would naturally grow up to be gamblers and he hoped to give his boys a better chance than most of keeping their ill-gained money in their own pockets.

In this respect and in many others he was known as the best and most famous of all the kidsmen and his toolers became the elite on the streets and in the busy arcades. Urchins would implore him to be enrolled in what Ikey referred to as the 'Methodist Academy of Light Fingers', a spoof on the Methodist Academy of Light, a Salvationist school for the honest poor, situated in an adjacent slum court in St Giles.