The Potato Factory (17 page)

Hannah, only slightly comforted by the fact that no warrant existed for Ikey's arrest, was nevertheless fearful of what the future might hold and she knew she would need to make plans. She had endured one six-year period with almost no means when Ikey had been imprisoned. Now they were rich and they should think about going to live in America or, if Ikey should escape the forgery charge, Sydney Town, though she was realistic enough to know that this was unlikely.

On the rare occasions Hannah had discussed the consequences of crime with Ikey, he had pointed out to her that the crime of forgery carried the hangman's noose, the death penalty. Hannah dared not think further on that matter.

However, she was not above thinking that the ideal situation was to see Ikey transported for life to Botany Bay, leaving her to settle in America with their total assets in her sole possession, though she could think of no way to bring this about. If Ikey avoided being indicted for forgery but was arrested as a fence and proved unable to fee the arresting officers, then she too could be implicated and would receive a similar sentence of transportation. In the unlikely event that she was able to prove her innocence, Ikey knew she could easily live off the proceeds of her six bawdy houses and, while the hope of completing his sentence existed, would never agree to giving her control of their combined resources.

Even if she should contemplate divorce, by definition of law the wealth they'd accumulated together remained the property of the husband. Hannah was quite unable to contemplate such an outcome. In the event of a separation, she would be rendered virtually penniless. Yet in Hannah's mind, all the money rightfully belonged to her. Ikey was no more than a retriever is to a hunter, the dog that brings in the bird and who has no subsequent rights to the spoils from the day's shooting.

In this Ikey seemed to support Hannah's expectations, for he had no apparent need for money. He spent none on himself - even his watch and chain were of very little value lest he be robbed for it. He had only one small personal indulgence, this being the sport of ratting. He kept three of the best rat-killing terriers in England, cared for by a trainer, a butcher in the village of Guildford. But even in the ratting pit he would bet modestly.

Ratting was a sport which involved every grade of society, the ordinary poor, criminals, shop assistants, servants, toffs and even occasionally some of the nobility on the slum, each gambling according to his own means. Or, as Ikey hoped, beyond his means. Ikey saw the rat-pit as another opportunity to make money. There were very few seasoned gamblers at the rat-pits on Great St Andrews Street who, at some time or another, were not in debt to him.

With little taste for the sport of gambling itself, but with a fondness for the game little terriers, ratting was the closest Ikey ever came to being of a charitable nature, for should a client owe him a considerable sum of money, he would extend him a further loan against the odds given on one of his own terriers. This was considered most generous in the circles of ratting, for should his terrier win the bout then Ikey accepted the winnings as part or full payment of the loan.

However, if Ikey's terrier lost, then the money loaned would be added to the gambler's outstanding debt. Ikey's charity was limited to a single attempt to wipe out a gambling debt and, as often happened, if the debt was a large one and the gambler, being as gamblers are, bet sufficient on one of Ikey's terriers to eliminate the money owed, and the terrier lost, then the debt naturally doubled. When this happened it was generally agreed that the offender should forfeit goods or services to cover the outstanding money. Many a toff or member of the moneyed classes lost an item of value from his household in this manner, the convenience and advantage that Ikey was a fence and the article could be handed straight over to pay the debt without first being converted to cash.

Common criminals who had given their marker to Ikey undertook many a burglary and handed the contents of their night's work over to him, whereupon their marker was returned so they would remain in good standing for a future loan.

It was generally conceded in ratting circles that Ikey's terriers, which came from the Forest of Dean on the Welsh border, were exceedingly well bred and highly trained for courage and of the very best disposition for the rat-pit. The little black and brown terriers, usually the smallest dogs brought to the rat-pits, more often than not took the prize from bigger and more naturally brutal animals. Ikey's sparing use of his terriers to regain money lost by his clients was well regarded in the sport, and it was the only endeavour in Ikey's life where those about him did not look upon him as a rapacious and vile member of the Christ-killing race.

However, Ikey's reluctance to let his little terriers into the pit too often had nothing whatsoever to do with his desire to be well regarded, but was in a great part due to a sentimental consideration for them. Sewer rats give dogs canker, which is eventually the death of them. After each killing in the rat-pit Ikey would rinse the pretty pink mouths of his tiny terriers with peppermint and water and return them to their trainer with instructions to carefully tend the rat bites they had sustained. It was a tenderness he had never shown his children or any other living person, not even Mary, whom he would have been quite unable to stroke or touch as he did the little dogs he owned.

Ikey, like every other dog owner in England, dreamed of one day owning another Lord Nelson, a legendary ratter. Lord Nelson was so small he used to wear a lady's jewelled bracelet as a collar, weighed but five pounds and a half and had once killed two hundred rats in a single evening. It was said that, at times, some of the sewer rats pitted against him were his equal in size. But there was never a one or even a dozen together in the rat-pit who could bring the little terrier to a halt or bail him up. Ikey dreamed of owning a dog such as Lord Nelson though, for once, not for the money it could wring from the rat-pit. It was because he was so small, the smallest ratter ever to win in the pits, yet this miniature terrier, like Lord Nelson himself, who stood at only four feet and ten inches, contained a courage greater per pound of weight than any dog that had ever lived to kill a rat.

Ikey, too, was small and thought of himself as weak and a coward. A dog such as Lord Nelson proved the exception to the rule that the small and the weak must always eat shit. Had another such as Lord Nelson presented itself for sale, then Ikey might for the first time have understood a reason for money beyond avarice. He would be prepared to pay a king's ransom for a dog like-proportioned to Lord Nelson and as well proven in the pits.

Even the sport of ratting could not claim to involve Ikey in the need for money, since the costs of keeping the dogs fit for ratting constituted only a small part of his total earnings from the sport. Ikey didn't need or use money for the material things it could buy, he simply accumulated it. When he required clothes or boots, he bought them secondhand in the markets around the corner or in Rosemary Lane, bargaining fiercely for an embroidered, long-sleeved waistcoat, or a pair of well-worn boots from a secondhand shoe dealer in Dudley Street. Ikey couldn't abide new shoes or even new hose and preferred his stockings to be well darned at the heels and knees. Only his great coat was purchased new, made bespoke of the finest wool to his own precise instructions with a hundred concealed pockets, the whereabouts of which required an exacting layout memorised in his mind.

In fact, this coat represented the very nature of Ikey Solomon. He, himself, was a hundred pockets, each concealing hurt: some contained past abuse, some inadequacies and some were stuffed with deformities of thought. In others past injustices rattled, yet other pockets contained abnormalities and social obscenities. A host of pockets were filled with past woundings which rubbed raw against insults, hatreds and peculiar malice. Ikey carried all the sins and bitter blows, pocks and pits of his wandering kind in the pockets of his mind. They became the total of who he was, the whole, concealed by a cloak of indifference to the outside world.

The sole importance of money to Ikey was protection. Money bought sycophancy and this passed well enough for respect. Money kept those who would destroy him at a proper arm's length. Money was the lining of the protective coat which concealed him from a dangerously cold and malevolent world.

For Hannah no such problem of concealment with a metaphorical garment existed. Her loathing of Ikey was the centre of her everyday preoccupation, and his accumulation of wealth her single reason for their coupling. Hannah saw Ikey as a servant to her ambition, and his wealth the means to purchase the social aspirations she so earnestly desired for herself, and for the futures of her six children. She had invested in Ikey as one might in the cargo of an opium clipper, and her expectation was for a handsome end profit.

Two days later Hannah received a very discreet messenger sent by the Upper Marshal of the City of London, Sir Jasper Waterlow. The messenger, a small, polite man in a frock-coat and top hat, somewhat too big for his head, stated that Sir Jasper wished to see her on a matter to her great advantage. She was naturally filled with apprehension though it did not occur to her to refuse his request, especially as the messenger had gone to great pains to assure her that she was not under arrest. She was to present herself at the Blue Wren coffee house in Haymarket on the following day, at precisely two o'clock.

Dressed in her Sabbath finery and having purchased a new best bonnet in the latest style, she pulled up at the Blue Wren, her barouche, hired by her father for the occasion, arriving at the coffee house door at precisely the appointed hour.

She announced herself to the surly proprietor, who took her cloak and ushered her to a small room to the rear of the premises where Britain's senior policeman, Sir Jasper Waterlow, waited for her. He neither rose from his chair nor took her hand at her entry. His expression was most acidic, as though the task at hand caused a sour taste in his mouth. Hannah thought this appropriate enough, expecting no different from the law.

Sir Jasper pointed to the remaining chair, there being but two upright chairs and a small table in the room. 'Sit, Mrs Solomons. I know you are aware of who I am, so I shan't introduce myself. Ceilings in such places have ears and the walls act as veritable trumpets for the deaf.' Then he added, 'It is not one's custom to be seen
or
heard in such an establishment and so I shall come directly to the point.'

The Upper Marshal of London was a small man though with a markedly large egg-shaped head. Its surface, including his chin, was quite free of hair but for three separate places: a very handsome black moustache curled and waxed at the ends, his eyebrows, equally dark and shaggy to the extreme and a pair of elaborate side whiskers which appeared to have been hot tonged and curled to resemble two dark tubes. They rested upon his jowls as though convenient handles to lift his over-sized head from his exceedingly narrow shoulders. His eyes were tiny, almost slits and his lips so narrow and straight that they suggested themselves as a single bluish stripe under his moustache. Indeed, had it not been for the large unlit cigar clamped between them, his mouth might have gone unnoticed. The only feature not yet remarked upon was his nose. It seemed a creature of independent life, large, bulb-shaped and wart-textured, and all together of a purplish hue. It sat upon his smooth, pink face like a conglomerate of several noses, where it twitched and snorted and seemed to wiggle continuously as though in great disagreement with the circumstances in which it now found itself.

This large head with its impatient, alienated nose was attached to a small, thin, short-legged body not more than five feet one inch in height. However, seated as he was with the cloth of his breeches pulled tight at the front, Hannah's practised eye observed that he carried the bulge of a surprisingly large engine for so small a man.

Sir Jasper was dressed in a dark cutaway coat above pale trousers and elegant boots, the heels of which were higher by a good two inches than might be normally supposed to be correct for the fashion of the day. A white silk choker finished off what Hannah knew to be the street uniform mostly favoured by men of the upper classes. Finally, Sir Jasper's very tall top hat had been placed with its brim uppermost on the small table between Hannah and himself, so that to observe the Upper Marshal she was forced to slightly crane her neck and look past the black hat's brim.

'So, madam, you are the spouse of the notorious criminal, Ikey Solomons?'

'Solomon, sir, it don't 'ave an "s",' Hannah corrected him, her heart fluttering at the presumption. Then she looked slightly bemused. 'Married yes, but as to criminal, not that I knows of, sir.' She drew a breath and then continued, 'Me 'usband, Ikey, 'as served 'is time, one year in Newgate and then on a hulk at Chatham. After six years 'e received the King's pardon.' Hannah paused again. 'Since then one or two small offences in the petty sessions, but nuffink what you might call
notorious
or
criminal,
if ya knows what I mean, sir?'

The officer sighed, 'Mrs Solomons, do not treat me like a simple-minded Bow Street runner or you could find yourself implicated in this unfortunate business.'

'And what unfortunate business is that?' Hannah asked politely, maintaining her calm.

'Forgery, madam! Defrauding the Bank of England by the printing of large denomination counterfeit notes of astonishing artistry to be passed through European banks and exchanged for foreign currency, and then reconverted to English currency again, though this time as the absolutely genuine article!'