Murder in Grub Street (9 page)

“As you like.”

And with that, he shut the door upon me.

I cannot say exactly how long I waited; mere minutes it was. I put my back to the wind and held my place against the iron rail, my collar up and my shoulders raised. I shivered and shuddered there, until at last I admitted to myself the futility of my gesture. Having thus made the admission, I did the reasonable thing and rang the doorbell once more.

The butler reappeared in a moment. He could not have been far away.

“Yes, boy?”

Making no further argument, I dug the letter to Lord Mansfield out of my pocket and handed it over. He took it with a curt nod and set about to close the door as I backed down the stairs.

“I have better clothes than these!” I yelled rudely at him, determined to have the last word.

Yet it was his to have. “Good,” said he. “Wear them, and we shall then see.” And then he shut the door with a sharp bang.

I left in such a state of agitation that I gave little thought to where I was headed. I simply held down my hat, clenched the collar of my coat, and hurried onward into the wind — until I realized my lack of proper direction. I sought the shelter of an arched doorway and pulled out the day’s last letter and studied the uncertain address noted upon it, together with Mr. Marsden’s equally uncertain directions. With a sigh, I stepped forth back into the wind and began the journey, which took me to the other side of Covent Garden and into another world entirely.

It was a curiosity to me when first I came to London, and still is such today how near the grand residences of the rich stand to the most squalid dwellings of the poor. There is untold wealth cheek by jowl with miserable poverty: no wonder the policing of these parishes proved so difficult even then for Benjamin Bailey’s men, the local constables, and the watchmen. Footpads and burglars could do their dirty work under the cover of night, often no more than a street or two away, then quickly disappear into the warrens and dark alleys they called home.

Thus it was that it took me no great while to move from Bloomsbury Square to an area near Chandos and Bedford streets commonly called a “rookery,” where all manner of queer birds flocked. Mr. Marsden had noted on the envelope that I was to look in “the Caribbees,” which was how this district was called. To this he appended a bit of advice borrowed from the Bible: “Seek and ye shall find.” Nothing very helpful there.

She whom I sought I remembered well from my first day in London when, gulled by an independent thief-taker, I stood accused of theft before one then unknown to me, Sir John Fielding. Having been discharged by him and remanded to the custody of the court, I had then waited as the magistrate heard his last case of the day. It involved a debt owed by Moll Caulfield, a pushcart vendor, to her greengrocer supplier, a debt settled by Sir John himself. I had seen the woman a couple of times afterwards in Covent Garden, as she returned from her rounds, a somewhat doleful woman, not elderly but seeming so. I recall her being addressed as “Widow Caulfield,” though she made no mention of her state in her letter to Sir John; hers was brief, simple, and quite touching: “I seen the grief writ on yr face, and it right pained me to see a good man like yrself brought so low. Take heart in the words of Our Savior: ‘To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ So spake He to Lady Fielding, and so shall He speak one day to you. You shall join her there, rest assured.” In his response, Sir John joined in her confident expectations for Lady Fielding’s salvation, thanked her for her hopes for his own, and blessed her for her concern and kindness.

This was the Moll Caulfield I searched for once I arrived at the crossing of Chandos and Bedford streets. I asked after her, shouting my questions against the wind, to all who seemed local to the area. Some knew her as “the pushcart woman,” others were ignorant, and the most were quite indifferent. It grew late in the afternoon, and Mrs. Gredge would want me home for my usual dinnertime duties. I wondered would I ever find the Widow Caulfield that windy day. But just then it was that I found one who knew her and knew well where she lived.

The person in question was one like Moll Caulfield herself, a pushcart vendor. Having sold out her wares, she was plodding home when I detained her and asked the question I had put to so many others.

“Aye,” said the old dame. “I knows her. We’re chums, we are.” “And do you know, then, where it is she makes her home?” “Home, is it? Well, I know where the poor dear keeps her cart and has her pallet, but ‘home’ is too grand a name for it — for mine as well, for all that. But come along now, I’ll show you.”

And show me she did, while telling me all the while of their friendship, their reading of Scripture together of a Sunday, with a few hints, as well, of their separate struggles to survive. We kept our heads close together as we talked so as to be heard above the rushing of the wind. In no time, it seemed, we came to St. Martin’s Lane. She took me a bit down that infamous way in which no less than Benjamin Bailey himself had recently been wounded in a late-night affray. We stopped before an imposing edifice — imposing yet rickety.

“She lives in there, she does,” said she.

It was an ancient, wooden court building, built along the lines of a galleried inn of the kind seen in larger towns all along the highways of England. From the look of it, this one was built well back in the last century, or perhaps in the one before it. There were three floors to the place — but no, four, if one counted the gables looking out through the roof, each one an attic room. Looking around me, I estimated there must be a hundred people living here — or more like twice that number.

“But where?” I asked Moll Caulfield’s friend. “Where is she here?”

“All right, my lad,” said she. “You turn to right as you go inside the gate, and you goes up the first stairs you come to — up to the first floor above the ground floor. Moll pulls her cart up those stairs every day but Sunday. Then you go to the third door, right near the corner it is, and then you give a good, stout knock upon it, for that be Moll’s door. Only mind me in this,” said she, suddenly grown most serious. “Mind you do not stay long, for it will soon grow dark, and it will not do to have you here after dark.”

“You have my thanks,” said I. “I could not have found this place without you.”

“Just tell old Moll that Dotty set you right,” she shouted back at me.

“I shall!”

And with that, I left her, waving my goodbye and turning through a wide space where once a gate must have hung.

The stairs she described stood half exposed to the gusty wind. I looked around me ere I started up them, and found that all manner of debris from the old building had blown down from the floors above and piled in the courtyard — shingles, shutters, broken glass, whole sections of railing. As I observed, a chimney pot and a great armful of shingles came sailing past me and crashed quite near me. With that, I sought the shelter of the stairs.

Yet found no shelter there, for open as they were to the wind, the stairs swayed dangerously beneath my feet as I climbed. Buifeted by the wind, I near lost my balance at one point, grabbed for the railing — and Found it missing, grabbed again and saved myself with a piece of it that had not broken free. Thus I made it to Moll’s floor—yet again found no ease there, for the balcony down which I made my way shook near as bad. In truth, reader, the whole building shook. I saw it move quite visibly, the very walls giving out and in with the great gusts of the wind, like the irregular breathing of some huge animal.

I reached Moll Caulfield’s door in something of a panic, experiencing those symptoms of dread which all feel when put in fear for their lives. My direst dread was confirmed when I saw residents on this floor and below throw open their doors and flee. One pushed past me as I banged hard upon the Caulfield door, calling her name. I banged again, and at last it came open. The poor woman stood transfixed with terror, eyes wide, head turning this way and that.

“Moll Caulfield,” cried I at her, “you must come away. This place may collapse!”

I grabbed at her wrist and made to pull her through the door. Yet she resisted. At the same time, I was given a bump as two more tenants pushed past me for the stairs.

“But I cannot go without my cart!”

I saw it just behind her. Perhaps she was making to leave with it when I came knocking on her door.

“Go!” said I. “I shall take the cart.”

Only with that promise did she allow herself to be pulled over the threshold. I reached in and grabbed it and followed her down the balcony way, which seemed then to be shaking even more fearsomely than before. A window burst, scattering shards of glass before us, thus making the way even more treacherous than before.

And so we reached the stairs, where I was faced with a problem I could not have anticipated. I had been pulling the cart, which was light enough and moved well on its wooden wheels. Yet it seemed dangerous to try the stairs in this way; I feared I might lose control of the thing. At the top of the stairs, she looked back at me, as if asking for instruction. I signaled her to proceed as I began to turn the cart about. She went on bravely enough, and I followed with her halfway down, pushing the cart before me. The stairs yawed left and right. I could but barely keep my own balance; managing the cart made it near impossible. Then, as I saw Moll Caulfield reach the ground, I was bumped from behind and pushed aside by a large woman near crazed by fear, who ran before me. I teetered dangerously. I hung on to what was left of the railing with one hand and to the cart with the other. Almost slowly then, whatever rotten and flimsy foundation it was that held the stairs gave way completely, and I saw the stairs before me begin to crumble forward. I lost my footing as the step disappeared from beneath my foot, lost my hold upon the cart, and as if in a dream sailed out and down ten feet or more to the courtyard below.

Had it been paved, I might not have landed so well. Had I been the age I am now, I might have broken a bone or two. Yet as it was, I came through the fall right enough, yet Moll Caulfield’s cart did not fare so well. While I went out and away from the stairs, the cart went under. Planks, rails, deals, and boards fell on top of it. And as I recovered myself, picking myself up from where I had fallen, I saw poor Moll frantically throwing off debris from the fallen staircase that she might recover her means of livelihood. I went to her, thinking to help, then happened to look up and saw that the balcony above her was swaying in the same dangerous way that the stairs had. I reached for her.

“Moll! Come away!”

But she shook me off. “I cannot! My cart!”

And with that, she uncovered it, and we both saw that it had been quite destroyed by the burden of wood that had landed atop it. She rose to her full stature, which was somewhat less than mine, and cast me the most baleful look e’er I had seen on a human face before.

Then I took her by the hand firmly and pulled her away, and not a moment too soon, for a moment later a great piece ot the balcony came tumbling down where she had stood. But that was just the beginning. Large parts of the roof followed—a whole chimney, a gable. It looked to me as if the whole structure was in danger of collapse.

“We must away from here!” I shouted at her.

She, having lost her cart, was quite submissive. I led her toward the gateway as fast as she would go, as section after section of the old building began to tumble down. As I looked back last, having pushed her through the old gate hole where she joined others, I saw a great piece of her floor give way, and with it the little place where she made her modest home. But she was there behind me as well, looking over my shoulder. She saw it all.

“Oh,” said she, “what shall I do? What shall I do?”

And still the old structure tumbled. We watched, now a great group of us, as the wind wreaked further havoc, separating timber from timber, nails from wood, and down, down it went into the courtyard.

At last there seemed to come an end to it. Men behind me surged forward. I was carried along with them. They began digging through the wreckage. Was it for bodies we were searching? Survivors? I listened for moans or cries for help but heard nothing. Then I saw that it was goods they were after — pots, pans, bedding, clothes, whatever might be salable. There were a few women joining in the search, as well. Yet it was the men who pushed and scrambled, as still debris dislodged by the wind rained down from above. They were as coastal wreckers pillaging a ship caught on a reef. Each had begun his pile of salvage. Disagreements erupted as to what belonged to whom. I was pushed aside not once but twice.

“Go away, boy,” one said to me. “This is man’s work.”

And so I decided that indeed I would go away and see what I could do to help poor Moll Caulfield. I found her where I had left her, though now great tears streamed down her cheeks. It was not the wind that had set them flowing.

“It seems,” said I to her, “that there is little to be done, little to be saved.”

“Aye,” said she. ” ‘Tis no longer even safe to go in there.” Then she turned to me and, as if wondering for the first time, asked, “Who are you that came to fetch me from my place when it was about to tumble down?” She brushed away her tears with her sleeve and sniffed a good, loud sniff.

I took but a moment to explain that I had come from Sir John Fielding with a letter in response to her message of condolence. I produced it from my pocket, surprised that, though wrinkled and besmirched, it had not been lost in all that had transpired. She took it from me and held it absently, not bothering to inspect its contents. I told her I had been directed to her dwelling by her friend Dotty.

“Ah yes, Dotty,” said she. “We read Scripture together. She’s a good old girl.”

“I … I’m sorry I lost your cart.”

“Oh, I do not blame you. You did what you could. I saw. But …” And here she hesitated most pitiably. “But what am I to do? I have no cart, no place to sleep, nothing. What am I to do?”

“Could you stay with Dotty?”

“She has her daughter’s child with her. There is bare enough room for the two of them.”