Read Online The Masters of Bow Street by John Creasey - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Creasey
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‘Eastward Ho!’ and ‘Westward Ho!’ were forever hovering on the river.
No law denied a man the right to build on the side of his property, or atop it, or beneath it, and so those who feared the law added rooms and shops, encroaching onto streets already narrow; and attics were built with narrow wooden stairways and sometimes only ladders, making such firetraps as London had not seen even before the Great Fire, which some old people could remember.
London’s burning, London’s burning.
Bringing different dangers were the cellars, dug into the gravel beneath the city, where damp rose and struck at the bones and joints of young and old, rats and other vermin thrived, and the seeds of the great plague festered until some special set of circumstances caused them to erupt into epidemics so fearful that the death carts could come again to the narrow streets. These ghettos, or rookeries, had narrow passages and connecting doors used to harbour thieves on the run from the law.
So London spread both up and down and at the seams until she swelled like a human being whose lungs were bursting.
The young novelist Henry Fielding, already stirred by a deep social conscience, said bitterly of the Charlies, who kept their slothful watch:
They were chosen out of those poor old decrepit people who are from their want of bodily strength rendered incapable of getting a living by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of His Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed villains.
In the cellars or the attics of grogshops the drunks lay in their stupor on bales of stinking straw; soon they would wake and stagger to the taproom and buy their penn’orth of gin so as to drink themselves back into oblivion. Much of the gin was bad, for all of it was illegal under the hated Act of 1736. Despite the public whipping ordered for all caught drinking gin, few tried seriously to enforce this, and none succeeded. In open defiance of the law, seven thousand quarters of wheat out of London’s yearly importation of twelve thousand quarters was used for alcohol, not one per cent of which was licensed.
The sober workmen slept.
The night watchmen, who were old and scarcely capable, dozed in their watchhouses.
The thieves slept as morning drew near. The whores and the good women slept with the same peace.
Lisa Braidley and Eve Milharvey slept, and so did the Reverend Sebastian Smith, next to his buxom wife and in a room apart from their five children, with whom the Marshall children sometimes played.
Even Dick Miller slept; and, exhausted by both tears and fright, so did Lilian Foster, by her husband’s side.
Only one of the Furnival family did not sleep well that night. She was Sarah McCampbell, sister of John and William and crippled Francis, Anne and Cleo. Recently widowed, she and her three children, two girls and a boy, were staying with Cleo while an apartment was being made ready for them. That night she lay awake, tossing and turning in the great four-poster bed, thinking of her husband; thinking, also, of her children, and in particular of her son Timothy, already a favourite with his aunts and uncles.
All of this family except John lived in various houses and flats in Great Furnival Square, built not far from Tyburn Lane and Hyde Park; then it had been two miles outside the limits of the metropolis but now most of the space was built up with fine squares and streets with easy access to Piccadilly and to Westminster. When the Square and the arches and the colonnades had first been built, there were many who had called it Great Furnival’s Folly. On the south side was the great house, taking up the whole of that side of the Square and facing a garden planned by Giacomo Leoni, the famous Italian who had laid out the gardens for the palaces of kings and noblemen. In this verdant garden grew trees and shrubs and
No law denied a man the right to build on the side of his property, or atop it, or beneath it, and so those who feared the law added rooms and shops, encroaching onto streets already narrow; and attics were built with narrow wooden stairways and sometimes only ladders, making such firetraps as London had not seen even before the Great Fire, which some old people could remember.
London’s burning, London’s burning.
Bringing different dangers were the cellars, dug into the gravel beneath the city, where damp rose and struck at the bones and joints of young and old, rats and other vermin thrived, and the seeds of the great plague festered until some special set of circumstances caused them to erupt into epidemics so fearful that the death carts could come again to the narrow streets. These ghettos, or rookeries, had narrow passages and connecting doors used to harbour thieves on the run from the law.
So London spread both up and down and at the seams until she swelled like a human being whose lungs were bursting.
The young novelist Henry Fielding, already stirred by a deep social conscience, said bitterly of the Charlies, who kept their slothful watch:
They were chosen out of those poor old decrepit people who are from their want of bodily strength rendered incapable of getting a living by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of His Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed villains.
In the cellars or the attics of grogshops the drunks lay in their stupor on bales of stinking straw; soon they would wake and stagger to the taproom and buy their penn’orth of gin so as to drink themselves back into oblivion. Much of the gin was bad, for all of it was illegal under the hated Act of 1736. Despite the public whipping ordered for all caught drinking gin, few tried seriously to enforce this, and none succeeded. In open defiance of the law, seven thousand quarters of wheat out of London’s yearly importation of twelve thousand quarters was used for alcohol, not one per cent of which was licensed.
The sober workmen slept.
The night watchmen, who were old and scarcely capable, dozed in their watchhouses.
The thieves slept as morning drew near. The whores and the good women slept with the same peace.
Lisa Braidley and Eve Milharvey slept, and so did the Reverend Sebastian Smith, next to his buxom wife and in a room apart from their five children, with whom the Marshall children sometimes played.
Even Dick Miller slept; and, exhausted by both tears and fright, so did Lilian Foster, by her husband’s side.
Only one of the Furnival family did not sleep well that night. She was Sarah McCampbell, sister of John and William and crippled Francis, Anne and Cleo. Recently widowed, she and her three children, two girls and a boy, were staying with Cleo while an apartment was being made ready for them. That night she lay awake, tossing and turning in the great four-poster bed, thinking of her husband; thinking, also, of her children, and in particular of her son Timothy, already a favourite with his aunts and uncles.
All of this family except John lived in various houses and flats in Great Furnival Square, built not far from Tyburn Lane and Hyde Park; then it had been two miles outside the limits of the metropolis but now most of the space was built up with fine squares and streets with easy access to Piccadilly and to Westminster. When the Square and the arches and the colonnades had first been built, there were many who had called it Great Furnival’s Folly. On the south side was the great house, taking up the whole of that side of the Square and facing a garden planned by Giacomo Leoni, the famous Italian who had laid out the gardens for the palaces of kings and noblemen. In this verdant garden grew trees and shrubs and
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