Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  The physical stench can be overcome with nosegays, and the better sort do indeed wander the Piazza with various items held to their faces to ward off the odour. The moral stench, though, is of another kind, and deepens at night, when the whores and the constables take over the pavements. They dance in front of the elegant Tuscan portico that Inigo Jones built on the front of St Paul’s, and the classical architecture puts Graham in mind not of God but of Derangement, for when comestibles give way to sex as the main item on sale, Covent Garden does seem to him to become Mad. Its covered walkways are cloisters for the insane, where whores who give their names as ‘Ann Nothing’ or ‘Mary Knowbody’ or ‘Kis my Comekel’ grasp at the sleeves of men and where pox surges through the blood of an unknown number of them, such that it may as well be all of them, an infected Body Erotick, shrieking its appetites to the sky.

  Consider, then, how Aaron Graham functions in a place such as this. For Graham buries his appetites beneath his great professionalism. He is universally admired for his application. His practised ease in society presents to the world the face of a man who knows everybody, is known by everybody, and is one of those two or three hundred ordinary men in London, neither nobility nor criminal, around whom the daily round circulates.

  So what is one to make of Graham’s life here in the Piazza of the Mad? What does it say of such a man that he chooses to make his home in a street that maintains its elegance, but nonetheless sits squarely between the rookeries of St Giles and the darkened doorways of Parkers Lane, now the most notorious whoring street in London? Does he hide behind his curtains at night while the street circus plays itself out? Or does he watch it, hungrily and bitterly, a lonely man abandoned by his wife, a man who like any other such man will, on occasion, present himself to a panderer in one of the coffee houses or taverns and ask to hear of the proclivities of their List? Why, here’s a young maiden, not yet broken in. And here’s one expert in the ways of bizarrerie, she will break your skin in ways you will never forget. And here’s one who weeps, and here’s one who laughs, and here’s one who never speaks but who has entered the dreams of Dukes and Viscounts …

  These whispered conversations in the corners of taverns are one element of the unconventional drama that plays out behind Aaron Graham’s careful eyes. But it is Sarah Graham who takes the biggest role in the masque. The anger towards Sarah leached out of her husband many months ago, though her motivation for taking such a scandalous course remains opaque to him. Sir Henry is a baronet with a fortune (though even that has attracted society gossip as to its provenance and its extent), but how can his social status accrue to a woman who had become, effectively, his concubine as well as his cousin? And yet somehow it does. The social sphere accommodates and, to a great extent, it forgives. Sarah may have married a well-regarded yet common professional, in truth a very rarefied kind of clerk, but she lives with a baronet.

  Is it enough? Was it worth it? Graham, who only speaks to his wife by letter and only, until recently, on dry matters such as estates and inheritance, cannot supply an answer. Sarah has taken with her their youngest child, their daughter, sweet Ellen, the girl he has not seen these past three years and now, it appears, has been rechristened Tempest Graham, as if she were a cow to be rebranded by her new owner. And that rebranding has implanted a question which dare not be asked and which Graham constantly recoils from: is he Ellen’s father, or is Sir Henry? Did this dalliance begin years before Sarah left Covent Garden for Thorpe?

  A year after her mother took her away, Ellen began secretly writing to Graham in Covent Garden, telling him of the comings and the goings of Sir Henry Tempest, and the growing dismay of Sarah Graham. He had written to her, though carefully, never alluding to Ellen’s own letters lest others read what he wrote and took action. It was the cessation of Ellen’s letters – which had become almost fortnightly affairs – which had made him particularly amenable to Sarah’s request for an investigation into the recent mysteries.

  And if Ellen Graham – Ellen Tempest Graham – is in danger, what then? How much would he risk for the wellbeing of a girl he does not see? Is this not another unconventional ingredient in the surprisingly complex stew that is Aaron Graham? A man with a daughter he never encounters, and yet a daughter that he loves. A daughter that may not even be his.

  Such a man lives in Covent Garden, the madhouse open to the sky.

  It is past eight when he finally leaves the Bow Street office. The inmates of the Covent Garden asylum are out in force in the late summer twilight. There is still a good deal of heat in the air, and the streetwalkers own the pavements along the length of Drury Lane, from the Strand and into the dismal rookeries of St Giles. He turns south down Bow Street and then into the great prostitutional artery, Russell Street, which connects the Piazza with the Drury Lane theatre. Here the streetwalkers are sometimes two or three abreast on the pavement, approaching all passers-by with their proposals. Even men walking with female companions, or children, are propositioned, and a good many of them have their refusals greeted with a volley of abuse. The trade is blatant, open and violent. And through it walks one of the magistrates who are supposed to deal with it.

  Or at least such is the belief of those polite people who are scandalised by the prostitutes’ behaviour. The reality, as Graham knows, is somewhat different. The law is by no means clear on which constituent part of itself is being broken by these women. Magistrates such as Graham are often reluctant to do little more with these streetwalkers when they come before them each morning than tick them off and quietly suggest they go about their business with a little more surreptitious care. The occasional unfortunate will get sent down to Bridewell, and until recently she may even have been flogged, but the pursuit of a case against a prostitute in the criminal court of the Old Bailey is rare indeed, at least in comparison with this heaving reality of the street. Graham has even heard tell of parish officers in some parts of the metropolis refusing poor law relief to young women, arguing that such as these can always go whoring to feed themselves. The law concerns itself primarily with Property, not Propriety, and as a result there must be two hundred whores on this street alone; a busy night, indeed, but by no means an exceptional one.

  Graham is no wide-eyed fool when it comes to these women. He knows they are trading something, and for many of them the thing they trade is the only thing they have. A good many of them will have been in service or in work as milliners or haberdashers or mantua-makers, but when a woman’s labour becomes surplus to the requirements of polite society, she must resort to other assets. Defoe had called this the amphibious lifestyle – the need for women to drift in and out of prostitution according to the tenor of the economic times. At the end of the last century, it is said Pitt himself created 10,000 whores by the simple expedient of taxing maidservants.

  This is understood by the magistrates, and it is understood even more instinctively by the men who are charged with arresting these women and bringing them before the magistrates – the parish watchmen and constables and beadles, the men who must share the pavement with these street women.

  The night watch is just now being set. Graham walks past the watch house, and nods to the head constable for the night, a man named Larkin who is no better or worse than any of the other men who fulfil this role. Larkin will tonight supervise perhaps two dozen watchmen, who are charged with patrolling their beats and making arrests as they see fit. Any women arrested will be locked up in the watch house and brought before the sitting magistrate at Bow Street in the morning. But even an arrest is a comparative rarity, for in truth the constables and watchmen tolerate the prostitutes. The gin-money bribes the whores pay out may protect this tolerance, but in truth it comes from a deeper source. The whores and the constables come from the same families. They have, in certain ways, been forced to trade on their last remaining assets. Where the women trade caresses and permit violations, the men have little left to sell but their eyes and their fists.

  It is, supposes Graham, a
kind of equilibrium. It is perhaps the only possible balance left to the chaotic, disordered mechanism that is London law and order. What else can be done? The watchmen and constables are responsible to the parish authorities, who pay their wages. Those wages are tiny, and subject to a battalion of back-handed benefits. The magistrates, their own stipends paid by the Home Department, have only a supervisory role over the men of the watch, and in any case there is a well-understood set of priorities for those magistrates. Nowhere is it written down, but the statutes and the lists of offences make it clear to any man with intelligence and the wit to look that London’s magistrates concern themselves first with crimes against property. They are the line between the monied classes and that enormous seething mass of criminality which the lords and merchants perceive as swilling up to their doors, its hands in their pockets and rifling around in their drawers. Perhaps, the wealthy might argue, it is better to tolerate prostitution, for at least it gives these vicious females a means of supporting themselves that does not involve theft from us.

  And indeed, look at all the fine gentlemen parading on the pavement tonight! Why, there is the third son of the Earl of W—, a notoriously vicious abuser of whores whose whip has marked dozens of backs on these streets. And there, disappearing around a corner pulling a girl by the hand who cannot be more than twelve, is Sir P— himself, whose tastes run young indeed. These men are beginning their night early, and are unusual – most of their peers will never be seen grabbing females on the street, unless it is their own particular predilection to do so. Most men of means will end up in the serails and nunneries of St James, where the polite doors of King’s Place open into elegant chambers of pleasure, sweet-smelling and clean, where the essential transaction between cully and whore is masked by suffocating sophistication.

  These are at either ends of the social scale of whoring: the street, and the salon. But in between are the hundreds of whores in lodging houses and the new breed of hotels, paying for their rooms by the hour, turning buildings with short leases into effective brothels, though with no presiding Madam or Mother Superior. These women can be accessed in two ways: they can be encountered on the street, or they can be hired through the offices of a panderer. Every tavern or coffee house around Covent Garden has at least one of these, a man who can be found either working as a waiter or perhaps just sitting and waiting on himself, a man who knows the names and prices and predilections of dozens or hundreds of whores, and is able to accommodate any dark desire or perverted passion. Such a man is Albert Talty, and he can be found at the Bedford Head Tavern, once owned by Talty’s illustrious predecessor in pimping, Jack Harris himself.

  Maiden Lane runs from east to west between the Piazza and the Strand, and is as disgusting a river of human vice as any in the metropolis. The Bedford Head lies about halfway along, and is one of the largest establishments on the tight little street. Graham is buffeted and knocked as he walks along, though here the bulk of the passing trade is male not female. A stream of very drunk costermongers heads from tavern to alehouse to inn, pouring the takings of the day down their throats, investing in tomorrow’s hangover.

  After some shoving and shouting, he makes it to the door of the Bedford Head. He does not feel uncomfortable or out of place, even though his outfit – a duck-egg blue frock coat, a white silk waistcoat, and silk breeches – would have paid the wages of one of these barrowboys for a year. He carries no money on his person, so his pockets can be picked again and again with no fear of loss. Seeing the small dark scurrying heads of children in the crowd, he knows that the pockets of those less careful than he are now being gently decanted into the purses of dark unseen gentlemen, through the medium of fast-fingered small boys.

  The inside of the Bedford Head is as raucous and crowded as Maiden Lane. A thick smoky fog passes for air inside, while almost eighty years of ale has given the floor and the walls the stench of hoppy vinegar. Waiters scurry from table to table with vast jugs of ale and endless bottles of wine, no doubt consisting as much of Thames water as of Burgundy grape. There are whores here, too, as there are whores everywhere; in one corner of the place he catches a glimpse of a posture moll, kneeling naked upon a table over a shiny pewter tray. Such things used to be the preserve of the Rose, next to his beloved Drury Lane; since the immolation of that place, they have clearly made their way south of the Piazza.

  But, Graham knows, the Bedford Head has a long tradition in such matters. The Society of Dilettanti, Sir Francis Dashwood’s prototype for the Medmenhamites, had met here regularly during the last century. In one of the rooms inside Dashwood and forty other men had dressed up in robes, hidden pretend books of magic inside a casket called ‘Bacchus’ tomb’, and had appointed an Archmaster of Ceremonies to sit on a throne, wearing a robe of crimson taffeta. Graham thinks of Sir John Cope and his ludicrous robes and furnishings, and wonders at the silly games of idle men.

  He feels an arm, deliberately, on his own, and looks down and to his right. A young girl of perhaps eleven or twelve looks up at him, her face thick with slap, a wig almost as big as her upper body tottering on her head, a leer in her eyes which looks as practised and alien on her young face as his own wife’s expression once appeared when he asked her if she was happy.

  ‘You’re the lucky one, tonight,’ she says, and the voice that comes from her lovely mouth is cracked and appallingly ancient. ‘You’ll be my first, sir. ’T’would be most fine, would it not, to be my first?’

  He smiles down at her, and pats her hand in acknowledgement of a fine performance.

  ‘First tonight, perhaps, my dear. You’ll need a more amenable gull than I. Now, tell me – I wish to speak with Talty.’

  She snatches her hand away from his, and her painted face hisses. She swears, words which would shame a boatswain, her eyes black and furious.

  ‘Hold your tongue, trollop. And tell me where Talty is, lest you spend the rest of this night in the watch house.’

  She swears again, but at the end of a run of curses which would have had that same boatswain blushing and taking holy orders, she flicks a tiny hand to a far corner of the bar, and then she is gone, off to pawn her already abused maidenhead to some other willing gentleman.

  Talty is on his own, a small circle of quiet in the chaos of the Bedford Head. It appears that the landlord has accorded the panderer special status; he is, after all, one who brings steady custom into the tavern, and Talty’s clients (both the whores he advertises, and the culls who seek them) make regular use of the rooms upstairs. And by giving Talty this little franchise, as it were, the tavern keeper avoids any potential accusation of keeping a bawdy house. If attention is paid to him, as it is unlikely to be, he will simply move Talty on to another tavern, and look back on a happy trade which had to come to an end.

  It is, of course, a shock to see him there. Graham can see it in the panderer’s eyes. Magistrates are not people of the street – engaging with the pavements is the job of watchmen and constables. Justices sit in their offices and have the bad and the depraved brought to them, and from there pronounce judgement. This is the model for most London magistrates. Graham, though, is different; he has been inspired by another approach, that of John Harriott of Wapping.

  ‘You are Albert Talty?’ says Graham. The panderer, still in a state of mild shock, just nods. He is dark-featured and younger than Graham expected. Graham tries to suppress his instinctive dislike of the man and his profession; it will cloud his judgement.

  ‘You know who I am? I see from your face that you do.’

  ‘And what do you want from me, magistrate?’

  Graham is aware of two large figures standing up from a table to his right, and feels an intense ripple of fear. He has stepped into a region where he is resented and incapable. Social conventions exist to prevent these icy moments. He should not be here.

  Talty sees the fear in his face, and smiles – a yellow-toothed, baleful grin. He hisses at the figures, and they disappear into the crowd. An equation has been
set, Graham sees. He on one side, Talty on the other. As of now, the equation does not balance.

  ‘Will you sit?’ Talty points to the chair opposite him, and Graham takes it, aware of sitting in the same position as hundreds of men before him, all of them seeking release. Perhaps he is no different.

  A waiter appears, but Talty waves him away. This will be a short interview, the gesture says. Thinking he should have brought a constable – or a dozen of them – with him, Graham begins.

  ‘I seek information on whores supplied to a particular group of gentlemen for their use at parties. I have been given your name by a servant to one of these men.’

  The pimp says nothing. Yellow teeth are still visible through his lips, but they no longer form a smile. They look like they might bite.

  ‘The men call themselves the Sybarites.’

  The smile comes back. A wolf, sharing a splendid story.

  ‘I know of the men. I have supplied them with no women. Why would I have done?’

  The lie is splendidly relaxed, and Graham ignores it.

  ‘Women were supplied by you to a party recently at the house of Sir John Cope. Also in attendance was Edmund Wodehouse, another gentleman. Both Cope and Wodehouse are now dead. They have been murdered in such a way that suggests a connection to these parties I have mentioned. I will be speaking to the other gentlemen concerned. I also wish to speak with the women who were there.’

  As he speaks, he is aware of Talty’s countenance changing. That theatrical, spiky grin eases, and is replaced by a face of concentrated thought. Graham knows what is happening. The world of society, the world of propertied men, the world which the magistracy was established to protect, has been threatened by the perpetrator of these killings. A justice has ventured out into the streets to investigate, an unprecedented event serving to emphasise the severity of matters. The comfortable balance between magistrate and pimp, between constable and whore, is being endangered. Refusal will make that danger intensify; Talty only has one option.