The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [30]
The task of locating a young Irish girl who may have been whoring for money was not quite as daunting as it sounded, but it was not too far from finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Pyke could rule out having to look too far from St Giles and the community in which she lived. Prostitution was rife across the entire city - from the taverns of the Ratcliffe highway to the fashionable assembly rooms of Haymarket - and theoretically Mary Johnson could have travelled to any part of it to ply her trade. But Pyke believed it was more likely she would have done so somewhere in or close to St Giles. This only helped slightly, for St Giles, since it bordered on the theatres of Drury Lane and taverns, hotels and private clubs of Covent Garden, contained the largest number of brothels and the highest concentration of prostitutes anywhere in the city.
Pyke knew that the image of a prostitute in respectable circles - a foul-mouthed tart with painted lips and false hair who called herself Sal the Siren or Anytime Annie - applied to just a fraction of them. Women from a variety of social backgrounds came to prostitution for a myriad of different reasons: to avoid destitution, to supplement a low income, to escape the shame of pregnancy or a broken engagement, to find a husband, to pay off a debt, or to run away from family.
Pyke was not looking for a type of woman. He was looking for a particular woman and it paid to know the difference.
As with all professions, there was an established hierarchy. At the top were the courtesans, who worked in the most fashionable areas and who solicited only wealthy gentlemen, and women who were kept in their own apartment by a single suitor. Below them were the board lodgers who worked and lived in brothels and paid a proportion of what they earned to a madam. Below them were those who hung about the lodging houses and taverns of the rookeries, and the dollymops who had other jobs as maids or cleaners and worked only to supplement their meagre income. At the bottom of the pile were the streetwalkers. Pyke doubted that Mary Johnson was anywhere near the top of that hierarchy. Nor did it seem likely that she worked full-time in a brothel or lodging house since she appeared to board with her cousin. This meant that either she worked on a casual basis, picking up men in taverns and coffee shops, or she walked the streets. And Pyke did not see her as a streetwalker; according to the neighbour, her clothes were too refined.
Though he had a full description and a name, his task remained a prodigious one: there were hundreds of young, pretty, dark-haired girls who picked up men in the taverns of the area.
But Pyke had two things going for him: first and most obviously it stood to reason that somebody knew Mary Johnson or knew of her and might know where he could hope to find her. More importantly, however, there was also the fact that Pyke had money and was prepared to pay generously for any information that might lead him to the girl.
Even though Pyke was aware of how badly he wanted to find and talk to Mary Johnson, it struck him as odd that he was willing to fund the exercise from his own pocket and had no chance of turning a profit on it. As he walked along Bow Street towards Long Acre and stared upwards at the vast canopy of frozen blue sky that stretched far beyond the limits of the city, he felt light-headed, as though the recklessness of his decision meant that he no longer understood himself as well as he once had.
After noon the temperature started to plummet, so that by the time dusk arrived the usually bustling streets of the capital were practically deserted. The conditions had driven even the hardy porters, cabmen and dung collectors indoors. It was so inhospitable that the river itself was in danger of freezing. Though it was only early afternoon, it also meant that the taverns and coffee houses were bursting with custom. In these establishments, Pyke found a cavorting mass of stinking bodies.
Even Pyke, who was used to the harshness of the city, was weary from