They robbed the rich; they robbed the poor. They robbed anyone who came along. They preferred the rich, for economy of effort, but if the poor sauntered past them off guard and had clothing, food or the proceeds of their own thefts, they set upon the poor without a qualm. Sometimes the poor struck back. Eliza lost her heart to a silver taffeta bodice she stole from a cloak bag, but had it snatched from her by a stranger before she had possessed it two hours; she spent the rest of her life hoping to find that bodice again or see one like it. Jem Starling was once beaten up at the back of a tavern so badly that he nearly lost an eye and for several months lacked his normal braggadocio.
It was a good time to be on the road. The hope of peace made people believe they could return to normal life. Projects that had been put into abeyance were revived. Bags of hidden gold were retrieved from thatched roofs and chimneys, then carried abroad to pay off outstanding debts, to pay fines, to fulfil legacies, to relieve suffering widows and succour the war's orphans. Delayed weddings were organised. Trade revived. All of these meant money would be on the move. Highway robbery flourished.
On the whole they were clever. Sometimes Jem Starling was accompanied by a 'boy' who held the horses; sometimes a woman was with him. They would dawdle around inns, never looking at each other. Since they were not lovers — or not often — Jem felt free to court serving wenches and innkeepers' wives like a virile single man, which concealed their partnership. They could ride for hours with other people, yet nobody suspected they knew each other. This enabled surprise when they attacked, but also they wanted their success kept secret. In their plan to own wild riches they gathered their 'earnings' as unobtrusively as possible. They hid away their money and any other treasures they had not yet exchanged for cash in safe houses across several counties. They had to pay a premium to the owners of the safe houses, but the repute they slowly earned for doing honest business (and for intolerance of treachery) helped make friends. Their willingness to shoot and stab to protect their capital was also known; this hint of danger about them did no harm.
In their first year they worked in the countryside. They moved gradually eastwards, in a wide loop around the capital, passing from one arterial road to the next as each location became too hot for them. Their methods were special but their aims were no different from those of honest business owners. They built up a reputation, earned goodwill, ruthlessly saw off competition and cautiously planned future expansion. They had treasurers who banked their capital. They used legal associates to bribe them out of trouble. Had their little empire's profits ever been subjected to unfair taxation, they would have fought that just as tenaciously as those tradesmen, merchants and landowners who went to war over the fiscal trickery of King Charles.
In due course Jem and Eliza gravitated closer to London. London was where all the big money was.
The year 1647 saw them reach Kent, working along the old Dover Road. During this period they found themselves at odds with the local criminals and highwaymen. Gadshill, Shooters Hill and the wilds of Blackheath were as busy with hold-ups as ever in their notorious history, but the nearby villagers believed that rich pickings from travellers were their hereditary right. The couple found that newcomers were resented and cold-shouldered. If newcomers failed to take the hint, locals turned nasty. As they took their ease at an inn, enjoying their spoils, others would barge in, bringing victims Jem and Eliza had robbed. The country bumpkins would point them out, even though Jem had by then pushed up his eye patch, while Eliza had set aside her pregnancy bump. They would have to buy off their victims, and perhaps a Justice's clerk as well, if one had been brought along. Inn staff were threatened with reprisals for giving them a welcome; fences and pawn merchants, who needed to live unobtrusively, were deterred with warnings. If all else failed, the locals resorted to bloody violence.
'Unfair practices are ruinous to us honest toilers. We must depart from these sheep-shagging parsnips,' Jem decided.
So they moved in even closer to London, where they thought the sophisticated business ethos might be more to their taste. They attached themselves to a party from Canterbury from whom, when they decamped in the night, they took two fat purses and a good saddle. Then they rode in through Greenwich and past Deptford, where there was a school for young ladies which they robbed of a sheet and pillowcase, a musical instrument and a freshly baked eel-pie, together with the dish it sat in. A man who claimed to be a royal park ranger offered to sell them a haunch of the King's venison, which he said his wife would cook for them. The King, they heard from the ranger (who presumably should know), had been sold by the Scots to the New Model Army. This news was of little interest to them, even if it meant His Majesty might be returned to London, wanting to eat his own venison. Since they had the eel-pie already, they declined the haunch politely; when dealing with other entrepreneurs, Jem Starling and Eliza were not greedy.
Their journey brought them down through the shipbuilding areas of Deptford and Rotherhithe, into the legendary stews of Southwark. The sour and seamy old rents of the bishopric of Winchester looked at their worst in the evening, when they managed to persuade guards to let them enter the Lines of Communication that enclosed even this grim old district within London's fortifications. On Bankside the bull- and bear-baiting pits still existed, though the famous theatres where Shakespeare and his contemporaries once made their names had been closed down. Other entertainments persisted. The Long Parliament's first wild rash of liberal acts had not just swept away censorship of printed material, but reduced prostitution from a felony to a nuisance. A felony was a hanging offence, as any professional thief had to know, but for a mere nuisance the penalty was just a whipping and a spell in a house of correction. In abolishing torture, too, Parliament had stopped whores being stripped to the waist and whipped at a cart-tail. But religious rectitude had forced the trade underground — where, as always, it flourished all the more.
Although prostitution migrated across the river to Cow Cross, Clerkenwell, Smithfield and most notoriously Turnmill Street and Pickthatch by Aldersgate, there were still blatant brothels on Bankside. Gone were the days of Holland's Leaguer, the elegant moated mansion in Old Paris Garden on Bankside, where gentlemen from King James downwards had been entertained to dancing, fine cuisine and expert fornication in luxurious surroundings run by the grand bawd Elizabeth Holland. The Leaguer, the epitome of a luxurious brothel, had been closed down by troops in the 1630s; its pleasant gardens now lay unkempt and its exquisite troupe of sexual specialists had fled through secret exits and dispersed. Yet the lowest women of the night still shrieked and caterwauled with their customers on the dark wharves, and drabs who had made themselves look attractive despite hard lives and the pox still clustered in doorways, beckoning gentlemen to come into Southwark's rotting houses for what passed as pleasure.
Regulations forbade Thames wherrymen from bringing their boats by night; it was supposedly to save young gentlemen from sin. Sin had gone north. Yet men in the city knew that on any South Bank street-corner cheap fornication with a woman desperate to buy food could be had. In these dark diocesan liberties where drunkenness and disorder had always flourished, nights were noisy and days were drear. Here beneath Winchester Palace, whose hypocritical bishops had raked in rents from the brothels for centuries, stood the Clink Prison, a miserable hole which regularly flooded, where heretics, debtors and those who ruined the doubtful peace were incarcerated. In local alleys used as lavatories and refuse dumps stood many rough dockside taverns where poor whores in white aprons (to make them visible on the dark streets) mingled with thieves, confidence tricksters, dubious surgeons and false astrologers. Above many a ship's chandlery were abortion premises. Into this slew of sad humanity slid Jem and Eliza as if it were their natural habitat.
For the greater part of a year they subsisted in Southwark. They robbed whores' clients while they were engaged in lust, and naive sailors so fresh off merchant ships they had not even found the whores. No longer on horseback, they took to luring victims up cul-de-sacs, hoping for an intrigue with Eliza but instead being beaten up by Jem. Sometimes Eliza would pretend to faint, with Jem leaping on any bystander who was foolish enough to try to help. Their simplest trick was to shout 'Stop, thief!', then watch where members of the public clapped their hands to make sure they still had their money safe — after which it was quickly removed by nimble hands. Despite ample profits, Eliza learned not to dress too richly, lest she be questioned by the authorities wanting to know how she could trick herself out in such finery. Jem learned little.
There comes a moment in many business partnerships where the more talented partner begins to regret hitching up with a lesser spirit. Since Eliza still refused to be Jem Starling's doxy, inevitably he found someone else. When he took up with a pockmarked bragging wanton called Sarah Straw, Eliza knew business would suffer.
When she was not 'conjugating' with Jem Starling, Straw was a procurer for a bawd called Mrs Flemming; she looked out for young girls who had just come up to London on a carrier's cart, seeking work. She befriended them, offered them somewhere to stay and lured them into prostitution. If these fresh-faced innocents were virgins, they fetched a premium at the brothel — and if they were not virgins, they could be 'restored' by a duplicitous physician called Doctor Lime for a modest fee. If they were pregnant, he would deal with that for a further shilling. If they were not pregnant, Mother Flemming's extremely fertile doorkeeper, her hector, soon saw to the business.
Holding people up with firearms was too dangerous in London. Jem was now reliant on Eliza's skill to rob pockets. He had gone so soft he even relied on her aggression for his own protection. In Eliza's opinion, Jem Starling was nothing without her. His new ladyfriend was a demanding piece, and to keep Sarah sweet he began to diddle Eliza on the share-out from their work. Sarah Straw then made the mistake of attempting to recruit Eliza for Mrs Flemming's disorderly house by Blackfriars Stairs. 'After you have learned the hazards of your trade, you may seek promotion to be a bawd yourself. It requires very little outlay to set up in an establishment, and the profits are extreme. You are no beauty, but with a few tricks, you should pass for saleable.. '
This ploy to get Eliza out of the way was Straw's mistake. She was left in no doubt of it, by the time Eliza finished beating her with a blackjack. Not only were Sarah Straw's physical attractions ruined, Jem Starling was soon in no position to lavish attention upon her. Eliza had informed on him to the Justices and he was thrown into jail. 'He works in company with a woman, one Straw, a bawd's baggage,' lied Eliza in her deposition. 'She will deny it, so do not heed her pleas..'
She knew Jem and Sarah were unlikely to make retaliatory accusations against her, because they needed her to remain on the outside, in order to fetch the money she and Jem had stashed away so they could bribe their way to freedom. Vowing herself innocent of their betrayal, she promised she would collect cash for a speedy rescue. She had no intention of doing it. Away she rode on a stolen horse, and she did indeed visit several of their old safe houses, removing what she considered her fair share of her savings with Jem. Then she kept riding north.
Suitably attired and with her old name of Dorothy Groome, she made her way to Stony Stratford. There she tracked down the parish authorities and with a humble confession made enquiries about the child she had abandoned. Sadly, she was told the records showed that, like most infants found in church porches, after it was put out to a wet-nurse her baby had died. Under pressure, she made a donation to parish funds, then cursed as she was forced to ride away in disappointment.
She had tried to do right. All it brought her were bad memories and financial loss.
Knowing no other life, she determined to return to Bankside. She thought she could make things straight with Jem. But during her long absence, Jem Starling and his doxy had found their own means of securing a release, though they needed to keep out of sight of the authorities and had vanished into the stews.
The day of her arrival back in Southwark was the 3rd of August 1647. Eliza gradually became aware that this whole area south of the river had a strange atmosphere. The streets were bare of whores, drunks and shady drifters. Foreign sailors risked walking about, staring around in curiosity. Some householders stood in their doorways, looking out. Otherwise, there were soldiers in red coats absolutely everywhere.
Her heart beat. Thinking about the baby had been bad enough. Now even older memories crowded upon her. However, there was no fighting, no looting, no burning of buildings. Nobody screamed. Nobody was shot. None the less, living the life she did, Eliza preferred not to be stopped and subjected to military interrogation. She slipped into a tavern she knew, paid for a supper, ate it out of public view and discreetly bedded down.
Next morning she woke early and braced up to her need to find another new life. With all her possessions in a sagging snapsack, Eliza stood on the bank of the Thames and gazed over at the city, which lay shrouded in coal smoke. She was below London Bridge, the only crossing point. Opposite were Billingsgate and the Custom House, and beyond them the mighty bulk of the Tower, with its forbidding walls and array of turrets, ancient towers and pinnacles. A bridge had stood here for centuries, since Roman times; this one was medieval, built on twenty small arches, with a defensive gateway and a drawbridge at the Southwark end. Along the bridge crowded houses and shops, some seven storeys high; only taverns were absent because there were no cellars for keeping liquor cool. At the centre stood the Chapel of St Thomas a Becket, grander than many parish churches, with steps at river level where fishermen and passenger boats landed. Landing was extremely difficult, as was sailing or rowing through the arches, which were so narrow they constricted the current and caused ferocious rapids. Most people preferred not to risk their lives; they disembarked at the Three Cranes, upstream, then walked along the north shore, past Nonesuch House, and took a different boat at Billingsgate. Watermills and grain mills at the northern end added to the fury of the current. Many people had drowned while 'shooting the bridge'. If they did pass through safely, they emerged into a more tranquil area; there, below the piers, where Eliza was standing disconsolately, lay the calm waters of the Pool of London, which when it was not frozen over in winter was always packed with trading ships and busy with lighters like waterfleas. Now, in August, the warm weather meant the district was pervaded by the stink of waters so fetid they could rarely be cleansed by the tide.
As she pondered the fickleness of men and the perfidy of women, Eliza's attention was drawn by unusual sounds and sights. Drumbeats first attracted her notice — not a sombre, funereal beat, but the brisk tattoo that helped infantry to march in step and gave them heart. Turning, she witnessed the departure from Southwark of all the red-coated soldiers who had occupied the south bank yesterday. They were now moving across into London. Their red uniforms, she knew, meant the New Model Army. Amidst a clamour from within, they were given entrance onto the bridge by their supporters, who opened up the Stone Gateway to admit them. Rank after rank, in several regiments, marched over London Bridge. The city, which had taken such measures to protect itself from the enemy, was being invaded by its own troops.
Word on the streets said those soldiers had refused to be sent on service to Ireland and would not disband until Parliament paid money they were owed. 'Why have we fought,' they were supposed to have asked, 'if we are to be treated worse than slaves?'
Eliza waited until all the men had crossed the bridge, then she reached her decision. Although she had never served in such a large army, their military presence reminded her of the past at Dudley and Edgbaston, days which in a way she had enjoyed. That nostalgia emboldened her for the future. She did not need Jem Starling. She would go across and work alone in the city. Once the soldiers had passed, she quietly slipped after them. It was the first time she had set foot on London Bridge and her heart quavered as she negotiated the Stone Gateway, where sturdy poles carried the heads of long-dead traitors, dipped in tar to preserve them, though the relics were mouldering badly.
On the famous bridge, she passed between nearly two hundred tall buildings. Space was short, so houses had been built out over the river on strong wooden supports, projecting over the water as much as seven feet, and also sometimes joined to the opposite houses above the street. Eliza felt she had entered a long tunnel. Merchants lived on the upper storeys and displayed their goods in shop windows at pavement level. They signalled the nature of their businesses with signboards, and did their selling through the windows. This commerce added to the congestion in the two narrow lanes of traffic, which clogged the bridge so badly that someone could take an hour to get across its three hundred yards. But this was reckoned to be an extremely safe community, apart from the risks of fire and pickpockets. Every night there was a curfew, when the gates were closed.
At the far end, Eliza found a long gap in the houses, damage from a serious fire a decade earlier. She was able to stand at the side and gaze upon the great city she was entering. London stretched as far as she could see and would certainly enable her to vanish from Jem Starling's sight, if he discovered she was back here. She was wise enough to know she was a stranger in the city; being an outsider carried many dangers. This was nothing like the little market town of Birmingham, where she grew up and learned to scavenge. She told herself she had been a soldier and bold highway robber, and could carry off anything. All she ever needed to start afresh was a new alias, a different personality and her native tenacity. Emboldened, she set off across the last few yards and came at last past St Magnus Church onto New Fish Street.
People were marvelling that when the New Model Army soldiers had marched through, they were quiet and disciplined, and stole not so much as an apple.
More fool them! Eliza thought.