Pierce directed the swift treatment of the man, who was barely conscious. He was revived with the vapors of ammonium chloride from a cut-glass inhaler. His clothes were stripped off by the women, who pretended no modesty but worked quickly; his many wounds were staunched with styptic powder and sticking plaster, then bound with surgical bandages. Agar gave him a sip of coca wine for energy, and Burroughs & Wellcome beef-and-iron wine for sustenance. He was forced to down two Carter’s Little Nerve Pills and some tincture of opium for his pain. This combined treatment brought the man to his senses, and enabled the women to clean his face, douse his body with rose water, and bundle him into the waiting dress.
When he was dressed, he was given a sip of Bromo Caffein for further energy, and told to act faint. A bonnet was placed over his head, and boots laced on his feet; his bloody prison garb was stuffed in the picnic basket.
No one among the crowd of more than twenty thousand paid the slightest attention when the well-dressed party of hangers-on departed Mrs. Molloys boarding house— with one woman of their party so faint that she had to be carried by the men, who hustled her into a waiting cab— and rattled off into the morning light. A faint woman was a common enough sight and, in any case, nothing to compare to a woman turning slowly at the end of the rope, back and forth, back and forth.
Chapter 14
A Georgian Disgrace
It is usually estimated that seven-eighths of the structures in Victorian London were actually Georgian. The face of the city and its general architectural character were legacies of that earlier era; the Victorians did not begin to rebuild their capital in any substantial way until the 1880s. This reluctance reflected the economics of urban building. For most of the century, it simply was not profitable to tear down old structures, even those badly suited to their modern functions. Certainly the reluctance was not aesthetic— the Victorians loathed the Georgian style, which Ruskin himself termed “the ne plus ultra of ugliness.”
Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the Times, in reporting that a convict had escaped from Newgate Prison, observed that “the virtues of this edifice have been clearly overstated. Not only is escape from its confines possible, it is mere child’s play, for the fleeing villian had not yet attained his majority. It is time for this public disgrace to be torn down.”
The article went on to comment that “the Metropolitan Police has dispatched groups of armed officers into the rookeries of the town, in order to flush out the escaped man, and there is every expectation of his apprehension.”
There were no follow-up reports. One must remember that during this period, jailbreaks were, in the words of one commentator, “quite as common as illegitimate births,” and nothing so ordinary was really newsworthy. At a time when the curtains of the windows of Parliament were being soaked in lime to protect the members against the cholera epidemic while they debated the conduct of the Crimean campaign, the newspapers could not be bothered with a minor felon from the dangerous classes who had been lucky enough to make a clean getaway.
A month later, the body of a young man was found floating in the Thames, and police authorities identified him as the escaped convict from Newgate. It received barely a paragraph in the Evening Standard; the other newspapers did not mention it at all.
Chapter 15
The Pierce Household
After his escape, Clean Willy was taken to Pierce’s house in Mayfair, where he spent several weeks in seclusion while his wounds healed. It is from his later testimony to police that we first learn of the mysterious woman who was Pierce’s mistress, and known to Willy as “Miss Miriam”
Willy was placed in an upstairs room, and the servants were told that he was a relative of Miss Miriam’s who had been run down by a cab on New Bond Street. From time to time, Willy was tended by Miss Miriam. He said of her that she was “well carried, a good figure, and well-spoke, and she walked here and there slow, never hurrying.” This last sentiment was echoed by all the witnesses, who were impressed by the ethereal aspect of the young woman; her eyes were said to be especially captivating, and her grace in movement was called “dreamlike” and “phantasmagorical.”