The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton Page B

respectable woman would let cosmetics touch her flesh; and her open presence as Pierce’s mistress. In those days, the dividing line between an actress and a prostitute was exceedinglyfine. And actors were by occupation itinerant wanderers, likely to have connections with criminals, or to be criminals themselves. Whatever the truth of her past, she seems to have been his mistress for several years.
    Pierce himself was rarely in the house, and on occasion he was gone overnight. Clean Willy recalled seeing him once or twice in the late afternoon, wearing riding clothes and smelling of horses, as if he had returned from an equestrian excursion.
    “I didn’t know you were a horse fancier,” Willy once said.
    “I’m not,” Pierce replied shortly. “Hate the bloody beasts.”
    Pierce kept Willy indoors after his wounds were healed, waiting for his “terrier crop” to grow out. In those days, the surest way to identify an escaped convict was by his short haircut. By late September, his hair was longer, but still Pierce did not allow him to leave. When Willy asked why, Pierce said, “I am waiting for you to be recaptured, or found dead.”
    This statement puzzled Willy, but he did as he was told. A few days later, Pierce came in with a newspaper under his arm and told him he could leave. That same evening Willy went to the Holy Land, where he expected to find his mistress, Maggie. He found that Maggie had taken up with a footpad, a rough sort who made his way by “swinging the stick”—that is, by mugging. Maggie showed no interest in Willy.
    Willy then took up with a girl of twelve named Louise, whose principal occupation was snowing. She was described in court as “no gofferer, mind, and no clean-starcher, just a bit of plain snow now and then for the translator. Simple, really.” What was meant by this passage, which required considerable explanation to the presiding magistrates, was that Willy’s new mistress was engaged in the lowest form of laundry stealing. The better echelons of laundry stealers, the gofferers andclean-starchers, stole from high-class districts, often taking clothes off the lines. Plain ordinary snowing was relegated to children and young girls, and it could be lucrative enough when fenced to “translators,” who sold the clothing as secondhand goods.
    Willy lived off this girl’s earnings, never venturing outside the sanctuary of the rookery. He had been warned by Pierce to keep his mouth shut, and he never mentioned that he had had help in his break from Newgate. Clean Willy lived with his judy in a lodging house that contained more than a hundred people; the house was a well-known buzzer’s lurk. Willy lived and slept with his mistress in a bed he shared with twenty other bodies of various sexes, and Louise reported of this period, “He took his ease, and spent his time cheerful, and waited for the cracksman to give his call.”

CHAPTER 16

Rotten Row
    Of all the fashionable sections of that fashionable city of London, none compared to the spongy, muddy pathway in Hyde Park called the Ladies’ Mile, or Rotten Row. Here, weather permitting, were literally hundreds of men and women on horseback, all dressed in the greatest splendor the age could provide, radiant in the golden sunshine at four in the afternoon.
    It was a scene of bustling activity: the horsemen and horsewomen packed tightly together; the women with little uniformed foot pages trotting along behind their mistresses, or sometimes accompanied by stern,mounted duennas, or sometimes escorted by their beaus. And if the spectacle of Rotten Row was splendid and fashionable, it was not entirely respectable, for many of the women were of dubious character. “There is no difficulty,” wrote one observer, “in guessing the occupation of the dashing
equestrienne
who salutes half-a-dozen men at once with whip or with a wink, and who sometimes varies the monotony of a safe seat by holding her hands behind her back while gracefully