The Italian Boy Read Free Page B

in the English capital? And what would these monsters look like? The answer: very ordinary indeed, your common or garden Londoner. John Bishop was thirty-three, stocky, slightly sullen-looking, but with a mild enough expression; he had a long, slender, pointed nose, high cheekbones, large, slightly protruding gray-green eyes, and thick, dark hair that continued down into bushy muttonchop sideburns that covered a good deal of his cheeks. James May, thirty, was tall and handsome, with a mop of unruly fair hair and dark, glittering eyes; he looked pleasant enough. Like Bishop, he was still wearing his smock frock—the typical garment of a rural laborer—in which he had been arrested, which perhaps made him seem even more guileless; his left hand was bandaged. Thomas Williams, in his late twenties, was shorter than the other two, with deep-set hazel eyes and narrow lips that gave him a slightly cunning appearance, but mischievous rather than malevolent; his hair was mousy, his face pale, and he could have passed for someone much younger. Michael Shields just looked like a frightened old man.
    The accounts of Bishop, May, and Williams of the events of Friday, 4 November, and Saturday, 5 November, given at the coroner’s inquest and at hearings yet to come, differed remarkably little from those offered by the various eyewitnesses also called to testify. There were a few discrepancies, but these would appear small and insignificant. The following train of events, at least, was not in dispute.
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    John Bishop and Thomas Williams awoke in No. 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, the cottage they shared in Bethnal Green, at about ten o’clock on Friday morning, breakfasted with their wives and the Bishops’ three children, and set off for the Fortune of War pub in Giltspur Street, Smithfield—opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and a regular meeting place for London’s resurrection men. Here, they began their day’s drinking and met up with James May. May had known Bishop for four or five years and was introduced to Williams, whom May knew only by sight, having seen him in the various pubs around the Old Bailey and Smithfield. The three men drank rum together and ate some lunch. May admired a smock frock that Bishop was wearing and asked him where he could buy a similar one. Bishop took May a few streets away, to Field Lane, one of the districts given over to London’s secondhand clothes trade. Field Lane was also known colloquially as Food and Raiment Alley, Thieving Lane, and Sheeps’ Head Alley, and Charles Dickens was to add to its notoriety six years later by siting one of Fagin’s dens there, in Oliver Twist . A steep, narrow passage, Field Lane comprised Jacobean, Stuart, and early Georgian tenements that were largely forbidding, rotting hovels; those on its east side backed on the Fleet River—often called the Fleet Ditch, since it was by 1831 almost motionless with solidifying filth, though when it flooded, its level could rise by six or seven feet, deluging the surrounding area with its detritus. By weird contrast, the windows in Field Lane were a dazzling display of brightly colored silk handkerchiefs (“wipes”); if the commentators of the day are to be believed, the vast majority of these were stolen by gangs of young—often extremely young—“snotter-haulers,” who would soon be incarnated in the popular imagination as the Artful Dodger (though Dickens used the more polite slang term, “fogle-hunters”). Here, in Field Lane, James May bought a smock frock from a clothes dealer, then decided he wanted a pair of trousers, too, and turned the corner into West Street, where he attempted to bargain with the female owner of another castoffs shop. 3 Already pretty drunk, May was unable to agree on a price with the woman but, feeling guilty at having wasted her time, insisted on buying her some rum, which the three enjoyed together in the shop. May and Bishop then went back to the Fortune of War to have more