FELIX QUI POTUIT rerum cognoscere causas. Happy is he who can ascertain the causes of things.
For reasons that were unfathomable to him, Child knew that women liked to discuss their troubles with their friends. Lucy had many misfortunes to share: the assault on her person six months earlier; losing her job as a sitter with the artist Agnetti; the anonymous note and rumours that had destroyed her livelihood; her consequent debts. Understanding this chain of disaster, Child felt, was key to finding the man who killed her. He therefore made tracking down Lucy’s friends his next priority.
Boscastle, Lucy’s landlord, had identified three of them: Kitty, the redhead from the Whores’ Club; Mrs Agnetti, the artist’s wife; and the pox-scarred prostitute with the limp and the brand on her hand. Neither Kitty nor Mrs Agnetti had called in several months, but the unnamed prostitute had been a much more recent visitor. The landlord had presumed she was a friend of Lucy’s from her thieving days, an assumption Child shared. After a midday breakfast of blood sausage at a Holborn chophouse, he walked the short distance to the Bridewell House of Correction, where, according to the Whores’ Club, Lucy had served her sentence for fraud.
A vast gloomy brick building on the banks of the Fleet, the prison buildings formed two adjacent squares, each with a courtyard at the centre. One half of the prison housed vagrants and homeless children; the other petty criminals, including a great many prostitutes. Child passed them on his way in: lines of women beating hemp in the courtyard, while an overseer barked orders. In another portion of the yard, a half-naked prostitute was being whipped while spectators watched from a wooden gallery.
Child often had business here, sometimes to speak to inmates who could help with his inquiries, sometimes to give evidence before meetings of the Court of Governors. Oswald Babbage, the Court’s secretary, was a sprawling, ungainly man with several chins and small red lips like the mouth of a purse. Upon payment of a modest bribe, he was happy to give Child the run of the Record Office.
‘If she came in through these doors, she’ll be in there,’ Babbage said, gesturing to the banks of wooden cabinets. ‘Just be aware that they like to change their names – sometimes many times over the course of a life on the street.’
There was a Register of Inmates for each calendar year. Lucy had told her landlord that she’d been branded on the hand shortly after she came to London. And according to both him and Orin Black, Lucy had been living in the city for many years. Child therefore started in 1775, and worked backwards.
He found no Lucy Loveless in the registers, and he thought it likely, as Babbage had suggested, she’d used a different name in her dealings with the justice system. Child therefore moved on to the more arduous task of consulting the Minutes of the Court of Governors, which passed judgement on the miscreants that came before them. Again, Child started in 1775 and worked backwards, looking for details that would correlate with the little he’d learned from his visit to the Whores’ Club.
It took three hours before he found her, in one of the minute books for the year 1767, when Lucy would have been just fourteen years old.
Lucy Redfern, 14, and Annie Yearley, 18, on the oath of Mr Jonah Warren, a gentleman of Red Lion Square, for defrauding of ten pounds for a counterfeit ring in the Sun Tavern on Milk Street, and for being common night walkers, wandering abroad at an unreasonable time and picking up men.
For Lucy Redfern: Cont. to branding upon the hand and 6 months to be served.
For Annie Yearley: Cont. to branding upon the hand, a whipping, and discharge.
Child took the record through to Babbage’s office. ‘Do you remember this inmate at all: Lucy Redfern?’
Babbage read the entry, then shook his head. ‘Annie Yearley I know. She calls herself Nelly Diver now. Been in and out of Bridewell for years.’
‘If Lucy Redfern had brought a child into Bridewell, would it be listed here?’
‘Yes, a note should have been made.’
Child wondered if that meant Lucy’s child had been born after she’d been in Bridewell, or whether it was already dead by then, or whether the child had been cared for by someone else while she’d served her sentence.
‘This Nelly Diver,’ he said, ‘does she have curly dark hair? A pox-scarred face? Walk with a limp?’
‘Got the scars back in ’75 in the epidemic we had here. She told the Court one of her pimps was responsible for the limp.’
Sometimes, Child thought, you just got lucky.