The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens by Thomas Hauser Page B

lingering tinge of long-ago beauty. Something in her said without words, “I am younger than you would think to look at me.” The other looked only of misery. She was the one who spoke.
    â€œPut your hand under my dress. Touch me where I am wet. Only five pence each.”
    â€œBe gone with you,” Christopher told her.
    â€œDo you want me gone, sonny boy? Or would you rather my hand inside your britches?”
    The streets were poorly lit with a spot here and there where lamps were clustered in a square or around some large building. Then the wind began to howl, and a heavy rain fell. Pools of water collected in deep brown mud.
    Finally, we came to a place where I turned to Christopher and said, “I know the road from here. You need walk with me no further.”
    â€œWill you be safe?”
    â€œThere is nothing to be taken from me. My pockets are as empty as those of anyone I might pass.”
    We embraced.
    â€œYou have my word. I will do my best to bring you justice.”
    â€œDo that for my sister, and you shall not be friendless while I live.”
    I walked on alone through the cold wet streets of London. Before long, I was in a more decent part of the city where the street lamps were more frequent and shone more brightly. But I did not go home. Instead, I walked for hours in solitary desolation.
    The rain stopped. The darkness diminished. There was no day yet in the sky. But there was day in the resounding stones of the streets, in the wagons and carts of labourers hurrying to work in pursuit of their family’s daily bread.
    The spires of churches grew faintly tinged with the light of the rising sun. Its beams glanced next onto the streets until there was light enough for men to see each other’s faces. Church bells chimed, sharp and flat, muffled and clear. Those who had spent the night on doorsteps and stones rose and went off to beg. Shops opened. Commerce came to the markets.
    All the while, I saw Florence Spriggs before me. I felt her suffering more deeply in my soul than all the suffering I had known or imagined before.
    Wingate had cut her like meat and branded her with his hatred. He had taken the face that James Frost loved and turned it into a mask of horror. His unspeakable cruelty had deprived James of life and left his beloved with nothing more than the vision of a future that should have been and would never be.
    A towering rage was building inside me. The flames kept rising. They would not subside. I made a vow.
    If I did nothing more in my entire life, I would wreak Biblical justice upon Geoffrey Wingate and bring him to ruin.

CHAPTER 5

    I rested on the day after my journey into the slums of London. Then I confronted the issue of how to fulfill the pledge I had made to Florence and Christopher Spriggs. The best first step seemed to lie in bringing the matter to the attention of the police.
    As I write these words in 1870, there is a unified, properly trained police force in London that serves as a model for police work throughout England. It was not always so. At the start of the nineteenth century, England relied on local watches and a parish constable system for the maintenance of order. As social and economic conditions changed, the machinery of law enforcement eroded. Crime grew rampant, particularly in London, and disorder was often prevalent.
    Responding to the crisis, in 1829, Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act. There would be one policeforce in London, replacing the numerous inefficient local commands. The sole exemption from its jurisdiction was the original City of London—an area twenty blocks squared—that remained under the control of a command known as The City Police.
    Headquarters for the new Metropolitan Police Force were established at Four Whitehall Place. The public was allowed to enter through a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The city was divided into seventeen districts, each having a superintendent,