Free The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre

blowing back, the good-natured and flirtatious chaff of the hotel’s regular drinkers. But when these same patrons overstepped the mark and were foolhardy enough to suggest that Kitty might like to consider some more intimate after-hours entertainment, they were left in no doubt, by way of a stream of vivid Irish invective, that the barmaid considered herself destined for rather greater delights than they could offer. The steamer from Dublin to Liverpool had been the first stage in Kitty’s planned journey to fortune and respectability; her current job as a hotel barmaid was but a way station along the route. The arrival of Messrs. Raymond and Wells opened up new and enticing vistas. Knights in shining armor were few and far between in Liverpool, and two wealthy Americans with money to burn were clearly the next best thing.
    “She was an unusually beautiful girl—a plump, dashing blond of much the same type [as the actress] Lillian Russell was years ago,” recounted Sophie Lyons. She was, like all the best barmaids, buxom. Her blond hair curled into ringlets reaching to the middle of her back and were arranged in such a way that they appeared to have exploded from the back of her head. Her features were delicate, her nose snubbed, her lips full, but it was her eyes, startlingly blue and slightly distended, that tended to reduce her admirers to putty. In certain lights she looked like nothing so much as an exceptionally attractive frog—which was only appropriate, since Kitty would shortly embark on a career in which, as in the fairy tale, she would be kissed by a variety of princes, charming and otherwise. In the best surviving portrait of her (a colored version of a picture by the French photographer Félix Nadar), Kitty Flynn is wearing an expression that hovers between flirtatious and simply wicked.
    That expression had an electric effect on the newest arrivals to the Washington Hotel in January 1870. It was never clear which of the two felons first lost his heart to Kitty, but that both did so, and deeply, was accepted as fact by all their contemporaries. Sophie Lyons is characteristically blunt on the matter: “Bullard and Raymond [she uses Worth’s real name and his alias interchangeably] both fell madly in love with her.”
    For the next month Kitty was besieged by these two very different suitors—the one small, dapper, almost teetotal, and intense; the other tall, lugubrious, and, as the Pinkertons put it, “inclined to live fast and dissipate.” Suddenly Kitty found herself being wined and dined on a scale that was lavish beyond her most extravagant dreams and that stretched Liverpool’s resources to the limit. In spite of their amorous rivalry, the two crooks remained the closest of friends as they swept Kitty from one expensive candlelit dinner to another, as Bullard serenaded her and Worth did his best to persuade her that he, rather than his exotic partner, represented the more solid investment. “The race for her favor was a close one,” records the inquisitive Lyons, “despite the fact that Bullard was an accomplished musician [and] spoke several languages fluently.” Finally Kitty gave in to Piano Charley’s entreaties and agreed to marry him. Yet for Worth she always reserved a place in her heart and, for that matter, her bed.
    Kitty Flynn became Mrs. Charles H. Wells one spring Sunday. The ceremony was performed at the Washington Hotel and a large and curious crowd of Liverpudlians turned out to watch the toast of the city being driven away in a coach and four by her handsome American husband. Adam Worth was the best man and, Lyons reports, “to his credit it should be said that the bridal couple had no sincerer well-wisher than he.” Worth had good reason for his equanimity, since, although Kitty had agreed to marry Bullard, she seems to have been only too happy to share her favors with both men. If Bullard objected to this arrangement, he did not say so. Indeed, he was hardly in a strong