Free The Masters of Bow Street by John Creasey Page A

peace officers; and in the hundred years of its existence, none had ever been caught in the attempt. They had been taken to the mayor and to aldermen, to justices at the Guildhall and the Mansion House, from where they had been committed to the Sessions in Newgate or Bailey Street. No matter what the trade, or from whence it came, the Furnivals were involved. At first they had been discreet, often buying small companies, such as shipping merchants, small coastal shipping lines, small banks, and wholesale distributors who brought in the food from all of England as well as from distant lands. They owned farms in Scotland and Wales as well as in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, from where cattle and sheep were driven to London’s markets. There were Furnival-owned dairy and pig farms in Norfolk, herds of which crowded the rutted, muddy roads; they had farms in East Anglia, coal mines at all the strategic points for shipment to London by sea. They owned drays and carts in and near London, and had gradually extended their trade until, in the previous generation, it had been impossible to hide the enormous size of their trading empire. In the same year, 1705, they had founded the third of the great fire insurance companies; a year later, the land on which Great Furnival Square was built had been bought - then virtually worthless farmland.
    No one knew how much their businesses were worth; but now they could compete openly with the great ducal landowners, with families that had been wealthy for centuries.
    This, then, was the Furnival empire, controlled wholly by the family, with John the one ‘rogue elephant’ who would not conform to traditions created by his forefathers. And in all of the houses in Great Furnival Square people slept safe in their beds.
    Soon London stirred.
    Long before dawn the journeymen were on their way to work, leaving narrow doorways and lanes, stepping over piles of yesterday’s filth, stepping over some old sot who, not knowing it, had drunk himself to death on the day of Tyburn’s frolic.
    And they stepped over foundling babes, some stark naked and blue with cold or even stiff with death before the light of day shone upon them, some bundled up in rags or blankets, perhaps sleeping, perhaps crying, all left by girls often no more than twelve or thirteen; the warm ones left by their mothers in the despairing hope that one child at least would be picked up and fondled and perhaps wet-nursed by a mother in desperate need of the relief of milk from her breasts, suckled, and cared for and even - loved.
    The great Foundling Hospital, with a royal charter, was in preparation because of the unyielding persistence of Captain Coram. Dukes and earls were to be on its board of Governors; some even said the Prince of Wales, the Minister of State and the Archbishops would be, also. But so far, it was only an empty patch of wasteland near Holborn Garden.

 
4:  THE PROPOSITION
    James Marshall began his day at six o’clock, arriving only minutes later than Morgan, his employer, a good enough man as men went and a member of the Reverend Sebastian Smith’s congregation at St. Hilary’s, a small church soon, it was said, to be pulled down. Morgan was a true believer, who had taken James on because he had promised well and his mother needed help. For sixpence a day James laboured from six in the morning until eight or nine o’clock at night, delivering groceries as well as vegetables and fruit to the big houses nearby, to inns, dining rooms, coffee houses, brothels, and wherever food was needed.
    Morgan professed to have great hopes of the boy. He might one day rise to a position behind the counter of this shop so redolent of spices, coffee and tea.
    It was James himself who had thought of making a yoke, like an ox’s, and stringing larger bundles to it so that they equalled, as well as balancing baskets on his head and pushing the two-wheeled cart, so heavily laden when he set out that it was all his young