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"He said that you would know what affair he was come about that it was very urgent; and that he could not stay in town beyond noon to-day. He said, sir, that he was to be found till then at the Mitre without Aldgate." Well; that was enough for me. But I did not relish the prospect of no sleep again; for I cannot trust my wits when I have not slept my seven or eight hours.
The parish of Aldgate, if I may give my opinion, buried above a thousand a week for two weeks, though the bills did not say so many; but it surrounded me at so dismal a rate that there was not a house in twenty uninfected in the Minories, in Houndsditch, and in those parts of Aldgate parish about the Butcher Row and the alleys over against me. I say, in those places death reigned in every corner.
While it was in all these parishes, the city and all the parishes of the Southwark side of the water and all Stepney, Whitechappel, Aldgate, Wapping, and Ratcliff, were very little touched; so that people went about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the city, the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague had not been among us.
The sweepers who work on the great lines of traffic from Oxford Street west to Aldgate, are consequently not nearly so numerous as they once were, though the members of the profession have probably doubled their numbers within the last twenty years.
I despise you, but I want money; and I will sell you my beloved daughter, Blanche Stiffneck, for a hundred thousand pounds, to pay off my mortgages. Let your son marry her, and she shall become Lady Blanche Pump and Aldgate. Old Pump and Aldgate clutches at the bargain. And a comfortable thing it is to think that birth can be bought for money. So you learn to value it.
One evening, after dining together, he took me in a cab across the City to the Three Nuns Hotel, at Aldgate where, in the saloon bar, we sat drinking. Before setting out he had urged me to put on a shabby suit of clothes and a soft hat, so that in the East End we should not attract attention as "swells." As for his own personal appearance, it was certainly not that of the spruce city man.
"The guard marched up and down the platform looking into all the carriages to see if anyone had left a halfpenny evening paper behind for him, and opening the door of one of the first-class compartments, he noticed a lady sitting in the further corner, with her head turned away towards the window, evidently oblivious of the fact that on this line Aldgate is the terminal station.
The old English Cnichtenagild surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house paints admirably the temper of the citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior Norman, built church and cloister and bought books and vestments in so liberal a fashion that no money remained to buy bread.
Assuming that the Aldgate murder was the subject of his cogitations, I ventured to ask: "Have you any material evidence to offer the coroner?" He closed his notebook and put it away. "The evidence that I have," he said, "is material and important; but it is disjointed and rather inconclusive.
In the same year he got from the corporation of London a lease for life of a house at Aldgate, on condition of keeping it in repair; and soon after he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wool, Skins, and Leather in the port of London; he also received from the Duke of Lancaster a pension of £10.
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