The last point was a master stroke on Ikey's part. Through Hannah he had met a notorious Belgian forger who had been forced to escape from the authorities in several European countries and had proposed a business deal. The forger, a man named Abraham Van Esselyn, was also a Jew. Moreover he was deaf and dumb and, if he was to make a living at his craft, needed a partner. Ikey was ideally suited to this purpose, for he could procure all the materials needed for a sophisticated forgery operation through his various contacts and had an established network of fellow Jews in Europe and America through whom the fake banknotes could be laundered. He would set up a printing operation in the cellar at Bell Alley.
Ikey now had the premises in Bell Alley working to his complete satisfaction. He hated waste and now he had turned every inch of space to profit – the cellar turning out counterfeit notes and, in daylight hours, printing handbills and pamphlets; the centre of the house supplying the physical and fantastical needs of bankers, lawyers, judges, magistrates and toffs in general; the attic serving as a counting house and storage for the rich fruits of his nocturnal harvesting.
Ikey was well pleased with himself. There remained no chinks in his emotional armour and he had kept Mary at his side by involving her in two of these activities. The forgery he shared with his wife Hannah and not with Mary, who did none of the bookwork involved.
Ikey had also persuaded Hannah never to venture near the premises at Bell Alley as implication in the forging of high denomination banknotes led to the death penalty. Ikey pointed out, though unnecessarily, that if they should both go to the gallows, all their property confiscated, their children would be alone and destitute in a cruel and uncaring world. Hannah needed no further encouragement to stay away. In this way Hannah was completely unaware of the existence of a high-class brothel at the Bell Alley address nor was she aware of Mary, the second woman in Ikey's life.
Though Ikey hated Hannah, she owned half of his ready fortune. That is, his convertible wealth, the gold sovereigns and ingots, silver and precious stones, for Ikey believed in liquid assets of the kind you could pack into a smallish space when you beat a hasty retreat. They shared everything equally by means of each of them only knowing a half of the combination to the safe they kept under the floorboards in the pantry of the Whitechapel house, so both were required to be present to open it and neither could escape with the contents without the co-operation of the other.
This was an agreement Ikey had foolishly made in earlier years when he had first been released from a prison hulk and the money taken from Hannah's bawdy houses had supplied the cash he needed to start up in the fencing business. Hannah had insisted on the basis that if Ikey was arrested again he might, under duress, reveal the combination to the authorities or various villains. He now regarded it as the single most foolish thing he had ever done, but Hannah had been unrelenting in her insistence that the practice be continued. Ikey comforted himself that while this prevented him from stealing the contents some day and deserting his wife, Hannah was placed in the very same predicament.
Mary took to the standing upright part of her profession handsomely and developed clear ideas of how she would conduct her role as mistress of a whorehouse to the gentry. She successfully persuaded Ikey that they must go first class with no corners cut and create an establishment second to none in London.
She furnished the house much like the Chelsea one she'd been chased from after the aborted affair with Bob Marley, though with a distinctly oriental flavour she'd observed in a picture of a salon in the window of a printing shop and which she persuaded the proprietor to sell to her. Mary spared not a penny in making the premises in Bell Alley grandly ostentatious with a front parlour lavishly done out in silks and rare carpets as well as erotic statues showing every form of human copulation. Many of the statues were painted in gold and bedecked in coloured ostrich feathers to make a dazzling display of erotica.
Ikey was a rich man, a very rich man, but not one given to spending it upon others. But persuaded by Mary that the best of London's professional and commercial society would beat a path to her door, or more correctly between her expensive linen sheets, where they would be attended by the most skilled and beautiful young courtesans in return for large amounts of money, he opened his purse to the fullest. At the same time he allowed that Mary should owe him thirty percent of the total cost of refurbishing, to be paid off from her future brothel earnings.
Mary was delighted. For the first time she was in control of her own life and she did not regard Ikey's terms as onerous. On the contrary, she was aware that she owed him a great debt and was determined that she would repay it with the utmost loyalty. Ikey was the first person who had shown her the least charity and she would never forget this. A great deal would happen in the course of this strange partnership, some good and much bad, but Mary would never deny that Ikey had been the means of her salvation.
In Mary's bawdy house Ikey could take vicarious pleasure in observing the high and the mighty at work through a peephole in the ceiling. He found it ironic and immensely pleasing to think that one day he was bound to stand trial before a bewigged and scarlet-robed judge and have the image recalled of this same m'lord, without breeches, fat belly wobbling, rogering one of Mary's plump little pigeons.
Mary's establishment made Ikey feel clean and respectable and even somewhat superior for the first time in his life and he grandly imagined himself a member, if only by proxy and proximity, of London's professional classes. Indeed, it gave him the greatest possible satisfaction that it was lawyers, judges, magistrates and bankers who became Mary's regular clients, the very men who, throughout his life, had caused him so much anxiety.
For Ikey it was money well spent and soon it was money most easily earned as men of the bench and at the bar and in the city knocked discreetly at the scarlet door of Mary's Bell Alley brothel.
For the most part Mary's clients shared two characteristics: the sprightliness and easy randiness of youth had long passed, though the memory of it remained bright as a sunlit morning. They came to Egyptian Mary's, as it became known, to attempt to relive the past while indulging any current fantasies.
The story of Mary's missing hands, often told with great conviction, added greatly to her fame and customers believed that many of the sexual fantasticals available to them stemmed originally from her time spent in the mysterious orient. Mary took to wearing a turban of multi-coloured silks which did nothing to dispel the rumours and added greatly to her mystique.
Mary taught her girls the use of belladonna to lift their spirits and to enter with enthusiasm into the many bondages, recitations, titivations, dressing ups and stripping downs, spankings, pretendings, offendings, excitements, oral, anal, frontal and often curiously banal, which her ageing, mostly pot-bellied, clientele required. They learned to be extravagant in their compliments and the most inadequate sexual performance was built to high praise so that the ageing participant left Egyptian Mary's convinced of his renewed and awesome virility.
There were three things not on offer at Egyptian Mary's but which could be procured at any other London brothel. Mary did not trade in little boys or girls or in young men.