The coach drew at last to a standstill, the coachman laying aside his horn and shouting, 'Whooa! Whooa!' to the wild-eyed beasts in the time-honoured way. The horses thus brought to a stop shook their heads in a jingle of brasses, champed at the bit and stamped their feet on the hard surface of the road. Their coats were lathered with sweat from their final gallop and their nostrils snorted smoky air.
The coach official opened the door on the widow's side. 'Oh me Gawd!' he exclaimed fanning his nose. He immediately turned to the waiting crowd. 'Anyone come for a show freak?' he yelled. 'If 'e is, she be blind, 'opeless drunk! Need ter fetch cart and oxen, or special sprung carriage. She'll not be walkin', I can tell 'e that for sure and absolute certain!'
The widow reached out and took the unfortunate official by the collar of his coat and pulled the top half of him backwards into the coach so that his head lay upon her lap.'
'Ullo, dearie, fancy a kiss?' she said, then burped loudly into the man's astonished face.
Ikey glanced quickly at Tweedle, who sat frozen upright looking directly out of the window, trying to ignore the bizarre antics of the drunken woman and the wildly struggling and whimpering official.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Ikey quietly unlatched the coach door on his side, leaving it ajar. Then he rose and lifted the still surprisingly heavy hamper and placed it down upon an astonished Tweedle's lap, quite preventing him from rising in pursuit should he take it in his mind to do so, whereupon he pushed the door open and stepped through it. But alas, his coat caught on the sharp corner of the small door and pulled him back. Ikey pulled desperately at the coat and a six-inch tear appeared in the thick wool as he wrenched it free, and then dashed into the dark shadow cast by the terminus building. In a few moments he had escaped up a narrow alleyway which ran between the stage coach terminal and the building beside it.
Ikey's immediate destination in Birmingham was not, as might normally have been the case, one of the more notorious flash-houses nor thieves' kitchens where he might be expected to take up temporary residence, but to a stabling property on the outskirts of the city.
This large, unprepossessing building of rough-hewn stone had all the appearances of a farmhouse. It was set on the road to the village of Coleshill, with stables on the ground level for several horses and above it two additional storeys, which a visitor might naturally suppose was the owner's residence. However, in this instance, the large building was much, much more than a simple farmhouse and might even have been called a kind of factory, a paper and ink factory to give this most improper and anonymous business a proper name.
The property belonged to Silas Browne Esq., outwardly a respected horse dealer but to those in the know, one of the greatest forgers of soft in the land. He was a man of great ingenuity and reputation known to all who dealt in a serious manner in good forged banknotes throughout England and continental Europe.
Birmingham was the chief centre of the production of good hard, this being the name for counterfeit coin. Since it had always been a place where fine jewellery, watches and military medals were made, it was easy enough for Birmingham craftsmen to turn to this illicit trade. The same was not necessarily true for the forging of banknotes, and had it not been for the remarkable talents of Silas Browne and his wife Maggie the Colour, the city might not have become a recognised centre for banknote forgery.
While the city supported a great many clandestine coining workshops it contained only a handful of talented engravers. These mostly derived from men who had been decorators of gold and silver plate. Though these few very skilled men together gave it an acknowledged presence in banknotes and forged letters of credit, and even some work on share certificates, their efforts were no greater than other major English cities.
Etching was an exacting task and a superior engraver might take a year or more to perfect the plates required for a single banknote, so that these men needed to be financed and carefully safeguarded by those who profited most from their skills. Silas Browne and Maggie the Colour were known to employ the very best engravers. But to the engraver's skill they added two ingredients which gave Birmingham an advantage in the forged banknote trade. The house to which Ikey now hurriedly set out was used for making this paper and ink.
Silas Browne, though seeming a ponderous and somewhat befuddled man, made the best counterfeit paper in England and his wife, Maggie the Colour, the best inks. This combination, together with the fact that Silas financed most of the more skilled engravers and so came into possession of the best engraved plates, made them very wealthy. It was claimed they had a share in every forgery printing operation in Birmingham and, as well, sold ink to Manchester printers and even to some of the better London operators.
Maggie the Colour was the daughter of a Manchester dyemaker and possessed a talent for mixing inks and dyes and an eye for subtle colour, shading and gradations, which was truly remarkable. She was known to use mostly local tinctures, some from plants and herbs she collected in the surrounding countryside, the juice of mulberry and pomegranate imported from Spain, as well as tannins from various types of wood. These she mixed with the exotic pigments and dyes available on the English market, but which came from India, China and from Dutch Batavia used by the silk makers in Macclesfield and the cotton spinners of Manchester. Any forger worthy of his name would use no other ink, the powdered galls mixed with camphor supplied by Maggie the Colour were so good that even the officials at the Bank of England could find no major fault with her product.
Given the very best engraver's plates, expertly prepared paper, perfect ink matching and superior printing, the work done by Silas Browne and Maggie the Colour was among the finest in England. But it fell short of perfection because the paper used for bills simply could not be reproduced, and the plates used for banknotes above the ten pound denomination were thought to be too complicated for a single engraver, and could never hope to deceive even the most casual banker's eye.
Abraham Van Esselyn's forged plates were near to being the exception. They were the very finest of their kind available, perhaps in the entire world of forgery, so perfect that they might have been prepared by the Bank of England's own engravers. These plates, now about to be offered by Ikey to Silas Browne, were the work of a single man of undoubted genius and moreover, each was perfect to the point of almost any magnification. This made them of the greatest possible value to a team like Browne and his wife, Maggie, though, of course, it was not concerning these alone that Ikey had come to see them.
Ikey, having walked for almost an hour, came at last to the end of the city's sprawling slums, and soon found himself in more open ground where cottages rested separately, some with small gardens to the front or back. Ikey disliked space of any sort and his eyes darted hither and thither. He shied away from a barking dog, and jumped wildly at the sudden crow of a cockerel or the hissing of a goose. Some of the lanes along which he passed contained hedges on either side which provided some concealment, though nature's walls of hawthorn thicket did very little for Ikey's peace of mind. Strange things went click and buzz and chirp within them, and none of these noises equated to the myriad sounds to which Ikey's highly particular ear was tuned.
It was coming up mid-morning when he finally reached the open field in the centre of which stood the house of Silas Browne. Ikey was in a state of high nervous tension. The daylight hour, though some snow had started to fall, coupled with the open terrain through which he had been forced to travel on this final part of his journey, had brought him very close to complete panic. He was hungry but so single-minded in his mission that he hadn't even thought to enter a chop house for a meal. Now he stopped and rested at the gate leading into the field and, removing his neckcloth, wiped the nervous perspiration from his brow and the back of his neck.