‘To get a confession from a proud male factor, it is always better to call for a poet than a priest.’ These are the wise words of William Archer, the narrator of part of The Fatal Tree and the notional editor of the rest. Mind you, he’s biased: he aspires to be a poet, though he is at best a ‘garreteer’, one of the Grub Street hacks who provide better writers than themselves with lurid copy about the early Georgian underworld they live in.
Archer’s world is the ‘Hundreds of Drury’, the streets and alleys around Drury Lane where the thieves, prostitutes and con men ply their trades. Known as Romeville in the thieves’ cant that colours so much of this novel, it holds up a dark mirror to the great metropolis around it. Romeville has its own laws and customs, its own heroes and villains. Immortalised by Defoe, Gay and Fielding, it both terrifies and fascinates the public.
Archer is fictional, but most of the other main characters are not. Among them is the infinitely sinister Jonathan Wild, the self-styled ‘Thieftaker General of Great Britain and Ireland’, who plays each side of the law against the other to his own advantage. His feud with Jack Shepherd, the charismatic burglar who refuses to accept his authority, is one factor leading to his eventual downfall.
But the voice we hear most clearly is that of Edgeworth Bess, a prostitute who loves Jack but knows his weaknesses. In February 1726, at the start of the novel, she is imprisoned in Newgate. She dictates her life story to Archer in ‘flash’, the thieves’ language, while she waits to end her life on the ‘Fatal Tree’ at Tyburn.
In parallel with her story, Archer unfolds his own, for a reason that becomes fully apparent only at the end.
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