The Potato Factory

Ikey was delighted. It meant that she was fully compromised. She would do his bookkeeping and add even further to his gain and, at the same time, completely negate his fears. Mary, he told himself, knew decidedly more of whoring than of clerking, and as the mistress of a brothel as well as his bookkeeper she would be tied to him for ever. Greed was the only emotion Ikey trusted in himself as well as in others. An agreement was struck between them whereby Ikey would put up the capital for the brothel for which he would receive seventy percent and Mary thirty percent after the deduction of ru

The last point was a master stroke on Ikey's part. Through Ha

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 Ha

Ikey had also persuaded Ha

Though Ikey hated Ha

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 Ha

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 pe

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 bellado