Pictures and Problems from London Police CourtsHolmes, Thomas
History
Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts
Holmes, Thomas
Crime -- England -- London; Poor -- England -- London
The years went on, and she got older; no rescue home would have her,
for I tried them all. No corner of the world would have her, for I
tried the various emigration societies in London, and though the
necessary money would have been forthcoming to pay for her outfit,
voyage, etc., no one would have her; so I clothed her decently and
brought her home. Three days she stayed with us, and the thought of her
child maddened her; the lust for liberty and drink came upon her, and
about ten o’clock at night away she sped, on and on, for the devil lent
her wings, till down in the old neighbourhood she found herself. A wild
joy and a fierce fight followed. The next morning, when I went into the
female prisoners’ waiting-room, she lay on the floor with cut head and
bruised face, her bonnet all smashed, her clothes all torn.
Now, Adams was naturally a kind and timid woman. When in the cells
she was quiet, when before the magistrate respectful, when in prison
well-behaved; but the devils of sensuality, drink, and despair had made
their abode within her, and they led her whereso’er they would. The
years went on and she still kept it up; bronchitis seemed to get fast
hold upon her, and it was wonderful to me how she lived. Probably it
was the frequent detentions in prison that kept her alive, for her name
became notorious, and her record was next only to that of Cakebread.
Again Lady Henry Somerset wrote me, ‘Bring her down to Duxhurst.’ Many
might have considered that the residue of her days were not worth
saving; yet I took her, and though Lady Henry knew that to receive her
was to receive a broken, almost dying, piece of humanity, she received
her. Two years she stayed there, and they were two years of peace.
She proved docile, obedient, kind, and trustworthy. But again Nature
had its own. She manifested symptoms of a disease that could only be
treated in a London hospital, and she was sent for treatment. It did
not succeed, and she soon passed away.
In one of the rooms at Duxhurst is a tablet kindly placed there to
her memory, and it tells of her goodness whilst an inmate of that
institution. Somewhere in one of our great London cemeteries, deep
down she lies--I know not where. Somewhere out in the world is her
child, now a man. He knows the life of shame and notoriety his mother
lived. For years, her hope was to see him, and to her doom she went
with that hope unfulfilled. If he is ‘respectable,’ I at least hope he
is not hard or bitter, and that he lets the knowledge that she had a
passionate love for him draw a thick veil over the main part of her sad
life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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