‘You found me well enough.’
‘The mere mention of your name –’
‘My office hours don’t begin till ten,’ said I, pointing to the painted sign. ‘But for Mr Geert Gyssels, I am always open.’
They were the finest boots that I’d yet heard upon my boards and it was a chilling sound, the triple step of his two feet and marbled cane. I made my way behind my desk, feeling that wretched spot of moisture beneath my heel.
‘That’s one very long pipe,’ said he.
‘From Calcutta. A beer?’
‘Pray forgive me, I have not the time.’
‘Surely I can offer something. An oyster perhaps?’
Gyssels bowed, flicked out his coat, and sat. It was a curious thing, a man like Gyssels on the other side of my desk. The left corner of his mouth was slightly cocked and his eyes ran right through me like a chilly, babbling river. I chose to focus on my tobacco, picking at a bunch and sprinkling it into the bowl. I packed it down and repeated, until it was stuffed and needing a haircut. Silence hung. I wouldn’t be the first to speak, I told myself, I wouldn’t! Slowly, I paced to the stove and lit a lucifer, returned to my chair and began drawing on my pipe. It was a relief to put some smoke between us.
‘Master Wild,’ said he, finally. ‘I received your dispatch.’
‘Aye.’
‘Become your livelihood then? The receiving of stolen goods.’
‘You, a man of the law, will know that it’s criminal to receive stolen goods. I broker return only.’
‘I find it rather interesting coming from –’
‘I make my money by fee, for time spent, much like yourself.’
‘I’m not so certain on the comparison.’
‘How goes our investment in the Perpetual Motion Machine?’
‘On that –’
‘I do apologise for seeking the liquidation so soon; as you’ll see my offices came at no small expense, and I’ve –’
‘The investment horizon isn’t predicated by shareholders. It’s determined by our schedule of commercialisation.’
‘My Flemish isn’t what it used to be.’
Through the smoke his eyes appeared even icier, like the same river but in a snowy setting with some wolves. ‘As I understand it, a transaction requires both a buyer and a seller.’
‘Mr Gyssels, pray speak plainly. We are associates, are we not?’
‘You stole my pepperpots.’
With two more ticks of silence, I felt the sway of power shifting, coming across the room and into my arms like we were aboard a lolling boat.
‘They were gifted to me by the poet Anselmus Wildebinde, and are of great sentimental value.’
‘Haven’t heard of him.’
‘I will have a Justice arraign you for the theft!’
‘Theft? I trade in information only, not goods.’
‘I noticed their absence the day you visited. It was you.’
‘Mr Gyssels, I am deeply vexed by such an accusation!’
‘Why, then, do you grin?’
‘It’s the effort of drawing on this pipe, you see,’ said I, puffing and blowing. ‘I really have to work at it.’
Gyssels rose to his feet and struck the alabaster orb of his cane handle against his left glove. Then he clenched it, the hide creaking. I’d learned the art of conversational manipulation from Uxbridge: when you’re on top, prolong.
‘You can forget liquidating your shares,’ Gyssels sneered, his colour deepening. ‘I will see to it personally that you’re diluted to dust. That your shares are rendered worthless.’
‘Now, now, all on the basis of some fable you’ve told yourself. I stole nothing, Mr Gyssels.’
‘I have a witness!’
‘You’ll force your sweet maid Tina into perjury? You should be ashamed.’
‘She claims to have seen you. And you acknowledge your possession in this letter.’
He reached into his coat pocket and introduced a paper, unfolding it and waving it around. So this was how it felt for Uxbridge: dominion.
‘Don’t worry yourself, Mr Gyssels,’ began I. ‘Anus Wildebeest’s pepperpots are in safe hands. But as you say, a transaction requires a seller and a buyer. And we both know I’m a seller.’
‘But they’re not yours to sell.’
‘I have a bill of sale from a pawner at the Edgware Road,’ said I, tapping a ledger that contained no such document. ‘That makes the items legally my own. And I, too, have witnesses. Many, many witnesses.’
‘Buttock-brokers,’ spat Gyssels.
‘Pray mind your tongue. The real culprit, as I generously informed you, is a felon named Blueskin Blake.’
‘I have no desire to involve myself in your petty intrigues. Now, how much are you asking for the Wildebinde pots?’
‘Are you familiar with the term “bulk buying”?’
Gyssels snorted.
‘It’s your lucky day. I’m happy to accept a discounted price for both the pepperpots and the Perpetual Motion Machine shares, if bought in the one deal.’
Gyssels returned to his chair, smoothing his brow from the centre outwards. He mumbled something that I couldn’t decipher.
‘Pray speak up,’ said I, but he only continued with the muttering. ‘If we’re to do a deal, you’ll need to speak to me, not your pants.’
‘I said, how much?’ growled Gyssels, now standing again and stomping his feet up and down. ‘HOW MUCH? HOW MUCH! HOW MUCH!’
I placed my pipe in its stand and made my way calmly around the expanse of my desk. ‘I’ll perform the calculations and give you a call,’ said I, opening my door to the crisp morning sun.
Returning to my chair in steps slow and possessed, almost as though each toe planted itself by conscious design, I noted that the wetness in my stocking had all dried up.
DEFOE
Difficult to explain
July 1724
The grey skies break apart and fall as wet gravel. Buried alive, who would have thought. The particles of grit magnetise towards each other and build a cairn over him. He tries to move, but he is buried too deep. There is a tiny tunnel through which he can breathe, no wider than a needle. The rocks tumble, scrape, screech. So loud. So very, very loud. His legs rise, folding boneless from his torso and dissolve into powdered haze. Then he is at Smithfield Meat Markets.
It must only be a year since the Great Fire. The abattoir, charred and destroyed, towers over him as he stands in his boy’s pantaloons and tunic. His father warned him against wandering off and now he’s got himself lost and will be beaten blue for it.
Without shoes, his toenails are welded black with solid earth. Traders are hurrying around him in every which direction. He searches urgently for his father. Somewhere to his left, he hears knives sharpened in patient, proprietary intervals. To his right a cleaver is brought down, once to the damp opening of flesh, twice all the way through, a third to be sure. Twine is repeatedly snipped. Chicken feathers dance above very high heads, angelic white against the graphite clouds. Nothing is still. Meat is hung on hooks, spiked on poles, resting on angled shelves and garlanded with intestines. The hands of the shopkeepers are meat too – wet, white and red – fingers creased like sausage links as they reach into barrels of viscera and emerge clutching blue. With two sets of pliers, a moustachioed man rips piebald pigskin from a vertically skewered carcass. It wrenches free in incremental yanks. He then hangs the skin over a suspended stick, catching the dripping blood in a tin tray.
‘Where is my dad?’ he asks one without the auspice of wig.
‘You’ll find him,’ he replies, hobbling off under a timber crate of tongues.
Two dogs part around a cart. All men are staring at horizons he cannot see, so far above him. He is being swallowed into a fleshy gullet. Tears are cooling his hot cheeks, as he closes his eyes, laces his fingers and prays.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven …
Upon the seventh recital he is lift
ed into the air, fingers boring into the flesh of his arms as he is hoisted level with his father’s eyes, which are filled simultaneously with rage and forgiveness. Through his sobbing, he cannot articulate the words. God, he is trying to tell his father, God brought you to me.
A great cold approaches, aiding in his dissolution. Torso now, arms too. In the distance are stars, bright pinpricks that are growing in circumference. Soon enough they are joining. Perimeters briefly ignite and sputter as they merge. What was once a constellation is now a pure veil of light, a sheet of bright nothingness, absorbing all. It moves towards him – or he to it, impossible to tell. Here I am, says Defoe. The ripping at his neck no longer pains, nor do the accreting rocks; it is but an abstract presence that has come for the journey. Here I am.
The light explodes into blackness. And pain. Terrible pain. The rocks scream again. His lungs expand. Defoe is pulled, wet and cold, above the surface. His throat burns as it draws air. He gasps and splutters.
‘Not on my watch,’ says the sentry, holding a bucket. ‘You’ll not die a sinner’s death tonight.’
Another turnkey holds a knife and the cut end of Defoe’s hessian rope. Rain pelts the prison roof with the sound of falling gravel.
‘The Lad! The Lad!’ the prison cheers. ‘Like a bird!’
Defoe reaches for his throat and he touches seared, raw flesh. The tubes inside his throat won’t fold back into shape.
‘You can thank The Lad,’ says the sentry. ‘We’d all have been sound asleep.’
From the window, Defoe sees cinders dancing upwards from passing torches. A mob is moving from tavern to square, gathering girth from many doorways. They are chanting.
‘Jack the Lad,
Can’t be nabbed
Jonathan Wild,
Can’t catch a cold!’
‘Surely not,’ Defoe croaks inaudibly. His neighbour, the old lacer from Fenchurch who was imprisoned for an unpaid supplier debt of nineteen shillings, sits glumly.
‘It’s shoddy, shoddy,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Wild’s saying no prisoner will be released until he’s found. Shoddy, shoddy.’
Defoe’s knees go weak.
‘Easy,’ says the sentry, setting him down. Once again his face is splashed.
‘What …’ Defoe coughs.
‘You hanged yourself, is what.’
‘No …’ He drools. ‘Sheppard …’
‘The only man to ever escape the condemned cell of Newgate,’ says the guard. ‘Nobody thought he could surpass his break at St Clement’s.’
‘Manacled to twelve inches of timber,’ calls a woman.
‘The cell was barred with two-inch irons,’ adds another voice from the dark.
‘The whole city searches for him.’
Defoe wipes splashed water from his face.
‘Supposedly scaled the outer wall. They found tallow on all the bars and manacles. Starved himself for weeks. Lubricated his body and slid right through.’
His throat burns, his head throbs, but the tears that gem on Defoe’s lashes are not from pain.
Later, lying in the darkness, he dreads the inevitable approach of a flesh-ripping swallow. His blanket is reduced to half size, and he cannot decide which orientation to lay it. Wet from his dousing, he shivers. For a very brief moment of slumber, he dreams of wet boats knocking into mossy stairs and is awoken by searing pain in his throat. The rowdy chatter of Jack Sheppard’s successful escape has attenuated into whispered mutterings of Daniel Defoe’s failed suicide. Once the room is silent, he listens to the flutter and whip of linens hung in the prison courtyard.
He would pay anything for a tankard of water to wash away the dryness, but there is none, and won’t be till the following midday. He lies in the dawn blackness, blinking. A gnarl of timber presses into his left buttock, but Defoe doesn’t move.
He had entirely forgotten the episode at Smithfield Markets. Plagued by the question throughout his adolescence, he is now, decades on, finally satisfied with the answer. God cannot reveal himself plainly to His Creation, for if His revelation were so evident as to be indubitable, we would have no volition, we would follow blindly. God seeks uncertain disciples, those who battle and ultimately choose. At best, God might, on a rare occasion, nudge His flawed creations: He might answer the prayers of a lost boy in Smithfield Markets or bring the degenerate soul of a failed trader tantalisingly close to the ineffable.
The need to swallow builds in his throat. Defoe closes his eyes and winces, readying for the pain. He will choose. No more writhing like a worm. No more status. No more blindness. Each day will now be treated for what it is: a preparation. From beyond the prison walls a rooster crows, the curling pitch well suited to the cool dawn. A preparation.
THE LAD
I am indentured to a Thief-Taker
1722
I quit the gainful employment of my upstanding master, Mr Owen Wood, in the autumn of 1722 and journeyed to the offices of Miss Lyon and Mr Wild in Barbican. I was still a virgin in all senses, wholly inexperienced in the three main occupations of adulthood (sex, deceit, apathy). I was twenty years old.
I do now wonder if I was inwardly aware of the iniquitous path that I had set myself upon or if every one of those future iniquities was a discrete evil that I committed in the moment and should be assessed (and indeed punished) each one in its turn. I don’t know the answer, but my intuition is the former, that we must, in our measuring of a man, take the totality of his actions. Rather than taking each of the drunkard’s drinks as a decision, one must blame the whole of his inclination. In all of us there is a part, persistent as a debt collector, whose sole function is self-ruin. Verily, for some it’s easier to run at death than to stroll through life.
All my possessions were in a valise sitting between my two pumps as I stood on the flagstone of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker General, hat held with both hands and the sun warming my back. My shadow cut darkness into his otherwise very bright room. Bessie was there to usher me in with a detached nod and the checking of a box upon a ledger. I need not describe the infamous man, large and hunched over his desk, with mean disfigurements around his little eyes, two pistols resting haphazardly upon his hide-inlaid desk and a tight-fitting bright green coat like a mould thriving on its host.
‘My associate Miss Lyon has vouched for your honesty,’ he said, slowly. ‘She has also explained that you are a mute?’
I nodded.
‘And skilled with tools?’
I nodded.
‘Is it true you have supplied and fitted bars, windows and doors to a number of drapers at The Strand, William Kneebone included?’
Again I nodded. He fingered the carving of one ornate pistol that sat upon a sheaf of papers.
‘We shall see about your reliability,’ he said austerely, puffing at his pipe. ‘You know our cause. We intend to keep the streets safe, to capture felons and return the wealth of this city to its people.’
I gave him a broad smile, made my hand as though wrapping a cylinder, and proceeded to masturbate the air.
Miss Lyon spluttered and Wild shot out of his chair. He spread his hands upon his desk, as though to remind me of all these things he owned.
‘Impudence,’ he spat. ‘From a mere lad, no less.’
I approached his desk and gestured at a pen. Reluctantly he pushed me a scrap page too, which I took up and wrote the following:
Master Wild, let us cut our discourse how Ockham might. I have been released from my apprenticeship in Hampstead and for a salary, gin and permission to imbibe it with your associate Miss Lyon, I will get you whatsoever you please from The Strand.
He looked between Miss Lyon and me, distrust in his eyes, along with a smaller, quivering reflection of me.
‘Let us test him,’ Bessie chimed in, I believe on my behalf. ‘Discover if the Kneebone intelligence is reliable.’
‘Aye,’ said Wild, to himself. ‘We will test the lad.’
Henceforth I was referred to, and became known, as Th
e Lad.
I wasn’t armed with bludgeon or dagger, like the others in Wild’s crew, but rather a woodsaw, pocket-wrench and hand-chisels, all of which I sewed into the lining of my jacket so I could walk freely with these tools about me. I was to be accompanied by one of Wild’s lackeys, Sykes, a child of no more than sixteen. At four of the morning I set about deconstructing the very security bars I had installed for Mr Kneebone only two months prior. I loosened the mortar surrounding the irons, measured the height (five-and-a-half shaftments, I’ll never forget) then returned to Wild’s office to prepare replacements. Wild expected me done with the job in a single night, but I shook my head and made horizontal revolutions of my forefinger to indicate that these things take time. The following night, I did get those bars free, and set Sykes inside to gather up roll upon roll of Fustian and Flanders plus a few pieces of plate, thereafter replacing the bars and hiding our loot in a cart that we pushed lazily down The Strand like two perfectly honest barrow boys.
Robbing Mr Kneebone had been so tremendously easy. I’d made away with goods enough to live two full years like gentry, and I’m shamed to admit that from that moment forward I decided that I should never pay for a thing when I could simply take it. Wild and Bessie were much impressed by the quantity and quality of the goods, and even more rapt that I’d left not a single trace of the crime. Indeed, when William Kneebone descended his stairs the following morning, with all his windows and doors in working order, it was like his goods had simply evaporated. Within two days, Mr Kneebone was at the Barbican office, enquiring how he might engage Wild to recover his goods and apprehend the felon responsible, to which Mr Wild was of course willing to oblige.
I had joined the enterprise to be with Bessie, yet from the moment I arrived her attentions were everywhere except where I wanted them viz. me. Her mind was entirely in the business, walking between her various places of meeting, her face either hidden by the flirtatious flick of her peacock fan or pursed in officious concentration at her ledgers. Her eyes were consistent no matter the task, always alive in their hazel exuberance, always devouring the visible world and spitting it back out brighter. She was loved and sought by all of us – those in and out of her employ – it didn’t matter boy or girl, man or woman, we all pined for Miss Elizabeth Lyon.
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