Mr. Timothy

by Louis Bayard

  But when all was said and done, there wasn’t so very much money, was there? Uncle N had been too frugal to court great wealth, and what with all the philanthropic gestures and the subsidies for his nephew Fred (now with five children of his own) and the armies of doctors and religious healers poking and prodding my right leg—well, we shouldn’t have been astonished to find so little remaining for the other Cratchits. A better salary for you, yes: sixty a year by the time you were played out. A nicer house and a series of maids. And monthly remittances for Peter and me, once we came of age.

  But what of the Cratchit girls? In retrospect, I think they must simply have grown tired of waiting for something to happen. They must have reasoned that if they couldn’t have remittances, they could have dowries…and so they seized the first chance to be gone. That’s why Jemmy married that engineer, whose sole qualification was that he promised to take her to Canada. This he accomplished, and he was quite punctilious, wasn’t he, in notifying us of her death? I recall the phrasing quite well: “Lost her life in giving life.” Nice sentiment, that, although the life she bore barely outlived her. I still have the letter somewhere.

  I’ve kept Belinda’s letters, too: the weekly marginalia of a country curate’s wife. She might be writing them still if the goat fever hadn’t taken her husband. I like to think that the rumours that have since trailed after her are a kind of compressed correspondence on her part. Last we heard, Father—Uncle N made inquiries shortly after your first attack—she was either fashioning bonnets in Cheltenham or keeping house for a rector in Monmouth or living somewhere in Herefordshire with a sawyer who was not certifiably her husband. Gone, in other words. As surely as Sam was gone.

  It’s strange to think how soundlessly it can happen. I never imagine that middle-class children will drop from view so freely. I always think they will make some great noise on the way down—drag their fingers along the parapet, pound the wall, rage, rage.

  But there is always pride to consider, isn’t there? Look at Martha, Father. Your eldest. You never knew how things stood with her, because she took such pains to keep it from you. We knew, though. We knew all about that husband of hers, the drunken rover—never one to leave a pub vertical when he could leave horizontal—and all the more eager, when he did come home, to reassert the household sovereignty he had forfeited. Peter once pounded him a new eye, which helped matters without exactly improving them.

  Martha never told you that, Father. Nor did she tell you how the money ran so dry once she had to run to Uncle N to plead for a remittance of her own. Two months later, she was back, pleading for him to cut it off. The law, you see, doesn’t protect a woman’s income from her husband, and Martha said she’d rather go without a penny than watch it all be flushed down that human sewer of hers. By then, she was making excuses not to visit or be visited. Rather unpersuasive excuses—sudden illnesses, mysterious errands—anything, I suppose, to keep from enduring witnesses. The last I saw her, Father, was at your funeral. She came alone, offered a large show of affection towards me and Peter, and left without a word to anyone else. Held herself the whole time with outright defiance, as if to set the world’s judgement to scorn. I’d never seen that head of hers raised to such an altitude.

  Ah, yes, pride. I fear that Martha and Peter and Belinda must have divvied up my allotment amongst them. Of all the Cratchit progeny, I am the only one left on Uncle N’s payroll. Much good it is doing me at present. If, for example, I were to move my arm just a few inches to the left, my hand would be resting in Lushing Leo’s urine. It has spilled out over the top of his trousers, and even now, the tip of his waterlogged penis hangs in plain view, looking pinned and severed, like the head of a martyr.

  I could move to a safer remove, but I find it more agreeable just now to lie perfectly still. There is a strategy to my asceticism. I have the sense—call it a hope—that I am husbanding my powers for a great calling. For something, anyway. For something. It glimmers out there in the dark. Or is that just you again?

  Chapter 16

  AT TIMES LIKE THIS, I wish I hadn’t parted with Colin quite so precipitously. What an admirable errand boy he would have made me, dashing through crossings, slipping between carriages, leaping puddles—fully enlarged by his own importance. As it is, I have to make do with the jailer’s son, a sausagey, slack-bodied child, either eight or eighteen, with dull brown eyes that turn to treacle when I flash him a half-crown.

  —Them’s so lovely, them coins. I like ’em ever so much more than florins.

  He is, inevitably, a dawdler. It is nearly an hour and a half before he returns with the following dispatch:

  —Nothin’ doin’ nohow.

  It takes all my self-control to keep from reaching through the bars and grabbing him by his sausage nose.

  —What do you mean? Did you go to Mrs. Sharpe’s?

  —She warn’t in, sir.

  —Still abed, you mean. Did you explain why I needed her? Did you say it was pressing?

  —Yes, sir, that I did. To a Miss Iris. Who said as how Mrs. Sharpe had gone and went away for the foreseeable future, and who was to say when she’d be a-comin’ back?

  Ah, Fate, how you use me. The one person who bothered to answer the knocker this morning: Iris.

  —Never mind, I have another errand for you. Here is the address. You are to tell this gentleman I need him urgently, and you are to bring him back with you. Ten shillings in advance, and another ten if you’re back within the hour.

  It can’t be said he moves with alacrity, but the profit motive does impart a mild spur to his bovine disposition. At least it brings him back before another hour has passed, bashful with triumph, his pudgy hand already extended for his candy. Following close behind is Peter, who takes in the surroundings with an expression that I soon recognise as mock astonishment.

  —It’s come to this, has it, Tim? Who’d’ve thunk it?

  Hard on his heels is Annie, not a wife who trucks with idle banter. She whips off her hat and gloves and surveys the alien terrain like a regiment colonel, seeking the breach points. Her mind, I can see, is aswarm with strategies and counterstrategies and contingencies, and the only thing that arrests her warrior momentum for even a second is the sight of my face.

  —Lord above, Tim, what have they done to you?

  —No, Annie, don’t touch it.

  —It’s downright criminal!

  —I didn’t mean for you to come.

  —And who would dare keep me away? As soon as I heard, I said to Peter, “Why, Tim would sooner cut off his head than go near a woman.” In that way, I mean. And if they need some other woman to testify to that effect, why, here’s one ready to be sworn. And you can tell that to Mr. Magistrate, with my compliments.

  I ask them who’s minding the shop, but rather than answer, they stand to either side of the barred door and pepper me with assurances.

  —You mustn’t worry about a thing, Tim. Listen.

  —We’ve engaged a lawyer for you, Tim….

  —Not the usual procedure for a police magistrate case, but one can’t be too…

  —And he came highly recommended by the friend of a…

  —And he was just leaving his office when…

  —And he was most optimistic about…

  —And he’s coming right behind…

  —Ten minutes, no more….

  —So you mustn’t worry.

  —You really mustn’t.

  In fact, another half hour passes before Augustus Sheldrake squeezes his way through the station-house door. A stout, whey-skinned man with a decamping hairline and advancing whiskers, soldierly red on both fronts. The hand he presents to me is quite damp, and there is a prevailing humidity all about his person: wet eyes, wet lips, wet teeth…and, exhaling from his pores, an effluvium that, unless my nostrils deceive me, represents the final gaseous iteration of imported Jamaican rum. I think I might have done better with Lushing Leo.

  There is no doubt, however, that Mr. Sheldrake exudes c
onfidence. He greets us individually and severally and treats us to so many cunning variations on the same smile that one feels constantly on the verge of applauding him.

  —Never fear, my dear friends. The battle is joined, and our triumph is ordained. We shall pummel our opponents from heel to toe. We shall bung them with the fist of logic. We shall jab them with the elbow of truth. We shall crumple them with the knee of righteousness. Oh, my friends, we shall carry this day.

  So persuasive is his rhetoric, so lustrous are his teeth, that I feel quite churlish in positing an alternative outcome.

  —Supposing, in spite of all your efforts, Mr. Sheldrake, I am still found guilty. Can you tell me what sentence I might expect?

  —Oh, yes, well, this particular magistrate…well, you see, he’s known for being a bit of a stickler. P’s-and-q’s, letter-of-the-law codger, you know the sort. Even so, I shouldn’t expect more than…what?…two months’ hard labour.

  —Two months?

  —One, perhaps, if he’s feeling generous. Or else a good hearty whipping and have done with it. Never mind, Mr. Cratchit, I am fully prepared to invoke the holiday spirit. I wish you could have heard me just yesterday arguing the case of Bawdyhouse Bob. ‘Christlike-mercy this, seasonal-clemency that.’ I carried all before me, Mr. Cratchit.

  Annie can bear it no longer. She has jammed her tiny fists against her sternum, in an effort, I think, to keep her heart from bursting through.

  —They’ll get hard labour from me if they start in with the whipping or the two months, and you can tell that to Mr. Magistrate, with all my blessings.

  Mr. Sheldrake looks discomfited by such sincerity. Collapsing into the nearest chair, he fumbles in his coat pocket for a silver flask—lime-and-seltzer, he explains—and drains it in half a second. This has the contradictory effect of reanimating and clouding him over, so that it is never clear how deeply the details of my case have penetrated his miasma. The only certain thing is Mr. Sheldrake’s smile, which streams forth so relentlessly it could set the sun to school.

  —Carry all before us, I tell you. We few, we happy few.

  A scant ten minutes later, we are ushered with bare ceremony into the magistrate’s office. Not an office at all, really, but a kind of morning room, with a large window and a fire grate and there, at the reading desk, the redoubtable magistrate himself, playing a game of patience. So engrossed is he in this work that I begin to wonder if we haven’t inadvertently broken into his home, disrupted his most cherished postprandial ritual. I look for some acknowledgement of us in his expression, but the calf pen in which I’ve been deposited permits me no view beyond the lank hand that screens the left side of his face.

  The screen stays in place even as the magistrate, with evident regret, raises his head to confront the roomful of petitioners.

  —Good morning to you all.

  A strangely occluded voice—buried under generations of neglect—and yet it stirs something familiar in me. I labour in vain to find my connection to it, but the voice keeps sliding from my grasp.

  —Oh, and good morning to you, Mr. Sheldrake. We so seldom see you in our environs. Then again, we so seldom see any of your ilk.

  There is no mistaking the gratitude with which he regards his deprivation. No mistaking it, I mean, unless you are Mr. Sheldrake, who rises and, with a protracted bow, announces:

  —Your worship, think of me as a mere conduit for the disinterested liquid of the law. As such, I pour myself humbly into your august cruet. You may imbibe me as you will.

  —Thank you, Mr. Sheldrake, I shall. Now, with respect to the matter at hand, may I ask who took the charge?

  A police officer steps up. A particularly tall specimen, full in the waist, proud in the chin.

  —It were me, your worship.

  —Swear him, please, Fairweather.

  The clerk is a wizened, furious man, with a scowl carved all the way down his short, bent frame. He holds the Bible like a banker, and as soon as the oath is complete, he retracts the loan with a violence born of equal parts revulsion and satisfaction.

  As for the policeman’s tale, it is notable only for its brevity. An unconscious woman…an unconscious man…a vague and general suspicion that something was amiss…an arrest. He looks embarrassed, frankly, at having so little to impart, and the magistrate’s voice, though still encrusted, sounds quite consoling during the ensuing interview.

  —An excellent accounting, Officer. Truly a credit to…to…now, if you wouldn’t mind my asking, why was the accused struck down in such a fashion?

  —I believe it were to keep him from escapin’, your worship. However, the person as done it was not on the scene when I arrived.

  —And correct me if I am wrong, Officer, but you did not actually see the crime in question?

  —No, your worship, I did not. Whatever as happened happened, and there’s an end to it.

  —And were there any witnesses?

  —Yes, your worship. A lady saw it all as it was occurrin’ and has very kindly stepped forwards.

  —Ah. Call her, please. And swear her, my good Fairweather.

  Miss Binny’s uniform is squarely in place: the plain white bonnet, the misshapen black dress that gives her the look of an inexpertly wrapped parcel. Intact, too, is her wheedling manner, that way she has of inclining her whole body towards the dignitary in question. She even performs this obeisance with Mr. Fairweather, whose satisfaction is abruptly cancelled by the sight of a rival Bible smothered in her armpit. Bigamy, his startled expression seems to say. But Miss Binny, for her part, appears to relish the superfluity, hugs her own Bible all the more tightly to her as she strokes Mr. Fairweather’s. Sails through her oath and even adds a closing benediction:

  —May God’s mercy guide us all!

  She then moves on to the divine work of burying me. A tale of sorrow and pity, and to her credit, she never looks too eager to tell it. Indeed, under the courteous questioning of the magistrate, she gives the impression of someone being dragged, against every instinct of her nature, towards a dire and unavoidable conclusion.

  —I couldn’t, of course, say exactly what was happening, your worship. By which I mean, I saw the gentleman in question tear the young lady’s dress, but I could not tell you what he hoped to gain by it. I rather hoped he was plucking a burning ember from her person, but not seeing any fires in the immediate vicinity…why, I didn’t know what to think.

  —And was it then you screamed, Miss Binny?

  —Yes, your worship. I blush to admit that the weakness of my sex overcame me in that instant, and not feeling fit to settle judgement myself, I preferred to leave it to minds wiser than my own.

  An especially pronounced bow in the direction of the magistrate, and then a final homily:

  —I must say, your worship, the good Lord has more than once seen fit to use me as His instrument in averting unspeakable crimes. I only pray that today, we may also be an instrument of salvation for the wretched gentleman who stands accused before us.

  With that, the magistrate ends his questioning, and Miss Binny settles into a silence as impervious as steel. It is enough to quell my good lawyer, who remains rooted in position, breathing labouriously, until nudged into action by Peter’s elbow.

  —Well, now. Well, now, your worship. My young client here seems to believe that Miss Binny is not, perhaps, the person best suited to appearing against him.

  —And why is that, Mr. Sheldrake?

  —On account of the fact that he and the aforementioned Miss Binny, the emissary of that admirable organisation, the Bible Flower Mission…on account of the fact that he and Miss Binny had an altercation of sorts.

  —Yes?

  —This altercation having to do with the welfare of a young girl of Mr. Cratchit’s acquaintance.

  —Is that true, Miss Binny?

  The missionary’s hand flutters to her chest.

  —Oh, your worship, we come across so many girls in our mission work. They droppeth as does the gentle r
ain from heaven. Twice blessed.

  —It was a particular girl, your worship. By the name of Wilhelmina. Sorry, Philomela.

  —Why, I’m afraid I don’t recall such a girl, your worship. By either name. Perhaps this gentleman has confused me with another of God’s handmaidens.

  And with that, the tether of Mr. Sheldrake’s brain snaps taut. Nothing now but dribbling expostulation:

  —Yes. Well. Be that as it may. Yes….

  But he has reserves, does Mr. Sheldrake. Enough, at any rate, for one last burst of advocacy.

  —Your worship, I ask you to dredge up the deepest wellsprings of seasonal charity and regard my poor client here. Behold him in yon godforsaken pen. Behold him, as the steadfast Christian you are, and tell me true. He don’t look so dangerous, does he?

  To this, the magistrate has no response. He never even drops the hand that screens him from view, or clears away the gravel that obscures his voice. Miss Binny seizes this moment to deliver her own verdict.

  —It may be that the good Lord has seen fit to fill this young man with a cleansing spirit. In which event, your worship, I hope that the punishment you see fit to bestow will but further him along on the path to full redemption.

  And now Mr. Sheldrake really is done. All done. Although that doesn’t stop him from sputtering on for a few seconds more:

  —Redemption, yes. All very fine, but there’s…there’s…

  A long stretch of silence then. And over the course of this interval, I am cognizant of two things: the undisguised contempt with which everyone, the clerk above all, regards my lawyer; and the kindly disposition of the magistrate when at last he interposes.

  —Thank you very much, Mr. Sheldrake. And thank you, Miss Binny. You may stand away.

  He lowers his head, and I fear we are once again on the verge of losing him to his game of patience. His hand surreptitiously places one card atop another, another card on that…and then he looks up, shocked to see the room still occupied.

  —Yes, yes. Helter-skelter, lickety-split. Please call the young lady who is preferring the charge.