Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Ikey arrived at the Pig ‘n Spit where the boys waited for him, jumping up and down in one spot and hugging themselves against the bitter cold. He lifted the canvas cover and removed the parcel wrapped in oilcloth, then sent the boys on their way, agreeing to meet them at his Whitechapel home in less than half an hour.

  Struggling with the heavy parcel, Ikey walked down a small alley to the side of the building and into the skittle yard at the rear of the public house. He placed the parcel at the back door and walked over to the cellar chute, where he bent down and lifted the heavy wooden cover with some difficulty to reveal a further barrier, a set of iron bars which were locked down from within the cellar. Removing his boot, he rapped loudly on a single steel bar with its heel, at the same time calling out to the cellar boy to wake up and open the back door of the public house. In a few moments a lantern appeared at the base of the chute, though it was too dark in the cellar below to see the face behind it.

  ‘Let me in, lad, it be Ikey Solomon,’ he called, keeping his voice as low as possible. ‘I ‘ave most urgent business with your mistress. ‘Urry now, I’ve no time to waste!’

  Ikey left the public house less than ten minutes later. The streets and alleys were white with snow though a few early-morning market carts, and a small herd of scraggy-looking sheep being driven to a slaughter house were already beginning to turn it into slush. It was six o’clock in the morning and not yet light when he reached his house in Whitechapel and waited for several minutes in the freezing cold for the boys to arrive with the cart.

  Ikey and the boys, their breath frosting from the effort, unloaded the contents of the cart and placed the load in the front parlour. Then Ikey paid the young lads a second shilling and sent them, well pleased, on their way.

  Mary’s ledger he took straightaways to his study and added it to those already concealed in the cavity below the floorboards. Then removing the counterfeit notes and copper etching plates from his bag he put each of the plates carefully aside. He then took up the notes, several thousand pounds of counterfeit longtails, which he placed in the grate and set alight, setting fire to the pile three times in all to make certain that there was nothing left but a handful of ashes. Whereupon he carefully swept the ash onto a piece of butcher’s paper and put them into a small pewter tankard which he half filled with water, stirred well and swallowed.

  Destroying the counterfeit banknotes was the most difficult thing Ikey could remember ever having to do - the notes were almost perfect and he might quite easily have allowed them into the London markets without fear of immediate discovery. But he was a consummate professional and in Ikey’s mind releasing the notes in London was the equivalent of shitting on your own doorstep, in effect asking to be caught. Laundering the false notes through foreign banks was an example of the finesse which had earned him his title as the Prince of Fences. Though, having finally swallowed the contents of the mug, he allowed two silent tears to run down his cheeks and permitted himself the luxury of a single-knuckled sniff.

  Ikey then took a needle and thread from the drawer of his desk and sewed the copper engraving plates into the hem of his great coat, first wrapping them carefully in four sheets of strong white paper. Each sheet was taken from separate books in a collection of several dozen handsome leather-bound volumes contained within a breakfront bookcase. Had any person been observing him they would have been curious at the manner of obtaining these squares of paper. Ikey removed the four volumes seemingly at random and opened them to the back cover where he carefully peeled back the endpaper. This revealed a second sheet of paper which Ikey now used as wrapping for the plates, first binding them with twine before sewing them into the hem of his coat.

  All this activity took longer than he had intended and Ikey was anxious to make good his escape. He climbed the stairs and shook Hannah awake so that she might help him carry the stuff from the parlour, to be hidden within the false ceiling. Hannah, naturally cantankerous and more so by having been awakened after less than two hours of sleep, cursed Ikey, though she was not unaccustomed to this sort of disturbance. Ikey was known to use several places to store goods at this time of year and sometimes they needed to be hastily moved. Neither was she surprised when after the task was completed Ikey grunted a brusque farewell, explaining only that he had decided to travel to Birmingham. News of a rich haul had come to him and seeking to amuse her so as not to arouse the least suspicion he added a sentiment she loved so much to hear: ‘Ah, my dear, the gentile scriptures are not correct. Even at Christmas time it is never better to give than to receive!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ikey arrived at the coaching post at Whitechapel markets just as the coachman’s call to climb aboard was heard, and he seated himself beside the far window so that he could look outwards with his back turned to the other passengers. He pulled his head deeply into the lapels of his great coat so that his hat appeared to be resting upon its upturned collar. Thus, cut off from the attentions of his fellow passengers, he fell into deep cogitation on the matters which had unfolded in Bell Alley in the earlier hours of that morning.

  It was not long before his ruminations allowed him to see the entire affair in an altogether different light, and Ikey suddenly felt himself ennobled by his sacrifice on Mary’s behalf.

  As he sat hunched in the coach, with its rattle and bump and clippity-clop, the general rush and rumble of wheels on flinted stone, rutted road and hard white gravel, and watched the country racing past, from deep within his great coat Ikey felt the warm glow of goodness enveloping him.

  This sense of saintly satisfaction was not one Ikey could previously remember experiencing, for it is an emotion which comes to a man who has sacrificed his own needs for those of another. It contained a strange feeling of light-headedness and was an experience Ikey was not entirely sure he would like to repeat. While he knew himself very fond of Mary, he was quite inexperienced in matters of the heart, and was therefore unable to recognise that strange emotion which sentimental women referred to so knowingly as true love.

  He had once, as a boy of eight selling oranges and lemons on the street, bought a secondhand halfpenny card from a barrow in Petticoat Lane. The card was braided along its edges with pink ribbon and showed a circle formed of tiny red roses at its centre, and within the circle two blue doves perched side by side upon a silver branch, their heads touching. Above the circle and below the braided ribbon was the legend, To my one and only true love. Ikey had carried the card with him until he was twenty-two years old, convinced that one day he too would find his one and only true love.

  At twenty-two, and quite soon after he had married Hannah, he was convicted of stealing a gentleman’s purse. He was sentenced at the Old Bailey to transportation for life and removed to the hulks at Chatham. Here he was to remain for six years, avoiding transportation to Australia through the influence of an uncle who was a slops dealer at the port, and who pleaded directly and successfully to the naval authorities for him to remain in England.

  While on the hulks Ikey made the acquaintance of a convicted forger named Jeremiah Smiles, who had taken to being a tattoo artist and proved to have an exceedingly fine hand at the matter of ink rubbed into human flesh. Ikey had paid him to tattoo the design on the card onto his upper arm. The card, by this time much faded and worn, had lost, by means of a missing portion, the last two words of the legend and it now read, To my one and only. . .

  Ikey explained that the two missing words were blue dove. Smiles, like all forgers, was not a man of great imagination. His aptitude being for detail and accurate copying of the known rather than depicting in fantasy the unknown. ‘Humph!’ he snorted. ‘Them’s birds, doves most likely. Birds don’t love and doves ain’t blue!’

  Ikey was never lost for an explanation. ‘It be a well-known curiosity that doves o’ this particular and brilliant hue takes only one partner in their life,’ he lied. ‘Should one dove die then the other will remain faithful to its memory, takin’ no other partner to itself eve
r again.’

  ‘Blue doves? Bah! Ain’t no such creatures, doves is grey and piebald and brown, speckled and pure white if they be fan-tails, but they ain’t blue. There never was, nor ever will be, blue doves!’

  ‘Ah, but you’re wrong my dear!’ Ikey announced. ‘Quite wrong and emphatically incorrect and absolutely misinformed! In Van Diemen’s Land there is a great wilderness which begins at the edge o’ the clearing to a prison garrison place name o’ Cascades.’ Ikey sighed heavily. ‘Gawd forbid, we may yet see it in our lives. It is to the edge o’ this clearin’ that the blue doves come at mornin’s light, each paired and seated with their ‘eads together. They sit and coo softly in the ‘igh branches o’ the blue gum trees and should they witness a convict fellow at work on the ground below, it is reliably told that they cry human tears for the misery they sees and the compassion they feels for the injustice done to all of us who suffer in the name o’ the unjust and ‘einous laws o’ Mother England.’

  Ikey paused, for he could see the beginning of contrite tears in his listener’s eyes.

  ‘When a convict dies from an act o’ violence, such as a floggin’ with the cat o’ nine, or a beatin’ by an officer or by means of a hangin’ or starvation or from a charge o’ shot while attemptin’ to escape, then a blue dove dies with ‘im, dies of a broken ‘eart.’

  By this time Smiles, seated on his haunches on the deck in front of Ikey, was sobbing unashamedly.

  ‘There is told of a tree at this vile place,’ Ikey continued soulfully, milking the moment to its extreme, ‘an old tree without leaf, its bark peeled and its branches pure silver, where at sunrise the blue doves come in such numerosity that they become the very leaves o’ the tree. The tree becomes a shinin’ blue thing in the antipodean sunlight. But, if you should observe with careful eyes, you will see no two doves are perched with ‘eads together. No dove is partner to another, for each o’ these doves is the partner of a blue dove who ‘as died when a convict ‘as violently perished.’

  Ikey lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘It is said that the blue doves that sit upon that great silver tree are too numerous for any man to count!’

  Much taken with this story, Jeremiah Smiles had faithfully rendered onto Ikey’s upper arm the circle of roses and within it the two blue doves, whereupon he had inscribed above the heart the words: To my one and only blue dove.

  Now, nearly twenty years later, on his way to Birmingham, the thought crossed Ikey’s mind that Mary was his one and only blue dove and he grew suddenly greatly sentimental at this thought.

  Ikey told himself he would take good care of his little blue dove, and that no violence would come to her, as she would not lack the means to bribe and pay her way. Should she be arrested, convicted in due course and, as was most likely, transported to New South Wales, he would pay for her continued good treatment in prison and upon her eventual transportation she would lack for nothing.

  It was at this point in his rumination that an idea of startling magnitude came to him, one so bold that it caused his head to pop completely up and out of his great coat to see whether the nature of things had changed so entirely that he was not, as he supposed, on the coach to Birmingham, but on some celestial flight of fancy - a voyage of the imagination which had taken himself out of himself and transformed him into another creature of an altogether different nature and disposition.

  But all he could see upon his tortoise-like emergence was a line of stringy winter willows tracing the path of a stream, the familiar dotting of black-faced sheep upon the rise, and a solitary crow high on a winter-stripped branch of a sycamore tree. Upon the road, wrapped in rags and skins, their breath clouding in the cold, trudged the usual conglomeration of feckless wanderers, gypsies, tinkers, navvies, moochers, beggars and tradesfolk.

  Moreover, the people within the coach seemed the same as those with whom he had embarked at White-chapel markets. There was a fat woman in mourning, her poke-bonnet festooned in black dobbin and upon her lap a very large wicker basket. Beside her sat two gentlemen from the city, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, square-rigged in black with coloured waistcoats, their top hats pulled over their eyes, bearded chins upon their breasts asleep.

  On the same side as Ikey, but at the opposite window, occupying fully the space for two passengers, sat an enormously stout red-bearded countryman. He wore a rough tweed jacket and breeches, and a pair of enormous countryman’s boots. The colour of his clothes was matched by his wildly gingered chin, upon which the stem of a curved pipe was gently cushioned, the tobacco of his choice being particularly acrid and rank smelling.

  At the ginger man’s feet lay a large hound with one eye missing, its head upon its paws, its single cyclops eye fixed balefully upon its master, who being a jolly fellow had purchased a ticket for the dog which entitled it to human passage, but then, in a gesture of goodwill, had invited the other passengers to place their feet upon its large, furry carcass. This the woman and two city gentlemen had promptly done as there was no possible alternative, the great lolling dog having filled most of the floor space available.

  On a warm summer’s day the foul pipe and the presence of the large panting creature who undoubtedly carried a host of fleas upon its back would have proved most onerous for a person delicate of stomach, but on this bitterly cold December afternoon it made for a certain snugness, even an unspoken friendly fugginess within the coach.

  Ikey was now much alarmed, for he was sure some mental aberration had struck his febrile brain, and now the banal scene about him seemed to contradict this very supposition.

  There had risen up in Ikey’s fevered mind the idea that he would reform, take on the mantle of respectability and the strictures of moral rectitude, forsake his born ways and take ship to Australia where he would establish himself as a gentleman and tend to Mary’s needs until she received her ticket of leave and was able to join him. Her head and his touching, blue doves together again.

  It may cause surprise that Ikey could think in such a mawkish manner, but even in the foulest heart there lies a benign seed of softness. It may long lie dormant, but if given the slightest chance will swell to fecundity and surprise all who have previously known its owner. Was this not the very point made by the salvationists who despair for no man and follow their hopes for redemption to the gates of Tyburn and to the knotted cord and final trapdoor itself?

  It must also be remembered that Ikey’s potential metamorphosis did not include his wife Hannah or his children. The milk of human kindness had not entirely washed away the stains of his known and expected character and he felt no compunction about deserting his wife and children providing he could contrive to take his money with him. This Ikey knew to be an unlikely circumstance as he was made to account to Hannah for almost all the transactions which passed through his hands. Besides, she held the second half of the combination safe under the pantry floor.

  Ikey’s obsession with bookkeeping was his downfall. He had trained Hannah to keep books on her five brothels and these he inspected every evening before leaving home, entering the profits in a ledger of his own. Hannah, who pretended to the outside world that she was illiterate, demanded the right to see Ikey’s ledgers, which she understood to a degree which often frustrated him.

  Ikey could not bear for anyone to know his business and the ledgers Mary kept so diligently for him consisted only of the merchandise coming in, a stocktaking list and first evaluation of stolen and fenced articles, not a final accounting. So she never entirely knew the state of his affairs.

  Ikey’s ledgers were of the final reckoning of profits cross-referenced in astonishing detail; the what, why, when and where of every stolen article, so that no two articles from the same source would appear for sale in the same market. These great books were an extension of his mind, a beautiful reckoning of the results of his every business endeavour. Each ledger was a tangible proof that he existed, the strong vellum pages, the stoutly bound cover of softest calf leather with his name embossed in gold upon it, th
e squareness of the corners and the beautiful marbled endpapers. These all spoke of strength, respectability and an ordered and handsome masculinity.

  Ikey’s ledgers were everything he couldn’t be and when he wrote within them in his neat copperplate hand, each entry adding to the sum of his wealth, in his mind the ledger became himself, brave, strong, valuable, clean, permanent, respectable and accepted. Ikey’s ledger was an addiction as necessary to him as an opium pipe is to the captain of a China clipper.

  For a man whose every instinct was to conceal his affairs, his compulsion to record everything was a terrible weakness which Hannah had exploited to the fullest. His year-end ledgers, which contained all the profits made from both his work and his wife’s, were kept in a large safe built into the floor of a small basement chamber. Its casual appearance resembled a cold storeroom for provisions, being without windows and fitted with a stout iron door to resist rats, and it was referred to as the pantry.

  Indeed, Hannah kept potatoes, flour and apples within it and from the ceiling hung the papery white carcasses of dried cod and a large bunch of Spanish onions. The safe was concealed in exactly the same manner as the one in Van Esselyn’s printing shop and in Ikey’s own study. Along with the ledgers, it contained a vast amount of paper money as well as gold, mostly in sovereigns, though some melted down bars, and several small velvet bags of precious stones worth a king’s ransom. So cunningly was the safe hidden that several raids on the house had not come even close to discovering its whereabouts.

  Alas for Ikey, Hannah’s insistence on them each knowing only half the combination meant that neither could open the safe without the presence of the other. Thus the bulk of their fortune could never be removed from the safe without their mutual agreement.

  It was against this background that Ikey found himself lost in the imaginings of escaping to New South Wales with the eventual prospect of uniting with Mary. Now, as the coach drew to a halt at a staging post to allow its passengers to take refreshment, he realised that he must have momentarily lost his sanity.