There is nothing windswept or thrilling about her employer, alas, despite his maritime history. Most of the time Timothy Marr simply exasperates Margaret. She finds his priggish fussiness annoying beyond words, and tonight is not the first time she has slammed his front door. Margaret has no father. The position with the Marrs was her escape route from her mother, whom she has left behind in a deserted little Essex cottage out toward the estuary, weeping into her washing. But now Margaret feels stifled again, and the truth is that she finds Timothy Marr ridiculous, a self-consciously upright paragon of virtue plying his trade among men who look like they would cut your throat as soon as speak to you. She cannot understand why Marr has not opened a little grocer’s shop somewhere genteel like St. Albans or Richmond. He seems to spend a large part of his time bemoaning the lack of quality among the denizens of the Highway, displaying a strange kind of snobbishness which even Margaret’s young ears find discordant and vaguely comical.
It has been a painfully long and hard Saturday. It is always the hardest day of the week, but something about today has been especially vicious. Marr started the day in a foul temper, shouting at his wife as Margaret emerged from her bed and then shouting at Margaret about some inconsequential nothing which she has already forgotten. He only got worse as the day wore on, despite the steady stream of customers into his shop. Normally, Marr’s moods rise and fall with the traffic through his shop’s door. A busy day will typically see him cheerful and raucous, trying (and failing) to make jokes with Margaret and the shop boy James Gowen. A quiet day will find him sullen, anxious, and short-tempered. Margaret does not yet understand the pressures on a self-made man to make something more of himself, particularly a man like Marr, who is the first of his family to have anything resembling a social position.
None of this matters to Margaret, who already considers herself as someone rather separate from the common herd. She is a girl capable of rich fantasies. Her mother gave her the gift of reading in the years after her father’s death, patiently taking her through the pages of the handful of books that were in their cottage, ignoring Margaret’s tantrums, wanting to give her daughter something unique and still rare. This gift has given Margaret access to the dreams of others, and like many secret female readers she has for some time been leading a double-life imagined from within the pages of a novel, in her case Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (her copy, dog-eared and fretted over, lies beneath her bed where Mrs. Marr discovered it once, picking it up with a curious frown before smiling to herself and placing it back where she found it). Walking the streets during the day Margaret sometimes looks at a tall, disreputable man and imagines he is Valancourt, come to London to whisk Emily St. Aubert (Margaret Jewell, as is) away to Toulouse. If the man looks back the vision creeps away in a cloud of excited shame, and she looks down at her feet and hurries on.
Of course, these are childish visions, and there is an emerging part of Margaret that finds these visions ridiculous. It is this part of her which will carry out this infuriating midnight errand despite everything, which will not allow her to just walk back to the house after half an hour and pretend the oyster shop and the bakers are closed. But she is also still a girl, and it is this girl who swears elaborately as she turns away from the door and then blushes, the words hot on the tongue.
Margaret heads westward along the Ratcliffe Highway. At this end of the Highway, nearest to the city, the houses are tidy and newly built, and within them reside many respectable people who are already in bed, Saturday or no. Much of this housing sprang up after the fire of 1794, which swept through Wapping and Shadwell and was a national emergency, the government forced to provide temporary shelter in military tents even while they were needed for the Revolutionary Wars sweeping across Europe.
London’s fires are like those in a forest, destroying the old and clearing the ground for the new. The property developers followed the fire and low, smart houses began to appear like new growth within a burned wood. This little wave of new housing reaches another few hundred yards further east down the Highway, away from the city, before crashing on the rocks of the old depravities at Wapping and St. Paul’s, where the new grid-like streets give way to clusters of sinewy lanes crammed together between empty land owned by the London Dock Company. Guarding the boundary line between the new and the ancient is the stern white mountain of St. George in the East. The church exerts a brooding presence on the local people, as if it had been dropped down into this place by angels with gigantic schemes.
Walking along the straight pavement toward the city, Margaret sees the bird-like Olney, the parish watchman, come out of his ramshackle hutch on the pavement and begin walking toward her. His steps are uncertain, and as he gets closer her sensitive nose picks up his smell even over the odors of salt and tar and fish and rigging which blow over the wall from the dock.
The man is drunk again. No surprise there. Almost all the watchmen she’s ever come across in her young life have been drunk from the moment the sun went down to the moment it came up again. After which time they were generally asleep.
Olney raises his cap to her as he passes, and seems about to say something, but thankfully her momentum takes her past the confused old fool. She continues down the road.
She has two errands—to buy some oysters from Taylor’s, and to settle the baker’s bill. The oysters were Celia Marr’s idea, something to please her husband and maybe coax him out of his foul mood. Celia tacked on the oysters as Margaret left the house, dispatched by Mr. Marr to pay the baker, which is a fool’s errand. Margaret knows the baker will be closed at this time of the evening. It is just an excuse to get her out of the house. Marr has made no secret about how very irritating he has found her all day. She’d overheard a conversation between Marr and his wife, some days before, in which Marr complained about there being “too many bloody children in this house.” She supposes she is one of the “children.” She is a year older than James, the shop boy, who is now helping the Marrs to close up. The new baby, a few months old, has seemingly been crying without stop since he emerged from his mother’s womb. Margaret is sick of the noise from the cellar, where the baby sleeps. The child is the most miserable excuse for an infant she’s ever come across.
The creaking masts of the ships in the dock are quieter than normal tonight—there is no breeze to buffet them—and the moisture in the air dampens the occasional cry from behind the wall that divides the dock from Pennington Street, just behind the row of houses to her left. But the absence of other common noises only makes the sound of her footsteps ring out even more, and Margaret feels a familiar little stab of anxiety, so familiar that it passes almost without notice. Any young woman walking along the fringes of the dark heart of the Ratcliffe Highway would recognize it.
She comes to Taylor’s, the oyster shop, and is surprised, despite herself, to find it closed. The shop would normally be open even at this late hour, selling Whitstable oysters to the shopkeepers and merchants of the surrounding streets, who typically don’t end their day until midnight on a Saturday. But now the shop is closed up and apparently empty, and looks like it has been so for some time. Muttering another little furtive obscenity to herself, Margaret turns around and walks back toward Timothy Marr’s shop. The baker’s is on the other side of number 29, eastward along the Highway and then down John Hill toward the dock.
She overtakes Olney the watchman as she approaches Marr’s shop again, but he doesn’t notice her. He is gazing, apparently awestruck but probably just confused, at the pale-white steeple of St. George in the East which rises up ahead of him. Margaret slips by the watchman as quietly as possible, silently praying to whatever God is in residence in the church tonight to stop the drunk old watchman from conversing with her.
She gets past him safely, and peers quickly into Marr’s shop as she walks past it in the other direction. Marr is still busy setting things straight, and she hears him bark an instruction at young James, whose shape hurries past the inside of the wi
ndow carrying an enormous box. She smiles to herself. Maybe she won’t hurry back this evening. Without breaking step, she carries on down the Highway, and turns right into John Hill, which runs down the hill from the ridge of the Highway and ends against the wall of the dock.
And, of course, the baker’s is closed. Like Taylor’s the oyster shop, it has an air of finality about it, as if it had never opened. Its shutters are closed and tight, like every shutter in the neighborhood will be in an hour or so’s time. This area might be moderately respectable, but people aren’t stupid; this is the Ratcliffe Highway, after all, and the residents round here are only too aware of the unending disorder a few hundred yards further east, where the lunatics, the thieves, the drunks, and the prostitutes congregate down toward Wapping and Old Gravel Lane, and are more than likely to chance their arm with a quick smash-and-grab on respectable households.
But what to do? She feels a strong reluctance to return to number 29 with neither errand completed. She can imagine what the reaction will be to that. Suddenly, she remembers another oyster shop, around the corner on Pennington Street. She might even be able to gain some credit by finding oysters on her own initiative, at least with Mrs. Marr. She walks down the remainder of John Hill.
In front of her, running from left to right along the far side of Pennington Street, she can see the dark, hulking presence of the dock wall, a prison-like expanse protecting the wealth within the new London Dock on the other side. The dock is as full as ever, and the tops of the tallest masts are visible over the top of the wall and the warehouses within.
It is not her night. The second oyster shop is as closed as the first. Feeling brave, she crosses the road to stand next to the wall of the dock. Underneath it the darkness is even deeper, and she places her hand on the new brickwork as she has done many times before, as if she could absorb some narrative from inside. She closes her eyes and imagines herself on the shore of a tropical country, sand beneath her naked feet and the sound of gulls screeching above.
If you put your ear to the dock wall, you can hear the river. It is the bass note to all the other noises of the dock—the shouting men, the creaking timber, the splashes and the crashes and the thunder of barrels rolling down planks and into cellars. This is the counterpoint to the bass of the river: the music of trade.
Because here, in this dock, is where the chattels of a ravished, crushed world are poured out. Wine and brandy (even now it pours in, even while Boney bestrides Europe). Tobacco from the New World. Rice and tea from the Far East. All of it tumbles down into the vast vaults that encircle the dock, the most expansive man-made underground areas in the world. The Pyramids contain only a fraction of the volume of these massive capacities. Trade built them, trade fills them, and trade empties them.
It is six years since the dock opened, nine years since men started digging out the damp marshy soil. Eleven acres of scrubby dwellings were cleared to make way for the clean lines of the new dock. The vaults take up another eighteen acres, creeping underneath the homes of Wapping and Shadwell and St. Paul’s, where people go about their days only feet above casks, pipes, barrels, hogsheads and butts, containing tobacco, tea, and enough wine to float a navy.
Above the ground, the dock is a gleaming display of the finest English brickwork, and follows the brutal aesthetic of its architect, Daniel Alexander, who has also just given the country Dartmoor Prison. Within its walls a mighty machine has been built, well run and ruthlessly protected. Every day lumpers and porters and sailors pour out of the dock to meet the grocers and innkeepers and boardinghouse women and prostitutes who sate their thirsts, fill their stomachs, and attend to their immortal souls and animal desires, while victualers and chandlers and coopers and drapers sell the goods which will equip their ships for new voyages.
For six years this economic organism has been spreading itself, pushing itself out northward and eastward. Its intensities have deepened and its sensibilities have coarsened. Only one language is understood, the language of trade, and even religion has had to give way against the tide. God has left Wapping, say many of the locals, and the Devil himself fancies his chances down here on the dock.
Saturday night will be the Devil’s night, when idle minds and hands turn their thoughts to sin. Even innocents can feel this, and Margaret opens her eyes suddenly from her dreamy revelry of sun and sand, thinking she hears something new and discordant in the night air, above and beyond the mutterings of the dock.
The quality of the night has changed. It has closed in, and her mind replays the sound she thought she’d heard, but she is unable to process it. A hum? The buzzing of bees? She takes her hand away from the wall, turns around, and begins to walk back to Marr’s shop, defeated in her errands but somehow anxious to be home.
The watchman, Olney, is nowhere to be seen when she gets back to the door. The shop is in darkness, the shutters up. She pulls the bell, and hears it ring inside the shop, and waits. She pulls the bell again. And waits. She places her ear to the wood and can hear nothing, but it is a pregnant nothing, as if the house were waiting for something to happen. She bangs on the door and, despite herself, calls out.
“Mr. Marr! Mr. Marr! It is Margaret!”
She places her ear against the door once more, and from inside she hears a faint noise, the creak of a footstep on the stair. She pulls away, relieved that someone is coming. The strange fears that had momentarily surfaced in her mind start to ebb away. She waits for the sound of the bolt being pulled on the inside of the door. It doesn’t come. She leans toward the door again, and hears the faint, sharp cry of a baby. Something about the noise recalls the strange sound she’d thought she’d heard by the dock, and the wave of fear in her head (an authentic fear, not one learned from the gothic extremities of a novel) crashes in again, and she begins to strike the door.
“Mr. Marr! Mr. Marr! Let me in please, Mr. Marr! It is Margaret.”
A hand falls on her shoulder, and she whirls around, the shout frozen in her throat. Behind her stands a short, stinking stranger who puts his toothless face into hers and yells at her:
“Hear the noise, filly! Hear it in your head! It’ll wake us all!”
He steps back, and Margaret leans away as well, her head brushing against Timothy Marr’s door. The drunk man falls backward into the street, sprawled headlong, and apparently falls asleep. Margaret feels a rigid stiffness in her stomach and a growing softness in her knees. She puts her hand against the door and forces herself to stay upright. She takes several deep, slow breaths. She regains herself, and turns back to the door.
Its solid, freshly painted surface intimidates her, and suddenly she feels hopeless and abandoned and exposed. She looks up and down the street, and sees, maybe a hundred yards away, old Olney emerging from a side street and beginning his slow, stumbling progress toward her. Then the panic breaks through and now she is striking the door with both hands, furiously and unthinkingly.
“Mr. Marr! Mr. Marr! Mr. Marr!”
OCTOBER 1564
Out on the edge of the dark moor, with winter coming on, a young man lay stretched out beneath an ancient leather coat, composing a letter in his mind.
My sweet Kate
Tomorrow, I will reach Plymouth. My traveling partner, the old Tin-Man, tells me we are only three miles away now, and I fancy I can already smell a change in the air. Perhaps it is the sea? It is certainly exciting. It smells of Opportunity.
God willing, I will find a Room for the night and a Table on which I can write down these words to you. It still feels wonderfully strange to write. I have a good supply of quills to sharpen, and the jar of ink is nearly full. Can it really be less than a fortnight since I left you in Stanton St. John? Even my daily Letter to you is not enough to make much difference to the supplies your Father gave me.
Writing was a skill hard-earned, even with the help of you and your Father. But it is why I am here tonight, shivering by the side of this old Road with an ancient Tin-Man for company. He saw me writing, in an aleh
ouse in Tavistock. He looked at me like I was some kind of Faery when he first saw me pull out the implements. I told him I was writing to my Wife and Beloved, but it did not take away the Wonder from his eyes. I believe he has never once seen another Person write something down for any other purpose than that of Commerce. I seem to him to have magical Powers.
So, we fell to talking, and I told him of my destination and he offered to guide me, saying he knew the quickest way to Plymouth and would help me enter the town. And as I was so concerned with missing the Ship, I readily accepted. And now, tomorrow, I arrive in Plymouth, and the next part of my Journey begins.
I believe I may not be able to write to you again for many weeks. Or perhaps I will write again tomorrow. Who knows? Who knows when the Ship leaves, or even if it has already left? Who knows if this is a Fool’s errand or the beginning of our lives together? I may come back with Money. I may come back with Nothing. But I am determined that I must at least try to provide the means for us to create our Future. Your Father is a generous, large-hearted man, and I think of him, indeed, as being the equal of the Father I lost. My Mother’s gratitude to him was a warmth which eased her passing. But Sons must grow beyond their Fathers, even when those Fathers are substitutes.
Money, or Nothing. These are the two Destinations I head towards. I come back with one of these, or I do not come back at all.
I know you are frightened by this Journey, my sweet. I am frightened too. But if all goes well, I will come back a Man, having left a Boy. A Man with Prospects and with the Resources to meet them. A Man, in short, with Money. Tomorrow, Plymouth welcomes me, and I welcome all that Plymouth may bring.
The English Monster Page 2
