The Newgate Jig

by Ann Featherstone

  It was a good exhibition, full of variety, and I was pleased that Brutus and Nero showed their skills, and the people who paid their pennies to come and see us were so appreciative. We gave half a dozen exhibitions like this, and I hardly stopped to breathe, as they say, which helped me more easily to put aside the unpleasantness of earlier events. But when the evening dropped down and the room was quiet, I fell to thinking about it and felt heavy again with that melancholy that comes over me when I am upset. No wonder that my hand shook as I scraped the stray tea leaves from the table and straightened my pot and cups. My little collection of books were all awry, pulled off the shelf and shoved roughly back, and the picture of the Queen, which was propped on the top, had slipped behind and only her crown was showing. It quite sent me off my hinges and I made haste to go home to be rid of the world and back in my own little room, safe and sound.

  Upstairs it was all quiet, but for the gentle rumble of Bella, the lioness: Conn was shutting up the menagerie for the night. In one of his rare moments of conversation, he once told me that the animals know when the Aquarium has closed.

  They fall silent,' he said in his own strange tongue, half- Irish, half-darkie (for he was of a mulatto strain). The apes stop swinging from the bars and sit in their corners. Birds stop calling. Bella, she lies down and sings herself a lullaby.'

  Bella was the great golden lioness that Mr Abrahams had bought from a travelling menagerie, along with her keeper, Conn.

  'Old Bella, that fine, fierce girl, she knows well enough about everything that goes on. She keeps her teeth back though.'

  Conn was as affectionate in speech about Bella as I was about my dogs, but there the similarity ended, for I could pet and play with Brutus and Nero, but Conn could only stand and stare at the bars of the cage.

  'She had me once, Bob,' he confided, when I had taken a packet of medicinal powders up to him for Bella's skin, 'and she will bide her time until she can finish me. Look into them old eyes, will you, and tell me if they are not full of love and blood-lust.'

  Indeed, I could not say! Riddles dropped easily from Conn's lips and when his voice faded to a whisper, it was difficult to know whether he was in all seriousness or in drink, for he did have a weakness in that area. When he was overcome, he would stagger up to the menagerie to sleep in an empty cage, and later would terrify Nightman (a nameless dwarf employed to mind the menagerie through the night hours), who never quite got used to Conn's habits. One gloomy afternoon I discovered Conn crouched upon the second landing, nursing a bottle and clutching by the tail a petrified lizard from one of the cabinets. He caught it, he said, when it was trying to steal away. And as he drained the bottle, he said more. About his life on the road. The travelling menagerie. The woman he had loved and lost. And Bella, the lioness, raised by him from a cub, who one day turned upon him and tore the flesh from his back and arm.

  'Here,' he whispered, tearing at his back, 'is where she laid her claws upon me and caressed my spine! And here is where her mouth kissed my shoulder and arm till I thought I should die from the pain.'

  He talked of his nights of agony, of the pain endured as doctors struggled to stem the blood and sew up the flesh - 'with thread so fine you couldn't see it' - and the fever and delirium which sent him nearly mad.

  They tied me to my bed, Bob, and I howled like a dog, and wanted to die. Who would not want to die, in my place, with a back torn to shreds and an arm useless. I begged Holy Jesus to take me, but He wouldn't. And as I screamed and howled, Bella roared back to me. Talked to me. Beast to beast. "Next time," she cried, "next time it shall be the rapture for you." And that,' he said, laying a hand upon my arm, 'is death.'

  Then the drink overcame him and he slumped under the Roman table, with his head upon the petrified lizard. I laid his coat over his shoulder and dragged a rug across him to hide him from the visitors, for he was much troubled and I couldn't help but pity him. In his drunken rages, he would pull off his shirt to reveal the terrible wounds which the lioness had inflicted upon him - 'Look at my back, Chapman!' he would cry. 'Get a cloth and stop the blood before I bleed to death!' But when I examined his back and shoulder, there were no gouges of flesh and skin, no torn muscle and ragged sinew, no raw wounds, still open and bleeding, as he often claimed. Just the hard, white stripes of childhood beatings, like the grain in wood, deep and ridged. Scars of the belt and the lash applied often and long to his young skin and paining him still, so much so that he had to invent a story to account for them. Bella, the lioness. The nearest thing to a family Conn had ever had.

  But whether she had mauled him or not, Bella was the most vocal of the creatures in the menagerie, and she could be heard all over the Aquarium. From a terrifying roar, which made my two boys stop in their tracks, to the gentle rumbling lullaby which I could hear now. Unlike Conn, I couldn't tell what she was saying but, having already had an unwelcome visitor to my stand, I wondered if something might be amiss. So it was out of concern for the animals and Conn, and the disquiet over that earlier intruder, that I mounted the gloomy back stairs to the menagerie, what Mr Abrahams called the 'service stairs', the route by which Conn brought up straw and animal food, and used by all of us if we wanted to avoid general scrutiny. The stairs were plain and bare, narrow and dimly lit, not intended to be seen at all, and had the advantage of leading to all parts of the building.

  I opened the door and was greeted by the warm smell of animals and straw and the sound of them moving in their cages. Brutus and Nero sat, obediently, in the open doorway, their noses high, sniffing the unfamiliar scents, whilst I cautiously stepped in. Conn had turned down the lights and left, and all was dim and shadowy. It ran the whole length of the building, a great, high room with long windows and a skylight. Full of cages. When it was first opened, there had been fish up here, in an aquarium, the biggest in all London, according to Mr Abrahams.

  'But,' said he, 'the weight of a tank full of water, you know, Bob, caused the floorboards to sag, so it had to go. I sold it to a man from Manchester. In twenty parts, each one labelled separately. And the fish in buckets. I hope they survived the journey.'

  He had looked sadly around the long room.

  'I liked to come up here and watch the fish. My Mimi liked it too. We would sit together in the dark, and watch them. Peaceful, she used to say, like another world under the water. And she was right. It was popular, Bob. We had the only aquarium in the whole of the city that contained not only sea- snakes, but a speaking fish too. In a separate tank, of course, and his own keeper. Pongo was the first talking fish since Jacko was exhibited in the Strand thirty years ago.'

  He had pointed to a flash above the door.

  'That's him. Pongo. A clever creature.'

  It was still there, a painted board. 'See Pongo. The talking fish. He will count!! He will sing!!!'

  But now, instead of a great glass tank in the middle of the floor, cages ranged as far as the eye could see, and the animals within, lizards and apes, pigs and snakes, as well as Bella, the lion, were crowded together like the inhabitants of a strange ark. A snuffling creature from Africa in a cage alongside a badger from Wales. Birds with feathers the colours of a rainbow fluttering in a cage next to one in which lay a sleeping fox. I peered into the tank of snakes where, in the corner, they were coiled and heaped, one upon another, and in the cage above it, a rabbit, grey and white, with ears that trailed upon the ground, its eyes bright and its nose twitching. Cage upon cage, they were crowded together, offending my sense of order and design, but that was not the worst of it for me. It pained me more acutely to see wild animals so confined, and so I rarely came up here. Brutus and Nero were similarly uneasy and would follow me into the room only if commanded, preferring to sit in the doorway as they did now. It was clear, as I walked along the range of cages where eyes blinked at me out of the gloom and Bella grumbled away, that there was no one here. No intruder, and surely nowhere for them to hide.

  But passing Bella's cage, I realized that it was Nero and not
the lioness who was growling, a low rumble in his throat, and barely audible except, perhaps, to me. I went quickly along the length of the cages to the door where he was now on his feet, growling still and looking hard at the flight of stairs up to the attics where, standing at the top, framed by the open door, was Mrs Gifford.

  'Chapman. Why are you still here? And what are you doing, creeping about like a burglar? You're fortunate I haven't called the constable and had you run in.'

  I wanted no truck with this woman and started down the stairs, but she was not about to let me go and hurried after me.

  'Just you wait there, Chapman. Don't you budge an inch!'

  I waited, though it pained me to obey her and she caught me up, standing three or four steps above me and staring me out.

  'If you have interfered with anything in there, Mr Abrahams shall know about it,' she said. 'You've no business in there, Chapman. Your place is on the second floor.'

  She continued finding fault, reminding me of my place, complaining about my dogs, the untidiness of my workplace, and yet all the time was looking beyond me, over my shoulder, never meeting my eye, until - was it my imagination? - I heard the soft thud of the front door closing, when she released me with a peremptory 'Good night'.

  I felt as though she had kept me there on purpose, and when I reached the hall, I stood for a moment, as it were, in another's breath. There was an unfamiliar scent upon the air and when I looked up, Mrs Gifford was still there, leaning over the banister.

  The Pavilion Theatre — Em Pikemartin

  I am a busy man these days, for I have prospects in view, to

  which end I have been scouring the 'For Sale' columns and found a number of market carts which will fit my bill (and pocket, eventually), and horses too. I have made calculations and worked into them the cost of feed and stabling and general upkeep - things which I think Mr Strong would be pleased I had considered. I feel as though I am almost a man of business!

  But I must earn and save the money to do it, so I had my work at the Aquarium, giving six shows a day, and more on Friday and Saturday nights. And I was attending rehearsals at the Pavilion Theatre, where Mr Carrier had Brutus, Nero and myself in the cast of the Christmas extravaganza of Elenore the Female Pirate, to open (and Mr Carrier will not give way on this tradition) on Boxing Day. So I was constantly running between the Aquarium and the Pavilion, with my dogs at my heels. People who knew me in the neighbourhood (for it was small and close) started to notice, and called after me, 'Hoi, Chapman! Dragged again!' and 'Run, don't walk!' after Mr Scarsdale's humorous song 'Walk, don't run, Sonny Jim'. And when Mr Carrier got to hear about it, he suggested that, because I was well known now for trotting around the district with Brutus and Nero at my heels, I should make our entrance in Elenore in this fashion - on the trot, as it were!

  Chapman's Sagacious Canines already had a name, of course, but a little extra attention in the exhibition business never goes amiss and helps to keep up numbers at my Aquarium show. Indeed, I believe one had already helped the other, and would increase in that way once Elenore the Female Pirate was running nightly at the Pavilion, for Mr Abrahams said more than once that he hoped Mr Carrier's enterprise was a success and had no doubt it would be a plusser for my business at the Aq.

  My friend Trim had also been brought round, and with a little persuasion had agreed to include noble rather than villainous dogs in his extravaganza, though I think it took our good friend Will Lovegrove an entire evening of flattery and attention to the bottle to achieve this. Now he is a man whose hand I am happy to shake every time I see him! And I am glad to say that I saw him more often these days, and not just of a night in a fuggy room at the Cheshire Cheese, for he took to joining Trim and me at Garraway's for breakfast before rehearsals. Happy days indeed!

  However, I could not forget the unpleasantness of the Nasty Man, and I wondered too about the boy, and why he returned Trim's precious package when he might simply have tossed it upon a dust-heap. And at night, when I was alone in my room, I thought about that generous action and how it had put me in the Nasty Man's eye, and I sometimes wished the boy had not been so kind and had consigned Trim's scribblings to the fire. But that was an uncharitable thought.

  One morning, we were strolling to the Pavilion, Trimmer,

  Lovegrove and I, after a hearty breakfast at Garraway's (courtesy of Trim, who had just sold another blood-curdler to Messrs Barnard, but told us he had promises - 'More like agreements and memoranda, no less!' - from houses of even greater note). The extravaganza was almost complete, but only after many frustrating weeks of amendments and additions, and so many extra scenes appearing - and disappearing - every day, that I was completely mystified! Only last week, Mr Carrier announced that he had secured the services of Mons. Gouffe, the man-monkey, for whom poor Trim was obliged to invent what he called 'casual business' at a moment's notice. (Of course, we have not yet seen Mons. Gouffe, though a quantity of black ink has been used in 'puffing him' from here to Hackney.) Poor Trim was at his wits' end and swore that he would never again attempt an extravaganza and, indeed, would rather compose any number of Little Jack Homers or Old Mother Hubbards than invent another 'new and original' Christmas entertainment.

  But that is the world of the stage. For my part, I attended the Pavilion when summoned; I put my boys carefully through their new pieces and even added a few novelties; I took my instructions carefully, and looked forward (with that hope and anticipation which so many theatricals embrace) to the multiplication of good fortune. 'How we apples swim, quoth the horse turd!', as Moses Dann, the Boneless Man, was fond of saying. A vulgar expression, but it always made me smile, especially when Dann whispered it in that wheezy, thin voice and clattered his teeth and put his bony hand upon his bony hip. But he was right. How very unexpected and delightful was my little success!

  This morning, Mr Carrier called us up for a 'final reading' of Elenore and we were assembled on the Pavilion stage early, heads down and bowling along for, despite Trim's claims that it was a 'serious piece of dramatic writing', there was not so much dialogue, and Mr Carrier, who was 'reading in the business' and describing everything that happened, had much the largest part. There were but four pages or so to go before the Transformation Scene (which, much to Trim's disgust, Mr Carrier has insisted upon) and he was steadily steering the pirate crew to whoops of triumph as they captured the slave boat, claimed the treasure, released the captives, and the hero, Redland Strongarm, the handsome pirate (ably and heroically read by Will), was reunited with Susan Goodchild (Miss Bella Jacques), the virtuous daughter of Dairyman Goodchild, but also cunningly disguised as the female pirate, Elenore.

  'Ho,' cried Susan, 'I am discovered. Shall I surrender or stand and fight? What shall I do? Where shall I fly? All around me is terror and distraction!'

  'Destruction,' murmured Trim, who is possessive of his words.

  'Ho, how I wish my dear James was here! Then I would share with him my dreadful secret! I would reveal the awful truth! He loves me, Susan Goodchild, sweet and chaste. But will he still love me when he learns that I am Elenora, Pirate Queen of the High Seas and Mistress of the Hisp ... Hisp ...'

  'Hispaniola,' put in Trim. 'And you are Elenore, not Elenora.'

  Miss Jacques (pronounced 'Jay-cwees') bristled under his corrections, and sucked in her cheeks so that her breath whistled through the gaps in her teeth. She was a fair actress, but a poor reader. To see her fixed upon her cue book, her fingers pressing hard upon each word as if to force it off the page, was agony for all concerned. Usually she had Mrs Crockett at her elbow, a grey and mouldering lady who, according to Mr Lombard, had in her day been the toast of the Lane and the Wells, but now toasted herself nightly in cheap gin, and suffered the indignity of being a Boswell to Miss Jacques' unworthy Johnson. So Mrs Crockett it was who softly murmured the words into her ear and helped her con the lines, and suffered, for her pains, the many indignities Miss Jacques heaped upon her. But Mrs Crockett was indisposed today, a
nd our leading lady was forced to shift for herself. She ignored the author and turned her complaints upon the manager.

  'I must protest, Mr Carrier, about the quality of the copying.'

  At which Mr Pocock's head shot up from his little table: he is the copyist (amongst his many other duties).

  'It is always the same,' she thundered on, her voice rising with every syllable, 'perfectly h'awful! How I am supposed to read this wonderful drama proper is beyond myself!'

  She smiled brilliantly at Trim.

  I was thankful that Miss Jacques turned her nose up at me entirely, and did not even notice my dogs. For to be within her eye's orbit was to risk being battered about by one of her dramatic storms, and when she sat like a duchess, with a mantle around her shoulders and a ridiculous feather bobbing in her hat, glaring at everyone - except Trim, of course - she was difficult to sail around. Only Mr Carrier had the skill to chart that particular course.

  'I will have Mr Pocock attend to it, Bella,' he returned, mildly, whilst the man in question continued to fix her with a very hostile gaze. 'Let us please continue to the end of the scene - and the end of the drama. And then we might all take care of our other business.'

  There were murmurs of agreement, for the dinner-time bell was ringing at the Bell and Leper, in harmony with the collective belly rumbles upon the stage. Miss Jacques settled herself, and out came the gloved forefinger to find its place upon the page.

  'Ho, James! My love! My sweet James! Would he not clasp me in his strong arms! Would he not fight them pirates!'

  'Ah, Susan! My pirate sweetheart! He is here!' cried Will, giving the words his very best heroic emphasis. Redland Strongarm is, as everyone knows, none other than James Moreland, the lover of Susan, sent to sea by an evil uncle when he was but fourteen years old, captured by pirates, only to become a good and honourable pirate chief - were there such a profession! - and running his blacksmith's forge in the off-season.