by Avi
From his waistcoat the sergeant pulled forth a large red handkerchief. He flourished it and blew his nose into it with a buglelike bleat, a proclamation that he was going into battle. After that he cannoned a cough into it, which resounded like the opening salvo of a general barrage. Next he rammed the cloth back into his pocket as he might wadding into a smoothbore musket. Finally, like a general announcing an advance, he stood straight and tall and cried, “Master John Huffam! Atten-shun!”
I, seated in the back form, rose up slowly and approached.
How shall I describe myself? For fourteen, I was somewhat small, with a round, perhaps placid face—with sandy-colored and lank hair that habitually fell over my blue eyes no matter how often I pushed it back. “Our dreamy angel,” Brigit had dubbed me, since I often took refuge in fanciful thoughts.
Normally, I wore striped trousers and a wool jacket with a rounded front collar. My white shirt was gray. Around my neck was an ineptly tied neckcloth. On my feet, scuffed brown leather shoes.
Despite my uneven garb, I was by far the best dressed of my youthful comrades, who, in most respects, were quite ragged. But then, Father liked me to appear to the world like the young gentleman he insisted we both were. At times I thought he chose that school solely because I could appear better than my fellow students.
At the moment—standing in class, pushing the hair out of my face, and blinking—I was surely not better.
“You,” announced Sergeant Muldspoon, aiming his cane directly at my heart. He spoke, moreover, in the grave tones a general might use when telling a soldier he was about to stand court-martial for desertion. “You were sleeping in the line of duty.”
“Please, sir,” I whispered, “I didn’t mean to.”
“Did we hear that, students?” cried our educator, his jaw jutting forward so that he looked like a field gun run up to the battlements. “Master John Huffam didn’t mean to sleep.” The cane in his hand twitched menacingly. “Did we hear it, school?” he cried, cocking his head to one side, signaling that the class was to respond.
“Yes, Sergeant Muldspoon,” everyone—including me—chanted like a shrill glee club. “We heard it!”
“If you did not mean it, then why, Master John Huffam, did you do it?” asked the teacher. “Do you think, midst the battle against ignorance, one can sleep?”
“No, sir.”
“Is not your education your great war against your mortal enemy, which is to say, your great ignorance?”
“I was … tired, sir.”
“Did we hear that, school?” exclaimed the teacher with mock shock. “Master John Huffam says he was tired” The cane positively leaped about in his hand with anticipation. “Did we hear it, school?”
“Yes, Sergeant Muldspoon,” we scholars returned. “We heard it!” Now that I was named offender, the others could relax.
“And why. Master John Huffam, considering that your father claims to be a gentleman and lords it above all, including yours truly, while he bombards the world with false airs and rude condescension, when he is no more than a mere clerk—whereas I, I shook the hand of His Grace the Duke of Wellington himself!—why, Master John Huffam, should you be tired?”
“Please, sir,” I said, “matters are uneasy at home, sir. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
“Did we hear that, students?” asked the teacher. “Master John Huffam says he didn’t sleep very well because of unease within his genteel home. Did we hear that, school?”
“Yes, Sergeant Muldspoon!” we shouted. “We heard that!”
“Master Huffam,” Sergeant Muldspoon proclaimed, “your response is inappropriate. Home is home. School is school. They are completely separate fields of battle. That said, it is very clear that your sense of discipline must be acquired not from your father, not from your fantastical genii, but in school. From me! Very well: John Huffam, you shall find this Englishman always does his duty. Break ranks. Step forward. March!”
“But, sir …”
“John Huffam, I am not aware that foot soldiers have been given leave to debate tactics with their general in chief. Advance!”
Most reluctantly I marched to the front of the room to stand before Old Moldy. Once there, I saluted. Then I bowed my head and extended my hand, palm turned up—following a practice understood by all. Indeed, such maneuvers were normally the first lesson our teacher taught his new pupils.
“Do not retreat in your war against ignorance, Master John Huffam,” snapped Sergeant Muldspoon. So saying, he brought the cane down hard upon my upturned hand.
I bit my lip to keep from crying out.
“Receive your punishment,” said Old Moldy, “like an English soldier. Now then, return to your place, march!”
“Yes, sir.” Eyes welling with tears, I retreated to the back row.
“Discipline, young men,” cried the sergeant, pointing to his sign upon the wall, “military discipline means never retreat. That is the byword of the true Englishman in this bastion of education. For this school is a fortress standing firm against those who would degrade the English monarchy and bring mob rule. Make no mistake! War upon the rabble’s ignorance is your patriotic duty! Tired will not do! Not in Queen Victoria’s England. Not in Sergeant Muldspoon’s Militantly Motivated Academy.
“Now then, class, continue.” He smacked his cane against the easel. Bang!
“D-E-A-D spells ’dead’!” we boys cried out in unison.
The sergeant was just about to assault the next word when Brigit, our family servant, burst through the door. The white cap she wore was in partial disarray, as was her graying hair. Her ankle-length dress was rumpled, as was the white—if stained—apron she wore. Her face was raddled with distress.
“I beg your pardon,” cried Sergeant Muldspoon, “whoever you are, you’re interrupting.”
“It’s Master John Huffam, sir,” said Brigit. “He must come home at once.”
“His gentleman’s home?” said the teacher.
Ignoring the tone of raillery, Brigit looked at me and made a frantic beckoning movement. “Did you not hear me, Master John?” she hissed. “You must come now! Something perfectly dreadful has occurred.”
I could have sworn the sergeant almost smiled. All he said, however, was, “John Huffam! Atten-shun! Stand down! Dismissed! March!”
CHAPTER 2
I Return to My Family
Brigit and I hurried down Bishopsgate, she leading the way as fast as a woman could go while maintaining decorum. I, in order to keep up, fairly well had to skip along the street gutter because the walkway was so crowded.
Such was her urgency, no words could be exchanged between us. Even so, I was just about to try when a sudden eruption of church bells filled the air from all points on the City compass, as if hearing the hour announced but once—it was four p.m.—was insufficient for Londons two million. Indeed, the bells rang on, from one church to another, until at peak performance a hundred bells caroled piously, only to dwindle to a last feeble strike, tickling the ear of what would have to be a very sleepy soul.
Of course, if one did not know the hour by the bells, one knew it by the darkness of the late November afternoon. (I have been informed that London, on average, has but three and a half hours of sunlight per day.) The regular dismal brown fog, known as a “London particular,” further congealed the gloom. Indeed, the coal-gas lamplighters, ladders over shoulders and glowing punks in hand, were already going from lamppost to lamppost, illuminating globes of soft light.
Crowds filled the sidewalks, three out often citizens looking to be my age, as if the whole City was at school upon the streets.
Street vendors were crying their wares: “Who’s for an eel pie?” “Buy my lucifers!” “Sharpen your knives!” “Latest London Spectator—thrupence.” “’Ere’s yer toys for girls an boys!” Tattered girls were hawking wilted watercress. Mud being universal, street sweeper boys were calling for custom at every corner. Braying beggars—crippled beggars, starving beggars,
diseased beggars—were everywhere.
Then too there was a sluggishly moving chaos of wagons, barouches, carts, omnibuses, barrows, hackneys, phaetons, and Hansoms, pulled by London’s hundred thousand horses. No wonder the cobblestones fairly sank beneath a sea of dung. No wonder that every breathing thing, every rolling thing, every voice, every cry, call, laugh, and sob, every shoe, boot, and hoof made so much din as to produce a relentless rumble that drummed and thrummed into every living London ear—and dead ones, too, no doubt.
But as soon as the clanging bells ceased their tolling, I turned. “Please, Brigit,” I called up to her—for she towered over me—“what’s happened?”
“Oh, Master John, I can hardly begin to speak it.”
“Has someone taken ill? Is someone hurt?”
“Nothing like, Master John.”
“Has someone died?” I cried, coming to a sudden halt.
“No, no,” she said, pulling me onward. “Very much worse, I fear.”
Remembering, I came to another stop. “Has my father”—I could hardly speak it—“has my father gone to—?”
“Out of the way!” a voice screamed.
Startled, I looked about, just in time to avoid being run down by a horse and goods wagon rolling past. Street mud and filth splattered my trousers. Though Brigit’s long skirt was also dirtied, she paid no mind.
“Please, you must tell me something,” I pleaded.
Brigit shook her head.
“But—”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Master John! It’s for your own father—not me—to tell you of his disgrace.”
“Disgrace!”
“Hush now! Well be there in moments, and you can learn the dreadful truth from his own lips.”
My heart thudding, we hastened round the corner to the quieter, darker Widegate Street, made a right onto Sandys Row, went scurrying past narrow Frying Pan Alley, until at last we turned into Mills Court, where my family resided.
In the light cast by the sole gas lamp at the head of our court, I could just see our family house, a soot-darkened brick structure of three levels. For five years we had been living on the ground floor while the upper two floors were rented to another family. I was not, however, allowed to be friendly with them since they, in my father’s ironic words, were “too low.” In fact, the big-eared boy who resided above us was leaning out an upper-floor window, smirking at the scene below.
It was, moreover, a scene I shall never forget—no, not if I lived for five hundred years.
CHAPTER 3
My Family’s Fortunes Fall
Two men were hauling my parents’ bed—bedclothes heaped upon it—from the house. My own bed was already on the pavement. As was my sister’s. So too the painted box in which we stored our clothing. Our blue Venetian glass vase. Our table. Our chairs. Mother’s heirloom silver teapot. Our five books, including my Tales of the Genii and Robinson Crusoe. Also: The precious, ornately framed painting of my father’s grandfather, the baronet Augustus Huffam. Everything was being loaded onto a wagon. Hitched to that stood a large gray mare willing, and able, to haul our household away.
Many of our neighbors were watching, milling about the street’s central water-spigot. Innumerable children were underfoot in various degrees of dress and dirtiness. Among the crowd were a few uniformed constables—“Peelers,” we called them—with their steel-reinforced top hats; belted, brass-buttoned, blue greatcoats; and gas-fueled bull’s-eye lamps on belts. They did not seem to be doing much of anything.
On the crowded steps that led to the house door, my family huddled like shorn sheep, looking on with what appeared to be disbelief as the last of our possessions were rudely heaved into the wagon. Simultaneously, they, along with everyone else, listened to a man read loudly from a large sheet of paper adorned with official seals, a paper he held in his plump, dimpled hands as far from his eyes as his short arms allowed.
This squat, round gentleman was someone I had never seen before. He sported long gray side-whiskers of the kind called “Piccadilly weepers,” the very image of a hard-blowing north wind emerging from storm clouds. That is to say, he was a perfect assemblage of puffiness: Puffy face, puffy nose, puffy cheeks, puffy eyes, puffy mouth, and very puffy belly. Perched on his round nose were old-fashioned round eyeglasses. Perched on his head was an old-fashioned cocked hat. Indeed, he even wore an old-fashioned greatcoat of faded scarlet, along with old-fashioned green knee britches, stockings, and high black boots. Tucked under one arm was a long walking staff, which he apparently carried not so much for stability as for the authority it signified.
My mother, clutching my father’s right arm tightly, was pale-faced and crying, her copious bosom heaving with emotion, her corkscrewed ringlets of hair quite unscrewed. My sister, as rail thin as Mother was barrel stout, was affixed to Father’s other side. Tears trickled down her sallow cheeks as she mewed and lamented like a distempered kitten.
For a moment I could do no more than stare. Then, recollecting myself, I pulled free of Brigit, calling, “Father! Mother! What is it? What’s happening?”
At first they did not seem to grasp that I was even there. But the fat man with the cocked hat and side-whiskers did.
“Here now, boy,” he cried as I tried to join my family. “Stand aside. Are you not aware that you are impeding the Queen’s majestic law in its … hmm … stately progress?”
“But what is it?” I cried. “What’s happening to our belongings?” By then virtually everything was in the wagon.
“Who is this meddlesome youth?” demanded the man. He pushed his eyeglasses up to his forehead, where they remained so that I had—as it were—four eyes glaring at me with reproach. “Does he know nothing of the dignity of the Queen’s law?”
Releasing my mother and sister, Father drew himself up. He was a tall and slim man, some might say (certainly he could and would say it) a handsome man, suggesting the amateur actor and clever theater critic he fancied himself. His thinning hair was ginger in color, his complexion unmarked by pox, his eyes a gentle light blue. His nose had been considered (certainly he could and would say it) rather noble. His erect bearing gave him the look of—as many had said (certainly he could and would say this, too)—a gentleman. Only on closer examination might one see that his jacket and trousers were frayed at the edges, shoes broken, shirt barely white, hair uneven at the ears, neckcloth soiled, chin in need of a shave—but of a certainty he would not admit to any of that.
“He is my son and heir,” my father informed the puffy man, speaking with the theatrical diction he often affected. “John,” said he, turning to me, “it’s my honor to present you to Mr. Tobias Tuckum, our parish bailiff. John, be so good as to extend Mr. Tuckum your compliments as befits the son and heir of a gentleman.”
“But what’s this all about?” I cried again.
“Your feckless father,” announced Mother in a voice as brash as that of any costermonger, “has gone bankrupt!” She pressed a small hand to her heaving heart, even as she gulped down what looked to be a sob as large as an Irish potato.
“Now, now,” said the bailiff with a bow in my direction. “Your father is merely in debt.” He lowered his glasses to the bridge of his nose, held up his paper, and read: “‘Wesley John Louis Huffam, you are hereby summoned, and in Her Majesty’s name, strictly enjoined and commanded personally, to be and appear before the Insolvent Debtors’ Court at Parliament Street, Palace Yard, on’ … hmm … ‘Thursday next before ten of the clock.’
“As you can hear,” explained the bailiff to me, “a writ has been sworn against your father. His property has been seized as security. In three days’ time the court shall pass judgment. If his debt be not paid in its entirety by then, he will soon be … hmm … languishing according to the Queen’s sacred justice in the debtors’ prison at Whitecross Street until such time as it is paid.”
It was, I realized, just what my father had warned might happen: That is to say, a catastrophe had come down upon us, a
catastrophe very much harsher than the blow Sergeant Muldspoon had brought down upon my hand.
CHAPTER 4
I Learn About a Sponging House
With a loud cluck from the wagon driver—one of the furniture removers—all our household goods were hauled away, the horse’s iron-shod hooves clattering upon the cobblestones like (or so it seemed to me) the rattling of bones in a coffin.
We watched the cart go in silence, though my mother and sister wept noisily. Brigit, white cap askew, apron bunched in one fist, looked tense. I turned my eyes toward my father, who had delicately touched the corner of his right eye with the tip of a well-manicured finger so as to dab away—in the most gentlemanly fashion—a solitary tear. Then he put his hands in his pockets, pursed his lips, and softly whistled that tune of his, “Money Is Your Friend.” This time the normally sprightly ditty sounded like a funeral dirge.
From the top-floor window of our house the smirking, big-eared neighbor boy—his name was Rufus Pendergast—jeered: “Debtors’ prison! That’s where you be goin. Y’bankrupts! Y’nasty, stuck-up snobs!”
That insult uncorked raucous laughter from the crowd of onlookers, a sound that made my sister wince and Mother’s face turn pale even as her nose turned up. As for the policemen, they nodded to one another, grinning, while Mr. Tuckum only frowned.
“Father?” I whispered as the wagon vanished into the night. “Where will they take our things?”
