by Peter Carey
The sad little party made its way back into the unnamed court at the back of Fetter Lane where, the Larkins soon discovered, it was their benefactor who was responsible for the bad fish smell which daily filled their little room, his accommodation being just one floor below theirs.
That night the earnest little man cooked them a fish and potato soup, and then, having made them promise not to leave their room until they saw him again, he returned with freshly fried fish for their breakfast.
And that was the start of Mercy’s long friendship with Percy Buckle who, even when he had ten fried-fish men working for him, always had time to sit and read the girl a bed-time story.
He was, as Mercy often said, the kindest, most decent man in all the world, and she would—as she later told Jack Maggs—as soon cut off her own arm as lose his kind opinion.
20
“I KNOW IT’S YOU,” said Mercy, emerging from the dark of the stair, her glistening eyes holding the pin-point reflection of his candle. “Who else would it be?”
Jack Maggs was thus exposed at his secret work: he had a dark blue apothecary’s bottle in his hand, a tartan blanket wrapped around his broad shoulders.
“Christ, Judy, you have a taste for trouble.”
A half-wit would have known it wise to pretend no curiosity, but here she was making obvious note of all the clues to the mystery before her: the quill, the paper, the blankets he had tied up so neatly across the curtain rails.
He had begun to hide the bottle in his jacket pocket, but what was the point?
“Ain’t you afraid of me?”
She raised her eyebrows mockingly. “Oh, I know you would not harm me.”
He snorted. “You is just a little mite, Judy. Your ma should be reading you fairy tales in bed.”
“My ma is a mad woman.”
It would be a lie to say the answer did not shock Jack Maggs but he continued speaking as if he had not heard her.
“Now,” he said, “why don’t I give you one more shy at the coconut? Why don’t you go back to your bed, and mum’s the word.”
“If you are such a fiercesome villain,” said she, “how come you saved Eddie?”
“I don’t know no Eddie.”
“Mr Constable, the footman. Him you had sworn to murder in his bed.”
He sat wearily on one of the gilded chairs which were arranged in a ring in the centre of the splendid room. He rubbed his face, smearing smuts amongst his stubble.
“I am an old dog,” he said, “who has been treated bad, and has learned all sort of tricks he wishes he never had to know. You are a young woman with all her life ahead of her, Judy.”
“Mercy,” she insisted.
“Mercy then.”
Said she, “I am an old dog too.”
“Mercy, I am too old a cove for you to fancy . . .”
She put her hand over her mouth but could not stop her laughter. “Fancy? Lor, oh dear, Mr Maggs . . .”
He folded his arms angrily across his chest but said nothing.
“What are you planning?” she asked him.
“What am I planning?”
“Aye, what are you planning in Mr Phipps’s house?”
“What I am planning . . .” He walked to the desk and began to shuffle through his pile of papers. “What I am planning, little Miss Muffet, is to find my letters of recommendation which was left in this household.”
“But you don’t have no letters. Eddie swears you don’t.”
“Is that so?”
“He had to learn you how to fix your hair.”
Jack Maggs began to answer her, but—Christ—she held up her hand to quieten him. “Shush. Listen.”
Now he, too, heard—a carriage. His first and only thought was Henry Phipps. He limped to the windows and peeked cautiously between the deep folds of blankets.
“It’s only Buckle,” he said, “come home from his Correspondence Society.”
“Oh Lor.” Mercy leaped to her feet. “Dear Jesus—home so early.”
“He cannot need you now, at this hour.”
“No, no, I have to go. Oh dear God save me.”
And she turned and ran off up the stairs.
Maggs followed, but at a more leisurely pace. By the time he arrived at the dormer window, she was already outside, slipping and sliding her way across the mossy tiles in her stockinged feet. He did not doubt her ma had been a mad woman.
21
IN THE EARLY MORNING, by the light of four bright candles, Jack Maggs finally dipped the great albatross quill into the apothecary’s bottle.
He wrote, Dear Henry Phipps, in violet-coloured ink.
He did not write these words from left to right, but thus:
He wrote fluidly, as if long accustomed to that distrustful art.
He paused, staring up at the gilded ceiling while the ink faded to a pale, pale lilac. Then he continued:
I did arrive on the date of which I had advised you and found you absent from these premises.
He watched these fresh lines fade, first to lilac, then to white; until, that is, they became invisible.
He continued:
I had hopes you might return tonight, perhaps having mistook my hastily written 23 for a 28, but I have waited these long hours on the settle, and now at your very handsome walnut desk in vain.
It is a most melancholy business to be solitary in the place in which I did invest such High Hopes, but I do trust my disappointment will be brief. I have a messenger who will soon fetch you. If you now read this letter it can only be because you have met up with him, the Thief-taker, and he has told you how to make these words visible. I hope he has remembered to tell you that you must BURN EVERYTHING when it is read. Many of the events I tell you are from a long time ago, but I fear they may still be used against me by my Enemies.
The Thief-taker has given you the mirror. If it be any cheap mirror, know that this is not the same as I gave him, for I am a wealthy man, and it was my pleasure to send the best mirror that can be obtained in London. If you are acquainted with the hallmarks of the great silversmiths, you will read a distinguished story on the mirror’s handle.
Well, Henry Phipps, you will read a different type of story in the glass, by which I mean—mine own.
You will forgive me for being too much the bull at the gate in my previous correspondence. It was written in a great rush in a Dover Inn, soon after landing. I dare say that my words were not as well chosen as they might have been and that I revealed things that made you fear a Criminal coming to harm you.
Henry Phipps, you were raised to have a tender heart and to obey the laws. This was always so clear in your loving letters, and it is no stretch to imagine that you were frightened to hear Jack Maggs was finally on his way into your polite and educated life.
I had many years to prepare you, and I did not. But what is done is done and you now give me no choice but to put my life before you all at once, to make you privy to information that could, in the wrong hands, have me dancing the Newgate Jig.
You have known for many years that my name is Jack Maggs, although Maggs was not my father’s name, but a name given to me by my foster mother who believed I talked too much. What my father’s name was I cannot tell, for when I was just three days old I was discovered lying in the mud flats ’neath London Bridge.
I was picked up by Mudlarks. I do not recall this, but have so oft been told of my Good Fortune that for many years I saw them in my dreams: wraiths pulled up from the stinking mud of the Thames. These half-starved scroungers found the strength to fight for my shawl and bonnet with such a passion that it was always said by Silas Smith—my Benefactor—that it was a wonder I was not torn in two like the child divided thus by Solomon.
Now pay attention to this Silas Smith, for he will come into the History later. It was he, that lanky thief with the long face and claret nose—a parson’s son—who paid the Mudlarks a ha’penny each for my naked body and then another ha’penny to carry me to a place where I might
have the stinking mud washed off me.
He asked the moochers, did they know the whereabouts of a midwife, but they were slow of wit, and begged his pardon for never having heard of such a thing. Silas then asked them who it was attended when the babies were to be born. But the Mudlarks never lived inside a house and never saw a baby born and could not think how to get the money until the oldest of them thought that Mary Britten might answer the description.
—Then take me to her, Silas said.
He followed the shivering little river rats up Pepper Alley Stairs. He walked through that stinking rubbish strewn street—no longer there, so I have been told. He ducked under a rotting trellis, came into a court strung high and low with drying washing, its gutters spilling over with soap suds. He was always one to play the left-handed fiddle, but he could never have imagined that he would finally prosper from this adventure.
As the party came into the court, the baby was crying and the Mudlarks were growing most reluctant to proceed. The one holding me nodded his sharp little head down a passage-way that opened in the furthest wall of the court, but Silas would not give the ha’penny until his guides had walked before him through the shadowed portal.
He held the ha’penny. The Mudlark still held the child. There was but one doorway at the end of the dark passageway and Silas knocked with his cane until the door was opened by a big-boned woman with wild red hair. Her shoulders were bare and her skin glowed white in the gloom.
—Madam, said Silas Smith.
Mary Britten did not even note the shining red nose. She told me, often enough, that her only observations were of me, and she did not want me. She heard the weak cry of a starving babe, the stink of cold & unwashed skin. She began to threaten with the bricks she had for the purposes of discouraging the rats.
—You take your rubbish somewhere else, she said. Take it to the foundlings hospital, she said, imagining Silas Smith a clergyman.
But then Silas did what was, for him, a most peculiar thing—he opened up his sovereign case.
Was it his heart he opened thus? I cannot say for sure, only that he was a thief, and receiver, what we called a “Family Man” and normally very cagey with his money.
—I’ll not see you disadvantaged, he told Mary Britten.
He gave her his calling card. Mary Britten curtsied to him and placed her brick bat on the floor.
Said she—I’m sorry, Sir, for how I spoke, but that is what becomes of us down here in Hell’s Doorway. Sitting here, said she, looking at the Devil’s thieving ways etc. etc.
Silas threw the boys a ha’penny and removed his tall black hat.
Mary opened wide her door, and invited me and Silas into her life.
I grew up being told these stories, and I never liked them even as a child. I heard a hundred times how I was starved and thin and wrinkled like a rag etcetera, how she washed me, wrapped me in a piece of clean grey blanket and persuaded me to take a little barley water.
And meat, always talk about meat. Mary Britten could not tell a story without a little meat in it.
—It’s meat he’ll be needing, she said. It’s the lack of meat that makes them slow. In that we have been blessed, she said, for my boy Tom Britten is a finder down at Smithfield. There is always meat in my house, she said, and always has been.
—Now lookee here, said Silas Smith, you are a poor woman, but you will soon be richer for your kindness.
And then, bless him, he gave her the sovereign. He, who had more schemes than knaves in a Magsman’s deck, gave away a sovereign to a poor woman.
As for Mary, this was the first sovereign she had ever touched in all her life.
—It’s the meat he’ll be needing, she said. Neck, scrag end, belly—that’s what’s missing.
And here the first entry ends.
22
AT A QUARTER BEFORE the hour of eight the following morning, there was a boy knocking on the door at Great Queen Street with a long letter in Oates’s hand wherein he apologized for the early hour, but begged Percy Buckle to be sponsor to an event which will “satisfy your humane and inquisitive nature.”
Percy Buckle, as was his eccentric habit, was waited on at breakfast only by the maid, and thus, his footmen being absent, he had to ring for Jack Maggs in order that he might read aloud to him the letter requesting his attendance at a Magnetic Experiment.
Jack Maggs listened only fitfully, for he was more concerned with Mercy Larkin, and the mischief he imagined in those sleepy eyes.
“He wants us now,” cried Percy Buckle, pushing away his buttered toast.
“I cannot go now, Sir.”
“Yes you can, Sir,” winked Mr Buckle. “I would not miss this for the world.”
“You’re coming with me, Sir?”
Mr Buckle stood, slurping down his tea. “Wild horses couldn’t stop me.” Mercy Larkin made a hand signal Jack Maggs did not understand.
“Your kippers are done, Sir,” he said.
But there was no time for kippers. No time for horses either. Down the hallway Buckle marched, his confused footman hard behind him. On the front step, the master paused to issue, sotto voce, the following instructions.
“Now Maggs, I’m sure you’ve been a footman longer’n I’ve been a master, but seeing as how your legs are so long and mine, well, call a spade a spade—I’m duck-legged—then I’d ask you to watch your step and stay back a little as we walk, not come down upon my heels. If ruffians call out, and they do, they do, you turn a deaf’n to them and don’t feel you have to stand up for my honour. Doubtless it is some mistake yet in my wardrobe, and that will be attended to directly. But for now, old fellow, it is off we go. Three paces behind, if you could be good enough to manage it.”
Thus Percy Buckle, a passionate Chartist in his private life, emerged as a high Tory on Holborn. He marched east along that great thoroughfare in a top hat and waterproof travelling cloak that reached almost to the pavement and which he had, from time to time, to raise above the mud. His footman followed him three paces behind, coiffed, powdered, gloved, in bright yellow livery and smart doeskin breeches.
Who can say exactly what it was that made passers-by smile to see them?—the slight roll to the fart-catcher’s walk, the anxious perambulation of the little master, the hundred little clues, perceived by the brain but not so easily named, to the counterfeit they were so earnestly enacting.
At Lamb’s Conduit Street, Percy Buckle’s inquiring knocks were answered by the master of the house. They felt the enthusiasm of his approach before they saw him and then Tobias Oates was standing before them—flash as a sharper in a bright green waistcoat.
“Splendid! Capital!” the writer said, reaching out his bony little hands to prod Jack Maggs—a finger point against each shoulder. “Come in, come in. We have a splendid fire, carefully guarded.”
Thus Jack entered Tobias Oates’s home a second time. He was guided into the front room which had, indeed, a crackling fire, and was now set up as for a lecture, with its bowl of apples gone, its large red chaise pushed back against the wall, a straight-backed chair upholstered in green velvet set up in the middle and some four or five assorted dining chairs arranged like pawns in the defence of a beleaguered king.
It was in this upholstered chair that Jack was left while Buckle and Oates whispered together in the hall. He was most apprehensive and was not calmed when he heard female voices in the hallway. He inhabited the chair as if it were a place of execution.
Then Mr Buckle entered, followed by tricky little Oates and two young women.
The first of the women was Mrs Oates, who was plump and plain with a slightly injured cast to her features, or perhaps she was merely tired by the babe she now carried at her breast. The other was a fresher daisy altogether, not merely in that she was a good five years younger, but that her manner was less put-upon. Neither were great beauties, but this younger one—Maggs heard her called Lizzie—had a hungry little mouth and big inquisitive eyes.
While Mrs Oates hove
red indecisively by the doorway, this girl sat straight away in the chair closest to the footman.
Are all of them to spy on me?
Oates did not start the Magnetism immediately but fussed with the firescreen instead, touching it in that peculiar way he had earlier touched Jack’s shoulders. So busy was he with this operation that he left the other three not much else to do except stare at the victim in the chair.
Maggs stood this well enough at first, but as the staring went on and on it became pretty near intolerable. He had no wish to be impertinent but what was his choice?
“So, Sir,” he called to Tobias Oates, “it is my good fortune, Sir, to have an audience. Have I become a fellow in a penny gaff?”
“Mark my words, Jack Maggs,” said Oates, still staring at the firescreen, “there never was a penny gaff of such importance.” He then spun suddenly, and all eyes in the room turned to him. “Look at what we have today.”
Tobias Oates tossed two shining discs of metal in the air and caught them behind his back.
“What’s that?” said Jack, now thoroughly alarmed. “We never spoke of that.”
“Conjuring,” exclaimed Percy Buckle. “Very good, Sir.”
“Magnets,” said Oates, holding out his open palms so that Mr Buckle could examine the discs. “We’ll drag the demons out of Master Maggs with these.”
“In front of everyone?” said Jack Maggs. “You never said it were to be in public, Sir.”
“Old chap,” said Oates, widening his eyes to look at him. “Do not do this to me now.”
Maggs was chilled to perceive the hard eyes behind those pretty lashes.
“You will get your introduction to the Thief-taker . . .”
“I need to talk to him, Sir.”
“Yes, we will talk to him. As we agreed. Thirteen days from now. It seems to me, Mr Maggs, that this bargain is all in your favour.”
