Jack Maggs

by Peter Carey

  “Now, you will lie down on your bed. And not raise yourself once more unless my voice commands it.”

  Jack Maggs then sat on the crib. He tugged off his boots and dropped them heavily onto the floor.

  “Christ,” he exclaimed, and then lay down, his hands still playing with his face.

  Tobias reflected on how he was to lay this Phantom to rest for ever. He had by now long forgotten, if he ever knew, that this wraith was his own invention, a personification of pain that he had planted in the other’s mind. He commanded the Somnambulist to describe the figure that haunted him. He could, of course, have himself described the ice-blue eyes, the cruel straight nose, the cornfieldcoloured hair; but his purpose was to make his subject concentrate upon the Phantom, and then, by some violent strategy he had not yet imagined, to cast him for ever, like swine, into the sea.

  Thus he pointed at the stain on the attic wall. “There he is, Jack, there he is.”

  Jack Maggs, for his part, resisted. He tossed his head and squeezed shut his eyes. He plucked at his cheek, digging into it with his straightened fingers as if his hand were a trencher and his flesh mere clay to dig into.

  “Is he dark then, Jack?” asked Tobias, who knew Jack Maggs liked an argument. “Is he a black man?”

  “Ah no,” the convict sighed. “He is fair. Very fair.”

  “His skin is white?”

  “He has my babe.”

  Tobias, weary and dirty, wished he could lie down, but he proceeded, calmly, to overcome this latest obstacle.

  “Then take back the babe,” said he. “Walk towards the Phantom. Stretch out your hands. He does not want the babe. He will return the babe into your arms.”

  “He is on the other side of the wall.”

  Tobias imagined that the subject was referring to the Phantom. “You have removed one brick,” he said irritably. “You will now remove one more. If needs be you will demolish the whole wall in order to reach him.”

  There followed more childish banging of the subject’s head, pulling at the cheek, etcetera. Tobias folded his hands on his lap and waited. When Jack Maggs was once more quiet, he asked, “Have you removed the brick now?”

  The other man grimaced sadly. “It is a cess pit they throw him in.”

  “The Phantom is cast out?”

  “My babe. My babe is dead.”

  “Where is your Phantom, Jack? Tell me again: how does he look?”

  “Oh, he is a soldier of the King,” the convict said bitterly. “He is a regular frigging beetle, but my poor dear little boy is laying in a ditch.” Much to Tobias Oates’s consternation, his subject began to weep uncontrollably. “Dear Lord, dear Lord. His sweet little cheek is cut open.”

  And there Jack Maggs lay, sobbing, his mighty legs drawn up to his chest as though he were a babe himself.

  “Do not make me see it,” he wailed, clutching at his own cheek, and dragging down on the flesh with his broad square nails. “Oh God, I wish I were dead, and that’s the truth.”

  “Attend, Sir.”

  “Leave me, leave, let me be.”

  “I will repair your son.”

  “You cannot repair him. He is dead.”

  “We will close his wound. Please.”

  “Leave him alone, you meddling bastard of a man.”

  But Tobias Oates had received an insight. “Look, Jack, look, the wound is healed. When his wound is healed, yours will be too. It is the same wound.”

  “I want it.”

  “No, look and see the wound is healed. Your pain is gone.”

  “I want it,” cried Jack Maggs, raising himself on his elbow and staring at Tobias Oates with such alertness that it was hard to believe he was still mesmerized.

  “I want it, fool. It is all I have left of him.”

  57

  THE TIC DOULOUREUX HAD been by no means vanquished, but the magnets had given Jack Maggs sufficient relief to enable him to scrabble under the mattress where, he now revealed, a great portion of his wealth was hidden.

  He turned his back on Toby and hunched his broad shoulders so the writer might not see the extent of his treasure.

  “On faith I give you ten,” he called.

  When he looked back his skin was still pasty, but some of his old rascality was again shining in his eyes. He spoke gruffly. “It’s a hard bargain you’ve made.”

  Then he seized Toby’s hand. “But, Jod’s blood, you’ll see me keep my word, mate.”

  He drew the startled writer very close, so close Tobias could not escape the stench of his sick breath. Toby’s hand was clenched into a fist but Jack Maggs pried the fist open with the hooked fingers of his mutilated hand.

  “On the morrow,” said he, “we will meet the gent himself.”

  “He lives in Gloucester.”

  “Then to Gloucester we will go, mate. And when I have him, then forty more of these golden beauties shall be delivered to your hand.”

  And with that, he solemnly counted ten warm gold sovereigns into Tobias Oates’s open palm.

  Later, as his hackney cab trotted up Great Queen Street, the writer’s fingers began to worry at these coins in his pocket. In the restless, ever-changing landscape of his mind’s eye, he saw the circumstances whereby they might have found their way to him. As always, he believed in the scenes made by his imagination, thought them as real as anything in Great Queen Street. He saw a cabin in moonlight, a thrusting dagger, a fallen lantern, a fire blazing suddenly in the antipodean dark. These scenes led him, by and by, back to the novel of Jack Maggs. He began to rehearse the ways he might describe it to old Cheery Entwhistle.

  He soon had himself immersed deep in the details of Jack Maggs’s birth. He had learned, by medium of his magnets, that the infant Maggs had been thrown off London Bridge. Now he began to play with the notion that the convict was, like Richard Savage, a bastard son of noble parents. It was here he would start to tell the tale to Cheery Entwhistle. He saw himself pacing up and down the publisher’s comfortable office while the old man sat with his hands folded contentedly across his waistcoated belly.

  He came back from the depths of this fancy to discover that his cab had been a long time halted. He looked out the window and saw his cabby and the driver of an omnibus standing with fists raised in the middle of the street.

  There was two guineas to be made here. He could write it in an hour. “An Altercation in High Holborn.”

  Add his sweeper boy (two guineas).

  Add his canary woman (two guineas).

  If he did not pay the grocer’s or the butcher’s bill, he might amass four hundred pounds by the time the deluge arrived.

  The cab set off again, at speed. He took out his chap book and began to write, thereby achieving two hundred words by the time he closed the book again at Merton Street. Here he instructed the driver to wait, and ran up the cat-sour path to Dr Hardwick’s door.

  The doctor answered the door with a grey and unsanitary napkin in his hand.

  “Dr Hardwick,” said Tobias. “I have your fee, as I promised.”

  This information seemed to confuse the doctor.

  “I am Tobias Oates.”

  “You are, are you?” said Dr Hardwick, and then wandered back up the hallway, leaving his front door ajar behind him. Not being invited to follow, Toby had no choice but to wait in the doorway, wondering all the while what sort of doctor would open his own door. On the evidence of the shadows, the old man was in the front room, walking hither and fro in the manner of someone conducting a search.

  Some ten minutes passed, but when he finally returned to the front door, he still did not have the necklace in his hand.

  “Here is a sovereign,” said Tobias urgently. “I believe I am your debtor to the extent of five shillings.”

  Dr Hardwick looked with some surprise at the coin thus proffered. “How goes my patient?”

  “The babe is well. I hope you can give me change, Sir.”

  This matter the doctor attended to readily enough, but
he did not proffer any jewellery in return.

  “I believe you have something of mine,” Tobias said at last.

  Dr Hardwick frowned. “Of yours?”

  “Well then, of my wife’s sister.”

  “Oh, you wish the girl’s necklace?” The old man then began fumbling around his jacket pocket.

  “It is not lost, I hope.”

  At this the doctor slowly drew the necklace from the fob pocket of his waistcoat.

  “You show too much of yourself,” he said to Tobias Oates, as he held the jewellery in the air in front of him.

  “Sir?” said Tobias, blushing brightly.

  Dr Hardwick lowered the necklace into Tobias’s impatient hand.

  “I trust you are as careful of your sister-in-law as I am with her necklace,” he said.

  Tobias could not believe what he had heard. He looked into the stranger’s yellowish eyes, and saw the eyes staring boldly back at him. Beneath the man’s discoloured whiskers he thought he saw the mouth move in some benign amusement. And, for a brief moment, he was tempted to unburden himself of all his woes, to seek a medical solution to that crisis which was presently threatening to destroy his entire world.

  But then he observed a curl in the old man’s lip, a steeliness in the eyes. He turned on his heels and returned to his cab.

  58

  Dear Henry,

  I imagine you waiting and watching. I imagine you beyond the door, outside on the street, peering through the cracks in the curtains. I fancy that you are waiting to see what sort of cove your Da is. You are careful.

  I also was a watchful lad. I watched Tom most particular, and I was not wrong to do so. Tom, at eighteen, had got tall and almost handsome. His hair had grown wild and curling, and thus did him the great service of hiding his ugly ears. All his spleen had concentrated in his ripe red mouth, where its meaning had become mixed up with appetite. This was a boy who liked to kiss, but there was also a conspirator’s air to him, and a hardness, a fierceness in his eye.

  —We are brothers, Jack, he would say, leaning over the famous carved oak table at the Swan with Two Necks. We don’t need no outsiders to do our work.

  By “outsiders” he meant Silas who, even whilst locked away in jail, still continued to control much of our activity and to take, according to Tom, the lion’s share of the profits. He was not permitted to complain of this to Mary Britten, so to me he poured out all the bitter feelings in his heart. He would take me by the wrist and hold me hard. —You are not blood, but you are family. I would die for you, Jack, etc. etc.

  This passion of his made me ill at ease, and even if I learned to counterfeit its equal—for he was very prickly and needful of my doing so—in truth I pitied him. And so, in looking down on him, I did not watch him as closely as I should have.

  When I tried to have Sophina join with me in joking about Tom, she reproached me severely. —You should be shamed, she said, to have a brother who would die for you, and to make a muck of it.

  In Tom, to her great cost, she heard and saw only what she wished were true. She did not understand the great animus he bore her Papa.

  Tom was both secretive in his habits and careful with his tools, and this lucky combination gave him a great talent for house-breaking. He had become, now that he had stopped trying to escape the bonds of his apprenticeship, his master’s great pet. This master had no idea that Tom Britten was a thief. Indeed, he boasted that there was no one in all the West of London who could make a dovetail so neat and fast. I do not doubt his claim was true. Tom told me once there was a way that lumber gave before him which felt like a beast surrendered. He made it sound a dirty thing.

  Tom might well have gone on to have a useful, honest sort of life, but he was his mother’s son and they were set on bigger things.

  By 1806 we ate best brisket, chump chops, rolled roast beef from the butcher’s shop in Upper Street, and Mrs Britten was the owner of two freehold titles, and her rooms were now attended by a better class of female who—if nervous to venture into Islington—were presumably relieved that they would see no one there they knew.

  Now the Ma dressed in a get-up she had invented for herself, all in white with a queer white cap upon her head. She sold her belly-ache sausages no more. Instead she advertised her Dr Britten’s Cock’s Spur Pills for Female Disorders. These pills she compounded from Ergot, a substance which gave all our hands an unpleasant fishy smell. Sophina and I spent many a morning counting the rough purple lumps into small brown bottles.

  At fourteen, I had grown too big to fit into a chimney, but both Sophina and I had got a mighty knowledge of old silver. Together with Tom, who had all the skills of his apprenticeship, we had elevated our thievery to a higher state than any Silas could have imagined.

  Sometimes Tom might pick the lock, yet often a simple cut of his fret saw would make the key a cuckold to his finger. Sophina and I were not present when the entry was effected, though it is easy to see Tom feeling his way into the house with tarred string and wire ticklers and saw-blades fine as a human hair. He made less mess than a death-watch beetle, and when he was done the house would sit waiting for us, as easily opened as the pages of a book.

  When he met us in our rendezvous to instruct us how we were to go about our entry, he would have his colour high. His movements would be quick but soft, and there was about him at once a great excitement and a heightened shyness. I saw how he cast looks at Sophina from beneath his long lashes, and how, in telling the story of his entry, he would seek to emphasize the risk. He wished to appear the real dog in the doublet. He did not speak to Sophina, or about her, but I was not blind to his strong feelings.

  When he came to see us in the house in Islington, he would ignore us both. He would stay up late conferring with his mother, hunching with her over the dining-room table where they spent endless hours going through their “papers.” What these were I could not say, although I do believe they included a sworn deposition relating to Silas’s innocence, and the title of her two properties, although I never did see the other property—which she described as a “commodious gentleman’s residence” in Notting Hill.

  On Sunday afternoons the pair of them sat at the table drinking gin from yellow Venetian glasses, while they added up rows of figures and hissed secrets at each other. What these secrets were, I still have no idea. I cannot tell you if she knew that he had betrayed Silas, or if the whole thing had been done on her instruction. Anything you might imagine about that pair, you could not call impossible.

  Sometimes Tom left early after some upset, but more often he was there long after Sophina and I had gone to sleep in our little room.

  We were, for most of the time, exhausted, and not because we were walking half of London several nights a week—or not that only—but because we were charged with the care and cleaning of the household, and never was a downstairs maid worked harder than we were.

  It was not so much the upstairs quarters which exhausted us, but that entire ground floor which Ma Britten had now devoted to what she called “my ladies.” These rooms, where none might eat or sleep, where one could be thrashed for introducing a slice of bread and dripping, she decorated after her idea of a ladies’ room.

  Mary Britten was not an educated woman, and there was about her tall raw frame a great rude energy which might remind you more of a coster than a nurse, and yet she had a passion to be genteel, to walk St James’s, to be admitted without question at Ranelagh, and she made this front room an altar to her passion, filling it with expensive flounces, and ruffles, with jardinieres, with doilies, and statues of dusky maidens whose outstretched hands could accommodate a lighted candle. And it is curious that I, who had certainly been in far more gentlefolk’s houses than she had, did not think to quarrel with either her knowledge or her taste.

  Sophina and I, of course, spent a great deal of time considering the very particular nature of that taste, for it was our task to clean both rooms, the pretty room and the plain room, as we called them.


  The pretty room was a nightmare of oak floors (which must be waxed) and heavy rugs (which must be beaten). Lord help us if we did not have the skirting board shining, if insufficient elbow grease had been applied to the mantelpiece, if there were a residue of silver polish left upon the silver vase I had stolen from a farmer’s house in Hampstead.

  The plain room was at once easier and more difficult— easier in that it was free of flounces and curlicues, difficult in that we might here find blood in quantities enough to frighten any child, and discover things in muslin-covered basins that haunt me to this day. We said nothing about the plain room to each other, but emptied the contents of the basins into the cess pit at the back of the garden. We cleaned the plain room with soap and scrubbing brush, quickly, holding our breath.

  To walk from these rooms up the stairs was like stepping behind the scenes at the theatre. Here was where we lived, and in quite a different style than previously. There was the large “cupboard”—in fact a small room with a window—where Ma ground up her Ergot and made her little pills: a painstaking process, for she moulded each small pill by hand, and one that made her tired and bad-tempered. There was the small kitchen with its fierce black stove on which we were forever burning ourselves. There was the room where Ma slept and in which, in a series of large boxes, she stored all the peculiar goods which had, before Silas’s arrest, been kept in the net loft in Wapping.

  There was a small “dining room” which also served as Ma’s office, and here she kept, in the tin box, the titles, and mysterious other Certificates and Orders which she was forever checking.

  We were both, Sophina and I, instructed to call her Ma, but did so knowing that we would be often reminded that we were not her children. When Tom came to visit, they would somehow team against us and, as they huddled over their papers, we did not think to calculate how much of the household income was produced by us, but believed instead that we had a roof over our heads only as a result of their whimsical charity.

  When he came to the house, Tom did not look at Silas’s daughter directly. And yet I was aware, even then, of the fierceness with which he did not look.