by Peter Carey
“Will you come back and sit with me, Mary?”
“No, dear. I have an errand to run.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay and read.”
“Yes, dear.”
She took little John to Mrs Jones and, with no proper explanation of the formality of her attire or the nature of her errand, she walked out of the house.
She might have taken a hackney cab—her husband would never have hesitated to do so—and yet Mary Oates, ever mindful of the economic stress under which Tobias suffered, walked.
Mary Oates was from Amersham, in Buckinghamshire, and had lived in London only since her marriage a year before. On her husband’s arm she had travelled to places as various as Limehouse and the Guildhall, but unless thus escorted, had been content to stay pretty much within the confines of her rooms. Thus to find her way to Cecil Street was no small expedition for her, and she had not got so far as Holborn without inquiring the direction of three different shop-keepers.
The day was clear and fine, although it was perhaps too hot for such a heavy velvet dress, or too warm to wear such a dress and walk so fast. In any case, the plump young woman finally arrived in the Haymarket very red in the face and out of breath, and allowed herself to be charged a penny for a glass of water by the owner of the coffee stand.
From the coffee stand to Cecil Street is no more than two hundred yards, yet Mary stopped twice more for directions before she came to that corner where the convict had stood on his first night back in London. From this point onwards their paths were so close that she must, from time to time, have brought her stout little heel down on the same spot of pavement where Jack Maggs’s hessian boot had trod. As for attaining her destination, she was more successful than her precursor, for she not only got through the gate of 4 Cecil Street but to the brass knocker on its door.
Her knock was answered almost immediately, and Mary was confused to discover that the person who stood before her appeared to be both respectable and friendly.
“These are Mrs Britten’s rooms?” Mary inquired.
“Indeed they are, Mum,” said the maid politely. “You come on in. You come on in and rest your feet, Mum.”
The young woman ushered her into a small room, decorated rather excessively with lace and flounces, and an almost violent looking wallpaper. There was a single window, large and arched, which was covered with two layers of white muslin. There was very little light from that source, but there were various lamps burning, and several ornate mirrors, and it was, as a result, a bright and determinedly happy little room. Three women were already seated here, though none looked up when Mary Oates entered. This collective expression of shame went hard against the intention of the decorations, emphasizing the dishonour the latter were presumably intended to disguise.
Mary Oates sat in the chair she was offered and accepted a cup of tea. It was very good tea and Mary sipped it carefully. When she looked up her glance was not towards the other women but in the direction of the handsome marble fireplace and, above it, a rather troubling engraving which depicted Napoleon’s army in grotesque and bloody disarray.
No more than ten minutes later, she was escorted along a hallway into a small plain room containing little more than a high leather couch and a straight-backed wooden chair. Here she was met by a tall, rather severe old woman in a starched white dress. The woman had a strong nose and chin, and piercing, angry eyes. She wore an extravagant tall white head-dress that reminded Mary of a painting she had once seen of a Dutch nun.
“And how may I assist you, dearie?” she inquired, raising her hands in a peculiar little greeting which might, in a church, have been taken for a blessing.
Mary felt very hot and itchy across her blistered back. She hesitated.
“What do you want of Mrs Britten, dearie?”
For an answer, Mary Oates held out the frayed little advertisement. Mrs Britten took it from her, and Mary, seeing how the fierce old lady held it between thumb and forefinger, was reminded of the way in which her grandfather had squashed caterpillars in his garden.
“These pills,” said Mrs Britten, indicating the illustration in her puff, “are from a recipe given me by a Swedish doctor. Very good pills they are.” She had a decidedly rougher voice than her initial appearance suggested, and although her features were handsome there was something of the fish wife about her hands, which were large and swollen at the knuckles.
“Very good pills,” she continued seriously. “Except for just one wee shortcoming.”
And here she winked, much to Mary Oates’s distress.
“And the shortcoming is as follows: should you be so unfortunate as to take them when you was with child, then, oh dear . . .” She dropped the crumpled advertisement into the waste-paper basket. “Know what I mean?”
“I think so, yes.”
“We are married women. We can be plain between us: you would lose the baby. You understand the shortcoming now?”
“I do.”
A long silence followed while the old woman stared at her so hard, Mary could only look away.
“How far along are you?”
“I beg your pardon,” protested Mary.
Before Mary could say anything further, the old woman had reached out and felt her stomach. It was a fast invasion, over before it had begun. Mary said nothing. What could a lady possibly say? She stood there like a goose, itching unbearably, blushing to the very roots of her hair.
“You come here for another lady?” Mrs Britten produced a yellow printed sheet. “Never mind. I have writ it all down, but the long and short of it is she must never, never, take these pills of mine if she is gestational.”
From her pocket she produced a small porcelain jar which she placed in Mary’s gloved hand. “Of course, she’d need to be taking one every morning and night for that to happen. Unless she did that, there’d be no danger.”
“Every morning and every night?”
“Every morning and every night.”
Mary felt another urge to scratch her back.
“As to payment . . .”
“Five guineas.”
Mary looked up and found the old eyes staring at her implacably.
“The advertisement said three.”
Mrs Britten shrugged. “Five is the price. Take it or leave it. Makes no diff to me.”
“I’ve got no more than four,” Mary fretted. “The advertisement said three guineas.”
“Four will do.” Mary Britten held out a weathered hand, thus revealing the name SILAS tattooed into the underside of her broad wrist.
Two minutes later Mary Oates was standing outside again. She set off back down Cecil Street holding the jar of pills tightly in her gloved hand. She arrived home without recalling the direction she had come.
78
AS DARK CUMULUS CLOUDS spilled through the dirty air, stacking themselves high above St Paul’s, Tobias Oates crossed the River Thames. It was seven o’clock on a May night, and the two men, having arrived in Borough at The Swan with Two Necks, were now passing over London Bridge in a hack. After thirty hours of travel, Toby’s hands were still deep in his pockets, his wrists still bound together.
As their vehicle came into the West End, Jack Maggs leaned out the window whilst drumming his right foot upon the floor.
Tobias, meanwhile, was deeply troubled. He feared the poison they were about to buy. He feared Lizzie, and could not imagine how he would persuade her to take such a potion. There were many other strands of apprehension in the matted tangle of his mood, and they were knotted harder by the persistent pain in his wrists and the unholy pressure on his bladder, which pride had forbidden him mentioning to his companion.
The London they left behind had been a sunny place where daffodils grew in the window boxes. The London they returned to seemed hellish—broken cotton bales, cracking whips, an omnibus alight on St Martin’s Lane—all the streets awash with a weary sulphurous kind of evening light that seeped into his very thoughts, and finally surro
unded the image of the family he had come so close to abandoning.
His captor then brought his big unshaven face close, and Tobias could smell the cheap brandy on his breath.
“Soon be there, eh, mate?”
“Indeed.” Tobias quickly turned his head away.
“All our trials will soon be ended.”
“Indeed, yes.”
“Miss Lizzie’s troubles mended.”
Toby shuddered at the damnable state to which he had descended: his very respectability depended upon enduring this insolent familiarity.
“We will visit Henry Phipps in the morning,” he told the convict firmly. And once more looked away, praying to God that the footman had spoken true, for if Constable did not really have Henry Phipps’s address, then Tobias was a dead man.
“It is a dream come true, mate. An old varmint’s dream come true.”
In spite of his previous vow to murder Toby, Jack Maggs had been unusually friendly to him throughout the journey, and now, as the convict leaned towards him, Tobias feared another embrace. But Maggs wished only to gaze up at the great sky, which was now, in the north, so very black and swollen.
“Isn’t that a queer thing to go out of a cove’s head?” said the convict. “When I was imagining my lovely English summers—and I did meditate on this subject an awful lot, my word—I would be suffering the mosquitoes and the skin-rot, to mention two of the least of my discomforts, but I would oft-times make a picture of me and Henry puffing our pipes comfortably in the long evenings. Do you ever make a picture like that, Toby?”
“On occasion.”
“Sophina and me, it was the storms we loved to watch. Do you think the Day of Judgment might look like this, Toby?”
Tobias pushed himself harder against the wall of the coach.
“My Sophina always thought so. Look, she would say, how all our troubles are little things beneath that mighty storm.”
Toby smiled weakly, sickened by this puerile philosophizing.
“See yonder clouds above Holborn,” continued his companion. “Look at all the old men’s faces in the sky. They’ll rattle the windows, Toby. There’ll be some fireworks with this one. But we’ll survive it, you and me. Perhaps you may visit me and Henry when you’ve forgotten the pain in your wrists. Are they paining badly?”
“I can bear it.”
“See, I’m as good as my word, for here we are almost in Cecil Street where Mrs Britten sells her famous pills. I’m surprised you never read her puffs. Well, I will be a moment collecting these items and I am sure you won’t scarper, for if you should, I would have a very sad story to deliver to your wife.”
The carriage stopped, and Jack jumped down. He was soon hammering on a black door with his silver-topped stick.
There was some brief dispute with a person inside, then Jack was admitted. Not three minutes passed before he was clambering back aboard to sit opposite Tobias once more, and the cabby was plying the whip con gusto. As they pushed violently into Cross Street, the convict’s face was clearly very strange: the cheeks hard and hatchet-like, the eyes awash with such violent emotion that Toby began to fear that the potion had been refused him.
“All in order, Jack?”
Maggs delved deep into the pocket of his Great Joseph and produced a small white jar.
Tobias looked at his companion’s trembling hands with some apprehension, but whatever drama had transpired behind that door he was never to know. Jack Maggs returned the jar into his pocket.
“I cannot produce your son tonight, you know that.”
“But you will produce him, Toby.”
“Yes.”
“What time in the morning would that be, Toby?”
“Ten o’clock,” said Toby decisively.
“Could you deliver my papers to Henry beforehand? It would be useful for him to read a little before we sit to have our yarn.”
“I could not deliver anything before ten.”
Said Maggs: “You know too much to lie to me again.”
“I know the forfeit.”
They travelled in silence until they had entered Lamb’s Conduit Street and Tobias realized that Jack Maggs intended to disembark with him.
“Jack, I do think this matter with the lady is my own affair. It is not something to be done in company.”
“I have business in your house, Toby.”
“It is private business, Jack. You must trust me. Cut my bonds, I will not run away.”
“First, we are to burn the contents of the tin box. Second . . .” Jack Maggs removed the cork from the porcelain jar and held it out so its contents might finally be examined.
Before they disembarked, Tobias had time to look inside the jar and see, not the clean white pills he had hitherto imagined, but some strange unsanitary little lumps of matter the colour of Virginia tobacco.
79
HENRY PHIPPS HAD always been excessively afraid of thunder; so much so, that in those long-ago days of his wardship, his tutor had built the most fanciful fortifications against it.
This tutor, V. P. Littlehales by name (the same individual named in that famous case with Dr Wollaston), had conceived a most elaborate series of towers and trenches on the quarter-acre of meadow attached to their cottage at Great Missenden. To the extent that this maze had been pedagogical in intention, it had failed: Henry learned nothing useful of the nature of the elements. To the extent that it had been magical, its power was insufficient: lightning had twice struck the old oak tree at its centre.
Victor Littlehales had been a gentle but troubled soul and, if truth be told, very superstitious about lightning. No matter what lectures he delivered on Natural Law, the great sum of his instruction was that they were base beasts, naked before a vengeful, all-seeing God. The only comfort he could offer his pupil was the mortal cradle of his freckled arms, and even that he finally withdrew: Victor Littlehales abruptly and inexplicably disappeared from Henry Phipps’s life on the eve of the young man’s twenty-first birthday.
On the same humid afternoon on which Jack Maggs returned to London, Mr Buckle paid a second visit to Henry Phipps. His host on this occasion looked neither like a boy abandoned nor like a man afraid of thunder. He received the ex-grocer and his whispering lawyer in the uniform of a subaltern of the 57th Foot Regiment. He stood before them stiffly, his hands behind his back, and, in looking down at them along the barrel of his straight thin nose, gave the impression of being both impatient and sarcastic.
When the thunder first sounded in the distance, Henry Phipps squinted slightly, but otherwise showed no emotion.
Mr Buckle did not hear the thunder, being too preoccupied with his own agenda to notice very much else at all. Not even the military uniform surprised him, and it certainly would never have occurred to him that this commission had been purchased in a great panic not three days previous.
Mr Buckle and Mr Makepeace seated themselves side by side on the Chesterfield. Henry Phipps remained standing with his back to the windows, flexing his knees a little strangely.
“May I ask you your business, Mr Buckle?”
“I have come,” said Mr Buckle, “to inquire as to your decision about your benefactor.” He was about to introduce his companion, but Mr Phipps turned his back and abruptly drew the curtains shut. This disconcerted Mr Buckle, who felt himself somehow reprimanded. “Of course it is not my affair.”
“True.” Henry Phipps struck a match, and spent some moments fiddling with a lamp. “It is in no manner your business, and yet I would have thought it obvious I have a new benefactor.”
“I have told no one, I assure you.”
“No, you mistake my meaning. His Majesty has become my benefactor, Mr Buckle. As you see, I am now a soldier.”
Now Mr Buckle appraised the uniform. Though no great student of the military, he knew enough to realize that the regiment was unfashionable, the rank lowly.
“No,” he said. “This won’t do.”
Outside, the lightning flashed. Henry
Phipps sat down quickly, and rested his chin in his cupped hand. “I am not going to be a dancing boy for a criminal.”
“No, Sir. Indeed not. That is not what I wished, Sir. The opposite. Did you forget our conversation?”
“You seemed to imagine that I was corrupted by my comfortable life and would do anything to sustain it. But I would not lower myself to that, Sir.”
“Nor should you, Sir. That was not my idea at all. It is for this very reason I have brought with me Mr Makepeace. Perhaps you have heard his name, Sir: he is a distinguished solicitor. Mr Makepeace has, at my request, studied the appropriate precedents.”
“Precedents,” Mr Makepeace whispered in agreement.
“Precedents which by their very nature must affect yourself. It is not too late, Sir. You are too good a man to be a subaltern.”
“It is the case of the Crown versus Forsythe,” continued Mr Makepeace in his distinctive whisper.
“What?” said Henry Phipps.
“In the best of weather, he is hard to hear,” admitted Mr Buckle. “But always worth the effort.”
“In the case of Mrs Forsythe,” continued Mr Makepeace implacably, “who did kill her son. The Crown versus Forsythe. It is a case well known in the Inns of Court. It has that immediate advantage—you may mention it to anyone and be saved the time and expense of their going to look it up.”
“I cannot hear you.”
“It is Mr Makepeace’s affliction,” interrupted Mr Buckle, “that his voice box was damaged as a child. But it is to your advantage, Sir, for he comes the cheaper on account of it.”
“It is of the Crown versus Forsythe that I speak,” said Makepeace.
“Then speak, for God’s sake,” snapped Henry Phipps. The rain was now coming down very hard against the window pane, and Henry Phipps leaned forward in his chair and held his elbows in his cupped hands.
“The Crown charged that Mrs Forsythe had murdered her son in order to reclaim the ancestral home from which she had been cast out on the occasion of her husband’s death. She was a very proud woman, and much attached to entertaining. Her son, as the heir to the property, was expected to take up residence in the Hall, and the mother to live in a dowager cottage on the estate. Nothing wrong with that. All quite in order. Then one wet night the son, it was alleged, broke into the dowager cottage with an axe, and his mother, allegedly mistaking him for a violent burglar, shot him through the heart.”
