by Peter Carey
“Put your arm around my shoulder and I will slip the bottom sheet from under you.”
“No.”
“It will make you more comfortable.”
“No, damn you!”
“Lizzie!”
Lizzie grasped her older sister by the wrist. “Listen to me, Mary.” She stared so fiercely and frankly that Mary was ashamed. “Promise me,” Lizzie demanded.
“Yes, dear. What shall I promise you?”
Lizzie’s dark hair had long ago become unpinned, and now it formed a great tangled frame around her damp white face. “You must swear.”
“Dear Lizzie, tell me and I will swear it to you.”
“When I am gone . . .”
“Don’t! You must not say such things.”
“When I am gone, you will roll up my sheets. You will not look at them. You will burn them on the fire.”
Mary looked at the vast amount of blood which was soaking into the mattress on which her younger sister lay, and was suddenly afraid.
“I will call the doctor.”
“No,” said the girl, lying back on her pillows. “It is too late for doctors.”
“Tobias will fetch Dr Grieves now,” said Mary. She would surely go to prison once the doctor discovered the sorry deed that had been accomplished that night. Soon all of England would know how she had put poison in her sister’s tea.
“Promise me, Mary.”
Mary called urgently for her husband. “Tobias!”
There was no answer. She flung open the door and found the landing empty. She ran downstairs but he was nowhere to be seen. Back in the sick room, Lizzie was writhing convulsively upon the bed. Mary held the basin ready for her sister to release the green fluid from her stomach. What was spilled into the bowl was laced around with red. When the spasm was done, Mary placed the beaded cloth on the top of the bowl, and wiped her sister’s brow.
87
MERCY WOULD HAVE preferred to cut his hair in the kitchen, but no, His Majesty must sit in his grand room on his throne, dressed up once more in his cock robin waistcoat and his nice sponged jacket. You could see him as the Lord of his Manor, dogs at his feet, a fire blazing in the grate.
She tucked a sheet around his newly shaven chin and began to snip at his wet hair while he sat upright, formal in his living room. She had, cross her heart, no plan to be in the least bold with him. She would cut his hair and make him look nice for his visit. As God was her witness, she had no other plan, unless it was to be granted a position in his household.
“Keep still.”
“I’m thinking.” He blew out his cheeks. “I’ve got such bloody marvellous thoughts inside my head.”
“What would you be thinking?”
“Could I ask you to run a message for me early?”
She put her hands upon the top of his head to hold it firm. “Well, I ain’t employed by no one else.”
“You could be employed by me?”
He caught her eye in the mirror. Once, in the cellar, he had looked at her like that. That time she had misunderstood him. She would not misunderstand him so readily again. She held his gaze a moment before returning to her work.
“Yes, Sir. It would be a great relief.”
“I have certain papers that I want my son . . .” and at this word he glanced up to the mirror and smiled shyly at her. “I want my son to study these papers before we meet.”
Never having observed this sweetness on his countenance before, she pitied him the cruel disappointment that awaited him on the morrow. She knew, God forgive her, what had happened when Constable had visited Mr Phipps. All Jack Maggs’s great passions were to be dashed upon the cobbles of Covent Garden.
“I’d be happy to take your papers to Mr Phipps.”
“Is he in the habit of rising early?”
“I know nothing of the gentleman.”
She avoided his glance and applied the scissors to his hair. It was dense and strong like the hair of an animal; alien, yet somehow intimate. She pondered the question of whether she need confess her moment of indiscretion with Mr Buckle. She had told him Henry Phipps’s whereabouts at a time when she imagined Jack Maggs had gone for ever. He was staring at her again. She felt her deception guessed at, and could not bear it.
“Is your wife a tall woman?”
He withdrew his gaze. Combing the hair down round his ears Mercy discovered that the top of the left ear was missing. It was not a clean cut, such as might be made with a knife, but a rougher, crueller kind of tear.
“You would not say wife if you knew the truth. You don’t know nothing about what it was to be in that place. You would not be judging me. You would shoot a man you saw treat a dog as we were treated. You might blow his brains out and not think yourself a bad ’un for having done the business. As for me, Miss, I had no more wife than a dog has a wife. A girl like you cannot imagine what it was, to live in such darkness.”
“You have no wife anymore?”
“You’re a right little terrier, ain’t you?”
She did not reply, but as the scissors flashed around him, he answered her.
“No, I ain’t.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Ain’t got a wife.”
She knew she would do well to leave this subject alone, and yet she could not. It was not the wife particularly concerned her: it was those little children.
“Are your children with their mother now?”
“Oh ain’t you ever the Miss Quizzical! There is two boys and two mothers. The boys are lodged with a mate of mine, a carpenter, and his wife, a good honest woman named Penny Sanders. It is a home they have known all their life.”
“You left them alone?”
“No, not alone.”
“But you were their da,” she insisted. “You were their da, but you had an aim to find a better class of son.”
“Jesus save me.”
She snipped and cut. God make me calm, she prayed. God, stop this dreadful temper.
“Yes,” said he. “I do hope I have found a better class of son. Yes, I most sincerely do. For his education, which is one thousand times as much as ever went into my brain box, cost me fifty pounds each year. I don’t know why you look so angry, Miss. It is what every father wants—his son to be the better man.”
“I ain’t angry. What have I got to be angry about?”
She came now to the short coarse wet hair around his neck. His collar was loose, and as she snipped the hair close to the bare skin, the long, cruel fingers of the lash were visible. It was a shocking thing, to see those scars glistening like torture in the candlelight.
“I am not a hard man, Missy.”
“Who lashed you, Mr Maggs?”
“He were a cockney named Rudder. A soldier of the King.”
“Then it were the King who lashed you,” she insisted.
“We were beyond the King’s sight. Not even God Himself could see into that pit.”
She cut the hair, staring down into the deep shadow inside his shirt.
“If I were your da, I would not leave you, Mercy.”
“You ain’t me da, though.”
“No, I ain’t.”
“What are their names?”
“None of your business.” He paused. “Richard,” he said.
“Richard?”
“I call him Dick.”
“How old is Dick?”
“John is six. Dick is ten.”
“And while these little boys wait for you to come home, you prance round England trying to find someone who does not love you at all.”
“You cannot know that, girl.”
“I can,” she confessed. “And I do.”
88
HENRY PHIPPS LEFT HIS CLUB with neither raincoat nor umbrella to protect his new subaltern’s uniform from further rain. On the whim of Mr Buckle’s lawyer, the self-appointed navigator of their little party, they set course for Great Queen Street by way of Russell Street and Drury Lane. It was not the sensible co
urse, nor the most direct, but Henry Phipps followed, and said nothing which might question the lawyer’s choice of route.
He was, as Edward Constable might have told him, a wilful and inhibiting man, but like many such individuals, Henry Phipps feared that he was weak of will, and as he followed Mr Makepeace, he brooded about that quality of character which allowed him to accept the direction of so poor a leader.
He walked down Russell Street with hands clasped behind his back, all the time looking with particular resentment at Mr Makepeace’s posterior as it pushed against the confines of his mackintosh. In those ample haunches he saw evidence enough to confirm his fear that he would follow any damn fool rather than the dictates of his own common sense.
What that common sense dictated was that he bid his house good-bye and report on the morrow to his regiment. But the fact was, Henry Phipps had long neglected the call of common sense, and it was a stronger force, his passionate desire to ensure his own comfort, which held him in the company of a man who wished him to commit a murder.
In this turmoil of mind, he turned the corner into Drury Lane and, before he knew it, had set his new boots deep into foul yellow clay. The mud was past his ankles and up around the bottoms of his trousers.
“This was a damned fool way to come,” cried he, staring down at the mucky ruin of his uniform.
“It is excavated for the sewer,” whispered Mr Makepeace.
“I am perfectly well aware that it is the sewer.” He withdrew his boots from the deep sticky clay and climbed up to the vantage of a broken brick. “Why would you come here when you could perfectly well walk up Long Acre? What possessed you?”
“I am more accustomed to Drury Lane,” whispered Mr Makepeace.
“We’ll clean you up, Sir, don’t worry. You come to my house first. My housekeeper will call her troops out for you.”
“Quiet.” Henry Phipps’s face in the gas light now clearly revealed that spleen which Edward Constable claimed to be so much a feature of his character. “I will lead the way.”
“Very good, Sir—please.” Mr Makepeace stepped back and, perching himself like a wet black biddy upon a pile of rotting lumber, gestured that Henry Phipps should move ahead of him.
Henry Phipps, however, did not move. He gazed instead down into that long pit the engineers had dug in the centre of the street. The trench was criss-crossed with new black pipes, and below this grid of iron was a further shadowy world of excavated arches leading to God knows what place. The sight induced in him a vertiginous unease which so paralleled the general anxiety about his life that he feared, even though he was some six feet from the edge, he might tumble into it.
He looked at Percy Buckle and found that gent nodding at him.
He looked back along Drury Lane, but it was a wild and unexpected landscape in no way like the Drury Lane he knew. Great wooden beams criss-crossed the street, like intrusions in a nightmare. Others had been propped against the walls of shops. These beams were joined together like inverted, lopsided A’s, and something in their rude design brought to mind the gallows. A kind of fog now rose from the excavation, and in the penumbra of the gas light Henry Phipps imagined he saw a man’s body hanging from a beam, suspended above the pit.
“You go,” he said, much frightened. “You first.”
He let the grocer squeeze past him, feeling, as he did so, the hard edge of the pistol case Mr Buckle carried concealed beneath his cloak. Then he followed suit, keeping close against the walls of the houses, avoiding the crumbling edges of the pit.
89
THE YARD AT MORETON BAY had distinctive odours: of dry clay dust, of fetid tidal mud, of some antipodean plant which gave off an oozing stink like blackberry mixed with sweat. And although it is sometimes said that the experience of smell itself cannot be remembered any more than the experience of pain, Jack Maggs could remember these smells as well as he could the carolling of those so-called “magpies,” and the squeaking wheels of the carpenter’s dray and the bloody red colour of its timber planks which would, in the course of one wet summer, be devoured by white ants.
He could still see the small red button at the apex of the flogger’s forage cap, the worn supple thongs which bound his wrists and ankles to the triangle.
There was a most particular smell hanging like bad meat around that cursed place, and small iridescent blue flies which crawled upon his face and nose. As the flies began to tease his skin, the wretched man would begin to build London in his mind. He would build it brick by brick as the horrid double-cat smote the air, eddying forth like a storm from Hell itself.
Underneath the scalding sun, which burned his flesh as soon as it was mangled, Jack Maggs would imagine the long mellow light of English summer.
The flies might feast on his spattered back; the double-cat might carry away the third and fourth fingers of his hand; but his mind crawled forward, always, constructing piece by piece the place wherein his eyes had first opened, the home to which he would one day return, not the mudflats of the Thames, nor Mary Britten’s meat-rich room at Pepper Alley Stairs, but rather a house in Kensington whose kind and beautiful interior he had entered by tumbling down a chimney, like a babe falling from the outer darkness into light. Clearing the soot from his eyes he had seen that which he later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen.
Now, all these long years later, Jack Maggs had become such an Englishman. Dressed in his red waistcoat and his tailored tweed jacket, he stood before what Tobias Oates might have called “a cheerful fire.”
The face he turned towards Mercy Larkin was hardened by its time in New South Wales—it had been rubbed at by pain until it shone—yet there was in his dark eyes a bright and glittering excitement which even he, with all his schooling in the art of secrecy, could not hide.
When he had suffered pain, pain so intense he had begged for death, he had seen this woman with her dark tangle of hair, sitting with hands folded thus upon her lap.
Now he took the brandy bottle from the mantel and refilled her tumbler. He watched with approval as she drank, not daintily, but as one suffering from a deep and persistent thirst.
“To you, Miss.”
“To you, Sir.” She continued to toy with those locks of children’s hair upon her lap. While he had insisted that the hair was not her business, it did not displease him that she was so stubborn. Tenacity was a quality he had good reason to value highly.
“What say you, girl? You will keep house for me?”
She drained the last drops of brandy, then looked him straight in the eye.
“I will keep house for your babes.”
She stood up. Thinking that she intended to give him back the locks, he held out his hand to receive his property.
“They are in another country,” he said.
But she gave him her left hand, retaining the locks of children’s hair in the right, and so they remained, hand in hand, at once at cross-purposes and yet not.
“They are waiting for you,” she smiled.
“Hark.”
He withdrew his hand abruptly.
“It is the street door,” she whispered.
In an instant he had the candles snuffed, but there was nothing he could do to staunch the fire which continued to burn brightly, throwing their two fretful shadows up onto the walls and ceiling.
Jack’s hair bristled on his naked neck and, as the door swung open, he reached for the tarred twine handle of his dagger. A spectral figure entered the room, holding the candle high.
There, in the firelight, he beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life.
The apparition held a heavy pistol. Jack Maggs saw this instrument very clearly, yet he stayed rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed upon the spectre’s uniform. The firelight flickered on that line of horrid buttons, each one embossed with the number 57. He smelt the bad meat smell of the yard at Moreto
n Bay, felt the soft supple leather bind his wrists and ankles again. He could see the great dull gape of the pistol’s barrel, and the fire light twinkling on the bright brass hammer which was fully cocked. I am to die before I meet my son.
Then, suddenly, inexplicably, there appeared from the darkness of the hallway none other than Percy Buckle Esquire. He pushed violently at the Phantom’s back so the creature lurched even closer to Jack Maggs, who was still staring, his mouth agape. “Take back your house, Sir. Defend your life against this burglar.”
The dagger was ready in his hand, and still Jack Maggs made no move.
“Fire!” Mr Buckle stamped his foot repeatedly upon on the floor. “Fire, for God’s sake, fire.”
At this confusing juncture, just as the pistol was raised and pointed at Jack Maggs’s heart, Mercy rose quietly from the shadows.
Jack Maggs watched paralysed as she walked softly towards the Phantom in her stockinged feet. In her right hand she still held those two precious locks of hair, but it was her left hand that he watched as she raised it, palm outwards, towards the barrel of the gun, as if by so doing she might catch the deadly ball; as if she were in truth a spirit, a force of nature equal but opposite to the malevolent being who now threatened to snuff out Jack Maggs’s life.
90
HENRY PHIPPS WAS ushered into his own hallway which seemed narrower and longer than he had remembered it. He did not feel himself a murderer, but an animal at Smithfield, hemmed in and hounded at all sides, with all his confusion magnified a hundred times by Percy Buckle, who was now pushing at his back with the point of his umbrella.
Gone was the mild apologetic little grocer who had first walked into his rooms at Covent Garden. In his place was this hissing, dark-shelled incubus whose alien and agitated presence strained the young man’s already over-stretched emotions. Percy Buckle, without being aware of it, had already twice placed himself in mortal danger.
