Black Wreath (14 page)

‘You must never return to Red Molly’s. This whole district is dangerous for you now. You understand that?’

‘Yes,’ James said. ‘What about the Darcy gang? Will they pursue you now?’

‘What gang?’ He looked at Hare and Kitty. ‘A wounded boy and a dead thug, and another scrambling around in the dirt like a rat. Gangs come and go; they’re temporary alliances
which break asunder at the slightest provocation. Do you know how many have been hanged on the evidence of their companions? Darcy himself has little loyalty to his gang; his first loyalty is to himself, and it’s not in his interest to pursue me, or you.’

James hoped Doctor Bob was right. As the doctor made ready to leave, James returned his sword.

‘Have you no weapon?’ the doctor asked. ‘Take this at least.’ He took the cosh from his pocket, but James shook his head.

‘No, I’ve robbed and fought and seen men brutally beaten. I don’t want to live like that any more. I mean to do without knives or sticks or cudgels.’

‘Then I wish you well,’ the doctor said. ‘But remember, others may not be so kind.’

James turned around and made his way back. The day was dark and spitting rain and the wind gusted the stench of the dump mingled with the stink of the tanneries in that district. He walked past the still unconscious form of Kitty, and out onto the street. Aware that Kelly might still be lurking in the neighbourhood, he turned away from the river and crossed eastward through a series of narrow and foul-smelling lanes until he emerged at Wormwood Gate and went down to the old bridge. He was tired and hungry and he had no idea where he was going.

Twenty

Respite

L
ater, James could not remember exactly what happened. He remembered leaving the dump and crossing the river, but after that everything became a blur. There was a graveyard with cold stones; there was the hot stink of a market. Straw, cattle dealers, butchers, the noises of cattle and commerce. One minute there was all this great din, as if all the noise of the city had flown to this one spot and settled here, and then there was silence, his body crumpling, his head emptying itself of noise and putting itself to sleep. Maybe it was the shock of the fight, or maybe he had been carrying it inside him for many days, but a fever had burst on him with a force he couldn’t resist. So he lay down right in the marketplace, the strangest bed in the city. He was woken by voices.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

He tried to answer, but nothing would come. The questions sank down into a marsh inside him and no matter how he
tried he couldn’t retrieve them.

The different voices resolved themselves into one voice: kindly, concerned. ‘I’ll take him.’

A man lifted him from the ground; his face was pressed against the fibres of a coarse shirt. Odour of dirt and blood. He felt sick, then everything was gone again. He fell down through the ground, through layer after layer, into cellars and pits and dank corridors, where he was chased by ugly forms. He heard his uncle’s cruel laughter. He screamed. There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, the door burst open. Then a wet cloth was placed on his forehead, a hand touched his cheek, cooling words came out of the darkness.

Gradually, the broken pieces of the world began to reassemble themselves again. A little more light fell into the room. His head began to feel as if it belonged to him again and his body pulled back from the desert heat.

Each day the room in which he lay became a little less mysterious to him. He even found out where he was: Phoenix Street. It wasn’t far from Smithfield, the market where, it seemed, he had collapsed. The man who brought him home was none other than the butcher from the Ormond Market who had cut McAllister and him from the hooks on the day of the terrible battle between the butchers and the Liberty Boys. James could hardly believe his eyes when he walked into the room.

‘I didn’t think I’d see you back again, Liberty Boy,’ the butcher had said, when James had been able to sit up and drink a little soup.

‘Oh leave him be, John,’ the woman of the house said – the
one who had placed the cloth on his forehead and put her own hand on it to test his furious heat. She was John’s wife, and her name was Nancy. Hers was the voice he had heard, breaking through the muddle of his fever.

‘The poor creature! Where does he come from, John?’

There was a third voice, quieter and heard less often. This was Sylvia Purcell, their daughter, of an age with James. She sometimes brought him water and soup but she didn’t fuss or ask about his sickness or where he might have come from. She looked at him a little warily, James thought, as if she was waiting to make up her mind about him.

‘I’m no Liberty Boy,’ James said to the butcher. His voice still seemed to belong to someone else. ‘I got caught up in the madness that day, I hardly knew what was happening. It seems a long time ago.’

‘No more talking now,’ Nancy said. ‘Now isn’t the time to be worrying about who did what. Plenty of rest and nourishment is what you need now.’ Her voice wasn’t much louder than her daughter’s, but it carried weight.

‘You’re in safe hands here,’ her husband said, smiling.

Day by day his strength came back. He began to feel hungry and was able to eat all the meat and potatoes he was given. One day he felt well enough to get out of his bed. He looked down into the street below, watching people pass by. A fish woman walked slowly with her creel on her head, shouting out her wares. A few small children played with a hoop. A man trundled a cart heaped with vegetables. Everyone moved with a purpose, and James longed to find a real purpose too. In a
few days, when he felt strong again, he’d find some useful work.

He panicked suddenly as he gazed out. What did he know about useful work? What if they found out that he’d been a common thief, that he’d hung around with a band of notorious robbers, that he had lied through his teeth in the Four Courts to get a footpad off the hook? That wasn’t me, he thought, not the real me. But who was he really? He thought of his words to Doctor Bob as they had stood in the grey light of the dawn: ‘I am Lord Dunmain’. He remembered how proud the words had made him feel, even if they amounted to a claim he couldn’t assert or prove. If he wasn’t Lord Dunmain, who was he? An urchin adrift in a dark city, dependent on the kindness of others.

No, he thought, his eyes fixed on the street, I mustn’t forget who I am or what I have to do, though even as the thought formed in his mind he realised that his main task for the moment would be just to survive. Dead men don’t claim inheritances.

He needn’t have worried so much about his recent adventures. The Purcells didn’t ask him who he was or where he had come from. All they knew was his first name. It wasn’t that they were not interested; just, James realised, that they were waiting for him to tell them himself, in his own time.

The day finally came when he was well enough to take his meal downstairs with the family. It was a slightly awkward occasion, though everyone did their best to hide it. The family were greatly relieved that he had come through his sickness, but now that the urgency had passed his position had shifted
from rescued waif to something else, someone who sat down at the same table and ate the same food. Sylvia was quiet, but he could feel a particular tension from her direction. And the butcher was not by nature a talkative man. But Nancy made up for both, bustling and fussing and talking. Whenever James had eaten a few mouthfuls she heaped more onto his plate.

‘You need your strength, dear,’ she said.

‘I’m very grateful to all of you,’ James said. ‘And I’m sorry to be such trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble at all,’ Nancy said emphatically. ‘And you must stay here as long as you like, mustn’t he John?’

The butcher pushed his plate back. ‘What’s ours is yours, young fella,’ he said. ‘Four mouths is as easy to feed as three, and it’ll be a great novelty to have a boy about the place. Not that we’ve exhausted the delights of womankind.’ He grinned at Nancy and gave Sylvia a little pinch on her arm.

Sylvia flushed. ‘Stop it, Da,’ she said. ‘Don’t mortify me.’

James felt a pang of guilt. What if his presence should bring misfortune on this family? Shouldn’t they at least know what they were dealing with? Maybe then they might be less open-hearted; they might even ask him to leave. In spite of this, he felt his name furiously racing around his head as if it wanted to leap into the room.

‘You may not like me so much when you know who I am,’ James said quietly.

John Purcell raised his eyebrows. Sylvia and Nancy looked at him curiously. Nancy made to speak, but her husband raised a hands to his lips.

‘I am James Lovett–’

John Purcell interrupted him. ‘Lord Dunmain’s boy? Him that’s dead, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ James said. ‘You knew my father?’

‘All Dublin knew him in some form or other, though not for the best of reasons, saving your presence.’

‘That’s alright,’ James said. ‘I know the kind of man he was.’

John Purcell looked worried.

‘But I thought …’ he said. ‘I mean, it was given out that his son was dead. Many thought he had done away with him.’

‘They, I mean Miss Deakin and he – he abandoned my mother and let it be thought that she was dead – sent me away. Something to do with money he was borrowing, but I think Miss Deakin must have had a deal to do with it too. And then my father died, and my uncle assumed the title.’

‘And does your uncle know you’re still alive?’ Purcell asked quickly.

‘Yes, and that’s the trouble. I fear my uncle is a much worse man even than my father,’ James said.

‘You don’t have to do too much to better them,’ Purcell said.

‘John!’ Nancy said, as if she might be afraid James’s feelings would be hurt.

‘The lad knows it, Nancy. But he’s made of finer stuff, I’ll bet.’

Sylvia was looking at James with sharp interest. ‘I knew you were no ordinary boy,’ she said. ‘Those hands haven’t seen much hard labour.’

James looked at his hands and laughed. ‘Maybe not, but they can wield a sword–’

Purcell broke in, an impatient edge to his voice. ‘There’ll be no talk of swords in this house,’ he said. ‘Swordplay is nothing to be proud of, if you ask me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ James said. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘You’ve been leading one kind of life, James,’ Purcell said, his voice quiet but determined, ‘but now it may be time to learn another.’

Purcell’s words would echo often in James’s mind in the months that followed. Every day he spent in the house in Phoenix Street was a step away from the life he had been leading and a step into an unfamiliar world. The small routines of the house were as strange to him as the most distant jungle and he felt like a rough explorer with only the dimmest knowledge of the territory. He was surprised at the amount of industry a house demanded. There were endless tasks to be performed: provisions to be bought in the market, meals to be prepared, bread to be baked, floors to be swept and mopped, the fire to be lit and tended. When they weren’t bustling around the house, Nancy and Sylvia would be busy in their chairs with sewing and mending, their eyes narrowed in concentration. For a while, as he built up his strength, James was content to watch all this labour, but he soon realised that it was no good standing on the edge of things. Learning another life must mean being right in it, he thought.

‘Let me help,’ he said to Nancy. ‘There must be something I can do.’

‘Hold your arms out then,’ Nancy said. ‘You can be the wool holder.’

James held out his arms. She put an untwisted skein of wool around them and then began to wind it slowly into a ball. James liked this because it meant standing close to her, but he had to keep his wits about him so the wool didn’t slip off his hands. He kept a close eye on Nancy to see which end the wool would be wound from next and move that arm towards her. It was a strange thing to match your movements to another’s like this, an intimate thing. He had never stood close to his mother like this and found himself envying Sylvia’s easy familiarity with Nancy. This is what a family should be like, he thought.

‘Not bad for a wild boy,’ Nancy teased.

‘Next he’ll be sewing and embroidering,’ Sylvia added coolly, and James felt his face burn. It made him want to drop the skein and run out into the street. He couldn’t decide if Sylvia liked him or not. He was annoyed at himself that her opinion seemed to matter to him; he found himself trying to make her think well of him. If swords were forbidden, then maybe his independence might win favour.

‘I know well how to sew,’ he said. ‘I learned it in the woods …’ He paused, seeing Nancy frown. ‘I mean I’ve often had to darn and mend. I’d be a sad sight if I didn’t.’

‘A sadder sight,’ Sylvia said.

James ignored this. ‘I wasn’t very good at it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to do it better. There are so many things I don’t know.’

‘Then we must be your school,’ Nancy said. ‘We’ll teach
you what we know, and, in exchange, you can tell us some of your adventures.’ She suddenly frowned, looking over at Sylvia and back at James. ‘Only those suitable for our ears,’ she added. ‘We don’t want to be scandalised.’

‘Speak for yourself!’ Sylvia said, grinning merrily.

It was a fair bargain. Over the next couple of weeks James told them of his early life in Wexford and Dublin, his life with his father and then Miss Deakin, and his life in the streets. He didn’t tell Nancy about his time with the Darcy gang, but Sylvia’s constant questioning whenever they were alone drew it from him.

‘You could have died, you know that, don’t you? They could have hanged you.’

She was especially horrified at the story of the trial and his own role in it.