Jack Maggs (11 page)

25

EACH NIGHT, BEHIND the double curtains, Jack Maggs impatiently roamed Henry Phipps’s rooms, inquiring deftly into drawers and dressers, running his large square-fingered hands over damask and lace. Here he slept fitfully on the settle, alert to every noise that might signal the return of the man he had come to meet. Here in these rooms he continued the letter which he intended the Thief-taker to present to the house’s absent tenant.

Each morning, by dawn, he was back in Mr Buckle’s house, and as the clock at St George’s rang for Morning Prayer, he would wearily present himself at Tobias Oates’s front door. On being admitted by the taciturn house-keeper, he would carry a cup of tea up to Mr Oates’s study where he would, at eight fifteen precisely, be mesmerized.

By
mesmerized
he understood that he was made the subject of magnets, and that these magnets in some way tugged at his Mesmeric Fluid, a substance in his soul he could not see. He understood that, under the effect of magnets, he was able to describe the demons that swam in this fluid, and that Tobias Oates would not only battle with these beings—named Behemoth and Dabareiel, Azazel and Samsaweel—but also, like a botanist, describe them in a journal where their host might later see them.

At first the convict had been astonished to read Dabareiel’s flowery speech—he could not believe that such an educated being might exist within him—but he accepted it soon enough, and with all the various explanations Oates constructed, it never once occurred to Jack Maggs that these “transcriptions” had been fabricated by the writer to hide the true nature of his exploration.

There were, as in all crooked businesses, two sets of books, and had Jack Maggs seen the second set he might have recognized scenes (or fragments) more familiar to him: a corner of a house by London Bridge, a trampled body in a penal colony. But even here the scenes were never very clear. For the writer was stumbling through the dark of the convict’s past, groping in the shadows, describing what was often a mirror held up to his own turbulent and fearful soul.

This second set of notes was entered in a red leather volume, Tobias’s daily work book. This journal contained many notes for novels, essays, and rough drafts of sketches for the
Morning Chronicle
, but from the twenty-first of April, 1837, six days after Jack Maggs’s arrival in London, it was almost exclusively devoted to his hidden history.

During lunch at The Sergeant’s Inn on April the twenty-third, Henry Hawthorne found the writer pale but very lively and voluble. He polished his knife and fork with his napkin and drank three glasses of claret before his soup was done. He asked nothing about Hawthorne’s
Lear,
which had opened to hostile reviews the night before. He blithely likened himself to Thackeray. He said he was like an archaeologist inside an ancient tomb. He invited Henry Hawthorne to secretly observe one session, and witness him pushing into the musty corridors of the Criminal Mind.

Alarmed by his young friend’s mania, Hawthorne did indeed visit on the next day, and was astonished to see the seated footman, in full livery, cry out and curse so murderously. Perhaps it was the role of Lear that made him think so, but Hawthorne was convinced that he would find the footman gone mad on wakening. Indeed, Hawthorne did not leave the house when he said farewell, but hid in the nursery with a brass poker in his hand. Here he waited until the criminal had been escorted from the house, only then revealing himself to his astonished friend.

26

ON THE NIGHT OF TUESDAY the twenty-fifth of April, having started awake from a troubled sleep, Jack Maggs took himself once more to the walnut desk in Henry Phipps’s drawing room, dipped his quill into the apothecary’s bottle, and penned the following:

Look, Henry, whether you like the sight or no, read these words
and imagine what it was to have, not your life, surrounded by
a ring of golden chairs, but mine.

Come, please, and meet my great Benefactor—Silas Smith. This is what passes for a Kind Man in my history. He has a long red nose, and an old-fashioned turned-up collar, and he comes into the gloomy court where I am playing at some boyish game of bones.

—Now Jack, says he, you and I are going to do your lessons. And there is Mary Britten (whom I called a mother) and her big red-boned son—Tom with his long jaw and his lonely little eyes. He had such big hands, did Tom, but never held a pen. When Silas Smith came knocking on the door to take me to my lessons, it was me he came for, not Tom.

Tom felt this very keen. He sat on the floor in the corner with his cheek resting on his bony knees, and sulked. As for me, I would have given up all lessons if I could have had Mary Britten love me, and call me Son.

Mary was young and handsome then. She had had her Tom when still a girl and could not have been more than twenty-three when she first took me in. She was a very dervish of a woman, always scrubbing and cleaning, and angry too, never at peace, never able to sit down and have a moment free of agitation, but if I could have chosen, she is the one I would have wished to claim me as her own. She was a force of nature, the Ma—her long arms, her wild hair, her skin always smelling of snakeroot and tansy. She could fill a space. She could stand her ground. She was the Queen of England in that little whitewashed room, delivering our neighbours’ babies, serving soups, examining the bones and offal on the rickety pine table.

If she was gruff and fierce with me, if she would clip my chilblained ears as soon as look at me, she also did her duty by me in those early years. She grew me up.

When I was four years old I would walk beside her great skirts, across London Bridge and up to Smithfield—an hour’s walk, never once was carried—to where nine-year-old Tom was working as a “finder,” which is a polite way of saying that he were a thief. He worked the filthy slippery floors amongst the sawdust darting like a rat, a cat, and here a breast bone, there an end of chop fat, there a kick up the keyhole for his trouble. It was not till he had been scoured in the cold bath that we saw which was his blood and which blood was that of beasts.

She had such a belief in the virtues of meat, the Ma. Had you seen her on market days, coming home from Smithfield with her lads pale and close around her great grey skirts, you might not have guessed how we regarded that bounty on her back. It was our future she saw in those stolen scraps. It was lack of meat she believed made all of those children in Pepper Alley so slow and listless. She liked to point them out to us as if they were strangers to our eyes—Billy Hagen, Scrapper Jones, sitting there by the lime-green musty wall playing with the bones. They never knew the name of the country that they lived in, never knew anything but the names of the Hagens and the Smiths.

Yet I do fancy that Tom, himself, was a little slow of wit. But that, as she would say, is not the question of discussion.

Each market night, Ma Britten carried the bag of bones back to our little home. This was not as simple as it sounds, for all the poor streets we passed through were somebody’s territory. On our side of the bridge it were the Hagens and the Smiths. They and their friends and allies were in a state of war. It was a dangerous matter to be unaffiliated.

But Mary Britten was her own person. She carried a great military sword, disguised from official eyes with old newspaper and hat ribbon, and more than once she drew it. One summer’s evening on London Bridge itself, she cut a slice down a young man’s arm so you could see the shining blue white of bone from his elbow to his wrist.

She liked me “be-in’ useful” and I therefore urgently made myself a useful little chap, as if my life depended on it. At five I was a scavenger for the coal which was often washed up on the river bank. Sometimes I lost this coal in fights, but if I could bring it home to her, she would pick me up and hug me, and I did so like the feel of her strong arms, that grassy herby smell which hung about her, I would have done anything to get it.

At five years old I could scrub a floor as good as any char. By six I could wash and sort the bones and offal, placing them upon the table in the manner she liked—a gruesome sight to your gentle eyes I’m sure—but it was nothing for me to arrange the innards in the way she found them most useful, and I fancy I had the knowledge of a slaughterman when it came to identifying the otherworldly shapes and colours of the organs of dead beasts.

Some she selected for soup, some were sold, and others she mixed with tansy, savin, snakeroot, to make her “Belly-ache” sausages which she hung from the ceiling and for which women paid her a tanner. At that age I had no knowledge of the great upset they caused inside their wombs.

I was, as I said, in no way her favourite, and yet I was the younger, and it was me she took with her when she went down to Kent for the hop-picking in the summer. Tom got left behind, he cried to be so abandoned, but she would not bend no matter how he pleaded. Tom felt his feelings very deep, and when we returned at the end of August he ran around the kitchen roaring and breaking her windows with a broom.

It was after this last adventure that Silas first came to fetch me for my lessons. It was to mark a new stage in his association with our household which had, until now, been most irregular.

He arrived with a suit of clothes, and he and the Ma watched closely while I dressed in them. These clothes were so filthy, they stuck to me like they were made from treacle and smelt so foul you would think I had been rolling in the river mud.

—Very good, said Silas, just the trick.

The Ma was a demon for being clean, and I never thought she would allow me to dress like that. But she nodded her head, and turned back to her stove. As she lifted the lid, the snout of a pig rose slowly to the edge of the battered old black pot.

Said she—You bring him back.

Said Silas—Don’t you fret. We ain’t travelling far.

But as I found out, this was not so, for we began by going onto London Bridge.

When we were standing in the middle of that mighty thoroughfare, Silas turns to me and says —Now lookee here whipper-snapper, you cannot walk aside me. I must use the footpath and you must run along the street. You must follow me, see, and not be run over. And do not lose me because we shall be going at a fair old clip. If the runners stop you, you are to say you are on an errand for Mr Parkes, the chimney sweep.

Said I—I don’t know no Mr Parkes.

Said he—Oh yes you do. And he gave my ear a twist to help me understand him. Said he—Mr Charley Parkes of Ludgate Street who has called for you to help him on a particular job in Kensington.

I asked was that place far away?

—Not so far, said he. You’ll follow me and when you see me walk into a stables, you’ll walk down the alleyway beside and wait outside the door and in a moment, why, then your Uncle Silas will come and let you in.

I asked him what would happen then.

—Then you’ll begin your lessons.

Thus all the time I followed him along the busy streets, dodging the hooves of horses and the wheels of mighty drays, I was imagining I was about to go to school.

Silas had told me about school before. He was an educated man, and once walked beside the sea with Mr Coleridge, or so he claimed. In any case, he could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare, and often did, sitting in our room at Pepper Alley Stairs.

It was by now September but the weather was still warm, and the sky blue. The rush of vehicles along the bridge was fearsome. Four-horse coaches, great omnibuses from which elegant cads cried “Kensington! Chelsea! Bank! Bank! Bank!” I trotted amongst the starved old horses of the hackney cabs, trying all the time to keep my eyes on Silas, who strode along amongst the quality, taking me further and further from the London that I knew.

I thought I was tasting what my future would be, and I was most pleased with what I saw about me.

The footpaths were filled with men and women in fine lothes. The houses were often very grand indeed. I saw footmen in plush breeches and neat white stockings riding on coaches, and men in grand livery waiting outside great doors with brass knockers on them, and I puzzled at why Silas should have put me in such filthy clothes, and rehearsed me in this cock and bull story about the chimney sweep.

Yet I was, as I recall, most light of heart and happy to follow. It was only when we came into the Mall that I, feeling myself very small, nearly lost my nerve. Such a fine wide space ahead and, at the very end, gates that might have been the ones that Peter guarded, so brightly did they seem to shine, even at that distance.

Yet even as I approached Buckingham Palace, no one inquired as to my purpose. They saw a Climbing Boy and understood, better than I did, what my business was meant to be.

I walked beside the King’s south wall. No one stopped me. I ran my hand along the bricks and as I did so my mind flooded with dazzling pictures of the school that Silas had selected for me. I wondered whether there would be a place to sleep or if I would have to take this journey every day.

It was dusk as we neared our final destination, walking along a street of very grand white houses, then down a lane filled with shining black coaches and carriages, and men busy with harnesses and reins. Here was the stable yard of which Silas had spoken, and now walked boldly into, stepping daintily in his shining shoes while I, dressed in my rags, followed down the mews until I found a small odd-smelling alleyway. There I found a door with many silver horseshoes nailed onto its bright black surface.

In a moment this strange door opened and I passed inside.

I waited to see where my desk would be, for Silas had often described to me the school at Westminster Abbey where he had learned his Latin, but there was no desk here, rather a tall gloomy room with the strong smell of leather and linseed oil, and many different sets of harness hanging on the walls.

There was a ladder on the wall which led up to a kind of loft. Up this ladder Silas went, nimble as a spider in the dark.

I followed, and soon found him at a window looking out at the night. He had taken off his coat, and when he saw me beside him, he climbed out onto the roof of the house next door.

He held out his arms to me. Said he—Go very careful, and keep your head down.

It was only then, as I followed him across the roof tops, that I understood I was not to go to school. Yet when he presented me, fair square, with a chimney, I did not fully understand my situation.

Silas carefully lifted off a chimney pot and placed it on the roof. Said he—All right, young whipper-snapper, down you go.

Said I—What for?

—What for? He brought up his eyebrows in a show of great surprise. What for? She didn’t tell you?

—If you mean Ma, said I, the answer is no, she did not.

—How forgetful of her, said he, but it is no matter, it is a simple enough errand. Slip down this here chimney and unlock the back door of the house. That’s all there is to it.

I asked what would happen then.

Said he—I will come into the house.

I said that I would likely fall and break my bones.

—Nonsense, said Silas. Get in.

I said I was too frightened to.

—Nothing to be frightened of, said Silas, grimacing as he picked me up. You’ll find it easy enough. It’s like walking down the stairs.

And so saying, he picked me up, and slid me in, as simple as dropping shot into a cannon.