Jack Maggs (22 page)

51

TOBIAS HAD SPENT a dreadful year, his fourth, in a home for orphaned boys in Shropshire, where he had been bullied continually. Thereafter he lived one year in Devon, with a mother who was most loudly inconvenienced by his presence. Brought by her to London at the tender age of five, he was soon put in the care of his father, although it was a very hard kind of care he got from that gentleman, and he was pretty much forced to make his own way from there, to find his feet in a city that would as soon have trampled him into the mud.

He had been cast off but he would not be flotsam.

He had been denied a proper school but he had learned to read and write and he had made himself, by will, a sorcerer of that great city.

Now, each day in the
Morning Chronicle
, each fortnight in the
Observer
, it was Tobias Oates who “made” the City of London. With a passion he barely understood himself, he named it, mapped it, widened its great streets, narrowed its dingy lanes, framed its scenes with the melancholy windows of his childhood. In this way, he invented a respectable life for himself: a wife, a babe, a household. He had gained a name for comic tales. He had got himself, along the way, a little belly, a friend who was a titled lady, a second friend who was a celebrated actor, a third friend who was a Knight of the Realm, a fourth friend who was an author and tutor to the young Princess Victoria. He did not dare look down, so far had he come.

Until this morning, when his fun and games had killed a man.

Then the doctor had cast him out, and this
criminal
, this outcast, had felt himself free to pick him up and shake him as though he were nothing but a rabbit.

“You would best be very calm, Sir,” he told Jack Maggs, although it was he, Tobias Oates, who was, by some trick of Fate, suddenly the criminal. “If you want this to end safely,” he cried fearfully, “you had best watch yourself.”

He disengaged himself and sought to button the jacket which had been torn off in the scuffle.

“Here’s the button, Sir. Give me your coat. The maid will attend to it.”

“Be
still
,” said Tobias.

“Yes, Sir, I’ll be still.”

And the scoundrel was still a moment, although his contemptuous dark eyes stayed on the writer.

“You have pulled off my
button
,” Tobias said incredulously. “Are you not a
footman
, Jack Maggs? Are you not a
servant
, man?”

For answer Jack Maggs sat insolently in the master’s wing-back chair and crossed one massive leg over the other.

“I’m bogged here,” he said. “Two weeks, and stuck up to my axles in the mud.” He rubbed his hand over his dark cheek and Toby saw the tic moving once again. “You are bogged with me, and I am bogged with you. And every day that passes, why it gets a little worse for everyone. It was on my behalf you came up with your Contagion. You could not know it would prove a wee bit fatal.”

“I can hardly be responsible for pneumonia!”

“As I said, you could not know.”

In the silence that followed Tobias began to believe that he was being threatened.

“I am most eager,” the convict continued, “to get along the track, but I cannot do it until I find Mr Henry Phipps. When I have him, then I’ll go. It was not what I had planned, but such is life.” He paused. “And as for what you done to Mr Spinks’s Magnetic Fluid . . .”

Tobias Oates looked at the convict’s face—the coarse black brows, the dry cracked lips—and found it vile.

“Do you imagine you can
blackmail
me?”

“I want what is owing—the name of the Thief-taker.”

“To hell with you, you tinker.”

That made his tic leap good and strong. Tobias saw it.

“You gave your word!”

Tobias looked into his adversary’s belligerent eyes, and knew that he could not afford to lose him. “You sold me fourteen days, Jack Maggs. I have used no more than eleven of them.”

“But it is two weeks from the day we agreed.”

“Only eleven days have you sat for me.”

The criminal raised his misshapen hand and pressed it hard against his cheek.

“Two days,” Tobias explained, “I was travelling to Brighton and back.”

Maggs would never beg. It was written in his body that he would not bend, that he must stand straight and hold his head high. But now he was—Tobias saw it—inexplicably, at breaking point.

“I have money.” The convict tried to smile, but the tic rippled down his face again. “Twenty guineas. How’s that? I’ll pay you for the man’s address. If you have expenses besides, I am your man.”

The sheer quantity of money shocked Tobias. He gave a sharp incredulous laugh.

“You name the figure.” The other man was now sitting forward on the edge of his seat. The palsy had changed the texture of his skin; it was oddly pale and crêpy. “Thirty if you must. Then I’ll be out of everybody’s life.”

“I’m sorry, old chap,” Toby said coldly, “but you must give me the three days you owe me.”

“For Christ’s sake, have mercy. I cannot wait three days. I cannot bear it any more.”

“You are still my subject, no matter what booty you are carrying.”

But Maggs barely heard him. His eyes rolled backwards in his head. He gave a groan and clutched his face in both his hands.

Tobias Oates watched his adversary as he slowly fell back into the cushions of the wing-back chair. To the maid who rushed forth from the shadows, he said:

“You may send him to my house at nine tomorrow morning. I’ll treat him then.”

52

WHEN TOBIAS OATES returned home it was already dark and he found the entire household—his wife, his sister-in-law, the housekeeper—all gathered in a circle in the kitchen, bathing his wailing baby boy in a metal tub.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

The women did not turn, and this alone made his pulse run the faster.

“What is it?” he cried and forced himself into the circle. There he saw his infant son, his face quite pale and his little chest now hugely inflamed. What this morning had been a pustule now seemed to look more like a growth. It was red and very hard, and when his papa touched it with his fingers, the little fellow emitted a thin weak wail.

“What ails him, for God’s sake? What is it?”

“It is witch’s milk,” said the housekeeper, laying her large broad finger tips gently on the swelling. “Set hard as rock.”

“He has a fever,” his wife said. “I sent for Dr Grieves. I sent the grocer’s boy, but the boy has somehow upset the doctor, for he was sent away with no message.”

“That boy!” exclaimed the old housekeeper, continuing to sponge the whimpering child. “He would be better back in Ireland praying to the French. He should not be here, nor neither should his mother.”

“Damn Grieves,” cried Oates. The three women looked at him with such alarm, that he immediately began to smile, and coo, and pat his hands in the air.

“Grieves . . . ah, Grieves,” he said. “Poor old Grieves.”

“What is wrong with Dr Grieves?”

He could not think what to answer them, and, saying only that he would fetch the doctor himself, he fled back out into Lamb’s Conduit Street just as a hackney cab came trotting by. He hailed it before he knew quite what he was to do with it.

He looked up at the mulish driver who, in turn, glowered down from his bench, with his many-skirted coat wrapped tight around him. He was a thug-like fellow with heavy brows and great yellow teeth like tombstones in his mouth.

“So what’s your pleasure, Sir?”

“I need a doctor nearby. Do you know of a doctor?”

“Doctor, Sir. Yes, Sir. Straight away.”

And off they set up Lamb’s Conduit Street, along Gray’s Inn Road, down across to the other side of Saffron Hill, passing on the way a number of buildings with lanterns advertising doctors.

“Now listen, fellow . . .”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I only have a shilling or two about me. Where were you going to take me?”

“Why, to Merton Street, to Dr Hardwick’s.”

“What sort of doctor is he?”

“Blessed if I know, Sir,” shouted the cabby, “but he is a doctor, and well thought of, I do know that.”

Tobias Oates wondered what class of person thought well of this doctor, and for what reason. But he had no choice: “Very well,” he said, “to Dr Hardwick’s.”

Soon enough they rolled into a dismal little street in Clerkenwell. The cabby pulled up before a high narrow house, distinguished by the smoke-blackened lantern burning faintly by its door. Had it not been for the evidence of this miserable lamp, Tobias would have thought the building abandoned.

“If this is only for the shilling,” said the cabby, “you best move smartly, Sir.”

“Very well,” said Tobias. He alighted, approaching the dark deserted pile with some uncertainty. The front gate was crooked on its hinges, and the stone stairs leading up from the street smelled as if a herd of cats had been encamped there.

He knocked on the door once, twice.

Very soon he heard a distant shuffling and then a cry of, “Who’s there?”

“I have a sick baby. I need a doctor.”

A male voice replied—a single word—but Tobias could not distinguish it. He knocked louder. “I need a doctor.”

There followed a loud noise of chains being dropped onto a floor. Then the tall door opened a fraction, and in the darkness—for there did not seem to be so much as a candle lit inside—he saw the shadow of an old man’s face, or rather, what he took to be the face of an old man, for the voice that came out of it seemed very old indeed.

“Who’s there?”

“Excuse me. Are you Dr Hardwick?”

“I am, Sir, have been, and will be a good while yet. And may I have the pleasure of knowing who comes knocking on my door while I am in communion with my herrings?”

“My name is Oates, and my babe is sick.”

“How old is your babe?”

“Three months.”

“Then you must know it for a fact—babes are always sick. It is their nature. How is he sick?”

“He has a fever. There is a great red lump upon his chest.”

“If you want to ride for a shilling,” called the cabby from the street, “I cannot wait for you to sign the Peace.”

“Who’s that?” inquired the doctor.

“The hackney cab.”

“Do you owe him money?”

“Sir, will you come with me?”

“Can you pay me?” asked the doctor. “That is always a question worth asking.”

“Yes, yes, I can pay you,” said Tobias Oates.

“My fee is five shillings, and has been since Waterloo.”

“Please, Sir . . .”

“But I have been known to accept chinaware in its stead. More than once, a little Delft. Do you know Delft? I don’t press for it, but I make it known.”

“I thank you,” said Tobias Oates, who had neither Delft nor dosh to pay any bill.

“I only make it known.”

“And I thank you for giving me that possibility to consider.” With these assurances the anguished father was able to get the doctor into the cab without actually lying about his financial situation.

The journey was conducted in almost total silence, and later Tobias could recall little else of it but the strong smell of fish, which he took to be herring, upon which the doctor had obviously been making an enthusiastic attack. It was not until they reached Lamb’s Conduit Street that he had a good chance to look at his companion, and there, by the light of the candle his wife held high at the front door, he saw that Dr Hardwick was a man of perhaps sixty years of age, balding on his top, but with a great shock of ginger hair much streaked with grey. His eyebrows, which were also ginger-coloured, were a very powerful feature of his face, pressing powerfully over his cloudy eyes. His clothing was old, his great cloak actually ragged around the hem and sleeves. Mary Oates, who saw all this at the same moment as her husband, turned as pale as the wax of her candle.

“This is Dr Hardwick, my dear,” said Toby.

His wife burst into tears and ran down to the kitchen where they found her, a moment later, holding the whimpering babe fiercely to her bosom.

The ragged old doctor entered the kitchen as though it were his own, dropped his scuffed old satchel upon the table, and called for water with which to wash.

When he had scrubbed his large freckled hands, he turned to Mrs Oates, who had removed herself as far away as the scullery. She was rocking her babe and talking to him in small and private whispers.

“Now, Ma’am,” said he, “please give the patient to me.”

Mary Oates looked to her husband who, not without serious trepidation, echoed the doctor’s request. The young author then watched his son passed to the old man, recalling at the same time the case of Dr Snipes of Wapping who had killed three of his spinster patients and fed their remains to his fox terrier. He wanted only to cry out, stop! enough! But he watched as the stranger removed the swaddling from his precious son and squeezed his stomach with his knobbly jointed hands.

“Hold him. Not you, Ma’am. You, Sir.”

Tobias Oates did as he was ordered. He held his son down on the table while the doctor removed a small spirit lamp from his bag and lit it. Toby looked away a fraction. When he looked back, the old man was passing a surgeon’s knife back and forwards under the bright blue flame of the lamp.

“Hold him tight, Sir. Ma’am, look away.”

Tobias Oates looked at the three women who were bunched, his wife at the centre, over by the scullery. The two sisters had a similar expression on their faces, their eyes wide, their lips parted.

Tobias Oates turned away from them.

“Papa’s here,” he said, feeling himself a liar and a fool. “Papa’s here, my darling.”

But as the knife approached the dear little boy’s chest, the tears began to well up in his father’s eyes, and as the blade came down across the swelling on the red protrusion, as the child’s face contorted in outrage, as the little fellow shrieked, as the great river of pus flowed forth from the lanced boil, Tobias Oates cried shamelessly, or so it appeared to all who saw him. In truth, however, the shame was very deep, and when he saw the evidence of infection pour forth from his son’s innocent body, he felt the poison to be all his own.