Jack Maggs (25 page)

59

Henry, had you been able to hear Judge Denman make his ignorant speech to the jury about what a poisonous line of blood
ran through my vermin veins, had you heard the phlegmy old
lambskin list my misdemeanours, you might have imagined me
so devoted to burglary that I had not a moment to spare between cock crow and midnight.

Sophina and I were worked hard, it’s true, but more often
as chars than burglars. When the Ma’s floors were scrubbed
and her banisters polished, time was often heavy on our hands
and many is the fine summer’s day we spent confined to the upstairs floor with no other amusement than to lie on the bare
floor boards with a tumbler against our ears, trying to overhear
the sad little dramas enacted in the room below our kitchen.

Silas in his penitentiary had more freedom than we did. He
was permitted often times to stand at the open door of the
prison in his fine grey tailored coat, and there, puffing on an
Indian cheroot, pass the day with whomsoever passed by. But
Sophina and I were forbid the little lane that ran down beside
our home. Even hopscotch was denied us.

It is not so queer then that we looked forward to our burglary more than we feared its consequences. It was not our
blood-line, or our criminal craniums, but our natural human
desire for something other than the tedium of close confinement. Thus we waited to be called to risk, waited while the
ground-floor voices murmured, while the blacksmith across
the way set up his steady cling-cling-cling, while a housefly
died noisily, buzzing against the green window glass.

The front-door bell rang frequently, but these were ladies for
the Ma, and no business of ours. If there were a call for us, it
would most likely come after supper when we were scrubbing
down the kitchen tables.

—Come, my lovelies.

We would look up from our grey soap and our hard brushes,
and see a cabby standing at the kitchen door.

—I am Uncle Dick, and I am here to take you for a little
trot.

And in three minutes we would be dressed for the street and
clattering down the stairs, leaving the bowl of soapy water on
the table for the Ma—for she would never hinder us on our way
to do our business.

Every Joe knows that the brotherhood of hackney drivers has
a calling in the criminal professions, but our Uncle Dicks and
Handsome Micks were innocent, at least temporarily. No matter that Silas himself had engaged them, no matter what
skivers and magsmen they might be on a Monday morning, on
those sweet summer evenings they had nothing more criminal
to do than to get us to an inn.

They were, as Silas told us, base links in a chain of gold.

Likewise, Tom would break the door of the house, but never
enter it. Likewise, my pretty sweetheart and I would select the
silver and pack it in the hessian sacks, but take the sacks no
further than the kitchen door.

—You ain’t breaking the law, Silas told us. You did not
break no lock, and you did not remove nothing from the
premises.

It was a scheme, in all its very definite Divisions of Labour,
which would have met with the approval of Mr Adam Smith,
but I do not think that this was an author I ever heard Silas
mention, although he was a well-respected scholar and able to
recite long passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare.

Even in Newgate, he kept his books about him, and complained often about favourites he could not accommodate in
his cell. Alas, he needed sufficient shelving for his port wine
and his claret, for he could not be without them either. Silas
did not go short of comforts. He always had a ham and two or
three different pies, all nicely covered with muslin to keep the
flies away. All this drove Tom into a great frenzy, but I don’t
think I ever really believed that Silas’s comfortable way of life
was paid for by my labours. Indeed, I had come to think of
these labours as being for my own amusement. And as the cab
began, as it most-times did, to head towards the West wherein
the faint glow of the departed sun could still be seen, my heart
would be already pounding hard in my chest. My hand would
soon go out across the seat and find my sweetheart’s. All around
us, the drivers of coaches, carriages, dog carts, phaetons, roared
and raced their mighty race, while we two children were like
insects brought to fervent life by a summer thunder storm.

As I had grown tall, Sophina had kept her own pace beside
me, and when we sat opposite each other in the soft London
light, our eyes were level, and each as hungry and curious
about its opposite as our tangled hands. I sought those grey eyes
in the gloom. What a heady blend of sagacity and recklessness
I found there.

And hurt, also. There was much hurt my Sophina carried
with her silently, hurt you would never guess unless you heard,
as I often did, her crying by herself at night, and there was a
certain wariness about her affections which had to be won over
just when you imagined there was no more winning-over to be
done.

But I said she was a beauty, so let me prove it to you:
Sophina had dark luxurious curls and an oval face with such
wise and gentle grey eyes and a wide, well-shaped mouth
whose naturally serious expression was forever breaking in a
most glorious smile. Her lips were soft—so soft I break my sentence to close my eyes and mourn them. And when we met
with Tom at the inn, I was all impatience to get to the house,
to get to the job, where I might kiss them.

Was this safe? For the most part, yes. It is much to Silas’s
credit that we were rarely called to any house where the danger of discovery was very great. Of course this was not necessarily on account of kindness, and one has only to think him
like a fellow with a pair of good fighting cocks he does not want
to lose too easily, to understand why he took great care in the
gathering of his Information.

Twice there were slip-ups. Once we found a master by his
fire when we expected no one home. Once we had a party return from Sussex when they had not been expected, but it is
one of the wonders of great houses that their owners are forever closing them down, and these were the houses to which
we were sent to do our “little spot of shopping.”

Had we such a house—as Sophina and I said to each
other—we would never sleep in any other, and it was our great
fancy that the houses where we exercised our craft belonged to
us, and thus, even in the selection of the silver plate we were
to steal, we acted the parts of a lady and gentleman choosing
which items to send to their country estate.

We were fast at our work, faster than those who depended
on us could ever guess, and when we had filled our sack, and I
had placed it carefully beside the kitchen door, I would mount
the stairs and set off, in all that great house, to find my “wife”
who had gone on ahead of me.

And who was in bed, of course, and waiting for me.

My dear boy, I pray I do not shock you with this tale or that
you, in imagining us wild animals, will doubt me when I say,
what innocents we were. Sophina was not one of those girls
who bloom suddenly into womanhood. She ripened slowly in
the London mist, and when I embraced her, I was a boy embracing a girl.

But a man too, for the man now who writes this embraces
her still, and longs, thirty years later, for the smooth whiteness
of her skin and all that great house around us.

’Twere the sweetest thing in all my life, to go burgling with
Sophina and to flirt with the great dangerous web of sleep
which came down to claim us afterwards.

60

On the twenty-eighth of July 1807 we were dispatched to a
large gentleman’s residence in Montpelier Square, an easy
mark because of the lane-way entrance to its stables at the rear.
We first met with Tom at the Golden Sheaf, a little inn in one
of the smaller streets which lead into the square.

There we watched Tom fill his face with cold boiled beef
and pickled walnuts. Finally, when he had washed all this
down with ale, he pointed out the open window and showed
us the house that had been selected for us. It was a tall, thin,
four-storey beauty, straight and tall as a guardsman with all its
iron work blacked and its brass work shining in the soft green
summer light.

We waited for the dark to fall, and then left Tom sitting
drinking his second tankard and playing solitaire.

A half an hour or so after we had gone inside, Tom heard a
commotion down below and, kneeling on his settle, he looked
out and saw a team of Bow Street runners “fair galloping”
across the square, shouting at each other as they went. It
seemed to him that they were heading towards the lane-way at
the back of our house.

This alarmed him at first, but after he had watched the
house a while and seen its windows remain dark, he went back
to his solitaire. He had performed this vigil many times and
was now accustomed to the long time it took us to select our
merchandise. But when the clock struck midnight and the
landlord wished to know would he like a room to sleep in, Tom
paid his bill and went on out into the night.

He had a Mr Steelshank waiting in another inn nearby, and
when the bag was ready he would call on Steelshank and tip
him the wink. But now he began to imagine that the Robin
Redbreasts had nabbed us in the kitchen, or the butler’s pantry
where—naturally enough—no light would have showed. If
that was the case, they might be waiting in there now, and he
could not send in Steelshank but neither could he make up his
mind what he should do. He walked around the square two or
three times until his activity was noted by a watchman who
wanted to know what it was he was looking for. As the fellow
raised his lantern, a hackney cab came into the square and
Tom straight way hailed it and set off, not to Steelshank, but
up to Islington where he set about the dangerous task of raising Ma Britten from her bed.

The Ma was a restless body who oft-times needed a dram or
two of French Cream to get her to her sleep. Once that precious land was won, she did not gracefully surrender it, and
when she was finally drawn up from the depths towards the
light of Tom’s lantern, she brought a foul mouth and an evil
temper with her.

Now I was not, I am pleased to say, a witness to this event,
but I spent enough years with the pair of them to now offer an
honest sketch.

—You better not have lost them little varmints, said she, or
by God, Silas will have the Push come looking for you.

—I ain’t lost nothing, Ma, said he, I just did my job, and
then the runners went into the house and now they ain’t come
back.

—You dunghill, said she.

—Ma, said he, don’t call me that. I ain’t a coward.

—Dung, she hollered.

She liked to call him that, call him anything that would
make him red in the face and even more needful of her affections. So even though he were a big fellow now, and handy
with his raw red fists, he was, as they journeyed out into the
night, a whining little mutt around her great black skirts.

—You lose those little Nokes, said she, and I’ll cut your
bleeding ears off. Etc., etc.

She might call us Nokes, and worse, but the truth was she
feared she was at risk of losing her golden geese, and although
she was normally a very careful woman with a penny, she did
not hesitate to pay for another hack to get her as far as Montpelier Square.

When they arrived at the back lane by the stables, Tom,
being convinced that the runners were waiting there to trap
him, gave his mother one more reason to call him a dunghill.
She pushed her way ahead of him and walked into the house.

There, in the face of Tom’s pleas that she do otherwise, Ma
Britten lit a candle, located the kitchen, and there discovered
the bag of silver Sophina and I had packed so carefully. That
this valuable booty was still in its place was, to the Ma’s mind,
proof positive that the Robin Redbreasts had not been near the
place. She jubilantly administered one or two fast clips across
Tom’s ears, and (having thereby calmed herself a little) set off
to search the house.

Tom, however, had an awful terror of transportation. He
tried to lag behind, and the Ma was forced to escort him by his
ear up the stairs, and she did not let him go until, on a landing, she heard Yours Truly snoring.

God knows what Tom thought the sound was, but it did
serve to send him into a dreadful panic.

The Ma demanded—Draw the curtains! But he had slipped
away from her into the darkness, and she had to run the risk
herself—as she was not slow to remind him later—of standing
in front of the open window in a public square while she
quickly drew the curtains. When this was done, she held the
candle high.

—Nokes, she cried.

I woke to see her there, her hair all wild as if for bed, but
dressed in the long dark skirts she favours to this day. She tilted
the candle and a drop of hot wax spilled onto my bare stomach,
then onto poor Sophina who leapt startled from her bed and
stood in the corner, trying to cover herself.

—Out! Ma cried at Tom, who now was standing at the
doorway, staring at our nakedness.

—Out! she cried again. Tom had gone, but I pretended not
to know what she meant.

—Get out, idjeet! she cried, never once taking her eyes off
poor Sophina.

It is to my eternal shame that I then deserted Sophina, and
stood like a shivering child outside the door where Tom, having glared at me and shaken his head, was temporarily restrained from any more physical attack upon my person by his
intense curiosity about what was being said inside.

—Stand! we heard the Ma say. Hands by your sides!

But then she dropped her voice, and the conversation inside
the door began to sound like the conversations we heard
through the floor boards of the kitchen. The questions, the answers, the tears. Only in its conclusion did this interview show
Ma Britten’s different relationship with the person whom she
now interviewed.

—Five months! she cried. You stupid little bitch.

She had discovered, so I imagined, the length of time we
had been man and wife.