Jack Maggs (26 page)

61

TOBY HAD BEEN ABROAD a day and night. He had slept in a flop house, magnetized a criminal, retrieved a necklace, and drunk first claret and then brandy with Cheery Entwhistle.

He had sold the copyright to
Jack Maggs
. He had signed a contract for sixty pounds, and now, as he stood outside his house in Lamb’s Conduit Street, he could feel the sticky dirt of London on his skin and taste its sulphurous corruption in his mouth.

A light rain was falling, scarcely more than mist, and it gathered on the outside of his curling hair like dew on a spider web. It ran down his unclean cheeks and thereby helped produce, in concert with a swollen mouth and shadowed eyes, a picture at once demonic and pathetic. He stood awhile in the shadows and watched his own household with a kind of dread.

As he gained the footpath he was able to look down into the kitchen and see Mrs Jones busy scrubbing down her table in readiness for the morrow. How he envied the old biddy the dull certainty of her day.

He let himself in the front door very quietly, only to be rewarded with her whom he wished most to avoid.

The girl was seated on the bench seat by the hat stand, clad only in dressing gown and slippers. Her hair was loose and falling on her shoulders, but still she came and recklessly embraced him, pushing against him with that darkest and most womanly part of her anatomy.

“Where is my wife?”

He drew her into the dark drawing room and sat her down opposite him at a small card table. Then, in the interests of propriety, he lit a candle.

“I have been waiting for you, dearest.”

“Where is Mary?”

“In the nursery, but listen to what your Lizzie has been waiting all day long to tell you.”

She then stretched out her free hand and touched his face. He could not help but flinch from her.

“Lizzie,” he explained, “my face is dirty.”

In reply she leaned across the table to kiss him once again. He saw then, quite clearly, the full curve of her breast.

“Toby—I plan to go away, by myself, to France.”

“For Heaven’s sake, do up your nightgown.”

She did as he requested but in a teasing manner inappropriate to their situation.

She continued. “My French is really very good, as you have said yourself.”

To France? He would not know how to effect such an adventure himself. She was but eighteen years old, and scarcely knew her way to the Royal Academy.

“Whom have you been speaking to?”

“I would be away but half a year.”

The floorboards creaked upstairs.

“I would stay in a good Protestant house in Paris.”

“Which house?” he whispered. “How could you find such a thing? Who would be with you?”

“I would be back by Christmas with the baby.”

“No!”

“Oh, silly dear Tobias. I would not say that he was our own.”

He looked at her with such alarm that she, in her madness, began to laugh. “I have already told Mary that I wish to adopt a foundling.”

“You must do no such thing, do you hear me? My wife is one hundred times sharper than you imagine.”

“No, poor Toby, she is one thousand times less sharp than you imagine. In any case, I told her this morning that I was resigned to being an old maid, but that I would adopt a babe of my own.”

“You are treading on thin ice, girl.”

“Do not be so cold with me, Toby.”

“I am not cold. I am shocked that you should discuss this with anybody. What did my wife reply?”

“Well, you can imagine the scene, I’m sure. First she must drink her tea. Then she must contemplate the matter as if it were a frightful conundrum. In this case she was silent an awfully long time, but at last she said that she was sure that it was forbidden by the English foundling hospitals—to give their charges out to spinsters.”

“She is correct.”

“Of course she is correct, dear. She had considered it, don’t you see? That is why she considers things. She has a terror of being wrong, especially in your company. I then asked her, did she think the French foundling hospitals would have the same proscription, and she said that she did not know, but that foreigners did the most peculiar things.”

“Dear Lizzie, I will not give you up.”

Lizzie frowned. “Of course. We will none of us give up the other.”

“Mary would be the first to know it was your flesh and blood. Can you not see how we would insult the very foundation of her life?”

Whether Lizzie heard this or no, was not clear, for something he had said had obviously angered her, and now she stared at him so malevolently that he chose this moment to return her necklace. He laid it on the table, as evidence.

“I have been busy on your behalf,” said he.

“On my behalf?”

She raised an eyebrow, then draped the necklace over her wrist. For a moment she twisted it to and fro, seeming to admire the way the stones reflected the candle light.

“So what would you have me do, Tobias?”

“It is a dark hour.”

Lizzie was silent.

“That is all you have to offer?” She laid the necklace back upon the table. “It is a dark hour?”

“No,” said Toby. “It is not all I have to offer. I have a plan, but first I must speak with Mary.”

“You cannot discuss it with
me
?” she cried suddenly, a great temper erupting in her eyes.

“Please, Elizabeth. Please be a little quieter.”

“And when might you have the time, Sir, to make the nature of your thoughts available to the mother of your child?”

He had no plan, of course. He had accrued one hundred and eighteen pounds and sixpence but no clear plan had come to him.

“I have a
wife
,” he pleaded, “and tomorrow I must earn my necklace money by being a servant to the convict.”

“But when will you reveal your plan to me?” She spoke loudly, carelessly. “How long do you plan to leave me alone with my mind spinning round and round?”

When Tobias stood, Lizzie remained in her chair, her shoulders rounded in despair.

“I will take care of this matter,” he said. “You can rely on me.” And then he turned and walked up the stairs, where he discovered his wife standing on the landing, a peculiar expression upon her face.

“I go to Gloucester,” he said.

62

TOBIAS TOOK NO CHANGE of linen with him on his journey to Gloucester. Instead he had brought his faithful yellow case, and in it he had carefully packed his cut-throat razor, his toothbrush, a quill, his work book and an ink bottle. Even before the coach had escaped the congestion at the turnpike, he had opened this ingenious portmanteau upon his knees, and made his travelling desk.

He uncorked his ink, set the bottle in the cavity made for this purpose, and there, in what de Quincey called “the great Mediterranean” of Oxford Street, he began the first chapter of
Jack Maggs
. He wrote in an ornate but graceful hand: not a wavering stroke to indicate that he was sitting in a coach, not a smudge or blot to suggest that this was a young man in despair, someone who felt himself to be moving only just ahead of the tide of his own disgrace.

He was not unaware that the subject of his tale was seated staring at him. Although Jack Maggs was in the far right-hand corner with his back towards the horses, as far away as he might be, the
True
Briton
, as the coach was named, was no bigger than any other mail coach. That is, it was made exactly as the Post Office insisted, with the same cursed three feet and four inches from seat to ceiling, six feet and six inches on the horizontal diagonal.

Tobias wrote CHAPTER ONE, and underlined it twice. Then he began:

It was a dismal January day in the year of 1818, and the yellow fog which had lain low all morning lifted a moment in the afternoon and then, as if the desolate pile of rock and stone thereby revealed was far too melancholy a sight to be endured, it descended again like a shroud around the walls of Newgate Prison.

“How do you do that, Sir?”

This from a clergyman, seated on his right. Tobias smiled, and dipped his quill again.

“I could not read with all this motion,” said the clergyman. “But to write, Sir, that is certainly an accomplishment.”

These walls, being made from Welsh blue stone, had not been easily broken by the quarryman . . .

“I did once see a lass at Amersham Fair who could knit a scarf whilst cantering a pony around a field.”

This from a farmer who had squeezed in opposite Tobias. He was a big square-headed fellow who could not get his knees anywhere they did not touch another passenger and who had seemed, until this moment, rather irritated on account of it. “Now that were something,” he insisted to Jack Maggs, who responded by folding his arms across his red waistcoat.

The farmer then turned to the clergyman. “That were worth the penny, that lass.”

“Indeed,” said the clergyman. “But our companion produces an even greater entertainment, Sir.”

“Oh, it were a
very
fine show,” said the farmer. “That lass were no more than ten years old.”

. . . and yet the fog, by virtue of its persistence, had been able slowly to penetrate the stone’s dark, inhuman heart . . .

“I do not doubt it, Sir,” said the clergyman, “but I suspect the young lass is being over-shadowed, as it were.”

“You’ll not persuade me so easy, your Reverence . . .”

The clergyman had seemed at first to be a man with no big range of emotions, but now his mouth was very straight and his face exceeding red. Said he, “To tell the tale of Captain Crumley and Mrs Morefallen: why that must be a performance of some great difficulty.”

Between the farmer and Jack Maggs there sat an old lady in a white cloak and faded red bonnet who had been quietly pecking from a pannikin of roasted wheat. Now hearing Mrs Morefallen’s name, she looked sharply up.

“Mr Oates?” she said. “It is not Mr Tobias Oates?”

The farmer was then suddenly, and most noticeably, silent.

This occurrence was by no means usual, and Tobias, although puzzled to know how he was recognized, was inordinately pleased to feel himself esteemed by these strangers. Yet so deep was his certainty of his own imminent disgrace that he could not savour their love without calculating how soon, and how brutally, it was to be torn from him. He therefore took no bow, engaged in no conversation, and in this manner gave his fellow travellers the impression of a cold and arrogant young man.

The attention of the other passengers turned soon enough to the signs of May—bluebells, the plum blossom by the church at Hammersmith, the hare fleeing across the turnpike. Toby’s eyes were on grimmer territory altogether.

There were a great number of women inside Newgate that year. They had been brought from all over the British Isles: petty thieves, murderers, all manner of wickedness crammed into that grim pile on Newgate Street.

He was still at that same address when the coach passed the great Park of Lord Dingley. Here, the clergyman and the farmer got into an argument about the virtues of the fir tree, a matter which would not be easily or simply settled. The farmer began to shout, the clergyman to laugh in a high and unpleasant manner. Tobias hardly heard this and yet there was another, more silent element, which really did distract him. That is: Jack Maggs’s gaze upon him.

He continued to write diligently, but now he was over-conscious of the other’s stare. It was like a ray from an eye-glass, warm at first, but soon too hot to be comfortable. He brought his own hard stare up to match the convict’s.

Time passed. One minute, two. It was a silent exchange yet such was its force that the conversation of their fellow passengers died away, and it was in the face of their attention that the convict finally retreated.

A moment later, it was as if nothing peculiar had occurred. Tobias returned to his labours, Jack Maggs looked out the window. Soon after they arrived in Hounslow, and the two travellers found themselves left alone in the coach for the next stage.

“What is it that you write about me?”

Tobias felt the colour rising up from beneath his shirt. “These notes do not concern you, Jack.”

“I know you’ve been writing about me.”

The convict then held out his hand toward the chap book.

“Dear fellow, this is not your business.”

“Give me,” insisted the other.

“No, Sir.”

“Deliver.”

Tobias hesitated and then, desperately, began to read out loud an item in his work book he had written late the night before.

In the region of Camden Town there were once to be found many famous old eccentrics, but lately it seems that they have “passed on” whilst we have slept, and now even “John the Happy Hooper” is said by local people to have gone to Sweden to amuse the family of the King and Queen. But the Inquirer did find, in Shaky Row, she who is known in those parts as the Canary Woman.

“Deliver!” insisted Jack Maggs, and Tobias had no choice but to give up his work book, his finger indicating the passage he had read from.

He watched with his heart racing, as Jack held the pages to his hard-boned face.

“You see,” said Toby. “It is as I said.” But Jack Maggs doggedly read all six hundred words.

“It is an old woman.” He did not smile, as the writer had rather hoped he would, nor did he relinquish the book, but held it stubbornly clasped in his lap.

“As I said, not you.”

“You get a good laugh out of the old biddy, I must say.” The convict opened the book again.

“She is a comic figure, Jack.”

“I reckoned it were
me
that were the comic figure.” He was turning the pages slowly now, and then he paused. He was staring down at the annotated plan of the Newgate cell in which Tobias planned to accommodate Sophina. On the right-hand page was the start of the chapter he had so recently composed.

“Come, Jack Maggs. My book, if you please.”

Jack Maggs frowned, as if dimly perceiving the unhappy fate before him on the page. Then, as if brushing off a spider web, he pushed back his long black hair from his forehead, closed the book, and returned it to its relieved owner.

“To the Gods we are all comic figures,” Tobias said.

“As flies to wanton boys are we.”

Toby’s heart was beating very fast as he tied up the red leather covers of his note book. “If you could look at my life from on high you would split your sides to see the muddle I am making of it.”

He tucked the book back in its place inside the attaché. He screwed the top on his inkwell, wiped his quill clean, and returned these items to their respective places, and when he had secured one with a ribbon, and the other with a leather strap, he snapped the case shut.

“You are a chap what plans,” said Jack.

“How plans?” asked Toby, although he was apprehensive about where any new conversation might take him.

“You have the one place for your pen, the other for your ink. I should have planned this better,” said Jack. “I was famous for planning in the Colony.”

It was the first time, outside of a trance, that he had acknowledged his past to the writer.

“Even before my pardon, I was known to be a chap what planned. I provisioned parties for exploration. I could make a list twenty pages long and not leave out an item. I thought nothing of provisioning that house in Great Queen Street from half the world away.”

“What house, Sir?”

“Go on with you. You knew the house was mine.”

“Buckle’s house?”

“He didn’t tell you? I am Buckle’s neighbour, or should have been.”

“You have the lease?”

“It is freehold, mate.”

To say this shocked Tobias is to understate it. To think this criminal should own a lease while he should be forced to waste his time on Comic Romps and Brighton Fires!

“As I said, I provisioned it from far away. I had a bachelor, a solicitor in Gray’s Inn. He sent me five score squares of wallpaper until I found the one I wanted.”

“This house you let to Henry Phipps? The fellow we are seeking— he is your tenant then?”

Jack Maggs frowned. “My point is that I should have taken as much care with Mr Phipps as I did with the house in which he lived. But I put it off, see. I was a busy man in Sydney town, busy with my bricks from one day to the next.”

“You were a brick-maker?”

“At the time of my conditional pardon, I was given a small grant to encourage me in my new honest life. It was a very poor bit of land, about twenty acres, all of them covered with vines and poisonous scrub. Beneath the scrub were solid clay.”

“It did not serve?”

“You could not grow a cabbage, but you could, if you had the nous”—and here he tapped the side of his considerable nose— “make a brick as good as anything in London. That clay made my fortune, Mr Oates. It gave me a mansion in Sydney. It gave me the dosh to buy the freehold of the house in Great Queen Street. And then, as I said, I provisioned it. I bought the wallpaper, the china, the finest Oriental rugs.”

“Oh, to stumble on such a landlord!”

“Mr Phipps wrote me very frank and respectable letters. I only regret I never took the time to be so frank with him.”

“Because?”

“Because, mate, I cannot bear him to think me a common criminal.”

He turned and looked out the window, leaving Toby surprised that so hard a man should give a fig for the good opinion of his tenant.

“I’m not your comic figure, Mr Oates.”

“In what way do you mean?”

“This old soul with her canaries—do you have a tin box for her?”

“Tin box, Jack?”

“Like you made a tin box for me. The tin box in which you locked all the demons you extracted with your magnets.”

“I have Behemoth and Dabareiel locked up safe and sound. I am not carrying them out on the high road.”

“But do you have a tin box for your Canary Lady? That was my question. For if you do, you must have more tin boxes than a pawnbroker.”

“I keep the canaries here.” Toby tapped his own forehead and smiled. “In this tin box.”

Maggs turned and looked out at the fields to the north. After a little while the turnpike became narrow, almost like a lane, and the hedgerows pressed in close upon the coach.

“All this,” Maggs said at last, “I keep in
my
tin box.”

“The country, Jack?”

“Aye,” said the other wistfully. And then he shifted in his seat and sighed.

They rode thus for a while longer, the convict turning more and more toward the window.

“By this
country
you mean Buckinghamshire?”

“Look how the blackthorn grows,” the other cried, as the untrimmed hedgerow lashed the coach.

“I took you for a London sparrow.”

“And so I am, but look, damn me: hedge bells, ground ivy. You smell that smell.”

“Is that violets?”

“Besides the violets, there’s another baddish kind of smell.”

“Can I smell Herb Robert?”

For answer, the convict bestowed on the writer a rare and candid grin. “My ma called it Jack in the Hedge,” he said.

“The bad smell?”

He shrugged. “She were a strange woman, my ma.”

Now Toby had already glimpsed this ma magnetically. He knew the pattern of her sword, but could not have yet drawn her hawk’s eye, her handsome red hair, her startling white shoulder. She was shadow, passion, hurt, an inky malignancy in Jack Maggs’s dreams, and now he sought to tease more winkle from the shell. “That could not have been so cosy, to have your mother name a bad smell after you.”

Maggs turned away again, but when he turned back his eyes were bright, and it was not hard to see the boy in him, to imagine the orphan’s hunger for affection.

“I don’t believe she named me after nothing,” he said. “She was from Bucks and that’s what they call Herb Robert in these parts. But even if what you say were so, Sir, I’ll tell you the truth: I’d rather be a bad smell here than a frigging rose in New South Wales.”

And he was thereafter silent and sulky all the way to Maidenhead.