Jack Maggs (34 page)

78

AS DARK CUMULUS CLOUDS spilled through the dirty air, stacking themselves high above St Paul’s, Tobias Oates crossed the River Thames. It was seven o’clock on a May night, and the two men, having arrived in Borough at The Swan with Two Necks, were now passing over London Bridge in a hack. After thirty hours of travel, Toby’s hands were still deep in his pockets, his wrists still bound together.

As their vehicle came into the West End, Jack Maggs leaned out the window whilst drumming his right foot upon the floor.

Tobias, meanwhile, was deeply troubled. He feared the poison they were about to buy. He feared Lizzie, and could not imagine how he would persuade her to take such a potion. There were many other strands of apprehension in the matted tangle of his mood, and they were knotted harder by the persistent pain in his wrists and the unholy pressure on his bladder, which pride had forbidden him mentioning to his companion.

The London they left behind had been a sunny place where daffodils grew in the window boxes. The London they returned to seemed hellish—broken cotton bales, cracking whips, an omnibus alight on St Martin’s Lane—all the streets awash with a weary sulphurous kind of evening light that seeped into his very thoughts, and finally surrounded the image of the family he had come so close to abandoning.

His captor then brought his big unshaven face close, and Tobias could smell the cheap brandy on his breath.

“Soon be there, eh, mate?”

“Indeed.” Tobias quickly turned his head away.

“All our trials will soon be ended.”

“Indeed, yes.”

“Miss Lizzie’s troubles mended.”

Toby shuddered at the damnable state to which he had descended: his very respectability depended upon enduring this insolent familiarity.

“We will visit Henry Phipps in the morning,” he told the convict firmly. And once more looked away, praying to God that the footman had spoken true, for if Constable did not really have Henry Phipps’s address, then Tobias was a dead man.

“It is a dream come true, mate. An old varmint’s dream come true.”

In spite of his previous vow to murder Toby, Jack Maggs had been unusually friendly to him throughout the journey, and now, as the convict leaned towards him, Tobias feared another embrace. But Maggs wished only to gaze up at the great sky, which was now, in the north, so very black and swollen.

“Isn’t that a queer thing to go out of a cove’s head?” said the convict. “When I was imagining my lovely English summers—and I did meditate on this subject an awful lot, my word—I would be suffering the mosquitoes and the skin-rot, to mention two of the least of my discomforts, but I would oft-times make a picture of me and Henry puffing our pipes comfortably in the long evenings. Do you ever make a picture like that, Toby?”

“On occasion.”

“Sophina and me, it was the storms we loved to watch. Do you think the Day of Judgment might look like this, Toby?”

Tobias pushed himself harder against the wall of the coach.

“My Sophina always thought so. Look, she would say, how all our troubles are little things beneath that mighty storm.”

Toby smiled weakly, sickened by this puerile philosophizing.

“See yonder clouds above Holborn,” continued his companion. “Look at all the old men’s faces in the sky. They’ll rattle the windows, Toby. There’ll be some fireworks with this one. But we’ll survive it, you and me. Perhaps you may visit me and Henry when you’ve forgotten the pain in your wrists. Are they paining badly?”

“I can bear it.”

“See, I’m as good as my word, for here we are almost in Cecil Street where Mrs Britten sells her famous pills. I’m surprised you never read her puffs. Well, I will be a moment collecting these items and I am sure you won’t scarper, for if you should, I would have a very sad story to deliver to your wife.”

The carriage stopped, and Jack jumped down. He was soon hammering on a black door with his silver-topped stick.

There was some brief dispute with a person inside, then Jack was admitted. Not three minutes passed before he was clambering back aboard to sit opposite Tobias once more, and the cabby was plying the whip
con gusto
. As they pushed violently into Cross Street, the convict’s face was clearly very strange: the cheeks hard and hatchet-like, the eyes awash with such violent emotion that Toby began to fear that the potion had been refused him.

“All in order, Jack?”

Maggs delved deep into the pocket of his Great Joseph and produced a small white jar.

Tobias looked at his companion’s trembling hands with some apprehension, but whatever drama had transpired behind that door he was never to know. Jack Maggs returned the jar into his pocket.

“I cannot produce your son tonight, you know that.”

“But you
will
produce him, Toby.”

“Yes.”

“What time in the morning would that be, Toby?”

“Ten o’clock,” said Toby decisively.

“Could you deliver my papers to Henry beforehand? It would be useful for him to read a little before we sit to have our yarn.”

“I could not deliver anything before ten.”

Said Maggs: “You know too much to lie to me again.”

“I know the forfeit.”

They travelled in silence until they had entered Lamb’s Conduit Street and Tobias realized that Jack Maggs intended to disembark with him.

“Jack, I do think this matter with the lady is my own affair. It is not something to be done in company.”

“I have business in your house, Toby.”

“It is private business, Jack. You must trust me. Cut my bonds, I will not run away.”

“First, we are to burn the contents of the tin box. Second . . .” Jack Maggs removed the cork from the porcelain jar and held it out so its contents might finally be examined.

Before they disembarked, Tobias had time to look inside the jar and see, not the clean white pills he had hitherto imagined, but some strange unsanitary little lumps of matter the colour of Virginia tobacco.

79

HENRY PHIPPS HAD always been excessively afraid of thunder; so much so, that in those long-ago days of his wardship, his tutor had built the most fanciful fortifications against it.

This tutor, V. P. Littlehales by name (the same individual named in that famous case with Dr Wollaston), had conceived a most elaborate series of towers and trenches on the quarter-acre of meadow attached to their cottage at Great Missenden. To the extent that this maze had been pedagogical in intention, it had failed: Henry learned nothing useful of the nature of the elements. To the extent that it had been magical, its power was insufficient: lightning had twice struck the old oak tree at its centre.

Victor Littlehales had been a gentle but troubled soul and, if truth be told, very superstitious about lightning. No matter what lectures he delivered on Natural Law, the great sum of his instruction was that they were base beasts, naked before a vengeful, all-seeing God. The only comfort he could offer his pupil was the mortal cradle of his freckled arms, and even that he finally withdrew: Victor Littlehales abruptly and inexplicably disappeared from Henry Phipps’s life on the eve of the young man’s twenty-first birthday.

On the same humid afternoon on which Jack Maggs returned to London, Mr Buckle paid a second visit to Henry Phipps. His host on this occasion looked neither like a boy abandoned nor like a man afraid of thunder. He received the ex-grocer and his whispering lawyer in the uniform of a subaltern of the 57th Foot Regiment. He stood before them stiffly, his hands behind his back, and, in looking down at them along the barrel of his straight thin nose, gave the impression of being both impatient and sarcastic.

When the thunder first sounded in the distance, Henry Phipps squinted slightly, but otherwise showed no emotion.

Mr Buckle did not hear the thunder, being too preoccupied with his own agenda to notice very much else at all. Not even the military uniform surprised him, and it certainly would never have occurred to him that this commission had been purchased in a great panic not three days previous.

Mr Buckle and Mr Makepeace seated themselves side by side on the Chesterfield. Henry Phipps remained standing with his back to the windows, flexing his knees a little strangely.

“May I ask you your business, Mr Buckle?”

“I have come,” said Mr Buckle, “to inquire as to your decision about your benefactor.” He was about to introduce his companion, but Mr Phipps turned his back and abruptly drew the curtains shut. This disconcerted Mr Buckle, who felt himself somehow reprimanded. “Of course it is not my affair.”

“True.” Henry Phipps struck a match, and spent some moments fiddling with a lamp. “It is in no manner your business, and yet I would have thought it obvious I have a new benefactor.”

“I have told no one, I assure you.”

“No, you mistake my meaning. His Majesty has become my benefactor, Mr Buckle. As you see, I am now a soldier.”

Now Mr Buckle appraised the uniform. Though no great student of the military, he knew enough to realize that the regiment was unfashionable, the rank lowly.

“No,” he said. “This won’t do.”

Outside, the lightning flashed. Henry Phipps sat down quickly, and rested his chin in his cupped hand. “I am not going to be a dancing boy for a criminal.”

“No, Sir. Indeed not. That is not what I wished, Sir. The opposite. Did you forget our conversation?”

“You seemed to imagine that I was corrupted by my comfortable life and would do anything to sustain it. But I would not lower myself to that, Sir.”

“Nor should you, Sir. That was not my idea at all. It is for this very reason I have brought with me Mr Makepeace. Perhaps you have heard his name, Sir: he is a distinguished solicitor. Mr Makepeace has, at my request, studied the appropriate precedents.”

“Precedents,” Mr Makepeace whispered in agreement.

“Precedents which by their very nature must affect yourself. It is not too late, Sir. You are too good a man to be a subaltern.”

“It is the case of the Crown
versus
Forsythe,” continued Mr Makepeace in his distinctive whisper.

“What?” said Henry Phipps.

“In the best of weather, he is hard to hear,” admitted Mr Buckle. “But always worth the effort.”

“In the case of Mrs Forsythe,” continued Mr Makepeace implacably, “who did kill her son. The Crown
versus
Forsythe. It is a case well known in the Inns of Court. It has that immediate advantage—you may mention it to anyone and be saved the time and expense of their going to look it up.”

“I cannot hear you.”

“It is Mr Makepeace’s affliction,” interrupted Mr Buckle, “that his voice box was damaged as a child. But it is to your advantage, Sir, for he comes the cheaper on account of it.”

“It is of the Crown
versus
Forsythe that I speak,” said Makepeace.

“Then speak, for God’s sake,” snapped Henry Phipps. The rain was now coming down very hard against the window pane, and Henry Phipps leaned forward in his chair and held his elbows in his cupped hands.

“The Crown charged that Mrs Forsythe had murdered her son in order to reclaim the ancestral home from which she had been cast out on the occasion of her husband’s death. She was a very proud woman, and much attached to entertaining. Her son, as the heir to the property, was expected to take up residence in the Hall, and the mother to live in a dowager cottage on the estate. Nothing wrong with that. All quite in order. Then one wet night the son, it was alleged, broke into the dowager cottage with an axe, and his mother, allegedly mistaking him for a violent burglar, shot him through the heart.”

“I do not have time for this,” said Henry Phipps abruptly. He peered around the curtains, then sat immediately down again.

“Ask me the verdict,” Mr Makepeace demanded.

Henry Phipps pointedly ignored him, and turned up the lamp.

“What was the verdict, Mr Makepeace?” asked Percy Buckle.

“English law has always held that you cannot profit from your own crime. A chap cannot inherit the estate of a person he has unlawfully killed.”

“Unlawfully. That is your point, I warrant.”

“Indeed it is,” said Mr Makepeace. “The law has always held that reasonable force may be used in defending one’s own home. Mrs Forsythe was found not guilty.”

“It is too late for this,” said Henry Phipps, but his manner was very sad, and when Mr Buckle advanced upon him, he seemed to have lost all will to resist.

“In a short while,” announced Mr Buckle, “a criminal will break into your house.” He then produced, from the depths of his tweed jacket, a large pistol. “You will shoot him through the heart.”

Henry Phipps stared with horror upon this weapon.

“For God’s sake, man. Are you mad?”

Mr Buckle continued to hold him with his eyes. There was a fixed sort of grimace, almost a rictus, on his face.

“You have a very nice house,” said Mr Buckle, laying the weapon on a nearby table. “It is natural that you would wish to keep your hands on it, so to speak. If Jack Maggs breaks in your door with an axe, you are allowed to shoot him.”

“Why would you think he would carry an axe?”

“What I know, I know,” said Percy Buckle.

“You are certain he will come?”

“I have spoken to his travelling companion’s wife. They are expected in London today or tomorrow. You should wait upon his arrival.”

“I do not know the man.”

“When you are a soldier, Sir, you will be called upon to fight many men you do not know, and for less reason than this.”

“But he has done nothing to me that I should harm him.”

The oil lamp sputtered, and went out. Mr Buckle could see the huddled dark shape of Henry Phipps not three feet from him in the gloom. He was all bent over himself, like a great round boulder that must be somehow levered off the hillside and sent plummeting onto the enemy below.

80

THE RAIN HAD BEEN heavy this last half-hour, but as Mercy let herself in through the kitchen door, it began falling in sheets, flooding the street and cascading down into the area. She leaned her dripping umbrella beside the door, and a small yellow rivulet began to invade the gloomy kitchen. It crossed the floor, making directly for Miss Mott, who was standing at the deal table not more than a yard away.

“I’m very sorry, Cook.”

Miss Mott continued to sprinkle flour, and roll out pastry.

“I was running a message for the master.”

There was a mighty clap of thunder. At this, Miss Mott raised her tightly braided head like a turtle.

“I was on an errand, Miss. It ain’t my fault.”

Mercy now cut her path wide around the cook.

“And where might you be off to now?”

Mercy hesitated. Then, as lightning flashed through the window, she set off briskly up the stairs.

“You come back here.”

“I’ll be back in a moment.”

Whereupon Mercy ran. She left tracks of mud in all six groundfloor rooms without finding the object of her search. The house was unusually cold and dark. She took one of the small wax dips Mr Constable kept in a china bowl in the hallway, but did not light it as yet. She ascended the stairs to the second floor which was queerly deserted. The door to the snuggery was shut.

Please God, let Jack Maggs be returned.

She opened the door. Though it was very dark inside, she had the feeling of someone present. There was a small sound, clear above the sound of the storm:
tap, tap, tap
. She lit the dip and held it up.

A single sad sheet of paper lay upon the bureau. It was from here that the
tap
was emanating, like a whispering ghost. She touched the paper, then felt a sharp shock as a drip of water hit the back of her hand.

The roof was leaking. This is what she tried to explain to Miss Mott when the angry cook came to fetch her back to work. The box gutter was blocked again. It was what she told the master when he arrived, soaking wet, a moment behind Miss Mott. Indeed, she stood on his chair and held her finger up to the drooping fabric canopy. She showed them: the drip became a trickle running down her arm.

Then Mr Buckle sent Miss Mott back to her kitchen. He held out his wet hand so he might help Mercy down off the chair.

“He’s back, ain’t he?” he asked Mercy.

“Is he?”

She watched him as he brushed away the mud her shoes had left upon his chair.

“What are you doing skulking round here?”

“The roof’s leaking, ain’t it.”

Mr Buckle took an altar candle from the bureau drawer; it burned with a smoky yellow flame which gave his face, wet from the rain, a strange and ghoulish appearance.

“You tell me where Jack Maggs is hiding or by God I’ll make you sorry, Missy.”

Although rain was now pouring through the ceiling, Mr Buckle did not seem to notice.

“I don’t wish him harm,” he said.

Mercy laughed incredulously.

For answer, he hit her. She did not see his hand but felt the jolt, saw the explosion of sparks inside the darkness of her skull.

She fell back, steadying herself against the paisley drapery. He knelt down with her, bringing the candle so he might peer into her eyes. She saw molten wax spilling onto her apron; she felt the snuggery curtains as wet as sheets upon the clothesline. Resting her cheek against them, she began to cry.

He was sitting upon the little ottoman from which she herself had watched Jack Maggs write his history. Mr Buckle’s moustache was sodden, and his brown eyes glistened with tears. As the water cascaded through the paisley he patted down his side burns, as if to still whatever beastliness had been awakened in his heart.

“I’m sorry, Missy, very sorry. I can’t bear the damage he has done to us. I swear to God I will never hit you again, only tell me: is he hiding in the house next door?”

The water had plastered his hair dark close upon his head, and she could see, through the wet poplin of his shirt sleeves, his dreadful ropy wrists. He made as if to touch her knee. She drew back into herself. He was vile.

“You must not leave me, Mercy.”

“How could I leave you?”

She had a vision of the filthy water sliding behind the wallpaper, creeping down into the dining room below. She pictured all the house below her to be wet, spongy, beyond repair.

“Where would I go? You’ve ruined me.”

“You will always be my Good Companion,” said Percy Buckle with much emotion. “I have taken care of you, have I not? When you have been naughty, have I not forgiven you?”

“I was
not
naughty,” said Mercy angrily. “And I never would have been alone with him if you had stayed with me in the snuggery. It was not my fault what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“I’ll kill him,” said Percy Buckle quietly.

Mercy rose to her feet. “I know where you was just now,” she said. “I know what you was up to. You went sneaking down to Covent Garden to talk to Mr Phipps.”

Mr Buckle remained seated upon the ottoman. He placed his large hands on his bony knees. “Say you didn’t follow me. That’s all. Say that to me.”

“I didn’t need to follow you. I heard your wicked scheming before you put a step outside. You were plotting with that lard-bag from the Inns of Court again.”

Percy Buckle cocked his head on one side. “My, my.” He made a small round O with his mouth and then covered it with his hand. “You seem to have lost all of your respect.”

“I heard what harm you wish to cause that man.”

“You can have no idea what I intend. I never said what I intended.”

“You just said it, then. You’re going to murder him.”

Mr Buckle did not deny this. “So, something did occur between you?”

“I kissed him,” she responded fiercely.

“In my house?”

“Aye, I kissed him, and he held me here inside this very room. When you left me like the coward you are, I kissed him. And I am not sorry that I did.”

“You are a very brave little miss,” said Percy Buckle with a dangerous smile.

“Hit me again.”

“No, Miss, I will not hit you.”

“Then what will you do?”

Percy Buckle removed the key to the snuggery from his pocket, and held it out to her. “Why, I will present you with this key.”

The water had eased off and was just dribbling down onto the desk. Mercy looked at the key lying in the master’s hand.

“What is this?” she asked. “What would I do with this?”

“It’s the key to the city,” said Percy Buckle sarcastically.

“What do you mean?”

He dropped the key back in his jacket pocket. “You are dismissed,” he said, and remained staring at her with his horrid smirking face until Mercy turned and left the room. She had nowhere to go. As she trod the dark staircase to her attic, she reflected that she was now worse off than when she first arrived.

She bolted the door behind her. She opened the window and climbed out onto the roof.