Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (35 page)

I tried to look up at Nick and smile, but my mouth wouldn’t make the right shape, and my eyes were blinded with tears.

“My mother,” I said.

I was afraid he’d think I was silly and girlish for crying. But his face and voice were full of understanding, and I suddenly
knew he’d come to exactly the same realization as I had, at exactly the same time.

“
Our
mother,” he said, gently.

She had come, like the
Sun of Calcutta
, on a ship from the East Indies, twelve years before; and so had we, her twin children. It was impossible to know from the
letter whether we had been born on land, or at sea; but we were still tiny and helpless when we arrived in London, that much
was obvious; and we’d been delivered into the hands of a family friend or relative, whose name was lost, and who had plainly
been unable to look after
us for long. I understood how I had come to be in the orphanage; but how Nick had ended up being claimed by the bosun and
Mrs. Muggerage was less clear.

But, as we talked, I became convinced of one thing. The man from Calcutta would have been able to tell us everything. On that
dreadful hot night, a few minutes of terrible violence outside the Three Friends had probably robbed us of our only chance
of finding out who we really were. He had come to find us; and we had spent the entire time running away. “Must talk,” his
note had said. And now it was too late.

I hardly let Nick out of my sight, now. I spent all my free time at Mr. Spintwice’s with him, and he spent quite a lot of
every day helping me out in the printing shop. Cramplock seemed genuinely pleased that I had discovered a brother I never
knew I had; but not, strangely, especially surprised. He was treating us with noticeable kindness, but he still insisted on
hard work, and came over to cluck and chivy us on if he found us talking about the camel adventure instead of getting on with
the job. I still couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was a girl and not a boy, and I had sworn Nick to secrecy. It was
too much of a risk. In spite of all that had happened, I was more or less sure he’d still decide a girl couldn’t be a printer’s
devil.

We thought we might find out more when, about a week later, Mr. Cricklebone came to see us at Spintwice’s.
The dwarf had never had anyone so tall in his house before, and Cricklebone had to bend nearly every joint in his body in
order to get through the door. Mr. Spintwice was very polite, but he wore a rather frozen expression throughout the visit,
as though he believed people really had no business being so tall, and that, if he were in any sort of power, he’d make it
illegal.

Cricklebone had ostensibly come to take down statements from us, gathering evidence to be used against the villains. As it
turned out, he was the one who found himself interrogated, as Nick and I showered him with questions from the moment he arrived.
He was being very cagey, doing little more than avoiding the subject or tapping the side of his sizeable nose. “There’s too
much idle talk in London already,” he said.

“This isn’t idle talk,” Nick said; “we want to know what
really
happened.”

Cricklebone perched on a chair, sipping tea and trying not to let his gangly elbow stray too far out in case it knocked a
clock off Spintwice’s mantelpiece.

“
Really
,” he said absently, “isn’t a very easy word.” He put down his teacup, and picked up a pencil and a folded sheet of paper,
preparing to write down some notes. “Now,” he began, his pencil poised, “perhaps you can —”

“I want to know,” I interrupted him, “what Mr. McAuchinleck was up to. Was he really the man from Calcutta all the time? Was
it him hiding out in the
house next door all that time? Did he kill Jiggs? Did he really have a snake?”

Cricklebone sat silently for a long time, with the end of the pencil in his mouth. “Mmmm-mm,” he said, at length, and I thought
for one ridiculous moment he was going to pretend to have a stammer again. “Mr. McAuchinleck was following the case for a
very long time. We discovered that a completely new kind of drug was circulating in London, something more dangerous and more
valuable than anything known before. We knew it was coming in from the East Indies, and there was a whole network of criminals
involved — but what we didn’t know was just how they were doing it, or who was behind it. So McAuchinleck traveled to and
from Calcutta on Captain Shakeshere’s vessel. In, ah — incognito, as it were. To watch.”

“Was this when he was pretending to be Dr. something?” I asked.

“Hamish Lothian, yes.”

“But when he got to London he disguised himself as Damyata?”

“I suppose so.” Cricklebone was being a bit irritating. I think he was enjoying the mystery he was creating. “McAuchinleck
dressed up a time or two, left a few notes. But the villains did a lot of work for us. They hated each other so much, all
Mr. McAuchinleck had to do was play them off against one another. He scared
you once or twice … but then, you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

“And this drug was so valuable that the villains were quite prepared to kill each other to get hold of it,” said Spintwice,
beginning to understand.

“It’s so valuable,” said Cricklebone, “that even the amount contained in the camel could make somebody very rich. You see
— once people take it, they can’t stop taking it. They find they can’t live without it. And they’re perfectly prepared to
kill for it, yes.”

“So who killed Jiggs?” I asked again.

“Jiggs — isn’t dead,” he replied, surprisingly. “He’s in Newgate. We arrested him, and then put notices out pretending he’d
been found dead, to scare Cockburn and drive him out of hiding. Well, it worked: he got really scared, had to change his hiding
place, and had to explain to His Lordship where the camel had gone.”

“What about the lantern? The
Sun of Calcutta?
”

“We pretended that had been stolen too,” Cricklebone went on. “The villains were just waiting for the moment when they could
run off with that. His Lordship wanted Cockburn to get it for him, and we knew either he or the bosun would go for it sooner
or later. So we, er — made out that Damyata had got away with it before any of them had a chance.”

“And had he?”

Cricklebone looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure
what you mean,” he mumbled.

“I mean, did the real Damyata get there first?” I said.

There was a short pause while Cricklebone contemplated what he was going to say. “Well, we riled them,” he continued, and
it became evident he’d decided he was just going to ignore the question. “I’ve been very impressed with Mr. McAuchinleck’s
skills. He had everyone well and truly fooled.”

“But there was someone else, wasn’t there,” I persisted. “There really
was
a man from Calcutta in London, wasn’t there? It wasn’t Mr. McAuchinleck
every
time, was it? What about the man we found lying in the lane that night on the way down to the docks?”

Cricklebone twitched, nervously. He made a few helpless little marks on the paper and stared at them, as though they were
going to transform themselves magically into the answers to my questions.

“And what about the man who tied me up, and took the camel?” put in Mr. Spintwice. “If that was your friend in disguise, all
I can say is he was taking his masquerade a bit too seriously for my liking.”

“And the house next door,” I said. “That night when I went inside, and it was all brand-new. Did McAuchinleck have it rebuilt?”

“He couldn’t have, could he?” Nick put in. “And then torn it all out again two days later? Why would he do that?”

Cricklebone’s mouth opened but no sound came out; so I seized on the silence to tell him about the letter from Imogen; about
its reference to the name “Damyata”; about the hunch I’d had that the man from Calcutta had been trying to tell me something
important — and hiding out next door all the while. Cricklebone was trying to make his face look as though he already knew
every detail of what we were telling him; but behind the stiff expression his eyes were betraying occasional surprise, even
alarm, at the mounting list of things he realized he still had to investigate.

“Well,” he said at length, with a frog in his throat, “Certainly it must seem to you as if your man from Calcutta is a — a
bit of a magician. I admit there are one or two details of Mr. McAuchinleck’s activities of which I’ve yet to be, ah — fully
apprised.” He’d gone a bit pale during my story, and now he was doing his best not to look crestfallen. “I th-think I’ve said
enough for today,” he finally muttered.

“What suspense,” remarked Mr. Spintwice, who’d been listening with increasing surprise. “Like finding the last few pages of
a book torn out.”

Cricklebone pricked up his ears at the metaphor. “Books,” he said, “as Mog here well knows, tend to have a few blank pages
at the end.”

“Yes,” I said, “because usually the gatherings have got to be —”

“It’s because,” Cricklebone interrupted, “the end of a book is very rarely the end of the story” He looked rather pleased
with this analogy, and stood up too fast, hitting his head very sharply on the low beam. “Well,” he said, his eyes watering,
“Good day.”

We showed him to the door. As he left, he held out his hand rather awkwardly to shake mine, then Nick’s.

“Nick,” he said, “Mog. I mean, Mog. Nick. Whichever one of you is which, ha ha. You’ve ah — you’ve done some good work for
us these past few weeks. Remarkable work, though you might not know it. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were some sort
of, er — reward, for this.”

Four pairs of wide eyes looked up at him from the doorway: Nick, Spintwice, Lash, and myself.

“Keep out of mischief now, mmm?” he muttered, finally; and he turned, and was off, like a stick-puppet, into the noise and
bustle of the city. We never saw him, or McAuchinleck, again.

They hanged Cockburn in October.

It was like a fairground. Everyone was wearing a happy face, as if it were a holiday. A juggler was entertaining for coins.
You could buy poorly printed pamphlets relating the gory and embellished history of Cockburn’s misdemeanors. Mr. Glibstaff
was strutting about looking important, tapping people officiously on
the backs of their calves when they were standing where he wanted to walk. Above us, every window on either side of the street
was flung wide, with four or five cheery people leaning out of each one to enjoy the spectacle.

Nick and I moved among the crowds, with Lash between us. Costermongers had cleared their carts and were charging people a
halfpenny to climb up on them for a better view. I saw Bob Smitchin organizing one such grandstand.

He winked at us.

“Grand day for it,” he said. He might have been talking about a picnic. “You’d be a proud feller today, Mog.”

“Proud?” I said. “Why?”

“Well, ‘e’s
your
convict,” Bob said cheerfully, “people might say you got a particular interest in the case, Mog.”

“Mmmm.”

“Serve ’im right,” he continued, helping another couple of people up onto his already overcrowded and wobbling cart, “way
I see it, a feller chooses to be a miscurrant, or not a miscurrant. Should be prepared for the consey-cutives.”

“Anyone would think,” I said to Nick, “it was the Devil himself being hanged.” Pressing our way between the gathering hundreds,
Nick and I spotted several people we knew to be thieves, or thugs, and they seemed to be shouting as loud as anyone else,
presumably relieved it was someone else going to the gallows this time.

“Some of this lot should be up there with him,” said Nick. He nudged my arm and nodded towards a wily-looking urchin a couple
of years older than us who was creeping round a circle of long-coated gentlemen. “Plenty of pockets to pick today.”

“They’ll find nothing on me,” I said, tapping my empty pockets. “That the sort of thing you used to do, is it?”

Nick shrugged.

Since the bosun’s death he didn’t seem to have stolen anything. People used to patronize him and tell him he’d turned over
a new leaf, which irritated him. “I haven’t turned over anything,” he maintained; “if I wanted to nail stuff, I would.” But
he didn’t seem to. I often reflected that, in the past few months, he seemed a lot older; and he laughed a lot more often.