Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (4 page)

BOOK: Printer's Devil (9780316167826)
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I nearly cried out, but before I could do so, the other person had melted off into the darkness. Lash was yelping, and straining
at the lead in an effort to pursue the shadowy figure, whose footsteps I could hear echoing between the high brick walls as
he fled. But I’d seen him, under the street lamp, and had a perfect impression of his startled face stamped on my memory.
A tall figure in a heavy black overcoat, out of whose collar rose a dark head, almost bald, the big forehead shining like
a dome in the gaslight; he had stark white piercing eyes, a nose curving like a crow’s beak, and beneath it a black mustache
which came to a fine point at either side. This was no resident of Clerkenwell! He was in a hurry to get somewhere, it was
plain — a foreigner lost in London, looking for someone, or perhaps fleeing from someone. And the look in his eyes, which
burned into me even now, after he’d rushed off into the night, bespoke some intrigue as dark and as menacing as the very points
of his mustache.

2
INDIAN INK

Tassie came through to the taproom of the Doll’s Head, accompanied by a rich tempting smell, and placed a steaming pie in
front of me.

“Now, what do you say to
that?
” she asked, with a grin so broad I could count her back teeth — and there weren’t very many of them.

“Ta,” I said as best I could with my mouth full.

“The lad would eat all I’ve got if I let him,” Tassie cheerfully announced to the rest of the customers, the usual slightly
shabby crowd sitting round the tables enjoying a smoke and a Saturday dinner. “Though I’d say he weren’t lookin’ himself today.
Looks like he needs some sleep, woul’ncha say, Mr. Gringle?”

The plump bald man at the bar squinted at me critically, and nodded his suet-like head. “Hollow eyes,” he said meaningfully.
“In fact, the lad’s got no flesh on him at all.”

“Wouldn’t think he got more of my hot pies down
him than any other body in Clerkenwell,” assented Tassie, wiping her taps.

I looked down at the table, irritated. What business was it of theirs? I was jolly glad I
didn’t
have flesh on me, if it meant looking like Mr. Gringle, whose belly was at present quivering beneath his filthy and bursting
waistcoat only inches from my plate. But Tassie was right to say I needed sleep. After my midnight visit to Flethick’s, I’d
spent the rest of the night shifting and bouncing in my lumpy bed, and my fitful bursts of sleep had been troubled by dreams
of the most disturbing kind.

In my dream I was blundering around in a kind of haze, like the pungent fog of Flethick’s room, in which people’s faces hovered
in and out of sight. Some were friendly, others menacing; but in every case, whenever I tried to speak to them, they would
be pulled away from me. One shadowy figure who emerged suddenly from the mist turned out to have the face of the convict from
the poster. Another turned out to be the mysterious man with the mustache I’d met in the lane: and as he floated towards me,
staring with his stark white eyes, his head had seemed to change into that of a crow, his prominent nose becoming a huge black
beak before my very eyes.

To tell the truth, I’d had this dream, or something like it, quite regularly since I was tiny. It was so familiar
now that, when it started, I always knew what was going to happen, and I dreaded it so much I often tried to wake myself
up so I wouldn’t have to have the dream. The part I always hated the most was when Lash’s barking face appeared, and I reached
out to try and hug him, and he drifted away, and I tried to grab his lead to pull him back, but I couldn’t get hold of it,
and he barked and barked without making a sound, and he was gone.

The final time, just before I woke up, the dream had been especially vivid. A delicate, shining human figure drifted towards
me and I found myself gazing into the beautiful face of my mother, whom I had never seen but whose face I always knew instantly
in these dreams, encircled by a headscarf of what seemed to be green and gold silk. She was mouthing silent words in the most
earnest, imploring way, as though trying to make me understand something terribly important; but, try as I might, I couldn’t
make it out. “Ma!” I called to her, “I can’t hear you! Talk to me! Tell me again!” Her lips continued to move but she was
receding now, her eyes alive with urgency, calling out to me silently. Real tears welled in my eyes, from frustration and
the pain of parting, as I watched her getting further and further away, still calling …

I shuddered. I didn’t dare say a word to the crowd in the Doll’s Head about last night’s expedition: I knew
I’d be laughed at, and besides, it didn’t seem quite so serious now, in the light of the next day, with the spring sun overhead
and the street outside full of fruit barrows and shouting boys and animals. And I harbored a nagging fear that, the moment
I did say anything, dark forces would be lurking and waiting to grab me.

But my mother’s apparition haunted me. I was certain that what she had been trying to tell me was in some way connected with
last night’s events. My mind worked feverishly all morning, trying to make sense of what I’d seen and heard. Flethick’s friend
had been told to shut up when he talked too freely about something called the Sun of Calcutta. “Such riches!” he had chuckled.
They had also seemed especially anxious about someone they thought might have been waiting outside. I was convinced that the
stranger I’d met in Cut-Throat Lane must be the person they’d been talking about — the one with three friends — and that he
had something to do with the Sun of Calcutta, whatever that was.

Gringle took a sip of his beer, and went over to sit down with some cronies, coughing loudly as he went. I thought it might
now be safe to ask Tassie something.

“Tassie,” I said, in a low voice, “where’s Calcutta?”

“Where’s Calcutta?” she echoed loudly, and I winced as her voice pierced the hubbub of the taproom. “Well, er — it’s a foreign
place, Maaster Mog.”

“I
know
it’s a foreign place,” I said, “but where is it?”

Her mouth worked for a couple of seconds with no sound coming out. “Well, er — it’s — a long way off,” she said, and it was
obvious she hadn’t a clue. “It’s in, er — the South Pole.” And she seemed satisfied with this sudden piece of inspiration
— triumphant, even.

“What are people like there?” I asked her, through a mouthful of pie.

“What are they like?” She echoed again. “Why, they’re — different,” she blustered.

“How, different?”

“Well, they, er. They.” She wiped her taps furiously, as though they were crystal balls and might supply her with the answer.
“They probably look like sheep, with curly horns. But I ain’t never seen anyone from there, so I can only say what I’ve heard.”

I decided Tassie was no use at all when it came to geography. But things started to look up almost immediately with the arrival
in the inn of Bob Smitchin, a cheerful youth well known in these parts of town. There wasn’t much that went on that
he
didn’t know about. He always had a winning word for everyone, and usually something extraordinary to sell — which people
were better disposed to buy after he’d been nice to them.

“Hello, Mr. Gringle! Mr. Ratchet! Another warm
one, eh? Hello, Tom, get the bricks all right? Mornin’, Mr. Fettle. Dot, my love, how was that bacon?Mornin’, Charlie, still
on top?” Indeed, wherever he went there were so many people he knew that it was a wonder he ever got anything done at all:
he could have spent his entire life greeting people. Once he’d worked his way through the taproom, exchanging handshakes and
pleasantries, he came to lean against the bar close to where I was sitting.

“Mog!” he said, noticing me. “The printer’s devil, large as life!” He knelt down to make a fuss of Lash, who sniffed and licked
at his fingers happily. “You look like you’ve got something worryin’ you,” said Bob, standing up again. “Nothing amiss, is
there? Nobody ill?”

“No, Bob,” I said, “just a bit tired. I was working on posters till late last night.”

“Posters! Not that escaped convict?” he said, giving money to Tassie in return for a full pot of frothy beer she’d just plonked
on the counter. “That’s a great job you done on them posters. I seen them up on doors and walls in I don’t know how many places
today. What a villain! Murderous! Eh?” He gave a whistle, and then a bright smile.

“I was sick enough of seeing his face after I’d done a hundred of ’em, I can tell you,” I said.

“I’ll bet you was,” he replied, putting the beer to his lips. “Aaah!” he said, after taking a sip. “Tassie’s finest,
just the thing to lay the dust.” A slight wince creased his face as the aftertaste hit him. He’d acquired a white mustache
from the foam on the beer, and he wiped it away with a stained shirt cuff. “Yeh, that convict poster,” he continued, “what
fine big letters, Mog, big bold ones. Not that I knows what they say, but I can tell sure enough they’re big bold words fit
to make any citizen watch their step where convicts is concerned. And what a face! What a fine murderous convict’s face to
stick up around town. Eh? Only thing is —”

He took another draught of beer, and acquired another frothy mustache in the process. “Only thing is, Mog,” he said again,
“I seen that face before.”

“What do you mean, seen it before?” I asked, intrigued. Was he about to tell me he knew where the escaped convict was?

“On another poster. I mean, it’s a fine face, for a villain that is, a fine murderous convict’s face to frighten anyone what
lays eyes on it. But it’s the same face what was on another poster for an escaped convict a month or two back.”

I stared at him. “What, exactly the same?” I said.

“No two ways about it, my son,” Bob said cheerily. “Never forgets a fiz, doesn’t Bob, and that one I seen before. Same eyes,
same crooked stare. Same big square chin.”

“Well, maybe he’s escaped twice,” I said, “maybe
they caught him the first time and locked him up again, and he’s just escaped again.”

Bob shrugged. “Maybe he has,” he said. “Except I feel sure it ain’t more than a fortnight since he did a bit of dancin’ on
thin air. The old Paddington frisk? Eh?” He made a strange jerky movement with his body and stuck his tongue out.

I was looking at him blankly.

“They hanged him,” he explained.

“What?”
I said, worried now.

“I could have sworn I heard tell,” he said, “that the convict on the other poster was caught and hanged. I could have sworn
old Tommy Cacklecross the prison gatekeeper told me that. And if he was hanged, well, they wouldn’t be putting out posters
of him saying he’s on the loose, would they? Before you go back and face Cramplock,” he said, leaning closer as if to impart
a confidence, “it might be worth you going and having a word with old Tommy, see if he knows the face. He’ll put you right.”
And he stood up again, beaming, looking around for someone else to talk to.

“Well, thanks for the advice,” I said crossly. Who was Bob to come criticizing my handiwork, telling me I’d put the wrong
face on the poster? If there was anything wrong with Bob it was his habit of putting his oar in where it wasn’t wanted, reckoning
he knew more about other people’s jobs than they did themselves. But
an uncomfortable dread nagged at me: might I have used the wrong picture? One big ink-covered engraving could look remarkably
like another as we fitted them into the blocks in the shop. And Bob’s memory for faces
was
usually impeccable. What on earth would Cramplock do if it turned out I’d misprinted the poster a hundred times over?

As I ate the rest of my pie I tried to work out where I’d live and what I’d do if I lost my job, and how I’d find enough food
to give Lash — and I’d soon constructed an entirely plausible future which saw me sleeping on the cobbles beside the Priory
gatehouse covered up in waste-paper I’d stolen from Cramplock’s garbage cans — until suddenly the word “Calcutta” woke me
up.

“Yes, Maaster Mog’s quite the mysterious one this morning, ain’t you Maaster Mog?” Tassie was leaning over her bar, chatting
to the effusive Bob. “Asking me all sorts of questions about Calcutta and the South Pole, you’d think I was a schoolmaster
to be inquired of!”

“Questions about Calcutta?” queried Bob. “Why, that’s a funny thing, Mog, because that’s exactly where this came from.” And
he produced from his inside pocket a very large silk handkerchief in an exotic pink and orange pattern, with gold thread running
in an ornate trace around the edge. “Thought I might find a likely buyer for this,” he said. “Keep me
in beer for the evenin’. Eh?”

“That came from Calcutta?” I asked, intrigued.

“Off an East Indiaman who came home last night,” Bob replied, “straight from the Orient, full of riches to dazzle the worldliest
of us! And I can offer this little square of the mystic East —“ he was getting into his stride and waving the handkerchief
around at the amused crowd, ”— silk of a quality you never seen, for a song, to the highest bidder. Direct from the hold of
the
Sun of Calcutta
, and unloaded not two hours since. Picture this fine silk softly stroking the neck of a Maharaja’s beautiful daughter.” He
put it to his nostrils. “Mmmm! Still richly scented with her heavenly perfume!” There was a ripple of interest among the other
customers. He was good at this. “And now, here it is,” he continued, “available to anyone with the wherewithal, to adorn themselves
like a true princess!”

BOOK: Printer's Devil (9780316167826)
11.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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