The Law of Dreams (21 page)

“Never put your time in another's hands, Fergus, or
you'll always be disappointed. When you're ready to leave us, don't
wait for Arthur. Here, take this.” Betsy took something from a pocket of her gown
and held it out — a small, pearl-handled clasp knife, no bigger than his thumb.
“Carry this. Go on, it's for you. Don't tell Shea.”

Opening the little knife, he tried the bright, brittle blade on his
thumbnail.

“If a fellow gets too rough, you prick him where he knows you mean
business. Come, slip that beezer in your pocket, and let's go
downstairs.”

SHEA, ARTHUR
, and the girls were in the piano room,
drinking tea, eating butter toast and apples, ham sandwiches, kippers, and little yellow
cakes the girls called lemon drops.

Arthur winked at him from across the tea table.

Shea was staring at him. “You've too much powder on him,
Betsy. He looks half dead.”

“I'll take him upstairs and do him over if you
like.”

“No, no, there ain't time. Try not to look such a sad dog,
Fergus!” Shea pinched his cheeks. “It's not a hanging! You're
here to make money, the key of happiness, so brighten up!”

The girls were noisy, giddy, dipping toast into teacups, slapping one
another's hands as they grabbed for cakes, and he could sense they were all
frightened.

THE COAL
fire sizzled in the grate. Fragrance of butter,
toast, blackberry jam, and tea with sugar clouded the room.

What would the Bog Boys have done for such food, which was beyond their
imaginations?

Arthur had been selected almost immediately. Shea touched his shoulder,
and he stood up and left the room, smirking.

Luke had been a whore in Limerick to feed herself, to put food in the
little boys' gawping mouths.

Shea poured the tea and Mary, in a crisp white cap and apron, handed the
cups around. He had grown fond of the whores' drink of tea, its smoky flavor. They
never had tasted tea on the mountain. Water or whiskey. Milk he'd tasted from
Phoebe's pail, or stolen, squeezed from her father's cows in the field. Men
drank porter in the beer shops on market day, after selling the pig.

“Here, Fergus, help yourself, take as much as you want.” Mary
was passing around delicacies on china plates: cakes, herrings, jam on toast, cold fried
oysters with salt. He was surprised that he had an appetite.

The whores were wearing their best gowns fluffed with starched petticoats,
their hair dressed in ringlets. They blew on their tea to cool it, poured it into
saucers and slurped noisily. They lit straws at the fire, then lit cheroots from the
straws. They blew streams of smoke at one another, told one another riddles he
didn't understand. They took up their needlework for a few minutes then put it
down. They screamed whenever they spilled a drop of tea or dab of jam on their dresses,
and didn't seem to be the same girls as they were in his attic room in the
mornings, daylight spilling in the windows.

* * *

ARTHUR RETURNED
and sat away by himself, a little black
cigar clenched between his teeth. Catching Fergus looking at him, he stared back coldly,
eyes narrowed against the smoke.

A few minutes later, he was chosen again and left the room once more,
following Shea.

Perhaps half of the girls had been led away. Those not chosen gobbled more
cakes and drank tea and laughed even louder at silly jokes, though it seemed to him some
of them were near tears. He couldn't tell if they were disappointed or
relieved.

Shea came in, pouring tea and telling girls to sit up straight. Standing
behind Fergus's chair, she placed her hands on his shoulders. “What is it,
man? Why so sad? Everyone must have a trade, you know.”

Empty chairs and abandoned teacups marked the places of those now upstairs
wrestling with the trade.

He suddenly knew how afraid he was. His body stiff in the chair. The faces
of girls seemed blurry. He wondered if he was going blind from the poison of fear, which
he could feel in his blood. He had never been so afraid.

He thought of his parents lying in the cabin rubble. Married people were
to be buried in the same grave or one would come looking for the other. By now the rain
would have beaten the wreckage of the cabin down to a slick mound of clay.

Jenny, tall and sallow, hair the color of wheat, sat down at the piano and
started playing, the notes flying from the polished instrument so bright and hard he
could almost touch them.

Gathering around the piano the girls began singing about Greensleeves.

Without knowing any of the words, he opened his throat to join in. They
were all as frightened as he was. Some had been summoned from the room two or three
times, inspected, sent back. Gathered around Jenny sitting at the piano, they were
singing to defend themselves from how alone they felt, how unprotected, while Shea moved
in and out of the room softly, touching girls by the arm, leading them away.

Singing gave them a sense of something surrounding and protecting them,
and they sang song after English song until Shea, reaching out, touched Jenny's
shoulder lightly.

The whore immediately stopped her playing. Closing the lid, she arose,
touched her hair, and followed Shea from the room. No one sat down to take her place.
The singing was finished and he followed the girls back to the tea table and helped them
light their cigars.

WHEN SHEA
shook him awake, he didn't know where he
was.

Gazing around the smoky warm room he saw girls yawning, and realized he
had fallen asleep with his head on the tea table.

“Come, come.” Shea was nudging him impatiently.

Thinking he had been chosen, he immediately felt queer and knew he was
going to be sick.

“You may as well go to bed before you put the others to
sleep!” Shea said sharply.

He looked up her. “What?”

“You're a dreary feature, not doing any good down here! Go
upstairs. You're casting a spell on the others. No one wants a boy so grim and
unbecoming! You're very poor investment.”

Relieved and ashamed, he headed for the door, anticipating the quiet of
the attic and the cool, dry sheets on his bed.

“You'll pick up by and by, Fergus.” Betsy was sitting in
a chair, doing needlework. “He isn't quite well, not yet,” she
reminded Shea.

“I want him fresh. Feed him some brandy next time! And not so much
powder, Betsy! Lively and fresh — that's what gentlemen want.”

Fresh fish.

IN THE
middle of the night he woke to noisy shouting
from downstairs. Racing down through the house, he found the kitchen crowded with
excited girls and half-dressed gentlemen. Arthur had chased a wag out into the alley and
was beating him with his fists. Standing barefoot in the cold, Fergus watched Iron Mike
and three other men dragging Arthur off the man and carrying the navvy inside, kicking
and writhing. They laid him on the kitchen floor, and Iron Mike sat on his chest, the
others holding down his arms and legs.

“You're breaking me, Arthur!” Shea was furious.
“You're ruining the Dragon and everything I built!

“He bit me!”

“I won't let you ruin my house. I'll let those Scotchmen
shoot you like a dog.”

“I won't have any maggot bite me!”

Iron Mike and the others strained to hold Arthur down. Shea looked at him
with disgust. “Put him below. Throw him in the coal cellar. We'll see if he
likes himself alone.”

NEAR DAWN
, Fergus went down to the coal cellar and
tapped on the iron door. At first there was no response, then Arthur's voice said
hoarsely, “Who is it? Let me out.”

“I haven't got the key. She'll let you out in a couple
of hours, I suppose.”

“You go tell her let me out now. Tell her I'm sorry,
I'll be excellent, and she won't have to worry about her precious old wags.
You tell her so, Fergus. Go on. Please, man. You and me, we are the railway birds,
ain't we? We shall tramp down the line together, by and by. Only you tell her to
let me out.”

Fergus went upstairs and knocked on Shea's door.

“Who's there?”

“Me.”

“Fergus? What is it?”

“Arthur wishes you to let him out.”

“Tell him he can rot.”

“He's very sorry for the trouble.”

After a few moments the door opened. Shea wore the silk dragon gown over
her nightdress and held a candle in a silver dish. “He'll ruin my trade.
It's always like this. He thinks being wild is glory — thinks we love him
for it. He knows nothing of the world.”

“You'll let him out, won't you?”

“He's never brought anything but trouble into this
house.”

But she already had the key in her hand, and followed him downstairs and
into the gloomy cellar, where she unlocked the door.

Arthur had been sitting on a pile of coal. He quickly stood up and stepped
out without a word.

“This is the last time, Arthur. Don't do it again, I warn
you.”

“What am I to do when a fellow insults me?”

“Take it — they're paying good money.”

“That rabbit bit me, bit my old cock.”

“I don't care if he bit it off.”

“Sure you do, sure you do.” He smiled at her.

Shea shook her head wearily. “I don't wish to see you. Go
upstairs, and make sure you're clean before you touch my linen.”

TWO COACHES
had been hired to drive the whores into the
country for their monthly outing.

“And you shall come with us, Fergus, you want some color in your
cheeks,” Shea decided. “That'll get the old crooks
snapping.”

Shea refused Arthur's plea to come along.

“You needn't punish me no more, Shea. I am quiet,
so.”

And it was true — since his night in the coal cellar, he had been
gloomy and silent.

“It won't do to show your face. Iron Mike says they have a
price on your skin.”

“I'm a veal calf, Shea. I must get out! Only for a spin
— I need the air worse than anyone.”

“Should have thought of that before you stabbed their
drum.”

Arthur grew so morose that Shea finally agreed to let him come along on
their outing if the girls disguised him as one of themselves. They bought fabric and
Arthur stood in the attic room glumly smoking little cigars one after another as they
measured, pinned, and cut. By Sunday morning they had him outfitted in petticoats and a
gray morning gown, trimmed with green ribbon; with a pelouse, bonnet, and a rabbit-skin
muffler. They hadn't found slippers large enough for his feet, but the skirts
concealed his boots.

“Oh Arthur, you're a bonny lass,” Betsy teased.

“I don't give a damn for it. I'd as soon let them kill
me.”

“Oh, don't say so. If Shea hears, she won't have you
come at all.”

Betsy and Jenny shaved and powdered Arthur, painting his lips, gradually
transforming him into a sullen, pretty young woman.

Fergus thought of Luke's body, a passion between the two of them, a
secret.

Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and
what they have done.

STANDING IN
the street, Fergus and Iron Mike kept a
lookout for the hired coaches.

Most of the loitering, lounging navvies had disappeared from the
Dragon's front steps when the cold settled in. Iron Mike said they had gone for
the railway contracts in Wales, or London for tunnel work, or had crossed the water
home.

“When are you going yourself down the line?” Fergus asked.

“Oh, I'm house porter now, Shea's house cat. My railway
days are over. Here we are,” Iron Mike said, seeing the carriages turning from
Hanover Street. “Fetch the lovelies.”

The whores came trooping down the steps in a pack, wearing cloaks and
bonnets, keeping Arthur surrounded with their bodies and laughter as they piled into the
coaches.

Shea nodded to the coachman and they were off, rolling by street corners
where emigrants stood guarding lumps of baggage. The sky above the stone buildings was
dark blue. Burnished pavement and scraps of frost shone in hard light.

WRAPPED IN
rugs, the whores dozed, lulled by the crackle
of wheels and the fresh air. The dense stone city thinned out to muddy building sites
and bleak new terraces of brick houses standing isolated in fields. Fergus kept awake,
alert and watchful, amazed at Liverpool's power and sprawl, the way it lay upon
the land.

Finally they reached open country, driving along a metaled road lined with
fat gray trees, sunlight flickering through the canopy of bare branches.

The whores awoke famished. There was a hamper and two bottles of champagne
in each carriage. They drank champagne out of the bottle and ate ham sandwiches and cold
meat pies as the pair of carriages rolled through a country of clipped meadows and soft
hills.

After noon the light thinned, the sky slowly losing its luster, and the
air grew sharper. In the yard of an inn, the horses were fed and watered, and the whores
brought inside and given warm cider and rum cakes with butter.
Piling into the coaches again, they started for home, the horses' hooves snapping
briskly on the road.

Late in the afternoon, near dusk, the coachmen made a last halt so the
girls could run out in a field and pee, while Shea fed apples to the horses, whispering
and stroking their necks. Arthur stood in the middle of the road, clutching a champagne
bottle, bonnet thrown back off his shoulders.

Fergus had climbed up in the driver's seat to look at the rim of
country, the hills of England, the neatly organized rigging of fields. They were close
enough to town so he could sniff coal smoke in the cold, still air. Daylight was murky.
The whores were squatting in tufted wet grass, peeing and swigging champagne.