Walking in Pimlico (30 page)

‘What would you say if I told you that Freddy McHenry’s arm, which you see before you, can be restored by the application of a specially prepared salve?’

‘I should say, let me see it work, and I will believe you,’ said I, quickly falling into this line of thinking.

He smiled. ‘Then I will show you,’ and he called to the lad to roll up his shirtsleeve. His arm was certainly short and thin, little more than a bone with the skin hanging upon it, though the sun was glaring and I was forced to shade my eyes.

‘Soloman’s Sure Salve is applied,’ announced the showman, and the lad produced a pot from his pocket, took a good dollop of the stuff and rubbed it vigorously, like a washerwoman, into his arm which I swear began to grow before my eyes. Where there were just stubs for fingers, big ones appeared and in length that arm grew inches and, I do believe, had another dollop of the salve found its way there, would have produced an arm rather too long than too short. I remarked that the showman ought to guard his recipe very carefully, for there were those who would stop at nothing to lay their hands upon medicine so miraculous, and indeed if he had a pot to spare, I would gladly purchase one. Joe shook his head and turned away from me, and I felt a little put out by his manner. The showman was not at all bothered, and produced a small, gaily coloured jar, covered with shooting stars and grinning imps, and ‘Soloman’s Sure Salve’ exploding out of a cloud in fiery letters.

‘A gift,’ he said, and I was ready to argue with him, and at least
offer him a penny or two, but he took off the lid and begged me to smell the compound. I took a noseful, and wanted to say goose fat, and on the turn, but feared offending him. It did have all the appearance of goose fat, being thick and greasy and grey, and the pong was not difficult to place, but I knew it could not be, for this, according to the label, and the showman, and Freddy McHenry’s lengthening arm, was Soloman’s Sure Salve.

Joe grabbed the jar, sniffed it and quickly handed it back.

‘Goose fat,’ he said, and the showman smiled.

‘True to you, young Snowball.’

I wanted to argue, but Joe tugged my arm with urgency now.

‘Remember,’ said the showman, ‘that folks
want
to believe. If I say this is Soloman’s Sure Salve, then it’s true, if you want it to be. Why should you not? Why should you
not
believe your eyes? Why should goose fat
not
cure a wizened arm, or anything else, if you want it to? And if
I
tell you it can.’

Why not indeed!

‘It is the very essence of showmanship!’ he said, smoothing his moustache, and making it sound so deep, so full of meaning, that it might have dropped from the lips of a parson in a pulpit.

Joe again pulled hard at my elbow, and I lifted my hat and made a polite farewell. The showman did likewise.

‘If you’re ever in need of a shop, come and see me. I have other shows hereabouts and I can always use two good men. Particularly young Snowball here,’ and he nodded towards Joe, who nodded back. ‘The name’s Roscius Soloman, the Bountiful Beauty, the Emperor of the East.’ And with that he disappeared into the shop like a rabbit into a wizard’s hat, pushing his way through the crowds of people eager to sample the crocodiles and heads. I would have gone in myself, but for Joe’s urgent tugs.

He was silent for most of our journey, while I was still considering the Sure Salve and the wizened arm and heads shrunk down to
taters, but after half an hour’s walking he took my arm again and directed me into an alleyway full of nothing but mossy cobblestones where the sun never lit them, and dead cats what crept there to die. We stood in the shadows looking down that dim and narrow gap between Godkins’s horsemeat shop and an empty building, occupied by rats and tramps. It was quiet and damp, though the sunny street, full of people about their business, was only a step or two away.

‘What’s up, Joe?’ I said, for I had a sense of his unease.

Joe rubbed his knees: they pained him, he often said, on account of his short legs being set oddly and his feet being on the large side. When he walked any distance, he did so with a roll, and that roll became greater as he got more tired and so his knees pained him. He crouched down and gave a sigh, and I perched on a burst sack of straw, scattering mice underneath me.

‘Mr Corney, sir,’ he said in his deep voice. ‘We must decide what is best for the lady. And the child. If we don’t then others will, and they will decide what is best, what is profitable, for
them
. We have a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, but we, you and I, we cannot look after Mrs Marsh. So we must find these ladies, the Misses Bellwood, as Mrs Marsh asks us to, and urge them to take her in. I think you must say to them that, if they will not take their friend in and give her a home, she will die. I think you must say this to them in a way that they understand.’

I wanted to ask him about the child, and he looked into my head before I had the chance.

‘If the child remains here alone,’ says he, rubbing his poor knees, ‘it will die. If the child goes with its mother, it will die. But it is better that it dies in the arms of its mother than alone and with strangers.’

Easy to say, Joe, returns I, but how to do it? We knew what Chittick had in mind for the child. Always with an eye on making a
quid, he planned to exhibit it. Buy up a nice painting of a child with a head as big as Wales (two a penny if you knew where to look), work up a little stage with curtains, find a female to hold the kid and a talkative cove to tell the tale and there’s a tidy earner. At a penny a throw, before the main show and all day until the kid died, it was an easy blow-off. And, though he didn’t have the style of Soloman, Chittick was a showman and knew how to do it.

Joe agreed.

‘And another thing, Mr Corney, although it is right that we save the child, we must also save ourselves. Mr Chittick will regard himself as a cheated man. He will be angry, and if he finds out what we have done, he will blame us. He will think that he could have earned plenty of money with this poor baby, and we – his clown and his groom – have deprived him. Yes, I think he will be very angry!’

I thought Joe had about put his moniker on it right enough. Chittick’s anger was not something I wanted to dwell upon, having often had a sample of it. But I was out of the circus line soon enough anyway, having found that tidy berth from the
Era
, and thinking about that reminded me of the scrap of paper torn from that very Organ of the Profession which was even now in my pocket. The one given to me at the Railway Hotel by Mrs Marsh. I brought it out, intending to look again at the card for the Sisters Bellwood and flattened it upon my knee. I thought I had put it more carefully into my pocket, for the paper was curled around the edges, so I turned it over the better to straighten it out.

feat of throwing a double somersault. They have a large troupe of vaulters.

BIRMINGHAM
Chittick’s Mammoth Equestrian hippodrome and zoological circus are still amusing this town. The novelties produced at this establishment are beyond the average expectancy of its
numerous visitors. Miss Martinetti on the tightrope is a most competent little artiste, and an act of horsemanship by Mr Martinetti, entitled ‘The Wild Indian’ was portrayed in a most daring and intrepid style. The various clowns are droll and witty, a new addition, Mr Corney Sage (Funny Foodle), in particular. We also witnessed the clever feats of a highly trained camel conducted by Mr Crockett.

I read it. Then I read it again, for I was taken by surprise to see my own name sat large as life before me in such a respected newspaper. And I turned it over and there on the back were the Sisters Bellwood, a little crumpled. And then I turned it back and there was yours truly. Here in my other hand was an address for the Sisters Bellwood. And all these pieces of paper were handed to me by a lady (of sorts) who even as we sat in the alleyway was sweating her life away, and who said Lucy and Kitty were her friends. The same friends as me. I could not see how this could be, but it was. A coincidence multiplying over and over.

Now I have to interrupt here to say something that I have mused over, for I am brought to mind of a story that my old master used to tell about the time an old dog rushed out of a chandler’s shop and bit him on the leg. The wound was very great, almost to the bone, and my old master was much inconvenienced by the injury which took him from his work for nigh on a fortnight. But that old dog, who was still rushing out of the same chandler’s shop and doing injuries to other innocent passers-by, was the means by which a very great change came over my master. For it was while he was laid up with the wound that my master came to know that his wife was enjoying the lodger’s bed, and the lodger too, who was a city clerk and quite twenty years younger than she. My old master was unsuspecting, as they say, and so the discovery was a great shock to him. That wound, he would say, given to him by the chandler’s dog, left
a scar upon his leg, but also a scar upon his memory. For when that old scar pained him, it recalled his wife and the city clerk and the unhappy discovery he made.

So, like my old master, I cannot now turn the pages of the
Era
and see ‘Birmingham’ written in bold letters without recalling that moment when I turned over a scrap torn from it and saw my own name.

But Joe was still talking, in that slow, steady way he had, talking in rhythm with the rubbing of his poor bent legs.

‘I wonder,’ he was saying, ‘if we might lay the blame for the disappearance of Mrs Marsh and her baby upon your landlord, Mr Halls. Perhaps we might suggest that she has been hidden away by Halls. Or got away. At least for a short time. It will be a distraction for Mr Chittick, and it will give us the opportunity to get ourselves away. But we must tread very carefully. From what I have heard, Mr Halls might also be a dangerous man.’

Clever Joe. He’d been thinking along practical lines while I was wondering about something else altogether. I had forgot about Halls and the difficulties that might entail whether he was in the plan or out of it. Like Joe said, he was a mean devil, and cunning with it, and I did not want to cross him. And in truth, I could not have forgot him even if I had wanted to (which I did), for Halls and his lung had been haunting the circus like a spirit for days, looking for me and Mrs Marsh, and asking everyone he come across where we was. Circus folk, as you know, are tight-lipped with strangers and were not about to tell him anything, even though he wheezed and held on to his chest and looked pitiful. Not that they are hard-hearted. Far from it. But they can spy a mongrel when he creeps up to them, so they spun him a yarn, and Joe (who knew about Halls and how fond he was of Mrs Marsh and her trunk) had been spinning him a regular three-piecer. In mute language, of course. Yes, he’d seen missis a week ago hereabouts; no, Corney Sage he hadn’t.
No, didn’t know where he’d gone to. Yes, missis might have gone with him. No, he wasn’t certain. Yes, possible. Yes, likely. All this fairly turned Halls about, and Joe said he couldn’t hardly hold back his anger, turning red to white like a barber’s pole, and no doubt thinking that he had been regular done over by one and all.

But, said Joe, that didn’t knock him on the head, for he was still poking his face about and upsetting the animals and women. ‘He is dangerous,’ said Joe, ‘like a nasty dog that licks your hand and then bites it.’

Dogs again.

All things considered, as we watched the flies buzzing around the horsemeat shop, we were in a pretty dilemma, though better off than we had been when we’d set out. Joe examined the coins what the showman had give him and found they amounted to three sixpences – the price of a cart to take Mrs Marsh and baby to her friends in Lower Marlpool-street, he said.

Corney Sage – Lower Marlpool-street

L
ower Marlpool-street was not a bad street. It was not a good street, either, being short and close-packed, with the railway yard at one end, and the other end opening out on to Upper Marlpool-street. The Great Turk was nowhere near as grand as it pretended to be, and Minton’s Palace – named after the landlord, Hector Lysander Minton – was the building round the back. A concert room in cert, newly built, with its own door, indicating that Minton and his establishment was on the up. But we did not linger on the outside, having a considerable thirst, which only Felkin’s Particular would serve and, as Joe reminded me, a tall order of a day’s work to complete before the evening.

Within the Great Turk all was tidy and clean, and the maid (who was quite a stunner for such a back-of-the-way sort of place) was not against chatter dressed up with flattery. So, trying my hand at the showman lark of telling a good tale, I made out I was the long-lost brother of two sisters who I had traced from my home in Africa, where I owned a score of gold mines, and six hundred slaves (Joe being a sample), and as I had come into cash and was of a generous spirit, I wanted to lighten my load by ‘handing over a corn-siderble amount to my dear sisters, what I had not seen since we was separated
as children’. I gave this tale plenty of colour, while Joe assumed his ‘slavish’ air – where he said nothing, looked nowhere and breathed quiet. The girl was much took, and in certain, Mr Soloman, the showman, was to the mark when he said that people want to believe what’s told them no matter how out-of-the-way or uncommon. For so took was she that she gave us house-free glasses, and twisted her curls about her finger and lifted her skirt (to show a pretty ankle) and altogether let me know how agreeable she might be. I was inspired.