Jack Maggs (3 page)

4

THAT EVENING MISS MOTT must cook dinner for seven gentlemen. When Mr Quentin had been master, this would have seemed a trifle. Then it had been ten courses every night, pheasant and guinea fowl, three different puddings to choose from. But Mr Buckle, although he had acted kindly towards his household, had not been conscious of his social obligations. He was a bachelor of an oddly private disposition, and often wanted no more than a little cheese and pickle for his tea. He hid upstairs in his snuggery with his book, his glass of porter, his round of Cheshire, and whether the housekeeper was housekeeping or the butler awake, he did not seem inclined to either notice or inquire, so long as he could have the cheeky little maid to wait on him.

Now there was finally to be a Grand Occasion, the fruits of his poor leadership were everywhere: one inebriated butler, one footman mad with grief, one untrained kitchen maid who was grating the suet so slowly that the cook could not bear to look at her.

Miss Mott worked on her apple pie. She prayed to God to speed the maid, to force Mrs Halfstairs to put her tiresome ruler away and engage a new footman. When Jack Maggs returned to the kitchen, she did not lift her head, but she had that capacity, commonly found in the short and shy, for peering up whilst seeming to look down.

When she saw no tell-tale envelope (the object of her curiosity being already in the inside pocket of Jack’s waistcoat) she assumed the worst—it was a well-known fault with her—and the little woman shivered like a dog with an itch that cannot be scratched.

Miss Mott was lean and sinewy and there was nowhere much for such a violent shiver to hide itself. Consequently it went right up her spine and disappeared inside her little white cap and then, just when it seemed lost, it came out the other side and pulled up the ends of her thin mouth in a grimace.

“I’m done for,” sighed Peggy Mott, but to no one she imagined would care or listen.

She gave the fellow a slice of short-bread and poured him a cup of tea.

Jack Maggs added four heaped spoons of sugar to the tea and stirred. He sipped. He seemed to close his eyes, but all the while he was assessing his new home. He watched the cook’s agitated little face as she sucked and blew and pursed her lips continually. She had the appearance of a sad and sorry bird, and he wondered about the nature of the cage that had made her so.

At the same time, Mercy Larkin watched Jack Maggs. She had no idea that she was observing an oyster working on a pearl, nor could she guess at the size of the upset contained inside the shell. Indeed, there was more than a little in Jack Maggs’s manner to suggest a man used to being well-treated at the table. He sat himself comfortably with his big legs apart, his hands resting loosely on his belly. He yawned.

“Very good,” he said to no one in particular.

He rested his chin upon his chest and closed his eyes a moment. Then a moment longer.

“Cook!” said the maid. And then, when Miss Mott did not react: “Look, ssh.”

“What is it now, Mercy?” said Peggy Mott, but she looked in the direction she was bid.

“Sssh. He’s asleep.”

“These hares is not hung long enough,” said Miss Mott nervously. “Not near long enough.”

“Come and look.” Mercy pushed her suet aside. She kneeled beside Jack Maggs’s great thighs.

“Mercy Larkin!” said Peggy, turning from the stove to see the bold girl with her face so close to the stranger’s. There was no doubt about it: the fellow was sound asleep.

“I don’t think he’s a footman at all. Don’t he look ever so distinguished?”

Peggy Mott looked at the hard face for a moment and gave another little shudder. “He looks like a murderer.”

“I think he’s a butler,” said Mercy. “Do you think we might have him instead of Mr Spinks? Do you think that might be her final plan?”

“Hush, Mercy. She has not engaged him.”

“Oh but she has, Mum. You are mistaken.”

Miss Mott began to rearrange the pieces of hare. “Mercy, you were never in service before. Someone should take you in hand, my girl, before you are properly spoiled. It does not help you that your dear Mother brought our master broth when he was ill.” She turned from the stove. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Mercy slid her small white hand into the sleeping man’s waistcoat and pulled out the long white envelope. “Hush, Mum. I am fetching you your heart’s desire.”

Miss Mott stared at the envelope. She blinked and sucked her lips in around her teeth.

“Oh, I do give thanks.” She held out her hand for the envelope. “I do give thanks.” Then, quickly, her mood changed. She gave the envelope back and spoke: “Nice and lively, Mercy. Please present Mr Maggs to Mr Spinks.”

“First we must wake him up,” said Mercy, slyly.

“Shake him, Mercy. Tap him on the shoulder.”

“I’ll not touch him, Mum. It wouldn’t be proper.”

The cook picked up a hand of flour and sprinkled it across the table, communicating, as she did so, a growing, almost uncontrollable tide of irritation.

“Mercy, I have seven gentlemen for eight o’clock. I have Mr Oates himself, God help me. Mercy, please be so good as to wake Mr Maggs and take him—and here, take this too, the envelope—to Mr Spinks, wherever it is that Mr Spinks is presently engaged.”

“And we know where that is, don’t we, Mum?”

Cook sighed. “Yes, Mercy, we do.”

It was as if the price was finally high enough, for now Mercy patted Jack Maggs upon the shoulder, and the new footman opened his eyes.

“We are to visit Mr Spinks,” said Mercy, “so as you may be officially employed.”

Jack did not understand exactly what she meant, but he felt her warmth, like a plate just removed from the warming rack. He reached in his pocket for his envelope before he noticed it in the girl’s hand.

“You dropped this,” she said, and handed it to him.

He knew he had not dropped it, but he took the envelope and followed her. She had a very pretty sweep to her back, and a soft white neck.

5

THERE WAS A PECULIAR little passage-way—its ceiling low and heavy-beamed, its walls crammed with bottles of preserves—which led from the kitchen, down a step, along a chalky white wall, and then round a corner to a heavy green door which, as Mercy opened it, revealed the butler’s parlour.

This was a surprisingly pleasant little room, with a window overlooking a budding old pear tree, and a big old-fashioned country fireplace in whose deep niches and sooty crannies Mr Spinks was in the habit of hiding his claret bottles. Along one wall was a mammoth oaken dresser in which was stored the household’s treasury of silver plate and before which the butler now sat. He was sound asleep with his heavy brass poker across his knee, his cadaverous old skull thrown backwards, and his little mouth wide open. The pages of the
Morning Chronicle
lay scattered on the floor beside his stockinged feet.

The new footman showed no interest in this spectacle, but turned his eyes on Mercy instead.

“You picked my pocket,” he said very quietly. As he spoke he laid his hand against his quivering cheek.

“Sir?”

“You had your hand in Jack Maggs’s pocket. That was very brave of you.”

She could not tell if he were pleased with her or angry.

“I’m not so brave,” she said.

As she knelt to gather up the newspaper she felt his presence all around her. She had a fancy—more, a kind of vision, a picture of herself laying her head against his manly chest. However, when she looked at him she found him staring at old Spinks.

Mercy did not like Mr Spinks—he was a bully and a snob—but when she saw the dried white spittle in the corner of his mouth, she was sorry that he should have lived so long as to let himself be seen like this. She folded the pages of the
Chronicle
and placed them carefully by the sleeping man’s feet.

“Our master is a good man,” she said. “He does not judge a human weakness.”

“Not even pick-pocketing?”

“Please don’t be angry with me. I done it just to stop poor Mottle fretting.”

“Oh, so you done it for her, did you? That were generous of you.”

“Well, yes, it was. I knew you were employed, because I saw your paper in your pocket, see. But Miss Mott, she didn’t see, and she was in a state on account of us being a footman short of what we should have. Tonight we have Mr Oates—Mr Tobias Oates—coming to our house to dine.” She looked at him as she said the famous name, but his features did not soften. “It is Mr
Oates
,” she said. “Mr
Tobias
Oates. You’d pick a pocket for Tobias Oates, I know you would.”

“I’m afraid,” he said, stiffly, “I don’t know no Tobias Oates.”

“Oh Lor.” She did not mean to laugh. “Where have you been?”

“I was with Lord Logan,” said Jack Maggs, a little gruffly, “in Glasgow.”

“You have surely heard mention of Captain Crumley?”

“Captain Crumley, perhaps I did.”

“Or poor Mrs Morefallen.”

“I’ve heard her mentioned.”

“It is all Mrs Halfstairs lives for—to see what Captain Crumley does about his son in prison. And now it is he who is to be our guest. This is a great day for Mr Buckle.”

“Mr Buckle—he is a friend of Captain Crumley?”

Mercy began to laugh, but something in the other’s eyes made her stop herself.

“Mr Buckle is your new master,” she said very seriously. “He has a famous author to come to dine with him tonight. It is because of this he has been in bed these last three days.”

“Your master is ill?”

“He could not bear to become ill at such a time.”

“He is sleeping?”

“He would like to sleep, but it is everything he can do to keep his poor brain from boiling over. No, he stays abed so as he don’t fall sick. He would not miss Tobias Oates for the world.”

“So do tell me, Miss . . .”

“My name is Mercy Larkin.”

“Did your master also make a friend of Henry Phipps?”

“The gentleman next door? Oh, Sir, you must forget
him
.” Her almond eyes were almost grey and very still. “Now you’re going to stay with us.”

He held her gaze. Even when there was a great crashing in the kitchen, he did not look away.

“That’s how she calls for me,” she said. She thought his eyes angry. “She drops things.”

“Then you should go to her,” he said.

Mercy did not move.

“You should be more careful, girlie,” he said.

“It’s for you to be careful,” said Mercy. “If I was you I would be very careful indeed.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She did not exactly know, but she felt passionate and irritated. “They will be likely to have you dusting, and it was the dusting that so upset he who came before you.”

“He gave his notice?”

“Aye, with a gentleman’s duelling pistol. He blew his brains out.”

“On account of dusting?”

She was not sure she liked his features any more. “He could not tolerate it,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Beg your pardon?” she inquired crossly.

“My pardon?”

“Beg pardon, Sir,” she said, “but I thought you was making a comment.”

“No,” he said, “nothing.”

“Oh yes,” she insisted, “something.”

She saw him hesitate.

“Did you ever
see
Mr Phipps?” he asked at last. “How was he? What sort of man was he?”

Mercy turned to face him. She was in a funny kind of passion she could not explain and Jack Maggs, seeing her face, somehow understood that she had become his opponent. He stretched to grab her wrist, but he was too slow. She giggled, turned, flipped the brass poker out of Mr Spinks’s lap so that it spun and clattered onto the tiled floor.

Mr Spinks sprang to his feet and found, before him, a stranger holding a long white envelope.

6

AT FIVE O’CLOCK ON Saturday Jack Maggs had been a man of substance, speeding towards London on the Dover Rocket. Now, at five o’clock on Sunday, he entered a stuffy attic which was, it seemed, to be his home awhile. It was not three paces from the squeaking door to the soot-stained dormer window, and he was across them in a trice, heaving up the stiff sash and thrusting his big head inquiringly out above Great Queen Street. Here he found no more interesting view than the melancholy apartments across the way and, in the immediate foreground, the slate tiles of the house next door to Mr Buckle’s. The latter, however, was obviously of particular interest to him, and had he been a master tradesman, sent to inspect their condition, he could not have examined the tiles more closely. They were grey Devon slate, with almost half of their visible surface covered with a thin coating of yellowish moss. They seemed to be, for the most part, well secured, although he noted a loose piece of lead flashing and a dormer window carelessly left open to the weather.

So intent was his inspection that he became only slowly aware of a distant percussion. It was not until he had squeezed himself back into his room that he discovered someone was hammering on his door and crying, “Open up!”

He stood before the door a moment with his brow quite markedly contracted. It was not at all clear that he would “open up.” Indeed he soon retreated to the window and looked out at the narrow strip of roof that might have afforded an escape. But finally he did as he was bid.

In the open doorway he was accosted by a being with hard white sculpted hair, a creature so resplendent in his yellow velvet jacket and soft doeskin trousers, that it took a full minute—during which time the impatient visitor entered the room and got himself deep into a large oak wardrobe—for Jack to realize that he was in the presence of the very same wild-haired Tom O’Bedlam with whom he had, less than an hour before, played bookends.

Edward Constable was of a lighter build than Maggs. He had fine wrists and large expressive hands which he had, in his recent dementia, been prone to wring. He had been a good-looking youth, and it was all still there: the high cheekbones, the well-shaped red lips; even the slight ridge on his aquiline nose did his case no damage. Of his recent madness there was, if one excepted the rather dangerous aroma of his master’s cognac, no remaining sign.

Now, without offering an explanation, he withdrew from the darkness of the wardrobe various items which he then laid out, with a somewhat theatrical tenderness, upon the little crib. Here he set a pair of doeskin breeches from which he picked a little smut. There a white shirt, just so. Beside it a lace cravat which he must move, an inch, no more, to accommodate a yellow velvet coat, the mirror image of his own, and from whose lapel he removed a single long blue thread. To this magnificent arrangement he added two long silk stockings and a pair of black shoes with silver buckles.

The two men stood side by side regarding the objects so assembled.

“I am to try these for size?” suggested Maggs.

“Tsk,” said Constable.

“I’ll take that as yes,” Maggs said, undressing with as much modesty as the cramped space permitted, aware all the time that he was the subject of the other’s censure.

“Now look here,” said Maggs, finally gaining the security of the breeches, “I know this was your mate’s kit, and he was your good friend and you miss him worse than air itself. I am sorry”—Maggs paused to tuck in the shirt, but did this in such a way that his witness raised a thin, sarcastic eyebrow—“I am sorry to remind you of the good comrade you have lost. I wish it was otherwise, but you see there is naught else I can do, in the circumstances, but wear his clobber.”

In response to which explanation, the footman hissed.

“No, good fellow. I really do not think it fair for you to hiss at me. For as I said, none of this business is my fault and I would rather, just like you would, that they would send me to a tailor and have the business done fair and square. But here we are.” Maggs slipped the jacket on. “The shoes are tight, but the coat fits well enough, and I am sure I can limp as far as pudding if you’ll be of some assistance to me.”

“Assistance. Is that so?”

“It is so, my fellow,” said Maggs, moving his bulk closer to the footman, who immediately began to back away. “And if I might start with what comes first—you can assist me with my hair.”

From the recesses of the commode the footman produced a saucer with a bar of white soap, a round box, and a large powder puff. These were duly offered, and declined.

“Still, old fellow,” said Maggs, “a cove needs more in the way of assistance than a saucer and a box.”

“Oh, a
cove
does, does he?”

“He does, yes,” insisted Maggs.

“You must excuse me,” shrugged Constable, “for it is quarter past the hour, and with Mrs Halfstairs it is eat when she says or never.”

“Mr Constable, I am asking you to render me assistance.”

The footman laid his hand upon the wooden door knob. “Mr Maggs, I am refusing it.”

Maggs’s hand snapped around the other’s wrist. Thus, even as the footman’s silver-buckled shoes scuttled out the open door, the upper part of his body was yanked smartly inwards. Maggs leaned across his prisoner’s flailing arms and drove the bolt home in the door.

“Now Thingstable,” he said. “You are about to place us both in peril.”

“Oh fie . . . ,” said Constable in a tight, disdainful voice. He held his free hand to his neck. “I tremble-Kemble. You’ll kill me? Is that what you have in mind? By God, I think it is. He wants to kill me.”

Softly, softly, thought Jack Maggs.

“Please, Sir, go ahead. No, no really, I do beg you, it would be a pleasure to be done away with by someone so nicely fitted out.”

“Fellow,” said Jack Maggs calmly, “you mistake me.”

“But this is rich, Mr Maggs. This is too rich for you to understand, but my friend, Mr Pope, with whom I stood and served for fifteen years—we were boys together in Lineham Hall—has done himself in. In this very room. Here, where we would chat after our day’s labours. And she, the meddling duchess, has me dress you in his very clothes, and now you say you wish to kill me . . . oh, please, you really have no notion what a pleasure it would be.”

“No one said anything about killing, my dear fellow.”

“I am no one’s dear anything,” said Constable, and burst into tears.

“Well, I must say then, I am sorry.”

“Sorry you wish to kill me? Or sorry to know such a thing has happened?”

“Don’t never try to beat me in the game of sorrow.”

“You think to match me?”

“I will sink you,” said Maggs gravely.

The pair of them stood opposite each other like two horses at a fence.

“All I require is that you assist me with my hair.”

“Assist?”

“I do not know how to achieve the correct effect with the hair.”

“Ha-ha,” said Constable, pushing his long finger against Maggs’s chest. “What are you? A toffee-twister, a dimber-damber?”

Jack Maggs took the finger, and held it hard inside his fist. Then he pulled the finger’s owner closer to him. “Listen carefully, fool. You do not have the devil’s notion who you’re dealing with.”

The pale blue eyes wandered over Maggs’s face.

“Who am I dealing with?” he asked at last.

“If you are very lucky, you are dealing with a footman.”

“A footman?”

“Hurry up, man. Before I change my mind.”

The stranger’s left cheek twitched violently.

“I’ll fetch the water,” Edward Constable said. “You’ll want it warm.”

When he was gone, Jack Maggs sat heavily on the crib, pushing his hand hard against the place on his cheek where the tic was centred. This tic pulled long cords of pain which ran from his left eye down to his back teeth, a pain now so intense that not even the thought that the footman might be on his way to call the police could rouse him from his seat.

Some time later, when the attack had finally begun to subside, Edward Constable returned. He brought a steaming copper kettle to the wash-stand.

“Now soak it,” he said.

Maggs looked up bleakly.

“Hair,” Edward Constable said. “You must remove your shirt and soak your hair.”

The big man bent slowly over the basin in his woollen singlet.

“Singlet off.”

“Singlet stays on.”

Constable put two fingers against Jack Maggs’s scalp and pushed his head into the bowl. The water was hot. Maggs cried out.

“Hotter the better,” said Constable. “Let it soak one minute by the clock.”

Then Constable cried, “Towel,” and Maggs was subjected to his first lesson in the footman’s trade as Constable, standing behind him, lathered his hair with soft soap and then applied the oddly perfumed powder with a puff. Sleepy Jack regarded the process in the mirror.

Constable combed the white sticky mess backwards with a comb, and then, like a baker icing a birthday cake, scraped off the edges with a wooden spatula.

“Just look at you,” he said. “It’s enough to make a cat speak.”