Jack Maggs (35 page)

81

AT THE MOMENT THE two travellers entered that deep green drawing room, Elizabeth Warriner was sitting in a straight-backed chair by the window. She was wearing a dress which was very bright and luminous, like the whites in Henry Bone’s enamel portraits. There was light also in her eyes and this, combined with the angle of her head, immediately bespoke a very intense kind of interest in her visitors, as if she knew that her fate was to be decided by the pair of them.

She placed her tea cup carefully on the sill and rose to meet them. Tobias then came to the fore. He approached her, his hands still manacled inside his pockets.

“Hullo.”

“Hullo.”

She was exceptionally agitated, and for a moment it seemed to Jack Maggs that she would rush into her lover’s arms, but then he saw her gather herself in. She stretched out a hand to tug at the arm of her brother-in-law’s travel-stained coat.

“Something is the matter with your hands, Toby?”

“No, no.” His red lips twisted into a lopsided smile. “A little prank of Master Maggs. Where is my wife, Lizzie?”

“I rather think she will sit with Grandma Warriner until the storm is over.”

“Yes,” said Tobias Oates, staring at her expectantly.

“It will be a big storm,” she said. “The sky is extremely dark. I have been watching it.”

“You are not frightened?”

“Of the storm? Oh no.”

“There is a spot of business I must transact with Master Maggs.”

The girl looked briefly at Jack Maggs, but quickly returned her frank gaze. “Tobias, we really must discuss my trip to France.”

“Yes, I will drink a cup of tea with you the moment this business is concluded. Is the pot fresh?”

“It is rather bitter, as a matter of fact. Mary insisted on making it herself. I tell her she is poisoning me, but she says it is from Rajasthan.”

“Mr Maggs, come up to my office, and we will deal with the contents of the tin box.”

While Jack Maggs judged the gentleman very hard for this offhand behaviour with his beloved, he obligingly followed him up the stairs. It was not until they were both inside the writer’s office that he took Tobias Oates roughly by the arm.

“Go back downstairs,” he demanded.
“Kiss
her.”

Tobias attempted unsuccessfully to shake himself free.

“She is still a girl,” said Jack. “She is in a terror. Tell her you have the pills, and you will take care of the situation.”

“Then release my hands, Sir.”

“Do not give me orders, mutt.”

“If you do not release my hands I cannot do as you wish, for I do not have hands to give her the pills.”

Jack Maggs took out his dagger, and did that which was required. He cut roughly and watched while Tobias did up his buttons.

“Give her two pills, and when you have done that come back to me. If you run away or leave the house, I will have to hurt her.”

Petulantly, Tobias rubbed the red marks on his wrists. Jack Maggs despised him for a sissy. “Go,” he said. “Do it now.”

“Why would you have me tread this path?”

“You would be a very stupid lad to argue with me.”

“But is this not the very path that brought you and Sophina so much pain and anguish? Is this not what I hear you howling about each time the magnets touch you?”

Jack Maggs put his mangled claw upon his face, clamped his nose, his chin, his jaw, as if he were a dog whose life could be shaken from him. The convict’s rage was very great, and he brought his vile cracked lips very close into the other’s face.

“What else can she do? If she has your baby her life is ruined. This is the only path she has available.”

“I cannot take it.”

“It is not for you, Nokes. It is for her.” And with that he pushed Tobias out the door. Half-way down, the reluctant writer turned and saw Jack Maggs’s massive shadow on the landing.

He made a venomous, impatient sound, which Tobias would remember later as a kind of hiss.

82

IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN Tobias’s method to approach his subject by way of the body. When he had set himself the task of writing about Jack Maggs, he had first produced a short essay on his hands, pondering not merely the fate of the hidden tendons, the bones, the phalanges, the intercarpals which would one day be liberated by the worms, but also their history: what other hands they had caressed, what lives they had taken in anger. He began by picturing the newborn hand resting briefly on its mother’s breast, and then he sketched, in the space of four pages, the whole long story leading towards and away from that “hideously misshapen claw.” This essay he knew to be a jewel, and he had hoarded it like a clock-maker, setting it aside for its small part in his grand machine. Now, with his wrists raw and red from bondage, he had, to put it very mildly, lost interest in his subject: the Criminal Mind had become repulsive to his own imagination.

Yet it was the Criminal Mind which now controlled Tobias. It was at its directive that he must now, this instant, hold his sister-in-law in his arms. Under its orders he placed two pills in that tender white hand and spoke as confidently, nay, as reverently, as if they had been communion wafers. Yet even as he calmed Lizzie’s fears he saw, in the pills’ brown misshapen form, not the salvation he promised, but the excrement of something abominable and verminous.

Then came three loud thumps on the floor above his head. Returning to his office, he found the murderer, legs wide apart, demanding to be presented with his “secrets.” He showed the writer no particular respect; indeed, he occupied his office wholly, the rank oil-skin odour of his coat possessing every corner of the room.

Later Tobias mourned the manuscripts he then so readily destroyed, for he very soon forgot how badly he had wanted Jack Maggs gone from his life. He might have contrived to hold back the best of his treasures, but no, he jumped up and down on chairs and ladders, divesting himself of everything related to Jack Maggs. Here— pigeon-holed at “H”—was the essay on the hands. Beside it, folded in four, were another two pages labelled “Hair.” This Jack Maggs received incredulously.

“This is my hair? All this about my bloody hair?”

“Yes.”

“But nothing else?”

“That only.”

There had been eight magnetic sessions in all, and the record of each one was tied and bundled in good neat order as you see the clerks do at the Inns of Court. Toby had to stand on his desk top, on tip-toes, to reach, and then he threw them at their subject.

“All this is me?”

“One way or another.”

Jack Maggs, for his part, untied each bundle and, although he did not read everything, he did read a good deal, enough to cause a very great embarrassment to show upon his face.

“My boy must not read this,” he said.

“We burn it,” agreed Tobias Oates. “We burn it now.”

The thunder echoed in the streets. Wind and rain rushed round and round the little garden.

83

LIZZIE SAT IN HER CHAIR. She sat with her novel open on her lap while she endured her terrible thoughts. Sometimes she read a line or two, but there was not a word in
Castle Rackrent
that could not in some way lead her back to her situation, to that homunculus which, being a creature of her own heart and blood, must be at least dimly aware of its fate. Did it not then, as she did, wait in dread, knowing that its last small hope had been taken from it?

She could not feel the poor creature any more than she could feel the presence of God or His angels, and yet she knew every moment of her life to be ruled by its presence, and even as the storm descended upon them and a mighty wind rushed down Lamb’s Conduit Street, pushing an empty wooden barrel before it, Lizzie sat with her hands resting over her belly.

When she heard Toby’s footsteps on the stairs, she felt no great expectation of comfort from that quarter. He had talked; she had listened. She did not blame him. She had done as he said.

But then she saw he brought that wretched convict back with him, and that the pair of them were carrying all manner of scrolls and piles of manuscript which they dropped, carelessly, before the fireplace. They did not look at Lizzie, or acknowledge her. Thus there was, in their general busyness, a kind of heartlessness.

Toby removed the fire-screen which she and he had bought together, one happy morning on Holborn in the early spring. Toby had always been afraid of fire, as if it would be the thing which would dash in and steal everything from him. How often, she thought, we defend ourselves against the wrong thing.

It was quite hot and close in the room, with the windows closed against the storm, but the two men were tearing up Toby’s manuscripts, as if they planned to begin a fire. Now her brother-in-law knelt before the grate and Lizzie caught, in the cast of his mouth, a glimpse of his great stubbornness, his will. Why he was about to destroy his own creation was beyond her, but how she wished she might have a will like that, and not be sitting here now when she might have gone away on a ship to France.

The rattling of the window pane brought her attention back to the street, and there she presently spied a small bent woman attempting to cross the busy road. She was not an old woman, but clearly destitute. Her clothes were ragged, her legs bowed, and she had the panicky motion of a small creature that knows itself the prey of many larger ones. She was carrying some treasure in her pinafore, and there she was, like a beetle or an ant, determined to cross whatever obstacle chance put in her path. The rain was very heavy but the wagons were no smaller or slower on account of it. Lizzie watched the woman take a step forward, then one back, then forward and then, finally, the poor soul made a fast and desperate foray out into the centre of the road.

Here, with a brewery dray almost on top of her, she slipped and fell.

She had been carrying onions in her apron and now all these treasures went rolling out across the coal-black road. The Clydesdale’s soup-plate hooves scattered the onions. The wheel of the brewer’s dray passed by the woman’s head. She rose hastily and began to gather up her onions.

Lizzie began quietly to cry.

On hearing the striking of a match, she turned. Toby was holding a match to the papers in the grate. She watched the fire catch. She watched the papers burn.

Then she saw that Toby had closed his eyes, and in that moment his face was so forlorn that she could easily see what great damage was being done to him as well. As the flames illuminated his familiar face, Lizzie saw, not stubbornness any longer, but a deathmask, like the one he had always kept in his office.

It was then she understood that her life had always been travelling towards this point. There was always to be this storm. The poor woman was always going to fall. This moment had lain there waiting since the day when Tobias had first come to court her sister at her father’s house at Amersham.

Now the wind rushed down the chimney, blowing smoke into the room. Toby and the convict were arguing. Toby wished the convict to go to his home. The convict said that he would “damned well” stay all night. She did not pay them much attention. She was thinking that she had been a very selfish girl indeed. She had always known the hurt she risked doing to her sister, and of that she had been careless enough, but she had never considered the harm possible to that luminous young man who had appeared before her family’s window one Sunday morning, dressed-up as a sailor, dancing a hornpipe. He had a boy’s face, and sweet needful lips, but he had been, although the world had not yet seen it, a giant amongst men.

And she, Lizzie, had almost ruined him, and she could not bear that that be so. She laid her hand again upon that little mound, that soft roundness of her stomach.

The men’s voices were softer now. It seemed the convict would indeed depart for his own establishment, and return here in the morning. A threat was made, a last match lit. She watched the final sheaf of papers flare, and saw the shrouds of blue and yellow as Toby stirred them with the poker. In the flames she saw ghostly figures, fictions rising amidst the skirts of flame.

When this last blaze had died away, the grate was filled with mourning: all those lines of gorgeous copperplate had become sheets of black crêpe which he now struck at with a poker. Whether they were struck in anger or merely from a desire to make them burn more efficiently, she could not tell; but if the latter, this intention was soon thwarted by the wind, which once again blew fiercely down the chimney and this time carried the black and broken paper out into the room. The men leapt back, coughing and waving their hands. The burnt papers rose, like black moths, as high as the ceiling.

Elizabeth Warriner, Tobias Oates, Jack Maggs—they all stood as the black ash fell around them.

84

“LIKE I SAID, MATE,” said Jack Maggs, opening the door and stepping into Lamb’s Conduit Street, “I’ll be at your door at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“You trust me now, Jack?”

Jack Maggs shrugged. The pills Lizzie Warriner had now ingested would soon begin their work. Then Tobias Oates would be so fully occupied, his hands might as well be tied.

“Are you not the least concerned that I might run?”

The other smiled grimly. “You tried that once already.”

“Still, I might betray you.”

“You’re in too deep, mate. You’d get no benefit, no benefit at all.”

For all this, Jack Maggs was by no means complacent. When he once again approached his property in Great Queen Street he in no way resembled the fellow who had got down off the Dover
Rocket
. Like a rat along the wainscot, he moved very quietly, melting with the shadows. He spied on his own house for a full hour before he crossed the street and unlocked its front door with a set of “ticklers.”

While the storm had long since abated, the windows were heavily curtained and so, although it was only nine o’clock, the house was very dark.

As Jack Maggs closed the door behind him, he felt the presence. There was no unexpected sound, no foreign odour: the ground floor gave off that same satisfying beeswax smell as hitherto. Yet there was someone here, no doubt about it. And now Jack allowed himself to acknowledge that he had hoped it would be thus. Indeed it was this very prospect which had drawn him away from Lamb’s Conduit Street when prudence should have kept him there all night. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

Cautiously, he stooped for his knife. He felt the rough sure grip of the handle which he himself had made with twine and tar. A convict’s knife, it dated from before the time when he could have afforded the finest steel and ivory for the handle. He crouched now, a powerful shadow in the doorway of his own living room, drawing the blade in wide circles through the night.

Noiseless as a shade, he then moved forward towards the settle. He heard a small sniffle.

“Henry?”

There was a second sniffle.

“Henry, is that you?”

He struck a match, thus revealing a sad and sorry Mercy Larkin, huddled in a tartan cocoon upon the settle.

“Christ, that was a foolish thing to do.” He sat heavily on a gilded chair, well apart from her.

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you, don’t stick your nose where it ain’t wanted.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told you long ago it were dangerous.”

“You thought I were Mr Phipps.” Mercy sat up and blew her nose. “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

“You could not frighten me, girlie. It would take more than you to frighten me.” But he felt sick and sour with disappointment and he did not bother to hide his great displeasure.

“You was expecting your Henry?”

He slid his knife back in his boot. “None of your business.”

“If that’s what’s got you in a snot, I can take you to him now.”

“
You?”

“Why do you look at me like that?” She folded up the tartan rug as if her departure were imminent. “Do you think I am such an idiot I couldn’t find my way to Covent Garden?”