Jack Maggs (37 page)

88

HENRY PHIPPS LEFT HIS CLUB with neither raincoat nor umbrella to protect his new subaltern’s uniform from further rain. On the whim of Mr Buckle’s lawyer, the self-appointed navigator of their little party, they set course for Great Queen Street by way of Russell Street and Drury Lane. It was not the sensible course, nor the most direct, but Henry Phipps followed, and said nothing which might question the lawyer’s choice of route.

He was, as Edward Constable might have told him, a wilful and inhibiting man, but like many such individuals, Henry Phipps feared that he was weak of will, and as he followed Mr Makepeace, he brooded about that quality of character which allowed him to accept the direction of so poor a leader.

He walked down Russell Street with hands clasped behind his back, all the time looking with particular resentment at Mr Makepeace’s posterior as it pushed against the confines of his mackintosh. In those ample haunches he saw evidence enough to confirm his fear that he would follow any damn fool rather than the dictates of his own common sense.

What that common sense dictated was that he bid his house good-bye and report on the morrow to his regiment. But the fact was, Henry Phipps had long neglected the call of common sense, and it was a stronger force, his passionate desire to ensure his own comfort, which held him in the company of a man who wished him to commit a murder.

In this turmoil of mind, he turned the corner into Drury Lane and, before he knew it, had set his new boots deep into foul yellow clay. The mud was past his ankles and up around the bottoms of his trousers.

“This was a damned fool way to come,” cried he, staring down at the mucky ruin of his uniform.

“It is excavated for the sewer,” whispered Mr Makepeace.

“I am perfectly well aware that it is the sewer.” He withdrew his boots from the deep sticky clay and climbed up to the vantage of a broken brick. “Why would you come here when you could perfectly well walk up Long Acre? What possessed you?”

“I am more accustomed to Drury Lane,” whispered Mr Makepeace.

“We’ll clean you up, Sir, don’t worry. You come to my house first. My housekeeper will call her troops out for you.”

“Quiet.” Henry Phipps’s face in the gas light now clearly revealed that spleen which Edward Constable claimed to be so much a feature of his character. “I will lead the way.”

“Very good, Sir—please.” Mr Makepeace stepped back and, perching himself like a wet black biddy upon a pile of rotting lumber, gestured that Henry Phipps should move ahead of him.

Henry Phipps, however, did not move. He gazed instead down into that long pit the engineers had dug in the centre of the street. The trench was criss-crossed with new black pipes, and below this grid of iron was a further shadowy world of excavated arches leading to God knows what place. The sight induced in him a vertiginous unease which so paralleled the general anxiety about his life that he feared, even though he was some six feet from the edge, he might tumble into it.

He looked at Percy Buckle and found that gent nodding at him.

He looked back along Drury Lane, but it was a wild and unexpected landscape in no way like the Drury Lane he knew. Great wooden beams criss-crossed the street, like intrusions in a nightmare. Others had been propped against the walls of shops. These beams were joined together like inverted, lopsided
A
’s, and something in their rude design brought to mind the gallows. A kind of fog now rose from the excavation, and in the penumbra of the gas light Henry Phipps imagined he saw a man’s body hanging from a beam, suspended above the pit.

“You go,” he said, much frightened. “You first.”

He let the grocer squeeze past him, feeling, as he did so, the hard edge of the pistol case Mr Buckle carried concealed beneath his cloak. Then he followed suit, keeping close against the walls of the houses, avoiding the crumbling edges of the pit.

89

THE YARD AT MORETON BAY had distinctive odours: of dry clay dust, of fetid tidal mud, of some antipodean plant which gave off an oozing stink like blackberry mixed with sweat. And although it is sometimes said that the experience of smell itself cannot be remembered any more than the experience of pain, Jack Maggs could remember these smells as well as he could the carolling of those so-called “magpies,” and the squeaking wheels of the carpenter’s dray and the bloody red colour of its timber planks which would, in the course of one wet summer, be devoured by white ants.

He could still see the small red button at the apex of the flogger’s forage cap, the worn supple thongs which bound his wrists and ankles to the triangle.

There was a most particular smell hanging like bad meat around that cursed place, and small iridescent blue flies which crawled upon his face and nose. As the flies began to tease his skin, the wretched man would begin to build London in his mind. He would build it brick by brick as the horrid double-cat smote the air, eddying forth like a storm from Hell itself.

Underneath the scalding sun, which burned his flesh as soon as it was mangled, Jack Maggs would imagine the long mellow light of English summer.

The flies might feast on his spattered back; the double-cat might carry away the third and fourth fingers of his hand; but his mind crawled forward, always, constructing piece by piece the place wherein his eyes had first opened, the home to which he would one day return, not the mudflats of the Thames, nor Mary Britten’s meat-rich room at Pepper Alley Stairs, but rather a house in Kensington whose kind and beautiful interior he had entered by tumbling down a chimney, like a babe falling from the outer darkness into light. Clearing the soot from his eyes he had seen that which he later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of England, and of Englishmen.

Now, all these long years later, Jack Maggs had become such an Englishman. Dressed in his red waistcoat and his tailored tweed jacket, he stood before what Tobias Oates might have called “a cheerful fire.”

The face he turned towards Mercy Larkin was hardened by its time in New South Wales—it had been rubbed at by pain until it shone—yet there was in his dark eyes a bright and glittering excitement which even he, with all his schooling in the art of secrecy, could not hide.

When he had suffered pain, pain so intense he had begged for death, he had seen this woman with her dark tangle of hair, sitting with hands folded thus upon her lap.

Now he took the brandy bottle from the mantel and refilled her tumbler. He watched with approval as she drank, not daintily, but as one suffering from a deep and persistent thirst.

“To you, Miss.”

“To you, Sir.” She continued to toy with those locks of children’s hair upon her lap. While he had insisted that the hair was not her business, it did not displease him that she was so stubborn. Tenacity was a quality he had good reason to value highly.

“What say you, girl? You will keep house for me?”

She drained the last drops of brandy, then looked him straight in the eye.

“I will keep house for your babes.”

She stood up. Thinking that she intended to give him back the locks, he held out his hand to receive his property.

“They are in another country,” he said.

But she gave him her left hand, retaining the locks of children’s hair in the right, and so they remained, hand in hand, at once at cross-purposes and yet not.

“They are waiting for you,” she smiled.

“Hark.”

He withdrew his hand abruptly.

“It is the street door,” she whispered.

In an instant he had the candles snuffed, but there was nothing he could do to staunch the fire which continued to burn brightly, throwing their two fretful shadows up onto the walls and ceiling.

Jack’s hair bristled on his naked neck and, as the door swung open, he reached for the tarred twine handle of his dagger. A spectral figure entered the room, holding the candle high.

There, in the firelight, he beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life.

The apparition held a heavy pistol. Jack Maggs saw this instrument very clearly, yet he stayed rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed upon the spectre’s uniform. The firelight flickered on that line of horrid buttons, each one embossed with the number 57. He smelt the bad meat smell of the yard at Moreton Bay, felt the soft supple leather bind his wrists and ankles again. He could see the great dull gape of the pistol’s barrel, and the fire light twinkling on the bright brass hammer which was fully cocked.
I am to die before I meet my son
.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, there appeared from the darkness of the hallway none other than Percy Buckle Esquire. He pushed violently at the Phantom’s back so the creature lurched even closer to Jack Maggs, who was still staring, his mouth agape. “Take back your house, Sir. Defend your life against this burglar.”

The dagger was ready in his hand, and still Jack Maggs made no move.

“Fire!” Mr Buckle stamped his foot repeatedly upon on the floor. “Fire, for God’s sake, fire.”

At this confusing juncture, just as the pistol was raised and pointed at Jack Maggs’s heart, Mercy rose quietly from the shadows.

Jack Maggs watched paralysed as she walked softly towards the Phantom in her stockinged feet. In her right hand she still held those two precious locks of hair, but it was her left hand that he watched as she raised it, palm outwards, towards the barrel of the gun, as if by so doing she might catch the deadly ball; as if she were in truth a spirit, a force of nature equal but opposite to the malevolent being who now threatened to snuff out Jack Maggs’s life.

90

HENRY PHIPPS WAS ushered into his own hallway which seemed narrower and longer than he had remembered it. He did not feel himself a murderer, but an animal at Smithfield, hemmed in and hounded at all sides, with all his confusion magnified a hundred times by Percy Buckle, who was now pushing at his back with the point of his umbrella.

Gone was the mild apologetic little grocer who had first walked into his rooms at Covent Garden. In his place was this hissing, dark-shelled incubus whose alien and agitated presence strained the young man’s already over-stretched emotions. Percy Buckle, without being aware of it, had already twice placed himself in mortal danger.

It was Mr Buckle who flung the door open to the living room.

“Fire,” he cried, while the lawyer hovered somewhere behind them in the darkness.

“Fire!”—and pushed him forward into the room.

For Henry Phipps, everything in this present nightmare seemed to be happening very slow. He had all the time he required to look at the man who had written to him for most of his young life. He had always known Jack Maggs to be a convict, known him transported for “the term of his natural life,” and Victor Littlehales, his Oxford tutor, had taught him how to gratify the needs of him who signed his letters “Father.” They had laboured together on the replies until young Henry finally found his voice, and thereafter the role came to him easily enough. If the letters could be called “lies” they could also be called “comfort.”

Henry Phipps had sung to Jack Maggs, sung for his supper. He had sung without understanding it was a siren song, without ever dreaming that this tortured beast might demand of him that which had been conceived only as a flight of fancy.

“Defend your house,” cried Percy Buckle.

Henry Phipps had no choice. He raised the gun.

From the shadow by the fire, a young woman came towards him. Her feet were bare. She raised her hand towards the barrel.

91

AT THE INSTANT Henry Phipps discharged the pistol, Lizzie Warriner died in her bed. Even though her pain ended, there was in that wracked body no suggestion of repose, but everywhere tension, angularity, distress. She lay in the midst of the rucked and tangled carmine sheets, her hand thrust into her mouth as if she were still biting it.

Tobias was not yet the bearded eminence he would finally become. On the night Lizzie died, he was a frightened, ambitious young man. His eyes were bloodshot, his red mouth contorted by spasms of grief. He wept upon his dead lover’s pillow, and then on the skirts of his wife, although this lady, uncharacteristically, made no move to comfort him. Instead she sat upon the death bed, expressionless, heavy-jowled, the corpse’s cooling hand in hers.

“Light the fire,” she said.

“I will call the doctor.”

Mary Oates bestowed on her husband a look of passionate antagonism. “You will light the fire, you foolish man.”

“You are wrong,” he said, although what exactly she was wrong about he did not say. It was clearly not the fire he was speaking of, for he soon took himself downstairs and managed to make a vigorous blaze of coals and faggots. Then he obediently performed that service which the dead girl had beseeched of her sister. That is, he made a pyre of her linen. Given that the fireplace was not large and the sheets were still, in some places, wet, it was not an easily accomplished task, but he persevered.

Throughout all this, he wept unashamedly. Mary, by contrast, sat woodenly in a straight-backed chair, the same chair in which Jack Maggs had first been mesmerized. When Mary did look finally at Tobias Oates it was with a gaze of such coldness that her husband quailed before it.

“You do me a great wrong,” said he.

“We have both done great wrong,” she said.

Later Tobias would think he had imagined this reply, but now he sat on his heels and watched Lizzie’s very life blood burning upon the flames. In those flames he saw, as he would throughout his life, the figures and faces of his fancy dancing before him. He saw the wraith of their dead child folding and unfolding in the skirts of fire. He saw Lizzie herself, her face smiling and folding into the horrible figure of decay.

He could not bear it. Would not carry it.

He poked at the blackened linen and found in it one abhorrent face, that of the man who had led him to Mrs Britten’s door, who had placed those dung-coloured pills where they would poison that precious life.

It was Jack Maggs, the murderer, who now grew in the flames. Jack Maggs on fire. Jack Maggs flowering, threatening, poisoning. Tobias saw him hop like a devil. Saw him limp, as if his fiery limbs still carried the weight of convict iron. He saw his head transmogrify until it was bald, tattooed with deep wrinkles that broke apart and floated glowing out into the room.

It was Jack Maggs who had done this, and in his grief Tobias began to heap up all his blame upon him. It was now, on the seventh of May, in the darkest night of his life, that Jack Maggs began to take the form the world would later know. This Jack Maggs was, of course, a fiction, and so it may not matter that Tobias never witnessed the final act of the real convict’s search: never observed Henry Phipps raise that pistol with his trembling hand, never heard the deafening explosion, nor smelled the dark and murderous scent of gunpowder.

It would not have been lost on him that Mercy Larkin’s wedding finger was blown away, and that when Jack Maggs came to her side, the pair were finally matched in their deformity. But the forces that made that famously “abhorrent” face inside the fire were different from those that drove the real Jack Maggs, who escaped London with Mercy Larkin that very night on the Portsmouth Mail. There is no character like Mercy in
The Death of Maggs
, no young woman to help the convict recognize the claims of Richard and John to have a father kiss them good night.

Dick Maggs was eleven years of age when Jack returned from England. He had twice been up before the magistrate, and little John, who was four years younger, had the same hard belligerent face, the same dark and needful eyes. It was not an easy role for Mercy Larkin, yet she applied herself to being their mother with a passion. She who had always been so impatient of the “rules” now became a disciplinarian. She brushed their hair and wiped their faces. She walked with them to school and saw they stayed there. It was she who moved the family away from the bad influence of Sydney. And in the new town of Wingham where they shortly settled she not only civilized these first two children, but very quickly gave birth to five further members of “That Race.”

Jack Maggs sold the brickworks in Sydney. In Wingham he set up a saw mill and, when that prospered, a hardware store, and when that prospered, a pub. He was twice president of the shire and was still the president of the Cricket Club when Dick hit the cover off a new ball in the match against Taree.

The Maggs family were known to be both clannish and hospitable, at once civic-minded and capable of acts of picturesque irresponsibility, and it is only natural that they left many stories scattered in their wake. Yet amongst the succeeding generations of Maggs who still live on those fertile river flats, it is Mercy who is now remembered best, not only for the story of how she lost her wedding finger, not only for the grand mansion on Supper Creek Road whose construction she so pugnaciously oversaw and whose servants she so meticulously supervised, but also for the very particular library she collected in her middle age.

The Death of Maggs
, having been abandoned by its grief-stricken author in 1837, was not begun again until 1859. The first chapters did not appear until 1860, that is, three years after the real Jack Maggs had died, not in the blaze of fire Tobias had always planned for him, but in a musty high-ceilinged bedroom above the flood-brown Manning River. Here, with his weeping sons and daughters crowded round his bed, the old convict met death without ever having read “That Book.”

For this lack, Mercy compensated. She read
The Death of Maggs
, first as it appeared in serial, then again when the parts were gathered in a handsome volume, then again when the author amended it in 1861. Finally, she owned no fewer than seven copies of the last edition, and each of these is now (together with Jack Maggs’s letters to Henry Phipps) in the collection of the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Of the seven volumes, six are cloth, one is leatherbound, and this last is signed:
To Mercy from Captain E. Constable, Clapham 1870
.

The Mitchell’s librarian has noted on each index card the “v. rough excision” of that page which reads:

Affectionately Inscribed
to
PERCIVAL CLARENCE BUCKLE
A Man of Letters, a Patron of the Arts