Jack Maggs (8 page)

17

IT IS NO EASY MATTER to ride the footplate of a phaeton, to pose like a piece of German porcelain, to float like one of God’s angels above the mud and ordure of the London streets.

Yet when the two footmen walked out to the mews the following morning—that is Tuesday, April the eighteenth—Jack Maggs did not request instruction, and he rode without anyone having shown him how to keep his knees a little loose, to hold his chin high, to alight before the coach was finally still. Even Edward Constable, who was of a habitually critical frame of mind, was impressed by the performance.

Their first appointment was the Patent Office Library on Chancery Lane, and although there was no more momentous business at hand than their master’s wish to peruse the plans of the latest donkey engine, they proceeded towards this destination at desperate speed, cutting in ahead of pony carts and hackney cabs, in a style at once so reckless and arrogant that even the most belligerent of London drivers—and that was the grand majority—gave way to the handsome blue phaeton with the gold lion emblazoned on its door. Having watched Maggs survive this desperate charge it was obvious to Edward Constable that his benefactor had, not to put too fine a point on it, a “gift.”

At the Patent Office, Constable opened the coach door, guided his master past a puddle, and watched him scurry up the steps. The very sight of Percy Buckle Esq., with his sunken cheeks and bandy little duck-legged walk, would normally have been enough to put him in an irritable sort of mood, and indeed it was a constant trial to him to wait in attendance on so low-bred a master, but on this particular morning, Edward Constable had almost no interest in Mr Buckle. It was his fellow footman who preoccupied him, and in this regard his skill on the footplate was a very small item indeed.

The two servants stood side by side on the footpath of Chancery Lane. Only inches separated them, but the newcomer affected a distance which Constable, much burdened with his own feelings of guilt and gratitude, soon found intolerable.

“You are a puzzle of a fellow,” he began.

Maggs turned, briefly presenting him with the blank wall of his face.

“If I was unfriendly to you,” Constable persisted, “—and it is not even ‘if’ for I know I was...”

“It’s past, mate. Forget it.”

“My friend is dead. It makes me bitter, and when I’m feeling bitter I say things I regret.”

“Say no more then.”

“But I must say more,” cried Constable. “So help me, Mr Maggs, I must do more. I am a man that always pays his debt.”

“The old dame was whipping you, and I took a great personal pleasure in stopping her. But if you want to thank me . . . do you know that fellow driving our coach?”

“Foster.”

“You know him a good while, no doubt?”

“He was with Mr Quentin when we were at Bath.”

“You’ve done him some favour in your time?”

“We know each other, Mr Maggs. What do you want? Say the word.”

“Tell him that Jack Maggs begs the use of the titty he is sucking on.”

“Mr Maggs, I want to oblige you.”

“Then here’s the answer. Ask him.”

“But Mr Maggs, you ask the one thing I cannot do.”

“Your wooden leg ain’t broken, is it? Go tell that dozy old farmer that his brother the footman wants to dance with his sister Miss Flask.”

“I enjoy a gin myself, Mr Maggs, but a footman in his livery cannot be seen drinking from a flask.”

“You said yourself—I am a scoundrel, not a footman. A Knight of the Rainbow may not get a thirst, but a scoundrel . . . Come, Mr Thingstable, I have the pain back in my face. Would you rather I went into that little dram shop yonder? I do not doubt they would be pleased enough to have my money. It is a funny thing about a dram shop, they have a great fondness for we rascals. We are patron saints to them.”

“I’ll speak to Foster, Mr Maggs.”

The lanky coachman, a West Country man, stayed in his seat with a rug around his knees, and from this high throne engaged Constable in a long and dogged negotiation. Finally terms were agreed on, and he handed across his “drop of the doings.”

“You had to pay him?” Maggs inquired.

“It is my pleasure.” Constable looked up and down the street which was, at that moment, free of servants. “Now. Drink it now.”

Alas, it was at that very moment, as Maggs tipped the flask up to his lips, that Percy Buckle came skipping down the steps of the Patent Office.

“Where to now, Sir?” shouted the coachman, but not before Percy Buckle saw what he was not meant to. He frowned and clapped his gloved hands together. “Well, do you know,” he said, looking from Maggs to Foster very suddenly. “Well, do you know, today I’m going to try a new one.”

“A new patent, Sir?” cried Foster, perhaps worried he would lose his silver flask for ever.

“A new book shop,” said Percy Buckle. “The largest shop in London.”

Constable opened the door for his master. “That would be Bowes & Bowes, Sir,” he said nervously.

“Now there you are wrong, my man,” said Mr Buckle, fetching an addressed letter from his side pocket. “It ain’t. It’s Lackington’s Temple of the Muses.”

“Never heard of it, Sir,” said Constable.

“Well you don’t know London like I do,” said Percy Buckle. “It’s in Finsbury Square.”

“Up Holborn Hill?” The coachman groaned.

“’Fraid so,” said Percy Buckle. “’Fraid it is precisely up the good old Holborn Hill.”

At the foot of Holborn Hill, Maggs and Constable were dispatched to run alongside while the groom applied the whip to the horses’ backs. Thus it was a hot and weary Maggs who finally helped Percy Buckle dismount at Finsbury Square.

“Give it,” said his master.

“Pardon, Sir?”

“The flask,” said Percy Buckle, thereby causing one red spot to appear on each of his cheeks.

Constable watched Maggs. He saw how fiercely he looked into Percy Buckle’s eyes, and how his master twitched and jerked in the gaze of his servant’s attention. But then, to his great relief, he saw Jack Maggs take the coachman’s silver flask from his back pocket and put it into his master’s hand.

18

A FOOTMAN CAUGHT DRINKING in the street might consider himself fortunate to keep his job, but to Jack Maggs, who was not a footman, the confiscation of the coachman’s flask brought—
Jod’s blood—
a most ungrateful passion rushing along the capillaries of his face.

When he returned to the house he was still out of sorts, and it took everything in him to accept the polishing rags and beeswax which Mrs Halfstairs now presented to him. She put him in a dark little cubby at the back of the house. And there, with no view of the street at all, he was compelled to polish the bindings of Mr Buckle’s books.
Frig me for a blind man.
He had not come to London for this indignity.
Damn me for a horse.
He had come to meet with Henry Phipps. That gentleman might be arriving this very minute and he would not know.

At supper time he took the chair with the best view of the street, and never once took his eye off it. He drank his pint before the grace was said. He repulsed Mrs Halfstairs’s questions about the mysteries of Mr Oates’s experiments, bolted his shepherd’s pie, refused his bread and butter pudding, and—without being dismissed or excused his labour—went up the gloomy staircase leaving the silent servants sitting, rather fearfully, in his wake.

Once in his room, he drove the bolt home in the lock and changed from the doeskins and white stockings into the darker, sturdier garments he had arrived in.

He had had little sleep the previous night and his heavy-lidded eyes were now sunken and red-rimmed, and his hair was speckled with London smuts, but he had no mind for his powder puff. He opened the tight little window, pushed his body out, and stared down into the street. Once or twice he sighed, and once it seemed that he might climb out the window, but he remained in this tight, uncomfortable pose for over an hour, listening to the carriages and voices in the street.

Then, suddenly, he heaved his bulky body out through the window.

He had one hand on the sill and began to edge his great leg out in the direction of Henry Phipps’s house, and there he was—splayed out like a spider—when he heard, above the noise of carriage wheels on the street below, a sound more alarming and more intimate: “Hsst.”

Under the moonless sky he moved, sloth-like, back in the direction from which he had come.

“Hssst.”

He got his hand back on his window sill. Then he allowed himself to turn and look back along the roof line. He was not sure what he could see, but there was an uncertain dark shape at the third dormer window of Mr Buckle’s house.

“Constable?”

There was no answer, but he watched in horror as a shadow poured from the window, sliding, then crawling across the slates towards him.

He saw the hair, the skirt, the maid.

“Go back, for God’s sake.”

For answer she gave a startled cry, and slipped. He leaned out towards her but the stupid biddy skittered towards the guttering, her skirt ballooning out like a spill of ink, her pale hands flapping fishlike against the tiles.

Jack Maggs did not save her, but something did, for here she was, alive and crawling up towards him.

“Get to the blazes,” he hissed. “Go back.”

“Cor,” she said. “Those tiles is slippery as a Christmas pig.”

He took hold of her sleeve for she was still being most careless of her safety. She hooked her hand into his belt. “What you up to?” she inquired. “What’s a footman doing crawling round the roof at night?”

“None of your damned business, Judy.”

“My name is Mercy, Mr Maggs, as you very well know.” She brought her face close to his. He had suspected her drunk but now he discovered that her breath was sweet with sugared tea.

“Get back inside.”

“I may,” said she, “or I may not.”

“If you don’t want nothing bad to happen, Judy, you’ll go, and quick and lively and forget you ever saw me here.”

She considered this threat. “Then may I please go in through your window?”

“No.”

“It is an awful way back into my own. I’m afraid I’ll fall.”

“Christ!”

“You’re not very polite, are you.”

“I’ll give you polite.” He helped her through into his room, and then climbed in himself and locked the door behind her. And then, with his heart pounding uncomfortably in his ears, he returned to the roof. A minute later he entered Henry Phipps’s house through its unlatched dormer window.

Once inside he calmed considerably. He went carefully down the stairs, gathering blankets from the bedrooms as he went. In the gloomy drawing room he dropped the blankets on a settle and then emptied the contents of his jacket onto a pale yellow walnut bureau—a sheaf of paper, twine, a bone-handled clasp knife, a fat creamy tallow candle, a long yellow quill, a little apothecary’s vial which would later reveal itself to be filled with a queer kind of ink. Lastly from his trouser pocket he removed a small silver-framed enamel portrait. He was about to place this on the desk but then changed his mind and returned the miniature to his pocket.

He next dragged the desk across the room so it stood beneath the windows. He removed his shoes. He picked up a blanket, then stood on the desk top. With the advantage of this height he was able to hang the blankets across the curtains. He used the knife to cut the twine, the twine to tie the blankets to the rods. He worked swiftly but neatly, and when he was finished there was—for all the makeshift quality of the arrangement—a workmanlike symmetry to it.

He came down from the desk, restored it to its previous position, then lit the candle, which first sputtered, then gathered strength as it revealed the sparkling nests of gilt everywhere adorning the handsome room: chairs, mirrors, picture frames, even on ceiling mouldings far above his head.

Here he settled himself, a massive man in the centre of a jewel box, carefully arranging his quill and his paper. He picked up the blue apothecary’s bottle, and was about to remove its ground glass stopper when he heard a footstep on the upper stairs.

He snuffed the candle, standing quietly in the smoky dark, his heart beating very slow. He knew it was the man he sought. He knew without seeing him, without being told of his return, and when the footsteps came down into the hall he coughed first to give a decent warning.

“It’s me,” he said. “Jack Maggs.”

“I know it’s you,” said Mercy. “Who else would it be?”

19

MERCY LARKIN’S FATHER had been a mechanic at the Woodwell pickle factory in Wapping, and had provided for his family handsomely. Mercy’s mother had done a little of the lace work in the summers, and Mercy had for a while attended Mrs McFarlane’s School where—if you put aside the blots and smudges—she did not disgrace herself as a scholar.

But one balmy night in May when Mercy—aged thirteen—was sitting on her front step cutting the patches of rot from the taters, she saw a strange procession of men walking down the steep and narrow street. There was a crowd of them on either side of a dray which was drawn by a pair of skittish chestnut mares. The men were whoaing and shouting for fear, it seemed, that the beasts would slip and fall. At first she thought the men actors in a theatre troupe but when they stopped silently before her she looked into the back of the dray and saw her pale-faced father lying on a bed of straw, with his bloody bandaged arm across his pale blue smock. It were no one’s fault, the men said, for Horace had been clowning and had fallen backwards into the main drive. It was only a broken bone, but it flopped like an empty sock when the foreman himself lifted Horace Larkin and carried him inside to his bed. It was only a broken bone, yet what woe it brought, all so quickly: gangrene and death, penury and eviction, and on a hot May day in 1829 there were no crowds of men, only one workmate to help move the widow and her daughter from their little cottage in Finsbury. Their departure was early so no one would be awake to see their shame. They walked up the cobbled street on foot, then rode a dog cart to a damp and crumbling slum at the back of Fetter Lane. There Mercy and her mother attempted to set up a little business as the bakers and street vendors of plum duff.

This occupation proved taxing, and only erratically rewarding: more than once her mother came home with signs of damage on her clothes or person. Marjorie Larkin had always been quiet, but then, her husband had been noisy. He had taken up all the space and so her quietness was a relief, or at least could pass unnoticed. Now, in widowhood, her quietness seemed darker, deeper, more alarming, and when she cut her black hair so queerly short, she had nothing but silence to answer the questions of her weeping daughter. She sawed at the hair with the same knife they used to cut the plum duff into ha’penny slices.

During the day, Mercy was imprisoned in their steamy little room with the foul smells of the fried-fish sellers drifting up in the hot air of the court below. Her mother would not say where she went or what she did or how much money she had. Her eyes seemed to sink back into her head and no one would guess that she was a young woman and had once been beautiful.

Then she began to take the duff out at night, loading her little cane basket and covering it with a cloth. Then she locked Mercy in the room with chains and a great black padlock. She was sometimes gone only a short time, but at other times she would be gone so long that Mercy began to fear her mother dead, and that she herself would die before anyone would find her.

They were dreary nights and days spent locked away above the gin-soaked little court. Mercy was not by nature a passive girl and she would never forget that hellish summer when she passed the hours pacing up and down the dreary room, praying to God to prevent her nibbling at the precious supply of duff-flour, to stop her dipping her wetted finger one more time.

Then one Sunday, without explanation, her mother began to work upon a pretty dress for her, sewing blue ribbon on its bodice, and adding layers of crêpe de chine which she hung from the waist. It was not a usual kind of dress but no one could deny that it was very gay, and although the girl was alarmed by its want of fashion, she was most encouraged by the fact that it was not black. Despite the fact she did not ask, she clearly understood that the mourning was now over.

No plum duff was cooked upon this long day, and the room was cooler and dryer on account of it. Finally mother and daughter set out, just as the bells began to ring for evensong. Neither of them had eaten all day long, but Mercy, although a little light-headed, was far too excited to think of food.

They walked down into Fleet Street, the mother in severe black, the daughter like a bird of paradise. They paraded, their heads high, amongst the quality along the Strand, and from thence on into Haymarket, at which jolly scene they arrived just on nine o’clock. There was a grandfatherly old fellow with a dented stove-pipe hat who had set himself up a coffee stall, and it was here, with the charcoal smoke blowing in their eyes, and the appetizing odours of coffee and chicory in their nostrils, that the two women finally paused.

The young girl’s dress certainly drew attention, and there was nothing in the eyes of those who looked at her to suggest that it was—as she had been most certain—out of the fashion. It was the hottest part of summer and the crowds were heavy everywhere.

They had not been standing on their pitch more than a minute when a tall gentleman with a red set of whiskers doffed his hat to her mama, and talked to her with such solemn familiarity that Mercy supposed him to be an old employer of her father’s. When, minutes later, her mother pushed her towards the man, and said, “Go with him,” she went willingly.

That was when the storm started, not in the still, humid street that was their destination, but in Mercy’s mind; years later, the confusion of her memory still blew dust and soot across that street and curled up into the evening sky.

She had set off in innocent expectation of being bought an ice, or tea; and indeed her stomach gave a most unladylike growl when they passed Reilly’s Chop House. Instead, she and her companion went to the back of a casino, and stopped beside a door from behind which there emanated a great clattering of crockery, and the smell of onions cooking in butter.

The gentleman had barely spoken to her, and when he took her arm, she still thought him shy. He then called her “Lettie” or “Lassie.” His diction was not clear, and it occurred to her later that he had been the worse for drink. He helped her into the doorway, and she took the door knob, expecting it to open. When she found it locked, she did not have time to turn before she felt the stranger’s arms around her waist, and then he was squashed against her back with all his great weight, holding her clamped, talking to her all the while he lifted the back of her dress.

She felt the air upon her skin. She did not know what to do.

What happened then happened, and like a broken plate was soon all pieces, most of them missing in the dark—the pain, the onions cooking in the butter, the smell of pipe tobacco on his whiskers, the wetness on her legs.

When he put some money in her hand, the coins dropped and rolled out into the lane and he—red-faced now—stopped and chased them, and brought them back to her, and doffed his hat.

“Thank you, Miss.” He looked as if he might cry.

“Thank you, Sir,” she said.

He hesitated, then turned back towards the coffee stand. She stepped down from the doorway and walked away from him. She sought out the dark corners of the lane, places where the wetness she could feel would not show up in the light.

She walked back through those boisterous crowds. Men sometimes spoke to her. She did not know how long she walked, or where she went. A tall severe woman, eyes glaring beneath her hat, handed her a small square of white paper: REPENT FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. She was still holding the paper when she found, at last, the coffee stand. Her mother, upon seeing her, slapped her daughter across the face, then immediately began to weep.

When the little fried-fish seller introduced himself, the mother stopped her tears and turned all her powerful upset on the stranger. She called him “coarse” and “vulgar.” She said he had a “low understanding” of their situation.

“You don’t recognize me, Ma’am?” said Percy Buckle, who had emerged from the confusion of Haymarket with the smell of fried fish heavy about his person. He was not “vulgar” as Marjorie Larkin said, but had, in fact, “a betterly appearance” with his brown surtout jauntily buttoned up to his black satin smock. He had his tray of fish slung by a leather strap about his slender neck.

“You scram. You skedaddle,” cried Marjorie Larkin, so loudly that a small crowd began to gather round them, and the owner of the coffee stall began to shout at them to move away.

“I am your neighbour, Ma’am,” said the earnest little man. “And I am this girl’s neighbour too, and with your permission I am going to take her to her home.”

But the mother did not understand his offer, imagined in fact that he was making the very offer that she had already solicited, and now the poor wretch turned—her eyes so dark and haunted—to the owner of the coffee stall, and asked him please to chase the fish seller away.

The coffee-stall holder, a large coarse man with a big voice, then began to shout. He called Marjorie Larkin a hoo-oor and other things, and splashed the slops from a cup across the cobbles at her.

“I am your neighbour,” the fried-fish man said quietly to the young girl.

“You are the Devil,” cried Marjorie Larkin.

Percy Buckle ignored the jeering crowd and repeated: “I am your neighbour.”

Only when he opened his fishy little purse and put a silver florin in her hand, did Mercy’s mother deign to notice him, and then she followed him, as he indicated she should—he did not touch her in any way—out of the Haymarket and back down along the Strand.

The sad little party made its way back into the unnamed court at the back of Fetter Lane where, the Larkins soon discovered, it was their benefactor who was responsible for the bad fish smell which daily filled their little room, his accommodation being just one floor below theirs.

That night the earnest little man cooked them a fish and potato soup, and then, having made them promise not to leave their room until they saw him again, he returned with freshly fried fish for their breakfast.

And that was the start of Mercy’s long friendship with Percy Buckle who, even when he had ten fried-fish men working for him, always had time to sit and read the girl a bed-time story.

He was, as Mercy often said, the kindest, most decent man in all the world, and she would—as she later told Jack Maggs—as soon cut off her own arm as lose his kind opinion.