Pugg's Portmanteau

by DM Bryan

  The first cut ran along a low overhanging beam of the ceiling, and from thence reversed to separate Tom, the idle apprentice, from his even wickeder companion, a fence dealing in stolen goods. As if in an act of charity, Gotobed’s cut separated the fence from Tom Idle’s company, even as Tom made his criminal exchange. In Tom’s upturned hat are fob-watches and snuffboxes like to the ones that so often came, as if of their own accord, into my own hand. The fence’s face was more like a skull than flesh and blood, but even thus it was a visage with more life to it than all of Bickham’s posed, drawn dolls. The cutline continued, taking with it Tom Idle’s hands, as befits a thief, and the well-formed calf of his leg. I mourned this calf most particularly, for its curved line was beauty itself in accord with Mr. Hogarth’s discourse on the matter—which I had not read but had heard discussed in the coffee shops. No matter, Tom’s leg was cleaved in twain.

  “Are you mad?” I cried, examining the damage from every angle.

  At first, Gotobed looked surprised, but then he consented to explain himself. “By the line of this cut,” said he, reaching over me to spread apart the severed halves of the print, “we are indentured to each other. The uniqueness of this cut makes the picture both key and lock.” And with this he pushed the portions together so that the cut almost vanished and the print appeared whole again. Then he rolled up and handed me my half. “This is our contract,” he said solemnly, and I might have argued if I hadn’t been so distressed at the fragmentary nature of what he pushed into my hand. Some of this must have shown on my face, for Gotobed himself looked down at what remained, and he shook his head. “It was necessary,” he said, both of us watching as the remaining paper curled in on itself, forming into a nautilus.

  “It was not,” I said. “You might trust me without it, you know.”

  To this, Gotobed made no reply, and I began to fuss with my tube.

  True, thieves are not considered the most honest companions—and I had never given the fellow any reason to find me honest. On the other hand, Gotobed might have kept Mr. Hogarth’s proof all to himself, but instead, he gave us each half of our common stock to keep for ourselves. I could see some fairness in his choice, but his action appeared all impulse—more a boy than a man. I wondered, not for the last time, why I should trust Mr. Gotobed.

  I opened my share of the picture. I had the half with the young woman in the kerchief, caught in the middle of betraying poor Tom. She holds one hand out for the money and points to Tom with the other. She must hate Tom a great deal, I thought, wondering what he might have done to deserve such enmity. I looked between them, comparing their faces and their strong, full bodies, until I realized the truth: she was as like Tom as if she were himself in skirts.

  Tom’s death by hanging upon the Tyburn tree was a certainty, for I’d heard of it in a pamphlet called “A Full and True Account of ye Ghost of Tho. Idle.” This work was written for the improvement of those of us who made our living just as Tom did, and so was circulated widely and very cheaply indeed. Those of us who could were often importuned to read it aloud by those who could not, for that amusing confession was a great favourite with all.

  And perhaps it was the cruelty of the world, where trust and goodness are a luxury, that made me forgive Mr. Gotobed his slicing of my print. Or, perhaps it was the certainty of punishment that rendered me careless, but I did pardon the man. I tucked my truncated print under my arm, and then, again, I took his hand to shake on our bargain.

  Mr. Gotobed and I parted ways. He promised to send word to me at a nearby coffee house when he had secured the engraver he sought, and so I waited upon that exciting event. A day passed. I went out in to the street and tended to my business. When, after a second day, I did not hear from him, I went out again, but I was not of such good heart this time.

  Before I say more, I must explain first where I live, for a young man adrift in London must always have accommodation on his mind. A room in an inn or a respectable house is best, but if these are beyond his means—as certainly they exceeded mine—he must still secure himself a place each night that is out of the wind and rain. For a boy truly down on his luck, the street must suffice, and if he is quick, he might claim for himself a foot or two of dry ground under the arch of a Fleet footbridge or below the vaults of St. John’s Gate. But, as soon as a bit of coin comes a fellow’s way, he will rent a bed by the night in St. Giles, although “bed” is a grand word for a shared sack of straw. At night the floors of those flop-houses run so thick with bedbugs they crunch under the feet of anyone using the pot in the corner. The street is cleaner and sometimes safer. No, what a boy of fluctuating means needs most is a bolt-hole that affords security and some privacy, and above all, is easy on his purse. Luckily, for boys and girls with a little craft and dexterity, such places exist that keep us all safely out of Bridewell.

  Of course, no bolt-hole in London is without its landlord or landlady, and in my case, it was the latter. She kept all clean and respectable, although, to be sure, she was neither, and I called her Mother, although, God save me, she was not that either. All of us under her care were tender in years, but none of us were whores, neither of the male nor the female kind. She would not let us ply that trade, and those she caught in the bagnios or in the gin shops, she turned away, weeping and wiping at her eyes with a yellowed piece of Flanders lace. Her advice to those of us under her protection was to take on nothing but proper work, such as thieving or coining, and to let alone the trade that ended in disease and death. She warned us to do our business far away from home, keeping the constables from her door, and to deliver up whatever we could, as regular as possible, for her to sell on our behalf. I did my best to oblige, and she repaid my industry by providing me with that most unlikely thing of all: a little London room of my own. It was the merest box, but I did not mind, for when I shut its plank door, I was alone.

  Mother’s house had once been a fine dwelling, the residence of a merchant whose wealth allowed him to build generous chambers on every floor. My room, such as it was, had been fashioned from one of these, divided from the rest by partitions of lath and plaster. In one particular place where the wall crumbled, I dug with my fingers to make a shallow hiding place. Over this hole, I pinned Mr. Bickham’s ugly picture, and in this secret cupboard I placed whatever of value I had about me: the watches, handkerchiefs, and snuffboxes that I did not yet wish to tender to Mother. Here, I also kept the small bag of coins that was my own, and now half Mr. Hogarth’s bifurcated print found a hiding place.

  With Mr. Gotobed’s absence stretching into a third day, I stumped down the many stairs to Mother’s parlour in a truly discontented state. My sham family had been called to account for itself, and the room held a number of infants in a variety of borrowed dress, sitting cross-legged around the false smile of Mother’s skirts. I was the last to arrive, and, as one of the favourites, I took for myself a chair between the window and the fire. The small girl I unseated scuttled away, finding herself a new place against a leg of the sideboard. It did me good to see her anger.

  Mother was one of those who was especially fond of Tom Idle’s Christian repentance upon the gallows, and she often read aloud from that broadsheet. Tonight, she propped this very page before her, listing in a slightly slurring voice all of Tom’s crimes: spurning his master’s advice, reading novels, and the like. “But of course,” Mother said, “Tom was lost forever when he commenced gaming,” and she mimed the shaking of dice.

  We, her listeners, nodded a little nervously. She often accused us of gambling away some of what we had earned. Then she would pinch our arms and demand the truth, claiming that she knew if we held anything back.

  Now Mother said, “I cannot abide a gambler, and neither do I like a drinker,” and we agreed with her, to a man—even those of us who were girls. We knew that visiting a public house for purposes other than stealing a silver tankard was sufficient to condemn a fellow to perdition.

 
The declaration appeared to have tired Mother, who was leaning back in her chair, looking up at the stained ceiling of the parlour. She rested her eyes there, clearly seeking wisdom in the direction of God’s own abode.

  “Didn’t Tom go sometimes to the playhouse?” tried one of us, an ineffectual thief with a cough, whose lack of skill condemned him to sleep on a bench in the kitchen. “Them girls on the stage can snatch your soul—isn’t that right, Mother?”

  Mother did not bother to answer him.

  “Don’t be daft,” said another, a tall cutpurse about to mature past all usefulness to the company. “You will lose your purse, not your soul, at the playhouse.”

  I thought Mother might say that a man could lose both, and his time in the bargain, but she continued to contemplate the heavens, breathing deeply and regularly.

  A young coiner spoke next—his voice uncertain, for he’d not been in that house long—and asked how Tom Idle could be already a true sinner when he had not yet become a highwayman and taken gentlemen’s gold at the point of a pistol. “For robbery’s worse than gaming or drink,” he reasoned.

  At this, a sigh went up, for all of us children longed to be highwaymen, and we lounged on the floor or in our chairs with as much swagger as we could manage. We were pupils in an infant’s school of crime, and the highwayman was the highest calling we could imagine. We could not aspire to be a lord, nor his steward, and not even his clergyman. Having no money for an apprenticeship, we could not aspire at all but to the glorious career of an outlaw and brigand.

  I saw myself engraved in a guinea print, riding the road to Bath, stealing jewels from the ladies’ necks. Armed robbery on the King’s highway had to be the point past which a man might never go to heaven, for how could a fellow truly repent that taste of glory.

  The broadsheet slipped from our Protectress’ fingers, making the swish-swish of a robber’s ghost. We all jumped, from the nervous coiner, to the cutpurse in the corner. Mother herself awoke and sat upright, her eyes blinking to find us still there, gathered at her feet. “What are you all doing here?” she said, shooing us from that room. “Get out. Go. Earn your living, for that’s the way to reach heaven.”

  All around me, my family scrambled to their feet.

  Like the others, I went out to work, although my heart was not in my labours. I soon found myself in the streets near to Bartholomew’s, half hoping, half fearing to see Gotobed again. I began to think I would walk as far as Covent Garden to see if lights burned in Mr. Hogarth’s rooms behind the Golden Head. But that was a long walk, and before I could turn my feet that way, I came across the girl I’d turned out of the favoured chair in Mother’s parlour.

  The child stood in the street outside Great St. Bartholomew’s and she was singing with her feet spread and her hands clasped in front of her. Two men stood by, and lewd sallies flew between the lines of her song. A fellow in a mustard greatcoat splashed with mud gave her a wink and a leer. “Come on, darling, shut your mouth, or open it for a more useful purpose,” said he. But she made no reply, only ending one song and beginning another. She was younger than I, although I was not certain how many birthdays I’d had—with no one to mark them, I’d begun to lose count.

  I stepped in between the two men to make a crowd, and I caught her round, fishy eye. All men love a press of people, and seeing three of us standing shoulder to shoulder, others began to gather. In the small knot of newly arrived onlookers, I spied a country drover, his sales complete and coins distending the deep leather pocket tied to his waist—he sauntered up to see and stayed to listen. Joining him was a brace of rakes, their bag-wigs dangling down their backs. A thin person, dressed all in inky hues, hung behind us, like a coat one of the company put off to dry. A clerk, I guessed, or an author—he looked hungry enough to be learned. He stayed too, although from his careful glances at the company, left and right, I could soon tell he was wise as well as educated. In time, came the figure I waited for: the tall cutpurse almost grown past use. He scowled at me, thinking me moving in on his game, but I put my hand to my own pocket, drew out a farthing, and threw it at the girl’s feet.

  “Sing us another,” I shouted, for she’d come to the end of her song and had paused to draw breath.

  The rakes beside me patted their soft palms to indicate their approval of the girl’s efforts, or my generosity perhaps, while the drover shouted, “Yes, lass, sing one for me,” and reached into his own purse. As he threw the copper he let the bag of coins hang for a moment from his hand. The cutpurse and I noticed this most particularly, but so, I thought, did the corpse-like fellow behind us, who stepped out of the oblongs of light cast by a pair of church doors. I half turned so that I might see him better, but already he’d vanished into the night. Then the singer burst into song, throwing apart her arms to distract attention from the cutpurse, who was making good on his name. The quick gleam of lamplight on knife blade was only visible to one who expected it, and I knew the drover’s money to be now in the hand of the cutpurse.

  Now, the girl broke off singing and cried as loud as she could. “For shame, sir,” she said, and she spun away from the cutpurse to stare hard at a fellow in a bubble of apron, who stood close beside her. To a man, we turned to examine this person so addressed, and the cutpurse slipped swiftly toward the blot of darkness beyond the church doors.

  “Only a coward would pinch a maid in a crowd,” said the girl, still playing her part.

  “I didn’t touch ye,” said the fellow in the apron.

  “Pinched in the crowd?” said the man in the mustard coat. “Why, you must pinch her upon the arse.” And he followed this witticism with more winking and leering.

  Now came the part of the game I did not expect, for the corpse-like man stepped out of the shadow to take the cutpurse, a trout rising for a fly. Nobody saw but I, and I was the only witness to the briefest of struggles. Soft, white appendages covered the boy’s mouth and held him. But by now both figures were sunk in the gloom of the narrow lane that leads off Cloth Street, and I could see no more. I heard rather than saw a body fall to the cobbles, but perhaps fear only conjured the sound out of silence.

  While I stood, shocked, the drover discovered his loss and, after seizing a flailing fop, thought better of his choice, knocking down the little Miss in his effort to take me. Astonished at this sudden turn, I made to flee but even as I did, I found myself treading on air. I was hoist off my feet by his countryman’s arm. His face swung into mine, and I sneezed as hoppy fumes found their way up my nose.

  “You stole my gold, wee man,” he bawled at me as I shook my head so that my neck cracked. I told him I took nothing and that he might search me, but that I would prove as good as my word. And search me he did, somehow, holding me with one hand and squeezing every inch of my person with the other. He pawed and pinched until, at last, his stupid face assumed an expression of surprise, and he shoved me so that I fell hard against the rough stones of the church. We exchanged a look, we two, but he had nothing more to say to me.

  By then, the girl was long gone, as were the fops who’d cut so fine a figure in their braided coats. An apron showed white in a distant pool of lamplight and then passed beyond.

  But, nothing can happen in London without a crowd, and a new one gathered around the drover and myself: three ruffians in coats, a tattered man on crutches, and a spongy-faced porter lifting a dog by its tail.

  “A wrong one is he?” said the porter when he saw me looking at him, and he set down his animal so that it ran in circles around his legs, shrieking and yelping. The porter leaned down close until I could see the dark veins in his nose. “I’ll set my dog on you for a thief,” he said.

  “I’m not a thief,” I said, attempting to rise, but a crutch swung round and pushed me back down. “Tell them,” I begged the drover. “Tell them I’m an honest boy.”

  The drover wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “To tell it true,” he
said, “I don’t know what he is.”

  “There’s your thief,” I said, pointing into the darkness of the lane behind my accusers, right at the spot where the cutpurse had fallen, but the men only laughed at what they termed my ploy and drew in closer around me.

  In a book, someone would have come from the church—a priest concerned at the sound of my cries or a warden of the church ready to do a poor boy a kindness—but no one came, and so hard hands gripped me and shoved me to my feet. They made me walk down Cloth Fair, which I knew better than they, so I felt every stumble and every stagger they took on the way to Smithfield, and for a short while I began to hope that the effort might prove too much exertion for ones such as these. A few gave up my persecution—one ruffian was sucked into a dim gin shop and another tumbled into a brighter, noisier tavern—but in time I found myself kicked and scraped the short distance to the cattle-ground. There, under the inspiration of the bright stars, they began to test the depths and various foulness of the miry ponds of liquid that dotted the place. At last they found one of a suitable depth so that they might lie me flat with my face at the deepest part, whereupon they commenced to repeatedly plunge my nose and mouth into the vileness. Mud choked me and plastered over my eyes. At least, I told myself it was mud, plain dirt, although the rankness of its odour suggested some other substance plugged my nostrils and was gritty between my teeth.

  I screamed. I cried. I begged them to not dunk me again, and I protested my innocence until one of them lifted me dripping from the mire and hissed in my ear, “Confess and we’ll stop.” This I did as soon as I could find breath, and, after a few more dunkings, my persecutors grew tired of my protestations and stopped. Then, they dropped me on my side, while I coughed and vomited up a gallon of the finest cowshit Smithfield had to offer.