by DM Bryan
They did not ask me to join them at breakfast, and neither did I ask if I might. I still hated Prosper—I hated his crested head and his silky waistcoat—but he’d read my story back to me, properly compositing my sketch in his thickened English. Prosper followed the marks my crayon left like another man might follow Fielding’s silvery phrases, or Mr. Richardson’s more stolid typeset—like a fellow might follow Mr. Hogarth himself, weaving with his eyes until loose ends connected. I still hated Prosper, I really did, but I’d come to a decision: I’d give him a chance with his burin and plate. I’d see if he could a second time translate my drawing, this time line-by-line into copper. Then Gotobed could test the plate’s inky truth on a clean white sheet. And if the work measured up—if Prosper passed—then I might consider us a partnership of three.
Three thieves—an artist, an engraver, and a printer—to imitate one inimitable genius.
I turned to look, but the others were already gone.
[
The following evening, I waited for my fellow schemers in the darkened close, slipping into a doorway at the passage of every yellow lantern and link. In between times, a chalky moonlight shifted along the street, whitening the line of cottages. Down cellar steps, sheltered beneath a bay window, drinkers settled in for their first sleep, grumbling over a candle’s sorry warmth. I wrapped myself tightly in my coat, and set to shivering as the evening deepened to slate. Then, from a square of blackness, I saw coming toward me two pale forms, pressed and silent. As they drew nearer, I stepped out of my sheltering arch, and both greeted me with handclasps, the warmth of palms masquerading as speech.
As soon as we entered the workroom, Gotobed began lighting tapers—two this time, one for me and one for Prosper. From under his coat, Prosper drew a bulky bundle, well wrapped in stained canvas. From this, he removed a tight roll of paper and peeled off a single sheet, thin as the skin of an onion. He gave me the page and bade me copy my drawing onto its opaque surface. He said, “Trace only the—how do you say it? The contour?”
“The outline,” said I, looking instead at the opened canvas bundle and the copperplates therein, red-gold peeping from sackcloth. I looked as another might squint at a breast.
“No detail,” said Prosper. “You do not make a drawing here.”
“I know,” I said, but I did not—I wanted to learn with every fibre of my being.
While I traced my drawing’s outline onto the onion-paper, Prosper selected a plate, tipping it this way and that before the candle, as if looking in a red mirror. Then, he rolled up his sleeves and unwound a kind of canvas belt, turning out a collection of small hand-tools, each fashioned of metal and wood. The canvas itself he transformed into a heavy apron to cover his shirt, refastening the ties around his neck and waist. A foggy cube turned out to be wax, which he melted over the copperplate, rubbing it against the metal to form a thin surface layer.
When I had traced an outline of my drawing onto the onion skin, I gave it to Prosper. He nodded his approval and pressed it, face down, into the waxed copperplate. Then, he began to retrace my lines with a tipped tool. I leaned forward, and when Prosper saw me looking, he turned in my direction, so that I might see more completely. He followed each of my lines, pressing on the paper, and when he was done, I could see that he’d left a faint impression in the wax-dulled surface of the copper.
Next, Prosper put his tools in order, laying them in a row and picking up the first, a kind of metal stylus, with which he began to incise directly into the plate. This time, when he held up the copper sheet, I could clearly make out a street lined with figures, but to me it seemed a crude thing, more like graffiti than an engraved plate. Prosper laughed at the eyebrow I raised at him, and said to Gotobed, “The little Protestant—he has no faith.”
From the line of tools, Prosper chose a new one. Unlike the incising tool, which was metal rounded to a tip, this was a thin rod, squared and filed, so that three of the edges ended in a dangerous-looking point. He gave it to me and named it: a burin. Next, he took out a bag filled with sand, which was a mystery to me, until he set it in front of him and gently placed the copper-sheet over top. Taking the burin between his fingers, he set it against one of the lightly scored outlines and began to rotate the plate on its sandbag base. A thin burr of copper snaked from the tip of the tool, until the burin reached the end of the line, and Prosper took up another tool to snap off the burr, brushing it away.
Then he picked up the burin again and repeated the process, each time pushing the plate gently. “See here, faithless boy,” said Prosper, “the plate moves, not the burin. That way all my strokes are curved and elegant—proper French lines with none of your English stiffness.”
“Ha,” said I, although I could not dispute his claim. He had transformed the marks copied from my tracing into arcing parabolas of gold. Their beauty excited me, but I had witnessed nothing as yet. Only when Prosper finished my outline, and began to work freehand to fill out the incised contours, did I understand just how much grace lay coiled in his long digits. Working from my crayon drawing, he translated my sketched details into cross-hatching that shimmered as the plate slowly spun. Candlelight caught in the red-yellow webs. Slowly, slowly, my scene emerged, luminescent and glorious.
I could not watch the whole time of course. Gotobed needed me to continue working on the designs of the other prints. So, with a little reluctance, I sat me down before a second candle and began to rough in another moment from poor Tom’s life. In truth, I did not mind so much as all that. Now that I had seen a little of what engraving was, I wished to discover if I could adapt my drawings to better suit Prosper’s art. Soon I lost myself in the attempt, laying in light and shadow according to my new understanding.
Dimly, I felt Gotobed stalking between Prosper and myself, his movement a mark in the corner of my eye. Once, I looked up to see a smile tweak his face, and I knew that we pleased him, we two. Accordingly, I scowled in his direction so that that grin might grow less certain, and I was happy to see his expression falter and then fail. He stopped pacing and came to lean over my page, and there he stood for a long time, watching me work.
This night, I drew Tom stopped by a pair of constables. For the officer’s faces, I pyrated familiar, hated phizzes, and I set the scene in the laneway that lay behind Mother’s rows of windows. In life, I had never seen a constable force his way into that reeking passage, but as soon as I began to sketch, I saw that laneway as no more than a contrast of darks and lights. Using the cross-hatches I had seen Prosper work into his copperplate, I rendered the shadows massy and rough. Then, I surveyed my work, pleased with the effect, and saw at once how I might play the white flare of the constables’ links against the black of a wall. In this way, I could isolate Tom in the silence of an honest thief. Happy with my conceit, I lifted my crayon and returned to the page.
So occupied, we worked until the glass in the windows turned as opaque as onion-paper. In the morning’s light, Prosper set down his burin and looked around him as though dazed. I busied myself making a last addition. In one corner, as if on the lane wall, I drew a little scrawl, the merest graffiti of a man on his back in a bed, his nose like a sail over water.
Prosper, came over to see my picture, and he laughed when he found the tiny rebus. “Ah Gotobed. This boy has immortalized you in art.”
Gotobed came at once, and when he saw the scrawl, demanded I remove it. I shook my head. “Master Hogarth includes the like,” said I.
“Take it out.”
I put my hands on either side of the page, letting my crayon fall from my fingers. “You flatter yourself that someone will read it aright,” I said. “You are beyond obscure, Gotobed.”
“Take the damned thing out.”
I looked at Prosper, who only winked at me. I shook my head at Gotobed.
“If you won’t, I will,” and Gotobed took up my crayon, making a heavy amendment to my page. When he was d
one the rebus had vanished, and my design was unbalanced.
Too angry to speak, I pushed away from the table, rolling up my page as I went.
I was making to rush into the pale splash of the morning, never to return, when Prosper stopped me. With his hand out, he gestured for me to give him my design, quietly saying, “Never mind, little Quire, I will put back in what he removes.”
I looked at him.
“You study to draw like a Frenchman. When I engrave this one, I will change very little.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” I said, but I put my roll of paper into his hand.
Then I glared over my shoulder at Gotobed, but I saw only his coated back.
That morning, I did not have the heart to pick a pocket or snatch a pewter tankard, even though I saw one disregarded, sitting on a table in a yard. Instead, I walked home through woe-gray streets, stepping over clouds reflected in puddles of piss. I stole a pie, or else I might not have eaten at all, and then I went home to my bolt-hole.
[
Outside that respectable house, two men stood in the street, deep in conversation. I did not like the look of them, but they soon parted ways. Even so, I watched from a distance to make sure they were gone. Then I climbed the step to Mother’s front door and went in.
Gaining the hallway, I removed my shoes and commenced tiptoeing up the stairs. I did not wish to draw any attention to myself, for more than anything else, I feared an invitation to visit Mother in her parlour. It was her habit to tax us her share of our gleanings as soon as we came home, sorting wheat from chaff. At first, I crept along in perfect silence, but then a creaky tread set up an alarm, just outside her door. Immediately, I heard her stir inside her room. Worse, she hailed me by name. How she knew it was me, I cannot guess. Sometimes she seemed downright supernatural, did Mother. For a moment, I considered fleeing that place, but in truth, I had nowhere to go, so I went in.
I found her reclining on a sofa, her eyes hidden behind a cloth. “Dear child,” she said, sighing. “I’ve been so ill. I’ve had to take a little of Dr. James’ powder.”
“Have you a fever then, Mother,” said I, coming no closer than the rug.
“No, not a fever,” she said, lifting one edge of her cloth and peering out at me. “ ’Tis a queasy kind of illness. I am so out of sorts, I cannot think clearly.” She lowered her cloth.
Then, without rising from the sofa, she put out her hand for me to fill with gold.
I felt in my pocket, and to my horror found I had nothing beyond a few coppers and the half-eaten pie. I had never before failed to bring her home a fistful of guineas or the same in fine goods, and I did not know how to excuse my poverty.
“Quire,” said Mother, snapping her fingers. “What do you have for me?”
In desperation, I took out the pennies and stared at them lying hopelessly on my palm. I closed my fingers, and felt their edges sharp against tender flesh. I wished I knew some trick to make them multiply, pennies to pounds, but I was a thief, not a magician.
“I’ve had very poor pickings today,” I said.
“Pickings,” said Mother. “The word turns my stomach.”
I reached for a lie, but found nothing in my tired head. “In truth,” said I, “I have only a few pence.”
“False boy,” said Mother, and she belched. She sat up, taking the cloth away from her eyes. “Come nearer,” she said.
I stepped up to the sofa on which she sat. Close up, she did look ill, bloated, with cheeks as striated as a marbled side of beef.
“Quire,” she said, “what do you conceal in your grubby fist?”
I shook my head. I was ashamed to show her what I had there.
“This is disobedience,” said Mother.
Again, I shook my head.
“Quire. Give me your hand.”
I gave her my hand and she pulled it close. Under her very nose, I release my fist and showed her the coppers, but also the crust of my pie, bits of gristle still clinging.
What Mother said next was indistinct, lost in the emetic effect of Dr. James’ fever powder. Engraved, she might have served as an advertisement for the astonishing purgative potency of that substance. I yanked away and ran, bumping into the servant as she entered the room, basin in hand.
I hid away in my bolt-hole, fearing the noise of footsteps on the stairs behind me. But none came. Mother’s indisposition seemed to suspend the usual order of that place, and servants in the hall below came and went without calling so much as my name. I waited fearfully, but then, hearing nothing alarming. I went to stand at the top of the stairs.
Some moments later, I saw coming up from below, a girl I knew slightly, a thief who specialized in wig-snatching to order. “Heigh-ho,” she said, when she saw me. “Why do you stand there like an old suit of armour?”
“What news of Mother?” I said.
“Why, she is drunk again,” said the girl, “but thinks she is ill. The doctor is coming so we must make ourselves scarce. Have you some need of her?”
I shook my head. My indiscretion, such as it was, did not seem to have produced any lasting effect.
“Have you seen Doll?” I asked on a whim.
“What do you offer?” she asked.
I pressed the scrap of pie into her palm.
“Doll who?” she said, inspecting the crust, and that was all she had to say.
Back in my room, my grate was cold, and my truckle bed grey with filth, but my secret cupboard remained secret. I climbed under my blanket and went to sleep.
[
That evening, I went to work on my third drawing for the partnership, and, not wishing to pass by Mother’s parlour again, I exited over the tiles, freeing myself by the very back exit I included in my second picture. For the newest design, I went back to the beginning of our tale and decided to draw Tom’s birth in a workhouse. For this, I had to use my imagination, for I had never been in such a place.
Gotobed came over to where I worked, looking down upon my drawing. I was still angry over his rude treatment of my rebus, and now we served each other civilly enough but with a stiffness too. We were partners in business only—I would not disturb myself chasing after his good regard.
I set to work on the dimensions of the lying-in ward, which I intended to be wide and airy, with windows at one end, very like those in this workroom.
Gotobed startled me with his growl. “Where in hell is that?” he said. “Do you prepare to draw a lord mayor’s banquet?”
I was so surprised, I let go my crayon, and it rolled onto the floor. I chased it under the compositor’s table, from which vantage point I could see Gotobed’s coarse stockings and his worn shoes. One buckle had lost its purchase on the latchet and was sliding sideways. The fellow shifted irritably from foot to foot, and a hole showed in the heel, passing through leather and wool to reveal something pale inside.
Then the shoe vanished, and Gotobed’s face appeared, inverted and about to lose its wig. He clapped a hand to his head. “Do not hide from me, Quire,” he said.
I came up again, my crayon between my fingers.
“Idiot,” said Gotobed. He meant me—there was no one else.
I would not reply, but sat myself again at my page and stared hard at the scene I’d begun sketching.
“Don’t be so offended,” he said to me. “I only meant your work is not so good as usual.”
A bit of soot filled my eye, and I wiped it hard. “You bring us such cheap candles,” I said. “I can hardly see to work.”
“Prosper has no such difficulties.” We could both hear the soft clicks of Prosper employing his tools, putting down his burin to take up his scraper. He had not yet finished graving the first plate, for engraving is more laborious than sketching.
I said, “Candlelight answers well enough for putting grooves in copper.”
&nbs
p; “You grow expert in Prosper’s line of work.”
“And you in mine.”
We had duelled to a draw, and so we sat without moving, each of us looking down upon my page. Before I could find some pretext for further abusing my foe, Gotobed addressed me in a low voice. His words flowed from him in an unsteady fashion, as though he would rather not speak at all. He said, “My sister had her start in one of Matthew Marryott’s houses, the one in St. Giles, which was the worst of them all. They had no place for women lying-in, so they put my mother with those who were too sick to work. I visited her there, saw her cared for only by other paupers, earning their keep. If you would draw a workhouse ward, you should show a cramped room, crowded with beds. Show Tom’s mother crying out. Show the toothless nurses busy at another bed, helping someone to die.”
At his words, the picture drew itself in my head. I looked up at him, and silently Gotobed handed me a new sheet of paper. This, I set before me and focused inwardly upon it. I could still hear his voice, even though he no longer spoke. It told me the dying man sat bolt upright, his features a mask of agony. I outlined the man’s eyes and mouth, but I did not mark his papery skin with my crayon, intending that Prosper not work this area with his burin tip. In their sober dresses, the nurses ringed round, like velvet around a button of bone. In the women’s hands, candles cast a penumbra that divided the room. On the far side, I drew Tom’s mother, labouring in her own frail shell of light. As Mr. Hogarth had done, I envisioned a window filled with moonlight, muntin and rail casting a shadow. Crossed bars fell across the blankets that covered the mother’s writhing form.
“Better,” said Gotobed, and he moved away.
I finished that sketch before daylight and went away as I had before, bemused by tones and shapes imprinted on the insides of my lids. London seemed a page and I a caricature flickering across its surface. I ate; I stole; I slept; and I planned my return to the abandoned workshop where my pages had all the depth and variety my waking hours lacked.