Smith
Page 17
He nudges Mr. Mansfield in the ribs.
“Oo’s to know the Court they was makers for was the Criminal one at Old Bailey?”
And, from their fine bay window, the sisters smile and wave and watch their neat, small brother and his grand and gentle friend walk side by side along the square, till at last they take the corner and are lost from sight.
But now the sun goes down and the air darkens. A wind sets in and clouds swing across the sky. Miss Fanny looks out somewhat sadly and dabs at her eyes with a piece of fine lace. She is thinking of Lord Tom and his glittering ways. But then she looks northward and sighs and smiles. For Lord Tom sleeps in a neat grave at the top of Highgate Hill, overlooking the Finchley Common. Nothing would have pleased him better . . . for from there ’tis but a ghost’s step to visit Bob’s Inn and go a-riding the night wind with Turpin, Robinson and Duval. A splendid and gallant company!
LEON GARFIELD (1921–1996) was born and raised in the seaside town of Brighton, England. His father owned a series of businesses, and the family’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Garfield enrolled in art school, left to work in an office, and in 1940 was drafted into the army, serving in the medical corps. After the war, he returned to London and worked as a biochemical technician. In 1948 he married Vivian Alcock, an artist who would later become a successful writer of children’s books, and it was she who encouraged him to write his first novel, Jack Holborn, which was published in 1964. In all, Garfield would write some fifty books, including a continuation of Charles Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood and retellings of biblical and Shakespearean stories. Among his best-known books are Devil-in-the-Fog (1966, winner of The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize), The God Beneath the Sea (1970, winner of the Carnegie Medal), Bostock and Harris; or, The Night of the Comet (1979; forthcoming from The New York Review Children’s Collection), and John Diamond (1980, winner of the Whitbread Award).