In which Mother Earth claims her own
She entered like the Queen of the Nile on a burnished barge – gigantic, resplendent, wobblingly white and colossal, rising through the mists of the blue-black smoke on a golden wicker bath chair like a sea monster riding on the waves – or an iceberg rearing its head to wreck the vessel of Twill’s hopes.
“Ma-Madam Manzoni…”
“Twill Jones – what a delightful surprise to find you here. Like a diamond in the dust!”
The barge upon which the matriarch of the Black Jack was seated was known as a bath chair – a giant wicker contraption somewhere between a perambulator and a light chaise, typically favoured by elderly gentlemen and the infirm old ladies who visit spa towns to take the water. Mounted on three wheels and named – it was said – because of the similarity of its shape to a bathtub (or, some said, after the watering hole where it had been invented) this particular contraption had been constructed in excessively large proportions. And indeed it needed to be, bearing as it did the gargantuan Madam Manzoni of the Black Jack, who lay like a colossal doll. And propelling this vessel through the burning vapours – with no small degree of effort – were no pretty-dimpled boys but…
“Mrs Spanks!”
“You wicked ungrateful girl!” Spanks panted. “Why, just wait till I have my spoon – and my breath!”
Twill looked from one to the other in horror and confusion. “I … I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”
“She’s Mother Earth!” stammered Boy Number Eight. “She the one wot takes all the girls.”
Twill glanced from the little boy, who was shaking in terror, to the monstrous form of Madam Manzoni who had never, in all of Twill’s living memory, left her boudoir in the Black Jack – and yet who now loomed like a vengeful demi-goddess before her.
“Why … why do you call her Mother Earth?” was the only question that managed to surface to her lips.
“Why – because she is the size of a planet!” said Boy Number Eight.
“And because everything that comes from Mother Earth must surely one day return to her,” said Madam Manzoni, with a triumphant wobbling purr. “That is the circle of life, my Snow Diamond – don’t you know it?” Madam’s little piggy eyes flickering dangerously, taking in Twill’s boyish garb and severed hair. “That is how I knew I would find you, my dear!”
“You – have been … looking for me?”
“You ditn’t fink Madam would just allow you to run off like that?” said Mrs Spanks. “Wiv your debt unpaid – and your monstrous ingratitude burning a hole in her generous heart?”
“I … I didn’t think—”
“Of course you didn’t!” trilled Manzoni. “And that gave me an advantage in this delicious game of diamond hunting. Meanwhile, my dear old friend Mr Barrabas and his associates in the Child Protection League have been my eyes. I’ve had them scouring the streets for my little lost girl for weeks.”
As she said this, Madam Manzoni turned to Fagin, who had retired to the corner of the room and was surveying the unfolding scene with keen interest, as if weighing up how the new turn of events might be used to his advantage.
A sudden dreadful realisation hit Twill like a short arm jab in the belly. “So that’s why the Child Catchers have started taking girls? Because you were looking – for me?”
“Mr Barrabas is an old acquaintance of mine,” Madam Manzoni continued in gelatinous tones. “Easy enough to commission the Child Catchers to pick up female strays to deliver to my Institute for the Edification and Betterment of Young Ladies of Ill Fortune!”
“But only the pretty ones!” snarled Mrs Spanks.
“Speaking of which – what have we here?” Madam Manzoni’s eyes had lighted upon Angel, who had attached herself to Twill’s side.
“What a delightful bonus!” exclaimed Manzoni, looking the little girl over as if she were savouring one of Baggage’s éclairs. “Eyes like the violet creams to which I am so very partial. Why, she will make quite the Butterfly one day!”
Angel clung tightly to Twill and gave a tiny sob, her big eyes filling with tears – which produced the somewhat unfortunate effect of making her appear only more lovely.
“Leave her alone!” declared Twill. “Take me – take me back, punish me for running off. Do what you want – but leave Angel alone!”
“My dear Snow Diamond, I do believe you glitter even more brightly when you are angry,” said Manzoni. “Of course, it’s a shame about your hair, but we can find you one of my old wigs – it might be a quaint, old-fashioned touch. Remind our young gentlemen of their mothers.”
Twill was quivering now with a sense of helpless indignation. She was caught in a trap, unable to run or hide, cornered and – what was worse – Angel was trapped with her. And it was all her fault.
“My dear Medora…” Fagin had remained silent but crept forward now, hands held together in an attitude of prayer, his keen eyes ranging hungrily over the scene before him. “Perhaps you might explain something to me…?”
“It’s all very simple,” said Manzoni, her voice trembling like a lute balanced upon a giant blancmange. “Meet my elusive Snow Diamond – Twill Jones in the flesh.”
“So another twist in the tale!” Fagin’s eyes lit up dangerously. “Mr Camberwell turns out to be Miss Jones. Why, today is full of surprises, my dear!”
Twill was still madly trying to make sense of the situation. Fagin and Madam Manzoni working in cahoots? But for how long? To what end? Were the Bumbles in on this too? Was this all part of the Brownlow plot? And how was she ever to extricate herself and Angel now?
Fagin took another step towards Twill and reached a gnarled hand out to touch her cheek. She recoiled and Fagin laughed, baring a mouth of brown, decaying teeth in a face as gnarled as a rotten apple. “A pretty little thing and no mistake. I can see why you were so anxious to retrieve her, Medora!”
“I am indeed most indebted to you, Mr Barrabas,” said Manzoni, her flesh wobbling ominously. “As she is indebted to me.”
“I owe you nothing!” declared Twill defiantly.
“On the contrary. An indenture is a legal document, my girl, and must be repaid!” said Madam Manzoni, as Mrs Spanks produced a scroll, which she unfurled to reveal the papers that Baggage had signed all those years ago when Twill had first come to the Black Jack.
Mr Fagin had snatched the document from Mrs Spanks and was studying it closely. “Well, well,” Twill heard him mutter, a sickly smile spreading across his face as he read the fine print of Mr Scapegrace’s carefully worded indenture.
“Twill?” said Angel, looking imploringly at the older girl.
“Don’t worry,” said Twill, pulling her quickly into an embrace. “I won’t let them hurt you. I promise.”
But her words felt empty. Her brain, which usually dodged and darted through the alleyways of any problem, seemed to have run up against a dead end.
“I’ll come back to the Black Jack and pay my debt,” she said, realising she was trapped. “I’ll work there as long as you wish – if you will only let Angel go.”
“Angel – what a delightful name for the little violet-eyed beauty…” quivered Madam Manzoni.
“Will you release her if I come?”
“I don’t fink youse in any position to make bargains!” said Mrs Spanks, thin lips pursed. She seemed to be enjoying this as much as she did delivering a good beating with a spoon.
“Perhaps,” said Mr Fagin to Manzoni, looking up from the indenture document with a malicious twinkle to his eye, “there is another way that your Miss Twill might repay her debt!”
Chapter 28
A short episode in which Mr Fagin sees an opportunity and Twill is caught in a snare of her own making
The plan was simple – and Fagin had been turning it over in his mind since the moment he had clapped eyes upon Twill, every bit the likeness of her brother.
The indenture document had confirmed a further suspicion in his mind, but this he
did not mention to Manzoni – preferring as he did to keep information squirrelled away like jewels, out of sight till he might need it. For now, the resemblance alone was sufficient for his dastardly plan. The rest might become useful later.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” said Madam Manzoni.
“I wonder if you might consider making a loan of your Snow Diamond – a small errand, nothing too much,” he spoke, with abject humility but with a horrible light in his eyes. “You might see it as a way of repaying the debt to me. And then, my dear Medora, we are even.”
“A loan? Even?” The two horrible co-conspirators surveyed each other with undisguised malice.
“I believe there may even be a way, my dear, of making this happy circumstance pay a little more – to our mutual advantage,” purred Fagin. “It is – one might say – a golden opportunity!”
“Golden?”
“Nay, Diamond!” said old Fagin, eyes like gaslights in the blue gloom. “Allow me to explain…”
There was a low fire burning in the grate of the office, even though the room was hot and sticky, its walls stained with the sulphurous vapours rising from the factory floor below. The heat and the fumes made it hard to breathe, and hard for Twill to think.
“My dear, she is the very image of the boy, Oliver,” Fagin said. “Oliver Twist to the tee. A dead ringer, one might even say! And thus your Twill Jones is the happy solution to the conundrum we find ourselves in.”
“Conundrum?” Madam Manzoni eyed him closely.
“Our dear benefactor,” said Fagin. “The ever so benevolent Mr Brownlow, who has proved so amenable of late.” He emitted a sinister low laugh and Twill thought of what she had heard of the machinations of the mysterious Mrs C and her camomile tea.
“But his generosity might still be extended further – perhaps to the fullest extent, indeed.”
“Indeed!” Madam Manzoni looked most interested.
“And sooner rather than later,” Fagin went on. “With a little assistance from young Twill here!”
Twill glared at him angrily. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
Fagin stared back at her. Unbeknown to Twill, he was at this moment recalling the innocent young face of Master Twist – the one child who had eluded him; the one boy who had refused to be moulded into a little criminal like the rest; the one brat who had driven old Fagin almost to the foot of the gallows. This girl had a different look in her eyes – no less pure, but perhaps with more fire. It would be easier to ruin her than her saintly brother, he thought, and, in so doing, he might not only avail himself of a share in the Brownlow fortune, but also stoke the fires of vengeance that he had kept smouldering ever since young Oliver’s escape.
“Why, just a little play-acting, my dear. A little haunting. Put a sick man’s mind at rest. We will need your Mr Scapegrace to draw up some documents,” he said, turning to Manzoni. “The rest should be easy.”
“Why should I help you?” demanded Twill, although in truth she already knew the answer.
“Simple, my dear, simple,” said Mr Fagin, whose keen eyes had sized up the situation from the moment he understood Twill to be flesh and blood – and female flesh at that. “Because you came here to save the little Angel girl, and so you shall…” He looked at Madam Manzoni significantly. “But only if you do as you are told.”
Twill glanced around desperately. She had no choice but to comply.
“Very well, I’ll do whatever you ask!” she said. “But only if you let Angel go free!”
“I shall send for Mr Scapegrace to draw up the documents immediately.”
Chapter 29
In which Twill becomes a ghost once more and a dreadful deception is enacted upon the best and kindest of men
And so it was that, as night fell over the city, Twill found herself in Craven Street in the borough of Pentonville, outside the residence of Mr Brownlow once more. Mr Brownlow had, as the reader is aware, been unwell, his decline in health coinciding remarkably with the arrival in his household of the new housekeeper, Mrs C.
There had still been no word from Oliver, and the rumour was that the boy was dead, lost at sea or fallen victim to a fever in the Indies, but Mr Brownlow – sick and debilitated as he was – refused to believe in Oliver’s demise. As did another member of his household – that same mealy-mouthed kitchen wench who now opened the door and who still harboured a softness for young Oliver in her heart, which positively melted anew on beholding his double. She let out a smothered gasp when she saw Twill, still dressed in her boyish garb, her pallor accentuated by the mist that rose up from the nearby Thames and shrouded her in a cloak of white smog.
“Angels be praised!” she cried. “’Tis Master Oliver!” Then the mealy-mouthed maidservant flung her arms around Twill’s waist and burst into loud and messy tears.
“Calm yourself, my dear!” said Fagin. “Where is your mistress?”
Her mistress was, in fact, right behind her, and as the mealy-mouthed girl disentangled her snotty face from Twill’s breeches, our heroine took in for the first time the lady hitherto known only as Mrs C. She was a plumpish woman; a woman who took great solace in her cats and who had, over the years, come to resemble her favourite feline companion, an overfed tabby who terrorised the mice under the wainscot. She had once perhaps been of the same colouring as that particular puss, but now the curls beneath her matron’s cap were peppered with much-lamented grey, and years of scowling had left her once-pretty features with the appearance of an over-wintered pippin.
If Dodger had been present, he would have put things together in an instant. For this was the lady once known as Mrs Corney – now Mrs Bumble by marriage. The good lady of the Mudfog workhouse where Oliver and Twill had been born, who had latterly achieved the dubious good fortune of marriage with the corpulent Chief Child Catcher. Mrs C – Mrs B – Mrs Bumble née Corney: the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of cruelty and deception practised upon poor Mr Brownlow. Though the details of the plot against Brownlow were still far from clear – even to Twill, who was to play the leading role therein.
“You are welcome, I’m sure, Mr Barrabas,” simpered Mrs C, ushering Twill and all the company into the below-stairs kitchen and closing the door quickly behind them. “And this is the girl?” she purred. “Why, you told true when you said she was young Oliver’s double.”
Behind her appeared her husband – Mr Bumble himself, wheezing and puffing, having been summoned at very short notice by a messenger whose missive had most inconveniently interrupted his dinner of pork chops and ale. He was evidently not best pleased to be called into the house’s nether regions, but his expression of consternation changed as he caught sight of Twill.
“Like two sides of a coin, I do declare!” said Mr Bumble, huffing excitedly and looming his giant red face so close to Twill’s own that she could smell the port wine and gravy on his breath, mingled with the stench of his rotten teeth, which made her recoil. “A veritable dead ringer, madam! The old man will never tell the difference!”
“This will break his very heart,” said a gleeful Mrs Bumble-née-Corney.
“We can but hope,” said Fagin, whose malevolence glowed so brightly here in the warmth and comfort of the good man’s kitchen that it caused Twill to shiver. “But not before he signs the deed.”
“Here,” said Mrs Corney with cat-like unctuousness. “Rub a little goose fat on her face to make it glow all the brighter. And let her hold the candle up under her chin – just so – to give a more ghostly impression.”
Both were done and the effect pronounced “unearthly” by Mr Bumble, “incredible!” by Fagin, and which provoked an “angels of mercy” from the mealy-mouthed girl, whose name was Anna Dropsy, and who was quite discombobulated by the arrival in her kitchen of Oliver-not-Oliver, and a collection of murderous conspirators besides.
“I can’t do this!” said Twill, though in truth she still wasn’t sure on the details of what she was doing.
“Consider it an
act – if I may say – of charity!” said Mr Bumble, with a tone of impressive pomposity. “You will be helping them paupers as have no work ethic and no purpose in life.”
“And helping the old man out of his misery whiles you’re at it,” miaowed Mrs Corney.
“But I…?”
“No time for buts – we needs to get you changed, then, spit-spot, up you go!”
Thus Twill was shortly ushered up the servants’ steps, moving noiselessly across the carpeted hallway, and past a portrait of young Oliver that Mr Brownlow had commissioned and which hung now on the wall. Twill had never – to her knowledge, at least – seen Oliver, and had merely taken the word of those around her regarding her resemblance to Master Twist. If she had given it a moment’s consideration, she would have assumed it to be merely a passing resemblance – a trick of the light, an optical illusion in the eyes of the beholder only. But as she stared at Oliver’s likeness in oil and canvas, her eye flicked to a mirror that hung on the other side of the hallway and she stopped in her tracks.
Mrs Corney had raided young Oliver’s wardrobe before she sent Twill on her mission, so it was no coincidence that Twill was now dressed in the very same neat blue suit that her brother wore in his portrait. There she stood – dressed identically in every point – and the likeness was more than passing: it ran deep in every contour, in every curve of the mouth, the cut of the chin, the shape of eyes, forehead, nose – the only difference being a greater animation of features on the girl than the boy.
“Why, we might almost be twins!”
Twill had never had siblings, although the ever-changing throng of Butterflies had been like so many older sisters to her, and she had always fancied a brother – someone with whom she might climb trees, play soldiers, make mud pies, race with the hoop and ball, collect insects, and plan raids on the neighbouring gangs. Someone with whom she could exchange dares and dreams, who might join her on the adventures she embarked on in her head every day and dreamed of before she fell asleep every night. Looking at Oliver’s likeness was like looking at the brother she had never had, and though she fancied he might not perhaps have been the mud pie and insect type, she felt equally sure she would have liked him. Nay, she felt certain they would have been the very best of friends. And the thought made her feel both happy and suddenly indescribably sad.
Another Twist in the Tale Page 11