And this difference seemed to have the most profound effect upon Mr Fagin.
“Oliver, my dear!” He spoke in a simpering voice now, the dangerous light extinguished from his eyes by the shadow of the gallows that he felt looming over him once more. “Have a little compassion for a confused old man. A dear old friend.”
“And, young master Twist,” interjected Mr Bumble, who seemed like a pufferfish that had been suddenly deflated, all his oratorical hot air quite extinguished, “was it not I who set you on the path to greatness? Who invented your very name? Who made you Oliver Twist? Why, it was I who lifted you from the den of paupers and put you on the path on which you now tread!”
Oliver Twist beheld them both: the man who had named him, half starved him, sold him, then conspired to rob him of his birthright, and the other, who had kidnapped him, attempted to corrupt him, and kept him from the family and fortune that were rightfully his. He said nothing for a moment. The light of goodness and charity shone out of his face, just as it had done the first day Mr Brownlow beheld it, but it was tempered now with a richer quality, a new maturity that knew the quality of mercy and of justice.
“Arrest them all,” he said quietly.
“All?” asked the tall policeman, his whiskers all a-quiver.
“These three.” Oliver indicated Bumble, Fagin and Manzoni. “They are fraudsters and swindlers, and the children of London will be safer with them removed from the streets.”
Suddenly there was an almighty groan as Madam Manzoni’s quivering legs gave way. She swayed for a moment, gurgling most terribly, her eyes rolling in the fantastical puff paste of her face, before her giant bulk came crashing down in the bath chair with such force it seemed to shake the very foundations of the Farthingale and Shillingsworth Bank. Then the terrible sound stopped and she lay slumped in the contraption – white and vast and terrible, with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limply from its huge arm.
“Somebody call a doctor!” blustered Mr Bumble.
But nobody moved.
“A physician, I say! I feel – I must say, I do declare – I feel most unwell!” Mr Bumble mopped frantically at his brow, stumbling towards the doorway, where the moustachioed officer stopped him in his tracks, producing a giant set of handcuffs that set Bumble perspiring anew.
“A handkerchief, a handkerchief!” Bumble cried, as the chains were locked over his fat little wrists. “My fortune for a handkerchief!”
The onlookers observed this spectacle with stupefied awe and it was Fagin who broke the horrified silence.
“I am an old man,” he whispered. “Just an old … old man.”
His body seemed to have shrunk and there was terror in the dark eyes beneath the red eyebrows. Perhaps he was recalling the nights he had spent in the condemned cell at Newgate: the sound of the banging as the workmen assembled the scaffold outside; the hissing cries of the crowd as he passed through the prisoner’s grate; the image of those many companions whom he had betrayed hanging limp on the end of the hangman’s rope like bundles of old clothes. And the great despair came upon him that he had felt only once before, the despair that had made him rave and bewail his fate like a child or a cornered animal, when he had felt barely human, when he had rocked himself from side to side like a snared beast.
“Oliver, here, here – let me whisper with you!” He seemed desperate, weakened, aged a decade in the same number of minutes.
“I will say a prayer for you,” said Oliver, his eyes shining with tears.
“Hang your prayers!” declaimed Fagin, and as the police officers stepped forward to apprehend him he writhed and struggled with the power of desperation and sent up a shriek that rang through the building of Farthingale and Shillingsworth. “Strike you all dead! What right have you to condemn me?”
It was Dodger who looked on him then; Dodger who said simply, “May God forgive this wretched man.”
Chapter 36
Chapter The Last
The fortunes of those who have figured in this tale are nearly closed, and what little remains of their history may be simply told. With the return of Oliver, the plot against Mr Brownlow unravelled like a frayed sleeve. How the deception had been practised upon him by the Bumbles. How the apothecary’s drugged tea had made his mind captive to their whims. How Mr Fagin had turned his philanthropic enterprise into a den of blackest iniquity for the exploitation of the boys therein. How Madam Manzoni had aided and abetted all this, as well as carrying out her own nefarious activities at the Black Jack. All was brought to light and set before the offices of justice.
The conspirators were duly arrested and taken to Newgate, though upon their trial it was Oliver himself who petitioned the judge for clemency, asking for their sentences of hanging to be commuted to life sentences of imprisonment. “For even the blackest of sheep deserve the Lord’s mercy,” the court report recorded him as saying, noting also that when he had begged the judge and jury to “let mercy season justice” his piety and goodness had reduced several onlookers in the gallery – including a certain mealy-mouthed maidservant – to tears.
With the removal of Mrs Corney – and her noxious camomile tea – Mr Brownlow made a remarkable and almost immediate recovery, aided no doubt by his joy in the return of not one but two young wards. Indeed, he took Twill to his bosom as quickly as he had Oliver, bestowing on her all of an adopted father’s love and affection, as well as altering his will to bequeath her half his fortune.
Then, with the assistance and guidance of the now twin apples of his eye, he set about righting the wrongs brought about during his illness. The Benevolent Home was once more restored to a place of refuge – a home from home where destitute and hungry children might find a warm welcome, a soft bed, a hot meal and the love of a family. I say children, for Mr Brownlow saw fit to change the name of the institution to “The Twist and Twill Institute for Homeless Boys and Girls”. He also saw fit to install as house parents one Baggage Jones and her newly wedded husband Bob (who had been so overcome by the tide of recent events he had accidentally proposed to Baggage, who – in a state of equal joy and astonishment – had accepted him).
Most of the blue boys had returned to the home once it had been extensively refurbished, the blacking factory erased from memory and replaced with home comforts and a kitchen large enough for Baggage to whip up cakes by the bakers’ dozen. The inky tincture of the blue boys’ skin was gradually fading with the weekly system of baths that had been instituted – much to the chagrin of small Nemo, who considered bathing almost as great an abuse as the blacking factory – as well as Baggage’s dietary maxim: “Let them eat cake!”
Meanwhile, the Sassy Sisters had also decamped from the printing press to the “Twill ’n’ Twist” – as it came to be affectionately known. And soon there came more – more wretched, loveless creatures who crept in from the cold, wet shelter-less midnight streets of London. In shabby rags with bruised and battered souls they came, seeking solace, seeking shelter, seeking a home.
In fact, there were so many orphans now in need of love that Baggage persuaded Mr Brownlow to recruit more mother figures in the shape of the Butterflies – past and present; the beautiful and the faded alike – to care for the loveless children. These dear girls had vast untapped wells of motherly love to give to the little occupants of the Twill ’n’ Twist, and so the arrangement worked perfectly, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.
Baggage had tried to recruit Dodger too, persuading him to take on the role of house leader, but all in vain. Dodger – never one for home and hearth – seemed to have itchier soles to his feet than ever before.
Since he stood in court to watch the closest man he had to a father sentenced to life imprisonment, Mr Jack Dawkins had not been himself. The ducker and diver that had once been the Artful Dodger seemed all cleaned out by the recent turn of events. And, according to Chelsea, no one could bring a smile to his face – not even little Angel, who had been rescued from the clutches of Mr
s Spanks by the Sassy Sisters.
Twill longed to talk to Dodger about what was ailing him, but she so rarely saw him these days, a circumstance that caused her more discomfort than she might once have imagined, nor was able to account for.
For Twill herself had been elevated to the life of a young heiress, the stuff of happy endings for most storybook heroines – and yet not so for Twill Brownlow-Jones (she had kept her name, for Twill Twist sounded rather ridiculous, and she considered Baggage as much her family as Oliver and Mr Brownlow). For, while she loved her long-lost brother and her newly found adoptive father, Twill found the necessity of wearing stays, and being subjected to the horrors of curl papers, and drinking tea with other fashionable young ladies … I would say irksome, but that would be to grossly underestimate the abject misery these necessities occasioned for the girl who had grown up running wild on the streets of Camberwell and Denmark Hill, who had risen in the ranks of the Sassy Sisters of Saffron Hill, who had foiled plots, brought villains to justice, freed the oppressed…
The worst of it was she knew she ought to be grateful. She had longed for adventure – and had it not been the best of larks while it lasted? She had longed for family she could call her own – and now she had so much family, with Baggage and Bob, the Butterflies, the Sassy Sisters, the blue boys, a twin brother and a beloved guardian, that she could barely keep count of them all. Oh, but the old itch gnawed at her so that it was almost impossible to sit still at her embroidery, or keep herself from twitching while at the tea table with the cultured young ladies whose society her guardian wished her to cultivate, but who did not understand her as the Sassy Sisters had, and could not read her very soul the way that Dodger had.
Dodger himself was – unbeknown to her – suffering from a very similar malady, yet his gnawing ache took a more precise shape and form than hers, perhaps indicating that he was the wiser of the two when it came to knowing the name of the dog that had bit him. The streets of London no longer held the thrill they once had for Dodger. His role as Chief Child Protector was redundant now that the Child Catchers had been disbanded and driven from the streets. And he had almost resolved to sail off with his old pal Harry Bates on the Calliope – and yet … something held him back.
And that something bore a distinct resemblance to Miss Twill Jones.
To think of the Artful Dodger himself with a broken heart – pining for a girl no less – was as unthinkable to the young man himself as it may be to the reader, but this was the case, and a very lamentable case it was too.
It was young Oliver who diagnosed the malady in both his dearest sister and best of friends and came up with a cure for both – though implementing the remedy caused him the bitterest heartache of his young and not always easy life.
One morning he and his new sister were sitting in the parlour, he reading a book of Mr Keats’s poetry, she stabbing angrily at a sampler of embroidery that was already pock-marked with unpicked stitches and the violence of her needle, when there was a rap at the door.
“I wonder who that could be?” said young Oliver, with a look in his eye that suggested he knew exactly who the caller was (hardly surprising since he had summoned him there by messenger not two hours earlier).
The butler rapped on the door and ushered in the guest. “Mr Jack Dawkins to see you, sir – miss.”
“Dodger?” said Twill, looking up in surprise, her face heating up unexpectedly.
Her erstwhile pickpocketing companion had grown a little in the months since we saw him in Farthingale and Shillingsworth Bank – as boys of that age are wont to do – and he had a smattering of down on his upper lip that gave him a distinctly grown-up appearance and which set Twill’s stomach into a state of disorder, the reason for which she could not fathom.
“Miss Brownlow-Jones,” said Dodger, bowing low but failing to meet her eye.
This greeting had the effect of worsening her symptoms rather than curing them, and fortunately Oliver broke the awkward silence.
“Jack here tells me he wishes to join the Merchant Fleet.”
“What?” said Twill. “But … you can’t!”
“Why can’t I?” demanded Dodger, eyes shooting up to meet hers now.
“Because – well, because…” Twill’s stomach symptoms seemed to have extended to her heart, which was hammering wildly. “It’s too dangerous!”
“Dangerous, pah!” said Dodger. “When did you get so lily-livered, Camberwell?”
“I’m as brave as you and braver, and you know it!” said Twill, forgetting in a moment all the ladylike manners that Mr Brownlow had been attempting to instil in her. “And don’t call me Camberwell!”
She glared at him so horribly that a lesser young man might have withered or turned to stone beneath her stare. Not so Dodger, who stared back just as ferociously.
“Indeed you are, my sister,” said Oliver, intervening before either did a damage by the savagery of their glares. “Which is why Mr Brownlow needs you.”
Twill turned to him, only half hearing what he was saying, the other half of her brain unaccountably fixated on the presence of Master Dawkins – his annoyingly broad chest … and angry blue eyes … and the irritating shape of his freckled nose.
“The Brownlow estates in the Indies are in quite a state,” Oliver went on. “My guardian needs someone to go and oversee them – and to make a stand against the slave trade once and for all. And he has suggested that you, my dear Twill, would be just the woman.”
“Me go to the Indies?” Twill’s astonishment was amplified by Dodger’s alarm.
“It’s no place for the lily-livered,” Oliver went on. “The life over there didn’t suit me one bit. What with pirates and slavers, and sea creatures that you only hear of in fairy tales…”
Twill and Dodger were both staring at him.
“Pirates?” said she.
“Sea creatures?” asked he.
“Oh, there are adventures enough to be had over there to keep you busy for a lifetime,” said Oliver, who at this moment was showing his truest wellspring of goodness. He had never had a sister, and his tender heart had attached itself to hers from the very first moment they met, so that she was now essential to his happiness. Yet he saw that adventure was essential to hers. And so perhaps was Jack Dawkins.
“And, Dodger, I would like you to go too,” said Oliver, adding, because he was only human after all –and fully aware of the effect his next words would have – “to look after her.”
“I don’t need anyone to look after me!” declared a furious Twill.
“Be that as it may,” said Oliver, trying not to smile. “I’d sleep easier if I knew Jack was with you.”
Twill looked at Dodger. Dodger looked at Twill. Neither said a word. He gave a sniff. She wrinkled her nose and shrugged. That was all. But that was all that needed to be said. For now.
“I – I’m not sure I’m fit to run a big estate,” said Twill, turning back to Oliver. “I can’t seem to even pour the tea properly. Or sew cross-stitch. Or dance a quadrille…”
“Nobody cares over there whether you are born a lady or brought up in a pigsty,” said Oliver. “The New World cares less about such silly distinctions than the old. It’s a place of strange winds, magical shifting sands – a place where any man can make a fortune on his wits. Or any girl too, for that matter.”
“Oh, but how I will miss you all!” said Twill, clasping the hand of her brother, whom she had come to love as she did the air of London’s streets, as she did Baggage.
“We’ll come back and visit,” said Jack, deciding this was the moment for him to take charge, before Twill got caught up in the soppy stuff. “When I have made my fortune I will probably want to come back and purchase one of them new mansions wot they’re building up in Mary-Le-Bone. Or perhaps a country shootin’ box, or a place in Brighton or Bath – though if Bath’s not good enough for our young queen, maybe it’s not good enough for Dodger neither!”
Twill looked at him with an expressi
on of mingled irritation and amusement. “You won’t last two minutes out there without me, Jack Dawkins. All them sea monsters and marauding pirates – yup, you’re gonna need a girl to protect you!”
“A girl!”
“Yes!” declared Twill. “This girl!”
And so that is where the story ends, with wrongdoers punished, benevolence rewarded, Twill and Dodger setting sail for a life of roaming adventure, and the righting of worldwide wrong. And what of equality for the female of the species? An equal chance for the girls who were so maligned when our tale began? Well, it may not be fully achieved – for we should not forget that women will not to get to vote for over half a century beyond the conclusion of this tale! – but let us say the female fight-back has begun – and our heroine is throwing the first punch.
Acknowledgements
My first encounter with Dickens was when my big sister was studying Great Expectations for O Level and started calling our little brother “Mr Pumblechook”. There was something about that glorious name, and all those others – Magwitch, Jaggers, Pip Pirrip, Orlick, Wopsle and the Aged P – that made my brain pop and fizz! But then I auditioned unsuccessfully for the school production of Oliver! and got the hump with Dickens for a while, so the first Dickens I actually read was Bleak House at S Level (no, that’s not a typo – S Level was a thing back in my day!). It was the first time I had ever seen a teacher cry – the wonderful Mr Jennifer Barratt weeping over the death of Jo in a portacabin at Lymm High School on a rainy November morning in 1990 made a deep impression on me. I was studying Nineteenth Century History at the time and I started to see that Dickens’ books were more than brilliantly woven plots and wonderful, eccentric characters - he was also a social campaigner who used stories to fight against social ills, boldly and imaginatively campaigning to improve the lives of the most desperate and overlooked in society through his fiction. That those powerful messages continued to resonate across the decades, across the centuries – enough to make my teacher cry over the death of a homeless boy who was a figment of a genius’s imagination – had a profound effect on me, and fundamentally shaped the writer, and the teacher, I have always tried to be.
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