Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

  Your project sounds so interesting, she keeps saying. From everything you’re telling me. Yeah, I’m really babbling on. But then, the manuscript is the main—only?—thing in my life since my ex left. Or I left. Or whatever fucking thing happened.

  Ursula’s being sweet. So sweet, in fact, that what I’m beginning to realize is: this woman has an appetite for trans, and thank fuck for that.

  But also now I’m panicking. Would I even know how to get it on at this point, given the opportunity? I used to be so—how to put this—confident. Very confident. But god it’s been so long. I mean, so very long that now I’m trying to mentally track through the house, to remember where I even last saw my cock. Under the bed? In the cheapo cardboard set of drawers I’ve stuffed in my closet? I have no idea what my face looks like as I’m running through these thoughts. Likely I’m grinding my teeth in that way I do when I’m trying to emulate Tom Cruise’s jaw-muscle flicker in Top Gun, and ending up looking like a serial killer. A friend once said all white people look like serial killers, which seems about right. So I try to adjust my face to look less serial killery but now inevitably look disturbing in a different way.

  I focus on regaining composure. I determine I must return her possible flirting with some gesture—anything—of my own. To my horror, this gesture ends up taking the form of a pseudo-gallant virtual hat-tipping move and a dumb little bow I do at her on my way out.

  I really feel mortified by the time I get to my car—have already cued up Metallica to channel my embarrassment into pathetic drumming on the steering wheel—when she texts me.

  Do you want to come to dinner Thursday?

  *5 By 1814, the so-called “philanthropic” organization, Society for the Protection of Asiatic Sailors, had proposed removing lascars from “public view” and remanding them to a barracks at the East End docks. Of course it was the East India Company that sponsored these detention centers. The Company had long been a testing ground for naturalizing new brutalities.

  Well, the Company and the ordinary racists of London, as with the pub-keeper’s wife, above.

  (For more on which, see Humberto Garcia, “The Transports of Lascar Specters: Dispossessed Indian Sailors in Women’s Romantic Poetry,” in Jordana Rosenberg and Chi-ming Yang, eds., “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century” [special issue], The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55, nos. 2–3 [2014].)

  *6 Language redacted in original.

  *7 Stealing

  *8 Begging

  8.

  The next morning was a hard return to the regularity of Kneebone’s. Jack had slept little due to excitement. As Kneebone show’d him a new caning technique at the workbench, Jack’s chin dropped to his chest. Kneebone tapped his knuckles with a Rod. “Cane more quickly, girl.” In all his years with Kneebone, Jack had labor’d with regularity and precision. This new shift in his demeanor wasn’t passing unnoticed.

  “I’m docking you the supper portion of peas and oats.” Kneebone rapped Jack’s knuckles with the rod for the third time that morning. Jack blink’d up at this beady-eyed crow, his master, bustling up pointed feathers, snatching back sustenance with an angry Beak.

  At the fourth chin-to-chest drop, Kneebone shook him awake with his spiny hands on his shoulders.

  “That’s it. Sending you to market.” Kneebone bent to unlock Jack’s ankle Cuff, then thrust a bunch of tuffets at him. “You’re useless today.”

  * * *

  —

  Tuffets hung off the crooks of Jack’s elbows like overblown, sun-softened fruit as he tumbl’d down the streets, weaving in and out of the thick mobs at Cheapside market, then down Gin Lane. He hummed happily, thinking of Bess, and the way she’d caressed his hands.

  He’d deliver’d the goods at various merchants and was rounding the intersection of Charing Cross and Tottenham Court roads, free of Encumbrances and somewhat bouncy, when a sudden and unusual sound jolt’d him. He halt’d in front of a Watch shop, looking for the source. Inside, the proprietor turn’d over a large rusted clock, peering at its underside—

  There came some Squawking from the interior…Every-Day-Same-Day-Same-Time-Different-Day. Can’t-Stop—

  Jack squinted through the glaze.

  Just then the owner knocked his tool with a distract’d elbow and bent under the bench to retrieve it.

  More squawking. Jack’s eyes fix’d on a rose-gold Pocketwatch. The proprietor’s head was still under the workbench, fussing.

  * * *

  —

  From behind him, the sudden rush of a tattered cloak, the scent of cigar rising from dirty wool, and a red-haired, rail-thin blackguard*1 had appear’d over his shoulder, noticing what Jack was noticing: the watchmaker unalert, the rose-gold Pocketwatch lying unguarded. The blackguard hurl’d himself at the windowpane, punching in the Glaze with his elbow and nabbing the watch from the sill.

  The watchmaker shouted out for the constables. “I’ve been robbed!”

  It was a clumsy, impulsive job—immensely stupid, in fact.

  But then the blackguard did something unexpected and canny.

  “I’ve been robbed,” he shriek’d, drowning out the sound of the watchmaker. His eyes bulged in pretended Horror as he patted his pockets.

  In sheer panic at the Mêlée, Jack began to run.

  Weatherwax church was spilling out from afternoon mass. The cries of “Stop, Thief!” had a Magnetic effect on the popish lot. They coagulated instantly into a wall, blockading Court Road. Jack spun and headed back towards Charing Cross just as he saw a constable huffing towards him, a musket bouncing off his hip—Jack assessed that he would achieve the intersection before the sentry did. The shops and houses blurred into an ochre wash as he ran, and his estimations were wrong because the next thing he knew, a second constable’s musket hit him square in the back—and he flipp’d onto his ass in the street with the catholicks clucking about him like a bunch of fuddled Hens.

  Then the constable’s hand was on him, rifling through his pockets, tearing at his already-torn woolens.

  “I didn’t steal anything!” Jack cried.

  The Pig issued a rough laugh. A gin-soaked blast of air, and the laugh accelerat’d into a cough that instantly became a seizure of hacking.

  The constable’s Hands were all over him—feeling ’round his ankles—patting his thighs—pausing over his Chest. A look of confusion cross’d the constable’s face.

  Jack’s heart was racing. “Dueling injury.” He waved his hand at his chest. “Bandaged up.”

  The constable tore Jack’s shirt up to his chin—saw the bandages— Jack’s throat had become a nest of Birds.

  The constable emitt’d a walrusy “humph,” and stood.

  “Perchance you swallowed the watch Fob,” he grous’d, in an effort to save face.

  “I can shite for you if you like,” Jack said, banking on this being a suggestion too odious.

  “Be on yer way—away from the pockets of the finer Sort.”

  Jack righted himself and stumbl’d down the lane in the opposite direction, willing himself not to look back.

  * * *

  —

  After several blocks, his breath returned to him. He was puzzling over why he’d panicked, when—at the intersection of Tottenham—Jack spy’d the blackguard again. Trotting casually down the lane ahead.

  And whether it was anger, or righteousness, or simply the leftover Energy in Jack’s veins making him dance forward quicker and quicker down the lane—or maybe he was hearing Bess’s words, You should be King Screwsman, playing through his head—before he knew it, Jack was picking his way quietly up behind the blackguard.

  The blackguard puff’d happily on a cigar as he trudged along. Jack walked in rhythm. Inhaling deeply and holding his Breath, he dipped his hand into the blackguard’s pocket, mimicking the gentle swoop he used
to cane tuffets.

  And then the watch was in his Hand.

  Perhaps Bess had been right.

  Jack turned backwards and rounded the corner of Fleet Street towards Kneebone’s.

  He had done it—his first—however unspectacular—Jilt.*2

  *1 Rogue; also: boot cleaner

  *2 The specifics of this interaction with the constable afford details that are not given in any of the other records. I will provisionally regard it as something of an exclusive inside report.

  9.

  Jonathan Wild—Thief-Catcher General, Mr. Thingstable*1, Namer-of-Names, Satanic Cunt-stable*2 of London—celebrat’d at his desk, alone, the ten-year anniversary of his release from the Wood Street Compter.*3

  The Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property—dug into one unusually thick hollowed-out post—sat twenty-five feet beneath the Tower Wharf. Wild watch’d through green scratched glazes the sewers emptying into the Thames. He catalogued the waft of Dreck, calibrated the waste with the limp map of the City curling off his walls. An accountant of Offal, he notated which carcasses came from which butcher shops and were thrown into which sewers—which tanneries had excess lime to dump in the Channels—which grocers were tossing out soft Turnips.

  A single candle burned. A single snifter of fine French Brandy balanc’d in his hand.

  * * *

  —

  The winch chair—Wild’s apparatus for entering and exiting the piling—clang’d to an office-level halt. At a timid knock on the door, Wild cleared his throat. “Come in,” he said, elongating the “eee” of “in”—an oily snake escaping his lips.

  A lady entered. Like all newly monied, this one was fond of flaunting her Wealth. Her shirt was speckled in mica grains, and opal and ruby Pins dotted her complex hairpiece.

  Wild strode around the desk to pull out the large leather chair.

  “I’ve come to talk to you about a robbery.”

  Wild nodded. The gray hairs of his brows cast thick shadows across the surface of his broad forehead, and his hand strok’d the infamous pair of iron manacles he kept jangling from his belthook.

  The Newly Monied glanced anxiously about the Office.

  Wild’s way with the manacles was legend. Though a dense, heavy man, with manacles he was a jaguar, a slip in the night. The speed of his Approach, his perfect aim, were legendary. As was the way he silenced the jangly metal in his beet-red fist as he walked up behind you. Wild’s right hand stay’d hot with sweat and bloomed the tang of iron Residues.

  His crisp-pressed smish hissed with starch as his shoulders rose and fell with breath. It hardly matter’d what this woman said. Wild had known why she was there the moment she stepped in.

  He handed her a dram of brandy and feign’d interest.

  “My husband maintains a watch shop in Charing Cross. Yesterday it was thiev’d and a rose-gold watch fob taken.” Her sparrow-hand shook the glass of Brandy into a small Storm.

  “A warming draught eases such traumatic recountings, Madam,” Wild soothed. “Tell me everything that happened to your precious personal goods. But not before”—he raised a finger, coughed—“my finder’s fee—’tis but a guinea.” He slid a ceramic dish towards her. “Let us get the nasty particulars of payment out of the way.”

  Dragging the dish back across the desk and pocketing the Coin, Wild placed his chin onto his clasped hands. “Now, to return to this heinous crime and your unique and irreplaceable personal Items.”

  She began a long recounting.

  Wild quickly ceased listening. For he knew very well who had nabbed her jingle-brained husband’s Watchfob. He had known the moment she walked through the door. It was in fact he who had dispatched Hell-and-Fury to Charing Cross the previous Afternoon, anticipating at that point charging ten guineas for the return of the property, plus his finder’s fee. Considering her fine apparel, he now determined on twelve.

  * * *

  —

  Not twenty minutes after the Newly Monied had left—and Wild had boxed the Jesuit*4 into a Chamber pot under the desk—the winch chair descended again.

  A soft tap on the door and in tripp’d Tom Sykes—or Hell-and-Fury, as they called him—the most hapless, ham-fingered, cringing Crook in town—as manipulable as a soft Doll lacking innards.

  A steam rose off his chalky skin. Hell-and-Fury was a jittery underfed mole—his narrow, bloody eyes squint’d frantically. His thin red hair was parted wetly down the middle of his pointed Skull. He smooth’d his filthy jerkin.

  “D’you have the fob,” Wild said, wiping the corners of his lips with a pocket square. He was anticipating dining on roast duck at the Iris Inn.

  Hell-and-Fury’s hands went to his right cloak pocket. The left. Then the interior. And his breeches pockets. His narrow eyes squint’d narrower. He even reach’d down to check the bands at the bottom of his stockings. Repeated the entire check again.

  He blinked in terror at Wild. “It’s gone.”

  “Get out,” Wild clipped, “before I do something horrible to you.”

  Hell-and-Fury scuttl’d to the winch chair.

  Wild put his head in his hands. Why do I have to tolerate the dumb fops of this town? Not a canny thief among ’em—not the ones that work for me, anyway. He curled up, then bit down on his tongue—an old affectation from childhood—briefly despised himself for retaining his childish affectations—uncurled his tongue—breathed out. God, you bastard, bring me Success in a bigger scheme. Immortalize me in this town and across the Oceans, too.

  The winch chair clatter’d down the post again. When the doors opened, Wild, head down, said, “Leave or I’ll take you to the gallows tonight and don’t think I won’t do it.”

  “I don’t appreciate being spoken to in that way.” Wild raised his head. Not Hell-and-Fury.

  James Evans—a pyramidal man with a wide base, a bushy white wig and a long thin face scorched with a constant Blush—totter’d in the threshold. “I’ve come to discuss our—my—well, now our experiments.”

  “Yes, Evans,” Wild exhal’d, clasping his hands under his chin and staring Evans down. “Please, please tell me you’ve made progress.”

  “I’ve drafted a—what could we call it?—a recipe of sorts. It’s not quite ready. Actually, not ready in the slightest. I’m perfecting it.”

  Wild’s gaze hardened. “You’ve been perfecting it for some time.”

  “It’s immensely difficult.” Evans flutter’d his hands while he talked in the unnerving way that he did.

  “If you can hurry up the Experiment, we’ll both be rich and you’ll never have to worry about the Royal College of Physicians snubbing you again. Nor will I have to worry about managing the dumb clunches that come through this office. We’ll be Legends.

  —“Perhaps not beloved Legends,” he clarified. “But Legends nonetheless.”*5

  *1 Eighteenth-century slang dictionaries offer a delicate way to avoid uttering the first syllable of this word—“constable”—which, in British English, sounds like a very particular indecent other word. Though, frankly “constable,” when you think about it, is a much more indecent word than “cunt.” For there are certain cases where the latter, at least, is used (verrrry) lovingly and consensually. The former, never.

  *2 Ahem. Thingstable.

  *3 Debtors’ prison

  *4 Had congress with himself

  *5 Every record of Sheppard features his pursuit by Wild. Not one of them, however, mentions an “Evans.”

  10.

  The watch puls’d warm in Jack’s trouser pocket. A small animal radiating heat and possibility—driving him towards Bess, hailing him into a Future where he would be no longer a freezing chained girl, mustering tuffet after tuffet at Kneebone’s command. A future where he would be with her, and he would be Jack.

  And so, although it was po
uring and very cold, Jack reached into his pocket for the file—slipped it into the ankle-lock, and freed himself from the warmth of his bed into the swirling wet Wind.

  By the time he reached Cresswell’s his fingers were gnarled with cold. He ascended with some measure of pain the rain-drenched bricks to the parapet. Waited ’til Bess finished with what sounded like an out-at-the-heels*1 duke, who climax’d in a tortured Squeal.

  After the exit of the cove, Jack sent down a branch he’d collected from the alley, tapping at the window. It opened to the upper casing with a thump.

  Drop. Swing. Tumble in.

  * * *

  —

  Bess wore a tight black Chemise with a low neck, and black jodhpurs. She was tying her hair back with a ribbon. The sawdust-and-Rose scent of her permeated the room—went straight to Jack’s groin.

  He cleared his throat. “I nabbed a watch.” He removed the fob from his pocket and laid it before her.

  Bess peer’d down. “A nice one”—looked up—“Pull a rum stall?”*2

  “More just a…” It was the blackguard who had pulled off the rum stall, in fact. Jack didn’t know the canting term for “unplanned pickpocketing.” “Jus’ a simple jilt, really.”

  “You can pawn this, dear rogue.”

  “Not much of a rogue.” He bit the inside of his cheek.

  “Are now.” She smiled, dangling the watch from her pinky. “Most of the thieves in this city are owned by Wild. Not you.”