The Complete Bostock and Harris

by Leon Garfield

  He stared at the rowboat as hard as he could. What was going on out there? What was he saying to her, and she to him? What had he given her? Had he really parted with a ring? What was a ring to a big Englishman like that?

  The Englishman had not parted with a ring. In fact he hadn’t parted with anything more than a lump of stale bread he’d given to Mary Flatley to feed the seagulls with.

  Andrews was a huge, good-natured youth, the color of a kipper, and as straight and true as a plank of wood, but he was a bit on the stingy side.

  Mary Flatley was his second girl, the first having given up after he’d spent no more than a shilling on her in eighteen months, and then when it was raining.

  He was, you might have said, a careful youth who was saving up for something, but he never said what, as he was a bit close with words, too.

  “Are ye savin’ up for a house, maybe?” said Mary Flatley, scattering all the crumbs at once. “Or a fine new boat of yer own to bring home fish for yer wife and little ones when ye have ’em?”

  Andrews, of the silver tongue, looked down at his knees and smiled at them affably.

  “A penny for yer thoughts, Mr. Andrews!” said Mary Flatley.

  He looked up with interest.

  “Eh?”

  Mary Flatley sighed and reflected that, if it hadn’t been for that smarmy, faithless Cassidy, she’d not have been sitting here now, as flat as a drink of water. She hated him; she loved him. He was her worst friend and her best enemy.

  “I was thinkin’,” said Andrews, as if still pursuing the offered penny, “that we might row over to the nets and look at the fish. That’s what I was thinking.”

  “If ye’re sure they’ll not charge us for it?” said Mary Flatley.

  “No,” said Andrews. “It’s all the same to them.”

  “Then let’s take a look,” said Mary Flatley. “For it’s all the same to me, too.”

  He spat on his hands, and, grasping the oars, began to row vigorously toward the nets. Mary Flatley, sitting in the stern, watched the blades rising and falling like choppers. She gazed over them to the beach. Sitting on the end of the dwindling breakwater was a lump of green that looked a bit like Cassidy.

  She waved. The lump waved back. She stood up and waved again. The boat rocked and Andrews clouted the water with a steadying blade.

  At once there was a scream and a terrible bubbling howl! Something wild and streaming, with a knife between its teeth, came up on the end of the oar. It was Bostock.

  “Harris!” shrieked Bostock, who, having been struck on the head, was seeing a great many stars, suns, moons, and comets without the aid of any telescope whatsoever. “HARRIS!”

  Captain Bostock’s ivory-handled knife fell out of Bostock’s mouth and vanished into the sea, where it sank and, doubtless, became jetsam and the property of the Crown.

  Bostock shrieked again. Mary Flatley screamed and Andrews struggled to dislodge the monster from his oar. Knowing nothing of Bostock, his hopes, his dreams, his abiding love for Mary Harris, nor the learned article on Courtship that was responsible for his appearance, the occupants of the little boat could only regard him with terror and revulsion and fight to escape his grasp.

  Bostock, still dazed from the blow, fought back and overturned the boat.

  Now Cassidy entered the lists. He stripped off his coat, plunged into the sea, and sank like a stone. He couldn’t swim a stroke, but he’d seen his girl in danger of drowning, and he meant to save her even if it killed the pair of them.

  He came up roaring water and waving his arms; then he went down again to the bottom of the sea. His past life flashed before his eyes and he didn’t regret a minute of it, though he wished it had been longer and a bit more drawn out.

  He came up five times in all, for you can’t drown an Irishman in three; then Andrews got hold of him by the hair and dragged him up onto the beach.

  He’d seen Cassidy in difficulties, and, leaving Mary Flatley safely holding on to the boat, he’d swum to his rival’s aid. He was truly a good-natured youth, as kind and brave as any knight, so long as there wasn’t any expense.

  Back went Andrews for the boat, and, with himself and Mary Flatley astride the keel, paddled away for shore.

  “He’s dead!” cried Mary Flatley, rushing to the sodden Cassidy, from whom water was running like whiskey on St. Patrick’s night.

  Andrews picked him up and held him upside down till the rest of the water came out. Then he laid him down, and Cassidy opened his eyes.

  “He’s alive!” cried Mary Flatley. “Mr. Andrews, ye’ve saved Michael Cassidy’s life!”

  Andrews stared down at his feet, affably.

  “Oh, Cassidy!” cried Mary Flatley, kneeling down beside him and wringing the sea out of his hair. “Did ye hear that? Mr. Andrews has saved yer life! So what can I do, me darlin’, but wed him today, if he asks? For I’ve nothin’ else to give him for his trouble but me hand and me heart!”

  “Oh, Mary, Mary!” groaned Cassidy. “I’d never have needed savin’ at all if it hadn’t been for the love I bear yerself! I’d nothin’ else to give ye but me life!”

  “But ye’re still alive, Michael Cassidy, so what’s the use of that?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE BEACH was empty. The unlucky boating party and the passers-by who’d stopped to watch had all departed. Nothing remained but a large wet patch on the stones, compounded of seawater and tears. The scene was finished. It was time for the others to take their bow.

  Bostock and Harris emerged from the shadow of the breakwater. Bostock, due to the action of the sea, was looking peculiarly clean, like a scraped potato. Harris was supporting him, as he was still weak from his exertions and unable to speak.

  They went first to Harris’s house. Harris concealed the telescope in the stone coffin while Bostock looked on with chattering teeth.

  Then they went to Bostock’s. Harris observed that the Irishmen’s cart was once more outside, but there was no sign of the owners.

  They went into the house through the side door and Harris helped Bostock upstairs.

  There was a long, lugubrious face at the window. It was O’Rourke. He had replaced the broken pane and was engaged in cleaning his own finger and nose marks from the new glass.

  He took no notice of the two boys. Unlike his partner, he did not feel talkative when he was high up. He was terrified of heights.

  Bostock began to take down the ships’ posters with Mary Harris’s name on them.

  “What are you doing that for, Bosty?”

  “It’s finished, Harris. It’s all over.”

  He rolled up the posters, tied them with a piece of string, and laid them on his bed. Idly Harris picked up a roll and, applying it to his eye, observed Bostock.

  “It’s still only Friday, Bosty. There’s still time—”

  “It’s no good! Everything’s ruined now!”

  “Oh, Bosty, how little you understand!” said Harris. “We’ve only just started! We’ve only just scratched the surface of things! That’s why they look such a mess! Nothing’s ruined, old friend!”

  He explained that there was still a great deal more in the learned article on Courtship that they hadn’t tried. It would be madness to give up now. For instance, there was—

  Bostock lost his temper. When he’d said everything was ruined, he hadn’t been talking about the learned article. He had been referring to his pa’s best coat, his best hat, his best wig and cape, and, most recently of all, the knife that had been presented to him by the Brighton Exploring Society and had been engraved with his name. His pa had been very proud of that knife and used it to peel apples when company came. Gone!

  In view of all this, didn’t Harris think that he, Bostock, had sacrificed enough?

  Harris, somewhat taken aback by Bostock’s outburst, remarked that Mark Antony had sacrificed a whole empire for Cleopatra, so wasn’t Bostock being a little close-fisted about Mary? And anyway, Captain Bostock was a sick man and not
in any state to discover his losses before Christmas.

  He turned the rolled-up posters toward the window and peered past O’Rourke into the distance, as if to demonstrate how far away Christmas was.

  But Bostock, who always looked forward to Christmas as a time of warmth and presents and kindness from his parents, was enraged by the thought of having even that snatched from his grasp. He glared at Harris, and, being reminded by the roll of posters of yet another item in the catalogue of his father’s missing property, said, “And I want the telescope back!”

  Harris stiffened. He removed the roll from his eye and stared at it as if it were the ghost of the fine brass instrument that was so close to his heart. He stood up.

  “I’m going now, Bosty.”

  “The telescope, Harris!”

  “Good-bye, Bosty.”

  “Harris!”

  But Harris had gone, and without shaking hands. Bostock stared at the closed door, at first with anger, then with bewilderment and dismay.

  At first he wanted to run after Harris and tell him he hadn’t meant what he’d said, but he was still too deeply hurt by Harris’s abrupt departure. He wondered if he ought to wait for Harris to come back and then tell him it was all right.

  “Oh, Harris!” he whispered. “Even if I never get Mary, you can keep the telescope!”

  The door opened. It wasn’t Harris. It was the housekeeper. She looked around the room and frowned at Bostock.

  “You’re for it!” she said.

  Bostock smiled feebly. She always said that.

  “Where have you put it?”

  “Put what?”

  She shook a polishing rag menacingly. “You know what I mean.”

  Bostock knew. She meant the brass telescope.

  Ordinarily it was not an article that interested the good lady, but, having seen the recent commotion at sea from an upstairs window, she’d gone to polish the master’s telescope and look through it, in case anybody she knew was drowning.

  It hadn’t been there, so her thoughts had gone to Bostock.

  “If it’s not back today, I’ll tell the master,” she said. “And then you’ll be for it!”

  Her tone of voice suggested that, if Bostock did not comply with her demand, he could count himself lucky that the house wasn’t equipped with a yardarm, as he’d undoubtedly be hanged from it.

  “But—but I haven’t got it!” he moaned. “Whatever it is! Word of honor!”

  He didn’t know what to do. He thought with anguish of what would happen if he asked Harris for the telescope again, and he thought with equal anguish of what would happen if he didn’t. There seemed no way out.

  The housekeeper, unmoved, repeated her threat, and then, raising her eyes, saw O’Rourke’s absorbed face at the window.

  The thought crossed her mind that, in spite of appearances and everything she knew about him, Master Bostock might be innocent, and those no-good Irish loafers might be to blame.

  She glared at O’Rourke and remembered his partner, who, she suspected, was as crooked as his nose. So she said, as loudly as she could, “I’ll give you till tonight to put it back. Either that or I’ll go straight to your father, Captain Bostock, J.P.!”

  She had the satisfaction of seeing Bostock on the point of collapse, and O’Rourke in a similar state as he vanished below the sill.

  Chapter Sixteen

  YE DIRTY thief, Cassidy!” shouted O’Rourke, coming violently into their little room in the King’s Head, where Cassidy was sitting before the empty grate, wrapped in a blanket, with his wet shirt hanging out the window and his dripping breeches depending from the mantelpiece, for he was a modest man.

  “Say that again, O’Rourke,” cried Cassidy, rising like the ghost of Julius Caesar—the blanket being full of holes, “and I’ll knock ye down!”

  “Then I’ll not make a murderer of ye as well,” said O’Rourke. “So I’ll keep me opinions to meself till ye’re hanged for ’em!”

  But he couldn’t. He was too angry and frightened. He began pulling out Cassidy’s belongings, going through his pockets and looking under the bed, raging and railing at Cassidy all the time.

  “What are ye lookin’ for?” demanded Cassidy, being pushed from wall to bed and back again as he got in the way of the search.

  What was O’Rourke looking for? Well might Cassidy ask! He was looking for whatever it was that Cassidy had thieved out of the magistrate’s house.

  O’Rourke, having heard the housekeeper’s threat, jumped at once to the conclusion that Cassidy had been guilty of backsliding. It was as plain as the nose on Cassidy’s face. He’d lost Mary Flatley, so he cared nothing for anybody any more. The loss of the love that had turned him into an angel had put him right back among the devils again.

  O’Rourke was almost in tears. Hadn’t he watched over Cassidy like a father and humored him every yard of the way? And now Cassidy repaid him by stealing out of the house of the very gentleman who could have them both hanged!

  In vain Cassidy protested that he was as innocent as a newborn babe. O’Rourke was too mad to listen; he’d been frightened to death by the housekeeper and the gallows glare in her eyes.

  Then Cassidy, who’d been racking his brains for the cause of it all, remembered the brass telescope. O’Rourke collapsed on the bed.

  “Then ye did steal it?”

  “Never! I gave it straight into the hand of the doctor’s son. I swear it, O’Rourke!”

  “Did he give ye money for it?”

  “Fourpence ha’penny for me trouble.”

  “Then it’s trouble indeed, Cassidy! Ye’re worse than a thief. Ye’re a receiver of stolen property, and as such ye’re liable to the full strength of the law!”

  “Never!”

  O’Rourke looked at him pityingly, then went to his carpetbag and took out a battered book. It was a volume entitled The English Lawyer. O’Rourke had stolen it from a bookshop in Liverpool, for how could he keep Cassidy from breaking the laws of the land unless he’d a list of them to know what was what?

  He found the page, and Cassidy, following O’Rourke’s huge finger, saw for himself that his friend was quite right. It was all written down, and it proved him to be as guilty as the thief.

  He’d get fourteen years’ transportation if he was lucky. Otherwise he’d be hanged. And poor O’Rourke, being party to the criminal, would get the same.

  O’Rourke began packing up. They’d have to leave the town at once. Cassidy lay on the bed with the blanket over his head and swore that he’d sooner be hanged than leave Mary Flatley to marry the Englishman. So long as she wasn’t a wife, there was still hope, even if it was only to be Cassidy’s widow.

  O’Rourke dropped Cassidy’s bag with a thump.

  “Then it’s good-bye to ye, Michael Cassidy. I’ll not be hanged for another man’s girl.”

  Up came Cassidy’s head. “Then ye’ll leave me?”

  “What good would we be to each other, hangin’ on the end of a rope?”

  “Could we not get the article put back, O’Rourke?”

  “D’ye mean steal it out of the doctor’s house?”

  “I’m still an honest man, O’Rourke.”

  “Thank God—else ye’d be hanged twice over!”

  “I was thinkin’ of goin’ to the boy himself. Give me a chance, O’Rourke! He’s only a boy. He’s flesh and blood. He’s not a boy of stone that would see a man hanged for a bit of brass!”

  O’Rourke came back from the door.

  “He’s flesh and blood, Cassidy,” he said, remembering the night in the churchyard. “I’ll grant ye that.”

  “And will ye grant me the chance to try him?”

  O’Rourke fumbled in his pocket. He produced a grubby scrap of paper, which was the firm’s worksheet. He consulted it.

  “Ye’re in luck, Cassidy. There’s a window needs mendin’ in the doctor’s house. It’s the window of the boy’s own room.”

  Cassidy leaped from his bed as if it were on fire. H
e dragged on his breeches and shirt. O’Rourke stood back.

  “I’m not saying ye’ll fail, Cassidy,” he said. “But if ye should and the boy denies ye, will ye promise to come with me out of the town tonight?”

  Cassidy promised. How could the boy deny him? Had it been an old man, now, stern and calloused with years and well past the age of loving, it would have been another matter. But a boy, still young and tender enough to cry over a lost kitten, maybe? Ah, there was nothing to it!

  They went out together, and even O’Rourke felt that it would have been an unusual boy indeed who could have remained cold and unmoved in the face of Cassidy’s love and Cassidy’s desperate plight.

  The ladder was off the cart and up against the wall almost before the pony had stopped, and Cassidy was halfway up when O’Rourke shouted out, “Ye’ve forgot the glass!”

  But Cassidy went on like a green shoot rising, and, when he came to the broken window, he looked down and waved to O’Rourke. The boy was inside.

  Cassidy began to talk through the hole in the glass, and when Cassidy talked, the world stood still. Ah, that Cassidy! He could have charmed the birds from the trees and every lass from her glass! Oh, Cassidy! Who could turn aside from the pleading look on your face? Who could deny you, with your golden tongue? What heart in all the world would not be melted by the aching love of Cassidy for Mary Flatley?

  But he was a devil of a long time about it!

  Cassidy came down like the weather.

  “O’Rourke,” he said, “ye’ll not believe it, but he is a boy of stone. Somebody ought to tell his father, the doctor, and maybe he’ll put him in a bottle.”

  “What did ye say to him, Cassidy?”

  “I told him of Mary and me.”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  “Nothin’. He just stared at me with them terrible eyes of his.”

  “And then what did ye say to him?”

  “I told him we’d be a pair of dead men if the instrument wasn’t put back in the magistrate’s house within the hour.”

  “And what did he say to that?”