Printer's Devil (9780316167826)

by Bajoria, Paul

  “And this drug was so valuable that the villains were quite prepared to kill each other to get hold of it,” said Spintwice, beginning to understand.

  “It’s so valuable,” said Cricklebone, “that even the amount contained in the camel could make somebody very rich. You see — once people take it, they can’t stop taking it. They find they can’t live without it. And they’re perfectly prepared to kill for it, yes.”

  “So who killed Jiggs?” I asked again.

  “Jiggs — isn’t dead,” he replied, surprisingly. “He’s in Newgate. We arrested him, and then put notices out pretending he’d been found dead, to scare Cockburn and drive him out of hiding. Well, it worked: he got really scared, had to change his hiding place, and had to explain to His Lordship where the camel had gone.”

  “What about the lantern? The Sun of Calcutta?”

  “We pretended that had been stolen too,” Cricklebone went on. “The villains were just waiting for the moment when they could run off with that. His Lordship wanted Cockburn to get it for him, and we knew either he or the bosun would go for it sooner or later. So we, er — made out that Damyata had got away with it before any of them had a chance.”

  “And had he?”

  Cricklebone looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he mumbled.

  “I mean, did the real Damyata get there first?” I said.

  There was a short pause while Cricklebone contemplated what he was going to say. “Well, we riled them,” he continued, and it became evident he’d decided he was just going to ignore the question. “I’ve been very impressed with Mr. McAuchinleck’s skills. He had everyone well and truly fooled.”

  “But there was someone else, wasn’t there,” I persisted. “There really was a man from Calcutta in London, wasn’t there? It wasn’t Mr. McAuchinleck every time, was it? What about the man we found lying in the lane that night on the way down to the docks?”

  Cricklebone twitched, nervously. He made a few helpless little marks on the paper and stared at them, as though they were going to transform themselves magically into the answers to my questions.

  “And what about the man who tied me up, and took the camel?” put in Mr. Spintwice. “If that was your friend in disguise, all I can say is he was taking his masquerade a bit too seriously for my liking.”

  “And the house next door,” I said. “That night when I went inside, and it was all brand-new. Did McAuchinleck have it rebuilt?”

  “He couldn’t have, could he?” Nick put in. “And then torn it all out again two days later? Why would he do that?”

  Cricklebone’s mouth opened but no sound came out; so I seized on the silence to tell him about the letter from Imogen; about its reference to the name “Damyata”; about the hunch I’d had that the man from Calcutta had been trying to tell me something important — and hiding out next door all the while. Cricklebone was trying to make his face look as though he already knew every detail of what we were telling him; but behind the stiff expression his eyes were betraying occasional surprise, even alarm, at the mounting list of things he realized he still had to investigate.

  “Well,” he said at length, with a frog in his throat, “Certainly it must seem to you as if your man from Calcutta is a — a bit of a magician. I admit there are one or two details of Mr. McAuchinleck’s activities of which I’ve yet to be, ah — fully apprised.” He’d gone a bit pale during my story, and now he was doing his best not to look crestfallen. “I th-think I’ve said enough for today,” he finally muttered.

  “What suspense,” remarked Mr. Spintwice, who’d been listening with increasing surprise. “Like finding the last few pages of a book torn out.”

  Cricklebone pricked up his ears at the metaphor. “Books,” he said, “as Mog here well knows, tend to have a few blank pages at the end.”

  “Yes,” I said, “because usually the gatherings have got to be —”

  “It’s because,” Cricklebone interrupted, “the end of a book is very rarely the end of the story” He looked rather pleased with this analogy, and stood up too fast, hitting his head very sharply on the low beam. “Well,” he said, his eyes watering, “Good day.”

  We showed him to the door. As he left, he held out his hand rather awkwardly to shake mine, then Nick’s.

  “Nick,” he said, “Mog. I mean, Mog. Nick. Whichever one of you is which, ha ha. You’ve ah — you’ve done some good work for us these past few weeks. Remarkable work, though you might not know it. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were some sort of, er — reward, for this.”

  Four pairs of wide eyes looked up at him from the doorway: Nick, Spintwice, Lash, and myself.

  “Keep out of mischief now, mmm?” he muttered, finally; and he turned, and was off, like a stick-puppet, into the noise and bustle of the city. We never saw him, or McAuchinleck, again.

  They hanged Cockburn in October.

  It was like a fairground. Everyone was wearing a happy face, as if it were a holiday. A juggler was entertaining for coins. You could buy poorly printed pamphlets relating the gory and embellished history of Cockburn’s misdemeanors. Mr. Glibstaff was strutting about looking important, tapping people officiously on the backs of their calves when they were standing where he wanted to walk. Above us, every window on either side of the street was flung wide, with four or five cheery people leaning out of each one to enjoy the spectacle.

  Nick and I moved among the crowds, with Lash between us. Costermongers had cleared their carts and were charging people a halfpenny to climb up on them for a better view. I saw Bob Smitchin organizing one such grandstand.

  He winked at us.

  “Grand day for it,” he said. He might have been talking about a picnic. “You’d be a proud feller today, Mog.”

  “Proud?” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, ‘e’s your convict,” Bob said cheerfully, “people might say you got a particular interest in the case, Mog.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Serve ’im right,” he continued, helping another couple of people up onto his already overcrowded and wobbling cart, “way I see it, a feller chooses to be a miscurrant, or not a miscurrant. Should be prepared for the consey-cutives.”

  “Anyone would think,” I said to Nick, “it was the Devil himself being hanged.” Pressing our way between the gathering hundreds, Nick and I spotted several people we knew to be thieves, or thugs, and they seemed to be shouting as loud as anyone else, presumably relieved it was someone else going to the gallows this time.

  “Some of this lot should be up there with him,” said Nick. He nudged my arm and nodded towards a wily-looking urchin a couple of years older than us who was creeping round a circle of long-coated gentlemen. “Plenty of pockets to pick today.”

  “They’ll find nothing on me,” I said, tapping my empty pockets. “That the sort of thing you used to do, is it?”

  Nick shrugged.

  Since the bosun’s death he didn’t seem to have stolen anything. People used to patronize him and tell him he’d turned over a new leaf, which irritated him. “I haven’t turned over anything,” he maintained; “if I wanted to nail stuff, I would.” But he didn’t seem to. I often reflected that, in the past few months, he seemed a lot older; and he laughed a lot more often.

  “And I pray our souls be cleansed,” someone was declaring close by, “and our hands stayed by the fear of the Wrath of God.” It was a shabby-looking man with a few broken teeth, holding out his hands and orating to the pushing crowds around him. “Bless you,” he kept saying, and holding out a crumpled felt hat in which a couple of coins lay. “The Lord,” he said when he saw us, “is ever merciful to the righteous, my boys, and fearful to the wicked. A penny from a pauper is more dear to God than all the riches of a nobleman. A camel may more easily pass through a needle’s eye than a wealthy man enter heaven.”

  He must have wondered what lay behind the meaningful glance Nick and I exchanged as we squeezed our way past.

  All around us, on post
s and hoardings, were multiple copies of a new and arresting poster, which had kept Mr. Cramplock and myself busy for the entirety of an autumn evening last week.

  THIS THURSDAY at 2PM SHARP

  One of the most Notorious

  ROGUES and MURDERERS

  of this Century

  IS TO BE

  HANGED

  At the Place of Public Execution at

  NEWGATE

  “You know what Mr. Spintwice says?” said Nick. “There’s no such thing as justice.”

  Spintwice had, I knew, made no secret of his scorn at the eagerness of people to gather in a big crowd and watch a man being hanged. “What’s he mean, then?”

  “I think he means,” said Nick, “nobody can ever be satisfied. You can’t set things right once they’ve gone wrong, not without turning back time and starting again. Like — hanging someone — it doesn’t undo the crime. People want blood, but when they’ve got it they’re no better off, are they?”

  The roaring was getting louder as the anticipation mounted. People were becoming aware that it was nearly the appointed time.

  “Do you want to stay and watch?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we began pushing back the way we’d come. I had to keep tugging at Lash’s lead to drag him away from half-chewed apples and discarded bits of pie which people had dropped on the ground.

  As we emerged out of the crush, a woman came up to us to try and sell us sweets.

  “Sugared oranges,” she cooed, “and cherries and ginger. Treats, my dears, come off the boat from the East Indies.” We peered into her tray and saw little squares and diamonds of sugared fruit, some of it wrapped in rice paper. A heavy, spicy smell was wafting up from the sugar-caked board. Nick reached in and took a square of ginger.

  “I want to get you this,” he said, fishing in his pocket for a grubby coin.

  The woman moved off, and he handed me the sweet. I unwrapped the thin crinkly paper it was wrapped in and popped the chunk of ginger into my mouth. Just as I was about to throw the paper away, I noticed some blue markings on it.

  “Hang on,” I said with my mouth full. Folding out the sticky little sheet, I found it had a printed inscription in faint blue. I stared at it. Slowly, the pale characters sank into my brain.

  I looked around. “Where’s the woman?” I asked. We tried to call her back, but she’d blended into the excited crowd, and the people were milling too densely for us to catch her.

  We turned and set off again, staying close together. The throng was too intent on what it had come to see; no one paid a scrap of attention to the pair of children, remarkably alike, one of them hanging onto a longlimbed dog, and each of them glancing back and forward occasionally to make sure the other was still there — as though, it having taken so many years for them to find one another, they were now determined not to let the other go.

  Up the street, a gate in the prison wall swung open, and a broadly built figure was led up the wooden steps to the back of the cart. Above our heads, the bells of St. Sepulchre’s began the solemn sequence that preceded the striking of two. Gradually, starting from the front, the jeers of the crowd fell silent, and the silence spread all the way along the street, up the hill, as far as the cathedral.

  MYSTERY.

  MENACE.

  MIRE.

  A thousand thrilling adventures await you in

  THE GOD OF

  MISCHIEF

  Sequel to The Printer’s Devil

  Coming February 2007

  1

  A BURIAL

  The chanting grew gradually louder. I was frightened. I was being swung around, by my feet, by two big grim-faced girls who held onto my ankles with a grip far tighter and more cruel than necessary. Their faces, the only still points in a whirl of figures and furniture, broke into sadistic grins as I stared at them. I was already dizzy and was beginning to feel sick, my short filthy hair feeling the breeze as my head just missed the wall or the edge of a desk by a matter of inches. I kept my arms pulled in tight against my chest to stop them from smashing into something and, with clenched fists, I silently begged them to stop. Round and round I went, faster and faster; the girls couldn’t possibly keep control of my whirling body for much longer, and I knew if they didn’t stop I was going to hurt myself badly. A few times I tried to shout at them to stop, but they were making too much noise for my voice to be heard; and anyway, I knew from experience that crying out only made them whirl you more violently and gleefully.

  As suddenly as the game had started, it was all over. The lookout’s warning — “Mrs. Muggerage!” — was taken up by the rest of the girls, until it was simply a general loud hissing sound throughout the room; the girls let go of me and dispersed to the four corners, leaving me spinning on my back, my hair grinding into the filth of the floor, my limbs sprawling.

  A terrible silence descended. A huge figure was standing in the doorway. Only gradually did I realize who it was, though at the back of my head was the troubling sense that something was wrong; that this couldn’t really be happening. I struggled to sit up, the room continued to spin, and I felt the awful, inescapable sensation of my breakfast trying to escape. As the walls and floor whirled around my head, I brought up a great splattering stomachload of acidic, watery porridge.

  A choir of angels couldn’t have been more innocent than that roomful of children pretended to be right then. Whether Mrs. Muggerage was fooled, I never knew — if she was, I couldn’t understand how — but there was only one child in the room who wasn’t sitting bolt upright, with her hands by her sides, looking wide-eyed and morally horrified at what she could see in the middle of the floor. And that was me. Just who else had been involved, it was impossible to tell; but plainly I had been at the center of things, because there I was on the tiles, propped up on one arm, retching.

  “Mog Winter,” said Mrs. Muggerage, in a tone of grim pleasure at the prospect of being able to mete out some punishment. Her black boots echoing on the bare floor, she walked slowly over to me. There were a few seconds’ grace as I wiped my mouth and lifted my dizzy head to look up at her. She stood above me, a woman of awesome bulk and power, a grimy cloth in her hand. She was blocking out most of the light, but gazing up at her shadowy outline, I could tell her expression was without compassion, even slightly sneering with revulsion at my sickness. Then she grasped me by the collar and yanked me to my feet with a single, violent motion. I hung there from her fist like a marionette, weakened, close to tears.

  “Mog Winter,” she said again. “I coulda guessed. Before I walked in, I coulda guessed.”

  She turned around, slowly, holding me out to exhibit me to the rest of the children. There was complete silence as they stared at me. I registered the faces of my chief tormentors among the group, and they were looking at me with disdain, as though they were genuinely as disgusted with me as Mrs. Muggerage was.

  “What have you got to say fer yourself?” she snarled at me.

  “This ain’t right!” I said, struggling. “You’re not meant to be here.”

  “No good,” Mrs. Muggerage was saying, “can ever come to those what misbehaves. Lord knows if we don’t try hard enough, girls and boys, to make it plain. Lord knows if I don’t teach the same lesson day after day. No good will ever come to those what can’t behave. And Lord knows if, day after day, some dreadful boy or girl don’t completely ignore the lesson, so’s I’m ‘bliged to teach it all over again. Well.”

  That “well” was calculated to send a shiver of fear into every young heart in the room. Although only a single word, it was stretched so it lasted as long as a whole sentence, and it contained more misery in its elongated syllable than any complete sentence you could possibly think of.

  She dropped me. Because she’d been holding me up with my feet off the ground, I had to put my hands out to break my fall, and as I tumbled to the floor again my palms went straight into the pool of vile porridge I’d left beneath me, sme
aring it further and sending it splashing up my arms and across my cheek. Without intending it, but unable to prevent myself, I swore — using a word I’d heard the other children use several times a day. The moment I heard myself say it, I knew my fate was sealed.

  Their hearts in their mouths, the other children watched me crouching there, and waited to see what Mrs. Muggerage was going to do.

  She said nothing for a long time, while my unguarded oath resonated in our terrified souls. She said nothing, just stared down at me, for what seemed an eternity. The walls towered around us, cold, dirty and cracked, with barred windows in them so high above our heads that all we could ever see through them was the sun, the clouds, or the night sky. They were that high up on purpose, of course, to prevent us from seeing what was outside and dreaming or devising plans for escape; but quite often, when we were unsupervised, we used to form acrobatic towers by climbing on top of one another. Four children standing on one another’s shoulders meant that the person on top could grasp the bars and peer out over the wide sill, and we used to take turns being the one on top. Looking down, we could see the flagstones of the dank little orphanage yard far below, and part of the high brick gateway that led to the outside world; but of much more interest to us was the rooftop view, at eye level: the vista of chimneys and church spires receding into the distance and, beyond the city’s rooftops, a glimpse of hills to the north. We didn’t know any names for the places we were looking at: it was just “Out.” When we scrabbled our way up to look through the grimy window, we could see Out; we dreamed constantly of being Out, and staying Out, and never coming back.

  And, although I thought about it almost every minute of every day, I had never longed more to be Out than I did at that moment.