by Peter Carey
“It was never to be in public.”
“This is not public. This is my wife, her sister Miss Warriner, my little son, who is the soul of discretion I assure you. Now, shall we proceed? Or shall we abandon the bargain? You tell me, but tell me now, for all time.”
“We shall proceed.”
“Good man.”
Oates pulled over a small piano stool and, having spun it until he had the height right, sat himself close against his subject. Then he began to pass the magnets around the other’s worried brow.
“With these little magnets we shall cure you. Look.” He showed how he had secured a magnet between each finger. “Look carefully.”
He began to make slow passes in front of that hard resistant face.
Maggs for his part felt himself a monkey in a sailor’s cage. He looked at the young lady who quickly averted her eyes.
“Keep your eye on me, Sir.”
He watched the slow pass of the hands. He watched the glint of silver caught between the fingers.
He had made himself immune to the magnets, or so he thought. When Oates asked him, “How is the pain today?” he imagined himself quite normally awake.
23
TOBY HAD ALWAYS HAD a great affection for Characters, reflected Lizzie Warriner: dustmen, jugglers, costers, pick-pockets. He thought nothing of engaging the most gruesome types in Shepherd Market and writing down their histories in his chap book. The subject of this Mesmeric Exhibition did not know it, but he was likely to appear, much modified, in Toby’s next novel. There he would be Jack Muck, or Jock Crestfallen—a footman with a coster’s voice and a chest like a strong man in a circus.
Since Lizzie had experienced a very unhappy morning so far, she sat herself down with the expectation of forgetting all those fearful apprehensions that had so bedevilled her recent days.
Mary Oates was also present at the Exhibition, although it was obvious to her sister that she would really rather not be there. Poor Mary came in order to please her husband, then succeeded only in providing further evidence that they were tragically ill-suited. She had grown up, as Lizzie had, in a house of books, but unlike her sister she had never pretended any interest in their contents. Mary would rather sew than read, and it had been embarrassingly revealed, on more than one occasion, that she had never grasped the point of Captain Crumley.
Now, with this grizzling baby on her hip, it was clear just how little patience she had for either science or literature. She called the Exhibition “an entertainment,” asked blunt questions about the noise that would be made, and how soon the business might be over. If she had any intimation of her husband’s genius, she was careless of revealing that genius was a quality she did not value highly.
While her older sister gave all her attention to the baby on her lap, Lizzie shyly observed the subject of the demonstration. He leaned backwards in his chair and patted his hands upon his stockinged legs. He looked for all the world, she thought, like a Cockney King settling down to watch a dance.
Then his gaze settled on her and she glimpsed his dark and hostile spirit. She turned her head away, only to see her dear fine Toby step forward to engage the fellow.
“Watch me, man,” said Toby.
As he held up his hands, Lizzie felt a chill of fear grip her womb; they seemed very delicate instruments with which to master such a beast.
Yet the footman must have recognized some greater power, for as he considered the writer’s hands, a strange criss-crossed frown erupted on his brow. He jerked his head sharply away, across the room, then stared fiercely at Mary and her baby.
“Keep your eye on me, Sir,” said Toby.
But the footman now rested his frightening eyes on Lizzie Warriner, who shuddered.
Then Toby spoke again: “Jack Maggs, I command you.”
The fellow subjected his reluctant attention to the other’s gaze. Once he closed his eyes, but soon after he opened them again, and before too many moments had passed, the footman’s head began first to nod, and then to loll. As that alien body finally surrendered, Lizzie Warriner felt an unexpected stirring of her own blood.
“Can you see our Phantom, Mr Maggs?”
The answer was very clearly spoken. “He stays mostly behind me.”
He raised his head. His eyes were open. If Lizzie had not known the footman was mesmerized, she would have judged him to be fully awake.
“We are going to chase him away. What do you think frightens him?”
“I don’t think my Phantom is frightened, Sir.”
Toby now put his hand into his jacket and produced a shortish horsewhip which he had had, all that time, concealed upon his person. He dangled it in the air, so its end waved inches above the Somnambulist’s head. This was very good, Lizzie thought, very good indeed. Toby was a fine actor. He had played Sir Spencer Spence at the Lyceum, and loved to amuse his friends and family with skits based upon that pompous old sawbones. Indeed, he had a great talent for all kinds of dialects and voices, tricks, conjuring, disappearing cards, pantomime performances.
Now, as he raised the whip, Lizzie patted Mary’s arm consolingly, for Mary was, as usual, fearful, squeezing tight her eyes, clutching her poor babe tightly to her.
“Do you imagine our Phantom might fear the double-cat?”
“No, Sir.”
For reply, Tobias swung the whip. It brushed the ceiling, and slapped against the settee. He brought it back again and down, producing a loud thwacking noise. A brass candle-stick leaped off the mantel and rolled across the floor towards the window.
The babe woke, bawling. Mary stood up, holding her hand protectively around the soft little skull. Now, too, the footman was rising. He pulled himself up slowly from his chair as if constrained by invisible chains. His face contorted pitifully.
“Oh no, not flog him!” he cried. “You mustn’t do that, Sir.”
“Toby, dear . . . ,” Mary whispered timidly.
“Remain seated, Sir,” said Toby. He waved at his wife, making pushing motions with his hands towards the door.
When the creaking door was finally closed behind the bawling babe, Toby silently indicated, for the benefit of the others, the footman’s physical distress. He pointed at his restless limbs, his twisted mouth.
“Yes, perhaps we should flog the Phantom?” he said loudly.
“Oh God no, please . . .”
“Do you think he would like that?”
“No. Let me wake up.”
Toby mouthed to his audience: Watch. Then, adopting a jolly, kindly tone, he spoke again to his subject: “Why are you so agitated, Jack? No one will harm you. It is your enemy we are to deal with today. He who is causing you pain. Can you see the place where we are going to deal with him?”
“I am used to the pain, Sir. It is an old friend.”
“I asked you another question. Did you not hear it?”
Jack Maggs began to beat his fists upon his chest. He was truly like a wild animal, and Toby his expert trainer.
“Can you see the place where we are going to deal with him?”
“Leave him alone, I beg you.”
“You are attached to your torturer, Mr Maggs. Can you see the place?”
This last question was accented by one more crack of the whip.
“Yes, yes,” said Maggs, visibly cowed. “I can see it.”
Mr Buckle stood, his arm raised as if to protest.
“Please, everyone be calm,” said Toby. “Master Maggs, we must see where it is he is going to be taken.”
“Please, Sir, I can’t bear to watch a flogging.”
“What would you watch instead?”
“The sea, the river.”
Toby now approached his subject very close. He brought his hands up to the fellow’s mouth and it seemed as if he were about to draw the poor man’s demon from him, dragging it back in his splayed fingers. “Now you are going to tell me. What is the river like? Do you know birds, Jack? Can you see birds?”
“Oh yes, Sir, hatfuls of birds.”
“Pelicans, no doubt.”
“Pelicans, Sir. Oh yes.”
“You can give me a pelican? Good old Jack.”
“I can, Sir. By golly there’s a handsome fellow.”
“Paint him for me, Jack. Give me a picture.”
“Oh he’s a big one.”
“Do me a sketch.”
“It has a great chest, and a great scoop of a beak. It comes in like a man-o’-war. It is a beautiful thing, Sir, the pelican.”
“Any other birds?”
“Is the Phantom to be whipped, Sir?”
“Tell me about the birds. Are there parrots?”
“I can’t look for parrots. How can I look for parrots when you have that damn triangle set up like that?”
“Tell me about the parrots, man.”
“I’ll not watch it, God damn you. I’ll not watch it. You can’t make me. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“Is the pain still there?”
“Yes, yes, damn your eyes, the pain is always there. God damn it.”
“You will be calm, Jack, and keep a decent tongue in your mouth. There are ladies present.”
“Then damn you for bringing them to so damned a spot.”
“Old Sir, do please rest your mind. No one will be flogged today.”
“No flogging?”
“None.”
“Oh God, Sir. Thank you, Sir. I could not have borne it.”
“Don’t cry, old chap, it is too beautiful a day. Can’t you feel the lovely sun on your face?”
“That sun could kill you, take my word.”
“Indeed, Jack, it is fearsome hot.”
“Blistering, Sir.”
Percy Buckle leaned forward and patted Lizzie Warriner on the elbow. He pointed over Jack’s shoulder, out the window where cold rain had begun falling once again.
“I’m so thirsty, Sir.”
“Remove your jacket if you wish, your shirt.”
“But the ladies . . .”
“The ladies are gone.”
Lizzie, confronted by a man about to undress, found herself most seriously discomfited. She stood. But her brother-in-law fiercely shook his head, and she sat down again, her eyes averted.
“I can’t take my shirt off.”
“You must.”
“Captain Logan won’t allow it.”
“There are no regulations here,” said Tobias.
Jack Maggs shed his jacket, then his silk ruff and shirt, then the coarse wool singlet, and stood before them, naked to the waist.
Lizzie Warriner sat in her seat, her eyes lowered.
“Turn,” said Tobias.
The footman turned. As Lizzie Warriner raised her eyes, she gasped at the sea of pain etched upon the footman’s back, a brooding sea of scars, of ripped and tortured skin.
“You will stand,” said Tobias. “You will stand perfectly still. You will not go anywhere. Do you understand?”
“I am too hot.”
“Here it is shady,” said Oates. “You are comfortable.”
And then he quickly escorted Lizzie Warriner and Mr Buckle from the room.
24
TOBIAS OATES LOCKED the door to the front parlour. Then he looked from Miss Warriner to Mr Buckle, his mouth twisted in a peculiar smile.
“I got the rascal.”
“Dear Brother, what are we to do?”
Tobias Oates waved Miss Warriner and Mr Buckle towards the staircase with little motions, like an old woman driving chickens into a coop. He ushered them upstairs and into a small cabin which, Percy Buckle realized, must be the sanctum sanctorum. The little grocer was consequently unable to refrain from touching the desk, from running his curious hand over the smoothly varnished surface of a pigeon hole. Here, he reflected, the prodigy wrote his novels. Here was the birth-place of Captain Crumley and Mrs Morefallen.
“Mr Buckle, you could have been murdered in your bed.”
Mr Buckle took his hand away from the desk at once. Tobias turned his attention to his sister-in-law.
“Did you not wonder at my intuition, Lizzie? I guessed he was a bolter from New South Wales.”
Miss Warriner took him by the sleeve of his jacket. “Dear Brother, what will he do to us when he finds himself exposed? He is a singularly large man, Tobias, and I do not doubt he will be very angry.”
“He is mesmerized,” the young man said impatiently. “I doubt he will remember anything.”
The young woman drew her shawl tightly around herself.
“It was when he described the pelicans, Lizzie, I knew the theorem was proved. Do you see what I have now? Do you see what I have been given?”
“I see, Toby, that you have brought a very dangerous man into your family’s presence.”
“He will not wake up until I release him, Lizzie. Don’t you see what I now possess? A memory I can enter, and leave. Leave, and then return to. My goodness, my gracious. What a treasure house, eh, Buckle? You can hear the cant in his talk. He has it cloaked in livery but he wears the hallmarks of New South Wales.”
“You cannot keep him here,” cried Lizzie. “He is not some nasty hand you can store in a bottle.”
“I will visit him in prison.”
“With respect, young Sir,” said Percy Buckle.
“Yes, Mr Buckle?”
“I am very aware, Sir, that it is a privilege for me to be . . .”
“Now, Mr Buckle, come, come.”
“I don’t mean to embarrass you, Sir, and I am grateful to have been called to witness such an unusual experiment.”
“Mr Buckle . . .”
“But in my opinion, Sir, and it seems that I differ from you here . . .”
“Please continue.”
“We do ourselves no credit in judging him.”
Oates snorted. “Did you not see his back, man? He is a scoundrel.”
“Well, we saw a page of his history,” said the little grocer stubbornly. “Whatever his offence, anyone with half a heart can see that he has paid the bill. I could not send him back for more.”
“I’m sure you don’t wish to return with him to your household?”
Mr Buckle became silent.
“To be robbed? Or murdered in your bed?”
Percy Buckle brought his mild eyes up to meet those of the young host’s.
“He has not hurt me yet.”
“Mr Buckle,” said Tobias Oates, laying his hand upon the other’s bony little shoulder. “I fancy that a grocer, who is every day concerned with serving honest citizens, does not see the things a journalist sees.”
“With respect, Sir, I think you forget something of my history.”
“I forget nothing,” said Tobias proudly. “I can name the flowers growing beside the path on my fifth birthday.”
“I was one of those poor beggars you see selling fried fish in Seven Dials. I was witness to things there, Sir. You and I might trade cruelty for cruelty, but we would know it best not to frighten Miss Warriner with that which we would rather forget ourselves.”
“No one forgets. It is all in there, Buckle. This Australian of ours holds his life in his Cerebrum. He carries pelicans and parrots, fish and phantoms, things the Royal Botanist would give a sov or two to hold. When he mentioned the double-cat . . .”
“God love me, Sir. The name itself.”
“When he mentioned the double-cat on our previous encounter, that was the clue to his secret. It is a punishment invented in New South Wales.”
“Did you never imagine yourself in his position? I felt that damned thing. Forgive me Miss Warriner, but damned is the right word for it.”
“Buckle, dear Buckle. It is my business to imagine everything.”
Percy Buckle’s mouth had become small, his cheeks pale and sunken. He stared hard at Tobias Oates before he answered.
“Is it, Sir? I suppose it is. As for me, I had an older sister who suffered transportation to that same cursed place. I had the honour of standing in Newgate and seeing
the Judge pronounce the words. I held my mother, Sir, when the poor old lady fell away. Excuse me crying, Sir. My sister was not an angel either. Lord knows what became of her.”
“Surely you heard eventually.”
“How could I have heard?” said Percy Buckle tersely. “She had no letters. How could I have heard? Put yourself in her place—how could she get word to those who loved her? She was a plucky thing, our Jenny. She thought me such a sad item with my fried fish, but I never did forget that day, God help us all, that Mother England would do such a thing to one of her own.”
“I think you a fine man, Mr Buckle. A Christian.”
“I do hate to keep disagreeing with you,” said Percy Buckle, looking down at the floor, and speaking in such a low voice it was difficult for his listeners to make him out, “but I am not a believer.”
“But surely you would not wish this fellow back inside your household.”
“I do not see I have a choice.”
“But what of your safety? The safety of your other servants?”
“I would like a better choice, and that’s a fact, but I can’t rightly see any. Shouldn’t we, Sir, not stand here talking when he is left there by himself all alone and who knows what terrors he is going through, imagining himself still alone in that dreadful place?”
Tobias Oates smiled. “You are a brave man, to take a lion into your home.”
“Not brave. Ask anyone. I am as timid as a dormouse. I wish I were brave, for it would make this business easier.”
Tobias Oates measured his distance from the wall. He ran his hand through his hair. He produced a tortoise-shell comb and rapidly combed himself. “Then I will maintain my interest in the case,” he declared. “I will not give him up.”
Percy Buckle cocked his head. “You were about to give him up to the Law.”
“Ah yes, but seeing that you insist we keep him—”
“That I keep him,” corrected Percy Buckle.
“But Toby,” Lizzie said, “we cannot let him go free.”
Tobias ignored her. “At night, Mr Buckle, I walk the city. I walk down past your old shop in Clerkenwell, down into Limehouse, back up through your dreadful Seven Dials. Wally Duke’s. The Hopping Toad. The Sheaf of Barley. I have them all here inside my cranium. But what you have brought me here is a world as rich as London itself. What a puzzle of life exists in the dark little lane-ways of this wretch’s soul, what stolen gold lies hidden in the vaults beneath his filthy streets.”