by Peter Carey
When Jack Maggs grasped its wrist, the creature did not yield. Rather it raised its coal-black eyebrows, and brought its soft little mouth to whisper mockingly in Jack’s ear.
“You wish to hang?”
Peering around the curtain, Jack Maggs saw what he was meant to see: that herd of dangerous gossips gathered in the kitchen, staring back at him.
“Sputum,” cried the doctor, and thrust the spatula down his throat.
Five minutes later, the house was declared to be in a state of Quarantine. Thus, for the cost of a sore throat, Jack Maggs had precisely what he had wished: the dike was plugged; the gossips were contained. But as he set out to secure his territory, the convict’s heart fell prey to a new anxiety—a blood-dark feeling in his gut—that he had become the captive of someone whose powers were greater than he had the wit to ever understand.
40
THE MINUTE SIR SPENCER SPENCE had left the house, Maggs took himself down into the cellar where he found a rusty hammer and a paper bag of nails.
He drove in the first nail, two inches above the lock of the front door. He hammered it in on a good angle and felt it bite into the oaken frame. Each hammer blow helped ease the knotting in his gut.
“My house,” cried Mr Buckle, appearing suddenly behind him.
Maggs drove in the second nail, three inches below the lock. “It’s what your doctor ordered.”
“He said nothing of the sort. Stop! I order it. You must not hurt my house.”
Maggs stood on tip-toes to place a third nail at the top of the door.
“You’re splitting it.”
Maggs drove the nail home. He turned the handle of the door and tugged on it.
“That’s what I call a Quarantine.”
“Look what you are doing. Look at how it splits. Please stop this, now. I order you. This is not a Quarantine. This is not what Mr Oates meant at all.”
But Maggs was already half-way across the drawing room. He tied back the heavy maroon curtains and stood, briefly exposing himself to the night while he drove in nine more nails in fast succession.
“You misunderstand the meaning of the word,” said the master of the house. “I’ll fetch the dictionary. Hold off my windows while I get the book. I order you!”
But Jack Maggs would be no one’s servant any longer. He retrieved a chair from the dining room, and, with a spray of six-inch nails poking from his mouth, moved across the three windows— bang, bang, bang.
“Here—” Percy Buckle re-entered the room, the dictionary open in his hands. “There’s no hammering mentioned under Quarantine.”
But the drawing room was done, the curtains drawn, the windows already pinned at top and bottom. Maggs replaced the chair in the dining room, and lit the candles.
Percy Buckle laid the heavy book upon the dining-room table. “This is my house,” he said.
But Jack Maggs was already on his way to the next floor.
41
WHEN THE HOUSE WAS finally snug, Jack returned the nails and hammer to the cellar. This room, being beyond Mrs Halfstairs’s territory, was a rancid labyrinth of passage-ways formed by high piles of coiled rope, abandoned scenery, and hanging costumes which must have begun their life in the late Mr Quentin’s theatre. Jack had not been in the cellar a moment when he heard the upstairs door open and saw candle-light shadows moving down the stairs. The maid’s soft voice called out for him.
“Here,” he said gruffly, lifting his oil lamp.
They met, not without some confusion, in a corridor of ancient costumes: long ballgowns with mildew creeping up their ruffled sleeves.
“You nailed my bedroom window shut,” she said. Her voice seemed slow and sleepy.
He admitted that he had been into her room and quarantined it.
“Why not Mrs Halfstairs’s, then?”
Had she been crying? In the gloom, he glimpsed her slightly swollen upper lip.
“You think she might be scampering out across the roof?” he asked sarcastically.
“As I’m sure you know, she’s come down with Contagion.”
Jack knew of no such thing. The odours of dark and dirt had always had libidinous associations for him; now this smell surrounded him and for a moment he knew of precious little else.
“Of course,” Mercy said. “It ain’t really Contagion, no matter what the doctor says. It’s that Metzmetric Fluid, as you know yourself. The poor old cow has got the fluid in her chest.”
Maggs raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, so you think me ignorant?” she said.
“No.”
“Then for your information, Sir, I went with Mr Constable to a Metzmetric Concert in Great Windmill Street at Christmas. That was an education I can tell you. There was a lady they made dance and sing and then she shook all over. It was done by using magnets on her Fluid. That’s what he done to you with all that waving of his hands. It were the same, exactly. It’s how he stopped your face hurting. You think I don’t know what’s going on?”
“What’s that got to do with Mrs Halfstairs?”
“You think I don’t know that weren’t no doctor? It was Mr Oates with all that powder on his head.”
Quietly he asked, “The others know it was Mr Oates?”
She snuffed her candle and dropped it in her pinny pocket. “They wouldn’t know their nose if it sneezed at them.”
“But you set them straight?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Then come with me,” said Jack, taking her by the arm.
“No! Let me be!” She pulled away.
“God damn,” he exclaimed, grabbing her by the waist so suddenly her cap fell off. Her hair brushed his face, releasing the faint scent of soot into the air.
“I’ll not be locked.”
“God damn me, you will.”
She was fast and lithe, but he pinned her, took her, her feet kicking six inches above the floor, carried her up the stone stairs to the ground floor while the ancient oil lamp, which he had kept hooked in his bad hand, swayed dangerously against her skirts.
At this hour the ground floor was empty. He set her down and the pair of them regarded each other, breathing heavily.
“Lock me,” she burst out. “I don’t care.”
“Yes.”
She shook her hair and brushed it from her eyes. “I don’t mind.”
“Good.”
“Lock me up all night.”
In silent agreement they proceeded upstairs. A light was showing underneath the master’s door. They crossed to the back stairs, and thence upwards to the attic. Three times Mercy’s black skirts brushed against Jack’s knees. He felt this so acutely it seemed to him she must also know his knee through the medium of the fabric. When she entered her room, he was hard behind her.
It was a very pretty little home she had made for herself, with many embroidered cushions and a framed painting of a young girl sitting below a windmill with a rag doll on her knee.
“How old are you?”
“A lady don’t reveal her age.”
He passed her the lamp, which she stood on tip-toes to hang carefully from a hook at the apex of the attic ceiling. While she was so occupied, he removed the key from the door. Hearing the metal scrape in the lock, she spun around.
“No!”
But he had already stepped outside the door.
“Good night,” he said, and locked her in before he could change his mind.
A minute later, he climbed across the roof, carrying all his turbulent emotions with him to the abandoned house next door. Here he wrote page after page, pouring all his feelings into that secret history. He slept two hours on the settle, and when he woke he began again: Dear Boy . . .
At six o’clock, he recrossed the slippery roof to Mr Buckle’s house. When he unlocked the maid’s door, she was dressed and waiting for him.
42
MERCY LARKIN APPLIED HER “nurse-maid’s rouge,” pinching her cheeks, tweaking them spitefully, all the time contorting her fac
e and letting out small cries of ooh and ouch. This cosmetic recipe she had learned from her mother, who had applied it enthusiastically before launching her daughter out into the Haymarket.
Now, waiting for her door to be unlocked, Mercy set to work on her upper lip. She had no mirror with which to appraise her handiwork but when the tingling in her lips and cheeks told her the effect had been achieved, she sat upon her three-legged stool with her hands resting in her lap. The face she turned towards the door now showed those swollen, slightly bruised features that always produced so amorous a response in Mr Buckle.
When the door at last swung open, she should have recoiled from him who stood before her: Jack Maggs with red-rimmed eyes, unshaven cheeks, his hair spectacularly disarrayed.
“You going to put me in the snuggery?” she said.
For answer he held open the door so she might pass before him. As they walked together past the master’s partly open door, Mercy’s lips began to itch—an omen, as she was well aware, that they would soon be kissed.
They descended the stairs together to the kitchen, where she saw Mrs Halfstairs’s small blue eyes appraising her features. Had she pinched too hard? The housekeeper opened her mouth as if to reprimand her but then, most unexpectedly, sighed and lowered her braided head into her hands.
In the sudden quiet that followed, Mercy donned her apron, then took the pan of kippers from Miss Mott, turning her face so the cook might not see her lips.
A moment later Miss Mott was sitting at the table. This was unusual: Miss Mott never sat down, not even to drink a cup of tea. Yet it took a good long moment for Mercy to realize that no one was thinking of her lips, that her amorous expectations were not an issue with the other servants. They were sick: Miss Mott, Mrs Halfstairs, Mr Spinks.
As Mercy buttered their toast she heard the butler cough. She listened to the gummy Magnetic Fluid bubbling in his chest. It was Contagion, no doubt about it.
She ate quickly then went, as usual, to set the table for the master’s breakfast.
She had not been at this task a minute when Jack Maggs arrived at the doorway of the dining room; she felt his eyes upon her back. Knowing the master might arrive at any moment, she prayed to God to not let nothing happen here. She finished setting the table hurriedly, and allowed Jack Maggs to escort her back to the room they had occupied all day yesterday.
Inside the snuggery, she turned urgently to face him. Her mouth was dry, her heart agitated.
She saw his dark eyes hesitate. She thought he was going to smile, but then he walked past her to the bureau. Disappointed, she watched him select one of the new goose-feathers in the master’s drawer.
“He won’t like you doing that,” she said.
Jack Maggs winked at her. He cut three inches off the feather’s top, cleared the barrel of its scurf, and made six fast cuts. Having thus manufactured a new quill, he set back to writing.
“It must be most important.”
“It is.”
“A good friend, no doubt.”
“I hope so, yes.”
Thus, to all intents and purposes, he abandoned her on the ottoman. There was nothing to do but knit and wait, and see what might happen. From time to time she secretly freshened her complexion, but with less hope as to the consequences.
The entire morning passed without further conversation, and she had naught to do but wonder at the passion which drove that strange hand. Some time in the early afternoon, however, Maggs stopped abruptly. A floor board creaked outside in the hallway. Then he put a finger to his lips and carefully laid the quill down. He rose, moving towards the door.
Then she saw it: a dagger. She had never seen one in a man’s hand before. It was at once deadly strange, and quite familiar—an ugly black blade with a hook at its pointy end. It should have made him repulsive to her, but it did not, and instead she watched how very graceful was his movement toward the door.
There was a low moan out on the landing, then a great crash as Jack wrenched the door open. She rushed to see.
“Jod’s blood,” cried Jack Maggs, and pushed her roughly back into the snuggery, but not before she had seen the heaving prostrate body of Mr Spinks.
The key was then turned in the lock; she was left alone listening to Maggs’s heavy tread ascend the stairs to the servants’ floor.
It was only then she realized he had left his secret letter sitting on the desk.
43
Silas and Ma Britten [Jack wrote] had a very original ambition: to do a series of clever burglaries without never laying fingers on the goods. And once they got Sophina and me properly trained-up to the art, it was, so Silas said, like having ferrets, except that he was excused the bother of carrying the cages.
Looked at from his way, it was a very pretty little dart. First Yours Truly would climb down the chimney—a journey I now made as easy as jumping out of bed—and then I would light my candle and inspect the locks on the dressers and cabinets. If need be, I would then unlock the kitchen door and whistle for the lever man, a great half-wit pugilist called Wexall whose brain had been jolted in its box one time too many. Wexall had nothing more to do than break the locks and then scarper, a service for which he was pleased to receive a silver sixpence. Then Sophina would enter, always carrying a little posy of flowers—I know not why this was—and wearing her good hat. It was she who was trusted to select the most valuable pieces of silver plate, and I, her black-faced companion, who would pack the treasures in the sack of soot. We went about our work as happy as eight-year-olds, magging to each other all the while.
Silas, meanwhile, had arranged for an old dustman by the name of Mr Figgs to come to pick up the sacks which I placed outside the door. Silas told me that Mr Figgs thought himself to be carrying naught but dust and ashes, and was happy to deliver the sacks to his net loft in Wapping for a penny each. This must have been a lie, but I believed it then.
In the summer of 1801 we did over twenty of these “errands.” We did so well that before the fireplaces of London were hot again, we had abandoned the rotten little court by London Bridge and moved, with Silas and Sophina, to Islington. We took a whole floor above a tobacconist’s in Upper Street and from this address Ma Britten kept herself as busy as ever, making her sausages and ministering to her female visitors. Whereas once she had received her callers in a curtained little area beside the stove, now she saw them in a small room above the yard at the back.
No one went to Smithfield any more. Ma Britten would send me with a note and half a crown to a proper butcher’s shop where a number of red-faced men, all named Mr Ayres, would wrap me up some lamb chops or a piece of liver.
Thus my life improved all at once. Tom was rarely there to twist my wrist or otherwise hurt me. I ate great meals of roast meat and roast potatoes. And if we were forbidden to play with the respectable children, Sophina and I had each other for company. Silas, to give him credit, often took us to the park, where we played hide and seek, and hoop-a-penny and blind man in a sack.
Alas, life was not so merry for Tom, who suffered much from home-sickness. Each Sunday he left his master’s house in darkness, arriving in Islington before the church bells had begun to ring. I would wake to the sound of his big heavy boots upon the stairs. Once inside our door he would run to our mother’s room, climb up into her bed and cry.
Tom did not like Silas or Sophina either. This was to my advantage because he seemed to lose his old dislike of me. Indeed I was now his ally, and on these Sunday visits he took to walking out with me, sharing confidences about his hopes and plans.
One September morning, before it had become properly cold, he took me all the way down into St James’s Park. He bought me a glass of milk from the stalls where they had the cows. There were a great many servant girls drinking the milk, which was said to be good for their complexion, but Tom paid the girls no mind at all.
It was me he watched. He was always watching me. His long bony face was alert and slightly angry.
—Does Sila
s buy you milk?
In fact, he bought us milk on many occasions, but I knew enough to say he never had.
—The brute has you all tied up in the harness, said Tom. He is riding on your back. He is taking all the money and won’t even buy you milk.
I ventured that Silas had taught me a great deal.
—We have no need of strangers sleeping in our house, said he.
I thought, at first, that he was referring to one of Ma Britten’s female customers who had recently spent the night vomiting and groaning in the small room at the back. I agreed that I did not like it.
—We should kick him down the stairs, he said, and take his clever Latin with him.
—Who?
—Silas, you little mutt, who did you think we were talking of?
I reminded Tom that it was Silas who had orchestrated our good fortune, that if not for him we would still be living in that room by Pepper Alley Stairs.
—We was happy there, said Tom. Before he came and stuck his big red nose in. You and me and Ma, we had good days. We didn’t have no porker snoring in the night.
—Still and all, Tom . . .
—Still and all, we must get rid of him.
—Sophina is my friend.
—I never said nothing about her, said Tom. You want my opinion, she’s a giddy goat, but I ain’t got no quarrel with her. It’s him we must get rid of.
—How would we do that, Tom?
—I ain’t talking of hows just at the moment. All I’m talking of is the fact of the matter and all I am telling you is—and here he pushed his raw face close to mine—Silas is a cheat and a liar and he is not a part of our family.
Tom frightened me that day. As we walked back up Haymarket I thought I had liked him better when we were enemies.
He walked so close. He was forever bumping into me, and as he walked, he talked, his mouth pushed close over towards my ear. He told me that we could get a great deal of money and run away to Bristol. He told me that his master had a steel closet with gold bars in it, and that I should come with him and climb down the chimney and unlock the door.