by Peter Carey
In his distress, Mr Spinks pointed to the door.
Jack Maggs, seeing Constable, immediately set down the bowl upon the side table. “He squeezed the lemons? He understood the mirror?”
While Mr Spinks escaped back beneath his covers, Mr Constable held up the unopened packages, then watched as the other inspected them, checking each and every untied knot along the way.
“Apparently he is not known of.”
At this point, Mr Spinks began to snore. Jack Maggs busied himself covering the old fellow’s withered shanks; when he finally showed his face again, his eyes were completely expressionless.
“If the man will not be found,” said Constable sympathetically, “he will not be found. There is no better place to hide than London.”
Jack Maggs showed no further interest in the topic.
“Mercy is doing for the women,” he said. “I said I would do for the Bishop here.”
“You have new linen,” Constable offered. “If you lift Mr Spinks I’ll do the changing.”
Constable then removed his jacket, and draped it carefully across a chair. While Jack Maggs lifted the butler, he swiftly stripped the bed and laid a cool clean sheet upon the old man’s ancient mattress. In all this, he was as efficient as a guardsman, but the effect of seeing Spinks’s ruined body cradled in this way by his companion was to make the winds blow stronger, to flood his mind with Christian images of the type celebrated in the stained-glass windows of the little church of St Mary Le Bow. From here he was carried, in a great swirl, to turbulent visions of Maggs’s scarred body, his massive strength, producing in him such a mighty want, not to nurse bullying old Spinks, but to be nursed himself, to have Jack Maggs take his head and lay it in his lap, to stroke him with that hand.
He now felt a dangerously strong desire to confess that he had indeed discovered the whereabouts of Henry Phipps, that he had thereby foolishly revealed Maggs’s whereabouts to a man who did not wish him well.
He knew it unwise, but he had a passion to unburden himself, to disclose that he too had known Henry Phipps, known him in the most personal and private sense. He had been flattered and led astray by that gentleman.
He had gone next door to deliver an invitation to tea with Mr Buckle. There he was engaged by the young master in talk of the West Country and its charms. He was taken upstairs to see a small oil painting of a storm off Bristol which, as it turned out, was not hanging where its owner had advertised it. He was then persuaded to stay to wash the young master’s hair, to towel him dry, to hold his head against his breast. He heard his soft promises; he had heard himself called Angel; he had taken his manhood deep inside of him.
And thought himself, for cursed truth, a princess.
For two weeks in 1836, Edward Constable had been drunk with Henry Phipps, dreamed of Henry Phipps, had been reamed, rogered, ploughed by Henry Phipps so he could barely walk straight to the table. He had been invited to take a tour of Italy with Henry Phipps, and upon acceptance, he had confessed the circumstances of the invitation to dear Albert Pope, who had been his honest friend and intimate companion during fifteen years of service.
The next day Albert blew his brains out with that horrid little pistol.
He could have told Jack Maggs how badly Henry Phipps had behaved after Albert’s death, but he held his secrets tight, like a fistful of gravel against his heart.
He tried to cover Spinks but the old man again became agitated and thrashed around, kicking the coverlet away and pulling at the neck of his fresh night shirt as if he meant to tear it from his body.
Constable picked up the old man’s dirty linen from the floor and tied it into a bundle. Though still dressed in his Sunday best, he hoisted the bundle onto his shoulder and carried it from the room. In the passageway he was surprised to find Jack Maggs still close upon his heels.
47
THE MAY SUNSHINE FELL in a steep bright mote upon the household linen, which was now bubbling and ballooning from the top of the wash-house copper.
There was, for the moment, no other labour demanded of Edward Constable and, although he had at first anticipated stealing a moment in the sunshine, he now began to notice how closely Jack Maggs continued to cleave to his side. The dark and steamy wash-house began to seem a great deal more appealing than the sunshine.
While his companion leaned carelessly against the ancient wall, engaged in no more productive activity than puffing on a corn-cob pipe—the fragrant smoke of which acted as a potent tonic on the footman—Constable stirred the sheets and pillow-cases. He breathed deep of that singular blend of soapy steam and dark tobacco.
“Pear’s in blossom,” he offered.
“Yes. Pear.”
After which no more words were spoken. Constable felt a slight tingling in his neck and a general tension, by no means disagreeable, of the type a chap might feel whilst dawdling beside another chap, as yet unknown.
“I lived a long time with secrets,” said Jack Maggs at last.
Constable’s heart thumped in his chest.
Said Jack Maggs: “You know where I come from?”
“No.”
“Doubtless you were told already by our little Miss.” Maggs puffed a little harder on his pipe. “It is New South Wales I come from. There. Now you hear it from my own lips.”
Constable looked down into the confusion of the steam.
“Why do you tell me this, Mr Maggs?”
“Three years of that time I had the misfortune to be in a hell called Moreton Bay. There a man might be killed on account of knowing another man’s secret.”
“Killed?” Constable thought of men with secrets like his own: Ensign John Hepburn, the drummer Thomas White, all those other jolly fellows who had been prosecuted and convicted and “launched into eternity” outside the Newgate walls. “You mean hanged?”
“No, no,” said Maggs impatiently. “Listen to me: had you known anything as dangerous as what you know of me now, why, you’d be a risk to me.”
“You can speak plainly with me, Jack.”
“I am trying to, Eddie. Listen: in Moreton Bay, every man would be a spy on every other man. It was how they kept us down. If you and I were lads together in that place, then you must give me a secret of yours, should you chance to stumble over one of mine. That way we were in balance.”
“Jack, are you confessing to me?”
“No. I am going to trade with you. I am going to tell you a secret.”
“But you already gave me a secret.”
“I need one of yours. I’ll pay you double.”
“I have no secrets,” said Constable carefully. “What secret?”
“The one I saw on your face when you walked into Mr Spinks’s room.”
“You think you saw my secret written on my face?”
“Aye.”
“It was in my manner? How I spoke?”
“On your face.”
“That clear?”
“That clear.”
“But what would you tell me?”
“That Henry Phipps is my son.”
“Your son?” Constable hesitated. “You do mean son? A type of son, being like a son?”
“It is a clear enough word.”
“But do you mean he is your petit fils? Or do you mean that you are, an older man, like a father to the younger . . . in many ways?”
“Whatever it is called, it is clear enough,” Maggs said, and Constable felt himself forced to hold that dark excited gaze.
“Henry’s afraid of me, ain’t that it?” demanded Maggs. “Your friends saw him, didn’t they?”
Constable hesitated.
“Then he must be told he has nothing to fear from Jack. I am his father. I would rather die than hurt him.”
“What of his mother?” Constable asked carefully. “Where is she?”
“We never did meet.”
“Then you do not mean son.”
“Don’t be so thick, man,” said Jack Maggs. “I have said it plain. Now, come
, come, I want your secret, laddie.”
There followed then a long silence, and Constable, much confused, began to hoist the first sheet high out of the copper and lead it towards the mangle.
“My secret may not please,” he said at last.
“Please or not please.” Maggs came to the handle and began, slowly, to turn it. Both men watched thoughtfully as the sheet, squashed and steaming, uncoiled itself from the mangle and lay in the stone trough.
“My secret?”
“Yes.”
“I am fond of you,” said Constable.
The roller stopped.
“You are fond of me?” Maggs asked perplexedly.
“I am, yes.”
“And it was that which was on your mind when you walked in. You are fond of me?”
“It was.”
And it was at that delicate point that their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a most piteous wailing. The two men ran out onto the little yard, and looked up to whence the sounds came. There they saw Mercy Larkin, framed in Mr Spinks’s high window.
“Oh Lor,” she cried, “come quick, come quick. Mr Spinks is taken bad.”
Jack took Constable’s shoulder: “Tell me—your friends saw my Henry? He did not want to know me? That was your secret?”
Constable was not by nature a liar, and when he looked into those hooded hungry eyes he wanted, more than anything, to tell the truth. But Constable feared that if Henry Phipps were found, then Jack Maggs would be lost.
And so he lied.
“No,” he said, looking him straight in the eye. “I swear. They could not find him anywhere.”
48
AT THREE O’CLOCK ON this first afternoon of May, Jack Maggs found the little grocer hidden far from the spring sunlight, in front of a sad and smoky fire in his bedroom. The curtains had been drawn and the candles lit, and Mr Buckle, dressed in an embroidered silk smoking jacket, had his pointed nose deep in a book. The unsavoury smell of cheese was strong about the room, and this smell, Jack Maggs soon saw, had its source in a yellow wedge of Stilton which, together with a glass of wine, was set up on a tray beside his elbow. When Mr Buckle finally became sensible of Maggs’s presence in the room, he leapt up so quickly he almost sent this tray flying.
“Whoa there,” cried the footman.
As he fled towards the fireplace, Mr Buckle’s slippers flashed beneath the turn-ups of his trousers, like the prow of an oriental boat. They were queer and sparkly, and nearly distracted Maggs’s attention from the war-like poker which Percy Buckle had picked up and was holding secretly behind his leg.
“Do not fear me, Mr Buckle.”
“Fear!” scoffed Mr Buckle, backing himself up against the mantel.
“Please sit down, your Lordship.”
Mr Buckle brought the poker out of hiding and, by way of justifying his attachment, poked the fire with it.
“Sit.”
Mr Buckle sat abruptly down. “Yes?”
“It is Mr Spinks’s rattle, Sir.”
“Rattle?”
Maggs was surprised to see the fearful eyes become more distant, his manner harden. “You mean a cough?”
“A rattle is a rattle. There ain’t no doubting what it is. We had best get a doctor to him very quickly.”
“What else beside the cough?”
As Jack Maggs told the symptoms, Mr Buckle listened, his head a little to one side, his hands clasped in his lap. He appeared most sympathetic in his demeanour but it was soon clear that, contrary to all his earlier fright and agitation, the master had little anxiety on Mr Spinks’s behalf.
When Jack Maggs offered to drag him to his butler’s bed where he might inspect the patient for himself, Mr Buckle responded by pushing his bony little backside deeper into his chair.
“Then what of Mr Oates?” he cried. “What do we do there?”
“In what respect?”
“I would be a very foolish man to go running to a doctor without asking Mr Oates’s permission.”
“Why’s that?”
“It is Mr Oates who should call the doctor,” continued Mr Buckle. “He’s the one responsible for the injury.”
“He laid the spell?”
“He laid the spell. That’s it exactly.”
“Very well,” Jack Maggs granted. “Then let me run the message to Mr Oates.”
“But it was only a prank, see,” said Percy Buckle, rattling the poker on the hearth. “That’s what alters it. That’s where you should watch your Ps and Qs. What will Oates think if I say my man is dying of his prank? He will think me trying to blame him for something which I have no right to blame him for. You may not know this, but I am a student of the Law. Oates could sue me for a slander. And if he could, he would. I hear he is a fierce gent about his reputation.”
“You tell him that Mr Spinks has the Mesmeric Fluid on his lung, and he will die of it unless Mr Oates be so nice as to take it away.”
“No, no.”
“Damn you! I’ll fetch him myself.”
“He may not be at home,” cried Percy Buckle.
But Jack Maggs was already checking his fob pocket to find a shilling for a cab. “One more thing, your Lordship.”
“I am listening,” said the other, beginning to preen his moustache again.
“You will hear me drawing nails from the front door.”
“Very good, Master Maggs.”
“But I would have to kill anyone who left your house.”
“Yes, yes,” said Percy Buckle, so distractedly that Jack Maggs would later wonder whether he could possibly have been understood.
Mr Buckle, however, had heard very well indeed, and as the criminal ran down the stairs of his house, he sat looking into the fire, watching Goats and Demons dancing in the flames above the coals.
49
MR BUCKLE LOVED HIS HOUSE, and he celebrated his Great Good Fortune, not merely on the fourteenth day of each month (when he retired to the snuggery to re-read the will) but at almost every moment of almost every day.
He had been often observed to stand and stare off into space, in what his servants imagined was a kind of rapture. It was, as Miss Mott said, as if the master could see an angel in his hallway, but Mr Buckle saw no angels, it was his house he worshipped, and what a miracle it was that he should own that dark-green wallpaper, the stained-glass fanlight, the gloss of polish on the oaken floor.
You could have fed him rancid bacon and he might not have complained. You could leave the sheets unlaundered for two weeks at a stretch. But Heaven help you if the floors weren’t polished, if the mantelpiece wasn’t dusted every day. He liked his inheritance to shine. Consequently, to see the fresh injury which Jack Maggs’s departure had caused to his front door was more disturbing to the owner than even he—who had seen the rusty nails first breach that lustrous black surface—might have anticipated.
He knelt before the door as if winded. The nails had been ripped out roughly. In their place were jagged wounds: gouges, dents, raw splinters. Tenderly, he laid back the splinters inside the wounds, but the hurt was too savage for such ministrations.
Back in his sitting room, he repeatedly pulled the bell for Constable. When he was not answered, he returned to the front door and picked up the horrid nails himself. He dropped them into his jacket pocket, and hurried down the breakneck stairs into his kitchen. Here he found the fire dead and a queer pink-grey mouse eating a crust of bread on the table. The three thin lines between Mr Buckle’s eyebrows deepened. At first it seemed that he might strike the mouse, but then all his energy emerged in a violent shiver. He went quickly back up to the ground floor and then up the back stairs.
And there, in the snuggery, he discovered Mercy and Constable sitting side by side on the ottoman, chatting contentedly like dowagers at a ball.
He spoke to them politely. They were lazy and familiar in return.
He requested them to come downstairs to sweep up the mess of nails and splinters. He did not wait to see how this orde
r was received, but descended straight away to the drawing room and picked up—he could have chosen anything—a recent pamphlet from the Workingman’s Association. Although he made a convincing show of reading, he was far too upset to study anything. All his attention was focused upon his servants who, even as they came down the stairs, were chatting as familiarly as before.
When they had swept up the dust and splinters, they were cool enough to enter the drawing room without an invitation.
Mercy sat in the embrasure of the window. Constable stood. And there they stayed, busy at waiting, he realized, for the return of the criminal whom they seemed to expect at any moment.
“I’ve got to tell him, Mercy,” whispered Constable. “It ain’t right for me to keep this secret from him.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Eddie. It’s not fair you have to decide.”
Mr Buckle did not know what secret they meant, nor did he care. He turned the page of his pamphlet.
“Who else could decide?” asked Constable. “I’m the one what knows.”
Behind the pamphlet the master’s face was as drained of blood as their shining countenances were hot with it. Mercy whispered something. He could not make it out. In reply Constable said, with uncharacteristic passion: “Whatever Henry Phipps has sworn, it ain’t worth spit.”
Mr Buckle put aside his pamphlet.
“Mr Constable,” said he, “you’ll not speak of a gentleman in that tone.”
Mercy then presumed to raise an eyebrow.
“What mean you by that, Miss?”
“I was surprised, Sir,” said she, just as saucy as if it were midnight and the door were locked.
“Why would you be surprised?”
“No reason, Sir.”
“Answer!” he cried, and she realized, at last, how angry he was. Her tone became more sober.
“I recall you did not think much of that gentleman next door.”
“You value your position, girl?” hissed Percy Buckle.
She stood up straight, putting her hands behind her back. “I’m sorry, Sir.”
There was a silence then, for a while.
“I do beg your pardon, Sir,” said Mercy.