by Peter Carey
“I also beg your pardon, Mr Buckle,” said Constable. “I forgot myself.”
Percy Buckle looked at the maid with his eyes narrow and his mouth now exceeding small. She had, finally, a frightened look about the eyes. He stroked his moustache and then folded his pale dry hands carefully upon his lap. “Did you attend to my bathroom yet?” he asked.
“Yes, Sir. I did it the moment you first asked me.”
Someone in the street cried Whoa-up.
“Is it him?”
“No, Sir.”
“What is that you have there in your apron, Mercy? What is it that you’re playing with?”
“Nothing, Sir.”
“Then bring your ‘nothing’ here.”
The girl came a little closer and Percy Buckle suddenly took her wrist and wrenched her violently towards him.
“Why,” he said, prying her hand open, “it is a little lock of children’s hair.”
“Two locks.”
“Two locks,” he agreed. The wool around the hair was old and faded.
“They was in his jacket pocket, Sir.”
“So our convict is a family man,” he said, looking into her agitated eyes. “How got you to have such a personal item, my girl?”
“Why, Sir,” she said quickly. “It was very clever of me as you’ll see. He had taken his jacket off to write his letters. Then Mr Spinks was took. Then Mr Maggs left me to help with Mr Spinks. They were in a little envelope in the breast pocket. It is baby hair, Sir, ain’t it?”
“Perhaps,” Constable suggested, “it is Mr Phipps’s hair.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Mercy. “How could it be Phipps? These babes have dark hair.”
The footman abandoned his post at the window, and asked if he might be permitted to touch the two locks of baby hair.
Mr Buckle could not decide if this was impertinent or not, proper or not. He stayed in his chair, watching uneasily as his footman held the locks of hair in his nimble long-fingered hands. This was how they were grouped, three of them clustered around these sad remains, when there came a sudden knocking on the front door.
50
TOBIAS DUTIFULLY BEGAN his report for the Morning Chronicle. He wrote a headline: “A Fire in Brighton.” He underlined this twice and then laboured on a small distinctive flourish beneath the underline.
The ink on the flourish was still wet when his first interruption arrived: a rather chatty little bailiff with muddy boots and three promissory notes signed by John Oates on the strength of his son’s good name.
Toby exchanged these three notes for one of his own, in which he promised to pay seventy-eight pounds twenty days hence.
Then he took out a sheet of fresh paper and wrote a painful letter informing his father that he could be no longer responsible for his debts. This took less than five minutes, but he then spent almost half an hour composing a more cautious public announcement to the same effect. He planned to deliver this advertisement to the newspapers when he handed in his report to the Chronicle, and when he had composed the announcement to his satisfaction, he made three fair copies which he placed in individual envelopes addressed to The Times, the Observer, and the Morning Chronicle. The unexpected expense of these advertisements then led him to take a fresh sheet of paper on which he made a revised estimate of his expenditures and incomes for the following quarter. These totals were very bleak indeed, so he put aside his Brighton Fire and set out to produce a quick Character Sketch for the Observer. This newspaper now paid five pounds for such pieces, and he was soon standing on his chair, looking for his notes for the “Canary Woman of Islington,” “Old Tom Wicks of Camden Town,” and other Types and Characters which he had collected for this very purpose. He finally settled on a Crossing Sweeper and sat himself at his desk where, on one more clean sheet, he began:
Those readers familiar with McKenzie’s Chop House in Fetter Lane have doubtless had the benefit of the broom of Titchy Tate, without ever imagining that he who wields this instrument with such violent effect, believes himself to be the luckiest little boy in all of London.
He would have executed both “Titchy Tate” and “A Fire in Brighton” by lunch time, except that he was pushed into a furtive conference with Lizzie (although what that conference was to be about he could not determine, for she had fled the room before it had half begun).
Next came his wife in a state of great distress on account of an angry red pustule which had emerged on their baby’s breast. Toby was considerably alarmed by what he saw, but when he suggested bathing the infection in salty water his wife seemed to think this very wise advice indeed, and he was able to return to his study, and once more take up the quill.
Whereupon Jack Maggs appeared at his doorway, demanding a doctor for a sick butler. He had no choice. He pushed “Titchy Tate” aside and took a fresh sheet of paper on which he composed a note to Dr Grieves of Gray’s Inn Road, requesting him to please be so kind as to attend to a butler at 29 Great Queen Street. This letter he gave into the care of Mrs Jones, asking the sturdy old lady to put on her shawl and take it up to an Inn in Chancery Lane where he knew the doctor ate his lunch.
He doubted the butler’s condition was dangerous, but he was a cautious man and, given his little joke about the quarantine, he thought it politic to be present at Great Queen Street to introduce the patient to his doctor. Thus he went to dress, and all the while he went about this business he had to endure the sound of the criminal’s hectoring footsteps pacing in the hall below.
Some minutes later, as he followed Jack Maggs back down through the drizzling streets to Holborn, he reflected that the man had as good as stolen five pounds from his pocket. He therefore, consciously, recompensed himself.
Tit for tat, he memorized the hard shine to Jack Maggs’s skin as it cleaved close to the bones of his cheek and jaw. He would use those bones, perhaps tomorrow. On the following day he would return for those deeper, more painful items which must still be cut free from the softer tissue of Jack Maggs’s memory.
He was developing, with every passing hour, giddy ambitions for this novel. Captain Crumley had been a comedy, a pantomime, broad strokes, great larks, a rowdy tale of old London that had Mr David-son the butcher in a fever while he waited for the next instalment. But in all of English literature there was nothing like the dark journey he now planned to take inside the Criminal Mind. He began, as he walked, to chisel away at its plot. He charted a course by abstract reasoning, almost algebraically. From Birth to Death, from Light to Dark, from Water to Fire. It was with some irritation that he found the walk had ended, and he must abandon this activity in favour of the real world.
In Percy Buckle’s drawing room, he found the physician had already arrived, and was standing with his back to Mr Buckle’s fireplace. Dr Grieves was a neat, well tailored man and in spite of being nearly fifty, of a markedly athletic appearance. He had always seemed a quiet fellow, almost excessively polite in his manners, so when Tobias saw the doctor’s stern face, his compressed mouth, he began immediately to apologize for dragging him from his luncheon.
“It were better you had dragged me from my breakfast.”
“The patient is very ill?”
“Very dead. To put it bluntly.”
In the silence that followed this announcement, Oates could hear the most piteous chorus of wailing descending from the upper floors.
“Oh dear,” said Toby.
No response from the doctor.
“A nice old chap,” offered Toby.
Mr Buckle nodded his head vigorously in agreement.
“He came down quickly?” Toby inquired of Percy Buckle.
Before the master of the house could supply this intelligence, the doctor turned to him and asked the privilege of a moment alone with Mr Oates.
Once Mr Buckle had departed, the doctor sat himself down in a wing-back armchair by the fire. There he put his hands upon his knees, and gazed long and hard at the black and smoky logs.
“Your shirt is showing, Sir.”
Tobias Oates followed the motion of the doctor’s head and saw a three-inch twist of bright green shirt sticking out from his flies. He coloured furiously. Dr Grieves continued as the writer attended to his shirt.
“As to the other business, I am damned if I know what to say to you.”
“Who else was I to send for, if not my own doctor?”
“Oh, dear God, Mr Oates, you cannot go around killing people.”
“I assure you—”
“You cannot come into this household, Sir, impersonating a member of the College of Surgeons. How do you think it would be, for you to be charged? What would the judge say, upon hearing that you had convinced the deceased that you were a surgeon?”
“It was a prank, a joke.”
“Mr Oates, the old fellow is dead.”
“But not of my prank.”
“Mr Oates, it is not as if you were a Balliol undergraduate . . .”
This, to Toby’s ear, was only another way of saying that he was not a gentleman.
“And on account of this lack,” he smiled bitterly, “I am a murderer?”
“I will write pneumonia on his death certificate, but if you really want my true opinion, it is that you bewitched him.”
“Sir, you are a man of science.”
“A man is known by his deeds, Sir. And you bewitched him. Just, Sir, as you bewitched the cook and the housekeeper who—although you have not asked after their health—are, whilst upset to learn of their companion’s death, not in any present danger themselves.”
“But surely, he was an old man. A pneumonia might have arrived in any case.”
“Do not, please, tell me my business, Mr Oates. I was pleased to have you a guest in my house. I enjoyed our evenings together.”
“As did I.”
“But I cannot thank you for having me commit a perjury on this death certificate.”
“Perhaps, Doctor, it is not a perjury. I do not say that I was not remiss, but—”
“A perjury. I cannot forgive you for it.”
Tobias put his head in his hands.
“I beg your forgiveness,” he said at last. When he looked up, his face showed his grief.
“But it is your God who will forgive you,” said the doctor, severely. “It is with Him that you have your business to settle. I have no thirst for ruining you.”
This last sentence was not without its effect.
The young man looked up at the physician, curly hair dishevelled, eyes swimming with tears. “I would do anything to undo this.”
The doctor stood up. “Then you must pray. In the meantime, you may know that the death certificate protects your reputation at the same time as it threatens mine: you will understand me, I am sure, when I say that I cannot serve your family any longer.”
“But what if my babe is ill?”
“Then you will take your babe to a doctor, and the doctor will cure your babe, and you will be a lucky man.”
“But I know no other doctor. He had, this morning, a kind of pustule . . .”
“Mr Oates, London is a big city . . .”
“I know London, Sir. I know it perhaps better than even you do. It is an exceedingly big city, and if my babe is ill . . .”
“A big city, in which you will find many excellent doctors.”
“You will give me an introduction?”
“Please, Mr Oates, how could I do that? I have already played loose with my good name.”
“You are casting me out?”
For answer, the doctor stood and pulled on the bell.
“Who else would I turn to?”
It was the criminal, in all his wild and slovenly dishabille, who answered the call. Toby, in the midst of his own distress, noticed the doctor’s astonishment as he asked the soiled and spotted man to fetch his coat and bag.
“If my wife is ill, who would I call?”
For answer, the doctor made a small formal bow, then walked out into the hall where Jack Maggs had his great-coat ready. He slowly donned the coat and buttoned it, then, without a word to anyone, he left the house.
The criminal closed the door behind him, then stood in front of it.
“Thank you,” said Toby, meaning that he would also take his leave, but the criminal did not move. He stood unnaturally straight, with his eyes straight ahead.
“Mr Oates,” said he. “I need a word with you.”
“I can’t think of that now . . . ,” said Tobias Oates.
The criminal then stepped so close to him that Tobias could smell the rum on his breath. Then the novelist found himself being lifted from the floor and shaken so his teeth rattled in his head.
He was next replaced carefully on the floor, but still held very hard by the shoulders. The smell of alcohol was very strong again. He could see the pores of his tormentor’s nose, the iron whiskers, the twitch in his cheek, the black fury in his eye.
Tobias Oates’s life was unravelling.
51
TOBIAS HAD SPENT a dreadful year, his fourth, in a home for orphaned boys in Shropshire, where he had been bullied continually. Thereafter he lived one year in Devon, with a mother who was most loudly inconvenienced by his presence. Brought by her to London at the tender age of five, he was soon put in the care of his father, although it was a very hard kind of care he got from that gentleman, and he was pretty much forced to make his own way from there, to find his feet in a city that would as soon have trampled him into the mud.
He had been cast off but he would not be flotsam.
He had been denied a proper school but he had learned to read and write and he had made himself, by will, a sorcerer of that great city.
Now, each day in the Morning Chronicle, each fortnight in the Observer, it was Tobias Oates who “made” the City of London. With a passion he barely understood himself, he named it, mapped it, widened its great streets, narrowed its dingy lanes, framed its scenes with the melancholy windows of his childhood. In this way, he invented a respectable life for himself: a wife, a babe, a household. He had gained a name for comic tales. He had got himself, along the way, a little belly, a friend who was a titled lady, a second friend who was a celebrated actor, a third friend who was a Knight of the Realm, a fourth friend who was an author and tutor to the young Princess Victoria. He did not dare look down, so far had he come.
Until this morning, when his fun and games had killed a man.
Then the doctor had cast him out, and this criminal, this outcast, had felt himself free to pick him up and shake him as though he were nothing but a rabbit.
“You would best be very calm, Sir,” he told Jack Maggs, although it was he, Tobias Oates, who was, by some trick of Fate, suddenly the criminal. “If you want this to end safely,” he cried fearfully, “you had best watch yourself.”
He disengaged himself and sought to button the jacket which had been torn off in the scuffle.
“Here’s the button, Sir. Give me your coat. The maid will attend to it.”
“Be still,” said Tobias.
“Yes, Sir, I’ll be still.”
And the scoundrel was still a moment, although his contemptuous dark eyes stayed on the writer.
“You have pulled off my button,” Tobias said incredulously. “Are you not a footman, Jack Maggs? Are you not a servant, man?”
For answer Jack Maggs sat insolently in the master’s wing-back chair and crossed one massive leg over the other.
“I’m bogged here,” he said. “Two weeks, and stuck up to my axles in the mud.” He rubbed his hand over his dark cheek and Toby saw the tic moving once again. “You are bogged with me, and I am bogged with you. And every day that passes, why it gets a little worse for everyone. It was on my behalf you came up with your Contagion. You could not know it would prove a wee bit fatal.”
“I can hardly be responsible for pneumonia!”
“As I said, you could not know.”
In the silence that followed Tobias began to believe that he was being threatened.
“I am most eager,” the convict continued, “to get along the track, but I cannot do it until I find Mr Henry Phipps. When I have him, then I’ll go. It was not what I had planned, but such is life.” He paused. “And as for what you done to Mr Spinks’s Magnetic Fluid . . .”
Tobias Oates looked at the convict’s face—the coarse black brows, the dry cracked lips—and found it vile.
“Do you imagine you can blackmail me?”
“I want what is owing—the name of the Thief-taker.”
“To hell with you, you tinker.”
That made his tic leap good and strong. Tobias saw it.
“You gave your word!”
Tobias looked into his adversary’s belligerent eyes, and knew that he could not afford to lose him. “You sold me fourteen days, Jack Maggs. I have used no more than eleven of them.”
“But it is two weeks from the day we agreed.”
“Only eleven days have you sat for me.”
The criminal raised his misshapen hand and pressed it hard against his cheek.
“Two days,” Tobias explained, “I was travelling to Brighton and back.”
Maggs would never beg. It was written in his body that he would not bend, that he must stand straight and hold his head high. But now he was—Tobias saw it—inexplicably, at breaking point.
“I have money.” The convict tried to smile, but the tic rippled down his face again. “Twenty guineas. How’s that? I’ll pay you for the man’s address. If you have expenses besides, I am your man.”
The sheer quantity of money shocked Tobias. He gave a sharp incredulous laugh.
“You name the figure.” The other man was now sitting forward on the edge of his seat. The palsy had changed the texture of his skin; it was oddly pale and crêpy. “Thirty if you must. Then I’ll be out of everybody’s life.”
“I’m sorry, old chap,” Toby said coldly, “but you must give me the three days you owe me.”
“For Christ’s sake, have mercy. I cannot wait three days. I cannot bear it any more.”
“You are still my subject, no matter what booty you are carrying.”
But Maggs barely heard him. His eyes rolled backwards in his head. He gave a groan and clutched his face in both his hands.