by Peter Carey
You would think it incredible that I, who knew his ways so well, would ever leave my pretty treasure undefended. But if I often did so it was because, my dear boy, I had already become Silas’s son-in-law. Not, of course, that Sophina and I were married in a church, though we often talked of that, and longed for the day when we might suggest such a thing and not be beaten on account of it.
Amo, Amas
I love a lass
She is so sweet and tender
We were then, as far as I can reckon, fourteen years old. And we lay under our counterpane at night, asleep in each other’s arms, imagining ourselves safe, at least, in our heartfelt feelings for each other.
59
Henry, had you been able to hear Judge Denman make his ignorant speech to the jury about what a poisonous line of blood ran through my vermin veins, had you heard the phlegmy old lambskin list my misdemeanours, you might have imagined me so devoted to burglary that I had not a moment to spare between cock crow and midnight.
Sophina and I were worked hard, it’s true, but more often as chars than burglars. When the Ma’s floors were scrubbed and her banisters polished, time was often heavy on our hands and many is the fine summer’s day we spent confined to the upstairs floor with no other amusement than to lie on the bare floor boards with a tumbler against our ears, trying to overhear the sad little dramas enacted in the room below our kitchen.
Silas in his penitentiary had more freedom than we did. He was permitted often times to stand at the open door of the prison in his fine grey tailored coat, and there, puffing on an Indian cheroot, pass the day with whomsoever passed by. But Sophina and I were forbid the little lane that ran down beside our home. Even hopscotch was denied us.
It is not so queer then that we looked forward to our burglary more than we feared its consequences. It was not our blood-line, or our criminal craniums, but our natural human desire for something other than the tedium of close confinement. Thus we waited to be called to risk, waited while the ground-floor voices murmured, while the blacksmith across the way set up his steady cling-cling-cling, while a housefly died noisily, buzzing against the green window glass.
The front-door bell rang frequently, but these were ladies for the Ma, and no business of ours. If there were a call for us, it would most likely come after supper when we were scrubbing down the kitchen tables.
—Come, my lovelies.
We would look up from our grey soap and our hard brushes, and see a cabby standing at the kitchen door.
—I am Uncle Dick, and I am here to take you for a little trot.
And in three minutes we would be dressed for the street and clattering down the stairs, leaving the bowl of soapy water on the table for the Ma—for she would never hinder us on our way to do our business.
Every Joe knows that the brotherhood of hackney drivers has a calling in the criminal professions, but our Uncle Dicks and Handsome Micks were innocent, at least temporarily. No matter that Silas himself had engaged them, no matter what skivers and magsmen they might be on a Monday morning, on those sweet summer evenings they had nothing more criminal to do than to get us to an inn.
They were, as Silas told us, base links in a chain of gold.
Likewise, Tom would break the door of the house, but never enter it. Likewise, my pretty sweetheart and I would select the silver and pack it in the hessian sacks, but take the sacks no further than the kitchen door.
—You ain’t breaking the law, Silas told us. You did not break no lock, and you did not remove nothing from the premises.
It was a scheme, in all its very definite Divisions of Labour, which would have met with the approval of Mr Adam Smith, but I do not think that this was an author I ever heard Silas mention, although he was a well-respected scholar and able to recite long passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare.
Even in Newgate, he kept his books about him, and complained often about favourites he could not accommodate in his cell. Alas, he needed sufficient shelving for his port wine and his claret, for he could not be without them either. Silas did not go short of comforts. He always had a ham and two or three different pies, all nicely covered with muslin to keep the flies away. All this drove Tom into a great frenzy, but I don’t think I ever really believed that Silas’s comfortable way of life was paid for by my labours. Indeed, I had come to think of these labours as being for my own amusement. And as the cab began, as it most-times did, to head towards the West wherein the faint glow of the departed sun could still be seen, my heart would be already pounding hard in my chest. My hand would soon go out across the seat and find my sweetheart’s. All around us, the drivers of coaches, carriages, dog carts, phaetons, roared and raced their mighty race, while we two children were like insects brought to fervent life by a summer thunder storm.
As I had grown tall, Sophina had kept her own pace beside me, and when we sat opposite each other in the soft London light, our eyes were level, and each as hungry and curious about its opposite as our tangled hands. I sought those grey eyes in the gloom. What a heady blend of sagacity and recklessness I found there.
And hurt, also. There was much hurt my Sophina carried with her silently, hurt you would never guess unless you heard, as I often did, her crying by herself at night, and there was a certain wariness about her affections which had to be won over just when you imagined there was no more winning-over to be done.
But I said she was a beauty, so let me prove it to you: Sophina had dark luxurious curls and an oval face with such wise and gentle grey eyes and a wide, well-shaped mouth whose naturally serious expression was forever breaking in a most glorious smile. Her lips were soft—so soft I break my sentence to close my eyes and mourn them. And when we met with Tom at the inn, I was all impatience to get to the house, to get to the job, where I might kiss them.
Was this safe? For the most part, yes. It is much to Silas’s credit that we were rarely called to any house where the danger of discovery was very great. Of course this was not necessarily on account of kindness, and one has only to think him like a fellow with a pair of good fighting cocks he does not want to lose too easily, to understand why he took great care in the gathering of his Information.
Twice there were slip-ups. Once we found a master by his fire when we expected no one home. Once we had a party return from Sussex when they had not been expected, but it is one of the wonders of great houses that their owners are forever closing them down, and these were the houses to which we were sent to do our “little spot of shopping.”
Had we such a house—as Sophina and I said to each other—we would never sleep in any other, and it was our great fancy that the houses where we exercised our craft belonged to us, and thus, even in the selection of the silver plate we were to steal, we acted the parts of a lady and gentleman choosing which items to send to their country estate.
We were fast at our work, faster than those who depended on us could ever guess, and when we had filled our sack, and I had placed it carefully beside the kitchen door, I would mount the stairs and set off, in all that great house, to find my “wife” who had gone on ahead of me.
And who was in bed, of course, and waiting for me.
My dear boy, I pray I do not shock you with this tale or that you, in imagining us wild animals, will doubt me when I say, what innocents we were. Sophina was not one of those girls who bloom suddenly into womanhood. She ripened slowly in the London mist, and when I embraced her, I was a boy embracing a girl.
But a man too, for the man now who writes this embraces her still, and longs, thirty years later, for the smooth whiteness of her skin and all that great house around us.
’Twere the sweetest thing in all my life, to go burgling with Sophina and to flirt with the great dangerous web of sleep which came down to claim us afterwards.
60
On the twenty-eighth of July 1807 we were dispatched to a large gentleman’s residence in Montpelier Square, an easy mark because of the lane-way entrance to its stables at the rear. We firs
t met with Tom at the Golden Sheaf, a little inn in one of the smaller streets which lead into the square.
There we watched Tom fill his face with cold boiled beef and pickled walnuts. Finally, when he had washed all this down with ale, he pointed out the open window and showed us the house that had been selected for us. It was a tall, thin, four-storey beauty, straight and tall as a guardsman with all its iron work blacked and its brass work shining in the soft green summer light.
We waited for the dark to fall, and then left Tom sitting drinking his second tankard and playing solitaire.
A half an hour or so after we had gone inside, Tom heard a commotion down below and, kneeling on his settle, he looked out and saw a team of Bow Street runners “fair galloping” across the square, shouting at each other as they went. It seemed to him that they were heading towards the lane-way at the back of our house.
This alarmed him at first, but after he had watched the house a while and seen its windows remain dark, he went back to his solitaire. He had performed this vigil many times and was now accustomed to the long time it took us to select our merchandise. But when the clock struck midnight and the landlord wished to know would he like a room to sleep in, Tom paid his bill and went on out into the night.
He had a Mr Steelshank waiting in another inn nearby, and when the bag was ready he would call on Steelshank and tip him the wink. But now he began to imagine that the Robin Redbreasts had nabbed us in the kitchen, or the butler’s pantry where—naturally enough—no light would have showed. If that was the case, they might be waiting in there now, and he could not send in Steelshank but neither could he make up his mind what he should do. He walked around the square two or three times until his activity was noted by a watchman who wanted to know what it was he was looking for. As the fellow raised his lantern, a hackney cab came into the square and Tom straight way hailed it and set off, not to Steelshank, but up to Islington where he set about the dangerous task of raising Ma Britten from her bed.
The Ma was a restless body who oft-times needed a dram or two of French Cream to get her to her sleep. Once that precious land was won, she did not gracefully surrender it, and when she was finally drawn up from the depths towards the light of Tom’s lantern, she brought a foul mouth and an evil temper with her.
Now I was not, I am pleased to say, a witness to this event, but I spent enough years with the pair of them to now offer an honest sketch.
—You better not have lost them little varmints, said she, or by God, Silas will have the Push come looking for you.
—I ain’t lost nothing, Ma, said he, I just did my job, and then the runners went into the house and now they ain’t come back.
—You dunghill, said she.
—Ma, said he, don’t call me that. I ain’t a coward.
—Dung, she hollered.
She liked to call him that, call him anything that would make him red in the face and even more needful of her affections. So even though he were a big fellow now, and handy with his raw red fists, he was, as they journeyed out into the night, a whining little mutt around her great black skirts.
—You lose those little Nokes, said she, and I’ll cut your bleeding ears off. Etc., etc.
She might call us Nokes, and worse, but the truth was she feared she was at risk of losing her golden geese, and although she was normally a very careful woman with a penny, she did not hesitate to pay for another hack to get her as far as Montpelier Square.
When they arrived at the back lane by the stables, Tom, being convinced that the runners were waiting there to trap him, gave his mother one more reason to call him a dunghill. She pushed her way ahead of him and walked into the house.
There, in the face of Tom’s pleas that she do otherwise, Ma Britten lit a candle, located the kitchen, and there discovered the bag of silver Sophina and I had packed so carefully. That this valuable booty was still in its place was, to the Ma’s mind, proof positive that the Robin Redbreasts had not been near the place. She jubilantly administered one or two fast clips across Tom’s ears, and (having thereby calmed herself a little) set off to search the house.
Tom, however, had an awful terror of transportation. He tried to lag behind, and the Ma was forced to escort him by his ear up the stairs, and she did not let him go until, on a landing, she heard Yours Truly snoring.
God knows what Tom thought the sound was, but it did serve to send him into a dreadful panic.
The Ma demanded—Draw the curtains! But he had slipped away from her into the darkness, and she had to run the risk herself—as she was not slow to remind him later—of standing in front of the open window in a public square while she quickly drew the curtains. When this was done, she held the candle high.
—Nokes, she cried.
I woke to see her there, her hair all wild as if for bed, but dressed in the long dark skirts she favours to this day. She tilted the candle and a drop of hot wax spilled onto my bare stomach, then onto poor Sophina who leapt startled from her bed and stood in the corner, trying to cover herself.
—Out! Ma cried at Tom, who now was standing at the doorway, staring at our nakedness.
—Out! she cried again. Tom had gone, but I pretended not to know what she meant.
—Get out, idjeet! she cried, never once taking her eyes off poor Sophina.
It is to my eternal shame that I then deserted Sophina, and stood like a shivering child outside the door where Tom, having glared at me and shaken his head, was temporarily restrained from any more physical attack upon my person by his intense curiosity about what was being said inside.
—Stand! we heard the Ma say. Hands by your sides!
But then she dropped her voice, and the conversation inside the door began to sound like the conversations we heard through the floor boards of the kitchen. The questions, the answers, the tears. Only in its conclusion did this interview show Ma Britten’s different relationship with the person whom she now interviewed.
—Five months! she cried. You stupid little bitch.
She had discovered, so I imagined, the length of time we had been man and wife.
61
TOBY HAD BEEN ABROAD a day and night. He had slept in a flop house, magnetized a criminal, retrieved a necklace, and drunk first claret and then brandy with Cheery Entwhistle.
He had sold the copyright to Jack Maggs. He had signed a contract for sixty pounds, and now, as he stood outside his house in Lamb’s Conduit Street, he could feel the sticky dirt of London on his skin and taste its sulphurous corruption in his mouth.
A light rain was falling, scarcely more than mist, and it gathered on the outside of his curling hair like dew on a spider web. It ran down his unclean cheeks and thereby helped produce, in concert with a swollen mouth and shadowed eyes, a picture at once demonic and pathetic. He stood awhile in the shadows and watched his own household with a kind of dread.
As he gained the footpath he was able to look down into the kitchen and see Mrs Jones busy scrubbing down her table in readiness for the morrow. How he envied the old biddy the dull certainty of her day.
He let himself in the front door very quietly, only to be rewarded with her whom he wished most to avoid.
The girl was seated on the bench seat by the hat stand, clad only in dressing gown and slippers. Her hair was loose and falling on her shoulders, but still she came and recklessly embraced him, pushing against him with that darkest and most womanly part of her anatomy.
“Where is my wife?”
He drew her into the dark drawing room and sat her down opposite him at a small card table. Then, in the interests of propriety, he lit a candle.
“I have been waiting for you, dearest.”
“Where is Mary?”
“In the nursery, but listen to what your Lizzie has been waiting all day long to tell you.”
She then stretched out her free hand and touched his face. He could not help but flinch from her.
“Lizzie,” he explained, “my face is dirty.”
In
reply she leaned across the table to kiss him once again. He saw then, quite clearly, the full curve of her breast.
“Toby—I plan to go away, by myself, to France.”
“For Heaven’s sake, do up your nightgown.”
She did as he requested but in a teasing manner inappropriate to their situation.
She continued. “My French is really very good, as you have said yourself.”
To France? He would not know how to effect such an adventure himself. She was but eighteen years old, and scarcely knew her way to the Royal Academy.
“Whom have you been speaking to?”
“I would be away but half a year.”
The floorboards creaked upstairs.
“I would stay in a good Protestant house in Paris.”
“Which house?” he whispered. “How could you find such a thing? Who would be with you?”
“I would be back by Christmas with the baby.”
“No!”
“Oh, silly dear Tobias. I would not say that he was our own.”
He looked at her with such alarm that she, in her madness, began to laugh. “I have already told Mary that I wish to adopt a foundling.”
“You must do no such thing, do you hear me? My wife is one hundred times sharper than you imagine.”
“No, poor Toby, she is one thousand times less sharp than you imagine. In any case, I told her this morning that I was resigned to being an old maid, but that I would adopt a babe of my own.”
“You are treading on thin ice, girl.”
“Do not be so cold with me, Toby.”
“I am not cold. I am shocked that you should discuss this with anybody. What did my wife reply?”
“Well, you can imagine the scene, I’m sure. First she must drink her tea. Then she must contemplate the matter as if it were a frightful conundrum. In this case she was silent an awfully long time, but at last she said that she was sure that it was forbidden by the English foundling hospitals—to give their charges out to spinsters.”