by Peter Carey
“What gentleman, Magnus?”
“I really could not say,” said Magnus, exhibiting the closed and shiny countenance of a freshly tipped servant.
“Did he state his name, his business?” asked Henry Phipps, who had, after three weeks of close acquaintance, grown weary of Magnus.
“Yes, I would say it was definitely business,” said Magnus. And waited, his eyebrows raised, as if he were a witty subject in charades.
“Inasmuch, Magnus?”
“Inasmuch as it could not be pleasure, Sir.”
“What are you telling me?” asked Henry Phipps impatiently. “Is he rough?”
“Oh no, Sir.”
“Is he a large man?”
“Oh no, Sir.”
Henry Phipps placed his tea cup heavily upon the dresser.
“He’s a wee chap,” Magnus obliged quickly. “He would not worry you, Sir, if that’s your meaning. He’s just a wee wee chap, with his wee little legs and his wee little hands.”
“Very well then,” said Henry. “Thank you, Magnus.”
“You never asked me his name, Sir?”
Henry sighed. A great surge of temper pressed up into his sinuses, and he bent his head, his hands pressing down beside his long straight nose.
“Very well then. What is his name?” he asked at last.
“His name is Buckle, Sir.”
“Thank you, Magnus. I will be down directly.”
Now Percy Buckle and Henry Phipps had been neighbours a good year, and on one or two occasions they had acknowledged each other whilst dismounting from their carriages, but that was all of the contact they had so far had. When Henry heard his neighbour’s name today, it meant nothing in particular to him, and when he had brushed his hair one more time and buttoned his fourth button, he descended the narrow little staircase to the Lord Strutwell, hoping that the volumes of engravings had been locked away in their glass case. Indeed, when he entered the room, his eye went first to that case. It was safely locked.
Then, turning his attention to the visitor, he beheld this most peculiar little gent with his short legs and his expensive spats and his tailored coat and his thinning hair. Henry Phipps did not like ugliness. Did not like it in any form, in any thing. Now, as he looked at Percy Buckle, some small signs in his handsome face betrayed his feelings.
“I’m much obliged,” said Percy Buckle, extending his hand.
Henry Phipps heard his accent and thought: debt collector.
“I don’t think you recognize me,” said Percy Buckle.
“No,” said Henry Phipps, releasing the clammy hand. “Have we met?”
“We have a brick wall in common,” joked Percy Buckle, then added, “and also an interest in a fellow named Jack Maggs.”
Henry Phipps felt his breath stop.
“You are his friend?” he asked at last. He sat himself carefully in the leather armchair. “He sends you here?” His heart was beating very hard and all the old uncertainties of his troubled life came bubbling to the fore. His pulse was racing as it had raced the day he had been delivered at the door of Mrs Gummerson’s orphanage.
“Oh no,” said Percy Buckle, also sitting—or rather perching, for his legs were so short he thought it best to stay well forward—on the very edge of the armchair. “No, I fancy he would be very angry to see me here. As”—he paused delicately while his cheeks betrayed his anxiety with a most distinctive patch of colour—“as I believe you would be displeased to see Mr Maggs sitting where I sit.”
Henry Phipps had so absorbed the notion that Mr Buckle was Jack Maggs’s messenger, that it took him some time to understand that he was not: that, although his visitor knew Jack Maggs, he did not come to further Jack Maggs’s interest in the matter. By the time he had reached this conclusion, Henry Phipps’s shirt was soaked with perspiration, and he had more than once brushed at his fair hair with his hands, and more than once wiped his hands with his handkerchief. He now attempted to wrest some order from the chaos of his feelings.
“Let me ask you a question.”
“No,” said Percy Buckle, “let me ask you a question.”
Henry Phipps blinked. “Very well,” he said, surprised by the hardness in the other’s tone. “If you wish.”
“What have you done to protect your assets?”
“Sir!” Henry Phipps stood up. “That’s damned impertinent.” And he began to pace around the room. He did not know what was happening.
“Sit down,” said Percy Buckle, “and quit the prancing.”
Henry Phipps could not obey such a creature completely, but he did stand still.
“Your house is not your own,” insisted Percy Buckle. “It is the property of Jack Maggs. I have seen the title again this morning, and as far as I can tell it is still in his name.”
Henry Phipps had never inquired about this title, but once he heard this information, his worst fears were realized. Now this too would be taken from him.
“And if Mr Maggs is to get himself arrested, do you know what will happen to that title?”
“No,” admitted Henry Phipps, and sat down in the chair.
“Why, it would be subsumed nullus contredris,” said Mr Buckle, mumbling to obscure the fraudulence of his Latin. “It would be taken from him, as a felon, and auctioned by His Majesty—or Her Majesty as soon it will be. Were you not aware of this?”
“You are sure?”
“You were not aware,” said Mr Buckle. “But now that you are, I assume you would do anything in your power to prevent him being arrested.”
“Has he been arrested?”
“No, nor do you wish it. Nor do I, for reasons you need not know of. But, on the other hand, Sir, I see that you do not wish to play the part that he has written for you. You do not wish to sit around his fire eating cakes and drinking brown ale.”
An involuntary shudder passed over Henry Phipps.
“You know he is attached to you?”
Henry Phipps slumped in his chair. He knew, in this instant, that his leisured life would soon be over. He had known this time would come ever since the day sixteen years ago when Victor Littlehales, his beloved tutor, had rescued him from the orphanage. Now this privileged tenure was ended and he must leave his house, his silver, his rugs, his paintings. He must be a soldier.
“I would imagine,” continued the hateful little creature, “that there is a Last Will and Testament . . .”
“I understand I am his heir, yes.”
“Well,” said Mr Buckle, “then the news is not all bad.” He took Henry Phipps’s cup of tea, though it must have been luke-warm by now, sugared it enthusiastically and drank it with gusto. “Not all bad by any means.”
Henry Phipps looked into the fellow’s excited eyes and was made to feel most uncomfortable
“May I ask, Mr Buckle, what is your interest in Mr Maggs?”
“It is a matter of the heart, Sir.”
“Jack Maggs is your rival?” asked the other incredulously.
“He is.”
“You would not mourn him, Mr Buckle?”
“He has betrayed my trust, which was very foolish of him.” The little man looked him straight in the eye, and Henry Phipps was surprised to find himself pinned by the gaze. “There are people like Jack Maggs who see me, Sir, and they pity me, or make mock of me— well, I don’t mind that, you know, I can see that point of view—but it is just a skip from pity to abuse, so I have found. And I will not be abused, Sir, not by anyone. And if I am to be humiliated in my own home, well then, that person will be punished.”
“My, my!” Henry Phipps raised his eyebrows.
“You be careful, Sir. Do you hear me?”
This was a very different creature from the one whom the young man had first cast eyes upon. “Yes,” he said. “I hear you.”
“Jack Maggs has gone up to Gloucester, without informing me, but I found out. Yes, he has gone to Gloucester, trying to find you. I have not the foggiest where he sleeps in Gloucester. But I know, Sir,
I have learned, the secret place he lays his head in London. And that’s the point for you.”
“And what would you have me do with that information?”
“Why,” cried Mr Buckle, rising from his chair in a very energetic style, “I leave that to you, Sir. It is none of my business, but I do believe it is yours, for the house he sleeps in might easily be your own.”
And with that he took his tall beaverskin hat, and carefully brushed it with the back of his hand.
Henry Phipps shook his hand once more, and when Mr Buckle had departed the club, he sat down in the chair alone, feeling rather cold and shivery.
73
Having heard Sophina’s name on Tobias Oates’s lips, having finally begun to understand the extent to which his secrets had been burgled, Jack Maggs became, by degrees, severely agitated.
He could not sleep, and as his mind tried to understand what had been done to him, a familiar dread slowly took possession of his being. As the punt lifted slowly off the sand, as the intensity of this feeling grew, he took his son’s framed portrait from his coat and pressed it to his stomach with both his hands. And there he stayed, hunched over on the mid-thwart, hugging the image as he had on many nights before. Now he could feel the Phantom pulling with his strings inside his face, long lines of cat-gut knotted to his flesh. He felt the demon stirring in his belly and everywhere about him. He imagined that horrid half-smile upon his patrician face.
He did not know what was done to him, or how it was achieved. He rocked back and forth, stubbornly alone, waiting for the light.
When, at last, the yellowish light of dawn penetrated the mist, he found they were bumping around the shore of a “pill,” or cove. His companion was still asleep, sitting sideways on the aft-thwart, his forehead resting on his drawn-up knees. Maggs leaned towards him. At first it seemed that he intended to shake him awake, but instead he executed the plan he had carried with him through the dark. Half-rising in his seat, he twisted his body and—with a thin, hard smile upon his face—inserted his three-fingered hand into the writer’s jacket pocket; then, very slowly, he withdrew the note book. Once it was well clear of its owner, he sat down again and set the sodden treasure ever so gently upon his knee. There he sought that which was his.
The pages were very wet, and the ink in some places washed away, but he began his search from the beginning of the note book and very soon, on page three, he was rewarded: M— would not go mad.
His brows came down upon his eyes.
M— would not go mad, but only because he carried with him the strong conviction that he would, no matter what Judge Denman read to him, walk once more in England’s green and pleasant land.
The hairs on his neck stood on end.
He had had that feeling in his gut before, that cold terror associated with the triangle. He knew his life and death were not his own. His forehead creased in a grid of criss-crossed frown marks. He turned the page.
Jack Maggs is a criminal who presumes to come home from Banishment, who, having accrued great wealth, buys the great mansion in which he will finally be burned alive.
He turned the page and found: CHAPTER ONE. Before the title, and afterwards: the sign of the Cross. All the following pages were vigorously crossed out.
74
CHAPTER ONE
It was a dismal January day in the year of 1818, and the yellow fog which had lain low all morning lifted a moment in the afternoon and then, as if the desolate pile of rock and stone thereby revealed was far too melancholy a sight to be endured, it descended again like a shroud around the walls of Newgate Prison.
These walls, being made from Welsh blue stone, had not been easily broken by the quarryman, and yet the fog, by virtue of its persistence, had been able slowly to penetrate the stone’s dark inhuman heart and touch the skin of a young woman prisoner who had fallen asleep with her face against her cell wall.
There were a great number of women inside Newgate that year. They had been brought from all over the British Isles: petty thieves, murderers, all manner of wickedness crammed into that grim pile on Newgate Street. Here, in a small cell on the second floor, eight women waited for the Majesty of the Law to turn its weary eye on every one of them by turn.
There was a good thick palliasse of straw in the corner of the cell. This, however, had already been claimed for the sole use of a ham-legged female servant “without situation” who was said to have robbed and murdered travellers on the Turnpike at Bayswater. The rest of the women—one of them a mother suckling a new babe—made use of what straw had spilled from the palliasse in the battle for its possession. They did not speak to each other, though when the name “Sophina Smith” was called through the spy-hole they looked at each other to see who “Sophina Smith” might be.
She who had rested her cheek against the wall now stood, revealing the bloody injury which had made her seek that cold comfort: four deep scratch marks on her face.
When the door opened she stepped out. Chains were put around her wrists and ankles and she was led off.
This Sophina Smith was a very comely young woman. She had exceptionally fair skin, and coal-black hair which hung in pretty ringlets around her face. She was tall and stood erect. Although slender, she had a most womanly figure. It was this very comeliness which had so affronted the ham-legged servant who had scratched her face.
Being brought out of the side door of the prison, the young woman blinked, then lowered her head, walked ten paces, then was admitted through a second door. Thus she passed from Internment to Judgment, for she was now inside the Old Bailey.
She was brought first into a dark and dingy room, illuminated by a single soot-stained lamp. Here, in company with other women similarly shackled, she waited for an hour. Then she was called into court to stand before the Judge.
The court had heard many charges that morning: a mother had tried to drown her babe, a woman had pushed a red-hot poker into her husband’s eye, but the charge against this prisoner brought a new gravity to the room.
Sophina Smith, it was now said, had used hammer and chisel to break into a house in Frith Street, Soho, the property of Gilbert Gunn, a solicitor, and therein she had stolen silver plate valued at one hundred and fifty pounds.
It was a figure high enough to have her hanged three times over.
“So,” said the Judge, “what plead you to this charge?” He was a benign-looking man in spite of his lambskin, and although his mouth turned down at the edges, an honest citizen might easily imagine him as an umpire at a county cricket match, holding the bowler’s jersey draped around his shoulders. When his question went unanswered, he bore it with good grace, repeating himself in a tone that made the recording clerk smile slightly.
Yet the young woman could not be teased into speech. She stared up at the high, panelled bench, her pretty face contorted by a rather mulish scowl.
The Judge inquired about her injury. She turned her head abruptly so it was hidden from him.
After one or two more questions, the Judge finally lost patience. He slapped his hand loudly down upon the Bench. The prisoner flinched.
Everyone who sat in the court could see her fright. Now, finally, her eyes were bright with tears. She addressed the Judge in a whisper.
“Again. I cannot hear you.”
The young woman spoke in a louder voice. She said that there could be no value in her testimony because she was a thief.
“Do you mean that you are a thief by nature or a thief as evidenced by these charges? If you are a thief by nature, that is not the concern of this court today. But if you are guilty of these charges then you must plead ‘guilty.’ If not, you must plead ‘not guilty.’ How do you plead?”
There were forty or fifty people in that court and every one of them understood that this comely young woman might be hanged for this offence. Thus her continued silence had a great effect on all of them; none more than upon a certain young man who had witnessed the proceedings with impatience from the very start. He was
a tall youth, dressed in a “flash” style, with a green kerchief around his neck and a bright red waistcoat covering his chest. This wardrobe, in accompaniment with his rather bellicose expression, might cause one to suppose that he had been up to no good, and had profited from his wrong-doing. His hair was cut short and he was closely shaven, and there was nothing therefore to mask his raw emotion, to distract one from the restless anger of his eyes. Yet had his head been covered by a leather hood, he would have given himself away, for he continually twisted in his seat, leaning forward and then back, and when the young woman finally whispered that she was guilty, he leaped up to his feet and cried out that she was innocent.
Immediately the constabulary were after him, trampling over a little boy in their attempts to reach the heckler. He was big-boned, but he was nimble, and he leaped onto the bench behind. With one boot on the back of the bench and another between a parson’s legs, he called to the Judge that it was he, Jack Maggs, who had done the crime.
By this time he was surrounded, and he stepped down to the floor, still very hot and passionate, trembling like a horse.
“Bring that ruffian to the Bench,” said the Judge. Three constables, all of them shorter than their prisoner, brought the young man to stand before the Judge, who immediately declared him in contempt of court, and thereupon, without recourse to any other authority, began the young man’s interrogation himself.
“Do you know this woman?” asked the Judge, and although the young man did not answer, the answer was obvious to all: he was hissing at the young woman and she was shaking her head back at him.
“She is my brother’s wife.”
“Ah,” said the Judge, “you can speak. The malady does not run in the family?”
“Yes, I can speak,” said the young man. “And I was also in that house in Soho and I can tell Your Honour that this young woman did not do nothing. It was her husband, Tom England, who broke the lock.”
“And you, I suppose, are an innocent by-stander?”
“How can I be? It was I who packed the silver.”