by Peter Carey
It was Mr Buckle who flung the door open to the living room.
“Fire,” he cried, while the lawyer hovered somewhere behind them in the darkness.
“Fire!”—and pushed him forward into the room.
For Henry Phipps, everything in this present nightmare seemed to be happening very slow. He had all the time he required to look at the man who had written to him for most of his young life. He had always known Jack Maggs to be a convict, known him transported for “the term of his natural life,” and Victor Littlehales, his Oxford tutor, had taught him how to gratify the needs of him who signed his letters “Father.” They had laboured together on the replies until young Henry finally found his voice, and thereafter the role came to him easily enough. If the letters could be called “lies” they could also be called “comfort.”
Henry Phipps had sung to Jack Maggs, sung for his supper. He had sung without understanding it was a siren song, without ever dreaming that this tortured beast might demand of him that which had been conceived only as a flight of fancy.
“Defend your house,” cried Percy Buckle.
Henry Phipps had no choice. He raised the gun.
From the shadow by the fire, a young woman came towards him. Her feet were bare. She raised her hand towards the barrel.
91
AT THE INSTANT Henry Phipps discharged the pistol, Lizzie Warriner died in her bed. Even though her pain ended, there was in that wracked body no suggestion of repose, but everywhere tension, angularity, distress. She lay in the midst of the rucked and tangled carmine sheets, her hand thrust into her mouth as if she were still biting it.
Tobias was not yet the bearded eminence he would finally become. On the night Lizzie died, he was a frightened, ambitious young man. His eyes were bloodshot, his red mouth contorted by spasms of grief. He wept upon his dead lover’s pillow, and then on the skirts of his wife, although this lady, uncharacteristically, made no move to comfort him. Instead she sat upon the death bed, expressionless, heavy-jowled, the corpse’s cooling hand in hers.
“Light the fire,” she said.
“I will call the doctor.”
Mary Oates bestowed on her husband a look of passionate antagonism. “You will light the fire, you foolish man.”
“You are wrong,” he said, although what exactly she was wrong about he did not say. It was clearly not the fire he was speaking of, for he soon took himself downstairs and managed to make a vigorous blaze of coals and faggots. Then he obediently performed that service which the dead girl had beseeched of her sister. That is, he made a pyre of her linen. Given that the fireplace was not large and the sheets were still, in some places, wet, it was not an easily accomplished task, but he persevered.
Throughout all this, he wept unashamedly. Mary, by contrast, sat woodenly in a straight-backed chair, the same chair in which Jack Maggs had first been mesmerized. When Mary did look finally at Tobias Oates it was with a gaze of such coldness that her husband quailed before it.
“You do me a great wrong,” said he.
“We have both done great wrong,” she said.
Later Tobias would think he had imagined this reply, but now he sat on his heels and watched Lizzie’s very life blood burning upon the flames. In those flames he saw, as he would throughout his life, the figures and faces of his fancy dancing before him. He saw the wraith of their dead child folding and unfolding in the skirts of fire. He saw Lizzie herself, her face smiling and folding into the horrible figure of decay.
He could not bear it. Would not carry it.
He poked at the blackened linen and found in it one abhorrent face, that of the man who had led him to Mrs Britten’s door, who had placed those dung-coloured pills where they would poison that precious life.
It was Jack Maggs, the murderer, who now grew in the flames. Jack Maggs on fire. Jack Maggs flowering, threatening, poisoning. Tobias saw him hop like a devil. Saw him limp, as if his fiery limbs still carried the weight of convict iron. He saw his head transmogrify until it was bald, tattooed with deep wrinkles that broke apart and floated glowing out into the room.
It was Jack Maggs who had done this, and in his grief Tobias began to heap up all his blame upon him. It was now, on the seventh of May, in the darkest night of his life, that Jack Maggs began to take the form the world would later know. This Jack Maggs was, of course, a fiction, and so it may not matter that Tobias never witnessed the final act of the real convict’s search: never observed Henry Phipps raise that pistol with his trembling hand, never heard the deafening explosion, nor smelled the dark and murderous scent of gunpowder.
It would not have been lost on him that Mercy Larkin’s wedding finger was blown away, and that when Jack Maggs came to her side, the pair were finally matched in their deformity. But the forces that made that famously “abhorrent” face inside the fire were different from those that drove the real Jack Maggs, who escaped London with Mercy Larkin that very night on the Portsmouth Mail. There is no character like Mercy in The Death of Maggs, no young woman to help the convict recognize the claims of Richard and John to have a father kiss them good night.
Dick Maggs was eleven years of age when Jack returned from England. He had twice been up before the magistrate, and little John, who was four years younger, had the same hard belligerent face, the same dark and needful eyes. It was not an easy role for Mercy Larkin, yet she applied herself to being their mother with a passion. She who had always been so impatient of the “rules” now became a disciplinarian. She brushed their hair and wiped their faces. She walked with them to school and saw they stayed there. It was she who moved the family away from the bad influence of Sydney. And in the new town of Wingham where they shortly settled she not only civilized these first two children, but very quickly gave birth to five further members of “That Race.”
Jack Maggs sold the brickworks in Sydney. In Wingham he set up a saw mill and, when that prospered, a hardware store, and when that prospered, a pub. He was twice president of the shire and was still the president of the Cricket Club when Dick hit the cover off a new ball in the match against Taree.
The Maggs family were known to be both clannish and hospitable, at once civic-minded and capable of acts of picturesque irresponsibility, and it is only natural that they left many stories scattered in their wake. Yet amongst the succeeding generations of Maggs who still live on those fertile river flats, it is Mercy who is now remembered best, not only for the story of how she lost her wedding finger, not only for the grand mansion on Supper Creek Road whose construction she so pugnaciously oversaw and whose servants she so meticulously supervised, but also for the very particular library she collected in her middle age.
The Death of Maggs, having been abandoned by its grief-stricken author in 1837, was not begun again until 1859. The first chapters did not appear until 1860, that is, three years after the real Jack Maggs had died, not in the blaze of fire Tobias had always planned for him, but in a musty high-ceilinged bedroom above the flood-brown Manning River. Here, with his weeping sons and daughters crowded round his bed, the old convict met death without ever having read “That Book.”
For this lack, Mercy compensated. She read The Death of Maggs , first as it appeared in serial, then again when the parts were gathered in a handsome volume, then again when the author amended it in 1861. Finally, she owned no fewer than seven copies of the last edition, and each of these is now (together with Jack Maggs’s letters to Henry Phipps) in the collection of the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Of the seven volumes, six are cloth, one is leatherbound, and this last is signed: To Mercy from Captain E. Constable, Clapham 1870.
The Mitchell’s librarian has noted on each index card the “v. rough excision” of that page which reads:
Affectionately Inscribed
to
PERCIVAL CLARENCE BUCKLE
A Man of Letters, a Patron of the Arts
PETER CAREY
JACK MAGGS
Born in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, in 1943, Peter Carey l
ives in New York City with his wife and two sons. He is the author of five previous novels and a collection of stories.
INTERNATIONAL
Also by PETER CAREY
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
The Tax Inspector
Oscar and Lucinda
Bliss
Illywhacker
The Fat Man in History
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1999
Copyright © 1997 by Peter Carey
Vintage Books, Vintage International, and colophon are trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Carey, Peter.
Jack Maggs/Peter Carey.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR9619.3.C36J33 1998
823—dc21 97-36893 CIP
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42644-4
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