Artful: A Novel (3 page)

TWO

I
N
W
HICH THE
R
EADER
’
S
P
ATIENCE IS
R
EWARDED BY
E
XPLAINING THE
S
EEMINGLY
I
NEXPLICABLE AND THE
J
AILER IS
I
NTRODUCED FOR AS
L
ONG AS
H
E
S
UITS
O
UR
P
URPOSES

B
y now, you are doubtless becoming impatient in wondering just how it was that the Artful was walking the streets of London rather than striding the deck of a ship bound for the land of Oz (an excursion not to be confused with his later unexpected journey to the Land of Oz, an astoundingly unlikely sequence of events that will remain unexplored for the duration of this history). Lest this curiosity become so consuming that it impedes your ability to become wholly involved in the narrative, be aware that it transpired thusly:

The Artful was only minutes departed from the courtroom, wherein he had laced into the judge and given him what for. The jailer was in the process of escorting him back to the lockup, there to wait for collection and enforced escort to the ship that the Crown’s representatives had arranged. Their intention was to make sure that the charm of Dodger’s acquaintance could be made with the savages, roughnecks, and criminals who largely comprised Australia’s population. The Crown’s representatives apparently felt that because the Artful was such a unique individual, it would be positively unjust to keep him to themselves.

The jailer was two heads taller and five heads wider than Dodger, waddling rather than walking, quacking rather than talking, so much so that Dodger was quite certain that if the man’s boots were removed, they would reveal webbed toes. By contrast, Dodger walked with his customary swagger, and this seemed to sorely annoy the jailer, although whether it was because he considered it an inappropriate attitude for a rapscallion such as the Artful, or he was simply jealous because he would have been physically incapable of emulating it, is impossible to say. “Show some respect for your situation, you rascal,” he snarled at him. “Bedad, you should! What right have you to act like cock of the walk?”

“The right of all free men and gentleman to behave the way God meant us to.”

Angrily, the jailer lashed out with one meaty, oversized fist and struck the Artful squarely in the back of the head. The startled Dodger went down upon the unforgiving floor, scratching his hands; scraping his knees; and, most catastrophic of all, failing utterly to prevent his hat from tumbling off his head.

“Know your place!” thundered the jailer. He hauled the lad to his feet, scarcely allowing Dodger the time to grab up his fallen hat, and shoved him forward with such force that Dodger nearly fell once more before he righted himself at the last second.

The jailer guffawed loudly as he approached Dodger’s cell. He reached into his pocket, extracted the keys, and opened the cell door with a rickety creak. “In ya go!”

The Artful strode in, but then, once having crossed the threshold, his shoulders slumped mightily as if the air had just been let out of him. The jailer slammed the door shut behind him, and then Dodger said something so very softly that the jailer could not hear him properly. Naturally expecting that it was some sort of imprecation, he snapped, “What said you, boy? Bedad, I’ll beat you senseless, even through these here bars—see if I don’t!”

Still not turning around, Dodger said, “I simply wish to
offer
my fart-helt apologies, sir, for you’re just an honest man doin’ your job, and I’m a dishonest lad doin’ mine, and of the two, you have far more reason to hang your head high than does I.”

“Well,” harrumphed the jailer, “it’s nice to see that in the twilight of your criminal career in our lands, you have some slight ability to see things as they are instead of what you wish ’em.”

The Artful turned to face the jailer then, and to the shock of that rotund individual, there were tears streaking the boy’s dirt-stained face. The jailer took a step closer to make sure he was seeing aright, and with an agonized sob that only the truly repentant could expel, Dodger shoved his arms through the bars and embraced the startled elder. “God bless ya, sir! And may ya get everythin’ that’s comin’ to ya!”

“And you, my lad,” said the jailer, unsure of what to do and settling for awkwardly patting the top of Dodger’s hat. “Look at this new chapter of your life not as a punishment, but as a great adventure and a chance to start off with a clean sheet.”

“My sheets will be of the cleanest, sir—I swear it so!”

The Artful then stepped back, having removed his hat and holding it in front of him and bowing so deeply that he could well have looked between his own legs.

The jailer waddled away then, swaying with the sort of pleasure that only comes from a bully having satisfaction from the powerless. As he did so, though, he began to become aware ever so slowly that something was wrong or out of place or out of joint, but could not quite determine which one or the other. And then, with the force of a thunderclap, it came to him. The side-to-side gait that was his customary method of locomotion was unaccompanied by any sounds other than the rubbing of his thighs and his own labored breathing. And the particular sound in question that was conspicuous by its absence was the jingling of his keys. By a startling lack of coincidence, the absence of the sound of keys was accompanied by an absence of actual keys.

The jailer voiced a roar that was intended to be on par with that of an infuriated lion, and indeed sounded like that to him in his own head (but to an observer or listener was much more akin to a consumptive mallard) and sped—which is to say moved with slightly less slowness than he typically did—to the cell that he had just absented.

This gave the jailer something in common with the Artful, who had likewise absented the cell. That was where the similarity ended, for the jailer knew where he himself was, but was clueless as to where Dodger had gone.

He sounded an alarm, which made it sound as if the consumptive mallard had acquired severe agita, but in the end it
accomplished
nothing. Dodger was long gone, and it was only subsequently that the jailer realized his purse had decided to provide Dodger some company in his sojourn from His
Majesty’s
tender embrace.

“This cell will not remain unoccupied long—I swear it,
bedad
!” bellowed the jailer, and in that, he was right. He wound up
spending
the next six months in it himself for his rank
incompetence
.

THREE

I
N
W
HICH
W
E
C
ONTINUE IN THE
S
PIRIT OF THE
P
RECEDING
C
HAPTER BY
E
XPLAINING
H
OW
S
OMEONE
W
HO
S
HOULD
,
BY
N
O
R
IGHTS
, B
E
W
ALKING THE
S
TREETS OF
L
ONDON
, N
EVERTHELESS IS
D
OING
P
RECISELY
T
HAT

I
t is extremely unusual for anyone to interfere with, interpose upon, or in any way impede the progress of an undertaker, because the average person, of whom there is an insufferable number in the world, prefers to distance him- or herself from anything having to do with that inevitable end result of life, that common condition in which we all find ourselves at some point or another, and from which none of us has a hope of getting
out alive
.

An undertaker’s wagon—typically drawn by a horse who appears to have one or more hooves already settled within that
six-foot
-deep hole to which the horse is journeying toward, so there was some measure of poetic justice intertwined with a mute commentary on inevitability—makes its way down the middle of a street. All stand aside or watch in silence, sometimes even doffing their hats out of respect, particularly if they know the occupant or if there is a sufficient number of mourners trailing behind to indicate that this was someone of respect or status.

This particular early evening, behind this wagon to which we now turn our attention, there were no mourners. Not even a small child trailing behind, with a tear in his eye, typically in the hire of the undertaker to foster sympathies upon onlookers (which as it so happened was Oliver Twist’s very first job once he had been shunted from the confines of the workhouse, because crying came so easily to him).

If anyone
had
been predisposed to follow behind the wagon, he would have been cheering or hooting or catcalling over the demise of the occupant, and holding up his passing as proof that there was indeed a benevolent God looking down from on high, despite the fact that it often seemed the perpetual cloudiness that hung over London obscured the city from His attention and left the residents therein more or less on their own. In fairness to the Almighty, though, it should be noted that lack of attention from God is not necessarily a bad thing, as the former residents of
Sodom
, Gomorrah, and the entirety of the Earth prior to Noah’s construction of an ark would have been able to attest. This would run counter to the desires of many
former
occupants of London who would have been delighted to see
London
, upon their departure, erupt in a tower of flame, cleansed by the wrath of God . . . .

We have wandered from the horse and will reorient ourselves.

Guiding the horse was one Mr. Sowerberry, a cadaverous individual whose stock in trade was cadavers. Mr. Sowerberry’s thoughts were his own, and not of overmuch interest to our narrative, other than that they were interrupted in a rather odd manner.

The street down which the wagon proceeded was narrow and darkened and not particularly pleasant. It would be relatively easy for a single man to impede the progress of anyone coming down the street in a vehicle of any width, and that so happened now to be the case.

It was odd, this man, that he was in the way, for a moment before he had not been there at all. Instead, he had been
securely
in the embrace of the shadows, and they had now apparently disgorged him for the explicit purpose of making certain that
Mr. Sower
berry could not continue upon his path.

It was odd, too, that he was tall—unusually so—but stoop shouldered and hunched, which served to undermine his natural height. He wore a black greatcoat that hung loosely around him. His face, or what Mr. Sowerberry could see of it, seemed to be composed almost entirely of chin, and a cap pulled low over his brow served to obscure his eyes.

“How now!” called out Sowerberry. “If you’re seeking to rob me, I have barely two shillings to rub together, and I assure you that my sole passenger is traveling light in the pocket.”

“I would imagine that he is,” said the man, in a voice that was low and unpleasant and brought to mind images of worms wending their way through the occupants of the great dirt collective. “To where do you travel, if I may ask?”

“You may not ask,” said Sowerberry stiffly, but then he shrugged and said, “but I may answer if it will satisfy your curiosity and send you on your way. Common sense would dictate that I am on my way to the graveyard.”

“I am not asking common sense. I am asking you.”

“Very well,” said Sowerberry with unrestrained impatience, “I am on my way to the medical college. This fellow has a date with an interested student of human anatomy.”

“For which you will be paid handsomely,” said the man.

“That is none of your concern. You are not my agent in these matters.”

“True. I am an agent of altogether a different nature.”

“And what nature would that be?”

At that moment, the horse suddenly reared up, astounding Mr. Sowerberry, who would have guessed the animal had as much ability to make such a movement as did the wagon’s cargo. The horse’s panic distracted Sowerberry from the man who had been blocking him, and so it was with astonishment that he discovered the man was no longer in his path, but at his side on the rig.

“The nature of which will bring about your death,” said the man, who had actually known the entire time what
Mr. Sowerberry’s
destination was and had simply been engaging him in
conversation
until the sun was sufficiently receded for him to be at his full power. With this declaration of his
agency
, he drew back his lips to reveal a pair of glistening fangs that seemed to elongate as Mr. Sowerberry looked upon them, and now he could see the man’s eyes, burning red with the power of inner fires that reflected his hellish origins. Sowerberry’s mouth moved, but no words emerged, which was a tragedy because a man’s last words are important, and Mr. Sowerberry’s were the utterly forgettable inquiry as to his killer’s nature from moments earlier.

The man’s head speared forward, his fangs sinking deep into Sowerberry’s neck. Interestingly, the horse calmed, as if realizing that it was not the target of the monster’s appetites and thus was content to let matters run their course.

Blood trickled down the sides of the man’s face, and
Sowerberry
was too terrified to do anything other than provide a small, pathetic whimper of protest. Then his head slumped to one side, and his skin went ghastly pale, drained of the juice of life, and in less than a minute, he was gone.

The new commander of the vehicle wasted no time at all. He tossed the empty sack of meat and bones that had once been
Sowerberry
in the nearest alley and turned his attention to the back of the wagon.

The sun, already low upon the horizon, had set completely, leaving the shadows to lengthen at will and consume the
entirety
of the street. Yet the man within moved with the assurance as one might if he were striding through daylight or—more accurately in this instance, because a stroll under the nurturing rays of the sun would be less than salutary to him—a cat padding through the midnight hour.

Yanking open the back of the hearse, the man gripped the end of the simple coffin within and pulled. It was a mere pine box with handles on either end, and yet one would have thought it would have some weight. But the man did not grunt or
exert
the slightest effort. The coffin slid out, and he angled it so that one end rested upon the street and the box leaned upright against the wagon that had been its conveyance.

The top was fastened with a simple padlock, and the man gripped it firmly and snapped it off with his bare hand. Then he threw open the cover and looked inside.

The deceased lay within, his head at an odd angle, the imprint of the noose still fresh and impressed upon his throat. His blazing red hair was sticking out untamed in a variety of directions, and his beard was bristling. His eyes were closed. His chest was not moving. He wore black, threadbare clothing upon a frame so thin and frail that it was a wonderment he had ever been alive at all.

“Fagin!” snarled the man.

The corpse started awake, his red-rimmed eyes snapping open.

Yes, they snapped open. We know that this may well be startling for the reader who was unprepared for this moment, despite all our previous warnings. This constitutes our first actual foray into the world of the living dead. If the more faint-minded of you need to take a few moments to compose yourselves, we will wait.

There. That should constitute sufficient wait time. Onward.

The eyes actually moved independently of each other for a few moments before finally coming to focus upon the man in front of him. “Sanguine Harry,” he whispered, “as I live and breathe.”

“You do neither,” Sanguine Harry reminded him. “Get out of the coffin, you lazy good-for-nothing.”

“Coffin? Why am I in a coffin?” He put his hand to his throat. “What’s wrong with my voice? Why are you sideways, my dear?”

“You strangled. You took the short drop and sudden stop.”

“Did I?” said Fagin, and then slowly the memories crept back to him. “Ah. So I did. So I did.”

“Come here, you old fool!” said Harry. He reached over, gripped Fagin’s skull firmly with either hand and then snapped the dead man’s head upright, a movement that was accompanied by a very distinct crack. Fagin let out a cry of pain and then
slowly
, experimentally moved his head this way and that. It flopped a bit, but otherwise appeared to be in normal, functional order.

“Thankee, Harry. You was always a kind one, you was.”

“I was never anything of the sort,” Sanguine Harry retorted. “And if you believe that, more fool you. Come. Come
quickly
.” He returned to the alley, retrieved the body of Sowerberry, tossed him into the coffin, then shoved the coffin back into the hearse and secured the door. Then he clambered back into the driver’s seat, Fagin slowly climbing up to sit at his side. Snapping the reins, Sanguine Harry continued the route upon which the late Mr. Sowerberry had been engaged.

“I thought I was done for, my dear, I truly thought I was,” said Fagin, his hand going to his throat. “I wasn’t sure that I, in my frail condition, could possibly survive. Not in the full light of morning. Eight in the a.m. An ungodly time to ask someone to give up their life, even if they had one to give up, which was not the case with me. Still, at least I had the black hood on; that was a blessing,” he said, speaking of the typical headwear placed upon the condemned so that he was allowed that small measure of dignity and so that the
onlookers
did not gaze upon the final death agonies as reflected in the
condemned’s
twisted countenance. “Kept the sun from doing me a treat, it did—”

“Shut yer yammering mouth,” ordered Sanguine Harry. “There was no sun that morning. Darkness and clouds. Even the Lord didn’t want to waste His time looking down upon you, nor does your brother, nor do
I
. Yet here am I, the only one forced to looked at your wrinkled, ghastly hollow of a face, so at the very least, spare me the endless array of useless verbiage that spills out of your mouth like sewage from a pipe!”

Fagin attended to keeping quiet for as long as he was capable, which happened to be just over a minute, and then he asked contritely, “My brother is put out with me, is he?”

“The right honorable Mr. Fang almost wishes that the noose had torn your fool head off.” And then, with something
almost
akin to sympathy, Sanguine Harry emphasized belatedly, “
Almost
.”

“Well . . . that’s something, I suppose, isn’t it, my dear? That my beloved brother allows for some small joy that I’m not bereft of my head?”

“It’s not as if you were putting the damned thing to any useful purpose. What were you thinking, Fagin, to let yourself wind up in such a folly?”

“It weren’t my fault, Harry—I swear to the living God what made me and turned His back on me, it weren’t,” Fagin said with such urging that he sounded not unlike a plaintive child. “They were lookin’ for a scapegoat, is what they wanted, and that’s no lie. Nancy, poor Nancy, old Sikes gave her what for. Murdered her in cold blood he did, and he died by his own hand, and that’s not what the mob wanted—no, it wasn’t. They wanted a warm body that they could hang for themselves to believe that they and they alone had brought proper vengeance to the situation. And who do they turn to as the object of their
hatred
and receiver of their unjust justice?” He thumped his chest in indignation. “The Jew. Always the Jew. You dislike the way of things? Grab the nearest Jew and vent your spleen upon him. It was a grouse miscarriage, is what it was. A grouse miscarriage.”

Sanguine Harry suddenly pulled up on the reins, and the horse, which needed very little incentive to come to a halt, obliged.
Fagin
looked up and saw that they had arrived at the medical college, a rather undistinguished brick building with gargoyles leering down at them from the drainpipes overhead.

“Wait here,” Sanguine Harry ordered him.

At first, Fagin was inspired to ask why and, for that matter, inquire as to why he could not simply be on his way, but when he opened his mouth to speak and made as if to depart the immediate area, Sanguine Harry glared at him with that evil eye of his, and Fagin kept himself exactly and precisely where he was, murmuring, “No reason not to be keeping peace in the family; no, there isn’t.” So he kept his peace—and while he was at it, kept himself in one piece—while Harry offloaded the coffin and, hoisting it onto one shoulder, strode into the college as if he were delivering a box filled with bread. He was there for several minutes, and when he emerged, it was with a black purse that jingled when he walked. He vaulted to the driver’s seat and once again snapped the reins. Had the horse been a man, he would have groaned audibly upon being made to start walking yet again, but the horse had been given no say in the status or social ranking it had achieved thus far, and so offered no protest, correctly judging that it would serve no purpose.