Jack Maggs (20 page)

45

IN FOUL-SMELLING FLORAL STREET, Edward Constable alighted from a hackney cab and carried his three parcels to the door of
Mafooz & Son, Importers of Dates and Coffees
, this drab business being distinguished by a small lantern which had been left to burn, carelessly it seemed, throughout the night.

It was a little after dawn as he pulled on the bell, but in far less time than might have been expected at such an hour, the peep-hole in the door was opened, and his business was demanded of him.

The answer being satisfactory, he was admitted into a dim, smoke-stained corridor where a faded individual with rouged cheeks and pouchy eyes was pleased to take his hat and gloves.

This was Magnus, as much a landmark for a certain caste of Londoner as the new column in Trafalgar Square. Magnus was the subject of many anecdotes, most of which devolved from the extremely handsome figure he had cut early in the reign of George III, the period from which his present wig most certainly dated.

This club was an institution in Covent Garden at that time. It was certainly well known to the costers that a certain type of gentleman (known in their parlance as Foreman’s Friends) frequented these rooms above Mafooz’s shop. The costers themselves, when they were finished with their brandy at the Dog and Whistle, had been known to beg admittance, and then there would be all sorts of fun and dancing into the small hours, particularly on Saturday night and often continuing well into Sunday morning, sometimes even at the hour when Edward Constable arrived to inquire after Mr Henry Phipps.

Neither by word nor by manner did Magnus allow that Mr Phipps might be presently upon the premises, but he did not deny the possibility either. Rather, he ushered Constable into a small room with its title LORD STRUTWELL blazoned boldly on its door. The room was decorated in most masculine style, with various flags and battle standards, and armchairs upholstered in Moroccan leathers.

Here, Constable sat himself down and waited with his parcels on his lap. He displayed no appetite for the bound engravings which filled the book cases, engravings which, in a happier time, might have produced in him a state of almost damnable desire. He waited half an hour with his back turned to the book case, and when the door behind him opened, he stood.

It was apparent from the moment Henry Phipps entered the room that he was drunk. He sat himself down heavily with his long legs stretched out and the contours of his manhood immodestly displayed beneath his doeskins.

He was a tall, well-made young man of conventionally handsome appearance. He had straight fair hair, long side whiskers, a good straight nose, and clear blue eyes, but it was the mouth which was the most expressive aspect of his physiognomy: being one moment utterly persuasive of its charm, and the next distinguished by its churlishness.

Now he squinted up at Constable. “Are you not that fellow from Great Queen Street?”

“I think you know me well enough, Sir.”

“The racehorse, eh?”

Edward Constable’s mouth tightened.

Henry Phipps was not too drunk to note the expression.

“Oh Christ,” he said as he closed his eyes, “please, don’t play the footman with me.”

“I am a footman, Sir, as you might have reason to recall.”

Henry Phipps opened his eyes sufficiently to consider Constable.

“My name is Edward Constable. It was my friend who died . . .”

Phipps then leaned forward, speaking more quietly than he had hitherto. “As I told you before, I will have no more discussions relating to that affair.” He made as if to rise.

“Stay, Sir. It is some other business.”

Mr Phipps sighed. “Perhaps you wish to blame me for the rain last night. I am, Sir, a tall fellow. Perhaps I caused it.”

“That is not my purpose.”

“For the sky does love me, eh, and then the rain does fall, and poetry being poetry, why”—he lay back heavily in his arm chair—“then I am to blame.”

“Mr Phipps, it is not that business, it is another . . .”

“Not involving my supposed obligation to you?”

“No, Sir, to another.”

“Oh Lord, this is very boring.”

“I am here on a message from Mr Jack Maggs.”

“The Devil you are!”

“I am, Sir.”

Henry Phipps’s manner now changed completely. He removed himself to the arm of the club chair, folding his large hands upon his lap, and regarded Constable with earnest attention.

“And how is he? How is Jack Maggs?”

“I would say that he was pining for you, Sir.”

“Pining for me, you say? How odd. But sit down, Edward. Tell me, what is he like? A ruffian, I warrant.”

“He is very comely, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh he is, is he? A racehorse?”

“A little grim at times, but the ladies are most taken with him.”

“The
ladies
?”

“There is a certain aspect to his manner which does betray his past, and yet you would not know the tortures he has passed through if you did not witness the scars.”

“He has scars?”

“He has been flogged, Sir. Yet for a man so abused, I think you will find him of a very decent disposition.”

“The thing is this, Eddie, old chap, I really do not think I will have an opportunity to ‘find’ him at all. I am called away.”

“You were ‘called away’ once already, were you not, Sir? Mr Maggs believes it was his imminent arrival that was the cause of your departure.”

“Now I am called away, let us say, further.”

“Abroad?”

“Further than it is your damned business to inquire.”

“In any case, Sir, he has asked me to deliver these little packages to you.”

And here Constable offered the three parcels to Henry Phipps.

The gentleman did not immediately reach for the gifts but rather peered at them.

“What’s this?”

“I believe one of the objects to be a mirror.”

“A mirror? Is he sarcastic then? What in the deuce does he mean by giving me a mirror?”

“And this one on the top contains three lemons.”

“Lemons?”

“And the largest of the three, so I understand, is a certain document which Mr Maggs would have you read.”

Constable then held out all three parcels.

“A legal document?” asked Henry Phipps, unable to hide his growing excitement.

“No, I think not.”

“Not the title to a house, for instance?”

“I imagine it is a sort of letter.”

“A letter?” cried Henry Phipps, suddenly angry. “Do you think I could correspond with such a one as he? And do you not consider the doubtful position you place yourself in? You are breaking the law to know his whereabouts without disclosing it. He is a dangerous man, Mr Racehorse, a man condemned to banishment, for ever. If you wish to reveal my presence to him, I swear I will make you wish that you were never born.”

“Sir, my information is that he sits up half the night writing in order to explain himself to you.”

“He said this?”

“Please, Sir, he thinks only of you. If ever he did you harm, I am very sure that he is sorry.”

For the third time, Constable attempted to deliver Jack Maggs’s gifts.

“He says it is necessary to squeeze a little lemon juice upon the pages. And then to read them through the mirror image.” There was a pause. “He is very fond of you.”

“But I am not fond of him. Tell him that I find the very notion of him vile.”

“Can I give him no comfort?”

“Yes: you may tell him that I am well aware of the obligation he has placed me under, and that he can therefore rely upon my silence for the moment.”

And with that the interview ended, and Henry Phipps strode from the room.

46

CONSTABLE, SEARCHING THE house high and low, found Jack Maggs in Mr Spinks’s bedroom, at which doorway he remained unannounced.

The Australian sat aside the butler’s sick-bed. His back was to the door, and he was offering a spoon of broth to the old man.

“You should never look a pooka in the eye. The eye is the strong point of all these dark magicians.”

He moved the spoon closer. The butler turned his head aside. The spoon withdrew a little.

“Every creature has its strong point,” continued the big man. “With a pooka it is in the eyes entirely. Were it not for the eyes they would be helpless as a new-hatched chicken.”

Mr Spinks knocked the spoon aside, and some liquid fell upon his counterpane.

Jack Maggs patiently set the soup bowl and spoon upon the side table. The feverish butler withdrew as far as he was able, until he was sitting up straight and hard against the bed-head, far too preoccupied to notice the footman standing in the doorway.

“Don’t look at me like that, old chap,” said Jack Maggs. “I’m not the pooka who put the spell on you.”

Mr Spinks folded his arms across his chest.

“His name is Oates.”

“Pooka!” croaked Mr Spinks sarcastically.

“So you can open your gob when you want.”

He offered another spoon of broth, but the butler’s mouth stayed firmly closed.

“Very well then.” Maggs took the old man’s unshaven chin and dug his thumb and second finger in at the hinge, between the gums. “This is how I drench my sheep in New South Wales.”

“Mmmph,” cried Spinks.

As he struggled to avoid the broth, the butler’s rheumy eyes alighted on Constable. The footman smiled encouragingly. Spinks began to speak, but as his mouth opened, so the soup slid in and Maggs clamped his horny hand over the old chap’s mouth and nose. There was no choice but to swallow.

“Fight fluid with fluid.”

In his distress, Mr Spinks pointed to the door.

Jack Maggs, seeing Constable, immediately set down the bowl upon the side table. “He squeezed the lemons? He understood the mirror?”

While Mr Spinks escaped back beneath his covers, Mr Constable held up the unopened packages, then watched as the other inspected them, checking each and every untied knot along the way.

“Apparently he is not known of.”

At this point, Mr Spinks began to snore. Jack Maggs busied himself covering the old fellow’s withered shanks; when he finally showed his face again, his eyes were completely expressionless.

“If the man will not be found,” said Constable sympathetically, “he will not be found. There is no better place to hide than London.”

Jack Maggs showed no further interest in the topic.

“Mercy is doing for the women,” he said. “I said I would do for the Bishop here.”

“You have new linen,” Constable offered. “If you lift Mr Spinks I’ll do the changing.”

Constable then removed his jacket, and draped it carefully across a chair. While Jack Maggs lifted the butler, he swiftly stripped the bed and laid a cool clean sheet upon the old man’s ancient mattress. In all this, he was as efficient as a guardsman, but the effect of seeing Spinks’s ruined body cradled in this way by his companion was to make the winds blow stronger, to flood his mind with Christian images of the type celebrated in the stained-glass windows of the little church of St Mary Le Bow. From here he was carried, in a great swirl, to turbulent visions of Maggs’s scarred body, his massive strength, producing in him such a mighty want, not to nurse bullying old Spinks, but to
be
nursed himself, to have Jack Maggs take his head and lay it in his lap, to stroke him with that hand.

He now felt a dangerously strong desire to confess that he had indeed discovered the whereabouts of Henry Phipps, that he had thereby foolishly revealed Maggs’s whereabouts to a man who did not wish him well.

He knew it unwise, but he had a passion to unburden himself, to disclose that he too had known Henry Phipps, known him in the most personal and private sense. He had been flattered and led astray by that gentleman.

He had gone next door to deliver an invitation to tea with Mr Buckle. There he was engaged by the young master in talk of the West Country and its charms. He was taken upstairs to see a small oil painting of a storm off Bristol which, as it turned out, was not hanging where its owner had advertised it. He was then persuaded to stay to wash the young master’s hair, to towel him dry, to hold his head against his breast. He heard his soft promises; he had heard himself called Angel; he had taken his manhood deep inside of him.

And thought himself, for cursed truth, a princess.

For two weeks in 1836, Edward Constable had been drunk with Henry Phipps, dreamed of Henry Phipps, had been reamed, rogered, ploughed by Henry Phipps so he could barely walk straight to the table. He had been invited to take a tour of Italy with Henry Phipps, and upon acceptance, he had confessed the circumstances of the invitation to dear Albert Pope, who had been his honest friend and intimate companion during fifteen years of service.

The next day Albert blew his brains out with that horrid little pistol.

He could have told Jack Maggs how badly Henry Phipps had behaved after Albert’s death, but he held his secrets tight, like a fistful of gravel against his heart.

He tried to cover Spinks but the old man again became agitated and thrashed around, kicking the coverlet away and pulling at the neck of his fresh night shirt as if he meant to tear it from his body.

Constable picked up the old man’s dirty linen from the floor and tied it into a bundle. Though still dressed in his Sunday best, he hoisted the bundle onto his shoulder and carried it from the room. In the passageway he was surprised to find Jack Maggs still close upon his heels.

47

THE MAY SUNSHINE FELL in a steep bright mote upon the household linen, which was now bubbling and ballooning from the top of the wash-house copper.

There was, for the moment, no other labour demanded of Edward Constable and, although he had at first anticipated stealing a moment in the sunshine, he now began to notice how closely Jack Maggs continued to cleave to his side. The dark and steamy wash-house began to seem a great deal more appealing than the sunshine.

While his companion leaned carelessly against the ancient wall, engaged in no more productive activity than puffing on a corn-cob pipe—the fragrant smoke of which acted as a potent tonic on the footman—Constable stirred the sheets and pillow-cases. He breathed deep of that singular blend of soapy steam and dark tobacco.

“Pear’s in blossom,” he offered.

“Yes. Pear.”

After which no more words were spoken. Constable felt a slight tingling in his neck and a general tension, by no means disagreeable, of the type a chap might feel whilst dawdling beside another chap, as yet unknown.

“I lived a long time with secrets,” said Jack Maggs at last.

Constable’s heart thumped in his chest.

Said Jack Maggs: “You know where I come from?”

“No.”

“Doubtless you were told already by our little Miss.” Maggs puffed a little harder on his pipe. “It is New South Wales I come from. There. Now you hear it from my own lips.”

Constable looked down into the confusion of the steam.

“Why do you tell me this, Mr Maggs?”

“Three years of that time I had the misfortune to be in a hell called Moreton Bay. There a man might be killed on account of knowing another man’s secret.”

“Killed?” Constable thought of men with secrets like his own: Ensign John Hepburn, the drummer Thomas White, all those other jolly fellows who had been prosecuted and convicted and “launched into eternity” outside the Newgate walls. “You mean hanged?”

“No, no,” said Maggs impatiently. “Listen to me: had you known anything as dangerous as what you know of me now, why, you’d be a risk to me.”

“You can speak plainly with me, Jack.”

“I am trying to, Eddie. Listen: in Moreton Bay, every man would be a spy on every other man. It was how they kept us down. If you and I were lads together in that place, then you must give me a secret of yours, should you chance to stumble over one of mine. That way we were in balance.”

“Jack, are you confessing to me?”

“No. I am going to trade with you. I am going to tell you a secret.”

“But you already gave me a secret.”

“I need one of yours. I’ll pay you double.”

“I have no secrets,” said Constable carefully. “What secret?”

“The one I saw on your face when you walked into Mr Spinks’s room.”

“You think you saw my secret written on my face?”

“Aye.”

“It was in my manner? How I spoke?”

“On your face.”

“That clear?”

“That clear.”

“But what would you tell
me
?”

“That Henry Phipps is my son.”

“Your son?” Constable hesitated. “You do mean
son
? A type of son, being like a son?”

“It is a clear enough word.”

“But do you mean he is your
petit fils
? Or do you mean that you are, an older man, like a father to the younger . . . in many ways?”

“Whatever it is called, it is clear enough,” Maggs said, and Constable felt himself forced to hold that dark excited gaze.

“Henry’s afraid of me, ain’t that it?” demanded Maggs. “Your friends saw him, didn’t they?”

Constable hesitated.

“Then he must be told he has nothing to fear from Jack. I am his father. I would rather die than hurt him.”

“What of his mother?” Constable asked carefully. “Where is she?”

“We never did meet.”

“Then you do not mean
son
.”

“Don’t be so thick, man,” said Jack Maggs. “I have said it plain. Now, come, come, I want your secret, laddie.”

There followed then a long silence, and Constable, much confused, began to hoist the first sheet high out of the copper and lead it towards the mangle.

“My secret may not please,” he said at last.

“Please or not please.” Maggs came to the handle and began, slowly, to turn it. Both men watched thoughtfully as the sheet, squashed and steaming, uncoiled itself from the mangle and lay in the stone trough.

“My secret?”

“Yes.”

“I am fond of you,” said Constable.

The roller stopped.

“You are
fond
of me?” Maggs asked perplexedly.

“I am, yes.”

“And it was that which was on your mind when you walked in. You are
fond
of me?”

“It was.”

And it was at that delicate point that their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a most piteous wailing. The two men ran out onto the little yard, and looked up to whence the sounds came. There they saw Mercy Larkin, framed in Mr Spinks’s high window.

“Oh Lor,” she cried, “come quick, come quick. Mr Spinks is taken bad.”

Jack took Constable’s shoulder: “Tell me—your friends saw my Henry? He did not want to know me? That was your secret?”

Constable was not by nature a liar, and when he looked into those hooded hungry eyes he wanted, more than anything, to tell the truth. But Constable feared that if Henry Phipps were found, then Jack Maggs would be lost.

And so he lied.

“No,” he said, looking him straight in the eye. “I swear. They could not find him anywhere.”