Artful: A Novel (2 page)

Damning evidence? Superficial at best? Many men, not to mention boys, were transported or hung on far less substantive testimony than that. There were many courts in London where the above would be more than sufficient to see Fagin with a
wooden
stake driven through his heart . . . presuming the
officers
of the court professed to believing in such things. I can merely present the evidence; you, dear reader, must be the judge and jury.

We must, then, show how these matters will intersect, and how Dodger wound up encountering his true destiny as a challenger to creatures seen and unseen; that will be the subject of the following tale. We know that these are disturbing subjects, and only hope that Mr. Dickens and his heirs and descendants—not to mention his long-departed shade who may well be dwelling nearby and reading this narrative over your shoulder and shaking his head and muttering, “The Dickens, you say,” and urging his long-desiccated body to spin in its grave—will not take too much offense in the unsavory, but no less true matters, being brought into the sort of light that they typically loathe.

ONE

I
N
W
HICH
W
E
S
TART
W
ITH THE
A
RTFUL AS
H
E IS
N
OW
, T
HEN
G
O TO
W
HERE
H
E
W
AS
,
B
UT
N
OT
S
O
F
AR
B
ACK AS TO
W
HERE
H
E
B
EGAN
, B
ECAUSE
T
HAT
W
ILL
B
E A
M
ATTER OF
L
ATER
I
NTEREST

J
ack Dawkins, since we had seen him in his last appearance in
Oliver Twist,
had grown both older and wiser, although a bit more of one than the other, and in height not much at all. It was never a certainty as to his age, for he was uncaring of such things and considered them rather limiting to a gentleman of his disposition. Indeed, on occasion when his age was asked after, it was a flexible commodity to be traded as needed for personal gain. Even when he was a child, he was not truly a child, if you catch our drift, and so it is simplest to say that at this particular point, young Jack—though not yet having been inflicted with that terminal disease customarily referred to as manhood—is exactly and precisely as old as you require him to be, which we think is very much how he would want it as it would be consistent with the way he lived his life, if naught else.

Mister (or Master, as it suits you) Dawkins had picked up any number of nicknames since his return from near transportation to Australia: Clever Jack, Jack B. Nimble, Jack-of-All-Hands. But none of them were as apt as the old standby of the Artful Dodger, and so Artful it remained and shall be, especially as it’s best to avoid any possible confusion with the notorious Spring-Heeled Jack, of which more later.

The streets of London to which he returned were remarkably different from those that he had left not very long before, which simply goes to prove how quickly life can and does change. At the point when he was hauled in and thrown into the choky, Fagin and his band of young thieves still ranged about at will, snatching gentlemen’s handkerchiefs and whatnot whenever and wherever they chose. The formidable Bill Sikes glowered and menaced and planned robberies. Oliver Twist—to the best of Dodger’s knowledge—was lying in a ditch somewhere and might well be dead. And Nancy, that tragic woman whose
fundamental
goodness of femininity had been diminished and dimmed, but not destroyed, by her life as a slattern whore, was still practicing her trade while worrying that her devotion to Bill Sikes would end tragically in her demise.

So it was that when the Artful emerged from his aborted incarceration, he discovered the following circumstances had transpired.

Fagin had been arrested, tried, convicted, and hung before a courtyard full of entertained well-wishers.

Having been the center of gravity for his band of rapscallions, the youngsters had quickly dispersed, most of them putting
London
to their back as hurriedly as possible lest their association with the late overseer of cutpurses and pickpockets wind up with their sharing his fate. One of them, Charley Bates, had been so appalled by what he had witnessed that he absented himself from the life of a criminal. We will currently not trouble ourselves on bringing up his occupation save to say that, if it becomes relevant, we shall inform you of it thusly: “There stood Master Bates.”

Nancy, she who had represented the ultimate in female
pulchritude
to Dodger, despite the fact that any true gentleman—as opposed to the faux gentleman that the Artful made himself out to be—would have taken one look at her and been repulsed because of her low office—unless, of course, he was prone to take advantage of her services and thus employ her briefly for higher office . . . alas, poor Nancy’s premonitions had been all too real, and she had been bludgeoned to death by the man in whom she had misplaced her trust and faith. She had always believed he would be the ruin of a woman already ruined, and in that regard, her trust and faith in him were, in fact, well placed.

That man, of course, was Bill Sikes, whose escape attempt from the mob baying at his heels went amiss when he inadvertently hung himself with the very rope he hoped to use to scamper to safety amidst the rooftops. This greatly frustrated his
pursuers
because failing to capture him alive meant that he could not be executed at their convenience and on their
schedule
—this being the same crowd that would not have given a halfpenny for Nancy’s life while she was living it. Thus it has always been: Only in death do worthless people have worth.

And then there was young Oliver, whose entire association with Fagin and his band was the result of Dodger’s own actions, when he had come upon the lad in the little town of Barnet on the outskirts of London. Dodger had seen possibilities in the boy, perceiving the perpetual sorrow Oliver wore around him like a greatcoat as a distinct advantage, and was sure he would make a splendid beggar and even better source of distraction. The plan had been, as Dodger hatched it in his constantly scheming mind, that young Master Twist would stand at curbside or accost pedestrians while looking limpid-eyed and pathetic, making them easy pickings for Dodger to relieve them of their valuables. As you well know, matters did not pan out for Dodger as he had planned, though—a rare misfire in his normal calculations. Indeed, things had gone so completely awry since the appearance of Oliver in Dodger’s life that the Artful was inclined to wish he’d never set eyes on the creature in the first place. Yet for all the disaster that had befallen everyone who came within the
influence
of Master Twist’s orbit, Oliver himself had landed upon his feet in a manner that any plummeting cat would have envied. Indeed, the Artful had espied the aforementioned felinesque Master Twist in a hansom less than a week after he had managed to extricate himself from the hospitality of those in authority (yes, yes, we are aware we have not yet explained how the Artful managed to escape transportation to Australia; we shall do so in the very next chapter, and so ask for your patience until we arrive at that point in the narrative). So on the side of the curb stood Dodger, aghast, as there—on the side of a smiling older man—sat Oliver, who was so ebullient that one could have leaned against him in pitch-blackness and had sufficient illumination to read a book. Oliver looked neither right nor left and took no notice of Dodger at all as the cab rolled by.

To be charitable to Oliver (or
more
charitable, as has been explained above), the Artful’s greatest weapon had always been his invisibility. Indeed, it was a power shared by all children who lived upon the street, for no one of any substance gave them even a first look, much less a second. But Dodger had honed his illusion of absence far beyond anything that others of his ilk could aspire to. Yet now he became a prisoner of that selfsame ability he had exploited, for though he waved frantically from the curbside and even shouted Master Twist’s name once or twice to attract his attention, it was to no avail. Whether it was the wind and the hustle and bustle of the crowd that drowned Dodger’s words or that Oliver’s interests were so upon the man who had recently adopted him as his own son that he failed to notice his former friend, Dodger couldn’t be sure. All he knew at that particular moment was this: He might well have been a pane of glass, so thoroughly transparent was he.

Dodger considered sprinting after him, for there was none fleeter of foot than the Artful, and it was possible that he might have caught up. But then what? Ask whether Oliver remembered him? Beg for tuppence?

In the words of a man with his own disturbing tale (which must wait for another time): “Bah, humbug.”

The Artful straightened his coat, snapped his chin up, kept his wavering top hat in position with that customary imperceptible tilt of his head to which we earlier alluded, and declared briskly, “I have my pride; yes, I does. A gen’leman don’t have no need to be runnin’ after the attentions of some former street urchin aspirin’ to move up to a class what he don’t belong in. That”—and he snapped his fingers—“for Oliver Twist.”

Thus having wrapped himself in a cloak of self-delusion that one normally had to reach full adulthood to acquire, Dodger went upon his way without once looking back (save for the three or four times he looked back until the cab vanished into the gathering evening).

And so it was that the Artful Dodger reclaimed his rightful place upon the street. His first order of business was to seek shelter; sleeping in the streets or in back alleys had quickly worn thin. His natural inclination was to hie himself back to those domiciles that had served him for so long, namely the beloved run-down pit of squalor that had been Fagin’s den of thievery. But he dared not, for the whispers in the wind declared the nature of the place public knowledge. This made the prospect of taking up residence therein dodgy for Dodger.

“What if Fagin peached on us,” muttered the Artful to himself, “in the hope of savin’ his scrawny neck from being drawn even scrawnier? And what with me just having taken my leave of that fine ’stablishment, which is to say the jail, they might come lookin’ for me here, if they was having a reason to come lookin’, such as Fagin’s peachin’.” Having come full circle in his speculations, Mr. Jack Dawkins did not hesitate to turn himself from his path and head instead in another direction entirely, one that he had not walked for a good long time but now found himself drawn to slowly and inevitably because it was his personal starting point, the place where his life had begun. All of it had started there, and so it was that it was there that he went now, the place being Drury Lane.

Night rolled in and brought the fog with it, and the
Artful
sank into its embrace like a child clinging to its mother’s bosom. He always enjoyed the fog. It had served to cover his criminal activities any number of times. Thanks to the fog, he had been able to sneak up on people without their seeing him, and then vanish with their purses or snuffboxes securely in his pockets. Once again he felt momentary gratitude for having escaped from being shipped off to Australia. He knew very little about the continent down under, but he doubted that the atmosphere would have been at all as suitable as his preferred environment.

The cobblestones were uneven, the cracks thick with dirt. Ladies of the evening were gathered at street corners, and some cast speculative eyes upon Dodger as he approached, for the fog obscured his age and his high hat and long coat gave him the appearance of a fine gentleman and potential customer coming their way. When he drew closer, of course, the painted ladies laughed and winked at him, but offered him nothing beyond that. Dodger, for his part, would remove his hat and bow deeply, even as sorrow panged at his heart.

For in every one of them, he saw poor, dead Nancy.

Nancy had been his solace, his escape from an even
greater
sorrow buried deep within him. When he had looked upon
Nancy
, so alive, so nurturing to him, his mind had a brief respite from memory of the woman in his past who should have been doing that very nurturing: his own mother, so cruelly and strangely snatched away from him.

The flame of his mother’s murder had burned less brightly with Nancy in his life. Now, with Nancy gone, not only was the pain not mollified, not lessened, but instead it was doubled.

Nay, quadrupled. For before he knew it, his feet—all on their own—had brought him to that very place that he had sworn he would never go to again, that pathetic little building that had been his family’s refuge from the hardships that the streets had to offer. He had not known what to expect when he came to it, and once he had, he stared upon it in confusion and looked around to make certain that the address was as he had remembered it.

At its best, the collection of tiny flats within the rundown tenement had been barely livable. But at some point, fire had swept through the building and gutted it. The walls were stained with blackened soot, the windows gone, half of the door hanging stubbornly upon the hinges as if refusing to acknowledge that its days as a useful portal were long gone. The roof was mostly intact, which was the most that the building had to recommend it.

For one such as Dodger, that was tantamount to a three-star endorsement from a board of governors.

Leaving the door to its solitude, he clambered in through one of the windows. There was no one around, which was a relief as he had been concerned that someone else might have seized upon the structure. Such was not the case, confirming for the Artful that, at least at this particular point in time, he had
actually
managed to find someplace in London so pathetic that no one could possibly want to reside there. He squared his shoulders and smiled in pride. “That’s something of an accomplishment of one sort or another, innit?” he asked no one save himself, and nodded in reply.

Thus did the Artful Dodger find a place for himself where he was not always in residence, but was more often than not.
Whether
the landlord had abandoned it or the city had taken it over and simply could not be bothered to attend to it, he neither knew nor cared. He had found a new home, which was his old home, and was thus content.
The memories of his mother remained vivid to him, and at first he had trouble sleeping at night because he could not
get past his recollections. He would wake up crying out as he would see the events of her death played out in his sleeping mind. However, as time passed, they faded sufficiently so that he was able to rest in relative peace, and awakening was a much rarer—albeit consistently traumatic—circumstance.