Charles Palliser (130 page)

Dick — but she said Dick was a-goin’ back to his dad in Lime’us to be put to the caulking-trade, and so Bob is looking for another hall-boy.”

“A plant!” I cried. “But can you be sure of getting him the place?”

Her face expressed bafflement.

“Don’t you mean Joey?” I asked.

She looked conscious and said after a moment’s hesitation: “Why, Master Johnnie, to tell the truth, I thought you’d take it.”

I was stunned and a thousand ideas rushed into my head. To become the humblest of menials! To exchange the independence of the gulley-hunter for the servitude of a domestic! In that house! I saw Joey watching me curiously and wondered how much he suspected of what I was thinking. Then I saw the appeal of the idea of entering that arrogant house in such a disguise in order to work its destruction.

However, an obstacle presented itself to me: “What about the tutor, Mr Vamplew? He might recognise me.”

“Nellie said he’s gone abroad with his young gentleman and they’re goin’ to be there until Christmas.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m ready to take it on. But would Bob give me it?”

“There’s a good chance,” she said. “I told the gal my husband had a sort of nevy, begging your pardon and may God forgive me for the lie. I said you’d jist come up from the country — I’d told her last time that my George’s dad come from down in the North, so that was as well — for she said Bob wanted a country-boy as bein’ healthier and not so artful as a Town-bred younker. So she took me straightaway to Bob in the Tap. ‘Send the lad along,’ Bob said to me. ‘Send the lad along and I’ll take a look at him and see if he’ll sarve.’ So

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you’re to go along fust thing tomorrer morning. And if he wants you, you’ll start straightaway.”

“And what wages would he pay me?”

She made a face: “You won’t make your fortun’. You’ll get your board, a set of clothes and two aprings a year, and washing found. As for wages, I didn’t think to ask. Maybe ten shillin’ a quarter, I suppose. Out of that you’ve only to find yourself in tay and sugar and soap.”

“That’s not much.”

“Hardly worse than we’ve been doing,” said Joey with a grim smile. “And as for me, why I’ll find something.”

“What?” I asked suspiciously.

“Come, Master Johnnie,” said Mrs Digweed. “We’ve work to do. You must larn your name and history, for you’ll have to take each word out of your mouth and look at it afore you use it.”

We chose for my place of origin a district near the Scottish borders, and Mrs Digweed took great pleasure in inventing a complex set of circumstances to explain how her husband’s aunt down in the North country had met and married a grazier from even further north.

“May the Lord forgive me,” she broke off once. “I suppose we ain’t doin’ nothin’

wrong?”

“Surely,” I said, “it’s no more wrong than making up a story in a book?”

She frowned over this and seemed unconvinced.

“What is my name?” I asked.

“I said you were called Johnnie,” she said. “I doubt if he’ll ask you for any other.”

“But if he does, I’ll say it’s Winterflood,” I said laughing.

Mrs Digweed looked surprised for a moment but when she remembered where the name came from, she laughed with me.

Later that night I lay awake beside Joey wondering what lay ahead of me. To enter my enemies’ house in this manner was indeed to grasp at the rose in disregard of the thorns.

But the shame worried me more than the danger, and I felt a bitter-sweet excitement at the prospect of coming so close to Henrietta in such a role. Close? Surely it was unlikely that I would even glimpse her! But however that might be, the will was the main thing.

In accordance with Mrs Digweed’s instructions, I reached the mews at the back of Brook-street at about half-past seven o’clock the next morning. Since No. 48 was next on from the one on the corner, it was easy enough to find the right set of buildings in the mews behind it. The main gate of the coach-house stood open and two men were cleaning a carriage which I recognised as the one in which Mr Steplight had come to Mrs Fortisquince’s house those many years before.

“Who are you?” the elder of the men said to me when I made to enter.

“I’ve come to see about the hall-boy’s place,” I replied.

“Very well, look alive then,” he said, jerking his head to indicate that I should pass through the coach-house.

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I did so and found myself in the back-yard where I saw three laundry-maids at work carrying baskets of linen from the laundry-house to a big rinsing-trough. One of them glanced at me in a friendly way and I crossed to her.

“Are you Johnnie?” she asked, with a smile.

When I confirmed this she said: “I’m Nellie. I’ll take you to him.” She turned to a stout woman nearby: “Can I take the boy inside, Mrs Babister? He’s come to see Mr Bob about a place.”

“Very well, but be quick about it,” the woman answered ungraciously. “And none of your nonsense.”

The girl led me into the house by the door which I remembered from that ill-fated night. Then we went down the stairs, along a gloomy passage and into a dark little room without windows and lit only by a tallow-dip, where we found a tall man a little over thirty, wearing a shirt and breeches with a long green baize apron reaching almost to the ground.

As we came in he was polishing a pair of boots, but when he saw us he dropped them, removed the apron and playfully made to seize the girl who dived away from him, but not so quickly or so far that he could not catch her briefly and plant a kiss on her lips.

She pulled herself away and said: “Why, Mr Bob! I nivver did! I’ve only come to bring the boy what his aunt spoke to you yesterday.”

“Come here, you fascinating creatur’,” Bob said, and made to catch her again.

However, she ran out with a giggle and the man turned to me, muttering something I didn’t catch. He was above middle height and quite handsome, though his features bore a somewhat spoiled and petulant cast and he had an air about him of feeling rather hard done by and owing the world a grudge in consequence. He now stared at me hard with cold blue eyes, and yet it seemed to me he was looking at me in an oddly evasive manner as if gazing at a point a yard in front of me.

“What have you done a-fore now?” he said, looking me up and down sceptically.

“I’m used to hard work, Mr Bob,” I replied. “I started by tenting crows when I was five and went on to helping my father with the cattle and the feed, singling turnips and swedes, winnowing corn, stone-picking, and all that manner of thing. I was nearly doing a man’s work when he died and my mother gave up the lease.”

Clearly this battery of rural terms conveyed nothing to him, but he grasped the main point: “Farm-work, eh? Well, you should be strong and hardy, though you don’t look too strong to me, for all you’re bigger than the last boy. He was a tiger, but you’re too tall and wouldn’t fit the livery. You won’t be found in livery, so don’t go whining arter one.

I’ll give you new togs twice a year. Not new, you know, but good enough. And if you don’t take proper care on ’em, you’ll feel the weight of my hand.”

I noticed with mingled feelings that these threats were couched in the future, rather than the conditional, tense.

“Now you works to me, is that clear? If ’Arry or Roger or anyone else tells you to do somethin’, you tells ’em it ain’t their business to give you orders. Is that understood.”

I nodded, and he went on: “But if Mr Thackaberry or Mr Assinder tells you to do anything, you do it jist the same as if I told you.”

I nodded again.

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Then I asked: “What will my wages be?”

He looked at me in surprise and then laughed without humour: “I say, you are a flatt.

You don’t get no wages for skinking. If you settle to the collar and work hard I’ll give you somethin’ now and then. Arter a bit, maybe I’ll start to give you a share of my vails.

Anyways, we’ll see. That’s all.”

He suddenly flung a piece of rag at me that was foully black.

“Make a start on them and we’ll see how you do.”

He indicated a pile of boots and shoes and a pot of blacking and so I stood at the sideboard and began to polish as hard as I could.

Bob hung the apron on a nail on the back of the door, donned a jacket, seated himself on a low chair beside me, and put his feet up comfortably on the board by my elbow.

“Now listen careful,” he began. “The fust time you do somethin’ wrong or don’t do somethin’ what I tells you to do, you get a thump on the ear. The next time you get a thrashing. If you do it again, you’re out, and I promise you’ll leave here singing the Black Psalm on account of a few bruises to remember your uncle Bob by.”

He pulled a short pipe and a tobacco-pouch out of a capacious pocket in the jacket and began to stuff the bowl meditatively.

“Now I’m ‘Mr Bob’. Not ‘Bob’. And when you’re talking to the other sarvints I’m still

‘Mr Bob’.

One of his feet suddenly moved sideways and hit me hard in the ribs.

“Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mr Bob,” I gasped.

“Jist so’s we knows where we stands from the start. Now you haven’t been in sarvice a-fore, but that don’t matter because you won’t need to do nothin’ but what I tells you.

Now this here’s below stairs and you don’t nivver go above without I say so. The only times you ever goes above stairs is with me when I cleans the rooms and when I does my lamps and candles last thing at night. If you’re ketched above stairs on your own when you haven’t no business to be there — and I wery much doubt if you ever will have the right to be there when I ain’t — then you’re goin’ to be in Chancery. That’s all.”

“What are the other rules?”

He started up from his chair: “What did you say”?

“What are the other rules, Mr Bob?” I hastily repeated.

He relaxed again: “That’s better. You’ll find ’em out. There’s jist one rule what you needs to know for now,” he said. “And that’s ‘Do what Mr Bob … ’ ”

At that moment he broke off suddenly as a fattish, middle-aged man came in. He was wearing a green coat and white trowsers with a yellow and black checked waistcoat and a fine white stock. He had a lowering face which was covered with brandy-blossoms.

Bob jumped to his feet and shoved the pipe into his pocket still cradled in his hand.

“Are you doing those boots, Edward?” the man demanded.

“Yes, Mr Thackaberry. That’s to say, the new boy’s jist a-doin’ of ’em now.”

“Keep at your work,” Mr Thackaberry snapped at me, for I had turned to look at him while I continued to polish as hard as I could. “There was a good half pint of sherry left in the blue glass decanter last night, which I want to know what happened to it?”

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“Oh no, Mr Thackaberry, with respeck, sir. There weren’t no more nor a couple of fingers.”

“I’m not going to argue about it, Edward. I’m just going to say, for the last time …”

“Excuse me, please, Mr Thackaberry,” Bob broke in deferentially. “Let me send the boy away.”

The man nodded and Bob turned to me: “Dick, go into the scullery and help Bessie clean the pans.”

Taken aback, I did not move for a moment.

“Is the boy half-witted?”

“Excuse me, Mr Thackaberry,” Bob said apologetically and then a blow landed on my head from the flat of his palm.

“Are you deaf ?” he shouted.

I staggered dizzily into the passage and making my way further along it, found myself in a gloomy, foul-smelling cellar that I took to be the scullery. Amidst the smell of damp and the reek of tallow-candles there was something sharper that pricked my nostrils. In a corner I now saw that there was a little hunched creature bent over a sink and scouring a huge copper.

“Are you Bessie?” I asked. “I’m Mr Bob’s new boy.”

Without glancing at me she nodded towards a number of vast pans stacked up beside the sink. I now saw that she was a girl of about my age but her body was twisted askew and her face was so thin that she looked like a very old woman. She said in a high-pitched voice: “Second table. Quick.”

“I’m Johnnie,” I said, as I picked up a pan. “That’s my real name, though they call me Dick here.”

She made no acknowledgement. I watched how she was rubbing a mixture of fine sand and caustic soda — that was the smell I had noticed! — onto the inside of each pan and then scouring with a stiff brush. I saw that her hands were red with numerous tiny splits in the skin that were bleeding in places and that their backs were covered in blisters.

So I began to work and found that the soda burned my hands painfully. I was much slower and less adroit than the girl but although she worked furiously and without stopping it took us nearly three hours without a break to clean the coppers and boilers, scraping the burnt food off the pans and then scouring them with lemon and sand and using soda for the dirtiest until they shone like looking-glasses.

Occasionally Bob wandered in and stood watching me for a few minutes, and two or three times a fierce-looking red-faced woman whom I took to be the cook came in from the other direction and encouraged us to work harder with a rain of curses and a shower of light blows about the head and shoulders.

By eleven o’clock I was exhausted and my hands seemed to be on fire with the pain, but we had finished the coppers. I noticed that my shirt and trowsers were now filthy.

Just then Bob came in and tossed something to me: “Put this on. Look at the mess you’re in. You should have arst me for your apring.”

What he had given me was a long white apron. I noticed that he had taken off the dark green one he had been wearing.

“Wait,” he said as I began to don the apron, and to my surprise he reached into one of the pockets of my trowsers and pulled out the contents: a six-pence, 6o2 THE

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three pennies, and some ha’pence and farthings. He investigated all my pockets in the same manner, though no more contents were disclosed.

He counted the money: “One shillin’ and four-pence three-fardens,” he said, then put the coins in his pocket. “This blunt goes in your box. And I have the key to it. So if you’re ever found with blunt or anythin’ what I didn’t give you, I’ll know how you come by it. Understand?”