Charles Palliser (83 page)

“In short, she’s an ugly old virago,” Mr Mompesson says, laughing.

“Well, the truth is, she has somewhat overstood her market by keeping her price too high. But I promise you, she’s a Smithfield bargain: she’ll bring you property with a rent-charge of ten thousand. You’ll be famously rich. And to show gratitude, you can buy me a place in the Patent-office.”

“Well, at least she’d keep me out of the hands of the Jews.”

Sir Thomas laughs and says: “I didn’t promise you that. Wait until I’ve found out if she’s really on the market and if you’re interested I’ll tell you more about her.”

“You’re making me anxious, Tommy. Perhaps she’d do for that cankered blossom of our house — as our motto has it — my brother Tom. They sound as if they’d make a fine couple.”

“But that wouldn’t do any good for you,” Sir Thomas objects.

“Yes it might,” Mr Mompesson replies. “For Harry has an idea and that’s what I wanted to speak to him about.” He turns to him: “Tell him what we were talking about the other day.”

“Tom could be married,” Harry begins, “and then a Chancery commission convened which could be relied upon to declare him a lunatic. (These things can be arranged in most cases.) Mompesson here would become his committee with complete discretion to handle his affairs.”

“Most ingenious,” says the baronet. “But it would take time so it won’t help you in the short term.”

“As far as that goes,” Harry says, “I could put you onto a broker who would take your acceptances.”

“Why,” exclaims Mr Mompesson, “that’s excessively generous of you, Harry.

Positively altruistic, I declare.”

“You’re a lucky devil, Mompesson,” Sir Thomas exclaims. “You’ve found a marriage-broker and a bill-broker on the same day!”

“Yes,” the future baronet answers, smiling at his friends. “And I wonder which intends to take the larger commission?”

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When I awoke the next morning my first thought was that I had no money and no prospect of acquiring any. I knew how difficult — nay, impossible — it would be to find work without skills or physical strength, and my only other recourse, begging, was not only uncertain but also dangerous, for I knew that I could be taken up for this offence and sent to the treadmill.

Deciding that if I were now forced to seek charity I should at least do so from those on whom I had some claim — however slight it was — I resolved to make one last attempt to find the Digweed family. I still remembered Pulvertaft’s address that old Sam’el had given me two years ago, and although it occurred to me to wonder if he would still be living there now, my faith in the Digweeds and what they could do for me was so irrationally strong — perhaps because of my state of hunger and exhaustion — that I was convinced that if I could only find Pulvertaft, all would be well. And so I set out to walk into the Borough, repeating the name “Digweed” to myself over and over again as if it were a magic talisman which had the power to lead me to safety like something from my beloved Arabian Tales, and quite forgetting not only the circumstances under which my mother and I had met Mrs Digweed and her son, but also our experiences with the Isbisters whom we had encountered in our pursuit of them.

I had a long and exhausting walk before I found myself in the notorious district called the Old Mint, and it was getting dark as I began to enquire for the Old Manor-house which Sam’el had told me was the nethersken (low-lodging-house) where Pulvertaft dwelt. I found it at last in Blue-Ball-court. Though it was old, it was like no manor-house that I had ever seen or read about. It was a low, two-storied tumbledown house lying up a dark back-alley and surrounded by a heaving sea of broken cobbles rising and falling like frozen waves. Only a few faint gleams of light came from the barred shutters and a little smoke rose secretively from its crumbling chimney-stack. There was a wooden staircase at one end leading to the upper floor so that one could come and go without reference to the main room or “kitchen” on the ground floor, which was reached by a door at the bottom of the stairs. I now knocked on this. There was a long pause and then a dirty-faced woman wearing a woollen shawl over a tattered gown and with her unkempt hair straggling to her shoulders, opened the door a few inches and I made my enquiry.

“He might live here,” she said. “Then agin, he might not. Leastways, he ain’t within doors now.”

“May I stay for him?”

“I can’t stop you,” she replied and the door was shut in my face.

So I settled down to wait a little way up the stairs. People slipped in and out of the door beneath me at frequent intervals, and others passed up and down beside me. As the night approached, ragged men and boys came and laid themselves down to sleep on the landing above me and on the stairs, getting kicked and trodden on by those who passed, some of whom were not in a condition to be very considerate towards others.

Exhausted as I was I quickly fell asleep, though I was woken a number of times when someone blundered into me and then showered abuse on me by way of apology. Once, waking in the near-darkness to feel something gently tugging at me, I realized that someone was trying to steal my pocket-book. I seized it, there was movement amongst the sleeping forms beside me, and in the little light 384

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there was, I saw a small figure escaping down the stairs. I tried to stay awake after that.

At last a man came out of the door carrying a stub of candle and, regardless of the sleepers around him, shouted up the stairs: “Where’s the younker what’s waiting?”

“Here,” I said, coming down to him.

“And who might you be, my fine cull?”

When he lowered the candle to look at me and I saw his face, I realized with a shudder of horror that I knew him: he had been the small man with the tortoise-like head and great beaked nose whom I had seen when I had watched the Borough gang attack Isbister’s men in the graveyard.

I must have stared at him in amazement for he reached out and shook me: “I say, what d’you want of me?”

And yet it did not surprise me that it should be this man. To the contrary, it seemed inevitable that through all the vastness of London the stranger I had come to find should turn out to be someone I had encountered before. There was clearly a design lying behind the apparently meaningless events I was experiencing.

“The old man, Sam’el at Cox’s-square, directed me here,” I said. “Are you Mr Pulvertaft?”

“I might be. What do you want?”

“I am looking for a family called Digweed. Do you know them?”

It seemed to me that a look of interest quickened in his face at this: “I might. What business do you have with them?” But before I could answer he seized my arm: “Come in here.”

He pulled me through the door and I found myself in a long, low room in near-darkness but filled with the noise of fifty or sixty people laughing, shouting, singing, crying and swearing. The only light came from a few guttering dips stuck in brackets in the walls, and from a blazing fire at the other end before which a number of people were sitting drinking from tankards, while one man was sprawled intoxicated on the floor.

Another in a similar condition was sitting at a table nearby with his head and arms lying on its surface, completely oblivious to his surroundings. The walls were of naked stone and the floor was of bare boards sprinkled with foul saw-dust.

I did not take all this in at first, for my assailant, having slammed the door after us, blown out his candle and thrown it on the floor, then pushed me back against the wall holding my head up with one hand : “Now what’s your business with Digweed? Tell me the truth or I’ll make cat’s-meat of you.”

In all that noise and drunkenness, no-one paid us any notice or could have heard us if they had.

“I want to ask his wife for help. Once — some years ago — my mother and I gave some assistance to Mrs Digweed. Now I am in need of help myself.”

He looked at me closely. “His wife?” he said. “There ain’t no Mrs Digweed so far as I know, or rather, there’s a deal on ’em.” He laughed. “You say the old man sent you here?”

I nodded as far as I was able.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

He scrutinised me while he smiled mirthlessly. Then he reached into my coat pocket.

“Is there anything in this?” he asked, pulling out the pocket-book.

“Only writing,” I said. He shook it and my grandfather’s letter and my map HONOUR AMONG GENTLEMEN

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fell out. He picked them up, looked at the letter holding it upside-down, then at the map

— clearly making as little sense of it, — and then shoved them back into the book and returned it to me.

There was a silence during which he frowned as if he was calculating.

At last he said: “The only Digweed what I know is Black Barney. The last I heard on him he was living in a carcase beyond Westminster.”

“A carcase?” I repeated in horror.

Tired and hungry as I was, my mind was in a peculiar state of receptivity so that at that word a vision came unbidden into my fancy of the man I was seeking as a huge white maggot boring into a human cadaver.

“Aye,” said Pulvertaft. “Betwixt the Neat-houses and the Old Bason.”

These words meant nothing to me but I recorded them in my exhausted mind so that they became part of the litany I repeated to myself: “Digweed, Black Barney, Neat-houses, the Old Bason”.

“Cross by the new bridge and arter the turnpike, follow the road along the shore until you come to the new way what they’re a-building. That’ll take you straight there.”

I began to move towards the door but the man called out: “Hold hard!”

I turned and saw that he was staring at me with an expression of cunning and eagerness: “He’ll want to know how you found him,” he said.

“What should I tell him?” I asked meekly.

“Why, what should you tell him but the truth?” he answered cheerfully. “And here’s your time of day: give him this message from me. Will you remember it?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell him: ‘Dan’el arsts if he can jine the fakement at Henrietta-street on Christmas-eve.’ Now can you say that agin?”

I repeated this mysterious formula to his satisfaction.

“Don’t forget for if you do, I’ll hear of it and, my word! won’t you come in for it! Now be on your way.” And, as if to encourage me, he pushed me to the door and out into the darkness, securing the door behind me.

Muttering to myself my precious talismanic formula, I made my way back towards the river. It was an hour or two before dawn and the press of vehicles converging on the metropolis was getting thick, though the road grew more deserted once I had crossed the river by the new Regent’s-bridge at Vauxhall and turned westward along the shore of the river — at that time quite empty and uninhabited.

Behind me was the vast octagonal shape of the new Millbank-penitentiary, and before me the Distillery with the white-lead works a little beyond it, whose stinking smoke I could smell with increasing sharpness as I drew nearer. After a quarter of a mile I came to where a new carriageway was being constructed and struck north-westward across what was then an area of market-gardens merging into a wilderness of abandoned pleasure-gardens, rough ground, and marshland which was known as the Neat-houses.

The road was unlit, unpaved and deep in mud, except where puddles the width of ponds and half a foot deep forced me to wade through them. Several times I tried to ask the way

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of one of the few foot-passengers I encountered, but each of them hurried on when I approached.

After some minutes I saw the angry glow of fires ahead of me, and when I got closer I found I was surrounded by brick-fields where heaps of ashy rubble were burning fiercely, for here the clay of the swamp was being turned into bricks for the extensive new building taking place. Around me were the mean huts of the brick-yard workers, and in the flickering, smokey light from the ash-heaps I saw-huddled forms where shelterless people were sleeping for warmth as near to the kilns as they dared. As I ventured on I saw in the distance a forest of derricks and masts where the Grosvenor-canal had just been opened and barges from the East of the metropolis were bringing rubble for the Bason to be filled in, though of course I knew nothing of this at the time.

The dawn-light was beginning to appear in the eastern sky over the City and I had left the river nearly a mile behind me when I reached the first of the lots marked out by hoardings and broken-down palings. When, a little further on, I spied some houses, I was surprised to see that they were all in darkness, for I guessed it was by now between eight and nine. On drawing nearer, however, I found that they were only constructed to the height of their first stories. Yet they had been standing for some time for they were weathered, and I realized that they had been abandoned before completion.

As I advanced northward the houses acquired their upper stories, then their rooves, and then in some cases their internal appointments and windows — though the carriageway and pavements had not been made up — so that I found myself walking through a skeleton of a city with a network of ghostly streets and squares precisely laid out but in varying stages of completeness. At last I found a street in which several houses seemed to be complete — although they had no chimney-stacks or doors or glazing in their windows which, like the door-ways, had planks nailed across them. To my delight I saw that one of them showed signs of being inhabited: a faint light appeared between the timbers across one of the windows on the ground floor. I ascended the imposing steps and hammered on the makeshift door. It was pulled a little way back and a man stared at me suspiciously around its edge.

“I’m looking for Black Barney,” I said.

The man blinked then pulled his head out of sight and began to secure the door.

Then his head re-appeared and he looked me up and down: “Try the carcase two streets up and on the left. But don’t say I told you.”

He vanished before I could thank him.

The streets had no names, of course, but in the one that had been indicated I found only one house that showed signs of being occupied.