Ollie's Cloud (22 page)

A surge of anger rises up in Ollie. He had allowed himself to be tricked again by his duplicitous mother. Without thinking, he stands and shouts out, “How dare you abandon your son! You do not deserve to be called a mother!”

Charles and William look up at Ollie, startled. The audience turns toward him. Anne looks up as well, searching for the source of that outrageous remark, then gasps when she sees Ollie standing in the box above her. She sinks to her knees.

The curtain falls. It is the intermission, a pause before the perilous chase across the desert.

The audience applauds, still looking at Ollie, some of them thinking he was part of the performance, the others merely confused. A belly dancer and assorted musicians scramble onto the stage, diverting audience attention. During this musical interlude the desert scenery is loudly erected behind the curtain and Ollie marches out of the box, profoundly embarrassed by his actions. Charles and William chase after him.

“Ollie, wait!” William shouts. Ollie is headed for the stairway, fully intending to leave the theater immediately.

“Ollie, I’m proud of you,” Charles says.

Ollie stops and wheels. “Proud of me?” he says scornfully. “Don’t be an idiot. I came here to watch my mother embarrass herself, but I ended up the fool.”

“I doubt if anyone here even knows who you are,” William suggests. “And if we leave this very minute…”

The three young men look at each other. For William and Ollie, anonymous escape suddenly seems the wisest course.

“But the play isn’t over,” Charles complains.

“Then you stay and watch,” Ollie says. “Tomorrow you can tell us what we missed.”

Charles considers this for a moment, then looks up at his friends. “Actually, the play is quite bad, isn’t it?” The others nod their agreement. “Then let’s get out of here. On the way back, Ollie, you can tell us how it ends.”

“I can tell you right now,” Ollie replies. “It ends with the slave-girl on a stage in London struggling to restore her dignity, and her son bolting for the exit.”

“The son must be a theater critic,” William interjects.

“All right, then. I suggest we return to the George & Vulture,” Charles says, “where William can make good on his promise to pay for an evening’s entertainment.”

Chapter 26

This particular summer day is unbearably hot. A dank mustiness hangs like a wet blanket in the air. But the sun is a welcome sight after five days of dismal clouds and a rheumy rain thickened by soot and coal dust into dark puddles of mucus. Now the high sun is burning away the humid cloud that had enshrouded the city and is raising the spirits of the residents—all, that is, but Herbert Eaton, who glumly looks out at the greenery that surrounds the Belgravia mansion and wonders at how this perfect day looks to the debtors of Marshalsea prison. One of these wretched souls has stubbornly occupied too large a portion of Herbert’s consciousness lately.

Eardley Pickwick.

Herbert shoulders a large share of guilt for the fate of Mr. Pickwick. He had known of Ollie’s plan for vengeance and had done nothing to stop it. This certainly makes him an accomplice before the fact. Morally, at least. Pickwick had been in desperate straights and easily duped into Hasan’s plot to publicly humiliate Anne. Which act is the more abominable one—Pickwick’s misguided attempt to earn support for his family, or Ollie’s spiteful ruin of the man?

Oh, not that Herbert is above feelings of revenge. He had experienced unbearable pain and rage that night at Almack’s, and for many nights after. He had not been able to work for weeks. And he had plotted his own revenge—against the puppeteer, however, and not the puppet. Unfortunately, the target of Herbert’s wrath has disappeared into the haze of a distant land.

Herbert can understand Ollie’s wrenching loss and can only estimate the young man’s personal torture, but he cannot live with the outcome of Ollie’s actions.

Looking about the immense Belgravia sitting room, with its artfully carved woodwork and expensive furnishings, Herbert feels doubly guilty. Has he not failed to correct Ollie’s shameful act out of his own selfish desire to remain an honored guest in this magnificent mansion? Has he not been desperately holding onto a shred of his pre-Almack’s destiny to be a master of this house? What if he should anger the young heir with a direct confrontation and be cast out on his ear? Herbert could not bear to dwell again in that cramped and cluttered apartment of his former life, not after glorying in the splendor of this Belgravia mansion. And the love and admiration bestowed upon him by the young Oliver Chadwick—how could he risk losing that? He and the young man have become father and son, bound together not by blood but by their shared loss and grief.

There is also, of course, the extraordinarily generous allowance that Ollie has arranged for Herbert, an amount that many wealthy men would not provide their firstborn sons. An amount that some would consider a bribe, and that even Herbert considers a strong inducement toward a positive relationship. To lose this support, to significantly reduce his standard of living would be… well, Herbert likes to think of it as unnecessary.

Such a quandary—caused, of course, by flaws in Herbert’s character grotesquely magnified by the plight of Eardley Pickwick. Herbert cannot live with the unfairness of Pickwick’s incarceration, but lacks the courage to confront Ollie directly. And so there is only one possible solution.

Herbert beckons a carriage—such a luxury to have one’s own driver—and heads off in the direction of St. George’s Church. The streets are more rutted than usual, he thinks. More holes and blown-down branches. The carriage rumbles steadily along, and Herbert is thankful for the thick embroidered squab beneath him. How often in the past he had suffered the bone-jarring jolts of the common hackneys and their greasy leather-on-wood benches.

Herbert disembarks just north of St. George’s. “I won’t be but an hour or so,” he tells the driver. The sour air stinks of rotting fruit and overflowing refuse from numerous laystalls. Here is the main gate to Marshalsea prison, that horrifying walled village-within-a-city.

At the bleak gate, Herbert shows his newspaper credentials to the porter and says, “I’m here to see Mr. Eardley Pickwick. Can you direct me to him?”

“Of course, sir,” the porter says. He consults a thick book, licking his dirty thumb each time he turns a page, then looks up and proceeds to give a bewildering set of directions that Herbert finally realizes must be written down.

Inside the locked gate, Herbert begins to walk through the filthy labyrinth of narrow streets and snaking alleys, turning left at the coffee house and right at the tap, walking past a row of grimy lodging houses, dodging a game of blind man’s bluff played cheerlessly by tattered urchins who suffer the sins of their fathers, proving—undoubtedly—the truth of the Scriptures. Loud shouts are flung from one shattered window, and from the next a soothing antidote—the sound of a woman singing a soft, heartbreaking lullaby to an infant born in prison.

Herbert’s destination finally appears, a slouching three-story house that sags like a dying mare. The front door, wrenched from its rusting hinges, is braced against the moldering wall as if holding the entire building upright. The entrance exudes a stale breath—a kind of hopeless sigh that Herbert fans away with a broad sweating palm.

He adjusts his cravat and enters.

Pickwick’s room is on the first floor. Past a splintered archway. Down a damp hall with mossy, wounded walls oozing rivulets of pearly slime. Around a cramped corner to a cracked door.

Herbert knocks. Heavy footsteps plod across a creaking floor and the door swings open. “What is it?” the tenant asks irritably. He is pale and unshaven, scarecrow thin, and coughing. At first Herbert doesn’t see that this broken man is Eardley Pickwick, but Eardley recognizes Herbert Eaton immediately. “Ohhh! I apologize for my rudeness. Please come in, Mr. Eaton. I think of you often.”

Only now does Herbert identify the man—a horrifying revelation. Even in Herbert’s nightmares, Pickwick had not appeared in such a miserable state. “Thank you, yes,” Herbert replies, and walks into the room. He sees bare, cracked walls, a wide broken bed, two wooden chairs and an empty water basin. Tattered clothes are strewn about as if some violent act has been perpetrated here.

“I’m surprised. I never imagined that Herbert Eaton would be paying me a visit. I am honored, sir.” Pickwick coughs again, producing a ball of phlegm that he spits into a soiled handkerchief. “Excuse me for that, sir. There’s little heat in the winter, and the summers are given over to mold and mildew. A bit hard on the lungs, it is. Please have a chair.”

Herbert glances more closely at the grimy chair offered by Pickwick and declines. “Prefer to stand for a time, I would.” The tart stench of decay is turning Herbert’s stomach. He swallows back a stinging rise of vomit. “I had intended to come earlier, but my schedule, you see…”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

“Yes, busy, very busy you see. But here I am now.”

“And for what reason, may I ask? No! Let me try to deduce your purpose.” Pickwick holds up a hand but coughs violently before he can speak again. Finally he sits down on the second chair. When he has cleared his chest, he hoarsely adds, “I imagine you have come seeking an apology, or perhaps some kind of vengeance. Well, as you can see, my offense against you and your almost-family has not gone unpunished due to the tenacious zeal of young Oliver Chadwick. God’s agent, he is. I hold no grudge against him.”

“You do not believe that the severity of your punishment—which, I might add, is for another offense altogether—is not unfair?” Herbert is astonished at Pickwick’s apparent lack of acrimony.

“
Unfair
you ask? The two men with whom I share this squalid bed have less debt than I. None of us can earn enough while in prison to settle our debts, yet here we are, stuck until we pay them off, which for most of us amounts to a life sentence. This whole system is unfair. But I have the added guilt of turning a mother and son against each other, of causing the public humiliation of your fiancée, of conspiring with Satan himself—for that is who I consider Mr. Hasan Qasim to be. I am, sir, in my own estimation, fairly judged and punished.”

These words of submission do not relieve Herbert’s guilt; they only heighten his anxiety. “But surely your family—”

“My crimes—and my sins—have wounded my family deeply. More deeply than my punishment. Fortunately, I was able to divorce my wife, sparing her from this hell-hole. My daughter is now resting in God’s bosom. You see, one of my other sins was to fail in providing for my family. I could not afford a doctor when Mary, my little girl, became ill at the tender age of eight. Eventually she died, and my marriage with her. My daughter’s older brother—he now forbids me to call him
son
—has disowned me.” Pickwick smiles sadly before coughing. Then he finishes: “Imagine a son disowning his father. You see, sir, I have no family anymore. If I had chosen a different employer than that scoundrel Qasim—if I had been paid for the honest work that I did for him—if I had not so willingly allowed him to deceive me—if I had been a wise man instead of a fool—”

“I must admit,” Herbert interjects, “that you have suffered terribly for your transgressions. There was a time when I might have strangled you with my own bare hands. The pain inflicted on me was intolerable, or so it seemed. But the more I’ve reflected on this tragedy, the less I blame you. As much as I loved Anne, I must admit that some of my feelings were motivated by ambition—and to a certain degree, also by an even more primitive biological force.”

“She was—
is
, I’m sure—a most beautiful woman.”

“Stunningly beautiful, yes. And ambitious, too, I’m afraid. Even more so than me. I will never know if she really loved me. You see, there was an inheritance at stake, and I was the shortest distance between Anne and the money.”

It suddenly strikes Herbert as peculiar, this urge to confess so much to Eardley Pickwick, but he cannot stop himself. “I’ve thought a great deal about this, and as much as I miss Anne Chadwick, I believe that she had planted the seeds of her own destruction the day she decided to hide her previous marriage for her own selfish purposes. The truth would have come out at some point. I wonder how many other lies…”

Herbert does not finish the sentence. He does not have to.

“And so you came here to explain this to me?”

“No, that was not my intention at all. My aim was something else altogether. To make a proposal, actually.”

“A proposal?”

“Yes. Before I came here, I firmly believed that you had been unfairly condemned to this living hell. I believe that even more strongly now. For that reason I would like to personally make your condition a little more, well, comfortable.”

“To ease your conscience?”

“Perhaps. Does it matter? A man in your straights should take whatever lifeline is flung to him.”

“I’m listening.”

“I cannot undo what master Chadwick has done. It is not my place, and he would never forgive me. For that reason I can’t settle your accounts and see to your release from this awful place. My personal risk would be much too great. But I have substantial means of my own, and I would very much like to rent for you an apartment on the Masters Side. The conditions there are much better—and healthier. You won’t have to chum with others, squeezed into one pathetic bed as you are here for some ridiculous price.”

“Two shillings and six pence per week for my part of a bed, it’s true, most of which goes into the Keeper’s pocket. Almost as much as I make in a week at the laundry.”

“Outrageous! From now on, then, your living expenses will be covered for you. With some diligent effort on your part, you can save money, and over time perhaps settle—”

“Your conscience must be quite prickly.”

“We are both victims of Mr. Hasan Qasim, and so is Oliver. I see this offer as a kind of settlement to even the consequences of Qasim’s treachery. It is not fair that you should suffer so disproportionately, especially since Oliver and I have wronged you as well. Oliver by his misguided efforts to injure you personally, and myself by allowing it to happen.”

“Then consider the score now settled. Money is unnecessary.”

“But—“

“I appreciate your offer, but you must understand that I have no life outside the locked gates of Marshalsea. Comfort does not appeal to me. A quick end to this miserable existence does. Take my appreciation, my sincere gratitude for your generous offer, and go now. Please! Without another word.”

Eardley Pickwick stands up. Herbert starts to protest but Eardley stops him with a shake of the head and a cold hand on the shoulder.

“I beg of you, go now,” Eardley says, his eyes watery and his voice trembling. “And know that you are forgiven for whatever you believe you have done to me. Both you and Oliver.”

Eardley escorts the speechless Herbert Eaton to the broken door and into the murky corridor. “Go now. And say a prayer for my little Mary, God rest her soul, and for my son’s forgiveness. You’ve done your part and surely God will recognize and reward your intent. Go now.”

And with that, Eardley Pickwick steps back into his bare room and closes the door. Stunned, Herbert turns the corner and begins to walk down the hall. At the far end, the doorway glows brightly, beckoning him to it.

What has happened here?
A change, a transformation. He can feel it. And now he is embarrassed that he had acted so cowardly.
Rent an apartment?
Nonsense.
Make the man more comfortable in this foul place?
Ridiculous. An insult!

No, Herbert will take the necessary risks to do what is right, what he should have done in the first place. He will pay off Eardley Pickwick’s debts and make sure the poor man is released from Marshalsea prison. He will somehow find gainful employment for Pickwick, and a doctor.

Herbert will save himself by saving Eardley Pickwick. Two victims will be resurrected. Oliver, unfortunately, is on his own. And as for Hasan Qasim, never before has Herbert Eaton so hated one man.

Herbert Eaton steps into the healing sunlight with two great missions: one of salvation, the other of revenge.