The American Boy (46 page)

On Friday morning, therefore, I washed as well as I could and put on fresh linen. I left the lodging house, breakfasted at a stall and went to a barber's to be shaved. Fed and respectable, I made my way to Lincoln's Inn. Atkins, Mr Rowsell's clerk, was copying a document in the outer room. He greeted me coldly – Atkins never cared for me; I believe he was jealous of my place in his master's affections. I begged the favour of a few words with Mr Rowsell.

“I am afraid he is not here today, sir.”

“He has been called away on business?”

“He has been unwell: there was palpitation of the heart yesterday, and Mrs Rowsell kept him at home to be bled. I believe he is quite recovered but he sent word this morning that he would stay away until Monday.”

“Would he object if I waited upon him at home?”

Atkins's mouth puckered in the pale circle of his face. “Mr Rowsell is a gentleman who enjoys company, sir.”

I thanked him and walked up to Northington-street. When I rang the bell, the door was opened by a servant but Mrs Rowsell was coming down the stairs, with a gaggle of children behind her. I scarcely had time to open my mouth when she pushed aside the maid and confronted me on the doorstep. I swept off my hat and made my bow.

“Mr Shield,” she said, her face reddening. “You are not welcome in this house.”

In the chilly silence, the children stared up at me. The maid peeped over her mistress's shoulder. Bransby knew of my connection with Mr Rowsell but I had not anticipated that he would move against me with such rapidity: he must have written yesterday, as soon as he had had the letter from Carswall. Nor had I expected Carswall's malignity to pursue me so far, or so quickly, or my friends to be so little proof against its power.

“Madam,” I began, “I hope I have done nothing to offend –”

“Go,” she commanded and flung out her right arm as though to sweep me from the doorstep. “Mr Rowsell will not see you again, either here or at Lincoln's Inn. Nor shall I. Go, Mr Shield, and never return.”

I bowed, replaced my hat and walked away. The door slammed. I drifted, allowing my legs to carry me according to their whim through streets filled with slush and mud and restless crowds. I had lost my position, my good name and even my friends. I had lost Sophie – indeed, had she ever been mine? In the middle of the throng I was as solitary as if I had been a castaway on a desert island.

The currents of the city flung me hither and thither, and at last washed me up among the coaches and wagons in the yard of the Bull and Mouth in St Martins-le-Grand. I hesitated at the open door of the coffee house, the rich smells reminding my stomach that I was hungry. But now I was friendless, I knew I must conserve my meagre stock of money; and I owed it to both my aunt and myself to preserve intact my little nest-egg in the Funds for as long I could.

A plump man was standing in the doorway, haranguing an unseen audience within. He was thinking about money, too. “Six shillings a day! Have you ever heard the like? God damn it, do they think I'm Croesus? Six shillings a day!”

At the same moment, a lady leaned over one of the balconies that ran round the yard and communicated with the rooms beyond. She called down to her maid, who was taking a parcel to the Cirencester coach. “Why didn't you pack the pearls?” she cried. “You silly, silly girl! You know I always take my pearls.”

Six shillings. Pearls.

The words flew together and jogged my memory. A foolish schoolboy pun fell out. Mrs Jem, I had said on the day that Mr Rowsell had informed me of my aunt Reynolds's legacy to me, Mrs Jem, you are indeed a pearl of great price. Mrs Jem lived at 3 Gaunt-court, and she still owed me six shillings from the sale of my aunt's belongings.

A week later, on the 29th of January 1820, the old king died: poor mad George III at last made way for his plump and profligate son: and the world shrugged its shoulders and moved on. By that time, I was already beginning to slip into another mode of life – by good fortune, rather than by intention. When one is entirely adrift, it is sometimes wiser not to splash and shout but to lie still and trust to the benevolence of the currents.

In their own way, the Jems were indeed benevolence incarnate. They lived in a tall, narrow building hard by the Strand. Three Gaunt-court was one of a group of dilapidated houses huddling around a dingy court like elderly ladies reduced in income, retired from the world and finding safety and recreation in the company of their kind. When I came to call for my six shillings, I saw a card in the window announcing a room to let. The steps up to the front door had been recently swept, and someone had tried to clean the knocker, though without notable success.

Mrs Jem remembered me. Without my prompting, she unlocked a drawer of the kitchen dresser and brought out a paper containing six shillings. I inquired about the room: she puffed up the stairs and showed me a back garret with a narrow bed. I was tolerably certain that Mrs Jem would not allow anyone to pilfer my belongings. Within a few minutes, we had come to an arrangement which depended on my paying my rent a week in advance, meals and laundry extra.

It was necessary for the agreement to be ratified by Mr Jem, an enormously fat man who spent most of his days in bed, but this was a formality, like Parliament sending up a bill to the monarch for the Royal Assent. Mr Jem had once been a carpenter with men working under him but a mishap with a saw had cost him his right hand.

“A schoolmaster?” he wheezed. “I have a letter to write. I'd be most obliged if you would assist me, most obliged.” He waved his hook at me. “I cannot write neatly, sir, not now, not as neatly as I would wish.”

I doubt he could ever write much more than his name. The letter was a petition to a man he had once worked for. The following evening I tried without marked success to show Mrs Jem how to reckon up accounts on paper as well as in her head. Within a few days, and quite without conscious volition, I had become part of a minuscule community composed of the Jems and their lodgers. We were held together by our poverty, and by our need for one another's services.

Jem and Mrs Jem and all the little Jems held sway in the basement and on the ground floor apart from the front parlour, which was rented out to a man who constructed fake Neapolitan mandolins and filled the house with the scent of wood shavings and varnish. In the rooms above nested the other tenants, not higgledy-piggledy, as in the Rookeries of St Giles, but with decent intervals between them. I remember a widow who washed clothes and a man who had a coffee stall in Fleet-street; a one-legged sailor who acted as a gentle and infinitely resourceful nursemaid to the smaller Jems; a Russian couple who spoke only a few words of English, who went in fear of the police, and who were always willing to offer you a dish of tea; and a broken-down clerk who had worked in the City before his health gave way. As for myself, I helped reckon up who owed what to whom, tried to teach the younger Jems their alphabet, and wrote letters for anyone who would pay for them.

No, Gaunt-court was not St Giles: there is more than one way of being poor. Mrs Jem was fiercely determined that her house should be respectable. On Sunday, she took the little Jems to chapel twice a day, and Mr Jem too, if she could contrive it. She ruled her kingdom with Amazonian severity. When she saw the seamstress from the second-floor front parading in her finery up and down the Haymarket one Friday evening, she threw the poor woman and her belongings on to the street. To be both poor and respectable, you must also be ruthless.

Mrs Jem and I got on well enough. She took me on trust: all she knew of was that my aunt had been a decent woman and that I was a college man replete with book learning. I told her I was newly returned to London, having lost my position through no fault of my own. I did not enter into particulars, and there was no need so long as my conduct continued satisfactory.

As time passed, Mrs Jem, whose invisible web of influence spread far beyond the confines of Gaunt-court, found me scraps of tutoring here and letter-writing there among her friends and acquaintances. Like old David Poe, I became a screever, a humble scribe of other people's communications.

So, by and large, my life was tolerably comfortable. I was poor but not indigent. I had useful occupation but not too much of it. I did not eat fine food but my belly was always full. I had a roof over my head and people who thought in a remote but not unfriendly way that I was one of them. From the window of my room I had, on clear days, a vista of slates and chimneys and pigeons; and at night-time the sky glowed an unhealthy yellow with the flaring lights of the West End.

I run ahead of myself. February moved into March. I felt a certain pride in my survival, for I knew that, even a year ago, even six months, such independence and self-sufficiency would have seemed an impossible dream. I had changed. My mind was whole again.

I could not say the same for my heart. Not a day passed but that I thought of Sophie. The humdrum nature of my existence left me plenty of room for reflection, and for dreams. In memory I relived that afternoon in Gloucester a hundred times, a thousand. I tried to recall every word, every gesture, that had passed between us, from our first meeting outside Mr Bransby's school to that cruel moment on my last evening at Monkshill when Sophie had seen Miss Carswall slipping away from the schoolroom.

On most days I would find occasion to visit a tavern or a coffee house and read one of the papers. In this way, I came across a brief account in the
Morning Post
of the inquest on Mrs Johnson. Sir George had contrived matters very neatly, and with great discretion. I learned that Mrs Johnson, the wife of a naval officer serving on the West Indies station, had suffered an unlucky fall, due in part to the inclement weather, in the ice-house on a neighbour's estate. She had struck her head on a grating and been instantly killed. The Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of accidental death. The report was entirely accurate as far as it went, but it did not go very far at all.

So there was a life gone, neatly parcelled up and despatched into oblivion. Early in March, after a decent interval, the engagement between Miss Carswall and Sir George Ruispidge was announced in the London papers. A few days later, I saw a notice to the effect that Mr Carswall and his family had come up to town, where they had taken their old house in Margaret-street again.

Had Sophie and Charlie come with them? Was Edgar back with Mr Bransby? The new term at Stoke Newington had begun on the first day of February. I would have liked to know whether Miss Carswall was sanguine about her future happiness. A prig was always a prig, surely, even though he had a baronetcy and a fortune to lay at her feet.

In this period, I communicated only once with my former associates. On the last day of January, I wrote to Edward Dansey, thanking him for his kindness, without specifying its nature, and asking him to have my trunk packed and stored until I was in a position to receive it. I enclosed a little money to defray his expenses. I did not give him my direction, however, though I added that I would do myself the honour of writing to him again when I was more settled. With this letter, I enclosed a note to Mr Bransby, regretting that circumstances compelled me to resign my position with immediate effect and begging him to accept the salary he owed me in lieu of notice.

Of course, I read the public prints for another reason. To my inexpressible relief, there was no mention of a stolen ring, no mention of a search for Thomas Shield. I reasoned myself into a belief – or at least a hope – that, having frightened me off and cost me my livelihood, Stephen Carswall had decided to leave me alone, perhaps because the pleasure of any additional revenge he might wreak on me was not worth the danger of scandal at this delicate point in his daughter's life. He would not want to put at risk the very existence of his grandson, the hypothetical Carswall Ruispidge, and his golden future.

The only item that still tied me to the past was Amelia Parker's mourning ring. I could not bring myself to drop it in the Thames, which would have been far the wisest course of action, for it was my one remaining connection with Sophie Frant. But I would have returned it to its owner, if I had known who its owner was. In the meantime, I hid it in a deep crack in one of the exposed purlins that ran the length of my room. I masked its presence with crumbling plaster rammed deep into the fissure; and in time a spider built its web across the crack, and I went for days without remembering the ring's existence.

I had cut myself adrift from my own life. I was not happy in those days but I thought myself safe.

The bubble burst on a Tuesday in April. It was a fine day, almost warm enough for summer, and in the morning I had walked out to the pretty village of Stanmore, where Mrs Jem had a friend who wished to write a long and carefully worded letter of complaint to her father's executor. When I returned to my lodgings late in the afternoon, I found one of the little Jems waiting for me on the stairs.

“Ma wants you,” she announced. “Mr Shield, am I as pretty as Lizzie? She says I ain't – she's a liar, ain't she?”

“You and your sister are both incomparably beautiful, each in your unique way.”

I gave her a penny and went down to the basement, where Mrs Jem was usually to be found sitting in an elbow chair placed between the range and the window at the front, which commanded a view of the steps up to the front door. Her fine, dark eyes peered out at me from their swaddling folds of fat.

“There was a man come asking after you before dinner,” she said.

“He wanted a letter written?”

“He didn't want nothing. Except to know if you lived here.”

“So you told him I did?”

“The girls told him. They was playing outside on them steps, the little monkeys. Then I came up and sent him about his business.” She studied my face. “What you been up to?”

“What do you mean, ma'am?”