Charles Palliser (119 page)

“Does that mean you don’t need me?” I asked.

“Why, don’t you want to?” Mr Digweed asked.

I hesitated for a moment and Joey saw this.

“I suppose it ain’t good enough for you?” he said.

“Now hold your tongue,” his mother ordered.

“For the time being at least,” I said, “I’d like to.”

Mr Digweed nodded approvingly: “Three’s much safer than two.”

“On’y,” said Mrs Digweed cautiously, “it don’t hardly seem right for someone like you to earn his living that way.”

Joey glanced at me with a half-smile that I interpreted as a sneer.

“What shall we say about the money?” I asked.

Mr Digweed glanced at his wife. “This is what we reckoned,” he said. “Let’s say we’ll split what we earn into five shares. You and Joey take one each and I’ll take the rest.

Then you pay us eight shilling for board and lodging with washing found.”

These terms seemed suspiciously generous. It was virtually an admission that they were receiving money from someone. I looked at Joey’s face and thought I saw there resentment that I was being treated on all fours with him.

So it was agreed. And now my life settled into this strange routine. And yet, however often I went down the shores, I never lost entirely the sense of terror I felt that first time.

It was all the stranger, then, that in the face of all the hazards, I felt a kind of safety in this way of life. At least I was no longer the play-thing of accident or the unknowing victim of a conspiracy, for I had reached the very nadir of human existence and yet had found that I could survive, and do so not by something as humiliating as begging for charity in the streets but by a means that demanded courage, skill, and endurance. Down here the frivolity of chance could do little against me and I no longer laboured under the delusion of freedom (as I conceived it) for I knew that someone was manipulating my life — even if I did not know yet who it was. Though the shores were in one sense degrading, they represented a merely physical danger and my pride and independence were uncompromised, for apart from injury, death, or disease I had nothing to fear from them. All I feared — and yet longed for — was the unveiling of the hidden hand that had guided the Digweeds towards me.

Mr Digweed was so skilful with the rake and trowel and, with the assistance of myself and the more experienced Joey to help him, was able to cover so much ground, that we made a reasonably good living, and my share of our takings after paying my eight shillings was usually between two and three shillings a week. I tried to save the seventeen shillings I had borrowed from Sukey, but I never managed to reach that figure and, unwilling to send her less than that, I put off writing to her.

As time passed I began to understand why Mr Digweed went so frequently to the nearby public-house.

“You need it to clean you out,” he explained. “For it’s dry work down there, very dry.”

I found it remarkably damp, but I could appreciate how, after the darkness 548 THE

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and confinement of the shores, he needed the bright lights and sociability of the Pig and Whistle. But Mrs Digweed similarly found her laundry-work “wery drying” and also needed to visit the public-house frequently, so that most of what little spare money they had went on beer and gin, and it seemed to me to be largely for this reason that both of them had to work so hard. They always invited me to accompany them there but I rarely went at first.

When I did, I discovered that Mr Digweed had professional reasons for his frequent attendance there, for the Pig and Whistle in Petticoat-lane was the house of call for the Society of shore-hunters. Here they exchanged intelligence about conditions below ground and administered a benefit-club to which they all contributed in case of accident or illness.

Joey often visited the public-house with his parents, but spent much of his time with a gang of boys searching for scrap wood and metal which they sold to rag-and-bone dealers. He was often getting into one sort of mischief or another, and his parents were worried that he would get involved again in something criminal. He wasted much of his money on fine clothes and tobacco, for he now cultivated a pipe. His manner towards me hardly improved at all as time passed, and he remained reserved and even hostile, though we worked well together underground. Once he invited me to join him and the other boys “for a lark” but I declined for I thought it necessary to keep a difference between us.

It would be very easy to succumb to these temptations and so gradually slip into the way of life of these kind, sociable people who lived for the moment and took little thought for the future. My destiny, however, was to be very different from theirs as my origins were different. I reflected often that if what Mr Nolloth had said about the will of Jeoffrey Huffam was true, then great wealth was mine by every criterion of morality, and yet here I was grovelling for coppers in the filth when I should be master of one of the greatest estates in England. Having worked myself into a state of rapture at this thought, it gave me a strange kind of pleasure to raise objections to it, and argue to myself that I had no proof that the will had even existed and no chance of regaining my rights unless it could be found, for these obstacles made my day-dreams seem the more plausible. But then I would go too far, for when I realized the impossibility of the will’s ever being located — even if it still existed, or had ever existed — I became quite downcast and my bright phantasies faded.

Moreover, to make any such attempt would be once again to expose myself to danger from the Clothiers and, tempted as I was to obey the motto of my Huffam ancestors and seek safety through confronting danger, I felt even more strongly the appeal of the anonymity and oblivion that I had now found.

My phantasies were not entirely selfish dreams of wealth, I assured myself, for having forgotten nothing of what the Clothiers and the Mompessons had done to their opponents, I was possessed by the desire to wreak justice against them. Justice would humble them and make them regret — if not repent — what they had done to me and mine.

Driven by a grim pleasure in watching the Mompessons enjoy their stolen wealth, I went sometimes at night to Brook-street and walked backwards and forwards before their house. Was I watching in secret those who were secretly providing for me? I wondered. Several times I saw Sir Perceval and Lady Mompesson arriving or leaving in their carriage, and once I glimpsed a young lady who might have been Henrietta.

The sight of the usurpers sent me back to my books. If I was to gain the THE RELEASE

549

estate I had to know a great deal about Law and Equity. And so, although I returned from our subterranean expeditions exhausted, I spent much of my time reading. I was glad that the others were out so much and that I had the little cottage to myself, for I missed my privacy. (The life of the poor, I discovered, is wholly social and the Digweeds could not understand my desire to be alone.) Many and many a time as I sat alone by the fire with a book open upon my knee, I thought of my mother and remembered our happy times in the village.

There was a second-hand book-shop in Maiden-lane, Co vent-garden, where I befriended the bookseller who was an interesting and thoughtful man. He permitted me, on payment of a small fee and a deposit on each book borrowed, to take home anything from his stock. I read mainly legal works but also odd volumes of
The Spectator, The
Tatler, The Rambler,
as well as the English classics: Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes,
Rasselas, The Vicar of Wakefield,
and Goldsmith’s
History of Greece and Rome
; and lighter works like
The Castle of Otranto, The Monk,
and
Peregrine Pickle.
But these were mere diversions from my study of the Law and Equity, and I felt that I was acquiring the knowledge that would both win for me my rights and permit me to enjoy them.

Though I was with the Digweeds as little as possible, I watched and listened all the time for a clew to who was giving them their instructions about me. I learned nothing, however. Their reticences were eloquent, though, for I was struck by the fact that Sally and the other children were never mentioned.

As the months lengthened into a year, I gradually began to see the absurdity of my hopes of regaining the estate. More than likely, the will had never existed, for the evidence was indirect and tenuous : probably Mr Nolloth had misrepresented or misunderstood what Peter Clothier had said, or the latter had done the same with what my grandfather had allegedly told him. And so as a second year passed by, my law-books gathered dust in the chamber upstairs that I still shared with Joey. I still hungered for justice and occasionally allowed myself to dream of great wealth, but I now came to see the suit as a delusive will o’ the wisp that was in danger of leading my thoughts into dangerous phantasy as it had my grandfather’s.

I tried to convince myself that it was better to accept the inevitability of my situation and of my bleak future than sustain myself on empty dreams. But I could not bear to think that I would spend my life like this; that I had sunk to the bottom and there I would stay. And yet, of what worth was I? As Mr Pentecost had said, a man’s value was his price on the market and mine was nugatory. So increasingly I became frustrated and restless as I saw my life stretching emptily and oppressively before me. Anger and hatred burned inside me and the little house seemed a prison. Now I went with the Digweeds almost every night to the Pig and Whistle, finding the bright lights and noise a welcome contrast to the solitude and darkness of the tunnels. Gradually I discovered the release and escape that drink offered and am ashamed to admit that I frequently found myself staggering home with the others. I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to blot out the thought of the past or of the future. Either way, what I sought was oblivion, a kind of death which was the counterpart of my life in the shores.

Grandfathers

One evening in the middle of May almost exactly two years after the Digweeds had effected my escape from Dr Alabaster’s refuge, I was reading in the downstairs room. No sign had ever come from the party who, I assumed, was paying them for their attentions to me, and consequently I had begun to have serious doubts about the validity of the assumption I had made about this. This evening I had the house to myself for Joey was out and Mr and Mrs Digweed were, of course, at the public-house whither I had for once declined to accompany them.

The street-door opened suddenly and I heard Joey speaking to someone who was entering the room behind him, and then a woman’s voice answering him. Joey came in looking rather mysterious.

Behind him was a young lady — at least, that is what I took her for. She was very finely dressed in a beautiful scarlet silk gown and a hat with a peacock feather. She was tall and handsome with bold blue eyes and a high nose. Her golden hair was worn in ringleted tresses and her cheeks were faintly rouged. She carried an elegant parasol and seemed strangely out of place in that mean little chamber that was now filled with exotic perfume.

To my surprise she looked at me as if she knew who I was.

“My,” she said, “haven’t you jist growed!”

Joey watched my face curiously.

Then I recognised her: “Why, it’s Sally!”

“I wondered if you’d know me,” she said. “I wouldn’t hardly have knowed you agin if I’d passed you in the street.”

I looked at Joey: “She’s your sister, isn’t she?”

He nodded in surprise.

“And what relation is Barney to you?” I asked them.

Sally was about to speak but Joey said quickly: “That’s for the old folks to say if they choose to. But they mustn’t know nothing about Sal coming here.”

“They think I’m bad for Joey,” she said with an unconvincing laugh.

“They’re at the tavern,” I said.

“Joey knowed that. I wanted to speak to you.”

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“To me!”

“It’s about that night you left the crib, you recall, when Barney needed a boy and you wouldn’t make one of us? So I went and found Joey?”

I nodded. “What was it they wanted you for?” I asked her brother. “What were they doing?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Joey said. “They had something on but I on’y seed a small part of it for I jist had to stay outside with the carriage. (They wanted a tiger to make it look like a swell’s.) But Sally knows the whole story.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said. “It can’t do no harm now and will show you I mean to deal plainly with you. This is how it was. Barney and the rest of us gals, Nan and Maggie and some of the others, was going up West together for months a-fore that and they was letting on that they was rich publicans and we was their friends. Well, we’d got acq’ainted with some genel’men what had lots of tin. And we’d been going to this hell with ’em.”

“Hell?” I asked.

“My, you are a downy! It’s a gaming-club. This one’s in Henrietta-street. Very respectable. Well, that’s to say, in course it’s agin the law, see, to run one of them places, which you have to know to understand what I’m telling you. They have people at the door what won’t let you in unless they know you in case you’re one of them traps — you know — that don’t wear the uniform. And they search you for weapons, too.”

“Hurry up, Sal,” Joey protested.

“Well, Barney and the other culls have knowed the coves as runs it for a long time. In fact, they’ve worked for ’em as buttoners — bringing in gulls and letting on that they’re winning a lot of money and all that kind of thing. So Barney had got Sam work there as one of the files what guards the door. But the coves what run the place didn’t know that, in course. Now these flatts what I’m telling you about have lost so much blunt there that Barney and the rest of us are completely trusted by the coves there. Now that night we’d told the gulls that they should bring lots of blunt with ’em because Barney had tipped the croupier a bit to rig the game in their favour. (Which was a wrinkle, in course.) Naterally everyone was searched at the door that night same as usual. But Sam let Jack in and Jack was letting on that he was a gamester, but he was carrying a pair of pistols.