The Falcon
Having secured payment of a barely acceptable five crowns for the predicted crisis in British prisons (which may or may not come to pass, Whitty could not care less), and the public uproar to follow (or not, as the case may be) when a certain condemned prisoner makes (or does not make) his escape, Whitty collects Sala’s stipend from the ancient cashier in spectacles and eye-shade, and upon exiting the building, negotiates the narrow passage to the rear, where the distinctive pong combines the fragrances of cemetery and inkwell. There he opens a small door and passes down a set of cellar steps, where the dank reek of mildew and wet earth contributes to an already rich bouquet. This is the entrance to the printing-office where
The Falcon
is set in type and brought to press; the firm is under separate ownership from the paper itself, having served a number of organs published in offices currently leased by
The Falcon
; the two companies have thus grown together like two adjacent plants in a crowded garden. The printing-house is by far the senior business, having printed for hire since broadcast began, some of whose workers – including the particular gentleman Whitty has come to see – have been employed here since they were children.
Two floors below, having traversed a short hallway and a set of swing doors, a quite different blend of odours presses onto Whitty’s face like the palm of a sweaty hand, an industrial confection of oil, glue, treacle, turpentine, stale breath, fresh paint, sodden paper and leaked gas, steamed together into an indivisible reek not dissimilar to overcooked cabbage. The noise is enough to rattle your sternum: a hiss on the top of the scale which would puncture your skull, accompanied by the low rumble of wheels on the bottom, with the intermittent rattle of straps and metal bands in between, the totality of which induces a peculiar vibration to the entire building from which nobody within may escape, from the Editor-in-Chief down to the lowest messenger, a vibration so constant that after a few months an employee would swear the building to be as still and as silent as a library.
Bent beneath the oppressive din, Whitty climbs a steep iron staircase in order to proceed along a walkway of the same material, set against a brick wall made shiny with the stains of a thousand inky, oily hands.
Intermittently he turns sideways in order to allow copy boys to pass – dirty-faced and hard-eyed, in paper caps and aprons, their shirt-sleeves rolled high above their elbows to reveal arms like black, stiffened hemp. As he passes an opening in the wall, he momentarily stops to gaze with admiration at the mighty steam engine one floor below, driving the ancient Koening & Baur press, its wheels turning so that flatbeds crash back and forth, causing cylinders and inking rollers to spin – a miracle of furious, untiring co-ordination, a brute symphony of cause and effect, and all so that a sheet of white paper at one end can emerge as a printed broadsheet out the other. The correspondent, who descends from a class well above the printing trades, knows as little as possible about the physical process of putting out a newspaper other than to wonder at man’s capacity to manipulate physical laws to advantage – imperfectly in this case, both in the varying quality of the product and in the machine’s tendency to break down at regular intervals, bringing the entire organ of public speech to a stuttering, ignominious halt.
‘Halloo!’ Whitty shouts down to a burly pressman lying on his back, wearing a large black apron over a grease-encrusted suit and cravat, working with an enormous wrench, like a veterinarian tinkering with the kidney of a shuddering beast. ‘You, my man! Have you encountered Mr Bigney?’
‘Wha?’
‘Bigney! Is he here, old chap?’
‘Whafa nomen?’
‘Bigney!’
‘Bigney wibtisset horse!’
‘Beg your pardon?’
The man points further down the ramp. ‘Tissers!’
‘Typesetters? Thank you, Sir!’
Whitty hurries up the ramp extending from the cat walk and turns in the direction of the typesetting room, whose double doors he is just about to swing open when out comes a small party whose skin has been inked as permanently black as an African’s. A clay pipe is wedged solidly into the gap provided by a missing tooth.
‘How do you do, Mr Bigney. Did you receive the material I sent you?’
‘Aye, and yor in luck. Yor on the pig’s back for sure.’
Mr Walter Bigney, whose official designation is that of engraver, is a bit over thirty and looks twice that, due to a distinctive quality common to long-standing members of the trade, the result of any number of
chemicals handled, inhaled, eaten and otherwise ingested in the course of a working day. However, even had he landed in a different occupation, Mr Bigney would still retain that particular stuntedness of stature common to the low-born, together with a set of black teeth, the result of a lifelong diet of ale, gin, tea, and bread dipped in animal fat.
‘Excellent, Mr Bigney. I knew I could rely upon you.’ Whitty feigns a heartiness he does not feel, for he does not like Mr Bigney and bridles at being called by such familiar names as ‘matey’ and ‘little prince’ by someone so distinctly inferior in rank. One does, after all, retain some semblance of personal pride. Or does one? One might think otherwise, to judge by the company one has been keeping.
Still, the engraver remains essential to Whitty’s professional well-being, being possessed of that peculiar faculty more of value in this building than in any other – namely, the ability to locate and combine information, at will. This capacity has, in effect, transformed a mediocre engraver into an invaluable library – or at any rate the nearest thing to such a facility in the building. Having taken to heart the sound business principle that supply and demand determine market value, Mr Bigney is able to command an income far in excess of any engraver in the industry, and a degree of deference far in excess of his station.
Whitty experiences uneasiness whenever he does business with Mr Bigney, a suspicion that the latter views him as but a cog in the larger machinery for social upheaval, all of which has the smell of something French.
Speaking of things Gallic, Whitty first made use of Mr Bigney’s service during the Courvoisier case over a decade ago – the bewildering and almost motiveless killing of Lord William Russell by his French valet, which investigation became thoroughly corrupted by the
£
400 reward offered by the family. Thanks to the engraver’s connective facility for incidents of the most miscellaneous nature, Whitty assembled an array of circumstances (the placement of stolen property, the recollection by a servant of a somnolence after consuming beer provided by the suspect, the likelihood that evidence of a break-in was concocted from the inside), which, combined with known and accepted facts about the natural tendencies of foreigners (their childlike avarice in believing that Englishmen carry vast sums of gold; their primitive assumption that by murdering the victim they erase all evidence to convict), created a distinct probability that the valet was guilty.
Hardly had the jury exited the courthouse before the correspondent, then a rank junior in the trade, burst into the sub-editor’s office (then a
vicious ape by the name of Waites), with a set of articles questioning the advisability of hiring foreigners as servants, which engendered a satisfying panic among the Mayfair set. This triumph secured Whitty the post of correspondent on public hangings over his then rival at the paper, Fraser. The latter subsequently went on to secure a position at
Dodd’s
, and has been undertaking a war of attrition ever hence.
‘So my little prince would be asking after Mrs Marlowe.’ This from Bigney, maddeningly cryptic as always.
‘Mrs Marlowe? I don’t recall having mentioned anyone by that name.’
‘That’s why yor’ll pay yor friend Bigney his price.’ Whereupon the engraver reveals his teeth in what Whitty presumes to be meant as a smile.
‘I beg your pardon, Bigney, but I cannot hear above the noise well enough for proper discussion. If I may presume that you have something for me, may we step outside a moment?’
‘With pleasure.’
‘Your pleasure usually comes at my expense.’
‘Get out yor pocketbook, matey, and prepare for an improvement of yor professional prospects.’
In the comparative silence of the outdoors, the correspondent’s ears ring like an after-tone of the bell in Coldbath Fields as he follows at a servant’s pace behind Mr Bigney on a turn around Ingester Square, in a dismal mist, sheltered by the weary-looking plane tree – which, seemingly afflicted by some wasting disease, reaches for the narrow patch of night overhead like a knotty hand from the grave.
The engraver is a proud man, inappropriately proud, with the false superiority of the accidentally talented – a vague, malevolent smugness.
Whitty reflects upon Mr Darwin and Mr Marx, on animal evolution and the eventual arrival of an Industrial Man – the latter consisting of that which remains of a human being after the removal of faculties incompatible with mechanized production. Before him may walk just such a prototype, Mr Bigney having been whittled down to the minimum necessary for the fulfilment of his purpose. The man cannot hear properly, nor can he appear in society without attracting alarmed stares at the condition of his skin (skin being the currency with which one trades first impressions); and yet, within the confines of this printing establishment, Bigney is perfectly suited to his environment, a bespoke creation of memory, malice and craft.
Whitty considers the faculty known as
hyperamnesia
– Bigney’s
uncanny ability to locate everything he has seen or read. Such prodigies are by no means uncommon in the hallways of journals and newspapers; every paper in London contains at least one unaccountably vast human storehouse of information – of crimes, scandals, plagues, accidents, together with their leading actors and various connectivities …
‘Pay attention now, I have not all night to be mooning about with the jabbering class.’
‘On the contrary, Bigney, I eagerly await your information.’
‘Yor asked to pursue a line of enquiry concerning a certain female admirer what is supplying the Fiend in Human with vittles and suchlike.’
‘That is indeed the direction I am taking.’
‘It led to a diversity of facts. Collecting the evidence required my attention for most of the day.’ Bigney leans against the rusty iron fence surrounding the churchyard and lights his pipe.
‘Never mind the cost for now. Who is your Mrs Marlowe?’
‘By Mrs Marlowe yor would be meaning Mrs Cox.’
‘And who is Mrs Cox? I’d be grateful if you’d come to the point.’
‘By Mrs Cox, yor would be meaning Miss Hurtle.’
‘Damn me, Bigney, I am beginning to become annoyed.’
Bigney places a black forefinger beside his nose, winking conspiratorially. ‘There were a certain connectivity in this Sorrowful Lamentation yor gave me, what struck me as familiar.’
‘So it seemed to me, though I couldn’t place it.’
‘Allow me to refresh yor memory.’ Whereupon the engraver recites part of the patterer’s Sorrowful Lamentation which the correspondent left with him earlier, pointedly by memory, though having glanced at it but once:
O once I knew a love so true,
Our hearts we freely gave;
Though she was of a class above,
My station she forgave;
But family ties will oft belie
The purest of the pure:
I, in her sight, a shining knight,
In father’s sight, a boor.
Corrupt and mean, a libertine,
Ancient, bald and stout;
A suitor from a class above -
For him I was cast out;
And in my wrath from the path
I stumbled and I fell,
While in her pride, my would-be bride
Did sell her soul as well.
Here Bigney emits a laugh which is, as always, at Whitty’s expense. ‘Did yor not make the connection? Ought I to say it in Gaelic?’
‘Blast! The business in Scotland. Of course.’
‘Further discussion will cost yor a half-crown in advance and a half-crown after.’
‘That is a grotesque overpayment for a reference which I could have deduced on my own.’
‘Try to sell it to Sala without me news clips. Believe me, my prince, yor onto a stunner. Think I’ll hike me advance to two crowns.’
‘Outrageous!’
‘Ah the fury of the jabbering classes, when the laws of provide and require don’t play in yor favour.’
‘Bigney, I shall pay you a half-crown in advance and one on approval, but only so that I may be free of your impudence.’
‘Done.’ The engraver bites the coin with his black teeth to test its genuineness, then leans forward and holds Whitty’s eye in his. ‘Yor recall the Inquiry on the State of Girls’ Fashionable Schools?’
‘Indeed, I received a small advance on it this week.’
‘Well, consider yorself a lucky man, because now yor got two birds to kill with the one stone.’
‘In what way?’
‘No recollection at all? Yor wrote it yorself at the time.’
‘Surely, you don’t mean Mrs Gorton’s Academy for Young Women.’