‘I beg your pardon, Miss Phoebe, but, if I may say so, you appear somewhat flushed. Do you wish me to stop the carriage? May I fetch you a drink, or offer a medicament for the nerves?’
‘Nothing, thank you, Sir. However, I do believe …’ Phoebe slips backward into the corner of the seat, for suddenly she is shivering.
Perceiving his companion to grow faint, Whitty secures one arm about her shoulders so that he may support her; in the meanwhile, the sleeve of his other arm accidentally touches her bosom as he attempts to warm her, so that, inadvertently, they are in a virtual embrace, his scented whiskers brushing her cheek, her breath soft upon his ear; whereupon she opens her eyes, now mere inches from his, wearing an expression she has seen on the faces of dancing ladies at the Crown – peering deep into his eyes, seeing only kindness there.
‘Oh, Mr Whitty,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t know what is happening.’ So saying, as though to eliminate the uncertainty, she delivers the correspondent a lingering kiss, full on the mouth – it being the first time she has kissed a man, she wishes to experience it fully.
And the extent of Whitty’s error occurs to him in full force.
Excellent. Skilfully done, old chap. You have blundered into moral quicksand. Such opportunities for making a cad of oneself! See them glisten!
True, his working method in pursuing this narrative has been no more chaotic than usual: like a hound, one detects a trail, which, by instinct, smells fresh. Off one goes with one’s tail in the air in pursuit of the scent, until one comes to a fork. A pause follows; then, with an amount of prescience no more reliable than the insight of a threepenny Tarot-reader, one chooses left, or right; and so to continue to the next fork in the path, there to choose, and choose, and choose again …
Oh, dear God, and now he is kissing Phoebe. Long and deep – too deep to pass off as avuncular affection. Her small lips are moving with
his, and with the utmost delicacy, and an eagerness to please – which fills the correspondent with an aching sadness, for he does not wish to be pleased by her in that way.
‘I beg you, Miss Phoebe, this must stop.’
‘Why would you wish it so, Mr Whitty?’ So saying, she kisses him again; Heaven help him, he participates.
‘Miss Phoebe, do I have your permission to speak candidly?’
‘By all means, Sir, I should have it no other way.’
‘In the first place, were this … this circumstance to go further, your father should have me unmanned with an axe.’
She laughs aloud. ‘Do you really think so? How savage!’
‘Well I shouldn’t blame him. Perhaps I should do the job myself. To involve you further in this terrible business, and then to commit an intimacy into the bargain …’
Again she laughs – with regret now, for she can feel the moment recede. ‘I am not a child, Mr Whitty. I know what is where, and I know what everything looks like, and I know where everything goes.’
‘Of that I have not the slightest doubt,’ he replies, ruefully, having for the moment lost the argument.
And so again they kiss – for Whitty a huge step backward; clearly it is one thing to settle on an ethical destination, quite another to summon the required strength to get there.
‘I plead with you, Miss, do not kiss me again. You’re hitting me below the belt,’ says the correspondent, instantly regretting the metaphor.
‘Might we discuss the matter rationally, Sir?’
‘If only we could, Miss Phoebe.’
‘Surely you don’t suppose that I am a virgin?’
‘Indeed, I am utterly certain of it.’
She frowns at the suggestion. ‘Certain on what basis, Sir?’
‘As a trained observer, may I say that you have the aspect, the eyes, and the spirit of an undefeated angel.’
She moves back in her seat, the better to determine whether she is being mocked. ‘Undefeated, Sir? Whatever can you mean? For I assure you I am no angel.’
‘By undefeated, I mean that nobody has yet taken away from you that which can never be returned.’
‘Yet, Mr Whitty?’
‘Yet, Miss Phoebe.’
They exchange a long look, the last between them of its kind, then a
gentle embrace, one which he might reasonably term avuncular, again with his whiskers brushing her cheek – except that now they tickle her, they make her laugh a little, for the situation has grown humorous.
‘I prefer your first excuse, Mr Whitty.’
‘What excuse is that, Miss Phoebe?’
‘That my father might unman you with an axe.’
The Holy Land
Henry Owler has not slept since the death. Nor has he moved since his return to the Holy Land, when he entered the room, saw and heard and felt its emptiness, and turned into a statue of grief. Odd, he thinks, emptiness being stronger than stone. For hours he has maintained precisely the same posture, in the way that a clown will impersonate a thinking man, perched on the edge of an empty bed, staring at another empty bed, behind him the makeshift curtain of patchwork, through which he has passed for the first time. The bed in front of him, which still belongs to Dorcas, remains precisely as she left it; therefore does the patterer cling to the sight of an unkempt blanket, as though the hand that moved it continues to exist in the room, hanging in the air like fog.
If only he could sleep. Yet he cannot, for his own daughter has not returned, nor has Mr Whitty sent word. Thus Henry Owler, father of Phoebe, sleepless, stares at what has been lost like a man perched at the edge of a cliff, chin in hand, awaiting the signal to leap.
‘Father?’ At first she thought the room empty, until she pushed aside the curtain.
He does not turn at first, believing the voice to have come from inside his own mind.
‘Mr Whitty remarked as you needed your knife for supper.’ Whereupon she drops the implement on the bed beside him.
He rises to his feet and reaches for her. His back temporarily declines to straighten properly and he finds himself bent like a hunchback until she steadies him, whereupon for a long time they hold one another, neither knowing precisely who is comforting whom.
He looks at the knife and apprehends its meaning. ‘I will put this clearly, girl: I would rather the murderer go unpunished forever, that he live his cursed life in luxury and ease, than risk the loss of you.’
She puts her arms around her father and kisses him. There is no need for him to know what she intends.
The patterer has had the entire night in which to formulate his plan, for the citizens who frequent Carrier Square don’t begin to disperse
throughout London before eleven of a morning, nor return before daybreak of the next. Lying wide-eyed in his cot, heeding to the regular breathing in the second cot, and the silence in the third cot, he has ample time in which to contemplate the fullness and the emptiness and the impossible grandeur of life – a most intricate business. The resulting sense of wonder he expresses by the writing of a Sorrowful Lamentation:
O heed ye to Henry, a man of your world,
Charged with the care of two innocent girls;
For the sake of a pound he directed his quill
To the man who would hang as the Fiend Chokee Bill.
While Henry did plot the condemned man to meet,
Freely the monster was stalking the street;
Yet for a story he shut up his ear
To the villain who’d murder his innocent dear.
And now he repenteth his seeking for glory,
Repenteth the taking of life for a story,
Thanks to the Fiend of a daughter bereft,
Perhaps to be robb’d of the one he has left …
Having taken tea in the public kitchen, with his freshly papered sandwich-board with its Sorrowful Lamentation draped over his shoulders, the patterer awkwardly mounts one of the coster carts in the square, moving aside the indecently protesting figures of its two female occupants. So situated with a view of the buildings (which, in the morning fog, resemble sooty-faced, one-eyed wraiths, their empty sockets patched with rags), he glances behind at the now-empty clothes-lines of Rosemary Lane, lifts the iron pot and stirring-spoon which he has taken from Mrs Organ, the ancient keeper of the public stove, and proceeds to apply one to the other with such force that the clamour elicits a responding fusillade of protest from the whores in the nearby carts, and from hundreds of unseen occupants within the tottering wrecks of surrounding houses – the costers and the black Irish, the coiners and the magsmen, the rampsmen, bludgers, buzzers, macers, dippers, nobblers, mumpers and troopers whose vocation is to inconvenience, injure and infect the upright citizens of London.
Heads begin to appear in the windows and to poke up from the cellarways, yet the patterer continues his unwelcome tintinnabulation; only when he is certain that even the rats are listening does he begin his annunciation, speaking in a voice honed and hardened to penetrate
walls, while gazing about with eyes filled with tears. Protest or no, they will listen.
‘Come-all! Come-all! Look to Henry Owler, and contemplate his errors to your future betterment! Born in 1812, of humble yet industrious parents, what left him to the custody of a maiden aunt at a willage in Essex! Where in penurious circumstances his infant ears oft harkened to the Sunday schools of his native place, singing the well-known words of Watts’ beautiful hymn:
When e’er I take my walks abroad,
How many poor I see …
‘Thus did the boy set down the broad roadway what is walked by the poor, seeking to better his own condition! Made his first duckett at twelve he did, no effort too great for a fadge! Who, from ambition, did not marry until twenty-five, whose lovely Edith of Clapham was took by a fever what all the tonics on Camomile Street could not cure, and him with a baby girl!’
‘Yet such losses and blessings did not prepare him against the foul demon what ever haunts the footsteps of the ambitious, waiting to pounce! Hypocrisy, Sir! Lies, Madam – agreed-to for personal gain!’
‘Come-all! Come-all! Learn what price he has paid for his blindness! Innocent girl falls to fiend! Barbarous murder! Mendacity brings father life of regret! In pursuit of untruthful narrative, a man abets a murderer! Hear his sorrowful lamentation! Intimate details! Full particulars! Mystery revealed! Horrid and inhuman murder, with more to come! Wile and inhuman seducer slays innocent girl! Bereaved father can but watch and wait! Intimate details, full particulars guaranteed to move the feeling heart! …’
Slowly, still grumbling, the bedraggled populace straggle out of their suffocating lairs to gather about the patterer. Switching from one coster cart to another when required to vacate by the owner, Owler carries on his standing spiel for two hours in classic professional form – the exceptional circumstance being that in this case he has no broadsheets to sell. Instead, the crowd of interested parties gathers about his board and reads the narrative for nothing, then scatters throughout the city with the story firmly imprinted in the mind.
Thus informed go the multifarious citizens of the Holy Land: the widow whose husband has died in the hospital for consumptives as many times as Wellington saw engagements; the master of the Poxen Dodge, having applied acid to wounds punctured with a pin to cause
the exposed surfaces of his body to present a mass of sores; Dry-Land Jack, who lost an arm in the Spanish Legion, never having been nearer to Spain than to Patagonia. Likewise the six shallow coves with twenty-seven stolen shirts, looking for a Welshman named Taff on Rosemary Lane; the twin orphan watercress-girls in matching dark print frocks, matching black chip bonnets and matching solemn eyes; the dextrous young wire (a picker of ladies’ pockets) – an agile lad with beautiful hands who can crouch to half his height and creep up on his mark like a cat; the blind bootlace-seller, who for a ha‘penny will tell of the day his eyeballs burst from smallpox; the screever with the shaved head and the coloured chalk with which to depict Christ with Crown of Thorns on flagstones; the family doing the Respectable Family Dodge, in their shabby yet scrupulously clean clothes, with a pack of pawn tickets to show they have parted with their all before coming to this, while the father stands silently with a paper over his face (
To a Human Public: I have seen Better Days
); and finally the lowly stick-men, off to Covent Garden for a ‘tightener’ of rotten oranges, to tighten the gut and hold at bay the awareness of starvation …
Amid the public’s infatuation with the telegraph it is all too easy to disregard the near miraculous passage of facts, warnings and rumours that occurs daily among the poor; how the presence of an especially vigilant crusher or an especially generous almshouse or a butcher who cheats with his scale becomes generally known from one end of London to the other within moments of its revelation.
From this morning onward, Phoebe will puzzle at the inexplicable gaze of impoverished strangers, while the leisure hours of many a fine-looking young clubman will be rendered less hospitable by the seemingly inescapable presence of the most appalling wretches, eyeing his every move. Especially discomfited by this change in the atmosphere of his favourite hunting-ground is Reginald Harewood, having received from the barkeeper at the Crown some awfully distressing news.
A MEMORANDUM TO MR ROO
You have lost an object which may prove of
considerable value to your personal assurance.
Should you desire its return for payment of a
suitable reward, would you please indicate to
this effect, care of the Crown.
— A Friend of Dorcas