The Star of the Sea (36 page)

Emboldened by the fact of his own escape, Mulvey began using the now infamous name as a verb; as a schoolboy might scratch his initials into a penny to see how long it takes before it comes back to him. Before too long, it did come back. To freddie a person was to beat him senseless. Men were being freddied all over the country. Oxford had freddied Cambridge in the annual boat race. One of these days those ungrateful bastard Irish would get the bloody freddying they so thoroughly deserved.
¹

Every time he heard a rumour concerning the monster, Mulvey tried his absolute hardest to scotch it, knowing that would encourage the rumour-monger to tell it again, and to tell it even more imaginatively the next time he did so. Men in grog-shops would quietly confide to him that they knew
for a fact
who had done the awful crime. They had met him, or were related to him, or had once had a drink with him. The wife had a brother who had a chum a screw in Newgate, and
he
said the whole affair was a cover-up by the Jews, and if you didn’t believe it you could
ask him yourself
.

When finally it was suggested in the liberal
Morning Chronicle
, by a scrupulous young reporter who had interviewed many of the prison’s former inmates, that Frederick Hall, the Monster of Newgate, was in fact a cunning Irishman called Murphy or Malvey,
who had contrived his crime to look like the work of a madman, Pius Mulvey left the city and quickly headed north.
Punch
magazine picked up on the item and scoffed at it. No Paddy would be intelligent enough to think of such a plan. Most of them had only recently swung down from the trees.

Eighteen months were spent rambling the north of England and the borderlands of Scotland from Berwick to Gretna Green; then the midlands and the eastern part of Wales; then down to western Devon and into Cornwall, where Lancelot and Merlin once walked with the elect. Often the fugitive found work at the harvest: the planting time, too, sometimes was good to him. Picking apples or sowing corn was a pleasant disguise; easy to blend with the hordes of migrant Irishmen who filled England’s meadows at those times of the year. Their accents stirred memories he tried hard to put away. The old nights of singing. The nights with Mary Duane. To think about her brought a guilt he found difficult to bear. He could not endure their company when they started into singing.

For a month he was a gang-man, digging foundations for railway tracks. One entire winter he spent on the outskirts of Sheffield, where a grain merchant was building a Gothic castle, an enormous roofless barn of a place, the size of Westport church. The merchant and his family slept in their current mansion, Mulvey and the other workers in a wigwam on the site. At the first stirring of spring, he quietly moved on. He never stayed in one spot for too long.

For a while he fell in with Lord Johnny Danger’s Travelling Circus and worked at setting up and taking down the tent. It was work he liked, it was simple and pleasing, and yet it required a rational mind. The tent was a three-dimensional theorem from geometry, a vast conglomeration of ropes and hooks, of poles and couplings and bolts and rivets, with only one correct way to put them all together. Mulvey could see a way of doing it more quickly and was given charge of the tentboys by the grateful ringmaster. Under his direction, this little Irish tinkerman, they learned to fling up the entire framing in less than two hours. He loved to sit looking at the naked tent; the skeleton of the dragon King Arthur might have speared.

He felt oddly at home among the freaks and bearded ladies, the homunculus clowns and pig-faced wrestlers. To make a living out of
perceived inadequacy seemed a brave thing to Mulvey; an effort requiring a measure of true adaptability, which by now was the quality he most esteemed. After a show there were plenty of girls; sometimes a drinking session that went on until dawn. But the happy times were not to last. One day while dismantling a cage he was bitten by a lion and lost the greater part of his left foot. His wound was cauterised by the harlequin who doctored the animals, and a wooden clog carved for him by one of the trapeze-boys, from a broken piece of signboard that had once been made to read
THE UGLIEST BEAST IN THE WORLD
. The upside-down W seemed like a capital M. ‘M is for Mulvey,’ the trapeze-boy smiled.

They kept him on for a couple of months but he knew he had become a liability. He wasn’t able to manage the tent work any more, nor was he truly needed to direct it. Others had learned from him how it was done and in fact had found ways to improve on it. Neither could he shovel or sweep or scrub: and he was afraid to go near the shabby old furbag that had mauled him. A Piedmontese acrobat helped him learn to walk again, showed him how to shift his balance and change his centre of gravity. They gave him the position of advance-man for a while; his task was to go ahead of the caravan into the next town and pass out handbills or complimentary tickets. One day in York he had performed his duties and sat on a bridge looking down on the Ouse, waiting for the others to trundle into view. By nightfall they hadn’t, and he knew they wouldn’t now. They hadn’t had the heart to tell him he wasn’t wanted, and for that much at least he felt something like gratitude. But it wouldn’t help him much, and he knew that, too. Once again he was alone in a world of strangers.

The winter of ’42 was devastatingly harsh, by far the worst in living memory. Snow began to fall in early November, followed by multiple freezing frosts that left the few leaves on the trees like steel-hard blades. The roads of rural England became ramparts of slush, buried under yards of ice and frozen mud. Mulvey tried begging, but it didn’t come easily to him; and country people were unimpressed by his poverty and lameness. Lameness was nothing in the winter of ’42. Half-beggared themselves, they had nothing to steal.

The new year came but the weather did not change. Soon came February. The weather grew worse. One day near Stoke he
happened upon an amiable Welshman, a frighteningly emaciated scarecrow of a man whose legs looked as if you could snap them with a twist of your hand. William Swales was a poor schoolmaster of Mulvey’s own age, on his way to seek a position at the village of Kirkstall near Leeds. He had little in the way of food or refreshment but what morsels he had he was surprisingly willing to share. He was fond of the Irish, he let Mulvey know, because his mother had run a boarding house on Holy Island near Anglesey, a port directly across from Dublin, and she had always found Irishmen scrupulously clean. Swales himself was not so convinced, but the Irishmen had paid for his grub and his tutelage, so he felt he owed their countrymen something of a debt regardless of their hygiene or deportment.

They spent nineteen days together walking the road towards the north and nineteen cold nights in barns or byres. Often as they trudged the slush-filled byways, they would talk about matters of scholarship. Mulvey found such conversations a surprising pleasure. Though his newfound associate was erudite and eloquent, Mulvey could keep up in general discourse and sometimes even best him.

Swales was a classicist, an old-school man. He knew music and geography, poetry and history: all manner of legends and ancient tales. But his greatest love was mathematics. Numbers were so mysterious and yet so simple and beautiful. ‘For instance,’ he would say, ‘where would we be without Nine? When you think about it, Mulvey, where would we be? The neatness, man. The utter perfection. It isn’t quite Ten, I’ll grant you that. Ten, after all, is the emperor of numbers. But it’s so much more than poor old Eight; a darling little number in its own right of course, and a pleasant sort of number, but not Nine. You’d go to bed with Eight but you’d marry Nine. The sheer, cunning, marvellously bumsucking, miraculously bloody
nineness
of it.’

Mulvey found this variety of patter intriguing but often tried to undermine it purely to while away the hours. Nine was a number much like any other, he would maintain, but not quite as useful as most. You couldn’t use it to count the days of the week, the months of the year, the deadly sins, the decades of the rosary, the counties of Ireland or even the teeth in your dense Welsh head. Swales would scoff and roll his eyes. Nine was magical. Nine was
Godly
. You could multiply Nine by any other number, and the digits of your
answer, if you kept adding them together, would always add up to Nine. (A whole day was passed, from Woodhouse to Doncaster, in Mulvey fruitlessly trying to disprove this contention without having recourse to fractions or percentages, entities Swales regarded as actually evil. ‘Fractions are illegitimate,’ he often averred. ‘The bastards of Outer Mathematica.’)

He had a more than middling bass singing voice, a thing Mulvey found startling in such a thin man; when he sang he seemed to rumble like an antique cello. He taught Pius Mulvey his favourite song, a nonsensical sea-shanty you could chant as a march, and together they would sing it as they crunched the snowy lanes, the scholar’s sonority putting much-needed gravitas beneath Mulvey’s uncertain and piping tenor.

One night betimes he went to bed, for he had caught a fever,

Said he, I am a handsome man, and I’m the gay deceiver.

His candle just at twelve o’clock, began to burn quite palely,

A ghost stepped up to his bed-head and said,

‘
BEHOLD! MISS BAILEY!
’

They would bellow the last three words as loud as they could. It became a contest to see which of them could roar the most ferociously. Often Pius Mulvey let the other man win, simply because he liked him and wanted to please him. He had no ferocity at all, the skinny little schoolmaster. He had never won anything in his life.

Singing was a way to keep up the spirits, but Mulvey was finding it harder to maintain his composure. His ravaged foot pulsated with agony. The pains in his back were growing worse by the day. One morning he woke up soaked with dew, fingertips numb; nose and eyes streaming. A strange itching sensation was irritating his scalp. When he scratched it, his fingernails came back bloodied. An arrow of horror stabbed through Pius Mulvey. His hair was crawling with lice.

He wept with shame and loathing as Swales shaved him bald, as he plunged his head into the icy stream by the roadside. Had there been an easy way of dying he would have taken it, then. He did not speak a single word for the next two days.

‘We’re nearing Leeds,’ Swales would smile. Everything would be fine when they got to Leeds, as though they were walking the golden highway to Paradise. The Yorkshireman was the decentest cully in England; he would always give a fellow a fair crack of the whip. He was a man of his word, the Yorkshireman was, not a twister or a bounder like some Swales could mention. There would be work for Mulvey when they got to Leeds.

‘Maybe find ourselves a couple of good girls, eh, Mulvey, my flower? Settle down. We’ll live like princes. Wine and sweet cake and a pork chop for breakfast. And Queen of Puddings for lunch, by Christ!’

In the meantime they ate anything edible they could find along the road: roots, leaves, wild herbs and cresses, the few berries not picked off the blackened shrubs by the birds. Sometimes they ate the bony birds themselves; occasionally they were fortunate enough to happen upon a starving grouse. One morning near Ackworth they found a dead cat in the lane and had a fire built and lit in a nettled ditch before each man said what the other had been thinking: he would rather go hungry than eat a cat.

It was a marvel to Mulvey that to talk about food seemed almost the same thing for Swales as to eat it. It appeared to give him genuine sustenance, and oddly Mulvey never found it an irritation. In time he even began to anticipate today’s feast; the banquet of words his companion would cook up as they tramped the frosted fields and slithery canal paths. ‘A roast swan, Mulvey, and a platter of oozing steaks. Sticks of celery and boiled asparagus. Potatoes the size of your Irish head. Cheeses, by Jesus, and Tuscany Muscadee and a flagon of hot cider to wash it all down.’

‘That’s only a titbit,’ Mulvey would say. ‘What about the main dish?’

‘Coming to it, coming to it. Hold your horses, man. A wild bugger of a boar with a Bramley in his chops. A bathful of gravy and another one of claret. Oranges from Seville in brandy sauce. Served up by Helen of Troy. In her drawers!’

‘Well that’d do for myself well enough, I suppose. But are you not having anything for yourself, Willie, no?’

And so it went, from day to starving day. ‘To eat one’s words’ was an English slang expression; to withdraw some foolish or unwise
thing you had said. But poor William Swales seemed to eat his words literally. His student learned to do it, too.

There were times when Mulvey suspected the master was so ill that he wouldn’t last the night, never mind see Leeds. He coughed up spumes of watery blood. Shivers racked him so badly that he couldn’t hold a cup. Through all of it he kept up a stream of quips and ventriloquism, as though he knew he would die if he stopped laughing for even an instant.

On the first of March, 1843, they left the town of Gildersome at five in the morning. Three hours later the dawn came up, and as the cold sun yellowed the snowy fields, William Swales began to sing a Hosanna. He nudged at trudging Mulvey and pointed up ahead of them, to the smokestacks and black steeples of Leeds in the distance. It was the Feast of Saint David, Master Swales pointed out. The holy hero of Welshmen everywhere.

All day they hiked like weary soldiers, but the road was hard and progress slow. At some point they got lost and appeared to be doubling back; by four o’clock the dusk was beginning to shadow the land. A hobo with the curious name of Bramble Prunty met them near Castleford and counselled them to be careful. The local constabulary were hard sons-of-bitches, he said. They would fling you in the bridewell for vagrancy just as soon as look at you; maybe give you a kicking simply for the fun of it. The best option for a doss was to go deep into the woods. The trees were thick and the forest floor dry and the constables never bothered to look in there. Two lads with a mutchkin of gin might have themselves a good carouse, with no uninvited callers to cause any distress. Assuming the man was looking for drink, Mulvey said he regretted that they had none to offer. The tramp gave a grin and produced an earthen flask from his coat. ‘Ten shillings,’ he said with a greedy stare. It was nine shillings and sixpence more than the market rate but they bargained him down to a pair of shoes.