Walking in pimlico, p.7
Walking in Pimlico, page 7
Here was the shop I had longed for, then. Refined, in a country sort of way. Clean and tidy. Friendly associates, and the sort of respect to which I could become accustomed and indeed, after all these years in the profession, it was nothing but my due. In Springwell there was no ‘Ho there, Corney Sage! Get yer arse in yer pants!’ but a polite enquiry from Signor Frazerini as to whether Professor Moore (that’s me, Professor Hugh Moore) was ready. And genteel applause all round, though more rorty when there were military about. Even so, there was not a man in his cups, not a woman bawling him out. There were no fights, no shouting matches.
And there were no murders.
Lucy’s letter recalled to me that unpleasantness, for I had tried to put it out of my mind, good and sure. But to have it spread out on the table before me even when the parlour of the Old Pitcher was so warm and cosy, and Mr Flynn’s beer drank sweet as a nut, well, it made me shiver some, especially when I thought of the dark Row and the footsteps tearing after me.
Lucy’s packet sat in my pocket again, tied up with brown paper now and string, and I sometimes took it out to read her letter or the bits from the newspaper. Or look at the picture of the beautiful woman. Like I was on this particular evening. She was easy to look at, a regular angel, and whoever had caught her likeness had made a good job of it, anyone could see. I turned it round and round in my hand, and not for the first time thought how Bessie must have grabbed it in her struggle, and how she held on to it in all her agonies. And here I wiped my eye, and thought that I was a fond fellow for all my guff.
The door opened and the girl (whose name was Hope but was called Topsy on account of her clumsiness) fell in. I say fell for that was indeed what she did, knocking over a chair and rearranging a table on the way. The pot of beer she had brought me had watered the front of her apron and acquainted itself with the floor, but there was enough left to wash down the rest of my bread and cheese, and as she put it on the table I could see her eyes drawn to the picture, so I pushed it towards her.
‘Now, Topsy,’ says I, ‘here is a beautiful lady who you would do well to imitate. Look at her fair skin and her golden hair. You have those features in abundance, and it would take only a pot of powder and a handful of pins for you to pass off as a lady yourself.’
Indeed, I flattered the poor child, for although she had indeed fair skin and golden hair, her other features were less striking, unless of course it was her two eyes, both of which were trained on the tip of her nose at the same time. She took up the picture in both hands like it was a jewel and gave it good scrutiny.
‘If I was to ask the lady what powder she used, and how many pins, Mr Professor, would she tell me?’
I had to smile, for she was solemn in her fancy.
‘I have no doubt, if you was to ask her in the proper way, polite and not forward, and did not spill anything on her good dress, nor knock her to the ground with your elbow, Topsy, I am sure she would tell you.’
She smiled. ‘Then I shall go on my next day off with my friend Agnes, who is Mrs Garnett’s scullery, and I shall be polite and not clumsy.’
‘Where shall you go?’ says I, thinking that, as well as all her other faults, the girl was soft also.
‘To the George. She stays at the George, and walks out with the other lady, and a tall man. Very handsome. And as tall as a tree.’ Topsy turned about and dashed a stool and the firedogs to the floor as she mopped up the spilled ale. ‘I thought they was a family, two sisters and their brother. But Agnes says they are not, though they are very great friends, and sit with each other constantly. Shall I bring you another glass, sir?’
I think I nodded, though I am not sure, for my poor brain was considering Topsy’s words. And it was still turning them over when she came back into the parlour, carrying a jug, and walking like there was glass or eggshells under her feet.
‘So,’ says I, trying to appear unconcerned, ‘you say this lady is at the George?’
Oh yes, she was there. Didn’t I know? Isn’t that why I’d got the coin? She supposed I was a cousin, at least, though I didn’t look at all like her, but then she didn’t look like any of her cousins (which I could well understand). Her name? No, she didn’t know that, but she could find out. Indeed, she would have to know that, wouldn’t she, in order to call upon her and be introduced.
And her brother, I said, as though it didn’t matter one jot, but holding my breath all the same, did she know his name?
She blushed again, and almost nudged my beer to the floor. She did know his name. Every girl knew the name of Mr Shovelton. And wasn’t he the handsomest man in Springwell? So tall. So dark. Such blue eyes, such an elegant figure. He had noticed Mrs Garnett’s girl, and she was not even a proper lady’s maid. No, he was not in the military, though his bearing was so straight he might have been. She had taken particular notice of him. Was that all, sir? Thank you, sir.
I turned the picture over and looked hard at the writing.
My room in the Old Pitcher was a simple affair, above the stables. Clean, yellow walls, an iron bedstead, a mattress without extras (the biting kind), and the friendly scent of four-footed companions shuffling and snorting below. I had lain there on my first night and stretched my bones till they cracked, and I felt all the hardness and difficulty of my life ease out and ebb away. I had woken up to birdsong not yawping, and the scent of stocks and sweet william rather than cat’s meat and bones. Seated to my breakfast in Mr Flynn’s parlour, his wife had brought creamy milk, still warm from the cow, and good thick slices of salty ham and white bread and flavoursome butter. I had found a berth here with which I could be content, and it occurred to me that I was tired of trouble and the hardness of city life. The clean air and bright sun, trees bursting with greenness, and the lapping river, all these simple things had been missing, and here they were in abundance.
But after Topsy had blushed her story out about the ladies and gent at the George, it seemed that a shadow was cast across me. When I reached my room, I locked the door, for the first time since I arrived in Springwell, and when I lay down on my bed, I felt as though all my bones were set agin each other. But it was an uncalled-for fear, I thought. Topsy was no great judge of features, surely? Here was a girl who was blind to tables and chairs when they was in familiar places! What chance that she should recognize this strange face as one she’d seen in the street? And how very strange it should be for this woman to be here! Out of all the women and all the places in this great country, how should she be in Springwell? And how should this picture, what I had now slipped under my pillow for safe-keeping, and its owner, and Bessie and Lucy and me, how should all this be threaded together?
I took off my boots and lay on my bed (which might have been in a corner of the Little Ease for all it gave me comfort) and thought about things.
I am no scholar. Mr Figgis (who brung me up, so not my father, but as good as) always said that I should use the bits of brains the good Lord gave me, rather than wonder about them what he didn’t. Or something along that way. But it was beyond me to work out how I, not for the first time, was troubled by business that was not of my making. This picture of a young woman had found its way to me, just as surely as I found my way into the back yard of the Constellation and into the eyeline of the swell who did for Bessie, though it would take some clever Oxford fellow to explain how and why. And yet here they were, joined up like a Roman’s rosary beads.
There was a bright moon and, wonder of wonders, shooting stars bursting across the sky. I leaned out of the little window and watched them make trails across the sky, and looked up and down the Parade, and I breathed in the clear air which I own I could not get enough of, after the stink of Whitechapel. It was all dark and quiet, only the distant rush of the water over the stones by the River Gardens. It was a perfect berth for me and no mistake, and felt like home. Whatever that might be.
I never knew my own mother, of course, though I understand she was a kindly, welcoming soul, and made comfortable any soldier or sailor who could find the coins to buy her a bed, and the appearance of yours truly was no inconvenience to her either, though perhaps something of a surprise. So surprising that she left me on the corn chandler’s doorstep, wrapped in a large poster (torn from a hoarding) announcing a balloon ascent the following day, which she attended with a mulatto mariner. (I think this last bit about the mariner is not all the truth and, true to you, I don’t know where it has come from. But it has become part of my story, so often have I told it.) The tale of finding me, the swaddling in which I was wrapped up like a parcel of fried potatoes and the search for my mother, was the sole subject of Mr Figgis’s conversation for many weeks.
The Figgises had no kids of their own and were Baptists through and through, but they gave me a name – Cornelius, of course – and a home, clean as a whistle. But that life would never do for me, though, and I can see Mr F even now, looking heavenward for assistance. Kind as they were and never a thought for themselves, they were not the mother and father I knew had started me up, so to speak. When I was older, I quizzed them till Mr F lost his patience and Mrs F started to cry, and then I asked everyone from the turnkey to the tanner. But it was like looking for an honest man in a court of law. I never knew my mother and she never came to find me, though I searched the face of every small, red-haired woman (I fancied I had inherited her looks) who crossed my path. Even now I often thought of her, the mother who had wrapped me in the only thing she could find, and left me with only hope and charity as protection.
I fell to musing on this, and certain the mild night air and the bubble of the distant water was very pleasant. For though I sometimes felt sad that here was a mother I never knew and perhaps brothers and sisters also, Springwell was so comfortable a shop, so very mild and easy compared with what I had been accustomed to, I could generally bring myself about, and dwell upon more cheerful matters. And this I tried to do, sometimes with success, but other times, like tonight, to no avail, for what crept into my thoughts were darker memories. Cold nights in doorways. An empty belly and the pain that goes with it. Thoughts of murder and someone who might be connected with it sleeping in a bed only a few steps up the street. I could not help myself but lean out and look upon the windows of the George, some still lit, and wonder if the lady on Bessie’s locket was in one of them. And whether the Mr Shovelton that Topsy was so struck by was indeed her brother. And how all these little things might drop together into something bigger.
And so I was considering the likelihood of these rags and trifles together, and feeling not a little careworn by them, when the sound of footsteps brought me up. Springwell was such a quiet, out-of-the-way place that anyone out after ten o’clock was probably up to no good. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do in Springwell when the night drew on, except sit by the fire or go to bed. But here was a gent striding out, heels striking the pavement like hammers and not caring who heard them, and stopping in front of the Old Pitcher, my little crib. I watched him cross the road and try the door, but Mr Flynn had turned down the lamps and turned himself into bed hours before and all was in darkness in the snug and parlour. His footsteps echoed around the side of the Old Pitcher and into the yard. My eye, I thought, he’ll be for it if he discovers Mr Flynn’s mastiff, and without thinking too much on it I leaned out of the window and cried out, not too loud so as to wake everyone, but enough to get the gent’s attention.
‘Hello, below!’ I cried, and the clattering footsteps stopped. I couldn’t see him owing to the deep darkness, and so I called out again, ‘Hello, below there! Sir!’ The footsteps turned themselves about and cracked across the cobbles, as I charged on, little thinking, desiring to be helpful.
I leaned out further from my nest and called, piano-like, ‘What is it you want, sir? Can I help you?’ He was as still as you like. I could almost hear him breathing. But, fool that I was, I kept at him. ‘Are you lost, sir, or taken ill? Shall I call Mr Flynn, sir?’ And then came again the sound of his boots, striking the stones like hammers and echoing around the yard. For he must have seen me, framed like a picture in the window, calling down to him. And I knew him. Or I knew his boots and their melody and their agony and what horrors they might create. It was as though I was back in Whitechapel, back in the Row behind the Constellation, back in my nightmare where he runs after me. The gent, Bessie’s murderer, after me now, as Lucy said he would be.
I have no recollection of how long I stood at my little window looking down into the darkness, searching out the face that went with the sound of those footsteps and which I knew was looking up at me from the shadows. Searching it out, but not finding it. It might have been minutes or hours, but something decided me that the only thing I could do was, like a rabbit bolting into its hole, to slam the window and secure the catch, and then check the bar on the door, and put my chair against it also.
Matters Better then Worse
Corney Sage – Springwell
I spent a bad night, the first one ever in Springwell, and got up the next day feeling very cheap. It was Friday, and a Grand Fashionable Night at the Pavilion, and Mr Cashmore, being an exacting man, liked to ‘give patrons a taste of the Metroplis’, as he put it – and charge ’em Metropolis prices. No one minded. It was the only entertainment to be had and Grand or Fashionable or not, people bought their tickets and looked forward to it.
I attended business as per, talking myself up and feeling sunnier as I stepped out upon the Parade, and tipped my hat here and there, and was greeted most cordially by Mr Beeton, the box-keeper who, as far as I could see, never left his box, but lived there entirely. Indeed, inside the box, which was no more than a cupboard, he had everything a man could want. As it were, a home in miniature. A pail of water in the corner, covered by a towel, for washing. A small stove on which he heated water for his tea. Mr Kean, his dog, and Mrs Malibran, his cat, both settled in their places, one sleeping always at his feet and the other on the top of his ledgers on a high shelf where she kept down the spider population. An old hat box stood duty as a container for clean collars and handkercher, hair oil and toothpicks, and a small, round-headed punisher, for dealing with difficult patrons. His meals (which he sent out for and which were brought round regularly by a crippled boy called Nidd) he ate in the box, so that there was always the lingering smell of mutton and greens to greet visitors. (But Mr Cashmore didn’t seem to mind, which surprised me for in every other way he was a to-the-letter man.)
Mr Beeton was, as I said, eager to greet me, and came out of his box (which he did so infrequently that he had to pause and adjust his pins and look up into the sky with an expression of wonder) and pumped my hand up and down like he was drawing water.
‘Professor Moore,’ he said in a high and whistling voice, ‘I’ve been looking forward to this occasion. Will you take a turn with me, sir?’
I was surprised and began to excuse myself, for I was due in the hall for a half past ten call, and do not like to keep musicians waiting.
‘Just five minutes, sir,’ he pleaded, ‘knowing your duties are onerous and time so precious, but feeling confident of your good nature. . .’
I had to give in. How could I not? At which he laid his hand upon my arm in a confidential way and we walked a few steps back and forth in front of the box.
‘It is a pleasure to me, Professor Moore, to talk to an educated man. Many persons pass by my window, sir, but few have a university education. From which university did you gain your degree, sir?’
Here was a puzzle and a dilemma. It was a surprise to discover that Mr Beeton was not wise to the world of the concert room. If he had been, he might know that most every comic fellow was a Professor or Doctor or Monsieur, and that these were adopted titles for the stage, and not signifying anything. But here was a man in earnest, with his hand upon my sleeve and a smile upon his lips, not at all anxious to hear that I was found on a doorstep in Portsmouth and educated at the Ragged School, but rather that I was the son of a respectable clergyman, and that I had been to the best (the only) university I had heard of, so I said, with as careless an air as I could muster, ‘Oh, Cambridge, sir, but I got tired of all the talking and the reading, so I tried the stage instead.’
His earnest face lit up like a lamp. ‘Did you really, sir? Well! And what a thing to do! Get tired of reading books all day? And of educating young gentlemen in the philosophy and the Greek? Why, I can’t count the pleasure I have in my little library, sir. Every day I take down a volume and open it up, just so, and here is Homer, sir, and the letters of Pliny, sir, and the Lives of the Emperors, which are my favourites.’
I nodded sagely and said I was partial to the Lives myself, though I liked a letter or two if they had plenty of moment to them, and weren’t too much occupied with politics, which I couldn’t abide. He looked at me curiously, and then laid his hand across his mouth and laughed for all he was worth. Indeed, the tears rolled out of his eyes and down his cheeks in a way I have never seen before in a man.
‘Droll, Professor Moore,’ says he, wiping his eye with a handkercher, ‘which a man can be with a education such as yours. Could I ask you, would it be a great imposition to invite you into the box to look at my little library?’
I had already begun to shake my head, but he whistled on.
‘I would deem it such an honour, sir, such a privilege to have your opinion and perhaps, though I should not impose but feel emboldened to do so, perhaps your recommendations. A bookseller in Plymouth sends me them cheap, if they are deficient by a page or two.’
He was so earnest and desirous of my attention that I could do no more than follow him into the box (and we were tight and cosy in there) and fix my eyes upon the twenty or so volumes ranged upon a shelf above the window. Mrs Malibran, who I believe saw through me immediately and was merely waiting on her moment to denounce me to her master and to the world as a fraud, looked down at me from the shelf above, though Mr Kean, as usual sleeping under the table, was in no way interested in my dilemma. I scratched my chin and cocked my head this way and that (as I’ve seen men do outside booksellers), and I made murmuring noises (as above), while Mr Beeton looked anxiously on.
