The Snake-Oil Dickens Man
Ross Gilfillan
A fast, witty and evocative first novel about the allure of the con man, the journey of a young man in search of his father, the loss of innocence and the works of Charles Dickens. Full of adventure, tricks, imagination and originality, The Snake-oil Dickens Man is the assured debut from an exciting writer.It is 1867 and Charles Dickens has arrived in Boston on his second reading tour of America. Meanwhile in Hayes, Missouri, Billy Talbot leaves town in search of his father after he has been told that he is the illegitimate son of the author of Great Expectations. Billy’s journey is rich with tricks, disguises and chance meetings that lead him to Hope Scattergood, a consumptive charlatan with his own interest in the great writer. Together Scattergood and Billy devise the ‘Dickens Lay’, a con that may lead Billy to a meeting with his father, the real Charles Dickens.The Snake-oil Dickens Man, tells a story that stretches from the clamour of Barnum’s circus rushing through the grassy plains of Missouri to the packed and riotous theatres of New York, and resonates with the writings of Charles Dickens. The Snake-oil Dickens Man is a funny and unforgettable tale of adventure, confidence tricks and the loss of innocence.
Copyright (#ulink_da865c19-2070-5daa-8113-723c05d4a8ba)
Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain in 1998
Copyright © Ross Gilfillan 1998
Ross Gilfillan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781857028140
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007485062
Version: 2017-02-03
Praise (#ulink_dc9ce33f-3197-5a90-addc-aa07b3eb43da)
‘A quality romp set in the America of the late 1860s … Robustly written, and with plenty of Dickensian resonances, Gilfillan’s first novel is an ingenious and entertaining read.’ Mail on Sunday
‘Weaves a fascinating tale … The atmosphere of 1867 is brilliantly captured.’ Oxford Mail
‘Compulsive, quirky, beautifully constructed, a read that has you wondering why no one has ever tried it before.’ Birmingham Post
Dedication (#ulink_805b9b1b-8732-517c-845d-10a95334b85c)
To my wife Lisaand Fae, Tom and Alice
Contents
Cover (#ua0048e25-7dbd-5356-a18e-269ee5767efb)
Title Page (#u106c1945-2ba5-5f75-852c-3c557bcecac9)
Copyright (#ulink_64cd0497-a0a5-5933-9901-e292fa1cb840)
Praise (#ulink_b81fe947-55f9-54c3-bf6e-8ded5847d464)
Dedication (#ulink_9bf94969-62b4-5b2a-892c-d8a442dd7fb9)
Prologue (#ulink_0a7bd454-15aa-52d9-82dd-12e8876bbb36)
Chapter One (#ulink_1f3c53bd-d602-57fd-adeb-5e439f465beb)
Chapter Two (#ulink_21d7f03a-12da-5416-938c-5c5d54eb6777)
Chapter Three (#ulink_937cb39c-ab46-5e48-96a9-0203c6a69d8f)
Chapter Four (#ulink_df4f36dd-3657-5380-ade6-85496caf39d4)
Chapter Five (#ulink_697d4f09-2274-5558-a3ae-d8250bad1c1b)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_eb254e4f-425c-5803-b829-0c3dc40ff239)
Ces Américains qui aiment tant à être dupés Baudelaire
NO ONE DOES something for nothing any more.
So the smart money says, anyway. If this is true then I suppose there is no reason why I should not be well recompensed for the hours I will sit at this desk, removed from spheres of more certainly remunerative activity. There are infinite ways in which wealth can be acquired with much less expenditure of effort than by the writing of a memoir. No, the profit I hope for here will be of another kind. I relate what follows not for pecuniary gain but rather that I might by the process of autobiography come to understand more of myself and see the beginning of the thread that has woven the thing that now I am.
Let me begin as I mean to continue – honestly – and say right out that I am not as I seem. No doubt you know me by my reputation and my office but even were we strangers, you might observe my English-cut suit and my fancy waistcoat and hear my knowing tones and mistake me for a man of consequence. And if I’m offering you some deal that’s going to make you rich quick and won’t jeopardise your capital one little bit then that’s exactly how you would have me. For all the world, I am prosperous, refined and respected. I am solid and that is all you need to know.
But perhaps what you now see really is me. Perhaps money has made me one of you: just as prosperous and as solid as any of the speculators, private investors and city tycoons I have lately lived off so well. All I know for certain is that once I thought I was different and that this journal shall be my testimony.
At this distance it is hard for me to credit that I was once a veritable slave to a low hotelier; that I was employed by Elijah Putnam as an agent of his own ambition and that I let my mother be abominably abused. Harder still to acknowledge that I owe my present eminence to an individual whose philosophy was markedly at odds with those who hold propriety and the law in reverence.
But now I have arrived at a time in my life when I would leave off pretence and apply myself to the task of understanding of what I am made. I shall begin today while my wife is in Mississippi, opening up the house in Natchez. She hardly needs two whole months to ready the place for Christmas – only an excuse to decamp from Washington DC. (She has never enjoyed playing the part of the politician’s wife.) However, her absence affords me ideal opportunity to begin my work. To this end I am seated at my great oaken desk, my inkpot brim-full and my nib poised above half a ream of white paper, fully resolved that I will not be distracted by my present great responsibilities or by the formless stain of black ink which despoils the oak and has proven the match of brush and polish alike.
But where to begin? A natural place might be with my mother and father but if I had known their histories in the first place this one would not be worth the candle. Nor was sense made of my childhood until its term had expired. Rather, I must overleap my dim origins and begin at a place which now seems pregnant with some significance, although I can offer no more apt beginning than this, with which you will surely be familiar:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
And so to make a start.
Chapter One (#ulink_0aa03351-171e-5b4a-ba59-5e27c7caadb8)
I
I HAD BEEN reading to Mr Putnam, same as I always did, right after supper and before I climbed the ladder to my bed beneath the rafters. I guessed he had something on his mind because this night he let me choose.
‘We’ll have the one about the feller with high hopes,’ I said, and settled down on the hard chair by the lamp and began to read.
Pip was still on the marshes, beside the graves of his five little brothers, when Mr Putnam, who had been quite unusually restless throughout, fidgeting and biting his fingernails, said, ‘That’s enough, boy. You must know it by heart. I had hoped you might have read us the latest part of his new one.’
I wanted to tell him that I had never liked that book and that when I had read its opening pages, which he bid me do as soon as the first instalment landed on American soil, I had been terrified out of my senses. I told no one that for weeks afterward, my bed became a boat whose dreadful occupants were black and faceless figures who sculled the river at night, fishing for the bloated corpses of suicides. I went to replace the volume but he heard my tread and sat me down.
‘Stay,’ he said. ‘On reflection, it occurs to me that the book will do very well for tonight.’
I took it up again and read of a marshland that I thought must bear resemblance to that which spread out beyond the limits of our own town – for how different can bogs be? – and of the hulks, which put me in mind of the captured ships tethered by the quay, here in Hayes, Missouri, and of the ranks of rebel prisoners that had shambled through the town only months ago. And of Magwitch; I thought I knew him, too.
I read mechanically, the narrative familiar and my mind more fully employed on matters closer to home. There was that about Mr Putnam tonight I was certain signified an urgency to communicate something to me. But it wasn’t my place to ask and I read on and let him bide his time. Pip had returned to the forge and to Joe, but also to his terrible sister and Tickler and still Elijah said nothing. He only continued to grip the copper head of the weather-worn old stick that he had come to rely and rest upon now that his eyes had untimely closed upon the world.
As I turned the pages, I saw he was no longer attending to the words I read but seemed instead to be listening to other voices and was murmuring and nodding in tune with conversations to which I could not be privy. I stopped the reading and he was immediately sensible of the closing of the book. I expected him to remark my temerity but instead, he waved me away and said only that it, whatever that was, would wait until another day. I snuffed out the lamp and found the handle of the door.
My eyes were still accustomed to the bright light and I was feeling my way along the black hallway, when I collided with a bulk I knew straightaways was Merriweather. I had run into him hard and he cuffed me, as I knew he would. I made to let him pass, thinking how it might teach him to be less mean with his gas, when he took me by the collar and whispered so close I could tell the grade of the whisky on his breath:
‘What did he say? ’Bout the lawyer he had up with him today?’
I said he hadn’t mentioned no lawyer to me, just gone and giv’n me my lesson, same as always. My sight had gotten used to the obscurity in time to see that this wasn’t going to satisfy the old goat tonight. I tried to dodge a blow he aimed at my head but either I was too slow or he wasn’t as drunk as I had judged because he caught me one, bang upon the temple and the black hall was lit up in flashes of lightning.
Even as a child, I had never considered Merriweather a strong man, but, reeling from his lucky blow, I couldn’t fail to notice that he had hefted me up by my shirt-collars and now had me pinned against the wall. He hissed spittle in my ear:
‘Mighty queer a man would see no visitors in three weeks and then spend three hours tucked up with a lawyer, ain’t it? And say nothing to no one?’
‘He didn’t mention no lawyer, I swear,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’ and his stubby little finger poked my face so that my eye bulged. Again, it came to me that even a skinny stick like me could maybe take a fat runt like Merriweather if push came to shove. He must have known the direction my thoughts were taking because he spat out the name that always brought me up short and I swore I would never lie to him, though I reckon I must have lied my way through every day at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.
I don’t know that he believed me. I have learnt since that you need to look steadily into the pits of a man’s eyes before you can be certain he has swallowed your line and that sometimes the act of looking itself is all that is needed to gull your mark. Merriweather’s eyes were normally the most polished and plated of any soul’s windows. They blinked ignorance and stupidity when faced with subjects beyond his purview of money and the baser forms of gratification and were slits of suspicion and avarice at most other times.
Tonight, though, they had been digested in the general pitchy gloom of that unlit hallway and I awaited his pleasure and my doom. He let go his grip and when he spoke he sounded mollified. Maybe he was just pleased with the bull’s-eye he had landed me.
‘Course, I reckoned he’d not be discussing his business with you anyways. It’d be me he would come to. But, for the sake of insurance, you be sure and tell me if Mr Putman ever mentions anything concerning that lawyer. Anything at all, you hear?’
I heard, for now, anyway. I waited until Merriweather had descended to the saloon and somewhere between stepping upon my ladder and crawling onto my old straw tick mattress, I swore that just as soon as I could arrange it, things would be different.
II
I knew quite soon what it was that Elijah Putnam had come so close to divulging to me that night. He had been sick for several weeks and he must have thought himself a lot worse than we did because he had indeed called in a lawyer and he had made his will. He was unwell, we all knew that. His failing sight, that had been so poor he had utilised my services as reader, amanuensis and discreet guide whenever he made a rare excursion from the hotel, was now entirely gone.
Elijah appeared to interpret his blindness as a terrible and significant portent, an indicator that his illness was progressing towards its final stages and that the next time he beheld a scene that was bright and clear and full of colour it would be in the Kingdom of Heaven.
By the next day I had clean forgotten about Elijah’s strange preoccupation, his suggestion that he had something to reveal to me and the behaviour of Merriweather in the hallway. My daily routine was one that left no time for idle imaginings.
I rose, as usual, to the sound of the roosters in the yard and shimmied down the stairs to the front hall where I unlocked the doors and swept the front step. I hung out the sign that advertised that we had vacancies and that our vittles were always hot and fresh, which stretched the truth a little, and fixed up the saloon. I washed up the glasses, righted the chairs, collected up the stubs of cigars and cleaned out the spit-boxes. Next I made a swift inventory of the stock and made sure that Irving, who kept bar, hadn’t been cheating. Not that Merriweather considered this a bad business practice – it was he who saw to it that I qualified every bottle of liquor we kept – it only became a problem when someone else got the benefit.
By the time the saloon was shipshape there were stirrings in the kitchen. I wouldn’t get anything to eat before I had prepared the table for the commercial gentlemen’s breakfasts and assisted in the laying on and clearing away of the plates of ham, pickles, salmon, shad, liver, steaks, sausages and other sundry items that these voracious salesmen and drummers demanded every time they sat down to board. I had emptied the pail of leftovers into the hogs’ trough and helped myself to bread and butter before changing out of my overalls to run errands in the town. We all had to look our best in town; Merriweather’s wasn’t called the ‘Particular’ for nothing and appearance counted for a lot.
There was a mirror in the porch, which was there for the gentlemen to set themselves aright before sallying forth to engage the town’s merchants. The glass swung on a central pivot and depending on how he placed it, a fellow could check the arrangement of his neckwear and hat, or the shine on his shoes. I always inspected my turnout thoroughly in case I should, accidentally on purpose, run into Cissy Bullock.
I can’t say that using the glass ever boosted my self-esteem. My store-bought clothes were good enough when they were gotten me, but now I had grown and the pants were too short, the sleeves the same and the ill-fitting stove-pipe hat, which Merriweather passed on to me, now served mainly as a challenging target for small boys with slingshots. But I thought that no mere apparel could mitigate the physiognomy with which I had been cursed. The deep-set blue eyes were much too big and doubtless I appeared as if perpetually amazed. The nose was sharp and much too small and my lips, I was told by a schoolfellow, were like a girl’s. This montage of errors was crowned with a tangle of tumbleweed that served as hair. I mustered what dignity the application of a little bears’ grease would afford and took up my basket.
On that occasion, the morning after the encounter with Merriweather, I had a small list of items to buy, a couple of letters to mail and some bills to settle. Then I planned to attend to a little business of my own: I traded in the gossip of the commercial gentlemen; in this way some merchants were able to hold out for better terms when they came to dealing with our guests and I was able, sometimes, to make fifty cents or even a dollar for myself.
Meantime, I would need cash to transact the business of the hotel. I could hear Merriweather in conversation in his parlour and considered postponing my departure. I preferred to encounter him on other ground; there had been times when a summons to Merriweather’s parlour had occasioned terror. It wasn’t that the room with its huge and heavy furniture and a crimson wallpaper such as Satan himself might have picked out was ugly and reeked of the sweet and stale smell of Merriweather’s cigars. Nor that he had beaten me in that place. There was something else about that room, some childhood memory that time had erased, but whose palimpsest was still traceable on the adult mind, which made me strangely awkward and uncomfortable whenever I addressed Merriweather in his private sanctum.
Merriweather was breakfasting in his shirt-sleeves, his black moustache twitching and collecting crumbs as he ate buttered toast and listened to what Silas Amory, the newspaper editor, was saying. ‘Now this town has the railroad, we need to give the city folk a reason to use it, get ’em coming into the town. Trading, settling, starting up businesses. It’s not happening yet. Tell me, Merriweather, has the railroad brought you the business they said it would?’
Amory’s slight and angular figure perched upon his chair. Only his small dark eyes showed animation as he awaited Merriweather’s reply. I thought he looked like a thieving magpie, intent on stealing morsels from the hotelier’s plate. Merriweather sneered and swallowed. ‘Waal, I allow it might have done that,’ he said, reaching for his cigar-box, ‘had not the railroad company gone and erected its own hotel hard by the depot. They never said nothing about that and I call it low-down and irregular.’
‘Sharp, too, though,’ said Amory. ‘So I guess you have to lower your prices to secure the custom.’
‘That I do, and allow for some little expenditure on advertising that fact, too. There just ain’t enough people coming through this town. Not for us all to turn a good profit.’ He swallowed some coffee and said, ‘What this place needs is a magnet of some kind. I don’t know, s’posin’ someone was to let on, to a newspaper, perhaps, that a little gold had been found in the creek?’
‘We’d get the wrong kind of people,’ Amory said, ‘and they’d be gone soon as they knew the truth.’
‘I reckon you’re right at that. This business needs some kind of a shove, though. Couple more years like this one and I’ll be looking for a job at the Central Pacific.’
‘Bad as that?’ said Amory.
‘Close to it,’ said Merriweather. ‘You know I got a little capital left. It ain’t much but maybe the time has come to venture it. Find some sure-fire investment opportunity. How about precious minerals?’
‘Nothing sure about that line. Lot of people lose their shirts. You might reconsider that matter we spoke of last fall. I’d still welcome a backer if you’d like to make your investment in me.’
‘You?’
‘I’m running for mayor whether or not you stake me, Melik. I’ll get the money if I have to put the Bugle in hock. But if you come in with me now, you won’t see no new hotels going up in Hayes. When I’m mayor I can put all kinds of interesting business your way.’
I cleared my throat and asked Merriweather for the money and I thought I saw Silas Amory damning me with his eyes.
‘Gaul-durn it, boy, allus asking for this or that. I tell you, Silas, this boy has drained me of a sizeable fortune since I took him ’n’ his mother in, nigh on twenty years ago. Twenty years of feeding and clothing. Sizeable, I tell you. Ah, but that’s the cross a true Christian has to bear, I suppose.’
‘Well, you got yourself a wife into the bargain, kind of,’ said Amory, with a leer to which Merriweather refused to respond. Instead, he spat out the end of the cigar and snapped, ‘Charity, Amory. You seen her, as ill-educated a crittur as ever crawled from the swamp. What I done, I mostly done for charity. Never mind what people might say.’
‘So long as you don’t go extending your charity to other women hereabouts.’
Merriweather choked on a crust, and his features broke into a leer that was quite as lascivious as Amory’s. He said Amory was a card and no two ways about it and then he pulled out his purse and warned me to account for every penny. I took the money and skedaddled down the steps. Old Henry, who had worked in the neighbouring livery stable for ever, probably, was being walked around to the front door by his chestnut mare.
‘That for me?’ I said.
‘No, t’ain’t, as well you know,’ Henry said. ‘It’s hired to the gennulman as arrived late last night.’
‘Well, ain’t you got some broken-down old nag you could lend me? I have to go to town.’
‘Elsa an’t broken-down, jest old,’ said Henry. ‘An’t your learnin’ taught you no respect for age?’
‘I’ll try and acquire some,’ I told him. As I started for town, I tried to summon up instances in which I had considered that respect was due. I was probably of a cynical disposition then but my short history had given me few occasions to be otherwise. I was twenty-four years old and young men of my age had already established themselves in lines of work and some were succeeding in their own concerns. Others were married.
I walked on towards town, lamenting my own single state, which I considered was partly the fault of older folk. I would most certainly have married Cissy Bullock and maybe now be lying in her arms had not our secret liaison and moonlight encounters been brought to an unsatisfactory close when Mr Bullock discovered us on their porch one night. I was returning her from a dance where we had contrived to lose her Aunt Louise and reckoned her folks would all be asleep by that time. Events had been taking a romantic course and I was hopeful of pressing my suit.
But Pop Bullock had found us and he was furious. He rounded on me like a mad dog. Foolishly, I tried to explain and lost all my standing. There wasn’t anything that needed excusing. I had behaved honourably and didn’t deserve this. But he had a head of steam up and was hollering for all the neighbourhood to hear, ‘I guess I’ve heard more than I ever want to about you and yours. Particular indeed! No one respectable goes up there any more. Travelling gentlemen and sharpers maybe but church folk don’t and my daughter won’t neither. You come around here again and I’ll fill you full of buckshot, understand?’
Pop Bullock had forbidden any further congress between Cissy and me and that was all because of the way Melik Merriweather ran his affairs. Or at least, so I believed at the time. I kicked stones down the track, like each one was a little granite head of Melik Merriweather. That morning I had been galled that he had ridiculed my mother as if her son had not been standing before him. ‘As ill-educated a crittur as ever crawled from the swamp,’ he had said.
Merriweather never gave a damn that my mother couldn’t read or write and had at best a basic understanding of life. I supposed he was just excusing himself to Silas Amory. But that she and I came from the swamp was undeniable. The oldest, faintest memory I have is the smell of the swamp. I don’t even know if it is a real memory. Maybe it came later, when I knew a little more, but that makes no odds: the stench of something rotten is too strong and too pervasive to be dismissed as fancy. The odour is sickly sweet and I seem to know it again – in the air on the marshes where the trees are stunted and toppled and the roads are still mud and corduroy – or strangely, in the stale smoke that is ever-present in Merriweather’s parlour.
Other memories are of equally doubtful provenance. Sometimes I think I remember the stage coach in which I know I travelled from Cairo but I know that can hardly be as I was still a babe in arms when I was taken away and installed with my mother at Merriweather’s Particular Hotel.
Within sight of the town, I was sensible, suddenly, of the thunder of hooves. I had been so lost in thought as I approached the church and burial ground that marked the town’s limits that I didn’t hear a thing until horse and rider were upon me and had nearly run me down. The Particular’s chestnut mare with its rider, cloaked and masked for the dust, galloped past. It wasn’t common to see anyone in a great hurry in these parts and I watched until he was out of sight.
III
Before my eyes were opened I was the lowest creature of evolution and I’m sure Mr Darwin would have recognised in me then some hairy antecedent of my present evolvement. My lot was better than that which had lately belonged to slaves and also than that of most new freedmen but I was a child strangely and harshly circumstanced and what might be supportable now, was infinitely less so then.
You will wonder how this came to be and to answer that I must go back to the beginning of all things and return to the smell of the swamp, which might or might not be my oldest surviving memory. There is that and I can summon its noxious vapour even now but what else of that time survives? Not much. The mingling of images and impressions and half-remembered speech that I retain must date from two or three years after I was brought to the hotel as a babe in arms and in what order they occurred I have not the slightest idea. But they are as follows.
I am pulled from my mother’s arms and someone is crying, no, howling and whether it is me or my mother who keens so piteously, I don’t know. This, I now believe, must have been the moment I was taken from my mother to live at the house of Elijah Putnam. A woman’s hands grip my wrists as she teaches me to use knife and fork. She leans across my shoulders, her breasts brushing my neck and her sweet-smelling breath whispers encouragement in my ear and I am grateful. The same woman is talking, loudly enough for me to hear clearly from the top of the stairs on which I sit, ‘Don’t take him away from me, Elijah, he’s all I have.’
And I remember the smoking and acrid-smelling remains of the house in which she died: the blackened doorframe and uprights that still stood among great heaps of charcoal and ashes and the half-burned artefacts and knick-knacks I rescued from the ruins and were my damaged records of a time when I had been happy.
There is the schoolroom, too, in which Elijah Putnam, appearing little different in my memory than he did when last I saw him, strides up and down between the desks. Stopping at my own with much greater regularity than at others, he points out this or that in a book or corrects marks I am making on a slate. There are many schoolroom memories: of reading aloud before the class or standing upon a chair with a sign about my neck that advertises that I am slothful; of my classmates finding me alone one day and taking their turns to cuff me about the ears … Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet ringing in the ears they stung so long ago.
It must have been soon after Mrs Putnam died that I left my room at his house and first slept beneath the roof of the Particular Hotel. My history is quite distinct after this date. After living a relatively ordered and peaceful life with Mr and Mrs Putnam, I found myself plunged into a chaotic world in which my function appeared to be to scrub floors, fetch and carry wash-basins, empty chamber-pots, change bed-linen, polish the boots, help the cook, wait on and clear away the tables, run errands, help Henry with the livery horses, clean the saloon and do any number of jobs, all at once, that would probably have taken three people to get done anywhere else.
I don’t know when I first encountered Merriweather but he seems a part of every memory I have of my new existence at the hotel. My life was quite suddenly, utterly changed. It seemed no stranger to be working my hands to the bone in the role of unpaid factotum to a hotelier than it did to find myself receiving personal tuition from Elijah Putnam, who had retired from his position as schoolteacher and had taken rooms in the Particular, to which I repaired every day.
But it wasn’t the work, exhausting as it always was, that made my days so miserable. I think I could have borne that well and enjoyed some parts of it, too, had I known that Merriweather were not always somewhere about the building, ready to box my ears or make threats of violence that would be directed not at me but at someone else and these I feared more than anything Merriweather might do to me.
I knew that the woman who worked mostly in the laundry and whom I sometimes caught stealing along the corridors was my mother. She cut the strangest figure of the establishment. It wasn’t just her worn-out appearance: she was taller than her posture suggested, her hands wrinkled from her work, rather than by nature, although what age she had then attained was hard to guess. Her clothes were patched and stained and she and they smelt strongly of the wash-house.
What was more extraordinary was the way she carried herself – like a whipped animal. She kept closely to herself and could even sometimes be heard running ahead of footfalls in an effort to conceal herself from any approach. She rarely met a glance and her eyes that were normally cast down were often shielded anyway by the wild mess of lank locks that fell about and often concealed her physiognomy. It could be a shock for a stranger to catch her with her face unobscured and find that she was actually pretty.
I discovered that this was my mother not long after I moved from Elijah’s house to the Particular Hotel. I had been helping Mary Ann, the cook’s girl, to knead the dough. The kitchen was warm with the baking and Merriweather, whom I had already identified as an enemy to children, was playing at cards in the saloon. I was happy to be there with Mary Ann. She wasn’t more than a few years older than I was and had become my only ally in this inhospitable place.
There was fun to be had when Cook wasn’t about and as she was napping, the bread-making had become a great game. Water was splashed and flour was spilt. Just as we were becoming so riotous that Mary was saying ‘Hush, you’ll wake Cook’, I caught sight of a figure in the corner of my eye and stopped everything, fearing Cook or Merriweather had caught us fooling.
But it was the woman I had seen skulking in the corridors. She hastened through the kitchen and out into the yard. Mary Ann looked up from her dough and muttered something like, ‘They hanged the witches at Salem,’ and giggled. I was shocked.
‘Is she a witch?’ I asked. She certainly looked like one.
‘Aye and a terrible one at that,’ said Mary Ann. ‘You seen all them cats in the graveyard?’ I had. There was a whole colony of feral cats there. ‘Them’s her families and she dances nekkid with ’em on dead men’s graves, come a moonlit night.’
‘Has she ever put a spell on you?’ I asked, terrified to find such awful danger so imminent.
‘She sure has. Turned me into a bullfrog one day and I had to hop all the way to th’pothecary, get some help.’
I don’t know if we were overheard or whether chance had played its part but when we looked through the door the woman was to be seen sweeping the back porch.
‘She’s got a broom too!’ I exclaimed, weak with horror.
‘I’m so scared I could just faint,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I never seen her with her magic broom afore. Likely she’ll murder us here or take us with her on her broom and do it in the forest. Oh, Billy, help me!’
‘What can I do?’ I said, scared stiff but unwilling to let down my only friend. ‘Shall I get a gun?’
‘Guns is no good ’ginst witches,’ said Mary Ann. ‘You gotta go right up to them and look straight into their eyes. Then you gotta say, “Listen, witch, to this my spell, get thee gone or burn in hell.” And then you says, “Begone old hag, begone!”’
‘You sure?’ I asked, and Mary Ann said it had never failed yet and the last witch they had, vanished in a cloud of smoke.
From where we had ducked down under the kitchen table, I could see the woman passing and repassing the door, sweeping the fall leaves back onto the yard. I had no doubt that this was indeed a powerful witch who might at any moment look up from her labours and make me into one of the hogs which were then squealing beyond the stoop.
I looked at Mary Ann who was pouting and appearing awfully frightened and I knew what I must do. I emerged from under the table and edged about the kitchen to where the door stood open. I looked once again at Mary Ann who signalled me to go on. Mustering my courage, I stepped out on the porch. There was no one there. Relief flooded my soul. ‘She ain’t here, Mary Ann,’ I called. ‘That witch musta seen me coming and took flight.’
Then the woman, who had been around the side of the house, turned the corner and looked at me. Her hair had been brushed off her face, whose still-youthful appearance seemed ill-fitted to her crone’s hands and stooped posture. Her green eyes were unusually bright and, to me, menacing. There was nothing to do but defend myself. I said something that approximated the incantation Mary Ann had taught me. I don’t know exactly what but it seems to me I called her a witch and an old hag more often than had been prescribed.
She remained where she was, still looking intently at me. I wondered if I had transfixed her and whether at any moment she might disappear in smoke. The spell seemed to be taking hours to work and I said, ‘Get thee gone, hag,’ louder and louder and still she stood there. Maybe in my panic I was finally shouting the words because the next thing I knew, Merriweather was standing by me, looking mightily amused and saying, ‘So you’ve met your mother, have you?’
I hardly need to tell you that I was terrifically shocked at this fantastic revelation. I, the son of that monstrosity? I had known that Elijah and Mrs Putnam were not my natural parents, whom I had vaguely understood were both dead. To find that my mother existed under the same roof and that she was as I saw her was a shock of cataclysmic proportions.
I was revolted but whether by her weird appearance and my newly-discovered relationship to her or by my stupid and heartless behaviour, I was too young to know. Whichever it was, such was the revulsion I felt that I concurred willingly with Merriweather’s dictate that I should at all times avoid her society.
And so, for the first year or so, I saw little of the woman they told me was my mother. I worked as usual, performing the same routine chores and becoming adept at anticipating what needed to be done to keep the business running smoothly. Merriweather let up on beating me and began to lean on me instead. I won’t say I was happy but I was becoming accustomed to my lot. But sometimes, as I performed some mechanical and dull task such as blacking the boots of the guests, I would be unable to stop my mind from returning to that woman and wondering about my own origins. But this was never productive and my curiosity stopped short of breaking Merriweather’s injunction and overcoming my own disgust, to talk to the woman herself. Besides, I had much to occupy me now and the times at which I had leisure to consider the oddities of my birth were few. Increasingly, I found my evenings taken up with the hours of tuition I was receiving from Elijah Putnam.
Boys will accept a status quo easily, especially when they have never known anything different and I don’t think I ever properly questioned why Elijah Putnam had singled me out for special attention at his school. Perhaps I assumed that it was because of the affection I was due as his ward. Nor did I find it strange that upon the death of his wife, he should throw up his position of schoolmaster and move into the rooms on the second floor of the Particular Hotel.
But move he had and even after years of infesting the place, it still looked as if its occupant had never intended these apartments as his permanent residence. There was insufficient shelving for his books and these stood in piles or collapsed in heaps about his chair and on top and underneath of the table. He had a big globe, whose dominant colours seemed to be red and blue. There were several oil lamps, whose wicks it was always my first job to trim and so our sessions of study were never interrupted by the going down of the sun.
What never ceased to puzzle me was why Merriweather was compliant with Elijah’s strange and often inconvenient scheme. Just when we seemed at our busiest and I was hurrying this way and that with dinner or tending to newly-arrived horses, the bell would ring and Merriweather might curse but he would always send me upstairs where Putnam would be waiting, book in hand. I could only figure he was pandering to the whim of his only resident guest.
Elijah Putnam had been a part of my life for almost as long as I could remember and yet I really knew very little about him. It was his gentle wife Rosalie I remembered first and who was, for a tragically short time, my mother. Elijah had been then an indistinct figure backgrounding those days and he only showed an interest in me when I grew a little beyond my infancy.
One day in particular I remember. I have always thought of it as the day he discovered me. I had been sitting by Rosalie as she plied her needle amongst a design that included a small house with roses around the door and flowers in its garden. The fall sun was shining low and yellow gold through the trees that shaded the lawn beyond the window. It was a little after the time we were used to expecting Elijah home from the schoolroom and Rosalie had been remarking his tardiness, when the door swung open and Elijah himself strode in.
She put down her sampler and stood to greet her husband but he ignored her proffered kiss and took me up in his arms, an action that both surprised and alarmed me. He carried me to the window where the rays of the setting sun dazzled me and then he turned my head this way and that and seemed to want to see me anew from every angle. At last he put me back upon the sofa and stood, peering down at me, with his hands upon his hips and his chest thrust out. He was smiling broadly and, because his countenance was more usually of a severe set, the effect was remarkable.
‘Well,’ he said, his thick red hair shot through with the dying rays of the sun, ‘this changes everything.’
IV
And presently I will tell you of how everything changed. As people often remark, it is a curious story. But no doubt you remember a masked rider astride the Particular’s chestnut mare and would rather follow him, because he was fast. When I met up with this man, he was in company with one of the most singular individuals it has ever been my fortune to meet.
The morning had been one of routine as I hurried about from one store to another, settling accounts, gossiping with shopkeepers and chewing the fat and plugs of tobacco with young men of my acquaintance. When I had done all I had to do I availed myself of a little leisure and strolled down Main Street, gravitating towards the environs of Cissy Bullock’s house. It was a striking residence, its clapboarding newly white-painted and its garden still in bloom. It was one of the few larger houses to escape molestation when the Yankees had ridden through the town a few years ago and that only because it became the temporary headquarters of a General Crabtree. Traces of the General’s occupation could still be seen, Cissy had told me, in the cigar burns on her father’s desk and in the light squares of wallpaper against which had once hung some valuable paintings.
There was no sign of Bullock himself so I swung a leg over the picket fence and edged around the corner of the house to the source of the music that floated on the air. Through an open window I could see Cissy sitting at the piano. She had on a pretty lemon dress; her hair, that she usually tied up, was let down over her shoulders and it seemed to me I could smell her soap from where I stood. I never saw any picture that looked half as pretty nor mountain stream look an eighth as pure as Cissy did then as she gave herself up to the music, unaware of my proximity. What torture it was to stand within inches of my beloved. I yearned to make my presence known.
But to have done so would have brought trouble not just for me but upon Cissy herself. Bullock might be anywhere about the house and I contented myself with listening to the nocturne and astonishing myself with the brilliance of her hair and delicate tones of her skin until I heard footsteps in the hall. At that juncture, I withdrew and retrudged through the town, heedless of the puddles and mud, oblivious even to the locomotive that must have crashed over the rails right by me, spitting sparks and cinders as it braked for the junction, where I found it, minutes later.
Our chestnut mare was tied up by the tracks still snorting and breathing hard after her exertion. I was curious about her rider and walked alongside of the train from which folk were alighting and carrying off trunks and I peered through the windows wondering if maybe our guest had ridden hard to make the train and be miles away before we discovered his unsettled hotel bill. The man seemed not to be aboard though I was unsure if I would have recognised him anyway. I only saw him once the night before when he had inquired whether there was a printing shop in town and nothing about his appearance or demeanour had been memorable.
I must have been possessed of more striking aspect than he, as when I turned from the last window I found the man I sought standing before me.
‘Pardon me, but ain’t you the manager of the brick hotel? I’d have knowed that hat anywhere. Mighty fine. Unusual, too.’
I admitted that you didn’t see many like it, any more. Was there something I could do for him, I asked.
‘Well, yes, I think there is,’ said the man, who I now noticed was rangy and tall, with wispy wires of hair that escaped from under his hat like stuffing from a chair. ‘I’m in urgent need to speak to someone in authority at that hotel and who knows this town like the back of his hand.’ I assured him that I was such a man and he took me by my arm and led me back to the mare. A man was standing in a buggy, distributing handbills to a small crowd of people and declaiming about something I hadn’t time to get the sense of. The man at my side said, ‘That’s a very important man, in that air fly. Very important for you and this here town. He’ll ‘spect your best room. It’s free, ain’t it?’
I assured him we had a good room vacant at that time. He mounted the buggy and whispered something to his companion, who wished the dispersing crowd well and turned to me.
‘Your servant,’ said the second man in a voice so rich and deep that I heard in it something of the quality of polished mahogany.
Perhaps you have at some time been in the presence of someone whose whole effect is to make you feel under-dressed, under-educated and under-prepared for the occasion? Such was the case then, as I took in the magnificence of the man who now extended a manicured hand. I guessed that he was perhaps fifty years old but he may have been younger or older. His hair was long but well-groomed and he wore what must have been a new city-style of hat, for we had none such here. His suit fitted him no worse than his skin and he gripped a polished, expensive-looking, leather valise. Something glinted upon his waistcoat as he pulled out and glanced at a fancy silver watch.
When he regarded me again, I was impressed by his deep-set, pale blue eyes, which I can only describe as being like beams that shone right inside my head.
‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance, sir,’ he said to me. ‘This is a great day for your town.’ And, with some gravity, presented me with a handbill on which I read the portentous type: P.T. Barnum. Greatest Show On Earth. Astounding Moral Circus, Museum and Managerie. Prop. Phineas T. Barnum. As Exhibited Before the Royal Courts of London and Paris.
There was more of the same but I was only conscious of my heart thumping beneath my shirt and the dazzling eyes of the man whom I took to be the world’s most brilliant showman, P.T. Barnum.
‘Mr Barnum!’ I breathed with no less reverence than a courtier addressing Queen Elizabeth or the Sun King. The thin man laughed but the other held my gaze and only slowly did his eyes crease and did I discern a merry twinkle. But I thought that he said, ‘Not in person, I regret,’ with no less imposing a manner and in my mind some small doubt still lingered.
‘I am Henri D’Orleans,’ he said. ‘And this, John Wilkes. We are advance agents for Mr Phineas Barnum’s great travelling museum and we are here to make the necessary preparations for its visit to this town.’
‘Barnum’s show, here?’ I said.
‘And very soon. We shall require the services of someone who can show us the lie of the land. We will need certain amenities arranged in advance of Barnum’s arrival. And, of course, we must be shown some place where we can throw up the tents and exercise the animals. I hardly suppose you would know of such a person?’
I did and while I rode the chestnut mare back to the hotel, allowing Mr Wilkes to converse with his partner in the fly, (‘You run along ahead, boy, and tell ’em the Barnum men is coming!’) my mind was churning with the excitement I then felt and that I knew would be shared by all when I told them the great news. Just wait till Merriweather and everyone else heard that Billy Talbot was bringing P.T. Barnum to the Particular!
I expected to create a stir, for the impresario had been much in the news, and a hotel guest who had visited Barnum’s American Museum in New York had been greeted with wheel-eyed amazement when he arrived back in town with his tales of performing animals, amazing automatons, astounding tableaux, panoramas and dioramas of scenes from the Creation to the Deluge, incredible human freaks of nature, rope-dancers, jugglers, ventriloquists and any number of scientific and mechanical marvels of the age. It was entertainment beyond possibility.
P.T. Barnum had been news for twenty years. He had the valuable trick of ensuring that anything he did was of great interest to editors of newspapers. Who in the country had not by then heard of his celebrated protégés General Tom Thumb or the Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind? His American Museum had been successful far beyond its home in New York and when he mounted the whole shooting match on wheels – because that was how it seemed – it was a magnet, a dollar-attracting lodestone for miles around, wherever it pitched up. Even his setbacks and reverses, his crashes and his fires were big news.
We all wanted to know what he would do next – there was no stopping Barnum!
Chapter Two (#ulink_5bbff4a7-d952-506f-b4fd-562c9ef7db57)
I
I RODE THAT poor horse hell for leather back to the Particular and jumped off by the front steps, fully expecting to be received like the messenger from Marathon. I found Merriweather where I had left him and poured out my news in one long and unpunctuated narrative. Merriweather was suspicious and sceptical but Amory said he’d had reports of Barnum’s juggernaut rolling through a neighbouring state and thought it might be due at a city not fifty miles from us the following week. Now he considered it, Merriweather recalled that he had seen a handbill bearing Barnum’s name in the street but hadn’t stopped to pick it up.
I said, of course it was Barnum. They’d only have to look at him to know that. And they could do that now because here was the buggy stopping right outside. Merriweather flicked aside the curtains and peered out. Irving, whose excitement had propelled him into the parlour after me, said:
‘I tell you it’s Barnum hisself!’
‘Barnum don’t look like that.’
‘How d’you know? You seen pictures?’
‘No, I ain’t seen no photographs, but why would he claim to be this Dorlyon?’
‘Well, I heard tell, one time he went and sat in the seats of his own cirkis, jest like he was a reg’lar customer and when they was all applaudin’ and calling out for Barnum, he jest sat where he was and never let on.’
‘Kinda thing he might do, then?’
‘Sure is. Exactly so. He’s checking us out, making sure this town’s the one for his show. Looking over this hotel too, I reckon.’
‘Appears the part, I must say,’ said Merriweather. ‘Fancy clothes. And what’s that on his finger? A diamond?’
‘P.T. Barnum ain’t the man to wear paste,’ said Irving.
‘Well, Barnum or no Barnum, it don’t do to keep customers waiting,’ said the hotelier and hustled Irving out the door. Then he checked himself in the glass, sent me about my work and made his own regal entrance.
II
I didn’t see Mr D’Orleans again until dinner-time but I could tell the impression he was creating from the orders that were being sent to the kitchen. Mary Ann and the cook were preparing for dinner like it was Thanksgiving at the White House. I had come to help out but finished up only getting underfoot and Mary Ann loaded me up with a great bundle of bed-linen and sent me spinning across the yard towards the wash-house. My mother was there, as she always was, stirring sheets and shirts in the big copper tub. She said, ‘Lo, Billy,’ but she kept on stirring, her hair all over her eyes, as it ever was.
‘You all right, Ma?’ I said, for I had taken to using this appellation and from that you may deduce that my relationship with her had considerably improved from the day I had attempted to exorcise her from the back stoop.
‘I guess I am,’ she said.
‘Don’t look it, Ma,’ said I, ‘Merriweather getting at you agin?’
‘That man,’ she said.
‘He ain’t beat you again, has he?’ I said. ‘Because if he has …’
She stood up from the wash-tub and straightened herself. Whenever she did this I was surprised to see how much taller she was and how proud she could appear when she didn’t stoop and wasn’t so timid and servile.
‘You listen to me, Billy,’ she flashed, ‘I don’t want you meddling with nothing that happens ’twixt Melik and me; ’taint none of your business. Someone’s going to get hurt if you do that. Understand me now.’
Anger and burning frustration flared like foxfire, as it always did whenever I tried to touch upon the roots of things and asked why Merriweather was so blamed keen to keep us both at the Particular.
I said, ‘I don’t know that I do understand, Ma. It’s awful hard when he threatens you. He does it to keep me in line. What if we was both to go away from here? What then?’
‘Some things jest ain’t possible,’ she said, with grim simplicity, ‘and that’s one of ’em.’
‘I wish I could change your mind.’
‘Don’t worry yourself over me. Merriweather ain’t so bad.’ She plunged her arms into the water and began to pummel one of his shirts. ‘Any case,’ she said, ‘where could we go? Here, I got shelter and food.’
She paused a moment and then said, ‘But you’re getting to be an ejucated fellow, Billy, I can see you gotta look out for something better.’
I couldn’t tell her the nature of the threats Merriweather had made against the eventuality of my deciding to quit him and his hotel, so I let the matter drop and helped her with the laundry. After we had done, I said maybe we could talk more when I came to see her later. My mother occupied a room in a lean-to behind the wash-house and I had taken to visiting her for an hour; not mainly for conversation, because she wasn’t one for that, but to teach her to read and write. But it was beginning to look like she was either word-blind or quite as stupid as Merriweather said and the worst of it was, I could never seem to make out which. As I left the shed, she said, ‘T’aint just Merriweather, Billy!’
‘What do you mean, Ma? Who, then?’
She held out her arms which were lividly red up past the elbow and her hands, wrinkled as a corduroy road, closed me to her bosom.
‘Nobody, Billy. I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘Only sometimes little people get swept into a corner by the big folk and once they get themselves in that corner, there just ain’t no escapin’.’
III
D’Orleans and Wilkes were seated before the most sumptuous table I had ever laid at the Particular. I served them with turkey and chicken and ham and pork and every kind of vittle we had in the larder. Then I brought the wine and was startled, as much as injured, when Merriweather struck me hard for bringing out the second-best. He sent me to fetch bottles from his own stock, apologising to his guests all the while. When I had set wine and a box of cigars upon the table, Merriweather ventured to pull up a chair and address the opulently-attired Mr D’Orleans.
‘I’m told you are agents for Mr Barnum,’ he said, with a smile you might have hung cups on.
‘’Deed we are,’ said Wilkes, through his own chip-toothed grin. ‘Our job’s to make sure everything’s fine and dandy when the travelling museum comes to town. I’m in sole charge of advance publicity. Maybe you seen some of them bills I posted?’
Merriweather nodded but his eyes were fastened upon Mr D’Orleans who continued to eat, quite daintily; eating and observing, but so far without saying anything.
‘And a nation hard job it is,’ the thin man was saying. ‘Barnum demands the best and only the best will do.’
‘Barnum’s is a pretty bully show, ain’t it?’ said Merriweather.
‘Why I should say it is,’ said the man. ‘Best since C’ligula. It’s been laid before the kings and queens of Europe. Barnum give ’em the best seats hisself.’
‘Old Barnum must be making a sizeable pile of money,’ observed Merriweather, eyeing D’Orleans’ ring.
Here Mr D’Orleans slowly ground out his cigar and spoke.
‘The trick, as I’m sure you appreciate, is in spending money to make money.’
Merriweather nodded, eagerly.
‘If Barnum thinks whales are what the public wants to see, he catches them and shows them at the museum, regardless of expense. Barnum has men scouring the earth for fantastical novelties that will pull the city crowds through the doors of his American Museum or the country folk after his travelling circus. Do you know how much it costs Barnum to take this huge show about the states? But it doesn’t matter because Barnum knows he’ll get it back, and more. He spends money on seeing to it that his show is always the best and he also spends on publicising the name of Barnum. Investing and advertising, that’s Barnum’s trick.’
‘I got charge of that,’ said Wilkes, ‘I post the bills, get the puffs in the newspapers, spread the word, hang the bunting, maybe rustle up a band to play Barnum into town. That way, when the caravan turns up, there’s a crowd of customers there already, just begging him to take their dollars. Oh, I think I can say that Barnum knows my worth.’
‘Indeed he does,’ said Mr D’Orleans.
Merriweather regarded the bigger man with fascination.
‘Mind if I inquire what is your function, precisely?’ he said.
‘I call it attending to details,’ said D’Orleans. ‘Mr Barnum is accustomed to the best of everything. He can’t take his circus just anywhere. Everything has to be suitable. He can as easily set the show some place else. It’s not just a matter of a likely spot to pitch the tents and corral the animals. Mr Barnum and his performers need their rest, away from the hurly-burly and quality accommodation is not always easily found.’
‘Very true,’ said Merriweather.
Mr D’Orleans adopted a confidential tone. ‘Mr Merriweather, I take you for a smart businessman. A man doesn’t come to have an establishment as fine as this without being sharp.’
Merriweather nodded complacently.
‘So I hardly need to explain to you the opportunity this will afford?’
‘No, no, I can see that. I heard what it’s done for other places. Why only this morning, I was saying to Silas Amory that what this town needs is some big attraction. I guess the Barnum show would do it.’
‘And you would be agreeable that Mr Barnum and his party lodge here? I did notice another establishment by the railroad …’
‘That plague-hole ain’t fit for Mr Barnum,’ said Merriweather. ‘No, you must have him come here. He’ll get the best of everything.’
‘That’s well because, of course, that’s what he is used to. Now, it’s a tedious business but there are certain small matters that will need attending to before I telegraph Mr Barnum with confirmation that both town and accommodation will suit.’
Telegraph Mr Barnum! That was a good ’un, I thought, as I refilled the glasses.
In the event the business seemed anything but tedious to Mr D’Orleans as he listed the requirements of P.T. Barnum and Merriweather copied them down. D’Orleans was evidently a man who delighted in making the most thorough of preparations. He rocked back in his chair, put his shiny boots upon the table and invited me to light his cigar.
‘Mr Barnum is partial to a good smoke,’ he began. ‘These will never do. But you can procure more?’
‘Oh, cigars? I don’t think that’ll be no problem,’ said Merriweather.
‘And while this sort of thing,’ he indicated the bones of the fowl on his plate, ‘is quite adequate for Wilkes and I, when it comes to Mr Barnum, it simply won’t do. I’m sure you understand.’
‘’Course I do,’ said Merriweather. ‘You just tell me what he wants and I’ll see he gets it.’
‘I should have your cellar replenished.’ He tossed off a bumper of Merriweather’s premium claret as if it were sarsaparilla. ‘I can recommend some vintages, if you like.’
Merriweather frowned at the stranger and said: ‘Pardon me, but I thought he was a teetotaller?’
‘Mr Barnum is, certainly,’ said D’Orleans. ‘It keeps the temperance folk sweet, but,’ and he touched his nose, ‘there are those of his party who are partial to a good Bordeaux. With the time they have spent in France, how could it be otherwise? I shall need to inspect your cellar.’
‘Well, there ain’t much to inspect but I guess I can get more supplied,’ said Merriweather.
‘Then there’s the matter of accommodation. He’ll take your best apartment.’
‘Nothing wrong with the one you’ve got, is there?’
‘Mr Barnum will want something more spacious. And, of course, rooms for his closer associates.’
‘Of course, of course. How many?’
‘All of them, at least,’ said D’Orleans.
‘But I have gentlemen occupying half of them,’ the hotelier demurred.
‘That’s your affair, of course. However, if I were you …’
‘They’ll be gone tomorrow,’ said Merriweather. ‘I’ll pack ’em off to the Central Pacific Hotel.’ Merriweather had begun to look uneasy. He loosened his collar, about which he appeared to be feeling some warmth.
‘There will be no problem?’ asked D’Orleans. ‘Because if there is, you should say so now and we will decamp to the Pacific.’
‘There’s no problem. It’s just going to be a big outlay. And what about my guests? They may never come back.’
‘Spend money to make money,’ smiled D’Orleans. ‘Barnum under this roof should be advertising sufficient to put this place on the map. A moderate outlay now will certainly return itself and more later. There was a fellow in St Louis, had a small but decent enough hotel. Barnum stayed and now he’s got the biggest place in town.’
‘He’s rich as creases,’ said Wilkes.
Merriweather smiled uncertainly. ‘Let me help you to another glass,’ said D’Orleans. ‘I think we understand each other. Now we come to those details peculiar to entertaining Mr Barnum’s party.’
Merriweather sat stiffly, like a rod in a lightning storm.
‘The General will expect special accommodation.’
‘The General?’ said Merriweather.
‘Gen’ral Tom Thumb, o’ course,’ said Wilkes.
‘You’ll know that General Thumb is travelling with Barnum?’ said D’Orleans.
‘I suppose he is,’ said Merriweather. ‘What of it?’
‘It’s your beds,’ said D’Orleans, ‘I measured them at three feet …’
‘And six inches,’ said Wilkes, consulting his notebook.
‘From floorboard to quilt,’ said Mr D’Orleans. ‘They will never do for the General. He will expect a bed of an appropriate size.’
‘Well, where can I get one of those? A child’s crib?’
‘A child’s crib? That would be far beneath his dignity, a gross insult to one of his high standing. Remember that the General has been exhibited at the royal courts of London and Paris …’
‘Then mightn’t he use a set of steps?’
‘That would hardly do! The General is Mr Barnum’s most prized exhibit and personal friend. If all is not acceptable to him, it will be no less so to Mr Barnum himself.’
‘Then what shall I do?’
‘Get a bed made,’ said D’Orleans. ‘And while you’re about it, have the carpenter fashion a wash-stand and chair. And an escritoire, so he may attend to his correspondence.’
‘This is outrageous,’ said Merriweather.
‘And have any regular-sized furniture removed from his room.’
‘Is that everything?’ said Merriweather, weakly.
‘Yes. Excepting the matter of the Indians,’ said D’Orleans.
‘Indians?’ said Merriweather.
‘Just a few Cheyenne, some Apache and a bloodthirsty Kiowa called Yellow Bear who have consented to attach themselves to the circus. They’re perfect gentlemen and won’t give you any problems. So long as you don’t inflame them, of course.’
‘How?’
‘Well,’ said D’Orleans, winking at me, ‘Be sure you don’t put a Commanche in the same bed as an Apache, for one thing. Although I’m given to understand that a Kiowa with a Commanche might be quite safe.’
Merriweather’s eyes were too clouded with the visions of ghostly dollars to see what was afoot but it was now clear to me that Mr D’Orleans or Barnum as we supposed, was having a rare game at Merriweather’s expense. He and Wilkes were enjoying it mightily but no one relished the spectacle as much as myself. In fact, now I remembered how D’Orleans had looked when Merriweather had struck me, I fancied that it might even be for my benefit.
My enjoyment was short-lived. Merriweather invited his guests to take a glass of whisky with him in the saloon, no doubt intending to show them off to his other customers. Wilkes bent over the table and whispered in his ear. Merriweather, his head crooked in my direction, seemed to notice my presence for the first time and snapped, ‘Don’t stand there gawking, Billy. Ain’t you got no work to do?’
IV
I had promised my mother that I would visit her later and was surprised and annoyed when I didn’t find her in her room waiting for me. She wasn’t in the kitchen and didn’t answer when I called up the stairs. I asked Mary Ann if Merriweather had sent her upon an errand, but Mary Ann was too busy scrubbing the pile of dirty dishes our new guests had caused to bother answering questions from me.
I was about to walk over to the livery stables, where she sometimes went to talk to Old Henry, when I heard Elijah’s bell. Wilkes’s high-pitched laughter rang from the saloon accompanied by a low and silken chuckle that I guessed must belong to D’Orleans. Everyone was having a bully time and I longed to hear what was going on. But Elijah had summoned me and I must go. I could have taken the back stairs but instead, I fished my book from my coat pocket and hastened into the saloon, heading for the main staircase. Mr D’Orleans arrested my progress. ‘And where might you be going in such an all-fired hurry? Won’t you sit with us awhile?’
‘Sit down, boy, you might learn something of the world,’ said Wilkes.
‘I have to attend on Mr Putnam,’ I said to Merriweather, showing him the book.
Merriweather exploded. ‘Putnam be damned!’ he said. ‘Our guests have requested your presence. You’ll stay here.’ Elijah’s bell rang once more and so used was I to obeying its call that sitting there while it jangled seemed next to unnatural.
But how mightily pleased I was to join the company and hear Wilkes and Mr D’Orleans entertaining the entire saloon with astounding accounts of Mr Barnum’s Travelling World’s Fair. Mr Barnum was truly an amazing man. He had built himself a palace and called it Iranistan. He took to farming at Iranistan but he didn’t use horses, not he. Mr Barnum’s ploughs were pulled by elephants! He had built his own city. He had the greatest show on earth – a circus, menagerie and marvellous museum all rolled into one – and when it came here, which it would, as soon as Mr D’Orleans sent word that all was satisfactory, we’d see the miracles wrought by P.T. Barnum for ourselves.
Mr D’Orleans said that he’d taken a liking to me and would escort me personally through the menagerie where I’d see wolves and bears and leopards and tigers. And he would take me to the kraal, where we could watch the bareback riders and sharpshooters practising. There’d be dwarves and giants, wire-walkers and acrobats, bear-tamers and lion-slayers. He told Merriweather that it befitted the dignity of the circus to have the best seats occupied by the dignitaries of the town and he would be honoured if the hotel owner would accept the first two complimentary tickets for such seats. Merriweather took the proffered red-coloured tickets while D’Orleans presented a handful of yellow ones to the assembled company. ‘Tell your friends,’ he told them.
‘Don’t let ’em miss the day P.T. Barnum came to town!’
While the crowd was taking up their tickets and talking up P.T. Barnum, Mr D’Orleans said to me, ‘I have quite taken a shine to you, Billy. You’ll help us pave the way for the circus, won’t you? I need someone I can count on.’
‘Oh, I sure will!’ I exclaimed.
‘I’m glad. You can show us a place we can erect the tents and pavilions? And put up signs advertising the coming?’
I could, for sure.
‘And maybe you could also help us with the tickets. Mr Wilkes?’
Wilkes, who had been exchanging a quiet word with Merriweather, gave D’Orleans his ear.
‘I had just been thinking of how matters might be expedited if we were to sell the tickets in advance of the show, as we have sometimes done before. It’s really not too troublesome and it would save much time later.’
‘Well, I suppose we could …’
‘Good, then I shall arrange with Mr Merriweather how we may proceed with sales of the tickets on the morrow.’
I basked in the glow of his attention and had it not been for my mother’s recalcitrance, I should surely have followed the dream that was born then, of slipping away with this circus and never seeing Merriweather nor the Particular again. Here was I, Billy Talbot, who had never been anything and had never looked like amounting to anything, called to assist the most famous showman on earth. What with all the excitement, the merriment and the two glasses of beer I’d just had, I couldn’t help voicing the question that was on the minds of everyone present.
‘Are you Mr Barnum?’ I asked and there was a perceptible hush.
No one could have been surprised at my question, only at my presumption in asking it. In his velveteen suit and silver watch chain, with his chest thrown out and his head back, he had the poise and the stature we would have expected of a legend. But he only laughed loudly and said, ‘Barnum indeed!’
The hotelier laughed with his favoured guest and clapped him on the back. ‘Barnum indeed!’ he echoed.
I was thinking I never had enjoyed a night at the Particular so much. It was an occasion I should remember for ever, I was sure of that. Our guests seemed to think I was capital company and even Merriweather was casting me approving looks. Mr D’Orleans excused himself – he was tired and would have a long day of it tomorrow. He left Wilkes to tell us of how they had to build great water tanks to hold the rhinoceroses, which they called rhinonosceri, on account of there being so many of them and of how he’d questioned his own wisdom in calling his shooting gallery the ‘John Wilkes’s Booth’. I was ready to be entertained but Merriweather was looking about for someone to be confidential with and could find only me.
‘Now this is more like it,’ he said, rubbing his palms.
‘Ain’t it, though?’ I said, glowing with pleasure. ‘I did right, didn’t I?’ I think by then I actually believed I had been instrumental in bringing Barnum to town, when all I had really done was to gallop on ahead, waving an arm and hollering ‘Barnum’s a-coming, Barnum’s a-coming!’
He too left the room shortly after and I gorged myself on tales of far-off lands, of adventures beyond the scope of my imagination and I congratulated myself that such wonderful people would actually stoop to take an interest in my poor self. Maybe the world wasn’t what I had taken it for, after all.
Then Merriweather reappeared in advance of something pink and shimmering. But for the drink inside me, I would have been more shocked. Even so, the vision of my mother, the drab, stained and work-worn hermit of the wash-house, transformed by a quality taffeta dress, with her hair washed and combed and piled up upon her head and cheeks modestly rouged and powdered, sent a tremor through my frame. She was suddenly beautiful. I tried to say something to her but either the words never escaped my lips or she didn’t hear me.
The rouge on her cheeks seemed of a stronger colour as she stopped by my chair. Wilkes said, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Billy,’ and got up and took her hand and together they walked down the saloon and I cannot tell you how I felt when she hoisted the hem of her dress and mounted the stairs.
Chapter Three (#ulink_b9a5813c-4f61-5569-90a0-a59a011a241f)
I
I WAS NOT feeling special bright when I awoke, on account of having discovered a hitherto-unsuspected fondness for whisky. In the period between my mother’s ghastly ascension to Wilkes’s room and my own unsteady flight to my eyrie in the eves I made my first acquaintance with hard liquor. I tried to rise but encountered a problem. How and when I was overcome by the villain who had trussed me up tightly and who even now was perhaps returning to finish me off, I did not know but tied fast I was.
That I had put up a fight before being overpowered by the gang there could be no doubt. The room was much changed. The chair on which I was used to hang my clothes was upturned, as was the rough bookcase, whose contents lay spread and damaged about the attic floor. The crudely-executed portrait of the man in the bearskin coat, by Elijah’s brother, was newly cracked and hanging askew upon the wall.
Then I noticed my left boot, which circumstantially must have been the instrument of the damage; it lay immediately below and it came to me that its brother had escaped at speed through the window, the culmination of a mortal struggle between he and me, over the right to stay in possession of my foot. Satisfied with that, it was the work of a minute to realise that I was bound by no conventional bonds but that I had, in the throes of troubled sleep, only wound myself up in my bedsheets. And could have wound myself tight as a halter as I recalled how my mother had brought humiliation upon my head with the stranger from out of town.
I could remember that much more clearly than I had any wish to. What was more opaque was the interval that followed, in which I believe I had gratefully accepted a glass of whisky from Irving, or Merriweather, or any one of the gentlemen then in high spirits in the Particular’s saloon. I had affected to pass off the incident lightly as if it were the custom or that I cared nothing that my mother had behaved as she had. With Wilkes and D’Orleans turned in, Merriweather and myself had become of augmented interest, being the only party present with any extra knowledge of P.T. Barnum and his imminent arrival in our town. Merriweather talked up the circus in a manner I believed might be worthy of Barnum himself and then became intimate with Mr Curry, who had recently been famously successful with a silver-mining speculation.
The faces about my table were still fired up with Barnum fever and plied me with whisky and hung upon my every word as I employed the little I knew to paint a gaudy picture of the amazing entertainment they had in store. I used the strongest colours to depict a scene in which elephants were as common as horses and giraffes left no one’s bedroom a place of certain privacy.
Why yes, I said, matter of fact, it was I who had persuaded the strangers that this was the perfect place for Barnum. I had charge of many of the necessary arrangements and it was in my power to ensure that the top folk were given the proper seats and maybe introduced personally to Phineas himself. Another whisky? Mighty kind. My mother? Not mine, sir. Mine had been an industrious wife and religious mother, raised on a small holding in the distant Shenandoah Valley, whose husband had been killed upholding the Union cause and who had herself died, cruelly, resisting a fate far worse than death, at the merciless hands of the Confederate army. Had a halter been handy on that next morning, I am sure I would have availed myself of the perfect peace it seemed to offer.
But such is the indefatigable nature of the human spirit that not my mother’s iniquity, nor my own admitted weaknesses, were proof against the clarion call of exciting and novel sounds that were wafted through my opened window to assail my ears on that bright summer’s day. I had been half-aware of the music and that a band of musicians was blowing their best somewhere just below my window but when I heard the unmistakable sounds of loud acrimony and squabbling not even drowning waves of guilt and inadequacy could suffocate the stirrings of wild curiosity and prevent me from stuffing my blue woollen workshirt in my pants and hopping into my single boot – the twin would be discovered in the horse trough, I was certain – and escaping downstairs to the street.
It mattered not that I had risen late as the gentlemen whose breakfast I should have served had other matters to occupy them than ham and eggs as they clamoured in the lobby, protesting their sudden evictions. I might have had sympathy for Merriweather as he quailed under a barrage of robust abuse had I not known that it was only another quandary born of his own greed. I snuck past these rioters, leaving Merriweather to untangle his own knots and caught a ride on a wagon that was heading for town.
II
There was no question that word of the great event had already spread. We passed trails of people upon the road and were passed ourselves by a number of faster vehicles. At the town limits, we crossed the wide plaza, where teamsters camped and horse auctions were held. This day it was swarming with people. I jumped down and threaded my way through men who were pacing off and pegging out the area of intended encampment and others who had gotten hold of the bunting and flags we used at election times and were stringing them between the grain store, the lightning tree and the liberty pole. Most folk who wandered about the plaza confined themselves to commenting on the operations and speculating upon the likely nature of the extravaganza itself. Overseeing the work was John Wilkes and my mouth dried and my heart missed a beat as he saw me and approached with outstretched hand. I had grasped it before I had thought to refuse.
‘I have to talk to you about last night,’ I began.
‘Billy, I just larned that the lady I entertained is your mother. Well, I was real shocked but I congratulate you upon having such a paragon for your guide in life. She is the very model of modern womanhood and she did me an unspeakable honour.’
He put an arm about my shoulder and said: ‘I’m sure you understand. Why, we’re men of the world. These things happen, as we know. Life goes on and today life is looking very bright indeed. Can I count on you to help, Billy?’
Looking back, I think I might have acted in a way that would have better preserved the dignities of both my mother and myself. But even had I the necessary resolution, the revolver I had bought solely as an accessory of fashion wasn’t over-choosy about its targets and I would most probably have hurt myself.
But it was hard not to be caught up in the excitement; impossible not to acknowledge the curiously friendly folk who had already accosted me with all manner of inquiry and entreaties for tickets. Rather than knocking him down or waving a gun in his direction I soon found myself up a ladder, with Wilkes up another as we tied a hastily-painted banner across a narrowing of the main street.
Then I was posting bills in shop windows, gossiping with traders and customers and relishing the celebrity and status my connection with Barnum had apparently brought me. To be the centre of anybody’s attention was a profoundly novel sensation. As I swaggered along Main Street, it seemed that every eye was upon me and every tongue forming my name.
All morning more people arrived. Wilkes had seen to it that the telegrapher was kept busy informing surrounding towns and rail stops that Barnum was here tonight. Already buggies, coaches and wagons were streaming in, horses were tethered all along the streets and long lines of people stood before the makeshift ticket office that Wilkes had arranged outside the Mayor’s office.
I watched as D’Orleans took their money and issued his tickets. When his customers had made their purchase they went back to milling about the town, wasting time looking at this and that, walking in and out of the stores and saloons, taking up good vantages on the plaza or just sitting on the sidewalk, shooting competing streams of tobacco juice into the dirt and reading the special issues of the Bugle that Amory had spent all night printing as soon as he knew what was afoot.
D’Orleans dealt his red and yellow tickets like cards from a deck but as fast as he could reduce one line, another had grown. From time to time he would stop and mount the table he had made from a couple of planks upon barrels, survey the crowd with concern and announce in a voice that carried to the ends of both lines, ‘Mr Barnum appreciates your interest, folks, he surely does, but there is only a limited number of seats available for tonight’s show. I must therefore prevail upon you to show forbearance and limit your purchases to six tickets per individual. Six tickets only, PLEASE!’
But that just got the crowd more agitated and more mothers with children attached, more farmers and merchants and drunkards and idlers pushed into the growing lines. When this was at its height, D’Orleans signalled me over to him and implored me to relieve him a while, while he attended to important business. It was maybe two hours before I saw him again, by which time I had significantly reduced the supply of tickets which were bundled in the carpet bag into which I put the takings. I had also had the enormous pleasure of being able to hand four of the coveted red tickets to Cissy Bullock. What would she make of me now, I wondered, as she floated back to her carriage?
It was hot and uncomfortable work, unrelieved by the warm breeze that had got up and gained in strength, flapping the big banner and sending hats skittering about the street and causing wise commentators to remark that Barnum had better have brought strong stakes, if he wanted to keep his tents. There was some local superstition about this zephyr, that it only came when things were on the change or something awful was about to happen to the town. But when I had spoken of this to Elijah, he only snorted his contempt and said that was all a fallacy.
But just as the wind seemed ready to snatch the tickets from my hands and my eyes were red-raw from the grit that had blown in upon them, D’Orleans reappeared. He told the remaining crowd there would be plenty more for everyone the next day and me to get on back to the hotel, where I was wanted by Merriweather.
III
But it was Elijah, and not Merriweather who had been ringing my attendance and it was with some irritation that I mounted the stairs after a fruitless search for the book I had taken with me last night, into the saloon. I passed Merriweather in the lobby but he was busy instructing the carpenter, regarding the special arrangements for accommodating General Thumb.
I had only lately come to regard my daily visits to Elijah as blessed periods of respite from the mundane routines of hotel life and times at which I might exercise faculties that went untested anywhere else in this no-hope place. This afternoon was different and I was loathe to leave the scenes of so much unprecedented excitement and had half a mind to ignore the summons, borrow a horse and gallop back into town. The other half acknowledged that it had been a long morning and that I had worked to exhaustion. Also, the effects of the whisky that so much novelty had distracted me from suffering, were now making themselves known. An hour or two with Elijah might be sufficient for me to recuperate before I returned in time to witness the arrival in town of the Greatest Show on Earth. Elijah recognised the condition I was in the second I began to make my apologies. I fumbled with the glass cover of the oil lamp and somehow caught it just before it hit the floorboards.
‘This is too bad,’ he said as he gazed vacantly through my presence. ‘It’s a poor enough show that you don’t attend me because of some flimflam men and their circus and that I have sat here the livelong day with nothing to occupy me but my memories. But that you lost your Great Expectations whilst in your cups is beyond crediting. Well, Pip and Estella will have to remain at what they are about until we can get another copy.’
He sighed over the manifold follies of youth, mine in particular. His brow furrowed as he cogitated upon something before he leaned towards me, upon his stick and said: ‘Billy, there is something I must talk to you about. It’s a very important matter and I must be sure that I explain it and you understand it properly. I had thought to lay the matter before you today but it’s clear that you’re too tired from your gallivanting and addle-headed from whisky.’
And so I had been an instant before but now that Elijah had confirmed my suspicion of the other evening, that something of significance was to be revealed to me, I felt as alive as electricity and burned with curiosity.
‘Pardon me, Mr Putnam, but you’re mistaken. I never felt better,’ I said. ‘Please tell me all now.’
But Elijah was adamant. ‘Tomorrow will be better,’ he said. ‘I shall expect you at sundown. We will take a walk. In the meantime and in lieu of our readings, perhaps you will be so good as to take down a little more of my memoir?’
I moved a lamp to a small table and opened the bound ledger in which was written already so much of Elijah’s story, the place at which his angular hand was replaced by my own slapdash loops denoting that at which he had owned to himself that he was certainly going blind.
He said, ‘Remind me of where we left off last time.’
‘You had been in London some three months and had visited with the lawyer, from whom you collected your inheritance. The sum was much smaller than you had expected but Mr Bulstrode had been good enough to help you invest it in the hope of great return. We had just completed a passage in which Mr Bulstrode announced that he had secured an introduction to Mr Chalmondely-Palmer, agent for the Bombay Spice and Silk Company.’
‘The Bombay Spice and Silk Company. Yes,’ said Elijah and reclined in his deep leather chair and in so doing, sank back some twenty-five years.
I dipped my nib and began to scratch away as quickly as I could, my pen racing hard against Elijah’s narrative.
‘Bulstrode and I both thought it was a golden opportunity. We had heard of others who had made their fortunes by it. I let Bulstrode invest a small amount and it paid off handsomely. I ventured some more and this too made an excellent return. This continued for such a time that we came to regard the Bombay Spice and Silk Company as a convenient source of revenue. One had only to send in a little bronze for it to return as gold.
‘Bulstrode visited me one day, greatly excited. He said the whisper in the city was that Bombay stock was about to soar and that he had mortgaged his home and staked all he had upon it. It was a sure thing and if I followed suit, I would undoubtedly return to America a very rich man indeed.
‘I hesitated. I had never been a gambling man and a venture of this magnitude had my heart pounding and head reeling. This was too big for me. I would quit while I was ahead of the game. I told Bulstrode, who shook his head and looked at me as if to say well, that was my funeral. He left, whistling at my rashness.
‘Doubt nagged me throughout the night. Supposing he was vindicated? Would I see Bulstrode in a golden coach on the morrow? If he was right – and respected City capitalists were certain of the Bombay’s future – then I would regret it for ever, I knew that.
‘That I had acted wisely was poor consolation and when I rose, tired and haggard the next day, I had changed my mind and prayed I could find Bulstrode in time for him to make the necessary arrangements before all the world knew about the Bombay. I found him in his office with another, grandly-dressed gentleman. He betrayed no surprise at my sudden entrance.
‘“I’m glad you’ve dropped by, Putnam,” he said, “for this is Mr Chalmondely-Palmer, agent for the Bombay Spice and Silk Company. It’s high time you made the acquaintance of the man who has made your fortune.”
‘I shook his hand and for a second or two I could say nothing, overawed as I was by the fine appearance of this gentleman. His suit, his hat, his rings and his manner all bespoke great wealth. Then I composed myself, said how honoured I was and asked Bulstrode if there was still time for me to fall in with him and invest my all. Mr Chalmondely-Palmer said it was all most irregular and Bulstrode was commiserating with me when the gentleman in the powder-blue suit appeared suddenly possessed of an idea. “Wait,” he said, “I think I see how it might be done.”
‘It is unnecessary to go into the details of how my wealth was converted into stocks and bonds of the Bombay Spice and Silk Company but transformed it was and I shook hands with both gentlemen and almost immediately, I took three of my closest friends to celebrate with dinner at the pleasure gardens. I could tell them nothing and how it must have perplexed them, to see me so gay and so lavish with my entertainment.
‘The next day I took my newspaper to my breakfast table and read of a massive fraud involving the Bombay Spice and Silk Company. The scandal was all over the second page but I had barely read the half of it before I had grabbed my hat and was running pell-mell down Chancery Lane to where Bulstrode had his chambers. I took the steps five at a time and burst into his apartments, where I received my second shock of the day. They were empty. Not physically so: the desk, chairs and carpets remained but not so any sign of Bulstrode. His pictures, books and papers, his certificates, plaster bust of Thomas Chatterton, knick-knacks and ornaments were all gone. It was the same scene in the adjoining room.
‘I left the door and bounded down to the basement, where the porter had his office. The man said that Bulstrode had paid up to today and vacated early that morning. I took a cab to the Stock Exchange, where my worst fears were confirmed. The Bombay Spice and Silk had crashed and I was newly penniless. How I cursed Bulstrode and the man who called himself Chalmondely-Palmer but how much more and how bitterly I cursed myself.
‘I pass over the next two days as they did me no credit. Suffice it is to say that I lay upon my bed much of the time and bemoaned the unfairness of my fate. On the third day, I called on friends I had made during my stay in London but, as did those of the prodigal in the parable, mine had deserted me to a man. They were apologetic but their suggestions, that I find myself a good post somewhere, or go home to America were unhelpful and it was plain that they would rather I took myself and my ill-fortune somewhere else. I found myself alone in a strange city with barely a penny to my name.
‘The education that I had thought to complete in London after I had collected my grandfather’s bequest was useless to me now. I exhausted the introductions I had made without any success whatsoever. I moved from my comfortable and spacious lodgings off Green Park, to a hellish boarding-house in Seven Dials but my spirit revolted at the noxious conditions and I spent what money I had assigned to accommodation, on two months’ rent of a single clean room near the river, in Bermondsey.
‘I had precious little money and eked out what food I allowed myself each day. My palate no longer revolted at thin, fatty soup and stale bread. I sought employment but my expectations were soon spiralling giddily downwards. After seeking positions in government offices, I tried to find reporting work on newspapers and in Doctors’ Commons and then applied for a succession of posts as personal tutor and as schoolmaster. Perhaps my foreignness of manner or appearance – for I had pawned my suit and looked now much reduced in circumstances – counted against me. I tried for work as a lowly clerk and then, when calamity loomed and nothing was in prospect, I offered myself as a labourer – to builders and rag merchants before seeking work on the docks amidst which I lived. But still I was without success. I have not the build of a labourer and my hands, that are more used to the feel of a book’s leathern cover than a pick’s shaft, betrayed my unfitness for the work.
‘When I had nothing left for food and only some days’ rent of the room, I joined those people who glean a small living from picking over the ash heaps and do other unmentionable work in the fight for existence. I failed in my every endeavour; others more tried and used to these conditions faired better and took what I might have had.
‘My poor diet, my hag-ridden mind and the foul places I was obliged to habituate affected my health, which soon deteriorated and I wandered about the docks, devoured by hunger and becoming weaker by the hour. When all hope had departed and I no longer had a roof above my head, fortune came to my aid in the form of a fellow countryman, John Andrews, of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
‘To my shame I had been contemplating suicide and intended to offer myself to the embrance of the river and become only another of the frightful things that were daily washed ashore or discovered in the mud at the ebb of the tide. To this end, I had been making my way through bustling places where gangs of men were unloading ships, and great consignments of goods from across the oceans were being hoisted aloft into warehouses, where sailors came and went between chandlers’ shops, instrument-makers and pawn-brokers and spilled out from low taverns and brothels. There was nowhere here that suited my fatal purpose and I went on, down a narrow street between high warehouses, towards a quieter part of the waterfront.
‘It was here that I fell against John Andrews, or he against me. I was weak and dizzy, he drunk. Whatever the origin of the accident, I collided with his massive bulk and the air was filled with his imprecations and I saw the blade of a knife glint in the waning sunlight. I don’t know what I said. I know I asked for no mercy and may well have implored him to do his work swiftly. I expected the deadly blow and no more.
‘I next found myself upon the cobbles and for a moment I thought myself cut and that my life blood must be seeping away towards the river. But I felt the fire of brandy in my throat and the face of the sailor was before me. “I’ll be damned,” he was saying. “A Yankee!”
‘He had a good heart, this Andrews and when I told him of my plight, he helped me to a tavern and watched me like a mother as I devoured a plate of lamb cutlets and potatoes. When I was much improved by the meat and the port-wine he made me drink, he bid me tell my story, which I did in full. He said I had been a fool and I said I could hardly argue that point and that my only wish was to return home to America. I might sink or swim there but I would be among my own, which I thought must be an infinitely more hopeful situation. I owned, however, that there was small hope of that.
‘Andrews only laughed, a big and booming laugh, that had the sailors and porters and prostitutes turning towards our table. “What a weak specimen of American manhood you are” he said, “to falter at such a low fence.” He called to a man at the bar, who was entertaining not one, but two ladies of the London night. “Jack,” he called, “I have an educated Yankee here, the very man for you.”
‘Later I would thank God for my fortune. Then, I only thanked John Andrews, for introducing me to Jack Fairchild, first mate of the passenger steam packet Britannia, due to set out from Liverpool for Halifax and Boston the next week and still in pressing need of a steward.’
Elijah paused and I wondered if he had finished for the day or had merely stopped to collect his thoughts. I was dead tired and my handwriting had become a record of my exhaustion. He took a breath and continued his story. There was a journey to Liverpool, a sea voyage and I thought I heard mention of Charles Dickens. But by then I must been dozing because the next thing I knew, Elijah was saying, ‘Enough, boy, enough,’ and lifting me upon the sofa, where I gave myself up to sleep.
IV
I was fairly blown along the road to town. The wind had gotten up while I slept and from the top of the hill I could see the fun that nature was having with man and his workings below. The big banners we had hung this morning were gone as was the bunting on the plaza. Small objects were chasing around in pockets of chaos and people were running about in the streets, for reasons I couldn’t guess at that distance.
Elijah had been incensed that when I awoke I had made feeble excuses and gone quickly, anxious that I was missing the arrival of Barnum’s show, but that was no matter; this was too big a deal to miss. There was no sign of any such event having occurred as yet. I crossed an empty plaza and was caught in a sudden blast that funnelled violently into Main Street, sweeping up a huge cloud of dust and straw, chaff and grit, hurling it against the offices of the Bugle and into the eyes of anyone who looked the wrong way.
Some part of the crowds of the morning could be seen through the windows of the saloon and in other places of refuge but hardier folk were on the street, appearing and disappearing in clouds of wind-born debris and mouthing words I couldn’t hear, because of the dreadful ruckus created by the wind as it whistled through fissures, loosened tin roofs and went searching for anything that wasn’t nailed down.
Women found their skirts turned sails and relinquished any choice of direction but the movements of a conspicuous party of men retained some purpose; they were darting this way and that and with bandannas and handkerchiefs covering their faces, they might have been a great gang of outlaws or a band of Confederate renegades, searching for a bank to rob.
One of their number separated from the pack and the dentist, Abe Oliver, was blown over my way. ‘Nice weather we got for Barnum,’ I hollered to him but he startled me by spinning me about and pinioning my arms behind my back. The cry went up, ‘They’ve got one of them!’ and many hands laid hold of me and hustled me along the sidewalk and into a sheltered alley. I was thrown to the ground and a crowd of townsfolk gathered about me, not one of them looking like he bore me any goodwill. I need hardly say that I was bewildered and not a little alarmed at this strange turn of events.
‘What’s the matter? Whatever’s happened?’
‘As if he don’t know!’ snapped Abe. ‘Where’s our money, you thief?’
Mrs Roop, the druggist’s wife was shouting into my face, ‘You’ll pay, you will. Every penny, you’ll pay!’
‘Where’s our money?’ went up again.
Someone at the back said, ‘Git a rope.’
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ I cried. ‘What are you about?’ I must have looked white with fright, because someone else said, ‘Let up on him, Abe. Maybe he wasn’t in on this.’
‘On what?’ I cried and Judge Eckert, who had elbowed through the crowd and was now keeping the rougher elements from exacting their own justice on me, said: ‘We’ll find out the whys and wherefores in a proper place. Now, boy, let’s have the truth. Have you been a part of this?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, ‘I’ve been with Elijah Putnam all afternoon. What’s happened?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s happened, boy. The men you kindly brought to this town don’t have nothing to do with P.T. Barnum. They’re guinea-droppers and sharpers and they just lit out of here with all the ticket money.’
He must have known I was innocent from the look on my face.
‘How do you know?’ I stammered. ‘Maybe they’ve gone to meet up with the circus.’
‘We just had a wire from Syracuse. They pulled this trick there last month. Those boys are long gone and our money with them.’
What could I say? I had been taken in as they had. We had all believed these nattily-dressed and sweet-talking gentlemen and I was the bigger fool than they. But because I had swelled myself up like the cock of the yard and had talked myself blue about Mr D’Orleans and acted like I had the ear of Barnum himself, I had done half these swindlers’ work for them.
Eckert could see that I was only a dupe and most of the faces I recognised were in agreement but many were by no means satisfied and I was shoved and kicked as I retreated before them out of the alley and into the windy street where I began to run, intent upon putting the shame of it all as far behind me as I could. But then someone coming out the hotel spotted me and hollered ‘There’s Billy Talbot making a run for it!’ and the bar emptied and it looked like I had half the town hard upon my heels.
I ran the length of Main Street, making hard progress against the tearing wind and saw that some of my pursuers had already left off the chase and returned to the bar but a gang of young bucks, no doubt hot with whisky, were gaining upon me, calling like hounds on the trail of a runaway slave.
I turned down a side street and leapt a fence and then another, trampling flowers and vegetables, my heart bursting and my breath short. I fled through the open gate of the brewery, vaulted barrels and lost precious moments as I located the gap in its back fence and then found myself on open ground, nothing but the distant hills and a great dark cloud before me. Still I was pursued: dangerous marshlands lay off to the east and from the west came the cries of another pack of hunters and so I ran on, hopelessly, unbelieving that this was happening to me, yet certain that a dreadful fate would overtake me at any moment.
‘We got him,’ someone shouted and finding myself on a road once more, I stumbled on, slowed by the wind that shot through my shirt and found ways through my ribs, and bowed my head down against the buckshot of wind-blown dust. I forced my way against the gale, my steps becoming leaden with fatigue and I knew that the end was near. I could go on no longer.
And then I was aware of being a part of a rampant confusion of noise and thought that my exertions had brought me to the edge of madness and that I had begun to hallucinate, for amongst the apocalyptic din of the wind I thought I heard music.
I looked up and shading my brow, perceived that I was in the midst of a massive cloud of wind-driven garbage. The weird sounds were still audible but I could hear nothing of the men behind. I stopped and sank to my knees, finished.
Out of the darkest part of the storm, vague and shadowy forms materialised and took shape and I doubted my raw and streaming eyes, which now beheld the strangest, the most extraordinary of sights. A great giant of a man, taller by far than anyone I had seen before, mounted upon a camel and at his side a tiny midget, upon an animal whose like I had not seen but which evidently recognised my kind, for it spat at me as it passed.
Chapter Four (#ulink_798267bd-15fe-5875-9419-4ba6bbcb60ec)
I
I SHOULD BE at other work than this. In the lobby beyond my office door are probably a whole roomful of people, half of whom will be awaiting my pleasure only so they may press more money upon me. They would have me sponsor this or endorse that, or simply do nothing so that they may further their own schemes. I pray that my loyal secretary and guardian of my secrets, Miss Tummel, will protect me from such distractions a little while longer.
But even she can impede my progress. She has reminded me that there is a speech I am to prepare and must give to the greatest of our great land. Its acceptance will inevitably result in the filling of the coffers of my associates and of my own purse too. However, compared with the tonguey rhetoric which was once my stock-in-trade and which might have earned me fifty or a couple of hundred dollars, or a few months in jail, it will be a poor affair. You who have the priceless leisure to read books for your own diversion may take me for a robber at least but if I commit robberies now, they are done in your name.
While we talk of robberies, I have one for you now. Readers of popular fiction may consider this a paltry affair: the theft has already been committed and there has been no fancy-play with six-guns. I’m sorry for that – if you prefer something more racy, you must open a dime novel or a daily newspaper.
A discovery was made while I lay asleep in Elijah’s room. D’Orleans had closed up the ticket office pretty sharpish; no one knew why. Then a couple of rounders had galloped through town, hollering about Barnum’s caravan coming up the road from the east. Soon after, riders and folk in buggies and on foot were streaming out of town to meet him, no matter that a wild wind was all but blowing them back into town. The rest of the populace found shelter and waited for the zephyr to blow itself out. Sometime during this, D’Orleans and Wilkes took themselves and the money out of town, most likely on stolen horses.
And P.T. Barnum did come to Hayes, Missouri, though I doubt it’s well-documented. The whole procession of gaily-painted covered wagons, teams of thoroughbred horses, great swaying stages packed with men and women inside and on top; freaks of nature on horseback and astride camels, Indians in the boots of coaches, huge carts piled high with cages of outlandish animals and ropes and tackle, canvas and abundance of mysterious contrivance, came quickly upon us and as quickly passed right on through.
We watched them rush headlong past, drivers whipping on the beasts with cries of ‘Hi-yi!’ and ‘G’lang!’ through crowds who had turned out to see Barnum arrive and you can imagine the kind of feelings that were abroad when it was realised that not only had the townspeople been swindled of their money but P.T. Barnum wasn’t even going to stop in Hayes anyway. The Barnum circus, looking neither tuckered nor travel-stained, as the efficient machine had unloaded from hired freight cars just down the line, shoved for the next town, where they mounted a memorable show and those who could still afford to follow him and see it, said it was wondrous to behold.
I don’t know that Barnum already had intelligence of something amiss in our town but he sure seemed in an uncommon hurry to put some dirt between him and Hayes. At least, that was the verdict of the informal inquiry held in the lobby of the Particular Hotel, the next morning. A deputation of citizens had arrived, headed by Judge Eckert and Sheriff McCulloch.
‘Maybe we was swindled by Barnum,’ someone said. ‘And it was all like we thought. The smooth-talking feller was Barnum himself.’
‘Don’t be so foolish,’ said McCulloch, ‘Barnum ain’t the man to do nothing of that sort. Fact of the matter is, he never planned to stop in Hayes and was only makin’ for the next place. We was a passel o’ fools to get taken in like we did, but it wan’t Barnum’s fault.’
‘They must have been considerable smart fellers to get the drop on us,’ said Old Henry.
‘Smart?’ said a deputy. ‘I’ll say they were. Why, those two boys were probably the slickest, sharpest operators as ever palmed a silver dollar. Didn’t you hear they did the exact same as this in Syracuse? And they’re double-smart people, in Syracuse.’
Others nodded and murmured their agreement, consoled in part, that they had been some taken in by the best. As we had appeared closely connected with the swindlers, Merriweather and I were keenly questioned. I told my story a number of times, repeating and enlarging on details I had given before and was believed in the end, in a grudging sort of a way, but not before I had been accused, sniped at and generally made to feel like the biggest fool in a ship of the same. That I might have easily borne for I felt as much myself but what had unnerved me during the ordeal was the entrance of Mrs Bullock and her daughter, Cissy, who swept past me and took seats at the back of the crowd. When I had been interrogated, derided and sent about my work, the crowd listened to Merriweather as he protested his innocence and neatly attached any remaining blame and suspicion to my coat-tails.
I hung about the doorway, waiting for the crowd to disperse, that I might exchange a word with Cissy: her mother was a placid woman, generally amiable and not as decided in her opinions of me as was her husband. I had every hope of being able to wish her and Cissy a good day, a brief exchange which would have cheered me immensely and gone a long way towards compensating for the blight I had felt that morning.
They were last to leave the lobby and I followed them down the steps to their buggy. I walked over to the fly and opened the door and let down the step, intending to hand in first Dame Bullock and then Cissy herself. I longed for the soft touch of her hand in mine. But first I offered Mrs Bullock my hand and she astounded me by brushing it away with her parasol, snapping, ‘Unhand me, you ruffian,’ before boarding under her own steam. I looked to Cissy but she only glowered and avoided my gaze. When I asked what was up, she said, ‘You leave us be. Poppa was right. I was blind. You’re nothing but a low-down swamp-rat and I don’t want nothing to do with you, ever again!’
‘But, Cissy,’ I said, quite thunderstruck. ‘I just told the inquiry, I had nothing to do with the swindle. I’ll pay you back your money myself.’
‘I ain’t talking about the swindle,’ Cissy said. ‘I was referring to the shame your family brings to this town. I heard,’ she said, with a look of sour repugnance, ‘all about your mother, Billy.’
She cracked her whip and the buggy moved off, leaving me such a sorry individual that had I been a horse, or a dog, I would most likely have been shot.
II
Merriweather was looking for me but I couldn’t face his certain wrath. He had been made to look a bigger fool than he was and would be seeking to vent his ire upon me. In other circumstances, I might have gone to my mother but now that was out of the question: because of her, my Cissy had spurned me. I climbed the old tree I had spent whole days in as a kid and mused upon my relation, whom I occasionally glimpsed through a veil of yellow leaves as she took linen to and from the wash-house.
The memory of the night she had wafted past me in a fantasy of taffeta and scent made me nauseous. But it also set me thinking. I had seen my mother dressed up before but never so perfectly as that night. I had an imperfect memory that Merriweather had once bought her dresses and that at some time in the distant past there had been something between them and only now understood that he must have used her and discarded her. At the time, I only saw the dresses and noticed that for a while she didn’t live in the lean-to behind the wash-house. Then I brought to mind other occasions when she had dressed fine but I didn’t recall them well as these were nights on which I had generally been sent early to bed.
I was sickened by an abrupt realisation. Parts of a puzzle I should have completed years ago fell into place. Bullock’s estimation of the Particular and of its inmates suddenly made sense. I had taken the bad name of the hotel to have some reference to its boorish and drunken owner and perhaps to the edifice itself, which had once been quite grand but was now broken-roofed and in need of a multitude of repairs. In truth, the establishment was a sham: a worn-out suit with brand-new pockets and everyone knew it.
Now I perceived that we took in any ragtag and bobtail at cut rates; that Irving was whispered to be wanted in Wyoming; that mystery surrounded the blind schoolteacher Putnam. Our poor name might have been born out of any of these facts. But that the reason some folk drove out of Hayes to stay in the Particular at the failed hamlet of Rodericksburg was because of the particular services that Merriweather could arrange, at a price, might never have occurred to me had not a snub from Cissy Bullock awoken my slumbering senses. I thought at first that I must have been blind, or he too discreet, for me not to have seen what was going on. But I searched my mind, and later the diaries I had kept as a child, connecting dates, impressions and memories and arrived at a conclusion that was as inevitable as it was terrifying. Unless there was something I had overlooked, it was awfully clear that my mother had been not only the gewgaw of Merriweather but had most likely been pimped by him to a succession of our honoured guests.
I thought of Cissy and how she now appeared as impossibly remote. Did she know what I knew now? That seemed impossible. Her father would slander my name yet never tell her that. But recent events were being talked up all over town and the customers who had been in the saloon that night had not omitted to include in their accounts of the evening, that Mrs Talbot had finished the night with the Wilkes man. If Cissy didn’t know the extent of what was going on now, it couldn’t be long before some gossip poured it into her ear like so much mercury.
III
In the afternoon, I knocked upon Elijah’s door. I had nowhere else to go and longed for the blanket of routine.
‘You’re early,’ he remarked.
He said that Mr Merriweather had lately been with him and had acquainted him with the fact that my name was presently not good currency. ‘He said it smelt to high heaven, in fact,’ said Elijah. ‘Well, never mind that now; we shall work on my memoir and when it is dark we will take a walk. It will be safer to talk without these walls. I have that to relate to you that will make you think differently of yourself and perhaps you will then not give a hang about the opinion of these small-town prattlers.’
Though electrified with curiosity, I knew it was no good pushing him and resigned myself to the ledger and pen. Elijah settled himself in a rocking-chair and took up his story.
‘I had embarked upon the ocean crossing, had I not?’ he asked.
‘Not so far as that,’ I said, for I had dozed through the last part of the narrative and this had gone unrecorded in the ledger.
‘We won’t mind the details. It’s sufficient to say that I got myself to Liverpool in time to join the steamer Britannia, bound for Halifax and Boston.’
His pale blue eyes fixed me with their sightless gaze.
‘I was barely aboard before I had been told that among the eighty-six passengers I would be attending were Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens. What do you think of that, then?’
‘Dickens? You met him?’ I asked, astounded that the man whose life and works had formed such a disproportionately large part of our studies, might be personally known to my tutor himself.
‘Not so fast,’ said Elijah. ‘All in good time.’
‘I’m listening,’ I said.
‘Don’t just listen, boy, take it down. Now, I would hardly have taken my fellow stewards for bookish men but both they and the crew were much exercised by this news. Such was, and remains, the celebrity of Charles Dickens. I was surprised that not a few knew him from his works themselves but many more knew him as the popular figure. They had seen his name time and again in newspapers and the likenesses of him and his creations decorating all kinds of products and advertising. Why, if you had asked them whom they considered the most famous man on earth, I guess that some might have answered President Tyler and others Queen Victoria but I would place a hefty wager that many more would have promptly replied, “Charles Dickens.”
‘So you may imagine there was not a little competition among we stewards for the honour of attending on the great man and we were sorely disappointed when he elected to ensconce himself in the ladies’ saloon where he would be served by a Scottish stewardess.
‘I caught sight of him the first night out. He was taking the air on deck before turning in. Against the weather, he was wearing a great pea-coat and a pair of cork-soled boots. At about thirty years of age, he was not much older than myself but what a gulf separated us! There was Boz, sipping his brandy, long hair blowing in the sea breeze, apparently without a care in the world, cutting through black waters towards a country that already loved him as its own fortunate son. And there was I, risking the fury of the chief steward by standing out upon the companionway, the better to catch a glimpse of the man who had come from nothing and made himself what he was, with no better weapon than the tip of his nib.
‘I longed to drop down the ladder and strike up a conversation with the immortal who had given life to Pickwick and Sam Weller, Fagin and Sykes, Squeers and Quilp. For unlike my colleagues and, I suspected, most of the passengers, I had read these books and his sketches of London life attentively and had long been fascinated by their author. But he finished his drink and ducked back inside before I had summoned the resolution to ask if he would like a second and that was the last I saw of him for perhaps five days.
‘When my labours were over, I lay upon my bunk, my mind churning with possibilities. This Dickens was not only the talk and toast of London. In America too, his admirers were multitudinous and eagerly awaited the arrival of each new part of his latest work. These no sooner arrived than they were hurried to booksellers and to newspapers and printers and copied until there were sufficient to satisfy even the furthest flung territories. We loved him as one of our own. His democratic concern for every stratum of society, his advocacy of reform and stout refusal to pander to a single class of reader had us adjudge him an American in everything but birth.
‘And here he was, sleeping peacefully, perhaps only a few feet above my head. I was excited by his proximity and yet recognised that I had no better chance of conversing properly with him than had one of the stokers. This seemed terribly unfair: because of my close study of his books I felt that some strange bond existed between us that he would acknowledge warmly were I only to broach the subject.
‘I might mention here that I had not only read everything he had produced, but, coveting his colossal success almost as much as I admired his genius, had already begun something of my own, in emulation. I had perhaps four chapters written, with which I was immoderately pleased. They were about me now and I became consumed with the notion of encountering Dickens and showing him the leaves and giving him the satisfaction of knowing that it was he that had stirred my dormant talent. But the next day saw a livelier sea and anyone without his full complement of sea legs betook himself to his bed and stayed there, Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens among them.
‘My own crossing to England had been a smooth one and the experience had persuaded me that constitutionally, I was a good sailor. This delusion sustained me for the first days of the return voyage and I was irked that I had never a sighting of his inimitable person. I expected to see him scribbling at a saloon table, at any moment. Conditions worsened on the third day and no one had any thoughts of anything but their own well-being while we were tossed from one giant wave to the next, for the idle amusement of the elements.
‘The passengers kept to their cabins but we attendants worked on, our nausea made subservient to the terrifying temper of the chief steward, though few of our charges welcomed our attentions, preferring to keep to their cabins and survive on diets of brandy and water and hard biscuit. And yet there was sufficient opportunity for accident and catastrophe. A steward blinded a passenger with spilt lobster sauce and, descending a companionway, another, delivering to table a huge round of red beef (optimistically, in my opinion), fell hard and broke his foot. Following behind, I received a deep cut to my eye.
‘Inanimate objects achieved lives of their own in this floating revolution. Cups and saucers performed acrobatics. Crockery smashed with almost rhythmic regularity. Objects on one table were found a moment later on the next. A gross of porter bottles broke free and could be heard rolling about the deck like drunken revellers, needlessly providing another hazard for those foolhardy enough to attempt a promenade from stem to stern. Seeming to sense that normal bounds of propriety had been cast asunder or might be suspended without impropriety for the duration of this hellish crossing, humankind behaved with as much irregularity as anything else aboard this crazy vessel. Of the passengers, one perceived that his worldly wealth would be useless to him in the next and proceeded to lose everything at vingt-et-un. A supposedly poor clerk was of a similar opinion and kept us busy fetching bottles of champagne. Among the crew, the cook salvaged some sea-damaged whisky and was discovered drunk by the captain who ordered him hosed sober and sent upon the next four watches without his coat. Worse for me was that the pastry chef succumbed entirely and I, though protesting I was no better than he, was ordered by the captain to take his place in a tiny cabin on deck. Propped between two barrels I was made to roll out dough and prepare sweet fancies, the sight of every one of which magnified my anguish and caused my stomach to revolt in paroxysms of agony. As a result I cared not a jot then that I was unable to see Dickens who had found his feet and was reported entertaining fellow passengers with a borrowed accordion.
‘But worse was in store. On the tenth day out from Liverpool, we were caught in a terrific storm that threatened to blow down the smoke-stack and offer us a fiery alternative to the watery end we expected at any minute. When it subsided sufficiently to make a walk along deck less than a method of certain suicide, we found that a lifeboat had been smashed to fragments and that the wooden paddle-housings were likewise destroyed, so that now water was scooped up and thrown on the decks, or over anyone condemned by duty to brave the elements.
‘At last, when calm returned and I could face my cakes with an equanimity unimaginable the day before, my thoughts turned again to our illustrious passenger and I pondered the problem of how I might meet with Dickens. The initial excitement passed, it came to me that encountering him now might actually harm my cause. How seriously could he take the babblings of a steward about some unlikely book? I was cast low for a full day but was then inspired by what appeared as a brilliant idea: once arrived in America, this hero of the people would surely be in need of an aide, a secretary perhaps, for the duration of his stay. It was impossible that he should deal personally with the deluge of correspondence that would inevitably follow in the wake of such an august event. I decided upon approaching him on land, in the guise of a free citizen of the United States.
‘The difficulty would lie in securing an introduction to the great man. I turned over innumerable schemes that I thought might achieve this end but rejected them all and was in low spirits during our brief stop at Halifax. My optimism was fully restored when we finally berthed at the busy port of Boston. No sooner had the painter been tossed upon the quay and the planks let down than the ship was boarded by piratical members of the Eastern press, some local dignitaries and by a certain luminary whose face I was startled to recognise. This was the artist, Francis Alexander, in whose employ my brother George now was and whom I had espied as he left his house, the morning I had paid a visit to his pupil, before taking ship for England.
‘The commotion on the forward deck was immense. Reporters were swarming like so many bees, the crew were tying off gangplanks and crowds on the quay were cheering anyone who made use of them. In this confusion, I was able to approach quite close to the bearskin-coated young writer and hear him receive Alexander’s introductions and note that Dickens had agreed to sit for his portrait during his stay in Boston.
‘I hugged myself in joy. To further my design now, I had only to make my way to Alexander’s studio and confide my plans to George and then to take up my position as secretary to Charles Dickens. And then, when Dickens realised what a protégé he had, what a world might be mine!’
‘And did it work out?’ I asked, forgetting my role as secretary yet knowing something of Elijah’s more recent history I felt I could answer this myself.
Before he could form his answer, I heard a commotion upon the stairs and then the door flew open and Merriweather burst in, with Silas Amory on his heels.
‘Is that you, Merriweather?’ said Elijah, angered by the unprecedented interruption. ‘You had better have good reason for this.’
‘Damn right I have, you old fool,’ Merriweather cried. ‘We’ve been robbed. Somebody cleared out the safe!’
I looked at Merriweather, his face crimson with emotion, his small black eyes fixed on me like the sights of twin rifles. Amory regarded us both, coolly and dispassionately and then Merriweather too, with equal impartiality.
‘Does something go forth here, is something afoot, gentlemen?’ he breathed, with the sibilance of snakes. Elijah rocked in his chair and continued to stare at a vacancy somewhere between us all.
Chapter Five (#ulink_e1d0d110-3216-5fd4-9772-d01266cc703d)
I
ELIJAH BROKE A moment’s silence.
‘So you have been robbed of a few days’ takings. What of it? I don’t suppose it amounted to much,’ he said.
‘I’m smashed, you fool,’ said Merriweather. ‘And by heaven if you had anything to do with this, I’ll break you too.’
‘Keep a tongue, Merriweather. Everyone gets robbed sooner or later, one way or another.’
I had seen Merriweather out of sorts before, enraged and in a drunken fury more often than I would ever want to remember but this was something different. He was frightened, abstracted, his eyes publishing the turmoil of his mind as he circled Elijah’s chair like a coyote about a big fire. Elijah followed the sound of his boot heels and said: ‘How can you be smashed?’
‘I ain’t about to explain my business,’ Merriweather snapped, fixing us both with his squinty gaze. ‘You tell me what you know now ‘fore the trail goes cold.’
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