A Beggar's Kingdom Page 20

  The dining hall has been cleaned up and the busty fiddler has left. Jasper is passed out on the floor by the slop sink. Sitting at one of the tables, Monk and Miri count their loot. Miri’s blonde wig lies next to her. They divide the ten shillings three ways, three shillings each. Monk does not offer Julian the extra shilling for helping.

  “Why did you follow me?” Miri challenges Julian in front of the others.

  “Because what you were doing did not look safe.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I told you, Jack,” Mortimer says smugly.

  “She’s right, don’t worry about her, Jack,” Monk says. “Our Miri can take care of herself.”

  “But, Miri, Jack is right, too,” Mortimer says, defending Julian’s defending. “The drunk ones can get violent real quick. One of them broke Miri’s jaw once, remember, Miri?”

  “No, Mort, I forgot.”

  In the silence that follows, blood rushes to Julian’s face. But his anger isn’t directed at the drunk man. It’s directed at Miri—for constantly putting herself in harm’s way, where a broken jaw, or worse, is inevitable. How can she not sense her life hangs in the balance?

  “I don’t need no friggin’ protection,” Miri says. “Not from you, Mort, not from him”—she gestures unkindly to Julian—“not from nobody.” She rolls her share of the coin into a small purse and sticks the purse inside her breasts. She has thrown a shawl over her exposed flesh. Show is over, business is closed, she’s covered up again.

  “Same time tomorrow night, Jack?” Mortimer says to Julian. “Miri, what time you starting out tomorrow?”

  “Probably after midnight. Got things to do before. But I told you—we don’t need his help.”

  “Maybe not you,” Mortimer says, “but I need it.”

  “Where you sleeping tonight, mate?” Monk asks Julian. “It’s fourpence a night at Dyott House or Mother Dowling’s. Only threepence if you can stomach the cellar without retching.” Monk chuckles. “Tuppence if you don’t mind sharing your cellar room with others. Or you can be like Jasper and Miri and sleep for free on the floor of the kitchen.”

  “I’m good,” Julian says, paling as he imagines Miri on the floor near pits of refuse.

  “You got to sleep somewhere.” Monk narrows his eyes. “Where does a well-dressed man like you sleep?”

  To earn their confidence (hers mostly) Julian forgoes his warm bath and white bed and opts for fourpence at Dyott House. By the time he wakes on a fleabag unmade mattress a few hours later, he no longer needs to worry about dressing down. He looks and smells as if he is thoroughly from St. Giles.

  Walking home through Covent Garden, Julian sees the robbed man from the night before, hatless, shoeless and sobered-up, shouting at a constable on Long Acre, pointing to Little Owl Street. The policeman impatiently explains that there aren’t enough days left in eternity to search the foul alleys of the rookery to find the cadgers who had taken the man’s pocket watch, gold cufflinks, and wedding ring. “If you can recognize the dance hall where the molly shook you down,” the constable says to the irate man, “where you passed out, if you can point me in the general direction of this fine dining establishment, I’ll be more than glad to oblige you by arresting the scofflaws.”

  Julian hears the man describe Miri to the constable, the blonde Miri of the flowing dress and swelling breasts, of sweet breath and a voice that melts ice. The man calls her a disorderly whore. Julian wants to brawl with him. Miri is not disorderly! She is chaste and buxom, streetwalking at night, keeping her virtue as best she can while she endangers her future by continuing to plunder well-to-do drunks. Not him, but other well-to-do drunks. She thinks he is not worthy of being plundered by her.

  That evening, Miri takes the long way around the rookery to Drury Lane, to the Theatre Royal, zigzagging through the back streets and alleys to make sure she’s not being followed. How long is Julian going to hide in the shadows before he can approach the woman as a man? She is dressed sharply differently from the night before. She is in clean, conservative clothes, in a long straight skirt and covered up to the neck in a prim bodice. Her hair is neat inside a dark bonnet. Her plain shoes are spotless. After buying a ticket at the box office, she disappears inside.

  It’s a warm and humid late May night in London and the theatre doors have been left ajar to ventilate the auditorium. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is playing. Richard Garrick—the owner of the Theatre Royal and its legendary lead actor for the last thirty years—is retiring, the marquee says, and these performances are his last. Julian stands by the open doors, listening in. I am sick when I look not on you, Garrick says and Julian repeats, searching for the back of her head in the packed gallery.

  He has learned a new meaning of survival of the fittest. If nothing abounds but dirt, those who survive eat dirt.

  Except for Miri. Sometimes in this dirt she plants roses.

  18

  The Ride of Paul Revere

  EVERYTHING STINKS, EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. IT STINKS when Julian sleeps and when he is awake. It stinks when he eats and bathes and when he dreams of love. Gin ferments and leaches into the pores of the skin of the people who drink it, gin mixes with grease and sweat and urine, gin mixes with unwashed hair, with decomposing mutton, with blood both clotted and flowing, gin mixes with dirt and sulfur from the fire pits, with rancid cheese and old milk, with every sour excretion in the human body and itself is excreted in greater quantities than the body can metabolize. Everything stinks, and everyone. The priests, the paupers, the men, the women, the horses, the rivers, the food stalls, the goldsmiths. Everything is covered with a thick layer of black soot from the coal-burning chimneys. The soot is never wiped off, and the manure is never cleaned up. That’s not a rookery thing. That’s an eighteenth-century big city thing. Gin is the rookery thing, the stench of gin mixed with dying bodies and rat kings.

  And Julian walks in this stink, a solitary nocturnal man, dreaming of lavender love with his beloved.

  ∞

  You know who is not dreaming of lavender love? His beloved. The next time Julian has an opportunity to whisper in her ear, he offers her what her drunk marks in pubs offer her: money. From him, she balks.

  “I don’t want anything from you,” Julian says, trying to placate her.

  “Good, we’re even, ‘cause I don’t want nothing from you,” says Miri.

  “I mean, nothing in return. I don’t want you to get me drunk, and I don’t want you to touch me.”

  “So what do you want, then?”

  “Nothing. Come for a walk with me.”

  “I walk all fuggin’ day long.”

  “Come to the park with me.”

  “Why? Smuts go in parks. No.”

  “Come for a carriage ride with me.”

  “To where? No!”

  “For a meal with me in another tavern?”

  “I eat plenty right here, and no.”

  Come for anything with me, Miri, Julian wants to say. Come however you want. Just come.

  After she rejects him, Miri trusts him even less. In her world Julian is the ultimate crook, the consummate swindler, because in her world, nothing is given for nothing. Everything is a barter, everything is a trade. Somehow, with his offer of money for nothing, Julian has managed to make things worse. He wants to explain to her but can’t that he’s a drowning man, grasping at anything to pull himself and her out. Well done, Jules, as Ashton would say. Well fucking done.

  Once upon a time she was born into a noble life of milk baths and servants and afterward reborn into the Silver Cross, a life of toil and prostitution, and in that life she killed a man in cold blood for a few pieces of gold and a woman out of vengeance. And now she is here, a closed-up con artist in a wasteland of decay and despair. Her suffering is getting worse, the older her soul grows. Is this how she atones for betraying the one who put his trust in her, by having trust scraped from her soul until not a shred is left? How can a shuttered heart be changed?


  ∞

  On the other hand, her friends and her mother grow fonder by the day of the man she keeps refusing. Agatha adores him, which makes Miri only more cross. Even Mortimer, that tough nut, has cracked, now that he’s got someone to help carry the half-naked marks out of the rookery. Monk shows his affection by constantly mocking Julian’s delicate sensibilities. “Look there, Jack, the St. Giles blackbirds are beggin’ drunk again,” Monk says. “This don’t please you? Has the neighborhood really gone downhill?”

  “Tell me you don’t find the stench of half-open shallow burial grounds objectionable?” Julian says. “It can’t just be me.”

  “Oh, it’s just you, Jack,” Monk says. “Repentance—that’s me and Fulko’s mum—used to work at Smithfields. She says the regular normal smells, like you was just mentionin’, in Smithfields was combined with damp waste from the cattlemarket and rotting carcasses from the shambles. What a pungent brew that was! Mum says she returned to St. Giles for the clean air.” Monk laughs, slapping Julian on the back. “And what’s the moral of that story? Cheer up, it can always be worse.”

  Hazel is out and about. Agatha’s legs heal. Days pass with the regularity of the tolling bells, quiet mornings, loud afternoons, busy nights.

  Dot 8.

  Dot 10.

  Everything is the same, day after day, but it can all change any minute, any second. The police can come; during her next trick, she can get beaten. She can get sick, raped, killed. Julian fears she may not make it out of dot 11 of the life she leads.

  Sure enough, on dot 13, the man she chooses to plunder nearly plunders her, right on King Street. He pulls her down to the pavement and mauls her. It takes a quick-thinking Julian to break cover and stagger between them, pretending to be drunk himself. Even that’s not enough. He must grab the man by the scruff of the neck and throw him face down onto the cobblestones. Only when the man is unconscious does he let go of Miri’s ripped skirts. Once free, she jumps up and runs, saying to Julian, “Why are you always around,” by way of thanks.

  Dot 15.

  On dot 16, Julian finally meets the famous Flora, Jasper’s disorderly fortune-teller. Holding Flora tenderly by the hand, Jasper points out Julian to her, as if the fortune-teller can’t divine for herself which face is new in their common circle.

  Miri might not make much eye contact with Julian, but the same can’t be said for Flora. She’s a tipsy cheerful creature with way too much lipstick and way too much cleavage. Invading his personal space and revealing her bare ankles to entice him, she inches up to him with a flounce in her excessive skirts, shaking her elaborately pinned rats-tails red hair at him, and giving him her best gin-soaked smile, never mind that it’s barely midday. “Hullo, there,” she says, extending her hand. “Jasper’s told me so much about you. Where you actually from?”

  You’d think she would know the answer to that, being a fortune-teller and all, but whatever. “From Wales. From the unknown forest.”

  “I’ve never seen a forest,” Jasper says. “They have that in the future?”

  Flora’s dress is held together by pins and ribbons. It looks good only from a distance—as does Flora. Up close, the young woman’s “disorderly” living is stamped around her eyes and her blemished skin. You know who doesn’t think Flora looks good only from afar? Jasper. He is smitten with her.

  A smiling Flora whistles as she paws Julian’s chest and shoulders. “This one’s a keeper.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Agatha says from her chair, crankily pulling on Julian to get him away from Flora.

  “Agatha, Jasper, let go of me, and let me do my job,” Flora says. “Blimey, the two of you.” Flora caresses Julian’s knuckly hands, looking into his square palms. “He’s come from a long way away!” she proclaims.

  “Long way like Wales?” Julian says.

  “Farther!”

  Cynically Julian considers her while the young woman runs through a litany of generic claims: Julian’s heart is full of strong emotion. He has many difficult decisions to make that cause him anxiety. He’s got secrets that weigh heavy upon him. He must work on his friendships. He’s in conflict with the truth.

  About whom could those things not be said?

  “But is he from the future, Flora, darling?” Jasper asks adoringly. “That’s the only thing we wants to know.”

  “Jasper, why would anyone from the future come here?” Flora says. “They can go anywhere. Why would they want to glance in on your miserable lot? Of course he’s not from the future.”

  Jasper takes Flora’s hand. “My lot’s not so miserable.”

  “Aha!” Monk says, sticking a finger into Julian’s chest. “Flora says you ain’t from the future. Lies and damnations! I knew it! She’s a soothsayer, and yer a cadger most cunning.”

  Desolately Julian glances around Seven Dials. There’s been no sighting of Miri this morning, not a glimpse. The dots are beginning to weigh on him. They’re beginning to press him into the ground. One dot, one heaping shovel full of dirt. And he’s got 16. He sighs. “Would you like me to prove to you I’m from the future, Monk?”

  There’s tepid applause. The curious and the idle at Seven Dials would like a freakshow.

  “What’s today’s date, June 4?” Julian winces. So much time has passed. “Listen to me, gentle men and gentle ladies,” Julian says. “The battles of Lexington and Concord have been fought and lost. Paul Revere has taken his midnight ride. He has warned the colonials that the British were coming. He has told them to take up arms, and they did. And the Redcoats lost.”

  Everyone ridicules Julian, including the great and powerful seer named Flora. A dozen grimy faces frown at him, a dozen boozy voices argue with him.

  “We’ll ask Miri when she returns,” Mortimer says. “She hawks them papers, she’ll tell us if it’s true, she’s smart. She taught herself how to read.”

  They laugh at Julian. Ridicule suits them, adds a gloss to their collective disposition. “What about after Lexington?” Monk asks. “Bet you don’t know that. What’s going to happen between the Crown and the Colonies?”

  “The Colonies will declare their independence,” Julian says.

  A gassy upheaval follows his words, a mini revolution in Seven Dials. Never! When?

  “July 4, 1776.”

  “That’s rather specific, Jack,” Monk says, after a small silence. The crowd laughs nervously. “And what about after that?”

  “England will lose the war,” says Julian. “England will lose America.”

  The crowd grows less amused. They stop taunting. No one likes talk of their country losing wars, not the rich or the poor.

  “Nothing in the spirit world tells me this is true,” Flora says.

  “Maybe you should find different spirits to listen to, Flora,” says Julian.

  A frowning Mortimer, his hat askew, wags his finger from above. “Don’t let the wrong ear hear you say those things, Jack. That’s treason talk.”

  The crowd grimly assents.

  “Yes, Mortimer, you know what else is treason?” Julian says. “Counterfeiting. It’s punishable by death. You should be more careful.”

  “Witchcraft is worse,” Mortimer rejoins.

  They stop mocking when Miri runs across the square, holding up a copy of the London Chronicle. They stop making all sounds.

  “We lost Concord!” she yells. “We lost Lexington and Concord!”

  Everyone turns and stares at Julian with incomprehension.

  Miri reads from the paper. “The king’s troops are in full retreat! The provincials are in possession of Concord!”

  “There’s a simple explanation,” Flora says. “He saw the paper already. He read it earlier this morning.”

  “It’s hot off the press,” Miri says. “Feel the page. It’s warm. What did he read earlier this morning?” She doesn’t understand the fearful wariness with which everyone suddenly regards Julian. But to be fair, Miri’s been staring at him like that from the start.

>   It takes Julian longer than it should to understand why there’s been such a delay in receiving the news. But that’s how long the information must take to cross the Atlantic—seven weeks.

  “It’s a lucky guess,” Flora says dismissively. “Nothing but dumb luck. He had a 50-50 chance of getting the winning side right.”

  One day Julian needs to explain to Flora the fortune-teller the difference between prophecy and probability. It’s a big one. She must die or she might die.

  Agatha pulls Julian down to sit by her side. “My dear boy,” she says kindly and quietly. “A word to the wise. It was funny what you was saying when we all thought you was joking. But now—for your own sake—stop speaking. Lie low and hope people forget what you told them today. Otherwise someone will get nervous and open their trap. Like Mortimer—he’s always snitching on others to take attention off hisself. And then yer going to be stoned in the pillory for being a warlock. And worse.”

  “Worse than a warlock?”

  “Worse than the pillory. Better to be a murderer than a soothsayer.” Agatha is serious. “They might hang you for killing, but they burn you for witchcraft.”

  As if that’s on Julian’s radar of immediate concerns. He rises, scanning the square for Miri. That impossible girl. She’s vanished again! It would be almost funny if it wasn’t happening to him. Here Julian is—living 300 years in the past, in eighteenth-century London, on the one hand having found her, on the other—still searching for her, as ever.

  “You keep seeking out my child,” Agatha says. “Why?” Her eyes blink in weary compassion. “Sit down, my dear, take the weight off yer feet. Sit. A word to the wise there, too. I don’t like to meddle in what’s not my business, oh, I gossip about it, I gossip most wicked, Lord have mercy on me. But no frisson between a man and a woman can ever end in anything but misery. Especially not between you and that woman.”