Read Online Jack Maggs by Peter Carey - Free Book Online

stretched. “So he said, Ma’am.”
    The cook—for he assumed her to be so—shook her head and went about readying the kitchen for breakfast, riddling the grate, throwing in the coal, getting the great kettle back in its place on the cold black top.
    “He cannot help himself. He saw your livery, and thought: there’s a chap with dirty livery. Just what you would think or I would think, but Mr Oates, he can’t stop there—he’s thinking, how did that fatty-spot get on his shoulder? He’s wondering, in what circumstances were the stockings torn? He’s looking at you like a blessed butterfly he has to pin down on his board. It is not that he hasn’t got a heart. Indeed, I’m like as not cold-hearted in comparison. But he is an author, as I’m sure you don’t need telling, and he must know your whole life story or he will die of it. There’s a boy from Tetley’s with a porcelain eye, he left the poor little mite waiting half the day. Miss Lizzie found the little tyke crying on the doorstep when she was going walking with the missus.”
    “Well, I’ll be on my way then,” said sleepy Jack, noticing for the first time his torn stockings. “For to tell you the truth, Ma’am, I must be explaining myself to my own master.”
    “Sit up all night and not get your shilling? No, no. You must go up.”
    “I’ve a long way to travel, Ma’am, and a household to attend to.”
    “You can’t leave now. He’s left you sitting for hours. You go up and tell him. He’s a fine man, a good man. You won’t find a better one.”
    “Just the same,” said Maggs.
    “Just the same, my aunt. You go, Sir, or I’ll bring him down myself.”
    “But surely he’s asleep.”
    “Asleep? He never sleeps. It’s half past five and he’s in his room. Come, I’ll show you where it is. If he’s writing in his book, don’t mind. Just say, here I am and John’s my name and I am here for to get the tip you left me all night waiting for.”
    So Maggs ascended the stairs a second time. It was just as well, he thought. If ’twere done, ’twere best done quickly . . .

13
    TOBIAS OATES HAD AN obsession with the Criminal Mind. He found evidence of its presence in signs as small as the bumps upon a pickpocket’s cranium, or as large as La Place’s Théorie analytique which showed the murder rate in Paris unchanged from one year to the next.
    There was a little shop in Whitechapel, the province of a certain Mr Nevus, where Tobias was in the habit of purchasing what he called “Evidence.” Here he had recently paid a very hefty sum for the hand of a thief. With the exception of the tell-tale little finger, which was malformed, the fingers of the hand were long, thin, very delicate; sadly in opposition to the skirt of skin which trailed back from the harshly butchered wrist. This hand floated in a large wide-throated jar of formaldehyde identified by a brown discoloured label, on which was inscribed a legend in Arabic the meaning of which was not, as yet, available.
    He had many such secrets hidden in his study. There, in that cubby hole labelled “M,” were the notes he had made on his visit to the Morgue in Paris. There, on that very high shelf up against the ceiling, was a parcel wrapped in tissue paper and tied with black ribbon—the death mask of John Sheppard, hanged at Tyburn in 1724.
    There was much of the scientist about Tobias Oates. The study, with its circular window and its neat varnished systems of shelves and pigeon holes, was ordered as methodically as a laboratory. There was not a loose piece of anything here, not a nightingale feather or an unbound sheet of paper: everything was secured in its own place, tied up with ribbon, or tucked away in labelled envelopes. In these corners Tobias Oates stored not only his Evidence, but also experiments, sketches, notes, his workings-up of the characters who he hoped would one day make his name, not just as the author of comic adventures, but as a novelist who might topple