Beneath the sagged beams of the loft in which he dossed, he would count the stars through the holes in the slating and listen to the clashing musics coming up from the street. If he couldn’t sleep – and often he couldn’t – he would sit at the window in his tattered underwear and watch the sailors wandering up from the docks; filtering into the bawdy-houses and grog-shops, to the freak shows and peepshows and streetside burlesques. Some nights he went down and strolled among them, for no other reason than to be among people. To be jostled; crowded; not to be alone.
Moroccans in turbans; teak-faced Indians; handsome Texans with suntans so vividly orange that when Mulvey first saw one he thought the poor Jack was jaundiced. Frenchmen; Dutchmen; Spaniards who smelt of spices. Wine merchants from Burgundy. Acrobats from Rome. One evening he had watched from his seventh-storey perch as a party of opera singers from somewhere in Germany came processing up from Tobacco Wharf, up through the East End like a pageant of judges. They were chorusing ‘Messiah’ as they majestically went, bestowing mock blessings on the cheering passers-by. Gazing down in wonder from his head-spinning rookery, Mulvey sang it back to them like a liberated slave.
King of Kings!
And Lord of Lords!
And He shall reign for ever and ever!
Most of all he loved the languages of London, the clamorous fanfare of the city in conversation with itself. To hear Italian or even Arabic was nothing unusual; Portuguese and Russian, Shelta and Romany; the mournfully beautiful entreaties and praisings that drifted from the synagogues on a Friday at sunset. Sometimes he heard tongues he could not even name; languages so strange and resistant to penetration that it was hard to believe they were languages at all; that any two speakers in the world could know them. ‘Pig Latin’ Carny; traveller Pidgin; the rhyme-slang of stall-boys; the ‘flash-code’ of criminals; the patter of bookies and three-card-tricksters; the drawling patois of graceful Jamaicans and the singsong lilt of Welshmen and Creoles. They borrowed from one another like children trading streamers; a bold lingua franca which anyone could own. It was as though the Tower of Babel had emptied its multitudes into the reeking streets of Whitechapel. Mulvey came from a place where silence was constant as the rain, but never again would he know such an awfulness.
And the cockneys talked as though talking in colours. Brash, blowsy banners of words. He listened for hours as they nattered in the markets, as they dandered through the carnival in Paternoster Square. How he wished he could talk with such brio and bite. He practised in the evenings, over and over; made reverent translations into their tongue.
Our old guv’nor,
which dosses in Lewisham,
swelléd be thy moniker.
Thy racket be come;
thy crack-job be done,
in Bow as it is in Lewisham.
Scalp us this day our lump of lead
and let us be bailed for our dodges;
as we backslaps the pox-hounds and Berkshire Hunts
what dodges agin us. (The bumsuckers.)
And jemmy us not into lushery or lurks
but send us skedaddling from blaggery.
For thine is the manor, the flash and the bovver.
Till mother breaks out of the clink. Amen.
The lexicon of crime became his favourite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing, and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. He loved those verbs, their fizzling magnificence: the majesty of their music in his Connemara accent. He stole a notebook and began to collect them. When that one was full, he stole a bigger one. Like the dictionary of his childhood he studied it constantly. It was Bible, cyclopaedia, passport and pillow.
He walked the noisy city like Adam in Eden, reaching out his grateful hand to pluck the fruits. But he wouldn’t commit the predictable sin, the cupidity that would cast you out of Paradise and into Newgate Gaol. He stole what he needed – never anything more. There was no point in being greedy, nor any need to be.
And he loved to steal. It made him happy. It gave him what he had never experienced except when singing: a dizzying sense of his own mastery. To live by thievery was to go by your wits, a Free Trade entrepreneur of the alleyway and marketplace.
He dressed himself in the princely togs of the East End flash-boy; the scarlet waistcoats, the spats and cravats, the velvet-collared frock coats and button-down britches; the uniform which announced your thievery to the world and told the world it had better take note of your arrival. The one thing he never stole was his clothes. You couldn’t be sure they’d be good enough if you stole them. The account at his little Jewish tailor’s was more than a half-year’s rent in Connemara. ‘Schmatta’ was the Yiddish for fine-cut clothes; ‘schmuck’ (literally, ‘a penis’) for the man who would wear anything less. Pius Mulvey’s days of schmuckery were over. To be a robber in the East End was not to be ashamed or cast down, but to be held up to youngsters as an example of possibility. In London it was the criminals who appeared in the songs; the highwaymen and muggers and cutpurses and cracksmen who ran through the city like a seam of gold through a dunghill. Their names were reverently uttered like a communion of saints. Swindling Sal. Joe the Magsman. The fence Ikey Solomons who escaped from Newgate in ’31. They dressed as though to parody the class who ruled them. Beware, their appearance seemed to say. One day we might take your clothes and put them on. One day the emperor will have no clothes. We will be you. And you will be us. And if you were us, could you last five minutes?
Even in defeat, nobility clung to them. They paraded to the gallows in silvered coaches drawn by teams of sixteen stallions, retinued by fleets of liveried servants and weeping women in gem-studded gowns. The important thing was not that you were about to die, but were about to ‘die game’, unbroken and disdainful. Such a departure required the sense of the moment which most of them had trained for years to affect. The first time Pius Mulvey went to a hanging he came away envying the dangling victim, who had flung an armful of roses into the crowd as he stalked up the steps of the scaffoldage like an actor. One hand on his hip, the other to his ear – as though he couldn’t quite make out the manic applause and would cancel the performance if it didn’t increase.
As he dipped into the pockets of the roaring throng around him, Frederick Hall told himself that one fine day he would be every bit as loved as that pouting, glamorous corpse.
Whenever he grew bored with the easiness of stealing he would venture his luck as a pavement balladeer. He tried singing some of the old Galway songs, but the people of London didn’t seem to like them. They appeared to find them wearisome or faintly disturbing, and they didn’t need to pay to be wearied or disturbed. Dark songs did not play so well in Whitechapel. Perhaps it had darkness enough of its own.
He began to try out the song he had written himself; the ballad of the recruiting sergeant spurned in Connemara. You couldn’t possibly sing it in its original form, but if you changed its uniform or clad it in camouflage it might be pressed into earning its maker a supper. He stitched at the text for a couple of nights, affixing ribbons of street names and crests of London slang; unpicking anything too disqui
eting or too noticeably Irish. Not a jot did it bother him to alter the ensemble. It was tailoring Galway remnants into East End swell-duds. The morning he finished the tacking and tucking, he hurried down to Bethnal Green Market and sang it fourteen times in a row, in the East End inflection he had now begun to master. ‘Cockney toe-rag’, a constable muttered as he passed. Frederick Hall took it as moment of apotheosis.
Me and my chum dodgin’ down in the Strand,
When up marches Major wiv sword in one ’and,
And yarns of his soldierboys fearless and grand;
Oh, the day bein’ cheerful and charming.
And says ’e, my gay cockerels, now sign up wiv me,
And it’s ten sparklin sovereigns you’ll suddenly see,
Wiv a crown in the bargain I’ll toss in for free,
For to drink the king’s elf in the morning.
Cut along with you, Major, we boldly did say,
For we loves Piccadilly and ’ere we shall stay;
To dodge all the night and to dally all day
Is to live life most cheerful and charming.
Oh the nancies we chases are free as the air;
The doxies of Dean Street and sweet Leicester Square,
And you’d lug us to Ireland with nary a care;
Where we could get plugged without warning.
So we’ll stay ’ere and play ’ere, flash-lads in the know,
Where the sweet Thames flows slowly from Richmond to Bow;
And with said benediction, we bowed very low;
And bade him be buggered this morning.
One evening in Limehouse, just as he had finished singing it, an alarmingly bearded gentleman in tails and a topper approached him politely and asked if they might speak. Mulvey had noticed him before in the neighbourhood, creeping the midnight alleyways like a burglar. Once or twice he had even considered trying to rob him, for he always seemed ill at ease in Whitechapel. His name was Dickens, the gentleman explained, but he preferred his friends to call him either Charlie or Chaz. Immediately Mulvey felt he was being told a lie. This milksop toff had never been called Chaz, except maybe in his dreams or his mickey-pulling fantasies.
Charlie or Chaz or Charles or Dickens was a writer of stories in literary magazines. He had a great curiosity for the culture of the working man, he said, for the songs and sayings of the labouring classes of London. Anything authentic interested him greatly and he had found Mulvey’s song fantastically interesting. Was it terribly old, he wanted to know? How had Mulvey come to learn it? There was a hopefulness in the way he put his questions and Mulvey discerned that an opportunity might lie here; an opening which honesty might well close down.
He had confided to Charlie that he was feeling too hungry to speak and the author had led him into a chop-house across the street and ordered up a dinner which would have satisfied a convocation of bishops. As they ate and drank, Mulvey spoke to him about the song. He had learned it from an aged pickpocket who lived in Holborn, he lied, a Jew who ran a school for young thieves and runaways. It was indeed very old and extremely authentic. Charlie was fascinated; he kept writing down Mulvey’s answers, and the faster he wrote them, the faster flowed the lies. Mulvey’s ability to lie amazed even himself. Before long he almost believed he was telling the truth, so vivid was the picture of the chuckling, sagacious Israelite, his artful little disciples and the voluble tarts who befriended them. When he ran out of inspiration he started stirring in details from Connemara ballads: the maiden betrayed by the false-hearted aristocrat, the girl of easy virtue murdered by her lover, the poor little waif sent into the workhouse. It was as though he had lived among these imaginary people; as though he had become one of his own fictional characters. Soon Charlie asked if he might copy down the lyric. Mulvey said he would happily sing it again, if only his throat were not so confoundedly dry. A pitcher of ale was hastily ordered and Mulvey sang it two more times. Charlie was trying to scalp him, but that was fine. Charlie was being thoroughly scalped himself. The song was an act of mutual robbery. There was a living to be made from manufacturing the authentic.
‘And his name?’ asked Dickens, ‘the name of the Jew?’
An ugly face arose in Mulvey’s memory: the hideous visage of a living gargoyle. The most evil old Jew-hater he had ever met. The parish priest of Derryclare. The thief who had stolen his brother away. Here was an opportunity for small but blissful revenge; to magic the old bastard into what he most detested.
‘Fagan,’ he said.
Charles Dickens smiled.
‘I think you have given me enough,’ he said.
CHAPTER XX
THE HARD-LUCK MAN
IN WHICH THE SCANDALOUS ADVENTURES OF MULVEY CONTINUE; BUT RECEIVE A SUDDEN CHECK.
On a mercilessly hot night in July of 1837, the tenement in which he squatted was set ablaze (by its owner), and Frederick Hall decided to ramble south of the river, to test his luck in another quarter. He tried Southwark for a while but without much success; the natives were careful and had nothing worth robbing anyway. Greenwich proved also a waste of his time. There were too many soldiers and prowling policemen. In Lambeth he fell in with a Glaswegian pickpocket and blackguard called Right McKnight (or so he improbably claimed) who had stolen a vicar’s cassock from a laundry in Ealing and was looking for a partner with whom to put it to good use.
‘Prating’ was the term for what he proposed: the misappropriation carried out by a bogus preacher usually with the aid of a disguised accomplice. It was a useful addition to Mulvey’s dictionary and a matter that swelled his admiration for the peoples of Britain once again. How could any language worthy of speech not have a word for that?
Mulvey would smear his visible portions with boot blacking and put on a tunic of coal sacks. Thus made up as ‘the convertite African’, and accompanied by his converter, the Reverend McKnight, he would roll his eyes and caper at the captivated onlookers, babbling a ceaseless stream of Connemara Irish. McKnight would bellow and point at the heavens, brandishing a crucifix and thunderously rolling his Rs: ‘Oh, hearr the pagan parrlance, brrothers and sisterrs. The verry vermacularr of Luciferr himself. Won’t you imparrt a few farrthings forr the converrsion of his trribesmen, who luxurriate this morrning in the sewerr of idolatrry.’ Little did they know that what the gibbering infidel was usually reciting was either the Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary or a random list of villages in the county of Limerick; a region whose indigenes he had always found bothersome.
At the climax of the performance, barbarian Mulvey would be made to sink to his knees in heart-rending reverence and copiously spit upon ‘a pagan idol’. (Actually a souvenir statuette of King Leopold of the Belgians, robbed from a junk shop in the Charing Cross Road and beheaded by the Scotsman with a spoon.) A kiss to the crucifix and another menacing blast of full-throated Irish would persuade the last of the doubters to reach for their purses. They knew very well that he wasn’t a black man. But whatever he was, it was savage.
From this dodge could be garnered five or even ten pounds a day, as much as a labourer might earn in six months. The Scotsman spent most of his share on gin and whoring, but Mulvey spent most of his own on clothes. Gin didn’t interest him and whoring never had. Nothing much interested him except survival and clothes, and collecting new words for stealing.
Sometimes when he had a little money to spare – which happened quite often, for his needs were few – he would send a couple of pounds back to Mary Duane in Carna. But he never wrote. There was nothing to write. He simply couldn’t think of anything to say.
McKnight eventually drank himself into Bethlehem madhouse so Mulvey was forced to go out on his own. He didn’t mind. It was time for a change. He had always found the Scottish an appealing people, bookish and deliberative as he was himself, but McKnight was not one of their finer ambassadors: a dullard when sober and violently unpredictable when drunk. Mulvey often suspected he had been swindling him on the quiet.
He became a solo performer, the
pavement his theatre, with a new drama for each new day. He prided himself on his scope and limitless energy, his lack of requirement for partners or props. Into the street he would saunter every morning, a gambler in a land of heavily stacked odds, outfitted with nothing except his imagination. Sometimes he was an impoverished mariner who had fought against the French; a distressed widower with seven hungry children; a miner who had survived a terrible explosion; a man who had once owned a flower shop in Chelsea before being mercilessly cheated by his unscrupulous partner. Women would weep as he told his tales. Men would beseech him to take their last pennies. Often his stories were so completely convincing that he would even weep himself.
The other hard-luck men who worked the area accused him of being greedy and not giving them a chance. When he refused to accept their proposals for regulating the market, one of them ‘ratted him in’ to the police. The judge proved a less receptive audience than some Mulvey had known. Frederick Hall was found guilty of obtaining with deceptions and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour in Newgate. He was stripped in the Gate-House and carefully searched, being forced to bend low so they could investigate his rectum, then shorn of his hair and blasted with a fire hose and examined by a doctor who passed him as healthy. He was dusted with a powder that was said to kill lice; then invited to swallow a measure of saltpetre, which the guards said would quell your natural desires. Declining to swallow it, he was strapped to a chair and had it pumped down his gullet with the aid of a funnel. Naked except for a bloodstained towel, he was chained to a leash and led into the prison; through cast-iron gates, along whitewashed landings, up the metal staircase to the Governor’s office. There Prisoner Hall and two other newcomers were given a talk by the Governor’s assistant, a man with the gentle smile of a paedophile uncle. There was a plaque on his desk inscribed with the debatable words: WE MUST CEASE TO DO EVIL & LEARN TO DO WELL. They had probably heard many things about Newgate, he said, but they were not to believe these exaggerated tales. The institution only existed to help them. Punishment could be an act of deepest love.