Printer's Devil (9780316167826) Page 5

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told them, “I don’t know no bosun.”

  The bandaged one laughed shortly. “There’s plenty wish they didn’t,” he said, “his own brat among ’em, I warrant.” His face turned dark. “You squeal,” he said, taking hold of my throat. “You been aboard that ship from London to Calcutta and back again, and you seen every move that camel’s made, an it’s your own Pa’s what’s nailed it, an’ we knows it!”

  I couldn’t begin to understand what bandage-head was on about. Did he really say camel?

  “What camel?”

  “Coben,” said the skinny one, “’e might’ve forgot. That brick might’ve knocked the sense out of ’im.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for ’im, Jiggs,” said the one called Coben, “if you believe a word ’e says you’re an even bigger fool than you look.” Jiggs opened his gormless mouth, but obviously thought better of arguing. Coben placed his massive, filthy hand around my chin and asked me again, more threateningly this time, “Where’s the camel?”

  His clenched fingers were genuinely hurting my face, and out of instinct I brought both my hands up to try and wrench his arm free. Fortunately I hadn’t cut my fingernails for about a fortnight and I managed to dig them into his oily skin and produce about six deep satisfying crescent-shaped welts in which blood appeared as he stared down at me.

  Slowly, he bared his filthy brown teeth in a snarl. “You’ve really asked for it now, you little ship’s rat,” he growled. “‘Elp me, Jiggs.”

  And as I kicked and struggled, the hideous twosome took my legs and arms and carried me across the room where, for the first time, I noticed the ornate chest they’d brought from the Sun of Calcutta. The golden decoration on its lid sparkled in the candlelight: patterns like peacocks with their tails fanned out, liquid shapes like falling teardrops of gold. But I didn’t have much time to appreciate it — at least, not from the outside. Before I knew what was happening Coben had opened the lid and I was being bundled inside! I shouted, enraged, letting out all the foul words I knew, which probably weren’t half as many as I’d have known if I really had been a bosun’s boy. Kicking wildly, I managed to land a resonant blow with my heel to the one called Jiggs, at a point on the front of his trousers which made him let go of me abruptly and turn away, clutching himself in alarm. But Coben was quite strong enough for two; and I might just as well have been a baby, wailing and feebly kicking, as he stuffed me into the chest and banged the lid down on me.

  It was a couple of minutes before I could think straight. The low voices of Coben and Jiggs filtered through into the darkness of the chest as I lay cramped up inside. I strained to make out what they were saying, but their words were muffled by the solid wood, and they were speaking to one another in a strange slang I couldn’t really understand.

  “You better sound out the three friends,” I heard Coben say.

  There were some indistinct murmurs from Jiggs, some of which sounded like, “That chavy wants drowning.” His tone of voice suggested he was still in pain.

  “Not yet,” said Coben, “we can get more out of ’im.” Another indistinct murmur from Jiggs, then Coben said: “We ain’t got long. My name’s out.”

  Again Jiggs said something I couldn’t make out. How irritating he was! “The man from Calcutta knows,” came Coben’s voice again. “But there’s something I don’t like. It’s a trick, Jiggs. Fact is, I need a boat.”

  There was a clattering. It sounded as though they might be preparing to leave. I listened as their footsteps creaked up the hollow stairs. Somewhere above, a door was slammed, and a key turned.

  Silence. They’d gone.

  I began to feel around the inside of the chest to see if there was any way of opening it. But no amount of pushing at the lid would make it yield. I was locked in, bent almost double, with my knees in my face and several hard lumpy objects underneath me. Fumbling with my fingers around the floor of my prison, I scraped them against a sharp edge, like a large knife. But it was wedged tightly under my weight, and try as I might I couldn’t move it.

  I could see absolutely nothing. I just hoped there was some crack in the chest somewhere where air could get in, or else I’d suffocate. As the reality of the situation sank in I began to panic, and started shouting and kicking at the sides of the chest; but there was so little room to move that I could make no appreciable sound at all. I was just exhausting myself. I gave up, my eyes filling with tears of frustration. Where was Lash? What had they done with him? In the darkness I could clearly picture the nasty boy’s face, and I wondered how much Coben and Jiggs had paid him to throw the brick at me.

  Faces spun around my head: the man with the mustache and the wily crow’s face he had taken on in my dream; the sneering Coben and Jiggs, the customs official laughing as they handed him money. The air in this chest was making me dizzy. It was heavy with an alien smell which reminded me of the foul air in Flethick’s sluggish den. A strange music seemed to be reaching my ears, fading in and out: music which sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, rising and falling and seeming to avoid all the familiar notes. The events of the last two days mingled in my head, out of sequence, running riot. I was printing posters with the face of a dog on them. Bob Smitchin was talking about camels, with three other people gathered around him. “Mog,” he said, “how rude of me not to introduce you. These are the three friends.” They turned to look at me, and I realized in horror that they all had the face of the escaped convict. Looking down at myself, I noticed my clothes rapidly blackening with tar, which was seeping all over my body. “Ink!” I shouted at the three convicts, “Indian ink from Calcutta!” They glared at me, their heads getting bigger and bigger on their shoulders, until suddenly one of them picked up a brick and it came spinning towards me, revolving in the air, infinitely slowly.

  I woke to thuds and crashes from outside the chest.

  How long had I been asleep? It was still pitch dark: I tried opening and closing my eyes but it made absolutely no difference to what I could see. Someone was clattering around in the room, knocking things over. Had Coben and Jiggs come back? If so, it sounded as though they were drunk.

  My head ached as if it had been battered for hours with spoons. Doing my best to move in the cramped chest, I felt a sharp pain in my thumb, and remembered the knife, or whatever it was, wedged underneath me. With difficulty I lifted my thumb to my mouth, and found my tongue immediately covered with warm welling blood.

  Right next to my ear, something clicked.

  The chest was being unlocked! Suddenly light flooded in, making me squint and gasp after such a long time in total darkness: and I found myself blinking up into the astonished face, not of Coben or Jiggs — but of the mysterious man with the mustache!

  I cried out instinctively, in sudden terror — and so did he. Above his beak-like nose his eyes were, if anything, wider and whiter than they’d been when I met him under the street light last night.

  For the first few seconds I was too shocked to know what to do; but then, scrambling to my knees, I reached down to grab the knife from the bottom of the chest. Only when I’d raised it above my head did I notice it was actually a huge curved scimitar with a golden handle, a weapon formidable enough to drive back a herd of elephants. The man with the brown face was no match for this — a tar-stained child springing like a jack-in-the-box out of the chest and waving a giant sword which flashed in the candlelight! He was off up the stairs, leaving the old wooden door swinging crazily behind him.

  I sat back on the rim of the chest. I was trembling. For the first time I took a proper look at the weapon I held in my hands. It was at least half my own height. Its polished blade was smeared with some of my own blood, and I wiped it on my shirt tail, adding a patch of bright red to the black tar stains.

  My thoughts were coming thick and fast now, a new one with every thumping heartbeat and every droplet of blood which squeezed its way out of my gashed thumb. This stranger, who’d just found
me in the chest and who’d bumped into me as I ran from Cut-Throat Lane last night, was looking for something. What was he after? Was he looking for the same thing Coben and Jiggs wanted, including the mysterious “camel”? Did this chest in fact belong to him, and had he come around here to try and get it back? “The man from Calcutta knows,” I’d heard Coben say. This man was the man from Calcutta, wasn’t he? I was absolutely sure of it. And Coben and Jiggs were scared of him.

  I shuddered. If he struck terror even into that violent pair, what kind of evil must he be capable of?

  I looked up at the open door. I mustn’t stay here for long. Coben and Jiggs might be back at any moment. And I had to find Lash. Gazing at the big sword, I was tempted to take it with me, as much for self-defense as anything else. But I’d have caused a bit of a stir carrying it through the streets, and I could hardly hide it up my sleeve or under my shirt. Reluctantly, I laid it back in the chest; but as I did so, my eye was caught by some inlaid carvings on the handle which made me pick it up again. I ran my good thumb across the design, to clean it. Glistening snakelike strands threaded around one another in complex knots. There was something very familiar about them.

  On the table, a stubby old stump of candle was still flickering. I could hear my heart beating in my chest and I knew I had to get out. But beside the candle, under an empty rum bottle, there was an untidy bundle of papers, which I couldn’t resist quickly surveying. The top one was an untidy note scrawled on ragged parchment.

  gentlmen

  yul hev to be qiuker nex time. If i gets my way yu wont be geting anuther chanc. this is my lay now and my lot ar on yur tale.

  the law is watching the 3 frends & and waching yu.

  Yur frend the BOSUN.

  I gathered this and all the other papers up, and stuffed them into my shirt. Before I left, I closed the lid of the chest and locked it, so it wouldn’t be so obvious I’d escaped; and took care to close the cellar door behind me too as I ran up the stairs and out into the air.

  I found myself in an overgrown backyard, with a crippled little apple tree, its roots half-submerged in bricks and broken glass, doing its best to claw its way out of the rubble and spread its branches up over the low roof of the dirty, decrepit house. I was debating which way to turn in order to hunt for Lash, when I heard an unmistakable woof— and there he was, near my feet, cooped up in a low kennel shaped like a pyramid, made of splintery old wood with bars nailed across it like a cage. There was barely enough room in there to keep a rabbit, let alone a dog like Lash, I thought furiously as I wrenched it open; but Lash evidently forgot the discomfort of his prison almost instantly, as he leapt at me and rested his paws on my chest and licked my face, even more overjoyed than I was at our reunion.

  I had no idea where we were as I crept out into the lane, but the buildings around me didn’t look like the place where the child had thrown the brick at me. The villains must have carried me here. A tingle of fear ran through me as I thought of the charcoaly little eye on the boson’s note, and I wondered what eyes might be watching the pair of us as we ran, as fast as we could, in what I thought was the direction of the city. It was evening, and the glow of sunset was sending shafts of orange light through the smoky air between the buildings. Attracted by the noise of voices and horses’ hooves, I turned a corner into a wide street and, as the buildings fell away like a clearing in the forest of brick and plaster, I could see the shadowy bulk of St. Paul’s belled out like a floating monster against the sunset. Keeping it to my left, I soon found myself in Cheapside, its bustle dwindling as the light faded; and I hoped, as I scuttled home, that I’d be able to remember the way to Coben and Jiggs’s lair, should I ever need to go back there.

  When I reached Cramplock’s it was almost dark. I let myself in, and unhooked a lantern from the back of the door. I was extremely tired, and my head hurt, and part of me just wanted to sink into bed; but I was also dying for something to eat, and I was sure, after being locked up in that nasty little kennel for several hours, Lash must be too. I went to look in Cramplock’s little larder, where I was thrilled to find the remains of the ham I’d bought from Tassie last night, along with some of the bread and a couple of pieces of rather hard cheese which had probably been there somewhat longer. I gathered the food scraps together and scampered upstairs, with Lash close behind, to the little room where we slept, and laid out our feast on the bed.

  Munching, and feeding morsels to Lash little by little, I took down my treasure box from the cupboard. It was really an old biscuit tin, but to me it was a store of the things which were most precious to me in the whole world — apart from Lash, of course. I didn’t really have many things I could call my own. I couldn’t afford to buy much with my wages, except just enough to eat, and even if I had been able to afford any possessions I had nowhere to keep them. But I often took down my treasure box, and admired the things in it, before I went to sleep. A little peg figure with matted woollen strands of hair which I’d brought with me from the orphanage and which I was far too old for, but which I couldn’t quite bring myself to get rid of. A fat and rather tatty bound book of blank pages, which Cramplock had let me make, bearing a title page proclaiming “Mog’s Book,” and into which I used to write or paste things I found particularly interesting or important. A quill pen; a few coins; and a heavy and ornate key I’d found once, for which I had no earthly use but which I kept because it seemed grand.

  Tonight, though, I had a particular reason for getting out my treasure box. When I’d been looking at the handle of the big sword I’d found in the chest at the thieves’ den, I’d thought the markings on it looked familiar. And here, in my box, was the reason why.

  My bangle. The only object I own which came from my mother. A small, bright, silver bangle, far too big for my skinny wrist but still delicate and beautiful; an elegantly stretched and twisted band of pure silver as wide as a couple of fingers. And all around its outer surface, it was decorated with finely etched patterns: gracefully curving, snakelike lines twining themselves around one another in a complicated lattice, a pattern which must have taken painstaking hours, days, even weeks to create. It was certainly the only really valuable thing in my treasure box, and I made sure I always kept it hidden away, for fear of its being stolen. Now, as I turned it over and over, I was gripped by a weird feeling of something momentous which I couldn’t possibly explain. This bangle had belonged to my mother — who had traveled to India and given birth to me on the voyage home, but had died before she got here. I had arrived in London very much alive, and hungry, and a couple of weeks old, and in need of looking after. That’s how I came to be sent to the orphanage, when I was still a tiny child. It had provided me with the companionship of other children, and walls and roofs for shelter, and just enough to eat; but no love. I was lucky to have found work as a painter’s devil at Cramplock’s and left the orphanage behind; and this bangle had come with me, the only thing I still possessed from those harsh years. Its beautiful patterns had been a source of fascination and comfort to me when nearly everything else in my life was cruel and ugly. Nowadays I barely gave them a second thought — until now, when I’d suddenly seen almost exactly the same patterns on another beautiful object which had come, I had no doubt at all, from India.

  I can’t describe how it made me feel, sitting there in my little room with my dog resting his head on his paws in the basket by my bed, except that I felt more curious than I ever had in my life. The sword; the ornate chest; the man from Calcutta; the villains’ impenetrable questions, and the sailor who’d stopped me on the dockside as though he knew exactly who I was…. Something was happening, and I was a part of it, without my having known it. For all I knew I might have been a part of it for months, or even years, and never had a clue. What I had to find out now was — just what was going on?

  I reached for the bits of paper I’d stuffed into my shirt at the thieves’ cellar, and laid them out across the bed. In some small way, they might be able to give me some clues. One
or both of the ugly villains who’d locked me up today was obviously able to read quite well, since some of the papers were densely covered with tiny writing. I wondered if they’d returned to the cellar yet to find me gone. Instinctively I looked up at the dark window, and felt so uncomfortable I got up to pull the curtain across.

  As well as the scrappy note from the bosun, I found a list of names covering two sides of a sheet of paper, scrawled almost illegibly in brownish ink. Holding it near the candle, I saw one or two names I could decipher. “Blandarm” seemed to be one, “Fetchwood” another, “Jacob Tenderloin” a third. There must have been forty or fifty names altogether. Were these people involved in the plot? It was rather foolish, I felt, to keep written lists of them, if they were. I laid the list aside and unfolded the next piece of paper. It was a letter, in quite a refined hand. It had obviously been folded up for rather a long time, and the words closest to the creases had more or less faded away. I had to strain my eyes to read any of it, but a few phrases emerged. “I charge you with this solemn duty,” I read. Then, farther down, “whatever the imminent fate of the soul.” Was it a sermon?

  And, farther down still, a line which appeared to read: “I fear it will not be possible to reach Damyata now.”

  This didn’t make any sense to me. If it was the name of a place, it was nowhere I had ever heard of. The writing was faded and it was hard to be sure of the exact letters: it might possibly have said “Oomyata,” or, in a pinch, “Damyalu.” But whatever combination of letters I tried, I couldn’t make it mean anything. I folded it up again with a shrug.