To Dodger’s surprise one of the richest women in the world then grasped his arm. ‘Now, Mister Dodger,’ she said, ‘I would like to talk to you about reading. Solomon tells me that you seldom make any attempt at reading and can barely cipher something approximating your name. This is not good enough, young man! A person of your calibre has no business being illiterate. Normally I would suggest that you should get enrolled in one of my ragged schools, but I fancy you would consider yourself too old for that, so instead, and so that I may begin to instil in you a love of words and the way they can be used, you will promise me that tomorrow night you will come with me and young Simplicity to the theatre to see the new production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.’
She straightened up and added, ‘Mister Cohen may accompany us too if he would be so kind. You must raise your play, Mister Dodger, because no man should waste his life tramping through sewers when he could be sailing through literature and the theatre. Raise your play, Mister Dodger, raise your play! You already have the gingerbread, time to get the gilt!’ She paused and looked at Dodger’s expression. ‘You are looking at me with your mouth open,’ she added. ‘Is there anything that I have just said that you might not have understood?’
Dodger hesitated, but not for long. ‘Yes, miss. I am rather busy but I would like to go and see the play, and I have seen gingerbread with gilt on it in some baker’s shop, but for the life of me I don’t know what that has to do with anything.’
‘One day, Dodger, you should ask Solomon what a metaphor is.’
‘There’s another thing I want to ask please, miss,’ said Dodger. ‘That is, how can you be sure that nothing bad could happen to Miss Simplicity in the theatre; they are big places with lots of people in them.’
Angela smiled. ‘Sometimes the best place to hide something is exactly where no one would think to look. But if they do, then surely, Mister Dodger, we will be one step closer to reaching a happy conclusion to this affair? Simplicity will be in no danger – I have the ways and means to see that all of us will be able to enjoy the evening unmolested, you can be sure of that. My footmen have – you might say – hidden talents. But we may gain more than an evening’s entertainment from the excursion.’
She very carefully steered him then into yet another very well-appointed room in which comfy chairs were in abundance and so, on the whole, was everything else. Up in the attic Solomon had nothing that was not practical. The old man had his work table and a very narrow bed, and behind his curtain Dodger had a bedroll and a number of blankets, and if it was a cold winter sometimes Onan as well; the smell could get bad, but Onan was polite enough not to acknowledge it. But this room was full of . . . well, things! Things that as far as Dodger could see were there just to be seen, or perhaps things that were designed to have other things put on top of them, or inside them. It also had enormous displays of flowers in great big vases, and the place looked like Covent Garden. He wondered why people needed all these things, when he himself could carry everything he owned in quite a small bag, not counting the bedroll. It seemed to be something that happened when you were rich, like in the Mayhews’ house but with more knobs on.
But he pushed that aside in his mind to make way for his plan. It was a good plan, a shiny one, and it had come together finally because Mister Disraeli had tried to make fun of him. All evening long he had been piecing it together, trying to figure out which parts were likely to be straightforward – such as the breeches – and which parts there were where you would just have to trust to your luck; and the Lady, of course.
Tomorrow was going to be a very busy day.
He was looking around for Solomon when somebody else tapped him on the shoulder and said very politely, ‘I’m very sorry to intervene, but I hear that you habitually frequent the sewerage system.’
The unwanted enquirer was a young man some ten years older than himself with the beginnings of a very curly moustache in the current fashion, and the way the question was asked made Dodger suspect that the man might be something of an enthusiast when it came to drains. He was a gentleman who wanted to talk about drains and he – that is to say, Dodger – had to be polite, and so there was nothing for it but to smile nicely and say, ‘I’m no expert, sir, but since you ask, I am a tosher and I reckon I’ve been down every drain anybody can get down in the Square Mile, and then some. And you, sir, are . . .?’ He smiled so as not to give offence.
‘Oh dear, how remiss of me. Bazalgette, Joseph Bazalgette; here is my card, sir. May I say that if you are thinking of a journey into the sewers I would be most pleased if I could come with you. Indeed, I would be honoured!’
Dodger turned the card over and over in his fingers, gave in and said, ‘I was planning an . . . expedition with Mister Disraeli and Mister Dickens. The day after tomorrow, I believe. Perhaps one more . . .?’ After all, he thought, it could fit in very well with his plans, especially if one of the aforesaid gentlemen should change their minds, or find themselves ‘otherwise engaged’, as he believed it was described.
Mister Bazalgette was beaming with delight. Yes, he was an enthusiast for sure. A man who liked numbers and wheels and machinery, and quite possibly sewers. Mister Bazalgette, Dodger thought, might just be a gift from the Lady. ‘You must surely know,’ Bazalgette burbled, as if reading his mind, ‘although perhaps you don’t, that the first people to undertake the work of building these sewers were the Romans. Indeed they believed in a goddess of the sewers, whom I believe is commonly known as “the Lady” and gave her a name – Cloacina. You may be interested to learn that not so long ago a gentleman here in England called Matthews wrote a poem to her, following the example of the Romans, imploring her to help him with – how can I put it? – a way to make smoother his bodily functions, which the poem suggests were something of a morning trial to him.’
From what Dodger had heard, the Romans were sharp coves and had built other things besides sewers, like roads. But now, without any warning, it turned out that they had also worshipped the Lady. Those Romans, according to Solomon, were tough and rough and merciless if you went up against them . . . and they had believed in the Lady. Well now, Dodger had prayed to the Lady to be sure, but he was never, well, definite when he did – sort of only half believing. Now it turned out that all those big warriors were once upon a time in this city kneeling down to her to make their richards a bit more squishy. There could be no better endorsement. Now more than ever, Dodger – admittedly via a roundabout route – was a believer.
Mister Bazalgette was coughing. ‘Are you all right, Mister Dodger?’ he queried. ‘You looked a bit far away for a while.’
Dodger hustled back to reality, smiled at the man and said, ‘Everything is fine, sir.’
Then a hand dropped on his shoulder, and gleefully Charlie said, ‘Excuse me, Mister Bazalgette, I thought I must remind our friend about that trip into the sewers. Benjamin too, because those of us who are his friends would love to see what the dapper chappie will make of the subterranean experience, especially if he slips over in it, and of course I sincerely hope that does not happen. I wonder what shoes he will wear?’ Charlie was smiling, in Dodger’s opinion with a certain touch of cheerful malice – not the nasty sort as such, but maybe the sort you use to tell one of your chums that he is getting too big for his boots. Dodger wouldn’t mind betting that Charlie’s mind was suggesting that the sewer excursion could just possibly be very entertaining as well as instructive.
As people milled around him saying their goodbyes to one another, Dodger said to Charlie, ‘I expect you gentlemen are all very busy, so for this trip let us meet at The Lion in Seven Dials. It won’t be a difficult walk from there to where we start and you could keep the growler there. The day after tomorrow, wasn’t it? Maybe seven o’clock? The sunlight will be low and you will be amazed how far it reaches into the sewers, like it was trying to fill them up.’ Then he added, ‘No offence to you, gentlemen, but if I take you down there and something nasty happens to any of you, I will be very upset and so will you. So I’ll do a little walk around there early in the day to make sure there ain’t going to be any problems because you never know. So, if it ain’t on, I’ll make shift to let you know so that it’s postponed.’