Although Julius Caesar and the other coves were not actually building any sewers on the stage, Dodger wondered if he should call the Lady by the name they had given her; it might be worth a try. So as the speeches rolled over him, he shut his eyes and trusted his luck to the Roman goddess of the latrines and opened his eyes again as a voice declaimed, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’ Eyes wide open, he stared at the players. Well now, if you were going to have a sign, something like this was certainly better than a little rat on your boot!
Miss Coutts, his hostess, was sitting beside him for propriety’s sake, leaving Simplicity chaperoned by Solomon, who being an elderly gentleman could in theory be guaranteed not to think about hanky or panky. Now Miss Coutts nudged him very discreetly and said, ‘Are you all right? I thought you were sleeping, and you nearly jumped out of your seat.’
‘What?’ said Dodger. ‘Oh yes, I just know that it’s going to work, no doubt about it.’
He cursed himself for being stupid then, because Angela whispered, ‘What is going to work, pray?’
Dodger mumbled, ‘Everything.’ And suddenly he paid more attention to the stage, wondering why it took so many Romans to kill one man, especially since he didn’t seem to be a particularly bad cove.
It was what Solomon called ‘a repast’. Which was apparently something much more exciting than a meal. There were glorious potted meats and cold cuts and pickles and chutneys to make your eyes water and Solomon’s eyes gleam. As they finished eating, Dodger said quietly to Angela, ‘Where are your servants now?’
‘Why, in the servants’ hall. I only have to ring if I require them.’
‘Can they hear us?’
‘Absolutely not, and may I remind you, young man, that you already know that they have my full trust. I would not employ them otherwise.’
Dodger stood up. ‘Then I must tell all of you what I hope will happen tomorrow, if you agree.’
The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it? But sooner or later he did need to tell it, and the time was now. He also needed an ally, and it needed to be Angela. It seemed to him that a woman who had more money than God, and was still happy and alive, must be a very clever woman indeed. So he told them, quietly and carefully, covering every detail, including what Mrs Holland had told him about the Outlander, and when he stopped there was absolute silence.
Then Angela, not quite looking at Dodger or Simplicity, said, ‘Well, Mister Dodger, much as I admire you, my first inclination was to utterly forbid you to attempt this curious and dangerous scheme. But even as I summoned up the breath to do so, I realized, having seen the looks that passed between the two of you and reminding myself that Simplicity is not a child but a married woman, that the best I can do is to thank you for allowing me into the secret. And frankly, even if I have to pick up the pieces, in truth this matter is one between the two of you.’ She turned to Solomon and said, ‘Will you tell us your thoughts, Mister Cohen?’
After a few seconds there was, ‘Mmm, Dodger has told me of the Outlander, and it is unlikely that he would find Dodger before Dodger’s plan comes to fruition. As a plan it seems to me it does have certain beguiling aspects, because if it works it is unlikely anyone would wish to delve into the matter subsequently. And, of course, my spirits rise when I consider that this plan will take place on a battlefield absolutely familiar to my young friend who, as I am aware, knows every inch of the terrain. In the circumstances mmm, I don’t think Wellington himself could do better with an army.’
Dodger’s eyes had remained on Simplicity through all of this. Once he saw her frown and his spirits had plummeted, rising again when she grinned – not a smile but a grin, quite a saucy one like somebody contemplating a weak adversary.
Angela said, ‘Well, my dear, you are your own woman and will have my support against any man who suggests otherwise. Pray tell me what you think of this hare-brained scheme, eh?’
Quietly Simplicity walked over to Dodger and took him by the hand, sending a quiver down his spine so fast that it bounced up again. She said, ‘I trust Dodger, Miss Angela. After all, look at the things he has done for me already.’
With this ringing in the air, Dodger said, ‘Er, thank you. But now you’ve got to give up your wedding ring.’
Instantly her hand touched the ring, and the silence in the room thundered great peals of absence of sound while Dodger waited for the explosion. Then Simplicity smiled and said, quite softly, ‘It’s a pretty ring, isn’t it? I loved it when he gave it to me. And I thought I was married in the eyes of God. But what do I now know about being married? The poor priest who conducted the ceremony is dead, and so are two good friends, so I think that God was never in this marriage. He was never there when I was beaten, or when I was dragged into that coach, and then there was Dodger. Angela, I trust my Dodger, completely.’ With that, she looked into his eyes, then dropped the ring into his hand and gave it to him with a kiss, and of the two he considered the kiss to be truly twenty-four-carat.
Angela looked at Solomon, who said, ‘Mmm, I think there is no doubt about it, Angela. What we have here is a rather unusual Romeo and Juliet.’
‘So you say,’ said Angela, ‘but as a practical woman, I think we will also need a dash of Twelfth Night. Mister Dodger, you and I must talk about particulars before you leave.’
Angela’s coach carried Dodger and Solomon back to Seven Dials, and they barely exchanged a word until after they had got back from Onan’s late-night run, and even then, still lost in their own thoughts, they spoke little in the gloom. Finally Solomon said, ‘Well, Dodger, I have faith in you, Miss Burdett-Coutts may have some faith in you, but Miss Simplicity has a faith in you which I venture to suggest is greater than that of Abraham.’
In the darkness, Dodger said, ‘Do you mean your friend Abraham, the slightly suspect jeweller?’
And the darkness came back with, ‘No, Dodger: the Abraham who was prepared to sacrifice his son to the Lord.’
‘Well,’ Dodger said, after a moment, ‘we are not going to have any of that sort of thing!’
After that he tried to sleep, seeing as he tossed and turned the face of Simplicity repeating again and again the words that she had said during that last discussion: ‘I trust my Dodger, completely!’
The echoes of it bounced among his bones.
In the morning, he counted what he took to be three plain-clothed policemen, trying to be surreptitious and as ever not doing it properly. He pretended that he didn’t see them, but Sir Robert Peel obviously meant what he had said; two nights in a row there had been someone outside his crib, and now they were here in the daytime too! They were, in a policemany sort of way, trying out new ideas, such as having no man visible near the tenement but putting a couple just round the corner, where he might run into them. Was Sir Robert getting nervous?
Long before daylight, Dodger had already been a very busy boy while the fogs, steams and smoky darkness gave him lots of cover, and now, as the world woke up some little way away, a poor old woman could be seen hobbling past the policemen – if there was anyone about who cared to look at poor old women, who were in reality something of a glut on the market, owing to the fact that they tended to outlive their husbands and generally speaking had nobody who cared about them very much. Dodger thought it was sad; it always was, and sometimes you saw the old girls scraping a living by scrabbling around in the dust heaps and sieving household dust for anything remotely usable.1 Of course, it was out-doors work but you hardly ever saw one of them in anything like a decent coat. And they were scary; they really were. Terrible bright eyes some of them had as they held out a claw for a farthing; toothless old ladies with that fallen-in look to the face that made you think of witches, and you found them everywhere – anywhere a body could get out of the rain.