I enjoyed my time with the waxworks display. I enjoyed presenting myself as a child barely into double figures. I enjoyed luring people into the tatty display by highly inflated claims of what it contained. I enjoyed most of all slipping off in the night to various rustic gambling hells to ply our trade and hone our skills. The Jarley routine of moving from one place to another made this last pleasure easier to procure. One or two visits to the local low place and we were on the road to another source of income. Grandfather was over the moon, and kept his winnings about his person. He never knew exactly how much he had won, so when I was putting him to bed drunk in the early hours I could abstract a bit for my own use.
Needless to say I put a rather different gloss on these activities in the manuscript I was preparing to hawk to Mrs Norton or that vulgar, jumped-up newspaper reporter Mr Dickens.
This pleasant life changed when we met up again with Codlin and Short. We had made their acquaintance a few months earlier, somewhere near Birmingham. You won’t be surprised to hear they were an odd couple. I had no problem with them because I was used to the phenomenon from our London circles: the pair of men, usually middle-aged, who squabbled and competed and bad-mouthed each other to outsiders but who really were as close-knit as a nut and a bolt. And Codlin was definitely the nut. He was always insisting that he was my real friend, not Short, and I never quite realized what his motives in doing this were – whether he had plans for some scam or other that required a young, virginal, stupendously innocent creature. Or was he hoping to get tips on my grandfather’s unrivalled techniques in card-play, the tables, horse-racing and cock-fighting?
We were on the way to Stratford-on-Avon, and Mrs Jarley was stroking my hair and telling me what a wonderful Shakespearean actress I would make in a few years – instancing Cordelia, Miranda and Celia, and I guessed these were innocent, slightly wet creatures, without an ounce of spunk.
“You have an aura,” she was saying, “a heavenly atmosphere that envelopes you, so that you would be an ideal embodiment-”
My mind strayed from this fulsome garbage and I saw, further along up the main street of the small town we were passing through, two peak-capped figures gazing into a shop window. Peelers. Members of that elite body of men recruited by Sir Robert Peel when he was Home Secretary, to reduce crime in the cities by their unique combination of brains and brawn. I don’t think! Just look at how much, or little, they get paid and guess how likely it is that the job will attract the elite.
I was just thinking the set of the two backs bending forward to survey the wares exhibited in the window reminded me of people I knew when they turned round as they heard the approach of hoofs and wheels.
Codlin and Short!
As we passed them by I raised my hand, and was rewarded by a double wave, very enthusiastic, in return. They began walking vigorously along beside us, only slowly getting left behind.
Fortunately we stopped at a public house on the edge of the town. Well, not fortunately – inevitably. We stop in nearly every town, so that Mrs Jarley can lubricate her coster-woman’s voice and her travelling hands. When she had steamed off to get her gin and water, grandfather brought me my shrub, with double rum to taste, and he went to mingle with the local mugs while I waited for the precious pair to catch us up.
“Well, you have landed on your feet!” came a voice from the caravan doorway. Actually I was still recumbent on Mrs Jarley’s well-padded couch, but I knew what he meant.
“We’d heard about the two new members of the company, and we guessed it had to be you and grandad. Mrs Jarley taken a fancy to you, has she?” asked Short.
“Actually I am extremely useful to the Museum management,” I said demurely. “I’ve brought hundreds through the door.”
“Didn’t answer my question, did she, Codlin?” said Short, grinning.
“Don’t be so personal, Short. A girl’s got a right to her secrets, hasn’t she, my darling?”
“And does Grandad get hundreds through the door too?” asked Short. “Or does he suggest a quick game of vingt-et-un, and line his pockets that way? His sort of swindle is not so different from Jarley’s kind, when you come down to it.”
Codlin nodded.
“Morally speaking I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Short.”
“I’m not used to hearing you moralize,” I said. “I suppose it’s the new job, is it?”
“Oh, the new job! No, my darling, Sir Robert’s successor doesn’t pay us to moralize. He pays us to catch criminals. Or failing that to keep track of them.” Short paused. “It’s a real police state he’s created, but we’re the last people who can talk about that. We get messages and send messages, and that means some little placeman in Westminster can put pins in his wall-map of England and show where all the big criminals and most of the small ones as well are at any moment.”
“Which is why we’re happy to have caught up with you again,” said Codlin.
“But why? We’re not big criminals.”
“You’re middle-ranking. And the gambling industry has a lot of good friends in this government, thanks to their readiness to grease the right palms. So we’re just telling you: there are stories going round linking a widespread gambling scam to a certain travelling display of ageing wax-works. Get me? And if you or your revered grandfather slips us a ten quid note and renews it every time our paths cross, we’ll keep you informed and tip you the wink when it’s time to move on.”
“Wouldn’t Sir Robert, or his successor, be angry if he found out?”
“Livid – if he found out. But if he wants to stamp out corruption in the nation’s police force he’d better start paying us what we’re worth.” He wagged a finger in my face. “Until then he’ll find that the work never gets done.”
“We’re public guardians bold and daring,” sang Short, in a quavering baritone: “When danger looms we’re never there.”
“But if we see a helpless woman, or little boys who do no harm,” took up Codlin, “we run ‘em in, we run ‘em in – I say, is that your revered Grandaddy I see coming towards us?”
It was, and when he heard what the pair were offering he stumped up. Always good to have friends in high places. We decamped quietly from the waxworks display that evening, taking a quite different route from them, and leaving Mrs Jarley with nowhere to put her hands.
The places we stopped at, on all of which we left our mark, I will not mention in detail, but we rarely stopped long enough to need a warning from Codlin and Short. We were on to a very good thing. Our lives changed, however, when we happened on the village to which the schoolmaster whom we had encountered early on in our travels had moved. Here he was, large as life and just as dispiriting. He was still mourning the bright young pupil he had had years before, and still polishing the young hypocrite’s halo every day of his life. A right little teacher’s pet that limb of Satan must have been! It occurred to us that this was the sort of place we could well settle down in.
Well, as soon as the idea occurred to us, we wrote to Codlin and Short. We explained that there were several towns within walking distance, as well as several lucrative hell-holes. We had made a series of nocturnal excursions after the village was asleep (at about 8.30, in order to save candles), and we really felt the place would answer, at least for a year or two. We heard back from them that they could think of no reason why it shouldn’t, and they would keep us informed as to anything they heard of that could be construed as a threat. And so things went on for three or four months.
Then I got bored.
I suppose we should have expected that. The night excursions still held a charm, but the daytime was terrible – catching up on sleep and enduring shiver-making visits from the schoolteacher or from his equally unappetizing friend The Bachelor – a local notable of similar habits and notions (my impersonation of infantile goodness and sweetness confirmed all his preconceptions about the non-carnal nature of the English female). I was tired of them all. I wanted London, I wanted stir, glamour, rich pickings. I was even nostalgic about Dan Quilp, one of our London friends, who had managed to evict grandfather from the Old Curiosity Shop: beneath his ugly, dwarfish exterior there lurked a diabolical energy, both criminal and sexual. He radiated an indiscriminate hunger and love of wreaking havoc. I understood why women were both repelled and thrilled by him. I wanted to get a share in that electricity, match myself with him. I hadn’t been so excited since those lovely years when I was the only girl member of Fagin’s gang.