Ned’s mother propped herself on one elbow and felt round her, first for the child and then for the bottle. Both were gone. She focused on the pinched shoulders of the old woman receding into the gloom at the far end of the barn and then she began to scream, scream like sandstorms on the desert, like the death of the universe. The crone hurried for the door, the girl’s screams at her back, the horses kicking blindly in their stalls. The bearded patriarch did not wake. But the stonecutter did. He was in his mid-twenties. He flung slabs of granite about as if they were newsprint, day in and day out. “Stop ‘er!” the girl cried. “She’s got my baby!”
He vaulted the railing and jogged the length of the stable just as the harridan was squeezing through the door. She spun around on him, a rusted scissor in hand. “Get back!” she hissed. The blow came like a seizure, secretive and brutal. He caught her in the shoulder and she collapsed like a bundle of twigs. Beneath her, there was the sound of shattering glass. And the keen of an infant.
♦ ♦ ♦
The stonecutter’s name was Edward Pin. They called him Ned for short. He took the girl and her child to his lodgings in Wapping, a fierce hangover raging behind his eyes. She’d washed him in tears and he felt like a hero, no matter how much his head ached. The infant, it seemed, had been gashed across the chest when the bottle broke. Pin lit a few sticks of wood and a handful of coal to take the chill off the room. The girl’s hair hung loose as she bent over the baby to dress his wounds. Her name was Sarah Colquhoun. She was drunk. “I’m going to name ‘im Ned,” she slurred. “After ‘is deliverer.” Pin beamed. But then a change came over his face and he took hold of her hair. “Don’t you go callin’ ‘im Pin, you slut. ‘Ee’s none of mine.”
“Rise I’m callin’ ‘im!” she shouted back. “Ned Rise, you son of a bitch.” It was the metaphoric expression of a hope. “You know why?. . Cause he’s going to rise above all this shit ‘is mother has had to eat since I could barely say me own name.”
“Ha!” he sneered. “Baptized in blood. And gin. And with a ginswill of a whorin’ mother. I bleedin’ doubt it.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Ned’s memories of his mother are sketchy. A drawn face, all cheekbone and brow, the skin stretched tight as leather on a last. A persistent hacking in the night. Phthisic pallor. Too much green round the gills. She was dead before he was six. Pin, needless to say, was a violent drunkard with the temperament of a cat set afire. When he worked, he came home white with stone dust, his eyes bleeding alcohol. Then he would settle down to torture the boy for the sheer joy of it, like a ten-year-old with a frog or rat. He tied Ned’s feet together and hung him out the third-story window like a pair of wet pants. He clamped the chamberpot over Ned’s ears, stropped a razor on his back, submerged his head in a tub of water for sixty seconds at a time. “Drown you like a rat, I will!” he growled.
When the boy was seven the stonecutter decided it was time he earned his keep. He appeared in the doorway one night with a fistful of baling twine, caught the boy round the neck, pinned him down and trussed up his leg at the knee. Then he cut Ned’s trousers high up the shin, fashioned a crutch from a broomstick, and set him out on the street to beg. It was cold in the wind, and the bindings chewed at the boy’s flesh. No matter. Seven years old, shrink-bellied and filth-faced, he teetered like a drunken stork and pleaded for pennies in Russell Square, Drury Lane, Covent Garden. But mendicity was a popular profession in those days and the competition was fierce. An army of amputees, lepers, pinheads, paralytics, gibberers, slaverers and whiners lined the streets shoulder to shoulder. There was the legless man planted in a chamberpot who hopped round on his knuckles like an ape; the limbless woman who polished boots with her tongue; the man-dog with a withered tail and spiked yellow teeth hanging over his lip. Ned didn’t have a chance.
There were twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pence in a shilling, four farthings in a penny. When Ned came home with two farthings the first day. Pin thrashed him. The following day, after sixteen hours of entreating, imploring and beseeching, Ned had nothing to show but a bit of string, three chestnuts and a brass button. Pin drubbed him again, this time giving special consideration to the nose, mouth and cheekbones. As a result, Ned’s face took on the color and consistency of a fermenting plum. This development improved the take somewhat, but then there was always the necessity of raising fresh welts each day. After a month of it. Pin pulled something in his thrashing arm. There’s got to be a better way, he thought.
Then he hit on it. “Ned,” he called. “Come over ‘ere.”
Pin was sitting at the table with a tumbler of gin. The floor was ankle-deep in rags and papers, the bones of chops and chickens, scraps of wood, fragments of glass, smashed earthenware, feathers. Ned was in the corner, feigning invisibility. The stone mason jerked his head round.
“Come over ‘ere, I said.” Ned came. A meat cleaver lay on the table, cold and tarnished. When Ned saw it he began to blubber. “Shet yer ‘ole!” roared Pin, forcing the boy’s right hand down on the table. His own grimy fist smothered it like a hood. Trembling, vulnerable, the boy’s fingers lay there on the block, pale as sacrificial lambs. There were black semicircles under the nails. The cleaver fell.
With his arm in a sling to display the mutilated hand to advantage (Pin had excised the first joint of each finger, thumb included), Ned’s take began to improve. In a month or two he was pulling in seven or eight shillings a day: a small fortune. Pin gave up the lapidary profession to sit through long afternoons in taverns and coffeehouses, bolting duck with orange sauce, swilling wine and laying his broad callused palms across the bosoms and backsides of women of pleasure. Ned froze his ass off on the street, choked on crusts and cabbage soup, the loss of his fingertips an ongoing horror to him, a waking nightmare. He wanted to run off. He wanted to die. But Pin kept him tractable with blows to the back of the head and threats of further mutilation. “Like to lose the rest of them nubbins? Or the ‘and maybe? Or ‘ow bout the ‘ole arm, eh?” Then he would laugh.
One grim afternoon, as the ex-stonecutter was reeling across the street from the Magpie and Stump to inspect his ward’s pockets, a landau drawn by four handsome bays dashed him to the pavement. He became involved in the rear spring mechanism and was dragged about a hundred yards up the street. A woman screamed. He was dead.
♦ ♦ ♦
For the next several years Ned lived on the streets: begging, filching, eating garbage, occasionally finding shelter with a loon or pederast or axe murderer. It was a tough life. No hand to comfort, no voice to praise. He grew up like an aborigine.
Then when he was twelve, his luck turned. He was at Vauxhall Gardens one morning, picking pockets and stripping bark from the trees, when he was arrested by a sound trembling on the warm still air, an unearthly fluting like something out of a dream. It seemed to be coming from beyond the fountain, near the flowerbeds. When he got there he found a scattering of parkgoers — rakes and gallants, ladies and tarts, nurses with infants, fops, cutpurses, itinerant hawkers — all gathered round a man blowing into a wooden instrument. The man was bald, his face and crown red as a ham, his cheeks puffed. Jollops of flesh hung over his collar and quivered in sympathetic response to the keening vibrato of the instrument. He was dressed like a gentleman.
Ned watched the clean athletic fingers lick up and down the keys, lighting here, pausing there, lifting, darting and pouncing like young animals at play. The pansies and jonquils were in bloom. Forget-me-nots and peonies. He sat in the grass and listened, the music reedy and sweet, like birds gargling with honey. The man's foot tapped as he played. Some of the listeners began to tap along with him, the buckled pumps and slippers and wooden clogs rising and falling in unison, as if manipulated by a string. One woman swayed her head in a soft glowing arc, almost imperceptible, the sun firing an aureole of curls round her face. Ned's foot began to tap. He couldn't remember a happier moment.