And the beauty of the whole thing, Ned reflects, as he strides along with a basket of fish roe under his arm, is that the stuff is practically free to begin with. It’s like bottling air and selling it for one and ten the bottle. There is an outlay, it’s true — he gives Liam and Shem two shillings a fish out of gratitude, pays a penny the dozen for terra-cotta jars and labels, and sixpence a day to a pair of street kids who strain and salt the stuff for him. But that’s nothing. A good fish will hold twenty or thirty pounds of roe — so for an outlay of a few shillings here and there he’ll recoup thirty or forty quid. It’s like a dream. Of course, he can’t count on its lasting forever — he knows that. For one thing, sturgeon only breed for two months out of the year — April and May — and so his egg supply will be tapering off soon enough. Then too, Shem and Liam are bound to wise up and ask for a bigger cut. . But for now, Ned Rise is riding an updraft: the Bank of the Bulge is solvent again, and under the bed of his new lodgings in Bear Lane an iron chest is slowly turning to silver.
On this particular morning — a morning struck through with sun and birds and bloom — Ned is off to try his luck on some of the households round Berkeley and Soho squares. As he traverses the grim dark line of the bridge, he breaks into an energetic whistle and begins twirling his cane.
The wind off the river ruffles his wig. A gull coasts by overhead. “Ah! The glory of life!” he thinks, striding along like a young lord on his way to an afternoon at croquet. But when he reaches the far side of the bridge, a sudden change comes over him. It’s as if the God of the Spastics has touched him with his crooked wand: his limbs contort, tongue goes awry, neck falls loose. Suddenly he’s round-shouldered and stooped, dragging his leg as if it were cut from a tree — and now there’s a tic under his left eye and his shoulder has begun to buckle. Is it an attack? Convulsions? Tic douloureux? Ned smirks with satisfaction as passersby back away from him in alarm. “Gah,” he says to them, chewing at his tongue and holding up his mutilated hand like a badge. “Gah,” he says, lurching up the street like a dog with a broken back. All this of course is part of his design to escape detection — he likes to think of it as his “mantle of invisibility.” The false nose and spectacles, the outmoded dress, the tics and twitches, the palsied walk — why he’s just another harelipped cripple peddling fish eggs in the street. God Himself, come Judgment Day, wouldn’t recognize him in this getup.
He crabwalks up Great George Street, through St. James’s Park and across the Mall, limping and scraping like a terminal syphilitic, when suddenly he hears a voice call out behind him. “Ned Rise! Ned Rise! Wait up a minute there!”
It’s Boyles, the ass, his face flushed with drink and hurry. “Ned!” he puffs, jogging up to him. “We thought you was dead. Drownded in the river. Why, when I seen you roundin’ the corner back there I couldn’t hardly believe me eyes.”
Ned shrinks into his jacket and pulls the three-cornered hat down over his brow. His head and limbs are flapping like wash in the wind. A battery of tics surges across his face.
Boyles has a hand on his sleeve. “But wot’s the anty-quated weeds for? And all this limpin’ and cringin’? Did you catch the ague or is it just a bit of playactin’?”
The world is coming down round his ears, a piece of the sky has broken off and clapped him in the back of the head. He can’t think. His hands are trembling. Twit, Smirke, Mendoza — they’ll be down on him like hounds.
“Ohhhhh — I gets it. You’re in disguise, then. Am I royt? Eh, Ned? Am I royt? Layin’ low, is it?”
Ned glances round, takes hold of Boyles’ arm and leads him down a back alley. A dead dog lies in the dirt beside a broken parasol. Out on the Mall, people of ton clip by in carriages. “How did you know it was me, Billy?”
“You kiddin’? I’d spot you a mile off, Ned Rise. A little foot-draggin’ and a false nose isn’t goin’ to help you any. I conned you plain as day.”
So much for the mantle of invisibility. “Listen, Billy. You can’t let on that you’ve seen me. If Mendoza and Smirke and the rest found out about it—”
“They’d eat you alive, Neddy. Mendoza come lookin’ for you the next mornin’, and Smirke cursed you up and down for a week after his public yoomiliation. Ha! You should of seen that, Ned — Smirke in the pillory. I let him have it with half a dozen rotted turnips and a dead cat. Gorry, it was good fun.”
But Ned’s not listening. He turns his back preoccupied, and digs deep in his knee breeches, fumbling about for crown and shilling, fishing for hush money.
“I’ll say this for him, though,” Boyles coughs, blowing a wad of bloody sputum into a rag of a handkerchief,” he felt heartsore about cursin’ you after he found out you was drownded. He set up the house for you, Ned — three times! And Nan and Sal — you should of seen ‘em carry on.
The two of ‘em went out and nicked black bonnets and screens and all to sorrify their faces, and then they threw a armful of geraniums into the river for memory of you. . no, you didn’t go to your grave unmourned, be assured of that, Neddy.”
Ned swings round and holds up a coin. “For you, Billy,” he says. “For your discretion. You never saw me, right? I’m dead and gone, right?”
“You can count on me, Ned. I won’t breathe a word.”
♦ ESCAPE! ♦
Mungo wakes with a headache. He has been drinking sooloo beer — a.k.a. bobootoo das—juggler of legs, scrambler of minds. He has been drinking sooloo beer and he is not quite certain where he is. A cellar certainly. He recognizes the yellow earthen walls, the roots and rhizomes, the cane ceiling, the ladder. Yes. No doubt about it. A cellar. He raises himself wearily to his elbows and discovers an empty calabash between his legs and a flocculent head across his ankle. The head belongs to Johnson, who is sprawled over the floor with his cronies in a farrago of limbs and feet, his great belly rising and falling like some elemental force of nature. All five are snoring serenely, teeth whistling, lips vibrating, tonsils flapping in the breeze.
It occurs to him that it must be morning, since the blackness he experienced earlier has now given way to the sort of soupy crepuscular light one expects of crypts, wine cellars and other damp and unsalubrious places. He rubs at a spot on his neck where something has bitten him during the night, and glances up as a glossy black scarab struggles across the floor with a ball of dung the size of an apple. He is sitting there, propped on his elbows, watching the beetle and waiting patiently for his head to clear, when the first cry sounds from above. It’s more a gasp actually, an insuck of surprise, tailed almost immediately by a prolonged wail, plaintive and despairing. Then a hurried exchange of voices — monosyllables thrown back and forth like tennis balls — the sound of feet rushing on the bamboo floor above, silence. The explorer cocks his head and gradually becomes aware of a whole undercurrent of noise emanating from beyond the house, out in the streets. A hum, building now to a roar — it seems as if the very earth is alive with it. He’s puzzled. Is it an earthquake? Stampede? Another sandstorm?
Ever curious, the explorer rises and crosses to the ladder, Johnson’s head slapping down behind him with a dull thump. Just as he steps on the first rung, however, a flap opens in the ceiling above and he finds himself confronted with a bony posterior and a pair of naked soles, descending. The explorer backs off as a shrunken little man makes his way down the ladder, slow and oblivious, dangling in the air like an arthritic spider. At the base of the ladder the little man plants his feet, turns round, and then starts back violently at the sight of the explorer.