Because the streets were so unpleasant, people of means took to traveling from place to place by coach or sedan chair. The sedan chair was particularly well adapted to its time and place, providing comfort and security for the privileged and a means of employment for some few of the starving masses. It consisted of an enclosed compartment attached to a pair of parallel bars. These bars were hoisted on the shoulders of the chairmen, one fore and one aft. The chairmen, impoverished inbreeds with harelips and misshapen heads, made a few pennies; the lady going out to tea could arrive with a petticoat free of shit smears. Advantages all around. But there was a further advantage to the sedan chair: once inside, one was invisible. Merely pull the curtains and peep through the cracks. See, and remain unseen.
What better means of conveyance for an invisible man?
♦ THE BALLAD OF JACK HALL ♦
With a sinking feeling, Ned watches Boyles’ pinched shoulders and flat-bottomed head recede into the crowd. He looks round furtively, feeling naked and vulnerable, a crab without a shell. Up the street, a chairstand. Ned hobbles up to the first chair, hands the chairman a coin and disappears within. The curtains are drawn. It is dark as a womb. Ned’s mind rushes with schemes and ruses and counterschemes. His own voice surprises him. “Monmouth Street,” he calls. “Rose’s Old Clothes.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Rose’s Old Clothes is a secondhand shop specializing in women’s attire and highly recommended by Sally Sebum (“She’s got the keenest bargains in town. Rose does”). It is one of a dozen shops of the rag-and-bone variety squeezed into a two-block span, all of which cater to the servants of the rich (selling), the wives of frugal burghers (buying), and the poor (just looking). The grimy bow windows out front are heaped with the strata of fashion: hoops, hats and whalebone corsets; petticoats, parasols, caps, bonnets and bustles. A cockeyed sign hangs over the door:
WE LAWNDERS ALL GARMINTS
PRIOR TO SELLING
Ned’s chair scrapes down outside the shop. “Monmouth Street,” announces the chairman, swinging back the door.
In the dark, jostling through the crowded streets, Ned’s mind has been active. Boyles, he realizes, is totally untrustworthy. As soon as he gets a few drinks in him he’ll blab the whole thing: Ned Rise is alive! I talked to him. Had me hand on his arm! The rumor spreads like ink in water, passes round barrooms, served up with the soup, until finally it whispers in the ears of Mendoza, Smirke, Twit and the rest. Two weeks. That’s all he needs. If he can get through two weeks more he’ll have cleared five hundred pounds on Chichikov’s Choice and he can get out of town altogether. Try his luck on the Continent maybe. Paris, The Hague, Leghorn.
“Monmouth Street,” the chairman repeats.
Ned straightens his nose and adjusts his wig, then limps out into the street. He hands the chairman half a crown. “Wait here,” he says, “and keep an eye on my basket of fish eggs, will you?”
♦ ♦ ♦
An anemic bell murmurs over the door as Ned steps into the shop. He finds himself in a foul-smelling room lit only by the odd strands of light that seep in through the avalanche of ladies’ apparel heaped up round the windows. The smell is of clothes tight at the groin and under the armpit, clothes worn without washing for years on end, clothes harboring all the vermin and disease known to man. He looks round for the proprietor.
“Shopkeeper!” he calls. The place seems deserted.
But then, in the far corner, a bundle of rags disengages itself from the general disarray and begins shuffling toward him. The bundle of rags turns out to be an old woman wrapped in a moth-eaten cloak. She looks as if she feeds on nothing but thousand-year-old eggs. “Yes?” she cackles, her voice full of rust. “Wot’ll it be? Buyin’ or gapin’?”
“A woman’s outfit,” Ned says. “The whole works: skirts and gloves and shoulderknots, a cap that ties under the chin and the biggest bonnet you’ve got.”
“EEE-ee-eeeee!” cackles the proprietress. “A bit o’ finery for the littul mistress, ‘ey?” She nudges him with her elbow and winks.
Ned is suddenly seized with a sense of déjà vu.
“Ye’ve got ‘er nekked up in some garret then, ain’t ye? Tore the threads right off ‘er, didn’t ye, ye wicked beast? Eeeeeeeeee!” she laughs, nudging him again.
Ned steps back a pace. The woman’s face is fleshless, skin stretched over bone. She is half bald. Something glitters on her lower lip.
“ ‘Ow’ll this be, then?” she puffs, bending to pluck a bundle of flowered skirts from the floor. “And this?” She reaches up for a veiled bonnet piled high with artificial fruit and gilded dromaderies.
“F-fine,” Ned stutters, his arms heaped with cotton, muslin, wool and chintz. He seems to have lost command of the situation, taken aback by the old slut, wrestling with the feeling that he’s been through all this before.
“Petticoats?” the old woman leers. “Undies?”
Ned heaps his clothes atop the makeshift counter — a plank stretched between two barrels. The proprietress produces a filthy scrap of paper and a pencil, and begins scrawling figures across the page. She is humming. No: singing. He recognizes the tune. The Ballad of Jack Hall.
“Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,” she moans, scraping away at the octaves like a saw cutting through a wet log. “It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o.” Then she leers up at him. “Four shillin’s, tuppence, Lothario,” she cackles. “Eeeeeee!”
“Have you got a back room?” Ned asks.
“Back room? Can’t ye wait till ye gets ‘ome to yer own mizzable lodgin’s? Wot are ye, anyway: one o’ them perverty types wot runs around jackin’ off on ladies’ garmints like a cat in ‘eat? Eh? Eh? That wot it is, peach fuzz?”
Ned lays another shilling on the counter. “Just point it out, will you?”
The old woman points, then looks down to count her money. “Takes all kinds,” she mutters. “Eeeeeee!”
♦ ♦ ♦
Ten minutes later he steps from the back room, a blushing beauty. The skirts are soiled, and they reek a bit, but you’d never know it from a distance. He’s tied a white cap under his chin, letting his own hair fall down his back, and crowned the whole thing with the foot-high bonnet.
The old woman perches on a stool behind the counter, a pewter cup and a jug before her. When she throws back her head with the cup, she catches sight of him and begins gargling out her weird laugh. “Ye didn’t tell me it was ‘alloween,” she chokes, pounding the plank and hooting. “Or is it the faggots’ ball ye’re going to? Hee-eeee! Eeeeee!”
Ned draws up his skirts and swishes past her, too uneasy to trade insults. There’s something about the old slut that rushes back to his earliest memories, pokes at him like a nightmare in the womb. He shudders as he hurries out of the shop, the splintered old voice ringing in his ears:
Oh, it’s a swingin’ I must go, I must go,
It’s a swingin’ I must go-o-o;
I must hang until I’m dead, dead, dead,
I must hang until I’m de-e-ad;
I must hang until I’m dead, ‘cause I killed a man,
And I left him layin’ on the cold, cold ground.