Oddly enough, the smell of death was a smell with a strange life of its own, and it would find its way in anywhere and it was damn hard to get rid of – rather, in some respects, like the smell of Onan, who was faithfully walking just behind him, his passage indicated by people in the throng looking around to see wherever the dreadful smell was coming from and hoping it wasn’t from them.
But now the sun was shining, and some of the lads and lasses were drinking outside the Gunner’s Daughter, sitting on the old barrels, bundles of rope, hopeless piles of rotting wood and all the other debris of the riverside. Sometimes it seemed to Dodger that the city and the river were simply all the same creature except for the fact that some parts were a lot more soggy than others.
Right now, in this tangled, smelly but usually cheerful disarray, he recognized Bent Henry, Lucy Diver, One-Armed-Dave, Preacher, Mary-Go-Round, Messy Bessie and Mangle, who despite whatever else was on their minds all said what people everywhere said in those circumstances when one of their number turned up wearing clothes that might be considered to be a cut above their station. Things like: ‘Oh dear, what is this pretty gentleman then?’ and ‘Oh my, have you bought the street? Cor, don’t you smell nice!’ And, of course: ‘Can you lend us a shilling? I’ll pay you on St Never’s Day!’ And so on, and the only way that you can survive in these circumstances is to grin sheepishly and put up with it, knowing that at any moment you could stop the merriment; and stop it he did.
‘Grandad’s dead.’ He dropped it on them out of the sky.
‘Never!’ said Bent Henry. ‘I was toshing with him only the day before yesterday, just before the storm!’
‘And I saw him today,’ said Dodger sharply. ‘I saw him die, right there in front of me! He was thirty-three! Don’t nobody say he ain’t dead, ’cos he is, right? Down below Shoreditch around about the Maelstrom!’
Mary-Go-Round started to cry; she was a decent sort, with an air all the time of being from somewhere else and having only just arrived here. She sold violets to ladies during the season, and sold anything else she could get the rest of the time. She wasn’t all that bad at being a pickpocket, on account of looking very much like an angel what had been hit on the head with something, so she wasn’t suspected, but however you saw her, she had more teeth than brains, and she didn’t have many teeth. As for the others, they just appeared a bit more miserable than they had before; they didn’t look him in the eye, just stared down at the ground as if they wished that they weren’t there.
Dodger said, ‘He gave me his haul, such as it was.’ Feeling awkwardly as if this was not enough, he then added, ‘That’s why I came here, to buy you all a pie and porter to drink his health.’ This news appeared to raise the spirits of all concerned more than somewhat, especially when Dodger reached into his pocket and disembogued himself of sixpence which magically became tankards all round of a liquid so thick that it was food.
While these were being emptied with variations on the theme of ‘glug’, Dodger noticed that Mary-Go-Round was still snivelling, and being a kind sort of cove, he said softly, ‘If it’s any help, Mary, he was smiling when he went; he said he’d seen the Lady.’
This information apparently didn’t satisfy, and in between sobs Mary said, ‘Double Henry stopped off just now for some grub and some brandy, seeing as how he’d just had to pull another girl out of the river.’
Dodger sighed. Double Henry was a waterman, constantly paddling his way up and down the Thames looking for anyone who wanted transport. The rest of Mary’s news was unfortunately quite familiar. The gang of people who were more or less his own age that Dodger met most often were a tough bunch, and so they survived; but the city and its river were harsh indeed on the ones who didn’t make the grade.
‘He reckoned she’d jumped off the bridge in Putney,’ said Mary. ‘Probably up the duff.’
Crestfallen, Dodger sighed again. They usually were with child, he thought: the girls from faraway places with strange-sounding names like Berkhamsted and Uxbridge, who had come to London hoping it would be better than a life among the hay seeds. But the moment they arrived, the city in all its various ways ate them and spat them out, almost always into the Thames.
That was no way to go, since you could only call what was in the river ‘water’ because it was too runny to be called dirt. When the corpses came to the surface, the poor old watermen and lightermen had to gaff them and row them down to the coroner of one of the boroughs. There was a bounty for turning over these sad remnants to the coroner’s office, and Double Henry had told him once that sometimes it was worthwhile to take a corpse quite a long way to get to the borough that was paying the most, though it was generally the coroner at Four Farthings. The coroner would post notice of the dead person and sometimes, Dodger had heard, the notice got into the newspapers. Maybe the girls’ bodies would end up in Crossbones Graveyard, or a paupers’ burying ground somewhere else, and sometimes, of course, as everybody knew, they could end up in the teaching hospitals and under the scalpels of the medical students.
Mary was still snivelling, and in a conversation made up largely of blobs of snot said, ‘It’s so sad. They all have long blonde hair. All the country girls have long blonde hair and, well, they are also, you know, innocent.’
Messy Bessie intervened with, ‘I was innocent once. But it didn’t do me any good. Then I found out what I was doing wrong.’ She added, ‘But I was born on the streets here, knew what to expect. Them poor little innocents never stand a chance when the first kind gentleman plies them with liquor.’
Mary-Go-Round sniffed again and said, ‘Gent tried to ply me with liquor once, but he ran out of money and I took most of what he had left when he fell asleep. Finest watch and chain I ever pinched. Still,’ she continued, ‘them poor girls wasn’t born round here like the likes of us, so they don’t know nothing.’
Her words reminded Dodger of Charlie. Then his thoughts turned to Sol and what he had voiced earlier. He said, as much to the open air as anything else, ‘I should give up on the toshing . . .’ His voice trailed off. Now he was talking to himself more than to anyone else. What could I do? he thought. After all, everybody has to work, everybody needs to eat, everybody has to live.
Oh, that smile on the face of Grandad; what had he seen in that last smile? He had seen the Lady. Toshers always knew somebody who had seen the Lady; nobody had ever seen her themselves, but nevertheless any tosher could tell you what she looked like. She was quite tall, had a dress that was all shiny, like silk; she had beautiful blue eyes and there was always a sort of fine mist around her, and if you looked down at her feet you would see the rats all sitting on her shoes. They said that if you ever saw her feet, they would be rat claws. But Dodger knew that he would never dare to look, because supposing they were; or even worse, supposing they weren’t!
All those rats, watching you and then watching her. Just maybe – he never knew – it would take only one word from her, and if you had been a bad tosher she might set the rats on you. And if you were a very good tosher, she would smile on you and give you a great big kiss (some said a great deal more than just a kiss). And from that day on you would always be lucky on the tosh.
He wondered again about those poor wretched girls who’d jumped. Many of them, of course, were with child, and then, because the barometer of Dodger’s nature almost always gravitated to ‘set fair’, he let go that chain of thought. Generally speaking he had always tried to keep a distance between himself and grief; and besides, he had pressing business to attend to.