The impudent, astonishingly resourceful Izzy Garber, a hirsute, barrel-chested master of magic, was a born scrounger for whom nothing was impossible, even within the bleak confines of the Steel. At the right moment Izzy’s loosely worn shirt would yield salamis, coils of stuffed derma, roasted chickens or rounds of cheese acquired who knows where, God knows how. He also never lacked for tobacco and gin and Indian hemp and soothing salves to heal the lacery of cuts burnt into Ephraim’s back. The other prisoners, even the turnkeys, treated Izzy with deference, calling upon him again and again to extract teeth, set broken bones, or stitch knife wounds, no questions asked. Izzy, never without his yarmulke, embossed with the inscription, “Honour the Sabbath, To keep it Holy,” was the most triumphantly Jewish man Ephraim had ever met. “Look at their God, or son of, as those sods would have it. Turn the other cheek. The meek shall inherit the earth. Codswallop. Nancyboy horseshit. But our God is truly vengeful,” Izzy once said, thrusting his siddur at Ephraim. “So say your evening prayers, because it doesn’t pay to mess with Jehovah, that old Jew tucker.”
Izzy aside, Ephraim’s sojourn in the Steel proved an invaluable learning experience. From coiners who normally operated in the Holy Land rookery of St. Giles he learned how to take a counterfeit with an unmilled edge and work it into acceptable coin. Practising with pickpockets of his own age he was soon adjudged sufficiently adroit to become a dipper, although he had no intention of putting himself in the hands of a kidsman when he got out.
“Nischt fur dich,” Izzy Garber said.
From a member of the swell mob out of Seven Dials Ephraim absorbed all he needed to know about garroting. But Izzy proved Ephraim’s most beneficial teacher. One night he told him how he had used to work village greens as a prater, or bogus preacher, raising funds for a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast. “‘Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’” Another night Izzy recalled his days as a professional beggar. He told Ephraim how, posted outside a church, waiting for the Christians to emerge, he would promptly fall to the ground, simulating convulsions: foam, produced by soap shavings under his tongue, bubbling pathetically to his lips. Then, as soon as sympathetic members of the congregation had flocked around, he would whip out his letter.
THIS IS TO CERTIFY, to all whom it may concern, that the EXEMPLAR, Captain Staines, was returning to Liverpool Dock, from the Canadas, laden with beaver pelts from Rupert’s Land, and that said vessel encountering a prodigious GALE and ICEBERGS off the banks of Newfoundland, and was dismasted and finally wrecked on the ice. That the above-mentioned vessel foundered and only the second mate and three of the crew, the bearers of these certificates, escaped a watery grave. These survivors were humanely picked up by the brig GLORIANA, Capt. Wescott, and landed at Tilbury Dock. That we, the Masters of Customs, and one of Her Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the said dock, do hereby grant and afford to said ISRAEL GRANT this vouchment of the truth of the said wreck and do empower him to present and use this certificate for twenty-eight days from the date thereof, to enable him to acquire such temporal aid as may be essential to reaching his wife and children in the Outer Hebrides. And this certificate further sheweth that he may not be interrupted in the said journey by any constabulary or other official authority, provided that no breach of the peace or other cognizable offence be committed by the said Petitioner.
As witness to our hands,
Magnus McCarthy, M.C. £1-0-0
Archibald Burton, J.P. £ 1-0-0
Given at Liverpool Dock, this 27th day of January 1831.
GOD SAVE THE KING
Given his skill in penmanship and Latin, and the connections he had made in the Steel, Ephraim envisaged setting himself up as a screever once his sentence was done. Izzy was pleased with his protégé. “It wouldn’t be nice for a Yiddisher boy to be a footpad or a dragsman. Remember, tsatskeleh, we are the People of the Book.”
“How will I find you after I get out?”
“Don’t worry,” Izzy said. “I’ll find you.”
On his release, Ephraim dug his money out of its hiding place in Hyde Park, acquired the necessary quills and inks and parchments, and moved into a lodging house in Whitechapel. Within months he was prospering. After dark he drifted from gin-shop, through bordello to gaming-house, seeking Izzy Garber, unavailingly. But during the day he was hard at it. He wrote letters for ruined clergymen. “Milady—I held the rank of Captain in the Peninsular War. I have struggled exceedingly hard, after being discharged from the service on account of my crippling wounds, but unhappily.…” Keeping a sharp eye on the death notices in the Times, he would send an appropriately dressed dollymop, a pillow bound to her belly, to the fashionable home of the newly bereaved family of a gentleman. She would carry a letter saying that the bearer had been seduced by the deceased and was now with child but utterly without means, cast off by her own family, and though she did not wish to publicize the affair.…
His letters, the penmanship exquisite, were signed with the names of sea captains, rectors, major generals, and lords of the realm; and they were garnished with heart-rending appeals, nicely turned Latin phrases and suitable biblical quotations.
Such was the demand for Ephraim’s inventive pen that he soon acquired an opera hat, a white waistcoat, an elegant snuff box and a silk handkerchief. He was brought to the attention of a theatrical producer, who offered him a position in his combine of brothels. Ephraim declined, but he did accompany him to a boxing match and saw Ikey Pig, a Jew, badly mauled. However, one taste of the fancy was enough to make him a victim of boximania. He was with the producer again when an American Negro, an escaped slave, had the effrontery to challenge for the enviable title of Champion of England. As Pierce Egan wrote of this match, “that a FOREIGNER should have the temerity to put in a claim, even for the mere contention of tearing the CHAMPION’S CAP from the British brow, much more the honour of wearing it, or bearing it away from GREAT BRITAIN, such an idea however distant, never intruded itself into the breasts of an Englishman.”
Ephraim, despairing of ever finding Izzy, became a regular at Laurent’s Dancing Academy in Windmill Street, the Argyll Rooms, and of course Kate Hamilton’s night house, flourishing there as a favourite of Thelma Coyne, whom he considered establishing in a flat in Holborn as his very own poule-de-luxe.