Artful: A Novel Read Free Page B

jail, they might come lookin’ for me here, if they was having a reason to come lookin’, such as Fagin’s peachin’.” Having come full circle in his speculations, Mr. Jack Dawkins did not hesitate to turn himself from his path and head instead in another direction entirely, one that he had not walked for a good long time but now found himself drawn to slowly and inevitably because it was his personal starting point, the place where his life had begun. All of it had started there, and so it was that it was there that he went now, the place being Drury Lane.
    Night rolled in and brought the fog with it, and the Artful sank into its embrace like a child clinging to its mother’s bosom. He always enjoyed the fog. It had served to cover his criminal activities any number of times. Thanks to the fog, he had been able to sneak up on people without their seeing him, and then vanish with their purses or snuffboxes securely in his pockets. Once again he felt momentary gratitude for having escaped from being shipped off to Australia. He knew very little about the continent down under, but he doubted that the atmosphere would have been at all as suitable as his preferred environment.
    The cobblestones were uneven, the cracks thick with dirt. Ladies of the evening were gathered at street corners, and some cast speculative eyes upon Dodger as he approached, for the fog obscured his age and his high hat and long coat gave him the appearance of a fine gentleman and potential customer coming their way. When he drew closer, of course, the painted ladies laughed and winked at him, but offered him nothing beyond that. Dodger, for his part, would remove his hat and bow deeply, even as sorrow panged at his heart.
    For in every one of them, he saw poor, dead Nancy.
    Nancy had been his solace, his escape from an even greater sorrow buried deep within him. When he had looked upon Nancy , so alive, so nurturing to him, his mind had a brief respite from memory of the woman in his past who should have been doing that very nurturing: his own mother, so cruelly and strangely snatched away from him.
    The flame of his mother’s murder had burned less brightly with Nancy in his life. Now, with Nancy gone, not only was the pain not mollified, not lessened, but instead it was doubled.
    Nay, quadrupled. For before he knew it, his feet—all on their own—had brought him to that very place that he had sworn he would never go to again, that pathetic little building that had been his family’s refuge from the hardships that the streets had to offer. He had not known what to expect when he came to it, and once he had, he stared upon it in confusion and looked around to make certain that the address was as he had remembered it.
    At its best, the collection of tiny flats within the rundown tenement had been barely livable. But at some point, fire had swept through the building and gutted it. The walls were stained with blackened soot, the windows gone, half of the door hanging stubbornly upon the hinges as if refusing to acknowledge that its days as a useful portal were long gone. The roof was mostly intact, which was the most that the building had to recommend it.
    For one such as Dodger, that was tantamount to a three-star endorsement from a board of governors.
    Leaving the door to its solitude, he clambered in through one of the windows. There was no one around, which was a relief as he had been concerned that someone else might have seized upon the structure. Such was not the case, confirming for the Artful that, at least at this particular point in time, he had actually managed to find someplace in London so pathetic that no one could possibly want to reside there. He squared his shoulders and smiled in pride. “That’s something of an accomplishment of one sort or another, innit?” he asked no one save himself, and nodded in reply.
    Thus did the Artful Dodger find a place for himself where he was not always in residence, but was more often than