Jack Maggs Read Free Page A

long.”
    “So they are not gone totally?” he asked.
    “As I said, they come and go.” She paused. “I really thought you were come to be our footman. Mrs Halfstairs is most particular about the height of our second footman. She is sitting in there with her ruler.”
    “Footman?”
    “You’re the height, and all. It’s a right shame you’re not a footman. You’re not a footman?” she repeated.
    He watched her say it, like you watch an auctioneer raise a hammer, but in truth he had already decided what he was to do.
    “I’m their footman,” he said. “I’m Mr Phipps’s new footman.”
    “So you are a footman,” she said, smiling. “I knew you was a footman.”
    “Of course I am the footman, girl. I am a footman to young Mr Phipps who has all my papers,” Jack Maggs said to the maid. “My letters of recommendation, all locked inside. What is a man to do now?”
    “Perhaps you were late.”
    “Late?” he cried, thumping his stick on the footpath. “I am never late. I was first footman to Lord Logan who perished in the fire in Glasgow.”
    “Mercy Larkin,” said a female voice from downstairs at Number 29. “Come down from there immediately.”
    “It is a footman,” the maid explained, “most tragically positioned.”

3
    MR PERCY BUCKLE was the owner of a gentleman’s residence at 29 Great Queen Street, but he was no more a gentleman than the man who was presently entering his household in disguise.
    A year before he had been a humble grocer in Clerkenwell, and for years before that time he had been well known, around the tap rooms and penny gaffs of Limehouse, as a seller of fried fish.
    Then, on a brisk autumn morning in 1836, Percy Buckle had “my little visit from the solicitor,” as a result of which good fortune he became, in two short months, the master of a household in Great Queen Street and the owner of the Lyceum Theatre on Holborn Hill.
    Having spent a lifetime laboriously elevating himself from friedfish man to grocer, this inheritance came as a great shock. He was at first rather feverish and dizzy, and could take nothing stronger than the toast and broth brought to him by the daughter of the mad woman he employed to scrub his stairs. For days he tried to follow the dark and slippery lines of blood and law that had led from the body of a deceased stranger to his door in Clerkenwell. He lay in his newly pressed night shirt, in his freshly laundered sheets, and looked at the small square of neat sunshine as it passed across his bedroom wall.
    Then on the third morning—Guy Fawkes Day, in fact—the fever lifted. Percy Buckle looked around his little room and knew he never had to weigh a pound of flour again in his life.
    I can read all day.
    Even as a grocer he had been a bookish fellow. All his life it had been the same—even when he was too tired to manage more than half a page of Ivanhoe in a night, even when he smelt inescapably of sprats and mackerel, he had been a member of a lending library, and a regular attendant at the Workingman’s Institute.
    He sat up in bed and smoothed his neat little moustache, and those mild blue eyes began to show a heat that could normally only be induced by learned men discussing anaesthesia or mechanics in a draughty hall.
    Within a week he had given the contents of his grocer’s shop to the Parish. He had found a tailor. He had been to Fletcher’s Book-shop in Piccadilly and purchased the complete set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall . He had moved to Great Queen Street where he was pleased to employ his charwoman’s daughter as a kitchen maid. Indeed, he was already exceedingly fond of Mercy Larkin and would have made her housekeeper had not he discovered the household overrun with servants who were still waiting to have their wages— not paid on the last quarter day—settled by the Estate.
    It took a week or so for Mr Buckle to understand that he had inherited not only a house, but a bibulous and senile butler named Spinks, two