Jack Maggs Read Free Page B

footmen, a cook, and a housekeeper who had made herself queen over the butler. Sometimes it seemed to Mr Buckle that it was too small a house to have ever held so many servants, but his benefactor, it seemed, had been as fond of them as of his cats, and Mr Buckle was prepared to be fond of them as well.
    He allowed the cats—there were five of them—to come and go through the open window of the drawing room. He saw no harm in them. Indeed he was soon accustomed to having both a marmalade and a tabby asleep on his chest, purring.
    He also saw no harm in letting the red-nosed butler snore in front of the silver plate, although—to be quite clear on this matter—he lacked the nerve to tell the pompous old man to stop his tippling. He was a little frightened of the housekeeper, but as she bought her bacon at sixpence the pound he comforted himself that she was capable. There is, he told himself, no point in having a dog and barking too. By which he meant that it was best to leave the running of his domestic affairs to those who were most experienced in that field. He ate kippers for his breakfast and spent his days away from the house, at the library, the museum, and the theatre.
    It was into this household that Jack Maggs was brought by Mercy Larkin. The newcomer found the smell of cats to be rather strong at first, but the claret which he was shortly sharing with the butler pushed that matter from his mind. He lunched on cold roast beef with the upstairs and downstairs servants, and was then brought into the presence of the housekeeper, a Mrs Halfstairs.
    Mrs Halfstairs had herself seated in her office, a peculiarly placed room, neither of the basement nor the ground floor, but located like a hunter’s hide in the branches of a tree, reached either by ladder from the cellar, or a set of steep little stairs from the kitchen. Here she sat in state, surrounded by all manner of mementos relating to her brother, a Captain in the 57th Foot Regiment who had fought in those long-ago battles of Vittoria and Nive. Here, she had opened her housekeeper’s journal and set about interviewing the latest candidate.
    Jack Maggs was not a footman. He could not produce a letter of reference. But he was the right height, and he stood before Mrs Halfstairs with his legs astride, his hands behind his back, the scarred stumps of the two middle fingers hidden in his folded hand.
    Mrs Halfstairs was a bully and a tyrant to all who came under her rule. Jack Maggs saw that and did not care. He explained to Mrs Halfstairs how it was that his references had been locked away by Mr Henry Phipps, and when he saw how ready she was to believe him, the last of his agitation left him and he began to feel a little sleepy.
    Part of this drowsiness was produced by the reprieve from immediate danger, but the greatest soporific—one he had been prone to since his earliest years—was the distinctive aromas of plenty: hanging hams, barrels of apples, beeswax, even the smell of turpentine.
    Mrs Halfstairs was a round-faced little woman with tightly wound grey hair. She was not quite fat but was solid and clumpish with thick wrists and narrow, distinctively pointed fingers which she now extended to pick up a rather ill-used-looking quill.
    “Height?” she demanded.
    Jack Maggs woke himself enough to reply that he was a little under six foot.
    The little soldier beetle made a fast, irritable entry in the back pages of her journal.
    “A little under?” she said. “With respect, that is exactly what I would expect from someone in Mr Phipps’s employ. A little under!”
    “An inch,” the applicant submitted.
    “So I must do my own subtraction. But can you swear to an inch, or is it really an inch and a quarter?”
    “I’m afraid I couldn’t say, Ma’am.”
    “Did Mr Phipps’s housekeeper not measure you?”
    “No, Ma’am, she did not.”
    “I think Mr Phipps’s first footman is rather stunted,” she frowned. “I really can’t imagine what he had