Dodger Page 0,116

Dodger, I have faith in you, Miss Burdett-Coutts may have some faith in you, but Miss Simplicity has a faith in you which I venture to suggest is greater than that of Abraham.’

In the darkness, Dodger said, ‘Do you mean your friend Abraham, the slightly suspect jeweller?’

And the darkness came back with, ‘No, Dodger: the Abraham who was prepared to sacrifice his son to the Lord.’

‘Well,’ Dodger said, after a moment, ‘we are not going to have any of that sort of thing!’

After that he tried to sleep, seeing as he tossed and turned the face of Simplicity repeating again and again the words that she had said during that last discussion: ‘I trust my Dodger, completely!’

The echoes of it bounced among his bones.

In the morning, he counted what he took to be three plain-clothed policemen, trying to be surreptitious and as ever not doing it properly. He pretended that he didn’t see them, but Sir Robert Peel obviously meant what he had said; two nights in a row there had been someone outside his crib, and now they were here in the daytime too! They were, in a policemany sort of way, trying out new ideas, such as having no man visible near the tenement but putting a couple just round the corner, where he might run into them. Was Sir Robert getting nervous?

Long before daylight, Dodger had already been a very busy boy while the fogs, steams and smoky darkness gave him lots of cover, and now, as the world woke up some little way away, a poor old woman could be seen hobbling past the policemen – if there was anyone about who cared to look at poor old women, who were in reality something of a glut on the market, owing to the fact that they tended to outlive their husbands and generally speaking had nobody who cared about them very much. Dodger thought it was sad; it always was, and sometimes you saw the old girls scraping a living by scrabbling around in the dust heaps and sieving household dust for anything remotely usable.1 Of course, it was out-doors work but you hardly ever saw one of them in anything like a decent coat. And they were scary; they really were. Terrible bright eyes some of them had as they held out a claw for a farthing; toothless old ladies with that fallen-in look to the face that made you think of witches, and you found them everywhere – anywhere a body could get out of the rain.

But on this occasion, moving through the lanes and alleys, there was a now rather more spry old woman towing a handcart – a vehicle of high status on the streets – and she was fussing over it as elderly ladies did. If there was indeed a watcher on the moon, looking down on London, they would have noticed her zigzagging her way to the embankment, whereupon she hazarded a penny on a boat that took her and her little cart across the Thames, although on this occasion she paid no more than a farthing – not the official sum for the trip, the watcher would have noticed, but the lighterman himself had never seen an old girl in such a sad old dither. Having an old mother himself, he felt a little generous today and even agreed to wait to take her back across the river, only to find that when she came back from her errand, on her cart was strapped a corpse in a winding sheet. This, to tell the truth, was a problem, but then one of his mates stopped on the landing to disembark a fare and, waving vaguely towards the old girl, who was still in such a terrible state, the lighterman got his mate to help him on with the cadaver. Fortunately, it was still bendy.

Dodger – because the old lady was indeed Dodger – felt rather happy about all this. And also slightly ashamed since, after all, the coroner of Four Farthings himself and his officer had come out to help the old lady with the cart and had assured her that the remains of her niece had been treated with veneration at all times. It warmed the cockles of your heart, so it did.

Then, of course, there was the return journey, this way against the tide, and the lighterman could see that he was not, as it were, going to become a rich man in this situation, so he