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Majesty, that would be Onan; he’s a very good friend, but of course we couldn’t bring him along here.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Queen and she cleared her throat. ‘You mean Onan, as in the Bible?’ Out of the corner of his eye Dodger could see Solomon stepping backwards, but nevertheless he said, ‘Oh yes, miss.’

‘Why did you call him that?’

Well, Dodger thought, after all she did ask. So he told her,1 and the young Queen glanced at her husband, whose face was a picture, and then burst out laughing and said, ‘Well now, we are amused.’

Like some sort of clockwork, the tea then disappeared as quickly as it had turned up, and there was a certain signal that this audience was at an end. Greatly relieved, Dodger took Serendipity by the arm and led her away, and was slightly surprised as they left the room when the white-haired man he had met before walked boldly up to him and said, ‘Sir Jack, allow me to be the first to congratulate you. May I trespass upon your time for a moment? Have you perchance had time to consider my proposal?’

‘He wants you to be a spy,’ murmured Solomon behind him.

The white-haired man made a ‘tsk, tsk’ noise and said, ‘Oh dear no, Mister Cohen. A spy, sir? Perish the thought. Her Majesty’s government, I can assure you, has no dealings with spies, oh my word, no. But nevertheless we like the kind of people who help us . . . take an interest.’

Dodger took Serendipity to one side and said, ‘What should I do?’

‘Well, he does want you to be a spy,’ Serendipity replied. ‘You can tell that by the look on his face when he says that he doesn’t. For someone like you, Dodger, it seems to me to be the perfect occupation, although I suspect it will mean learning one or two foreign languages. But I have no doubt that you will find learning them quite easy. I myself know French and German, as well as a little Latin and Greek. Not too difficult if you put your mind to it.’

Not to be outdone, Dodger said, ‘Well, I know some Greek. ?’2

Serendipity smiled at him and said, ‘My word, Dodger, you do lead a very interesting life, don’t you?’

‘My love,’ he replied, ‘I think it’s only just beginning.’

And that was why two months later, Jack Dodger was running through the boulevards of Paris with the gendarmerie lagging far behind him. He was carrying a pocket stuffed with coins and bonds, a tiara that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette and would look very good on his wife Serendipity, and last but not least, the plans for an entirely new type of gun. Whistles were blowing all over the place, but Dodger was never where anyone thought he would be. He had been most interested to find out that the Froggies had drains too, pretty good ones which you wouldn’t have expected from Froggies, and so he jigged and dodged and ran on to the safe house he had sorted out last night, and he was having the time of his life.

1 If you want to know more about Onan – a well-known biblical character – I am sure that many of my readers know their Bible from one end to the other. And if not, Google, or any priest – possibly a slightly embarrassed one – will help you.

2 Please direct me to where the naughty ladies are.

Author’s acknowledgements, embarrassments and excuses with, at no extra cost, some bits of vocabulary and usage

DODGER IS SET broadly in the first quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign; in those days disenfranchised people were flooding into London and the other big cities, and life in London for the poor – and most of the people were the poor – was harsh in the extreme. Traditionally, nobody very much bothered about those in poverty at all, but as a decade advanced, there were those among the better off who thought that their plight should be known to everybody. One of those, of course, was Charles Dickens, but not so well known was his friend Henry Mayhew. What Dickens did surreptitiously, showing the reality of things via the medium of the novel, Henry Mayhew and his confederates did simply by facts, lots and lots of facts, piling statistics on statistics; and Mayhew himself walked around the streets chatting to little orphan girls selling flowers, street vendors, old ladies, workers of all sorts, including prostitutes, and