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cuddle him. ‘Spoken like a true gentleman. I couldn’t possibly expect a little kiss . . .?’ she asked hopefully.

And so Dodger kissed the cook – a rather pneumatic lady who kissed at some length – and when he was allowed to break free, she said, ‘When you rise up high, remember them as live lowly.’

1 Around about the time of Dodger, most sewerage in London went into septic tanks, or cesspits. The tanks were emptied out and the contents taken away by honey wagons.

CHAPTER 6

In which sixpence buys a lot of soup, and a foreigner’s gold buys a spy . . .

THE EMBARRASSMENT OF this followed Dodger all the way back home, as did a certain aroma of giblets. Somehow he wasn’t quite as certain of who he was now – a kid from the sewers, or somebody who chats with the gentry – although he knew enough to understand that Mister and Mrs Mayhew were not exactly all that much like gentry, even with their house and servants. It was certainly better than anything Dodger had lived in, but the place was just a bit shabby here and there. Not really dirty, but just enough to indicate that money was perhaps tight in this household, like Mrs Quickly said, so every penny had to be counted.

Mrs Mayhew had been worried too, and Dodger rather felt that the worry was somehow built in, and not just about Simplicity. He shrugged it off. Maybe that’s how it goes, he thought. The more you’ve got, the more worried you become, just in case you lose it. If money gets a bit short, then you might be worrying about losing your nice house and all those pretty little ornaments.

Dodger hadn’t ever worried too much about anything beyond the important things – a decent meal and a warm place to sleep. You didn’t need a house full of little ornaments (and Dodger was a great one for noticing little ornaments, especially the kind that could be picked up very easily and shoved into a pocket at speed and sold again almost as fast). But what was the point of them? To show that you could afford them? How much better did that make you feel? How much happier were you really?

The Mayhew household had been doing its duty in a stiff kind of way, but it didn’t appear to be very happy – there had been a kind of tension there which he couldn’t quite fathom, unhappiness riding on the very air – and in a strange way that made Dodger feel a little unhappy himself, and he wondered why. Unhappiness was a state of mind generally alien to him. Who had the time to be unhappy, after all? He was often pissed off, fed up, even angry, but these were just clouds in the sky; sooner or later they passed. They never lasted long. But as he walked aimlessly away from the Mayhews’ it seemed that he was dragging other people’s worries with him.

He felt that the only cure for something like this would be to go down into the sewers, because if you had to be down in the dumps you might as well have a feel around and see if you could find sixpence. He would have to go and get changed – the shonky outfit was the finest and smartest he had ever worn, and it would never do to go to work in, would it?

But . . . Simplicity. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. Wondering who she might be, and who might know what had happened to her and why. And who had hurt her, of course. He really, really needed to know that now. And in this crowded town there would always be somebody to overhear anything that a body said.

The police wouldn’t know anything, of course – that was because no one in their right mind ever talked to the peelers. One or two of them were OK, but it didn’t pay to trust them. However, people talked to Dodger, good old Dodger, especially when he loaned them a sixpence, to be repaid on St Never’s Day.

And so, on his winding way back to the attic to change, a route not just roundabout but swings and slides as well, he found time to lounge around chatting to the dregs of the earth; and to the Cockneys, who sold apples and who liked nothing better than to gang up on the peelers for a real old-fashioned,