1
1838
London
The sun isn’t yet up over Bell Court, and already someone is screaming.
It’s not, however, a familiar scream, and so Jacob ignores it. There’s a select circle of people whose screams he knows intimately, and for surety of whose well-being he will sacrifice the sear on a pan of sausages to investigate a cry in the dark. But whoever’s screaming through the uncertain light slipping into the narrow court is a stranger, and one who sounds more angry than frightened. Well, Jacob thinks, twirling the toasting-fork so it catches the firelight, there’s a great deal in the world to be angry about. If some stranger can’t bear the trials of life without howling in the streets about it, that’s none of his affair.
He flips one of the sausages—a little early; its exterior is beginning to toast but is not yet fully browned. He settles into his chair, drawing his scarlet dressing-gown back from where it slipped to expose his throat and the ridges of his collarbones. Behind him, an old clothes-horse sags under the weight of some two dozen squares of patterned silk, which he’ll spend the day laundering and ironing and sorting when the sun is properly up. The value of stolen goods, he’s learned over the decades he’s been dealing in them, is at least half in their presentation. Properly pressed and folded, this collection of ordinary pocket-handkerchiefs could go for three shillings, provided someone with a suitably respectable demeanor is brokering the deal. And while a respectable demeanor isn’t something he possesses, he knows several places where one might borrow an upright-looking individual for a reasonable fee.
The screaming is closer now. Some thief, he gathers, wasn’t as subtle as the profession requires, and what should have been a quick maneuver devolved into a chase. As long as it’s not one of his boys, it’s all the same to him. After sentencing a thief Jacob doesn’t care about to six months in Bridewell, the police will move on, leaving the thieves he does care about to their business. Certainly Charley isn’t to blame for the commotion outside: just now, he stumbles into the room with his hair in disarray from sleep, his shirt creased and drooping off the left shoulder. At eleven, Charley Bates looks even younger than when Jacob met him at nine. Then, the boy was all hard edges and anxiety, but two years with a roof over his head and someone to cook him breakfast if he steals the raw materials have rekindled his childishness. It makes him a liability in their line of work, but Jacob can’t bring himself to frighten the endearing brainlessness out of the boy. Charley sits cross-legged in front of the fire, eyeing the sausages with intent.
Jacob kicks at him with the side of his slippered foot, like nudging a dog away from a roast. “Wait your turn, Charley.”
Charley scowls. “Dodger’s not here. ’S only me, and I don’t see why I should wait.”
“Because you’ll eat the lot of it, you shameless little tramp, and in this house those who work first eat first.”
“I’ll work,” Charley insists.
“I’ll expect it. You know I’m not in the habit of paying in advance.”
Flipping the second sausage reveals that he’s waited the proper time—the poorly ventilated room begins to smell of toasted meat, and if that won’t call Dodger in, Jacob isn’t sure what will. He spears one of the sausages with the toasting-fork and holds it out to Charley, who seizes it so eagerly he hardly seems to notice his burning fingertips.
The door at the end of the passage bangs open, and for a moment the sound of shouting from the street surges to full volume. It’s cause for attention, but not yet for alarm. Still, beneath the surface, Jacob is always ready to run underground. There are ways out of this house that no one knows about, not even the boys, and he intends to keep it that way. It’s not that he specifically doesn’t trust them to know about the passage downstairs, more that he’s never trusted anyone with anything, and this attitude has seen him reach the age of fifty-one with all his limbs still attached.
“You’re late, my boy,” he calls to the person he assumes is Dodger. “You know I don’t like it when you’re late.”
“And when have I ever changed how I live to suit what you like, Fagin?” a woman calls back.
“Nan!” Charley cries in delight. He wolfs down the sausage almost without chewing and launches himself toward the door, where Nancy Reed stands with a felt hat jammed over her unbrushed hair and what seems to be half the mud of London on the hem of her skirt. She smiles as Charley seizes her round the waist in a crushing hug, but Jacob can see the distance between her smile and her eyes, and he knows she didn’t come for company. His nerves, newly loosened, wind themselves again.
“Once or twice, my dear,” he answers her, “if memory serves. That carrying-on in the street had nothing to do with you, I hope? Unbecoming for a lady, causing commotion.”
Nan snorts and pushes Charley off, swatting him good-naturedly on the back of the head. She sweeps the hat off her own and thumps it businesslike against her thigh, dislodging a cloud of dust. He has half a mind to tell her his home isn’t a barnyard for all and sundry to knock their dirt free in, but he’s under no delusions about the state of the house. With the water pump a fifteen-minute walk away and the line for it usually twice that, no one in Saffron Hill can afford to have standards.
“You know I never cause a commotion unless I want one,” she says. “Was Toby again, the heavy-fingered idiot. Expect he’ll crash in here before long, sweating like a pig from outrunning the law.”
Jacob sighs. So it was one of his after all. Toby Crackit is twenty-one now and only an occasional visitor to Bell Court, preferring to spend his evenings at the gin-palaces or buried up to his hips in some girl or other. Even so, Jacob’s known Toby since the lad was six, and his strongly held principles of
us and
them make it clear what side of the equation Toby falls on. “That one will find himself collared before the year’s out if he isn’t careful.”
“You taught him everything he needs to know,” Nan says. “If he didn’t learn, that’s his funeral. But I didn’t come here to talk about Toby.”
Over the years, Jacob and the children who stay with him have developed an unspoken language. All it takes is one look as sharp as the toasting-fork, and then Charley scurries upstairs murmuring his regards to Nan—though not, Jacob notes, before snatching another sausage, leaving a trail of grease in his wake. Jacob doesn’t like animals, never has, but some days he thinks taking in a pack of stray cats would at least have been neater.
He waits until the door at the landing bangs shut before gesturing at one of the chairs. “Tea?”
She sits. “How many times have you used the leaves?”
“For you, Queen of Saffron Hill? Fresh.”
“You spoil me, Fagin.”
He drifts toward the hob, removing the kettle, pinching out tea leaves with unnecessary ceremony. When he turns back, the distance between her eyes and her smile remains the same, for all the lightness in her voice. He leaves the tea to steep in the pot and returns with two mismatched cups, the chipped one done up in pale blue chinoiserie and the intact one with a bloom of roses. They were both part of fine sets at one point, though their quality didn’t survive the loss of their mates.
“Now,” he says. “Talk to me, Nan. I assume it’s Bill.”
Nan gnaws her lower lip, confirming it.
“Right then. What is it this time?”
“He’s frightening me, Fagin,” Nan says quietly.
What Jacob thinks, but doesn’t say, is that if Nan is only just now becoming frightened of Bill Sikes, she hasn’t been paying attention for a very long while. To give her time to collect herself, he returns to the teapot, pours two cups, nudges one toward her. She stares into it the way he’s seen suicides stare at the Thames.
“He wants Charley,” she says finally.
Jacob doesn’t know what he expected her to say, but this isn’t it. “What on earth for?”
“Next job. Says there’s nothing like a boy for getting into and out of tight spots. The house he’s after, it’s near twenty miles out in Chertsey, half a day’s journey just to case it, and you know the owner has dogs and servants who aren’t afraid to shoot. Almost makes me wonder whether he’s trying to get caught.”
She isn’t saying it, but Jacob knows what she’s thinking. If Bill goes down, he’s taking everyone within arm’s reach down with him. And no one these past twenty-five years has been closer to Bill Sikes than Jacob has.
“He’s met Charley before, hasn’t he?” he says finally.
Nan laughs, surprised into it. “You know one boy’s the same as another to him. He doesn’t know Charley will run off chasing a butterfly halfway through the job. But you tell him that and he’ll only make you find him another.”
He nods, but he’s hardly listening anymore. The black eye Nan came to see him with last week is nearly gone now, though she keeps her sleeves pulled down almost to her first knuckle, and he’s known Bill and Nan long enough to suspect what that’s meant to hide. He’s tried to voice that concern more than once, only to be dismissed each time with the same grim laugh and the same “You’re one to talk, Fagin.” Granted, he
is one to talk. But that’s why he knows he’s right.
A person who was properly afraid of Bill would not be in Jacob’s situation, would not be the one Nan comes to in times of crisis. He’s not Bill’s keeper, is not Bill’s friend, is not Bill’s father. Every time he tries to think of what Bill is to him and he to Bill, he is made aware anew of the vast holes in the English language, the voids into which the men society casts off can slip, and where they must form categories and semantics of their own. He is Bill’s, and Bill is his, and no dictionary in the country can put the matter more precisely.
“I’ll talk to him,” he says. “About all of it, not just Charley. I know how he gets better than anyone.”
“Anyone but me,” Nan says, her chin lifted.
“Anyone but you,” he concedes. “You have my word. I’ll talk to him.”
Nan laughs. “Your word? Damn my eyes, what is your word good for?”
He sips the tea, grimacing—the tea leaves may be fresh, but they are not good, and at the moment he lacks so much as a splash of milk to make them more palatable. “More than you’d think, in some circles. He’s at the Cripples?”
“Will be. Still asleep when I left him. He didn’t come back until past three last night. The dog turned up without him, and for two hours I thought the traps had pinched him.”
“Not Bill,” Jacob says. “Not like that, in dark of night. If they ever take Bill again, I promise you, the whole of London will know about it as it happens.”
Nan seems prepared to remark that this is a singularly cold form of comfort when the door thumps open again, and two sets of footsteps rattle down the passage. Both Nan and Jacob fall silent, listening. Their two visitors are clearly of opposite temperaments. One swaggers in with great clomping steps, as if a brass band appeared to herald their entrance. The other—so quiet that less-attuned ears than Jacob’s and Nan’s might not even hear them—creeps with an air of apology.
He nods to Nan. “Not to worry,” he says. He knows what such footsteps signify. He’s been here many times before.
Sure enough, Jack Dawkins bursts into the room with his hat under one arm, a grin stretching the sides of his thin face. The boy looks as if he got into a fight with a penned-up swine and came off decidedly the worse: mud and dust cling to the hem of his coat, and a smear of dirt swipes across his cheek and chin in a way that puts Jacob in mind of a gentleman’s sideburns. There is, of course, nothing gentlemanly about the self-styled Artful Dodger, despite the elaborate bow he gives to introduce his companion.
The owner of the apologetic footsteps is a boy of indeterminate age, somewhere between six and twelve. A workhouse boy, Jacob would bet his life on it. Children stumble out of such institutions simultaneously too small to walk the streets on their own and too old to laugh or shout or smile. The boy, whatever age he might be, is fair-haired and fine-featured, and his wide blue eyes dart across the room, taking in the seemingly random furnishings. He lingers on the clothes-horse bedecked with pocket-handkerchiefs before proceeding to the three sausages still left in the pan, which catch his attention and keep it.
“Haven’t you any manners?” Jacob says to Dodger. “Do we not introduce guests anymore, just let them wander in like sheep?”
Dodger’s grin becomes, against all laws of anatomy, wider. “Oliver, this is old Mr. Fagin, him as I told you about,” he says. “And Miss Nancy, a friend. Fagin, Nan, this is Oliver Twist. Walked here from Tadley, so he tells me. I met him on the way.”
Despite himself, Jacob stares. Tadley is fifty miles from London if it’s an inch. The improbably named Oliver Twist watches him with something between terror and defiance, two things Jacob is perfectly prepared to work with.
“Not a bad distance for a morning stroll, my boy,” he says, recovering his composure. “Come, sit. There’s sausages left, if you’ve worked up an appetite.”
Oliver stares at him with the same wide, hungry eyes Fagin remembers seeing in Charley’s face, and Dodger’s, and Toby’s, and, in what feels like another life, the reflection of his own. “Yes, Mr. Fagin, sir,” Oliver says. “Please.”
It’s impossible to say who laughs first or loudest, Dodger or Nan or Jacob himself. Regardless, it’s Dodger who thumps the boy on the back and steers him into the chair, still chuckling.
Copyright © 2025 by Allison Epstein. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
