London - Edward Rutherfurd [534]
“Hello, Silas,” she said.
It was hard to believe that this rosy-cheeked old man, with his neatly trimmed beard, his beautifully tailored frock coat, and twinkling shoes – even the nails on his strong old hands, she noticed, were manicured – was really Silas. The transformation was astounding.
“I thought maybe you’d died,” he said slowly.
“I’m alive.”
He continued to gaze at her, thoughtfully. “I looked for you once. Couldn’t find you.”
She stared at him. It might be true. “I looked for you,” she said. “Couldn’t find you either.” But then, that had been a long time ago.
She had seen Silas only once more, after that day when he had given up the boat. It had been a year later when, one grey morning, he had come trudging into their lodgings and told her gruffly: “You come with me today, Lucy. Got something for you.” She had not wanted to go, but her mother had begged her, and so, reluctantly, she had accompanied him to the smelly little cart he drove, and they had gone off. Their route had taken them down into Southwark and across into Bermondsey until at last they had turned into a large yard, enclosed by a high, ramshackle old wooden fence, and she had found herself gazing at a most remarkable sight.
Silas Dogget’s dust heap was already almost thirty feet high, and it was evidently still growing. Fresh cartloads of material were constantly arriving – if fresh was the appropriate word. For there was nothing fresh about the contents of those carts. Dirt, rubbish, muck of every kind, the scrapings, leavings and refuse of the metropolis piled up in a single, putrid, stinking mountain. But most remarkable of all was the activity taking place on it. A swarm of ragged people was climbing it, burrowing into it, getting lost inside it for all Lucy could tell. Some dug with trowels, others used sieves, others scraped with their bare hands – all under the gimlet eye of a foreman who inspected every one of these human ants before they were allowed out through the gate at the end of the day, to make sure they took nothing with them. And what did they find? It was astonishing, she soon learned, as Silas took her round: bits of iron, knives, forks, copper kettles, pans, quantities of wood, old clothes, coins galore, even jewellery. Each of these items, and many others, was carefully placed in bins or subsidiary heaps where Dogget himself would assess their value and how to dispose of them. “This pile,” he said with satisfaction, “will make my fortune.”
And she – this was the generous offer he now made – could help pick it over with the others. Not only that: the pickers, being casual labour, were paid only pence a day, but Silas would pay her a weekly wage of thirty shillings. “Your being family,” he had explained. “Maybe one day I might find you something even better,” he suggested. “I told you,” he reminded her, “that I’d help you.”
But as she had gazed at the filthy heap, and at the grim slovenly form of the former dredger, Lucy’s heart had sunk. She had pulled bodies from the river with him; poor little Horatio had dug in the Thames mud for coins, just as these poor, ragged folk were climbing up his precious mountain of dirt and slime. She had done all this before: the memories were too painful. She had refused him.
He had not said much. He had driven her home. When they got there he turned to her. “You’ll never get a better offer. This is your last chance.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Obstinate like your father.”
“Maybe.”
“You can go to hell then,” he had said, and without so much as giving her a shilling, he had flicked the reins and driven his cart away.
That had been the last she saw of him. Five years later, when her mother died, she had half expected him, in his uncanny way, to appear.