UNTIL THE LOSS OF HER SAVINGS, MRS. BEDLAM HAD BELIEVED that an adequate (though by no means ideal) education could be gleaned from the Bible. Beginning with Genesis, she had taught the boy his alphabet. From Adam to Zillah, Tom learned his letters. The Bible was also Tom's source for geography and history. He didn't know where France was, but he knew that the river from Eden divided into four— Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates; and he didn't know the kings of England, but he knew that Lamech was the son of Methuselah, who was the son of Enoch, who was the son of Jared, and so on. Such matters, however, seemed irrelevant within the walls of Todderman's factory.
One morning, when Tom neared twelve, it became obvious to his employer that the boy could no longer fit into the nooks behind the kilns, or make his way through some of the tighter passages. Todderman summoned Tom to his parapet and handed him a letter sealed with red wax. “To whom is this letter addressed, Tom?” he said.
After reading the name of the addressee and the street aloud, Tom proved himself a capable messenger. He was to deliver invoices in the city.
Quickly, he learned his way around London, from Westminster to Paddington, and Finsbury Square to Whitechapel. He knew which streets were busy and which offered quick passage. Sometimes he dawdled on the way back, knowing how much time he could tease out of his errands.
One day he went walking along the Thames Embankment, where the workers gathered at lunch. The street entertainers were out in large numbers to take advantage of the crowd. A man played a flute while two monkeys danced at his feet, and farther on several acrobats constructed a human pyramid to the watchers' enormous applause. Still farther, a man stood upon a crate, holding up a small sign, which read, SHAKESPEAREAN SOLILOQUIES. His silver hair and pike-straight nose immediately caught Tom's attention.
“Tom? Good heavens! What luck!” cried Bill Bedlam. “Come to me, lad!” he cried, dropping his sign and giving the boy a hearty embrace. “This calls for celebration!” After leaving his crate and sign in the safekeeping of another performer, he led Tom down a side street.
“Come, lad, ask and you shall receive! What'll it be?”
Buoyed by his father's greeting, Tom glanced about the busy stores and noticed the pastry shop directly before them. It was a genteel establishment, with a large window at which many people were seated. Peering in at the counter, he saw an array of lemon tarts. “A tart, perhaps?” he said.
“A tart!” echoed Mr. Bedlam. He immediately dug into his pockets and, having taken tally of what was inside them, removed his hands slowly.
“Here's the thing about lemon tarts, my boy.” He frowned. “The one thing you don't want is a lemon tart. Did you know that it stunts the growth? I suspect not. The effect of this poison on the body is most obvious in the petite figure of our own Queen Victoria.”
To make his point, Bedlam composed a limerick:
There once was a queen quite absurd,
With a passion for pastry and curd,
She ate three small portions,
And suffered contortions,
“The poor creature!” Bedlam continued. “If she were not a monarch, she would be on parade in a circus for tuppence a showing. Tragic, eh? What I propose is something guaranteed to give you long life and a healthy disposition.”
“Those people are eating tarts,” Tom countered.
Bedlam, however, removed a green apple from his satchel; it was pitted with holes, bruised, and unimpressive, in spite of the furious polishing it received from Bedlam's sleeve.
“Yes, and they shall shrink, Tom,” he said. “You, on the other hand, shall attain a respectable height, live a longer life, and thank me for it one of these days!”
Reluctantly, Tom accepted the apple, though it reminded him of the dull farthing he had received the last time they met.
“Tell me about your mother. Is she well?”
“She is as well as usual,” Tom replied. “Did you put on your play?”
“Not yet, lad, but I have good prospects,” his father replied. “And when my ship comes in, so will yours!”
Bedlam proceeded to describe his standing in the theatrical community. He was clearly adored by his audiences, admired by his fellow actors, and sought after by producers. Success was merely a matter of time.
“I'd like to see you play a king or a prince,” Tom said.
Bedlam promised that Tom and his mother would have the best seats in the house at his next production. “You have my word, Tom,” he said and, embracing the boy went on his way.
when tom told his mother about his encounter, she listened but expressed no joy at her husband's promises. Tom couldn't understand why.
“He expects to be on the stage in a few months,” Tom explained.
“God bless him,” his mother replied with more condemnation than kindness.
BY THE TIME TOM WAS fourteen, there had been no more news of Mr. Bedlam. True to his father's prediction, however, Tom gained many more inches, which he attributed to the avoidance of lemon tarts. He had more mature interests and desires now, and had refined the technique of eluding his responsibilities in pursuit of these impulses. It was a wonder that he still had a job, for he was never available when he was needed, and when he wasn't needed, he was always up to mischief.
“Where's Tom Bedlam?” cried Brandy Oxmire when Todderman sent him to find the boy. Brandy roared for him past the sweat-soaked men shoveling coal into the furnaces, past the workshops of the potters straddling their wheels as they drew jug and bowl from primeval clods, past the glazers, spattered and half-demented from using their leaden potions, until he arrived on the rooftop, with London spread out before him—a thousand towns of steeples, town houses, and higgledy-piggledy tenements dappled with sun and smoke.
There, Brandy dug into his pocket for his thistle-shaped clay pipe, but finding his leather tobacco pouch empty, he cursed, stuffed the pipe into his pocket, and let out another roar for the idle boy in case his employer might be listening.
The only place Brandy had missed was the factory cellar, a quiet tomb where rows and rows of freshly fired porcelain pieces stood white and still—a line of stiff-shouldered earls no taller than a boy's hand, two score duchesses with raised noses and milky white décolletage, dozens of delicate horses poised on rear hooves, and fifty milkmaids with coy smiles.
In a dark corner, two figures were nestled on a heap of sacking. Tom Bedlam placed his hand on the warm, pink breast of Sissy Grimes.
“Tom,” she murmured in warning, but the boy smiled innocently. She was a pretty creature. She worked in the sunlit studios where the glazing was done. Sissy's job was to paint the identical smiles on the lips of the milkmaids—perfect copies of her own tempting and elusive pout. But when his hand strayed below her waist, Sissy's body went taut, and suddenly she slapped him, not once but three times.
“I love you, Sissy,” he said, gasping.
But she was already fastening her buttons, her fine eyebrows knitted together and her own milkmaid mouth firmly set. “Love!” she muttered.
“Honest,” he added. But her head tossed skeptically, and her elbow almost knocked the shelf that supported the porcelain earls.
“Take care, Sissy.” Tom gasped, fearful that, if one piece fell, the whole row would shatter and Todderman would have his skin.
“You'd best be careful, Tom Bedlam!” Sissy's eyes bored into him. “You're only a boy.”
“But I do love you,” he replied, perhaps with more emotion than he meant, in defiance of that increasingly unkind stare of hers.
“Love.” Her skepticism reappeared. “A man who loved me would get me away from here,” she declared, indicating with a glance the dusty timbers of the cellar and everything above, including the smokestacks.
“I'm going to marry you,” he vowed.
“Oh, Tom.” She sighed, tied up her hair, then shook her head at him. “If I married you, I'd be stuck here forever. I don't want to turn out like your mother.”
Tom might have defended his mother if Brandy's uneven footsteps hadn't approached. He snatched a basket of figurines while Sissy busied herself by spreading the other items on the shelves.
“Gone deaf, Tom Bedlam?” muttered Brandy, his deep breaths enough to make the little salt and pepper shakers tremble. Then he noticed Sissy. “What are you doing down here with her?”
“See here, Brandy, you'll upset the whole works,” chided the boy as the cripple glared at him. “Sissy was helping me bring some pieces up to the glazers. A dozen milkmaids. Now you watch—one breath in the wrong direction and there'll be nothing standing. What'll Mr. Todderman say then, eh?”
The cripple stopped breathing; with hands raised, he tried to turn around, but his hip grazed one shelf, and a small puppy dog rocked. Tom caught it before it fell, and Brandy groaned.
“No harm done, Brandy; lucky I was here,” he scolded. Sissy slipped up the far stairs without a backwards glance.
After Tom took the basket to the glazers, Brandy gave him his next task. “The master wants you to deliver an invoice to Belgrave Square. And on your way, Tom,” he added, softening his tone as he tossed the boy a coin, “get us some t'baccy”
Tom loved the distant errands. On those rare moments when the weather and his duties collaborated, he slipped into the more genteel crowds—gentlemen in their top hats and day coats, women in gaily colored frocks and bonnets—and imagined himself a man of leisure with money in his pocket to spend as he pleased. For a moment he forgot his oversize shoes, oily black breeches, woolen shirt, threadbare cap, and the grimy canvas bag slung over his bony shoulders that contained one invoice from Todderman & Sons Porcelain & Statuary. That was, until he brushed against a barrister in a handsome black morning coat, who took offense and swiped at Tom's ear with the ball of his fist.
After delivering the invoice to the gentleman on Belgrave Square, Tom remembered Brandy's demand. He decided to go out of his way, across St. James's Park, to a shop on the river near the shipping companies where Virginia tobacco was sold and where, coincidentally there was always a crowd and a show to be seen.
Today, a man with a deep voice and a small body stood upon a wooden crate, pamphlets in one hand, Bible in the other, and predicted the “end of the world two weeks hence!” His name was Paddy Pendleton, and his face might have been carved from granite, full-lipped, with deep-set eyes and a big puss's nose and whiskers. When the Bible became too heavy, Mr. Pendleton would take hat in hand, flick back his mane, and temper his tirade to make a plea for pennies for orphaned children. Once an adequate sum for a meat pie and a pint of ale had gathered in his hat, it would return to his head, the Bible would rise, and the subject would return to the darker matter of Armageddon.
The next act that caught Tom's attention was a new one. A sizable throng gathered around a rope stretched between two lampposts while a figure in a white dress and parasol attempted to cross from the first to the second post. The performer's jerky, exaggerated movements seemed futile at first, but it became obvious to Tom that this was a comic performance intended to provoke laughter and derision.
Two strangers to the event spoke behind the boy.
“Good heavens, is that a lady?”
“Only if I'm a lady too,” said the other with a laugh, noting that the “lady” had very broad shoulders and hairy fingers.
The figure now executed a backwards somersault and landed back on the rope, petticoats tumbling. The bonnet fell to the crowd, revealing the acrobat's face—a swell of silver-white hair tied back in a ponytail and a familiar nose.
“It's a bloke!” cried a sailor to one of his companions. Rude laughter burst from the group.
Tom worked his way through the crowd until he was close enough to examine the fellow in petticoats in closer detail.
It was unmistakably the face from the broadsheet on his wall. The man executed three somersaults on the wire and displayed enough dexterity to earn applause and a generous offering of coins. But instead of playing kings and princes, Tom's father was reduced to playing the fool.
Whatever elation Tom felt at seeing his father was muted by disappointment; quietly he eased himself away through the crowd, hiding his face for fear of being recognized by the performer.