when she had nothing else to sell. Her hair was just the start of it.’ He dropped the plait into the basket again.
‘If this was quality work, I’d be using human hair on you. See? This is the closest for colour and texture.’ He brandished a salt-and-pepper bunch next to the dwarf’s face and Carlo twisted away from it in disgust. ‘Devil Wix won’t pay for that, of course. You and your model will be making do with an identical pair of horsehair wigs. What are you supposed to be? The good philosopher, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll be generous to you both and give you your eyebrows in real hair.’
Carlo stared at the egg-bald wax head on its stand. The coffin maker’s was creepy enough, but this shadowy place deep in the wrecked streets surrounding the railway yards more than matched it. There was a box containing dozens of glass eyes on the floor at his feet, all unwinking and all fixed on him.
‘You and Wix know each other from back when?’
The other held up a loop of wire, measuring by eye the breadth of skin between Carlo’s brows.
‘A long time.’
No more was forthcoming.
Without meeting the gaze of the glass eyes Carlo tried another topic on the modeller. ‘Odd sort of a job you do, wouldn’t you say?’
Jasper gave him a contemptuous glance. ‘My waxwork of Miss Nellie Bromley in Trial by Jury is the favourite figure in the Baker Street exhibition. I’d not call my artistic work odd. Not by comparison with your own, for example.’
Carlo scowled but said nothing. After that they had posed and modelled in silence.
After a long night at the coffin maker’s Devil walked up from Holborn to Euston and thence along the sooty roads that led to Camden Town. All along the way rough tent encampments lay beside the railway lines and under the arches and bridges. The men, women and children who existed here were black-faced and their ragged clothes were black, as were the heaps of brick rubble and even the dead leaves hanging on the few weak trees. Black smoke billowed from cooking fires and smouldering brick kilns, and the occasional threatening figure lurched out of this murk and mumbled at him. By shrinking inwardly Devil made himself seem smaller and darker too, and he passed through these places without difficulty.
By the time he rattled the latch of the studio door Jasper Button was already at work.
‘Jas? You there?’
‘Where else would I be?’
‘I’d say anywhere you could be, if only you had the choice.’
Jasper ignored him. The streets outside might be warrens of decrepit houses and belching chimneys and gaunt sheds but his studio was snug enough. A blanket hung over the doorway to keep in the warmth, there was a coal fire in a narrow little grate and a black kettle on the hob.
‘You want some tea?’
‘You don’t have anything stronger?’
It was a question that didn’t expect an answer. Jasper Button never touched a drop, and given what had happened to his mother and father Devil understood why not. The modeller warmed an earthenware teapot and lifted the kettle using a knitted potholder.
Devil was stalking the bald wax head, examining it from every angle.
‘What do you think?’ Jasper was eager for Devil’s approval. More than a decade ago, the two of them had played together up in the green fields and lanes surrounding the village of Stanmore. Devil had been the ringleader in those days, the admired and feared chief of a band of boys who had in common their rebelliousness and their longing for first-hand experience of the world they could see from the top of Stanmore Hill.
Devil pretended to consider. ‘I think you have achieved a reasonable likeness.’
‘Go to hell. The head’s not for sale, then.’
‘Poor Jas. What will you do with it, in that case?’
‘I’ll exhibit it. There’s always an audience in the Chamber of Horrors.’
‘True enough. Let’s have a look.’
Jasper lifted the head off the stand and turned it upside down to reveal a meticulously gory cross-section of severed bone, muscle and artery. Devil whistled.
‘I say. That’s very pretty. Is that what it really looks like?’
‘Like enough,’ Jasper said brusquely. ‘Enough to satisfy your tavern audiences, at any rate. If I decide to let you have it, that is. I rather liked your midget friend, so I might just keep his likeness beside me for sentimental reasons.’
‘I expect you will feel even more sentimental about two sovereigns, won’t you?’ He put two fingers into the pocket of his waistcoat where the naked end of his watch chain rested.
‘Let’s see the colour of them,’ Jasper insisted, knowing his friend too well.
The money and the model were exchanged and Devil stowed the waxen version of Carlo in a bag with his scarlet stage costume. Once the transaction was complete he was able to give due praise.
‘You’re a magician, Jas, you know, in your own way. Not in my league of course, but it’s a decent skill. Are you going to pour that tea or leave it to stew?’
Jasper passed him a cup and they settled beside the fire.
Once, long ago, the two of them had been amongst a crowd of gaping children who had watched the performance of a few magic tricks in a painted canvas booth set up by a travelling conjuror on the village square. The man had been more of a tramp than a real performer, and the sleights as Devil now recalled them had been shabby and fumbling. But still, here was a man who could make a white rat appear from a folded pocket handkerchief and who could grasp a shilling out of blue air. They hadn’t been there an instant before, but the rat and the shilling were definitely real. He could still remember how the sleek warmth of the animal had filled his hands when the conjuror asked him to mind it for him, and he could taste the coin’s metal between his teeth when he had tested it with a bite. How had such solid things appeared from nowhere? What strange dimensions existed beyond the range of his limited understanding?
Everything he had known up to that point had been narrow, painful, humdrum, and devoid of mystery. There was his own confined world and then there was beyond, somewhere out of reach, where great events took place. Yet here he was in the centre of the ordinary with the extraordinary somehow taking place right in front of him. To witness the magic had been his first experience of wonder, and it had filled his childish heart with yearning.
All around him his friends and their brothers and sisters were shouting and jeering and trying to grab the rat or the shilling but Devil was silent. All he wanted was to see more magic, to be further amazed and transported, and at the same time he was envious. Why was it not given to him to create wonder in the same way? What a gift that must be, he thought, as he gazed at the grog-faced man in the canvas booth with his tattered string of silks and his hands that shook so much he dropped his shilling, to the great amusement of the crowd.
Ten-year-old Hector Crumhall hardly knew how, but he understood that the bestowal of wonder was the ticket that was going to carry him out of Stanmore.
At the end of the scrappy show
