Dodger

card . He carefully put all the letters together, and the numbers too; for after all, everybody knew where Fleet Street was. It was where all the newspapers were made, but to Dodger it was a halfway decent toshing area with one or two useful other tunnels nearby. The Fleet river itself was part of the sewer and it was amazing what ended up in there . . . He recalled with pleasure that once when he was exploring there he had found a bracelet with two sapphires in it, and on the same day also a whole sovereign, which made it a lucky place, given that a decent haul from a day’s toshing could often be as low as a handful of farthings.
    So he set off, Onan still trotting obediently behind him. He walked on, lost in thought. Of course, Messy Bessie wasn’t the sort to come up with something so helpful as a crest such as might have been seen on a nobleman’s coach, and it dawned on Dodger that in any case, if the coach was doing such dirty deeds as taking young ladies to places they shouldn’t be going to, someone might not want to put their crest on it. But a squeaky wheel would go on speaking until somebody did something about it. He didn’t have much time and that was all he had to go on, in a city with hundreds of coaches and other miscellaneous conveyances.
    It is, he thought, probably going to be a little bit difficult, but if I have anything to do with it, the squeaky wheel will get the grease, the grease being Dodger. And possibly, he entertained in the privacy of his own head, the men involved might form a close acquaintance with the comfort of Dodger’s fist . . .

CHAPTER 4
    Dodger discovers a new use for a Fleet Street spike, and gains a pocketful of sugar
    FLEET STREET WAS always busy, day and night, because of all the newspapers, and today the Fleet was not so much running as oozing along the open drain in the centre of the street. Dodger had heard stories about the Fleet sewers, especially the one about the pig that escaped from a butcher’s shop one time and got down there and then into everywhere else, and since there is so much to eat in a sewer if you are a pig, it became enormously fat and nasty. Perhaps it would have been fun then to go and find it; on the other hand perhaps it wouldn’t have been – those things had tusks! But right now, the only monsters in Fleet Street, he had been told, were the printing presses whose thumping made the pavement shake, and which demanded to be fed every day with a diet of politics, ’orrible murders and death.
    Of course, there are other events, but everybody liked an ’orrible murder, didn’t they? And everywhere along the street men were pushing trolleys and piles of paper, or running fast holding tight to smaller bits of paper in a terrible urgency to explain to the world what had happened, why it had happened, what should have happened and sometimes why it hadn’t happened at all, when in fact it did happen after all – and, of course, to tell everyone about all the people who had been ’orribly murdered. It looked a bustling place to be, and now he had to find the
Chronicle
in all of this, hampered by the fact that he wasn’t very good at reading, especially big words like that.
    In the end, a printer in a square hat pointed the way, while giving him a look that said, ‘Don’t you dare steal anything here.’ A bit of a slander to Dodger’s way of thinking, since toshing wasn’t stealing – surely everybody knew that? Well, they did if they were a tosher.
    He tied Onan to a rail, confident that nobody would steal him because of the peculiar smell, and walked up the steps to the
Morning Chronicle
, where he was understandably stopped by one of those men whose job it is to stop the kind of people who need stopping. He looked as though he enjoyed his job, and he had a hat to prove it, and the face under the hat said, ‘Nothing here for the likes of you, boy, you have no business here and you can go and do your thieving somewhere else, you and your dreadful suit. Hah, looks like you’ve got it off a dead man!’
    Dodger carefully did not change his expression, but stood up straight and said, ‘My business is with Mister Dickens! He gave me a mission!’ While the man stared at him, he pulled out of his pocket Charlie’s visiting card, and said, ‘And he gave me his card, and told me to meet him here; can you get that into your head, mister?’
    The doorman looked daggers at him, but the name Dickens apparently had an effect here for