Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

'Let me in, lad, it be Ikey Solomon,' he called, keeping his voice as low as possible. 'I 'ave most urgent business with your mistress. 'Urry now, I've no time to waste!'

Ikey left the public house less than ten minutes later. The streets and alleys were white with snow though a few early-morning market carts, and a small herd of scraggy-looking sheep being driven to a slaughter house were already beginning to turn it into slush. It was six o'clock in the morning and not yet light when he reached his house in Whitechapel and waited for several minutes in the freezing cold for the boys to arrive with the cart.

Ikey and the boys, their breath frosting from the effort, unloaded the contents of the cart and placed the load in the front parlour. Then Ikey paid the young lads a second shilling and sent them, well pleased, on their way.

Mary's ledger he took straightaways to his study and added it to those already concealed in the cavity below the floorboards. Then removing the counterfeit notes and copper etching plates from his bag he put each of the plates carefully aside. He then took up the notes, several thousand pounds of counterfeit longtails, which he placed in the grate and set alight, setting fire to the pile three times in all to make certain that there was nothing left but a handful of ashes. Whereupon he carefully swept the ash onto a piece of butcher's paper and put them into a small pewter tankard which he half filled with water, stirred well and swallowed.

Destroying the counterfeit banknotes was the most difficult thing Ikey could remember ever having to do -the notes were almost perfect and he might quite easily have allowed them into the London markets without fear of immediate discovery. But he was a consummate professional and in Ikey's mind releasing the notes in London was the equivalent of shitting on your own doorstep, in effect asking to be caught. Laundering the false notes through foreign banks was an example of the finesse which had earned him his title as the Prince of Fences. Though, having finally swallowed the contents of the mug, he allowed two silent tears to run down his cheeks and permitted himself the luxury of a single-knuckled sniff.

Ikey then took a needle and thread from the drawer of his desk and sewed the copper engraving plates into the hem of his great coat, first wrapping them carefully in four sheets of strong white paper. Each sheet was taken from separate books in a collection of several dozen handsome leather-bound volumes contained within a breakfront bookcase. Had any person been observing him they would have been curious at the manner of obtaining these squares of paper. Ikey removed the four volumes seemingly at random and opened them to the back cover where he carefully peeled back the endpaper. This revealed a second sheet of paper which Ikey now used as wrapping for the plates, first binding them with twine before sewing them into the hem of his coat.

All this activity took longer than he had intended and Ikey was anxious to make good his escape. He climbed the stairs and shook Hannah awake so that she might help him carry the stuff from the parlour, to be hidden within the false ceiling. Hannah, naturally cantankerous and more so by having been awakened after less than two hours of sleep, cursed Ikey, though she was not unaccustomed to this sort of disturbance. Ikey was known to use several places to store goods at this time of year and sometimes they needed to be hastily moved. Neither was she surprised when after the task was completed Ikey grunted a brusque farewell, explaining only that he had decided to travel to Birmingham. News of a rich haul had come to him and seeking to amuse her so as not to arouse the least suspicion he added a sentiment she loved so much to hear: 'Ah, my dear, the gentile scriptures are not correct. Even at Christmas time it is never better to give than to receive!'

Ikey arrived at the coaching post at Whitechapel markets just as the coachman's call to climb aboard was heard, and he seated himself beside the far window so that he could look outwards with his back turned to the other passengers. He pulled his head deeply into the lapels of his great coat so that his hat appeared to be resting upon its upturned collar. Thus, cut off from the attentions of his fellow passengers, he fell into deep cogitation on the matters which had unfolded in Bell Alley in the earlier hours of that morning.

It was not long before his ruminations allowed him to see the entire affair in an altogether different light, and Ikey suddenly felt himself ennobled by his sacrifice on Mary's behalf.

As he sat hunched in the coach, with its rattle and bump and clippity-clop, the general rush and rumble of wheels on flinted stone, rutted road and hard white gravel, and watched the country racing past, from deep within his great coat Ikey felt the warm glow of goodness enveloping him.

This sense of saintly satisfaction was not one Ikey could previously remember experiencing, for it is an emotion which comes to a man who has sacrificed his own needs for those of another. It contained a strange feeling of light-headedness and was an experience Ikey was not entirely sure he would like to repeat. While he knew himself very fond of Mary, he was quite inexperienced in matters of the heart, and was therefore unable to recognise that strange emotion which sentimental women referred to so knowingly as true love.

He had once, as a boy of eight selling oranges and lemons on the street, bought a secondhand halfpenny card from a barrow in Petticoat Lane. The card was braided along its edges with pink ribbon and showed a circle formed of tiny red roses at its centre, and within the circle two blue doves perched side by side upon a silver branch, their heads touching. Above the circle and below the braided ribbon was the legend, To my one and only true love. Ikey had carried the card with him until he was twenty-two years old, convinced that one day he too would find his one and only true love.

At twenty-two, and quite soon after he had married Hannah, he was convicted of stealing a gentleman's purse. He was sentenced at the Old Bailey to transportation for life and removed to the hulks at Chatham. Here he was to remain for six years, avoiding transportation to Australia through the influence of an uncle who was a slops dealer at the port, and who pleaded directly and successfully to the naval authorities for him to remain in England.

While on the hulks Ikey made the aquaintance of a convicted forger named Jeremiah Smiles, who had taken to being a tattoo artist and proved to have an exceedingly fine hand at the matter of ink rubbed into human flesh. Ikey had paid him to tattoo the design on the card onto his upper arm. The card, by this time much faded and worn, had lost, by means of a missing portion, the last two words of the legend and it now read, To my one and only…

Ikey explained that the two missing words were blue dove. Smiles, like all forgers, was not a man of great imagination. His aptitude being for detail and accurate copying of the known rather than depicting in fantasy the unknown. 'Humph!' he snorted. 'Them's birds, doves most likely. Birds don't love and doves ain't blue!'

Ikey was never lost for an explanation. 'It be a well-known curiosity that doves o' this particular and brilliant hue takes only one partner in their life,' he lied. 'Should one dove die then the other will remain faithful to its memory, takin' no other partner to itself ever again.'

'Blue doves? Bah! Ain't no such creatures, doves is grey and piebald and brown, speckled and pure white if they be fan-tails, but they ain't blue. There never was, nor ever will be, blue doves!'

'Ah, but you're wrong my dear!' Ikey announced. 'Quite wrong and emphatically incorrect and absolutely misinformed! In Van Diemen's Land there is a great wilderness which begins at the edge o' the clearing to a prison garrison place name o' Cascades.' Ikey sighed heavily. 'Gawd forbid, we may yet see it in our lives. It is to the edge o' this clearin' that the blue doves come at mornin's light, each paired and seated with their 'eads together. They sit and coo softly in the 'igh branches o' the blue gum trees and should they witness a convict fellow at work on the ground below, it is reliably told that they cry human tears for the misery they sees and the compassion they feels for the injustice done to all of us who suffer in the name o' the unjust and 'einous laws o' Mother England.'