Was wondering when we’d get to the Onan joke…
Summary
As they’re heading home from the party, Dodger gives Solomon the piece of paper handed to him by Sir Robert. Solomon tells him that it’s an embassy and shows him where it is before they head home. Dodger goes back in the dead of night (after retrieving his thieving kit from Ginny) and steals a load of jewels and documents from the place, then sets the stables on fire after releasing the horses in order to get rid of that terrible carriage. When Solomon wakes him the next morning, he tells Dodger that he knows he would have rather done something far worse than steal, and so he thinks this is square with God. He tells Dodger that some of the information he recovered will be very useful to their friends, and that he will get them money for the jewels. Dodger asks Solomon to set a few aside to make him a ring. Dodger uses his contacts to create the disguise of an old woman and heads to the coroner to find a suitable corpse to match Simplicity and then heads to Mrs. Holland and Aberdeen Knocker. Holland gives him some advice about what to do with the body and warns him about a killer called Outlander who’s been asking after him and the girl.
Dodger and Solomon go to see Julius Caesar with Angela and Simplicity. After the fact, Dodger lets them all in on his plan. Angela thinks it’s mad, Solomon thinks Dodger has a fighting chance at pulling it off, but the only person who can really agree to the plan is Simplicity, who says that she trusts Dodger implicitly and hands over her wedding ring when asked. Dodger dresses up as the old woman again and goes to the morgue to retrieve the body, then brings it down to the sewers and prepares it as Mrs. Holland instructed him to do. He’s picked up by the peelers and taken to Sir Robert, who tells him about the break-in at the embassy and what was stolen. He also mentions that a great deal of the stolen information seems to have found its way to his office from a Jewish gentleman his officers couldn’t identify. Dodger insists that he was nowhere near this crime and has no idea about any of it. Sir Robert clearly knows this is a lie and tells him not to do it again. The next day, he is ready for the sojourn into the sewers, joined by Joseph Bazalgette, Charlie, Benjamin Disraeli, and one of Angela’s “footmen,” who is actually Simplicity in disguise. Once down in the sewers, he gets Disraeli to do a little tosher work.
Dodger lets Simplicity have a go next and she finds the ring he had made for her. Disraeli calls her Simplicity in that moment, leading Charlie to scold him for accidentally calling a “handsome young man” by the wrong name. They continue until it begins to get darker and Dodger hears the sound of a crowbar, but when he whistles, no one answers back. He hurries the group out of the sewer and heads back to check things out. The Outlander rushes him, but Dodger is on his own turf and wrestles him to the ground with ease, brandishing Sweeney Todd’s razor at his throat… only to find out that the Outlander is actually a woman standing behind him and he’s tackled her assistant. As fortune would have it, Simplicity returned to the sewers to look after him and gets the drop on Outlander. They tie the two up and Dodger adjusts his plan: He tells Simplicity to stay hidden until he whistles for her. He goes to find the body—wearing the same cap and trousers and Simplicity—and puts her husband’s ring on the body, then shoots the corpse with Outlander’s pistol. Everyone comes running, and he is able to set up the fiction that Simplicity was killed by Outlander, but he was able to stop the criminal. Charlie sees the fiction for what it is, and Dodger explains the original plan that would have occurred had the assassin not showed up at such an opportune moment. He’s deeply impressed.
Dodger is questioned by very powerful men, who all agree that he did everyone a favor by catching Outlander and that he has done nothing truly wrong. One of the men, in asking about his break-in at the embassy, asks if he would be willing to do this as a service to the crown—though, of course, the crown would never employ spies or admit to having any. Later, Dodger dons his old lady costume and takes Simplicity out of the city, finds hair dye in Bristol and dyes Simplicity’s hair red, and then they head up to Somerset, where they both set about learning the accent and making themselves at home. Angela visits Solomon and tells him that she has heard the highest authority might have some work for Dodger. Dodger and Simplicity (now calling herself Serendipity) head back to the city, briefly part ways, and appear to meet for the first time on London Bridge. At home, Dodger is given a summons to Buckingham Palace the next day. He leaves the rest of the money collected for him by the Chronicle to Sweeney Todd in Bedlam and gifts a bottle of brandy to the coroner to helped him. The next day, he is brought before Queen Victoria to be knighted with Solomon and his fiancée Serendipity at his side. Serendipity suggests he take the name Jack for this occasion. And Dodger is properly recruited as a spy in Victoria’s service and embarks on a new life.
Commentary
The rest of the book clips along very neatly and ties itself up in much the same way: Dodger figures out his plan, executes it well, things still go wrong, and he adjusts with relative ease. You can see all the spots where this would have served as setup for future books—Solomon and Prince Albert both being Freemasons, all the useful and historically famous friends Dodger’s made along the way, upcoming historical events that may have been of use. It would have been a fun series for YA readers, for sure.
Pratchett can’t help but bring the same sensibility to this book that he does to all his stories. In an unforgiving era when the world was in some ways much crueler to those who had very little, Dodger manages to enact kindnesses that otherwise wouldn’t exist. He sends money to ease Sweeney Todd’s stay in Bedlam, he helps out his neighbors wherever he can, and he saves Serendipity from being sent back to a man who would likely see her killed. He tips the scale a little in favor of those who need it.
The denouement on this one is frankly lovely for a bit, particularly in the description of the trip that Dodger and Serendipity take to change her appearance and accent, and make her more difficult to recognize. It’s nice to imagine taking a little time out where you can see more stars and giving yourself and a loved one time to recuperate. It feels far more real than the events of the story itself, particularly in its descriptions of Somerset and its accents and rhythms, which Pratchett clearly has some affection for. I found myself wondering if folks from the Discworld’s Chalk aren’t meant to have a similar accent…
There’s something to be said here about the Victorian Era, which was a period marked by certain types of innovation yet mired in inequality, that lends itself to stories like this. Steampunk tends to rest somewhere in there too, along with numerous episodic SFF adventures (Doctor Who’s “Tooth and Claw,” for example). It bemuses me more for how often Victoria and Albert are used as characters in these narratives? As people, writers seem to enjoy imagining their personal idiosyncrasies and their relationship more than other royalty. I’m less surprised by Pratchett’s interest, however, given his clear preferences toward female characters who are never “soppy” and the men who love them. They fit the bill, as it were.
But more than that, the romance between Dodger and Serendipity feels so… appropriate? To the time period? It’s sudden, but in a manner that you buy given both of their circumstances and what they know of each other. Marriages and courting often happened far more quickly in this era, and Serendipity is wonderfully up-front about her needs and desires, making everything between them straightforward and delightfully sweet. She’s the reason I really wish there had been more of these books; she was clearly going to build into an integral part of these adventures, along with Angela.
But alas, we’ve only got this tome to appreciate all that Dodger’s world might have grown into.
Asides and little thoughts
- Dodger thinks that Aberdeen Knocker has never been to Aberdeen “which was somewhere up north, like maybe in Wales.” Look, I do love how folks who live in major metropolises view the rest of the world in vague and largely wrong directions. It’s inevitable. Everything to the north of New York City is the Hudson Valley to my brain. I can do nothing about this.
- In giving some explanation of Onan’s name, this is the first time a footnote has suggested that the reader consult Google, which should be funnier still years down the line when the company (or the internet) has morphed into who-knows-what. It’s already awkward now, given how AI and Google’s algorithms have borked the once mighty search engine.
Pratchettisms
Solomon had earlier tried to give him some inkling of what Julius Caesar was all about, and it seemed to Dodger to be about something like a gang fight, except that everybody talked too much.
Dodger looked at the old man, who probably wasn’t all that old but instead had been made old by the white hair.
His smile broadened and he said, “I always think one should lie to policemen; it is so very good for the soul and, indeed, good for the policemen.”
He didn’t like the look of the smaller man, who was obviously the boss—because whenever you see a big man alongside a small man, the little man is generally the boss.
Gonna pause for a couple weeks while I’m on a lil vacation! We’ll be back three weeks from now (8/16) with Raising Steam, and read up to:
It was so… unethical.
