The Baker's Tale Read online

  BOOKS BY THOMAS HAUSER

  GENERAL NON-FICTION

  Missing

  The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea

  For Our Children

  (with Frank Macchiarola)

  The Family Legal Companion

  Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl

  (with Dr. Robert Gale)

  Arnold Palmer: A Personal Journey

  Confronting America’s Moral Crisis

  (with Frank Macchiarola)

  Healing: A Journal of Tolerance and Understanding

  With This Ring

  (with Frank Macchiarola)

  Thomas Hauser on Sports

  Reflections

  BOXING NON-FICTION

  The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing

  Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

  Muhammad Ali: Memories

  Muhammad Ali: In Perspective

  Muhammad Ali & Company

  A Beautiful Sickness

  A Year At The Fights

  Brutal Artistry

  The View From Ringside

  Chaos, Corruption, Courage, and Glory

  The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali

  I Don’t Believe It, But It’s True

  Knockout

  (with Vikki LaMotta)

  The Greatest Sport of All

  The Boxing Scene

  An Unforgiving Sport

  Boxing Is . . .

  Box: The Face of Boxing

  The Legend of Muhammad Ali

  (with Bart Barry)

  Winks and Daggers

  And the New . . .

  Straight Writes and Jabs

  Thomas Hauser on Boxing

  A Hurting Sport

  FICTION

  Ashworth & Palmer

  Agatha’s Friends

  The Beethoven Conspiracy

  Hanneman’s War

  The Fantasy

  Dear Hannah

  The Hawthorne Group

  Mark Twain Remembers

  Finding The Princess

  Waiting For Carver Boyd

  The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens

  The Baker’s Tale

  FOR CHILDREN

  Martin Bear & Friends

  Copyright © 2015 Thomas Hauser

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Despite the incidental use of actual historical figures and places, the characters and incidents portrayed in this book are wholly fictional.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hauser, Thomas.

  The Bakers Tale: Ruby Spriggs and the Legacy of Charles Dickens / Thomas Hauser.

  pages; cm

  1. Bakers—England—London—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A759B35 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2015009414

  Cover design by Faceout

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

  Counterpoint Press

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-669-8

  FOR RUBY CARELLIE CHAPMAN

  AND

  REECE EDWIN CHAPMAN

  Contents

  Book 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Book 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Book 3

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Book 4

  Chapter 13

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Throughout the manuscript, I have comingled the words of Charles Dickens with my own. I have also drawn from the May 1842 report of the Royal Commission headed by Lord Anthony Ashley that investigated the conditions in England’s mines.

  Thomas Hauser

  New York, N Y

  2015

  In the winter of 1836, I held an infant in my arms. The child, a girl eight months of age, was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London at that time. Since then, I have often wondered what happened to the child.

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Written at sea while returning home to England from America

  April 1868

  Book 1

  CHAPTER 1

  The night passed. The stars grew pale. The day broke, and the winter sun rose over London on a cold day in January in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and thirty-nine.

  A white frost lay upon the ground. The sun looked down upon the ice that it was too weak to melt and hid behind a veil of clouds. Trees shuddered as blasts of wind howled and shook their bare branches. It was harsh, sharp, piercing, bitter, cutting, biting, cold.

  I am not a well educated man, but I am wiser than some people take me for. I have an interest in many things and have taught myself what I can. I am a plain man and a practical man. That is my way.

  I am a baker by trade. My labour in the bakery starts in the dark hours of morning. I rise early and breakfast by candlelight. The bakery is in a fashionable part of London. Servants come early and wait for the first bread and rolls to come out of the oven.

  Bread is the best of all foods and one of the oldest foods known to man. It is spoken of hundreds of times in the Bible, twenty-three times in the Book of Genesis alone. It is the first thing asked for in the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples.

  In London, as in much of the world, there is a harrowing disparity between rich and poor. Wealth and poverty, repletion and starvation, exist side by side.

  At times, the classes are intertwined. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death borne by rats killed one of every three people in London. Three hundred years later, again borne by rats, the Great Plague came. Thousands of corpses were carried in death carts and buried together in huge unmarked graves. In 1666, much of London was destroyed by the Great Fire, one of several times that flames have brought the city to its knees.

  But among the poor, ignorance is a greater curse than plague or fire. There the divide between the classes looms large. The absence of learning and want of knowledge is a constant cause of misery among the downtrodden. Ignorance is the reason the poor live—that is to say, they have not yet died—in ruinous places on dangerous streets that are avoided by all but those who live there. On winter days when the sun shines, their hovels are colder than the outdoors.

  Others among the poor are without shelter of any kind. They wander through long weary nights, counting the chimes of church clocks from hour to hour. They listen to the rain and crouch for warmth in doorways and beneath old bridges. They watch lights twinkling in chamber windows, thinking of the children coiled there in beds and the comfort that these children enjoy.

  Their lives are unlightened by any ray of hope. Every aspiration blights and withers before it can grow. They were poor before. They are poor now. They will be old and poor before they know it. From birth to grave, their path is narrow.

  Their life of poverty knows no change and no goal but that of struggling in toil for bread. A poor man labours to gain food for himself and for his family from day to day. His children cry with hunger. They plead for bread.
Not the daily bread of the Lord’s Prayer as prayed for in London’s richest congregations where it is understood to include half the luxuries of the world. They plead for as much food as will support life, a crust of dry hard bread that is often just beyond their reach.

  The wind was blowing harder now. Men and the few women who were on the streets bent down their heads to defend against its stinging arrows. A light snow began to fall and joined with the frozen crust upon the ground.

  Then I saw a man and child standing outside the bakery.

  The man was attired in coarse rough clothes. His coat was of a size that had not been made for him and had come to such a state that it was impossible to know its original colour. It was ragged at the edges and seemed too thin to keep him warm. His eyes spoke of long hard endurance and dreadful hunger.

  The child was a girl between the ages of three and four. Like the man, she was wearing common clothes. Her coat was patched with rag and her shoes with straw. A shawl had been wrapped around her shoulders and chest in an effort to keep her warm.

  It was the child that captured my attention. Such hardness as I might summon up to sustain me against the miseries of adults fails when I look at children. I see how young and defenseless they are against the injustices of the world.

  Several of the child’s fingers pushed through holes in her mittens. The young endure these things better than the old. But like the man, the child was shivering. She clung tightly to his bare hand and kept close to him.

  Man and child gazed with hungry eyes at the bread behind the window. Bread guarded by a sheet of glass that was a brick wall to them. Then the man came to the door.

  As a rule of business, I do not give to beggars. But the strong affection between the man and child touched my emotions. I allowed him in.

  “Begging your pardon, sir. Could I do labour for you in exchange for a loaf of bread?”

  My answer was slow in coming.

  “Please, sir. The child is hungry, and it is wrong that she should suffer. I will do anything for bread for the child.”

  There is a table in the rear of the bakery where I sometimes sit and engage in conversation. The apprentice boy was on duty in the front, which gave me the freedom to converse. Had it been otherwise, everything would have happened differently and I would not have this tale to tell.

  I led the man and child past loaves of bread, rolls, pastries, and other goods of my trade. The smell of coffee and freshly baked bread filled the air.

  There was a warm fireplace by the table in back. Sometimes we are hungry. Sometimes we are frightened. But cold is often hardest upon us.

  The man sat by the fire and opened his hands to receive its warmth. The child took off her mittens and did the same.

  He was of average height, well made with intelligent eyes and a muscular frame grown thin.

  “What is your name?”

  “Spriggs, sir. Christopher Spriggs.”

  “And the child?”

  “Ruby.”

  “She is your daughter?”

  “No, sir. My niece.”

  “And her parents?”

  “She has none.”

  I extended my hand.

  “My name is Antonio.”

  I put two mugs on the table. One with coffee from a pot above the fire, the other with milk for the child. Then I cut two thick slices of bread, one for Christopher, the other for Ruby.

  His eyes met hers with a reassuring look.

  Ruby took the bread, clenched it in her little hand, and ate as though nothing else in the world mattered. Not ravenously. She chewed and swallowed each bite. But after each swallow, she immediately took another bite.

  When the bread was gone, she smiled.

  There was a glow about her. Had she been wrapped in a blanket, it would have been impossible for the haughtiest stranger to differentiate between her and a child of the highest rank in society. As for her smile, a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done no more to warm my heart.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “In no place long,” Christopher responded.

  “And the child’s parents?”

  “Her mother, my sister, was a good woman. She died of fever a year ago. The father was there only on the night of conception.”

  “Are there only two of you?”

  “Only two.”

  As we conversed, Ruby’s eyes rested upon mine with an expression of wondering thoughtfulness that is seen sometimes in young children.

  Christopher did not eat his bread. I know when a man is hungry. I can see it in his eyes.

  “Eat. I will give you more for Ruby to take home.”

  The bread that I had given to him was quickly gone.

  “I would like to work for what we have eaten,” he said.

  “Not today. But you have come at the right time. Perhaps it is fate. Be here tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning. There may be a job and more for you.”

  I gave Christopher the rest of the loaf of bread to take home. He and Ruby left. I knew the world they were retreating to. The streets are mean and close. Poverty and misfortune fester. Hunger and want had surrounded Ruby Spriggs from the first dawning of her reason.

  That night, she would not leave my thoughts. I was anxious for her return.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was born in London in 1801. King George III sat upon the throne. The French still owned a portion of America as vast as the original colonies. Lord Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets was in the future. A practical steamship had yet to be built.

  My father was a British seaman who married a beautiful Italian woman and brought her back to England. Unfortunately, I inherited my father’s looks. When I was five years old, my mother fled England with an Italian nobleman. I never saw her again. If she had been the wife of a king, war would have followed. But since she was only my father’s wife, the affairs of state went on uninterrupted.

  The schools in England are for people of means, which I was not. It was expected that I would live my life as a labourer, unable to read or write. Then, in my eighteenth year, I met a man named Octavius Joy.

  Mr. Joy made a great deal of money in honest finance. He was a brilliant man of scrupulous veracity with regard to numbers. Once he had earned his fortune, he set out to spend it.

  “People are anxious to be employed and fairly paid for their labour,” Mr. Joy said. “Those who work hard and are able to provide for their families through fairly paid labour are likely to be content. I have seen men whose lives were lived under the worst privation and suffering become happy and at peace when they were given work to do and were fairly compensated.”

  In keeping with this belief, Mr. Joy put common men and women in situations where they learned the skills necessary to run a business. When their skills were sufficient, he placed them in a business of their own. “I seek to leave them,” he explained, “not with resources that can be easily spent but with skills that place them beyond the reach of poverty forever.”

  It was also important to Mr. Joy that people learn to read and write. He expressed this view with the declaration, “Reading is a passageway to knowledge. All men and women should be able to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic. They should be able to keep accounts. That is, they should be able to put down in words and figures the cost of what they need to live and how much money they have to spend. I hope for a day when all children in England regardless of their class are taught to read and write. Reading and writing, knowledge of the world, the spread of ideas. That is the key to everything.”

  In keeping with this philosophy, Mr. Joy established a learning center in London. Common men and women and their children were welcome to attend free classes in reading that were taught six days a week from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night.

  I was a labourer in Covent Garden market when Mr. Joy took me off the streets. At his direction, I apprenticed in a bakery. I learned the trade and, at his insisten
ce, I also learned to read and write. Then Mr. Joy placed me in a bakery of my own.

  “You are to follow four principles in the operation of your business,” he instructed. “One: good quality food is to be prepared and sold. Two: each person you employ is to be fairly paid. Three: all bills for purchases by the bakery are to be paid weekly. Four: every person who walks through the bakery door is to be treated with dignity and respect.”

  Remarkably, Mr. Joy refused any profit from the businesses that he helped establish.

  “I am rich,” he said. “I take no pleasure in hoarding and have more than enough to ensure comfort for the rest of my life. I would be ashamed to touch what has been earned through the hard labour of another man.”

  “What is your motive in this?” he was once asked.

  “Always fishing for motives when they are right on the surface,” Mr. Joy responded. “The motive is plain. To make people useful and happy. It brings me great pleasure to see people who are achieving the most that they can out of their natural abilities. I do not believe in the Bible as the absolute word of God, and I am particularly suspicious of those who seek to impose their own interpretation of the Bible upon us. But I do believe that we should do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us were we in their shoes.”

  Christopher and Ruby returned to the bakery at ten o’clock on the day after we met.

  “Good morning, little one,” I addressed the child. “You look fresher today than a spring flower.”

  She smiled. No view in England was as enticing.

  I gave them bread, coffee, and milk, as I had done the day before.

  At eleven o’clock, Octavius Joy arrived. He was a man of sixty, portly with a round, good-humoured, benevolent face that was full of life and radiated an almost innocent happiness that would have been delightful in a child and was particularly appealing in a man his age. His cheeks were rosy, a colour occasioned in part by the cold. His hair was a silvered grey. Looking at him, one might have forgotten for a moment that there was such a thing as a sour mind or a crabbed countenance in the world.