St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

morning?”
    â€œI can’t. I’ve got to be in the West End early again. Granny will take you.”
    â€œHave you got a hangover?”
    â€œYes.” Jake motioned him closer. Lowering his voice, he asked, “Anything new on Tibbett?”
    Tibbett, a schoolmate, was splendid at football.
    â€œYou won’t tell Molly?”
    Jake promised.
    â€œHe’s being transferred to Leeds. They got twenty-one pounds for him.”
    â€œBut he must be worth more than that.”
    Mrs. Hersh was calling.
    â€œWill you take me to school tomorrow, then?”
    â€œTomorrow’s Saturday … Oh, Sammy!”
    â€œYes.”
    What do you say to him? I never got to know my father and now it’s too late. Or, look here, starting next week I may be a boarder at Dartmoor for a while. Until I get home, walk tall.
    â€œI enjoy you. I like taking you places with me. You’ve got style. Now hurry or you’ll be late.”
    Five minutes later the doorbell rang and Jake opened his window and shouted down to Ormsby-Fletcher, “Coming.”
    Your lordship, look at it this way. There’s a sexual revolution going on outside. All this switched-on lean hungry alienated white Negro cat wanted –
    Quite, Mr. Hersh.
    Ormsby-Fletcher, disconcertingly cheerful this (and every) morning, continued to chirp, making reassuring noises, as Jake alighted from the black Humber before the Old Bailey.
    Cut into stone over the main entrance was the inscription:
    Defend the children of the Poor;
    Punish the Wrong-doer.
    And if the Wrong-doer, like Harry, is a child of the Poor? Ormsby-Fletcher gave Jake the thumbs-up sign and Jake responded with a wink. His most ebullient wink.
    Jew boys and WASP Canadians, Jake knew, had a long and dishonorable association with the Number One Court of the London Assizes. He wasn’t the first.
    In 1710, when Jonathan Wild, the Prince of Robbers, was the unquestioned
numero uno
of the London underworld, his indispensable aide was a
macher
named Abraham. “This Israelite,” according to the Newgate Calendar, “proved a remarkable, industrious and faithful servant to Jonathan, who entrusted him with matters of the greatest importance.” Traditionally, coiners and highwaymen, footpads, sharpers, and rogues of every description, pleaded – once apprehended – that they had flogged their ill-gotten gains to a Jew boy in Whitechapel. And, speaking of Jews, latter-day Jews, there was also Lord George Gordon, instigator of the riots of June 2, 1780. Lord Gordon’s followers set fire to Newgate, laying it in ruins, and plundered the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. Lord Gordon himself went on to libel Marie-Antoinette and Count d’Amédar, but did not reveal himself as certainly deranged until he “… was discovered, in the habit of a Jew, at Birmingham, with a long beard; and having undergone circumcision … (having) firmly embraced the Jewish faith.” Once Lord, now Reb, Gordon lingered on in Newgate for some years, praying daily, keeping a kosher cell, until he died of jail fever. Once the most popular idol of the mob, he perished, as the Newgate Calendar put it, in the company of the very refuse of society, “… negros, Jews; gypsies, and vagabonds of every description.”
    The social tone hadn’t much improved by 1880, when the fastidious Montagu Williams, Q.C., complained in his memoirs of the “shabby Jews with anxious faces” who loitered outside the courthouse. Shabby Jews who had knit into defiant gangs, in 1903, and declared their intention to free the accused murderer Lipski, which obliged the warders of Newgate to carry guns for the first time in history on the Polish Jew’s hanging day.
    Among WA SP Canadian precursors, Jake, of necessity, identified most closely with the cross-eyed sex nut, junkie, and McGill alumnus, Thomas Neill Cream, debauched habitué of the