A Spectacle of Corruption Read online

  “Whose message?” He wiped the cold rain off his face.

  I did not pause for an instant. “Me lady’s,” I told him, hoping he had not done his business so well that he knew Monck to be septuagenarian and little likely to be involved in intrigues.

  “Who is your lady?”

  I smirked at him and rolled my eyes as I had seen saucy footmen do a hundred times before. “That ain’t none of your business, nor for you to know neither. Who might you be, who stand in my way like insolent fellows?”

  “These fart catchers think themselves great gentlemen,” one of the centuries announced. “We’re Riding Officers, that’s who we be, and you are but a bootlick. You oughtn’t to forget that.”

  “Go and deliver the message, me lord,” the other one said. “And I beg you pardon our disturbing you as you carry out your important task. I should hate to think I had stood between Mr. Monck and your lady’s cunny.”

  I offered a sneer to the one who had spoken and then knocked upon the door; despite my haughty performance, I’d grown restless with alarm. Riding Officers: the agents who enforced the laws of customs and excise. Why would men whose role was to search for smugglers and customs evaders come in search of a supposed murderer who had broken his way out of Newgate? It made no sense, but it suggested that there was even more to the matter of my prosecution than I had yet supposed.

  When I heard the doorknob turn, I had further cause for alarm, for Elias’s landlady, Mrs. Henry, would surely recognize me, and I did not know if I could depend on her silence. She had always looked upon me more kindly than is perhaps ordinary, but I was now generally believed to be a murderer, and I knew well that there would be those who might interpret my actions at Mr. Rowley’s house in none the best light.

  Fortunately, I had little cause for alarm. Mrs. Henry opened the door, glanced at my face, and, as though she had no idea who I was, asked me my business. I simply repeated what I had told the centuries, and she invited me inside.

  I thought she might have questions for me, or pleading words about how I must return myself to prison and have faith in the law and the Lord, but she offered none of that, only a warm smile and a gesture of her head. “Go upstairs, then. He’s there.”

  Elias opened the door almost immediately upon my knocking. His eyes went wide for a moment, and then he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside. “Are you mad coming here? There are men downstairs looking for you.”

  “I know,” I said. “Riding Officers.”

  “Customs men? What business can they have with this?” He began to say something on the peculiarity of my pursuers, but changed his mind and instead approached a sideboard with a bottle of wine and some unwashed glasses upon it. Elias’s rooms were pleasant enough, but none the neatest, and old clothes, books, papers, and dirty dishes were spread throughout. He had several candles burning upon his writing table, and he appeared to have been at work on some project or another when I called. Though a surgeon of some reputation, Elias preferred the literary arts to the medical ones and had tried his hand already at playwriting and poetry. He was now, he had told me, at work upon a fictional memoir of a dashing Scottish surgeon making his way through the social labyrinth of London.

  “Obviously, you have been through a great deal,” he said, “but before we discuss it, I must urge you to take an enema.” He held a cylinder the size of my index finger. It was brown and looked as hard as a stone.

  “Pardon me?”

  “An enema,” he explained with great earnestness. “It is a purging of the bowels.”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the concept. But having escaped from the most dreaded prison in the kingdom, I haven’t the inclination to celebrate my freedom by shitting in your pot while you stand by, ready to examine the goods.”

  “No one relishes an enema, but that is hardly the point. I’ve been doing a great deal of studying of the matter, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the best thing for you—better even than bleeding. Ideally, you would combine it with a diuretic and a purging, but I suspect you’re not quite willing to subject yourself to all three.”

  “It is amazing how well our friends know us,” I observed. “You see my innermost soul as no stranger could, and you perceive that I am in no mood to shit, piss, and vomit all at once.”

  He held up his hand. “Let us set the matter aside for the nonce. I have only your health in mind, you know, but I see I cannot force good medicine upon you. I suppose you shan’t object to a glass of wine, however.”

  “For reasons I cannot fully articulate, that offer appeals to me more than your other.”

  “There’s no need to be sour,” he said, while he poured a glass of pale red wine. As he turned to hand it to me, he seemed, for the first time, to notice my livery. “Service becomes you,” he said.

  “It has proved, thus far, an adequate costume.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From Piers Rowley’s footman.”

  His eyes widened. “Weaver, you didn’t go there, did you?”

  I shrugged. “It seemed like the best course at the time.”

  He put a hand to his face, as though I had ruined some great plan of his. He then stood up straight and breathed in deeply. “I trust you engaged in no foolish actions.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I did, however, cut off one of the judge’s ears and take four hundred of his pounds.”

  Somehow, the extremity of this revelation calmed him. He cleared a pair of wine-stained breeches from a chair and sat. “You’ll have to get out of the country as quickly as possible, of course. Perhaps the United Provinces. You have a brother there, do you not? Or you could go to France.”

  “I’m not leaving the country,” I said, as I lifted what appeared to be a lady’s stays from the chair nearest to me. “I’ll not run away and let the world believe me a murderer.” I tossed the article of clothing on top of the breeches and took my seat.

  “What do you care what the world believes? Even if you could prove you did not kill this Yate fellow, you will still be hanged for cutting the ear off a judge of the King’s Bench and then taking four hundred pounds. The law frowns upon that sort of thing.”

  “It frowns upon judicial corruption too. I am certain that once the world is made to understand that, in his corruption of his office, Rowley left me no choice, any charges against me will be dropped.”

  “You’ve gone mad,” he said. “Of course the charges won’t be dropped. You can’t trample upon the law, no matter how just your motivation or logical your reasoning. There’s no fair play to be had. This is the government.”

  “We shall see what I can do and what I can’t,” I said, with a confidence I did not possess.

  He paused for a moment. “Four hundred pounds is a great deal of money,” he said. “Do you think you’ll need it all?”

  “Elias, please.”

  “Well, you do owe me thirty pounds, you know, and as you are about to be carted off to the gallows, I think it only right that I bring this up. If I am to finish this little work of fiction I’m composing, I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I can’t stay here long for I told the Riding Officers outside that I was merely here to deliver a billet-doux to your fellow lodger. I will leave now and meet you in one hour at an inn called the Turk and Sun on Charles Street. Do you know of it?”

  “Yes, but I’ve never been inside.”

  “Neither have I, which is why it will be a good place to meet. And make certain you are not followed.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Call upon your writerly muse for inspiration. Take multiple hackneys, perhaps.”

  “Very well,” he agreed. “The Turk and Sun in an hour.”

  I stood and set my glass down on his writing table.

  “How did you get out, anyhow?” he asked me.

  “Did you see that woman who embraced me after sentence was pronounced?”

 
; “Truly, I did. A fine-looking creature. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know, but she pressed a lockpick into my hand.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How very good-natured of her. You don’t know who she was at all?”

  “I can only guess that, following his performance, she might belong to Jonathan Wild. Only the Thieftaker General would have a stable of pick-wielding beauties at his command. However, I won’t even speculate as to why he would wish to see me free, but then I could not suppose why he would have testified so kindly on my behalf.”

  “I wondered that myself. When he took the stand, I felt certain he would do all in his power to destroy a rival. He’s treated you mighty shabbily in the past, what with sending his roughs after you to knock you down and stomp upon you. And now he pretends to admire you. It is the confusingest thing in the world, but I don’t expect you care to ask him, do you?”

  I laughed. “Not likely. I have no intention of showing up in his tavern while there is a bounty on my head, to ask him if, having done me one good turn, he was responsible for doing me another. Should the answer prove to be no, I would find myself in a bit of trouble.”

  Elias nodded. “Even so, if he is responsible for sending that lass to you, it would behoove you to learn why.”

  “I will. In the end, I’ll know.”

  “As you are no longer inside Newgate, I can only suppose that you put the lockpick to good use.”

  “I put it to the best use I could. I picked the locks of my chains,” I said, “tore a bar from the window, which I used to smash through the wall of a chimney I climbed. I then broke through a few more locks, made my way up a series of stairways, and smashed through a barred window and, finally, climbed down a rope made of my own clothes, leaving me naked in the street.”

  He stared at me. “An hour,” he repeated, “in the Turk and Sun.”

  I had passed by this inn a hundred times and never entered, for it always looked unremarkable. This unremarkable quality, however, was now precisely what I sought. Inside, the tables were filled with nondescript men of the middling sort, with their rough wool clothes and their coarse laughter. They did what men do in such places—drank, mostly, but also ate their chops, smoked their pipes, and grabbed at the whores who drifted in, looking to earn a few shillings.

  I took the most poorly lit table I could find and called for a plate of whatever was warm and a pot of ale. When a boiled fowl in raisin sauce was set before me, I dug at the bird with carnivorous ferocity until my face was slick with grease.

  I suppose liveried footmen were not part of the usual patronage of the inn, and for that reason I received my share of curious glances, but I endured no more molestation than that. After I finished eating, I drank my ale and, perhaps for the first time, contemplated in all seriousness how I might go about extricating myself from this terrible situation, surely the worst I had ever faced in a life full of terrible situations. I had reached very few conclusions by the time Elias showed himself. He joined me at the table, hunching over as though afraid someone might toss an apple at his head. I called for ale, which cheered him not a little.

  Once the drink had moistened his lips, he found himself ready to begin addressing the matter at hand. “Explain to me again why you will not flee.”

  “Had I truly murdered Yate,” I said, “I would flee gladly, with all my heart. I would adopt the role of a fugitive. But I have not murdered anyone, and I won’t live the rest of my life as a renegado, afraid to enter the country that has always been my home, because someone has wished to see such a thing happen.”

  “What someone has wished is to see you dead. While you live, you surely have defeated your enemies.”

  “I cannot accept that. I must have justice. At the very least, I must understand why all of this has happened, and I will risk my life by remaining in London to find out. And I owe it to Yate.”

  “To Yate? I thought you’d never met the man until an hour before his death.”

  “It’s true, but in that hour we formed a friendship of sorts. At one instant in the fighting, he saved my life, and I won’t let his death go unpunished if I can help it.”

  He sighed and rubbed his hands down along his face. “Tell me what you know thus far.”

  I had already recounted to him of my early meetings with Mr. Ufford and Mr. Littleton, though I recalled those events to him and spoke also of my meeting that night with Rowley.

  Elias was no less astonished than I had been. “Why would Griffin Melbury want to see you hang?” he asked. “Good Lord, Weaver. You are not cuckolding the man, are you? For if this is merely a matter of bedding another man’s wife, I will be very disappointed.”

  “No, I am not bedding another man’s wife. I have not seen Miriam for nearly half a year.”

  “You have not seen her, you say. Have you carried on some sort of intrigue by letter?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort. I’ve had no contact with her. I would be surprised that Melbury even knew I had ever asked his wife for her hand. I cannot believe she would speak to him of his former rivals, and certainly not in a way that would be intended to spark his jealousy.”

  “You can never be certain with women, you know. They will do the most astonishing things. After all, did Mrs. Melbury not surprise you entire by becoming a Christian?”

  I looked away. Miriam had surprised me—to a degree that I could not entirely understand. Since I had resumed contact with my relations, most notably my uncle and his family, and returned to our neighborhood, Dukes Place, I had found myself drawn—as much by habit as by inclination—deeper into the community of my coreligionists. I attended Sabbath worship on a regular basis, said my prayers at the synagogue for nearly all major holy days, and increasingly found it difficult to violate the ancient dietary laws. I had not yet determined to observe these laws to the letter, but I had come to get a queasy feeling when I contemplated eating pig flesh or oysters or meat stewed in milk—or even the bird given to me at this tavern. I had begun to dislike keeping my head uncovered; I begged off business on Friday night or Saturday if it could be postponed; from time to time I would sit in my uncle’s study looking through his Hebrew Bible, struggling to recall the slippery language I had studied for so many years as a child.

  I do not claim to have been inching toward anything a true devotee would consider full observance of the Jewish laws, but I found myself more at ease if I inclined myself toward several of them. And perhaps because, like all men, I tend to look inward and easily presume the rest of the world thinks the way I do, I believed Miriam would be so inclined as well. After all, she attended the synagogue, she assisted my aunt with holiday preparations, she never, that I could see, blatantly violated Sabbath or dietary law—not even after she moved from my uncle’s house. So why had she joined the Church?

  At first I presumed it had merely been to appease this Melbury, whom I imagined as oily and unctuous, a handsome spark of better breeding than means. But later, as I contemplated Miriam’s choice, another thought occurred to me. More than once she had told me that she envied me for my ability to be like the English. I knew it was something she desired, but it was made impossible by her being a Jewess. There was an irony here, for as a Hebrew man, I could never be English, I could only be like the English. As a Hebrew woman, the opposite was true of Miriam.

  Only look at the works of the poets, and you will see it. There is always the Jew, and there is the Jew’s daughter or the Jew’s wife. This truism is perhaps most blatant in Mr. Granville’s famous Jew of Venice, in which the pretty daughter, Jessica, need only leave her villainous Jew father and embrace her Christian lover in order to shed all vestiges of her Hebrew past. Miriam, to deploy the terminology of the natural scientists, as a woman was but a body in the orbit of the most powerful man to whom she attached herself. Marrying a Christian allowed her to become English; more than that, it necessitated it. It has happened that Jewish men marry English women, and each partner maintains the erstwhile religion.
It cannot happen with a Jewish woman, and so it did not.

  Elias, however, was far more interested in why Melbury would wish me harm. “If you have done him no wrong, and presuming that you are right and that his wife has not incited a hatred, why would he wish to destroy you? And perhaps more important, how could he possibly tell Piers Rowley how to conduct himself?”

  “As for the latter, I presume that Rowley owes some sort of allegiance to the Tories, and that Melbury is a patron of one kind or another. The judge made it clear that in anticipation of the upcoming election, men must gravitate as their loyalties demand and act accordingly.”

  “Indeed they must.” Elias cocked his head. “I had forgotten that you were no politician, Weaver, which is why the story is utter nonsense. Rowley owes nothing to the Tories. He is a Whig, sir. A Whig, and one known to be aligned with Albert Hertcomb, Melbury’s opponent in the upcoming race.”

  “I know who Hertcomb is,” I said sullenly, as I took a sip of my drink, though I had only learned of the fellow because I had heard a newspaper story about him read aloud at a tavern a few days before my arrest. “Rowley insisted that my arrest and hanging were somehow vital to the Tory cause, so why—?” I stifled my own question as I recalled the nature of the story to which I had listened. “Wait a moment. Is there not some connection between the Whig candidate, Hertcomb, and Dennis Dogmill, the tobacco merchant these porters hate so much?”

  Elias nodded. “I am surprised you know that. Yes, Dogmill is Hertcomb’s patron and, as such, Hertcomb has been instrumental in the passage of several bills that favor the tobacco trade in general and Dogmill in particular. He is also Hertcomb’s election agent.”

  I slammed my hand upon the table. “Let us use your wondrous ideas of probability and see what we know. A priest spoke up for the rights of the porters who unload Dogmill’s tobacco and then received a threat, warning him to cease his actions. Next, a leader of the labor agitators is killed, and I am arrested for the crime. The judge at my trial, a Whig, does all in his power to convict me, but when his feet are to the fire, he blames a great Tory. When I approach a location where any searcher might hope to find me, it is guarded by men of the Riding Office, who ought to concern themselves with smuggled cargo rather than escaped murderers. Given the generally acknowledged corruption of customs officers, who are said to be in the pockets of the most powerful merchants, I believe I can deploy the mechanisms of probability and determine the identity of the villain.”