The Devil's Company (39 page)

“Is there any hope,” I inquired, “that you chanced to overhear the location of these meetings?”

“In that I may assist you. On one occasion, I did chance to overhear Mr. Pepper speaking to a friend of his, describing a forthcoming meeting, and he identified the location as a house on Field Lane, bordering a tavern called the Bunch of Grapes, if I recall. I cannot say if this is a public house or a private one, but I do recall hearing him give that direction.”

“Did you ever follow that direction yourself?”

“No, why should I?”

Because you were curious, I thought. Because you would never have recalled the location if it had been of no consequence to you. Nevertheless, I held my tongue, for I had nothing to gain by exposing that I knew more of her heart than she wished to allow, and it would little serve my ends to demonstrate that I saw she was, in a very strange way, jealous of this Teaser.

Further inquiry revealed that Mrs. Pepper had nothing more to tell me, so I thanked her for her time.

“And what of my annuity?” she asked me. “Is it safe?”

Having no desire to eliminate what I believed might still be a useful fount of knowledge, I chose to remain vague. “I shall do all I can to serve you,” I said, with a bow.

She bit her lip in clear distress. “If I show you something,” she said, “if I let you look at it, you must accept that I do it in the spirit of co operation and you will do what you can to help me.”

“Of course,” I promised, making all possible efforts to banish from my mind the hypocrisy of words. I could not say to what ends the East India Company paid this lady an annuity, but should I expose their secrets, in all likelihood the money would run dry. In short, I made every effort to convince this woman to aid in her own ruin.

She bade me wait and then disappeared for a moment, returning with a thin calfskin-bound quarto in her hands. She clutched it to her bosom so that I could observe a large discolored streak along the front of the book.

“It was always a peculiarity with my husband, the late Mr. Pepper, that his books were his memory—or so he told me several times. He had to write down his ideas, nearly at the moment he had them, lest they be gone in an instant, never to be recovered. Indeed, he believed he had forgotten more fine notions than a whole army of men will enjoy in their lives. So it was that he kept books about him at all times and took notes incessantly. Many of these books, he believed, had fine ideas, many others, nothing of note. When the men of the guild came for his books, they said they wanted everything. And yet I held something back. Just this one volume, and only because he told me it was a book of false starts, terrible ideas. It was a book he once told me he would never care if he lost. I recollected this volume, for it had the imperfection in the calfskin that looks almost like a letter
P—
for Pepper, you know. In any event, I dared to keep it for myself.”

I held out my hand. Reluctantly, she delivered the goods. Page after page was full of cramped, slanted writing, so small I could hardly read it. The letters ran together, and my head began to ache from the effort to decipher. In addition to these passages were, as Hale had told me, drawings—drawings of what looked like the equipment and materials for silk weaving.

Mr. Pepper believed the book to be of no value, but I could not be so certain. “May I take this with me? I promise to return it to you.”

It pained her, but she granted me a reluctant nod.

Now confident that my efforts could hope for no further reward, I bade her farewell, once more promised to diligently pursue her case, and went to find the return coach. Alas, it was a longer wait than I should have liked, and I did not return to the metropolis until nearly dark. Then, once upon my familiar streets, I had to make my way home, so a dark gloom cast itself over Duke’s Place as I approached my home.

I had grown very hungry during my travels and considered stopping to eat before retiring, but there is nothing like travel to make one wish for rest, and even if my landlady should not have a light supper at the ready for me, I preferred a meal of bread and cheese in my room to one of cold meats and peas in an eating house.

But as I approached my house I felt a rough hand land upon my shoulder. When I turned, I could not say I was entirely surprised to find the very faithful Edgar at the ready to deliver a sneer.

“You been smoked, Weaver,” he said, pressing his lips together in his duckish way. “You thought to hide like a coward under cover of your uncle’s death, but we are not so foolish as you think. Did you believe Mr. Cobb would not discover your double-dealing?”

“What double-dealing is that, you rascal?” I managed. I tried to sound indignant, but in truth I wondered which particular bit of deception had been uncovered.

He barked out a laugh, for clearly what he felt was satisfaction and not mirth. “It is one thing to believe you might play us for fools. It is quite another to feign ignorance once you’ve been caught. There is nothing in it for you, so you may as well accept that you’ve been discovered, and you had better be more forthcoming lest you do more damage to your friends.”

“More damage? What is it you mean?”

“What I mean is that Mr. Cobb has been generous with you, far too generous in my opinion, but your foolishness has now caught up with you. You were told that, should you defy us, should you refuse to deal with us like a gentleman, then your friends would suffer. It became clear, all too clear, that you would not believe us unless you were shown a measure of our determination, so Mr. Cobb has decided it is time to show you he means what he says.”

I lashed out without giving the matter a moment’s thought. I grabbed the unctuous fellow by his cravat and twisted that instrument, turning his face, almost immediate, a dark color, the precise shade of which was impossible to determine in the darkness. “What have you done?” I demanded, though it quickly became clear that he would not answer so long as I strangled him. Reluctantly I let go and allowed the wretch to fall to the ground.

“What have you done?” I asked again, delivering a kick that he might understand the earnestness of my question.

“It’s your friend Franco,” he told me, after a series of histrionic flailing gestures. “Franco has been taken away. And if you don’t begin to follow orders, he will be but the first.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

HAT CAN I SAY OF MY CONSTERNATION AT THIS MOMENT THAT my reader cannot, for himself, imagine? Moses Franco, a man to whom I was kindly disposed, one who had never done me harm and had only meant me well, was now thrown into a dark dungeon because of my actions. I told myself that I must refuse to shoulder the blame. It was, after all, Cobb and Hammond, his vile lapdog nephew, who had taken these actions. I had never sought harm for Mr. Franco. Nevertheless, I could not entirely convince myself that I spoke the truth. After all, I had been heedless with my investigations, and I had not reported my discoveries to my unwanted overseers. I had tried to serve many masters, none more than myself, and now it was for Mr. Franco to pay the price.

I thought to take myself to the prison at once, but it was late, and I had no desire to disturb whatever rest and quiet he might find in that place. Instead, I spent a night of restless sleep and left early the next morning to confront my tormentors. It being Sunday, I was not expected at Craven House, and was at liberty to indulge myself in a day of not pretending to serve the East India Company.

I arrived before eight o’clock, an unreasonable hour, but I had little concern for the comfort of Mr. Cobb’s household. In fact, I wished to wake them early, and I had every intention of arriving before they left for Sunday worship, presuming, of course, that these were the sort of men who might spend six and a half days indulging in every villainy imaginable and believe it justified by a few hours of hypocritical repentance.

I was surprised to find I needed to pull the bell cord but once to be received by a dressed and ready Edgar, regaled in full livery and without a hint of sleep about him. “Weaver,” he said. “Why does your appearance not surprise me?”

I pushed past him, and he snorted at my rudeness. He little understood, however, that the very fact of his life, the terrible truth that he dwelled upon the same world as beautiful women and laughing children and prancing puppy dogs, filled me with such disgust that had I not brushed past him I should have been forced to strike him. I do not mean a manly challenge and round or two of fisticuffs, either. No, had I remained in that hallway another instant, I should have stomped hard upon his foot, driven my elbow into his nose until it blossomed with blood, battered my knee into his manhood—I hardly know what.

I followed the sounds of silver making music against porcelain and soon walked into a small dining room—not the capacious grandeur of Ellershaw’s but a much smaller and more intimate space. I presumed Cobb to be possessed of a second dining room where he could entertain in high style, should he ever wish to do so. Still, this room had the pleasures of comfort, though its Turkey rug was of all dark blues and browns, its furnishings a near black in color, and the walls a green so gloomy it might well have been the color of a cloudy moonless night. There were, however, high windows that sent in lances of light, giving the impression that the room was crisscrossed with the filament of a spider’s lair, and there, at breakfast, were the spiders.

Cobb and Hammond sat across from each other at a rectangular table, not so large as to impede conversation. The table itself was filled with enough food to satisfy a company five times their number: breads and mushrooms and cakes. And while I stood there, squinting in the streams of encroaching sunlight, the two men filled their plates with every imaginable manifestation of pig flesh: rashers of bacon, links of gray sausage, slivers of ham cut so thin as to be nearly translucent, their fat glistening in the candlelight. Though I now essayed to adhere to the dietary laws of my people, I had not always done so. Nevertheless, in recent years, since my return to Duke’s Place and the eateries of the Hebrews, the smell of pork had become unpleasant to my nostrils, but that was not what filled me with such disgust. Rather, it was the carnivorous pleasure with which these men ate. Indeed, watching them put the meat in their mouths, I sensed that, had they their way, they would have preferred to rip suckling piglets from their mother’s breast and devour them alive.

Cobb looked at me, nodded, and washed down whatever was in his mouth with a reddish-yellow liquid that sloshed in an oversized crystal goblet. I took it for some sort of thin arrack punch. “Weaver,” he said, once he had swallowed and set down the goblet. “This is not entirely a surprise. Shall I have Edward set a place for you?”

“Oh, let’s not be excessive,” Hammond said, snapping upright from his plate, which he had been studying with rapt attention. Less fastidious than his uncle, he did not wait to swallow his food entire, and shards of pink ham exploded across the table. “He has no desire to eat with us, and we none with him. Let him stand there if he has something to say. And better yet, let him stand there while he listens to what we have to tell him.”

“I wish Mr. Franco released from the Fleet,” I said.

“I can understand how you must feel, Mr. Weaver,” Cobb said, “but surely you must understand our position. You have not been entirely forthcoming with us.”

“And we have been paying him. That’s the very devil of the thing, you know,” Hammond announced. “It isn’t as though we’ve simply been forcing him to do our bidding, now is it, Uncle? No, he’s received coin, and good coin too. And from the East India Company as well. And now he has the audacity to accuse us of wrongdoing because we penalize his failure to perform his duties. I daresay he’s lucky he’s not the one languishing in there, waiting to die of jail fever before Parliament can enact some foolish relief law.”