The Devil's Company (5 page)

“Ah, young master Benjamin,” he cried out. I had always taken amusement in his addressing me as though I were still a child, but I understood it well. He did not like to call me by my assumed name, Weaver, for I had taken it when I’d fled my father’s house as a boy and it was a marker of my rebelliousness. He could not understand why I refused to return to the family name, Lienzo, so he would call me neither one nor the other. In truth, now that my father was dead and I had grown to live on such familiar terms with my uncle and aunt, the family name no longer sat ill with me. However, the world knew me as Weaver, and I earned my bread based upon my reputation. There was no turning back.

I took his hand in greeting. “It has grown quiet here, I see.”

“Oh, aye,” he said gravely. “’Tis quiet indeed. Like a graveyard quiet.”

I studied his weathered countenance as a dark mood fell over him. The lines and crevices of his face appeared now gulfs and jagged valleys. “Is there some trouble?”

“I reckon that’s why your uncle called for you, ain’t it?”

“My uncle didn’t call for me. I came on my own business.” Then, seeing the hidden implication in the words, I thought I had cause to fear the worst. “Is he unwell?”

He shook his head. “No, not that. He is no more distressed than his usual. Things are bad enough. I wish only that he would entrust to me—or someone, I care not who—more of the trade. I fear his responsibilities harm his health.”

“I know it,” I said. “I have spoken to him before.”

“It is that he has no son,” Joseph said. “If only you, sir, would agree to shoulder—”

I shook my head. “I want my uncle to recover, not perish from the misery of watching me destroy his business. I know nothing of his trade, and I have no desire to learn it while each mistake could do him harm.”

“But you must speak to him. You must implore him to rest. Now, he’s in his closet. Go on back, my lad. Go on back.”

I strolled to the far end of the building, where I found my uncle in his small office, seated behind his desk, strewn with ledgers and maps and manifests. He drank from a pewter cup full of thick wine—port, I supposed—and stared grimly out his window toward the Thames. He did not hear me enter.

I knocked upon the door as I walked in. “Uncle,” I said.

He turned slowly, set the cup down, and rose to greet me, managing the task only by keeping one frail hand pressed hard on an ornate walking stick, an elaborate dragon’s head composing the top. Even with the stick, each step was labored and sluggish, as though he waded through water. Nevertheless, he embraced me warmly and gestured for me to take my chair. “’Tis well you’ve come, Benjamin. Fortuitous, I suppose. I was going to call upon you.”

“Joseph said as much.”

He filled an identical pewter cup with the rich smelling port and gave it to me with a wavering hand. Even with much of his face covered by his neatly trimmed beard, I observed his skin to be dry and sallow and his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. “There is something you might be able to help with, but I presume you have your own business, so let us hear from you first, and then I will trouble you with my difficulties.”

The words came slowly and with a rattling hollow sound as he drew a painful breath. For the past several months, my uncle had been suffering from a pleurisy that would lay him low with labored breathing and great pain in his chest. It would bring him, so we feared, to the very brink of a piteous end, and then, having so terrified him and those who cared for him, it would relent and his breathing would return to what we now thought of as normal—though it was far more constrained and troubled than it had been before the onset of the illness. Though he received frequent visits from a fashionable physician of good reputation, endured regular bleedings, and had each order for the apothecary filled at once, he continued to decline. Little would help, I believed, but a quitting of London, whose air was too filthy in the winter months for any man with diseased lungs. My uncle would not hear of it, however, being unwilling to relinquish his business, arguing that his trade was all he had done for his entire life, and he knew not how to live otherwise. Indeed, he supposed idleness would kill him faster than labor and soiled air. I believed my aunt still occasionally made an effort to work her entreaties upon him, but I had long since quit, believing that the argument did him harm and no expostulations I might offer would put him in a different frame of mind.

I watched him shuffle with old man steps to sit again at his large oaken desk, which sat before a well-tended fire. My uncle was not a tall man, and in recent years he had waxed plump like a good English merchant, but since growing ill this summer, much of that weight had melted like ice under the sun.

“You don’t appear well, Uncle,” I said.

“That is no kind way to begin a conversation,” he said, with a thin smile.

“You must entrust Joseph with more duties and tend to your recovery.”

He shook his head. “There may be no recovery.”

“I will not listen—”

“Benjamin, there may be no recovery. I have accepted that it is so, and you must too. My duty to my family is to make certain that I leave behind a thriving business, not a vortex of debt.”

“Perhaps you might summon José,” I proposed, referring to my estranged brother, with whom I had not spoken since we were boys.

My uncle’s eyebrows raised ever so slightly, and for a moment he appeared to be the healthy man I recalled from only half a year earlier. “You must be worried indeed to suggest such a thing. But, no, I have no wish to trouble him. He has business and a family of his own in Amsterdam. He cannot abandon his life to put my affairs in order. And I assure you I have will and strength enough to do what I must. Now, what is it that brings you here? I pray for the sake of domestic peace that you come not on your aunt’s request, for I endure her pretty speeches enough at home.”

“She had no need to instruct me, as you have seen. But I hesitate to add to your troubles, sir.”

“Do you think you would not add to them if you refrain from letting me help you when I can? In sickness I see more clearly than ever that little matters beyond family. If I can assist you, it will give me pleasure to do so.”

I could not but smile at his generous spirit. Only a man of my uncle’s good nature could make it seem as though I aided him when I asked for help. “I find myself in trouble, Uncle, and though I wish not to add to your burdens, I fear you are the only person to whom I can turn.”

“Then I’m glad you’ve come to me.”

I, however, was not. On many occasions he had, suspecting my finances were none too mighty of stature, made it clear that he was ready to provide any assistance I might require. For my part, I made it a habit to refuse these offers, even on occasions when I was sneaking about the city to avoid capture by bailiffs with warrants sworn out by some exasperated creditor or other. Yet here was a new matter. This was not a case of my spending more than I earned—who of my station was not guilty of such an indiscretion?—but of my having been trepanned so vilely that I could not resolve my troubles without assistance. It made it easier to ask for money because the need was not my fault, but it was still no easy thing.

“Uncle,” I began, “you know I have always loathed the thought of presuming upon your generosity, but I am afraid I find myself in the most awkward of positions. I have been wronged, you must understand—sorely wronged—and I require a loan of some funds to undo the crime that has been perpetrated against me.”

He pressed his lips together in an unreadable expression, perhaps sympathy, perhaps physical pain. “Of course,” he said, with far less warmth than I had anticipated. Here was a man who ever sought to thrust a purse in my hand. Now that I asked for it, he demonstrated reluctance. “How much will you require?”

“It is a great deal of money, I’m afraid: twelve hundred pounds. You see, a man has contrived to fabricate a claim of debt against me, and I need only pay it to relieve myself of danger. Once so free, I will be able to discover the mischief and, I believe, recover the sum—”

I stopped because I saw my uncle’s face had gone pale. A silence fell upon us, broken only by his labored wheezing.

“I see,” he said. “I had anticipated something more on the order of thirty or forty pounds, perhaps. I could even manage as much as a hundred, if need be. But twelve hundred I cannot do.”

It was a large sum, but his hesitation surprised me. He dealt quite regularly with far larger sums, and he had extensive lines of credit. Could it be that he didn’t trust me?

“Under usual circumstances, I should not hesitate to give you what you ask and more,” he said, a loud rasp now entering into his voice, a sign, I had come to know in recent months, of his agitation. “You know I ever seek the opportunity to offer you aid, and I rankle at your refusal to let me, but there has been a catastrophe in my affairs, Benjamin. It is for that reason I thought to call you. Until this knot is untangled, I can’t produce any sum of that sort.”

“What knot is this?” I asked. I felt something uneasy churning within me. Some vague shape began to appear from the fog.

He rose to poke at the fire, working up, I presumed, the strength to tell his tale. After a minute or so of jabbing logs and sending sparks flying, he turned back to me. “I recently brought in a large shipment of wines—a very large shipment indeed. I import Portuguese wines as a matter of course, as you know, and there are one or two shipments each year to stock the warehouses and keep them full. This was one of them. As always, I purchased insurance upon the cargo to protect against this sort of thing, but it has done me no good. You see, the shipment arrived as it was supposed to, was delivered to the Customs House, and was registered there accordingly. Once it was unloaded, the maritime insurance ended, for the goods were considered safely delivered, but now they have disappeared.”

“Disappeared,” I repeated.

“Yes, the Customs House claims they have no record of my shipment. They claim my records are false, forged. Indeed, they have threatened me with prosecution if I choose to press the case, emphasizing as they do so the little justice members of our nation can expect in this country. I cannot understand it. I’ve dealt with these people for decades, you understand, and I have always provided the necessary payments to keep the customs men my friends. I’ve never heard a word of complaint from them, that I did not do my share or any such thing. I received no evidence that they were dissatisfied with my generosity. And now this.”

“They toy with you? They hold your cargo hostage?”

He shook his head. “There is no implication of anything of the sort. Indeed, I have spoken to my longtime contacts there, men I consider nearly friends, men who hate to see me harmed because they have grown fond of my payments. They are as perplexed as I am. But the result is, Benjamin, that until this cargo can be discovered I am in rather severe debt. I have letters of credit being called in, and it is taking an inordinate amount of shifting and accounting maneuvers to keep from being discovered and ruined. If it were a few coins you required, it would make no difference, but I cannot discover anywhere a spare twelve hundred pounds. Removing such a brick from my edifice would make the building collapse.”

“But the law,” I proposed.

“I have begun legal proceedings, of course, but you know how these matters are. It is all delay and blockage and obscuring. It should be years, I think, before there is any answer from the law.”

I took a moment to consider what I heard. Was it strange that my uncle should find himself in considerable debt at the same moment I did as well? No, it was not strange at all, it was design; I had no doubt of it. As Cobb had gone to such lengths to make clear, his nephew, Tobias Hammond, worked for the Customs House.

“Do you think, Benjamin, I could prevail upon you to look into this matter? Perhaps you could discover what has happened, and with that knowledge we might force a resolution more quickly.”

I slammed my hand hard against his desk. “I am sorry this has happened to you, Uncle. You have been ill used on my account. I see now that someone has undone your business to keep me from receiving relief.”

Briefly I told him of my dealings with Cobb, in part because I wished to know if he had any familiarity with these men and could tell me something of them. In truth, though, I wanted to explain to him all that had passed in the hopes that he would not judge me too harshly for whatever role I might have played in creating these troubles for him.

“I’ve never heard of either of these men. I can make inquiries if you’d like. If this Cobb has so much money to squander on making you his subject, he must be known.”

“I would appreciate anything you might tell me.”

“In the meantime,” he said, “you must discover what it is he wants.”

I hesitated for a moment. “I am not eager to do so. I cannot bear that I should be a puppet on his strings.”

“You cannot fight him if you don’t know who he is or why he would work so diligently to render you toothless. In revealing to you what he has in mind, he may also reveal to you the secret of how to defeat him.”

IT WAS GOOD ADVICE and I could not ignore it, at least not for long. Nevertheless, I was not yet prepared to return to Cobb. I wanted more counsel before I did so.

I made arrangements to meet my friend and frequent collaborator, Elias Gordon, at a coffeehouse called the Greyhound off Grub Street, where I expected to find him inside with a newspaper and a dish of chocolate or perhaps a drink of some more considerable strength. Instead, I observed upon my approach that he was outside the coffeehouse, standing on the street, ignoring the snow that fell with increasing strength, and speaking most heatedly with a person I did not know.

The man with whom he engaged in this hot discourse was far shorter than Elias, as most men are, but wider and more manful in build—indeed, as most men are. Though dressed a gentleman in a fine-looking greatcoat and an expensive tie periwig, the stranger’s face was red, his chest puffed out, and he spoke with the venom of a cornered street tough.