by David Liss
“Well, I’ll be deuced if I know it.” He laughed. “I think you would rather vote a goose into Parliament than me, sir.”
“I think he would as well,” said Mr. Dogmill, who now approached us, jostling aside any man who got in his way. “I have heard that Mr. Evans is a Tory. His being so makes his appearance at my home inexplicable, but not nearly so much as his appearance here.”
“I read in the papers, Mr. Dogmill, that all were invited to attend this event.”
“Nevertheless, it is generally understood that these events are for electors, and electors who intend to support the party. That is how business is conducted in His Majesty’s civilized domains. In short, sir, your presence is not required.”
“Faith!” Hertcomb said. “I rather like Mr. Evans. I would hate to see him run off so unkindly.”
Dogmill muttered something under his breath but did not trouble himself to address the candidate. Instead he turned to me. “Again, sir, I cannot think what it is you do here, unless you visit in the capacity of a spy.”
“An event that shall be written of in the papers hardly requires a spy,” I said. “I had heard of these cruel games with animals, but I have never witnessed one for myself and only wished to gaze with my own eyes upon the depths to which an idle mind will sink.”
“I suppose you have no blood sport in the West Indies.”
I neither knew nor cared if there was blood sport in the West Indies, but such matters were hardly my concern. “Life there is troublesome enough. We require no added brutality for our amusement.”
“I suspect a little amusement would help you to ease the brutality. There is nothing quite so pleasing as watching two beasts have at it. And I value my pleasure as a man over the beast’s suffering.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “a rather sad thing to brutalize a creature simply because one can and to call it sport.”
“If you Tories had your way,” Dogmill said, “the Church courts would be invited to condemn us for our amusements.”
“If amusements be condemned,” I answered, rather pleased with the quickness of my wit, “it matters little if the court be religious or civil. I see nothing wrong with immoral behavior being judged by the very institution that helps us to remain moral.”
“Only a fool or a Tory would condemn amusement as immorality.”
“It depends upon the amusement,” I said. “It seems to me that the foolishness is to condone any behavior, no matter how much anguish it causes, because someone, somewhere, finds it pleasurable.”
I suppose Dogmill might have answered my criticism with little more than his contempt had not a lady with pretty gold ringlets and a wide hat full of feathers not overheard our conversation. She studied me for a moment and then my rival and then fanned herself as she raised expectations as to what comment she might have for us.
“I own,” she said to Dogmill, “that I must agree with this gentleman. I find these sorts of gatherings monstrous inhumane. The poor creature, to be teased so before its death!”
Dogmill’s face flushed red, and he appeared to feel the greatest confusion. I could not but doubt that a man of his strength and his temperament should find this sort of verbal confrontation unbearable, particularly since his role as election agent precluded taking a more physical stance against me. It was for that reason that I meant to press on.
“You are clearly a lady of great sense,” I said with a bow, “to recognize the lowness of this entertainment. I hope you share my horror.”
She smiled at me. “Indeed I do, sir.”
“I beg you consider that Mr. Griffin Melbury also shares my horror,” I added, strongly suspecting that my words would further inflame Dogmill.
They did. “Sir,” he said to me. “Walk over this way with me for a moment.”
The gentlemanly thing would have been to comply, but the provoking thing was to refuse. Accordingly, I refused. “I think I should prefer to speak of these matters here,” I said. “I cannot imagine that there is anything in the treatment of geese that cannot be discussed openly. It is hardly a matter of love or money that requires privacy.”
Dogmill could hardly have been more astonished. I do not know that anyone had ever teased him so much in his life. “Sir, I wish to speak with you in private.”
“And I wish to speak with you in public. It is a terrible puzzle, for I hardly know how our different designs can be reconciled. Perhaps a state of semi-privacy shall answer our needs.”
The lady with the golden hair let out a shrill titter, and the noise was to Dogmill like a blade in his back. Had she been a man, I believe he would have set aside the demands of his public role and struck her in the face without a moment’s hesitation.
“Mr. Evans,” he said at last, “this is a gathering for supporters of Mr. Hertcomb. As you are not among that number, and as you have done the rudeness of canvassing for a Tory, I must beg you to vacate.”
“I am no supporter of the Whigs, but I like Mr. Hertcomb tremendously and support him with all my heart in his other endeavors. And as for speaking kindly of the Tory candidate, I hardly think it so offensive. I would not hesitate to attend one of Mr. Melbury’s events and mention how amiable I find Mr. Hertcomb.”
Hertcomb smiled and nearly bowed at me, but he thought better of it. He had seen enough to know that he could offer no more public support of me.
“I have heard,” I continued, “that you are a man of a violent temperament. And I have seen you behave barbarously toward your servant. You are reputed to be unkind to the indigent and the needy. I see now that you are also unkind to brute creatures, and that may be, for all I know, even worse, for they have not the power to choose their paths. One might look at a beggar and wonder to what degree he elected to eschew a life that would have been more productive, but what choice did that bird ever make to end in such terror?”
“No one,” Dogmill said in a coarse whisper, “has ever spoke to me thus.”
“I cannot account for what others have done or not done,” I said calmly. “I can only account for myself, and I should be ashamed to call myself a Tory and an Englishman if I were to hold my tongue in the sight of this behavior.”
Dogmill’s face now found heretofore-never-known shades of red. He clenched his fists and kicked at the ground. A crowd had gathered around us as though we fought a boxing match, and I fairly believed that such an outcome was perhaps likely.
“Who called you here?” he demanded at last. “By whose invitation did you come here to disturb our recreation? Has anyone asked for your opinion on the treatment of livestock? I have never before encountered such rudeness, and I can only believe that it is your rusticated ignorance that leads you to speak thus. If any man dared to speak to me in this manner while I was not an election agent in an important campaign, I would not hesitate to treat him as he deserves, but I see what you are about, sir. You have come to provoke me so that the Tory papers will have something to say. They will have no such satisfaction from me.”
I glanced at Mr. Dogmill and then to the crowd and back once more at Dogmill. “You have grown marvelous hot,” I said calmly. “I had thought we were only having a conversation, and now I see that you insult me in the rudest manner. It is easy for a man to speak of what he would do if he could, but it is perhaps less easy for him to speak of what he will do just now. You say you would call me out if you could, and I say you would call me out if you were a man. If you wish to apologize to me, sir, you may send for me at my lodgings at Vine Street. Until then, I wish you good day, and I hope you may find yourself some superior manners.”
I did not look back to witness his perturbation, but I can only imagine it manifested itself in some extreme fashion, for I heard the woman with the golden hair gasp in astonishment, or perhaps terror.
Having had the pleasure of advancing my interests as Mr. Evans, I thought it high time that Benjamin Weaver involve himself in the affair of his own ruin. Elias’s idea that I make myself conspicuous in the less seemly
parts of town had struck me, in the relative safety of a tavern, as a fine idea. Once trudging through the streets of Wapping, however, I wondered if I had been a fool to attempt so dangerous an endeavor. Any group of eager villains could set upon me in an instant and drag me off to the nearest magistrate, but to do so they would have to know my face and recognize it when they saw it. I hoped the darkness of the streets and a hat pulled low would protect me well enough, at least until I was ready to be seen.
Besides, what choice did I have? There were tasks to be performed, and they could not be performed by a man of Matthew Evans’s stripe. So I strode boldly to the house I needed to visit, knocked upon the door, and asked for Mrs. Yate. I kept my eyes cast downward when I spoke to the landlady, but this withered creature, with hardly the strength to turn the doorknob, barely noticed. She inquired of me no name or that I state my business, but only sent me upstairs when I asked for the woman. I could not but suspect that she had some experience in sending men to those rooms. Perhaps, in the absence of her husband’s earnings, Mrs. Yate had been forced to turn whore. I wondered, too, how she would react to seeing me come for her. If I could but ask her my questions and leave, I had no doubt that the story of my visit would circulate widely, and so Elias’s plan would be executed without my risking my life.
The stairs of the house were broken and treacherous, and those parts remaining intact were often covered with old clothes or piles of newspapers or empty beer buckets. I should hate to have to make a hasty exit from such a place.
The door I sought was on the third landing, and when I knocked a distractingly pretty woman, small in stature but finely shaped, answered without hesitation. She wore a loose-fitting gown that did little to conceal the treasures of her form. Her hair, which tumbled out beneath her bonnet, was so pale as to be almost white, and the features of her face were rounded and delicate. She looked as much a doll as a breathing woman.
“Do I know you?” she asked me. Her voice was sweet and soothing, but it quivered, too, when she spoke. Her eyes, of a gray so dark as to be on the cusp of black, focused on nothing in particular, as though she were afraid to look too much at my face.
“I beg you, allow me in and we shall talk of it,” I answered. I had expected her to want more persuading than that, but to my surprise she stood back and let me step inside.
The room was dark, with one lamp lit, but there was enough light for me to see that it was cluttered and ill kept. I could smell old beer and sour wine, and older and more sour clothes. I stumbled my way to an old chair, whose originary legs had all been replaced with mismatched wood, and sat in response to a lazy flick of her hand.
“You do not recognize me now?” I asked her, as I stepped into the light of her single flame. She stared at me while lowering herself into an old barrel that had been adapted into a chair.
“I do,” she said. “I do now, and I’m not surprised to see you, for I believed you must come at last.”
“I did not kill your husband,” I said, holding my palms upward in a gesture of—I don’t know what. Something benevolent, I suppose. “I had never met him before, and I had no reason to wish him harm.”
“I know it,” she said softly. She looked to the floor. “I never thought you had done. I was at your trial and heard all.”
“I am glad that you say so, for I would be very grieved if you thought me guilty. You must know that we are all of a single purpose. We both want justice for your husband.”
She shook her head. “There can be no justice. The world ain’t right, Mr. Weaver. I see that now. I once reckoned it was, but that was just foolishness. A woman like me don’t have a chance, and Walter never had a chance neither. I thought he did before. I thought that Judge Rowley was a kindly man to do Walter such a turn, but I see he is no less wicked than the rest of us.”
I leaned forward. “I don’t understand you, madam. What good turn had Rowley ever done your husband?”
“What good turn? Why, he saved him from the gallows is what he done. Not a year and a half ago, sir, when Walter stood before Rowley on charges of socking tobacco. That Dogmill said Walter took two shillings’ worth, though he never done no more than what every man who worked his ships done: collect the gold dust, as they call the loose leaves that fall out of the hogshead. And maybe now and again he’d dip in with his hand, but what of it? That’s the way it’s always been done—since time immemorial, he always said. But then Dogmill has Walter taken by the constables, and a month later he is facing trial for his life. They wanted to hang him, they did, for two shillings’ worth of tobacco scraped from the deck of a ship.”
I blinked hard, as though to banish the confusion. “But Rowley sided with Mr. Yate?”
“He did, sir. Dogmill sent a thousand witnesses to lie, sir, saying that Walter was a bad man who wanted nothing but to steal so he could be lazy, but Rowley looked after Walter, the way the law says he should have done for you—but he didn’t.”
It would appear that Rowley once took his responsibilities as a judge more seriously than he had at my trial, all the more surprising because, in the case of Walter Yate, he sided against a Whig like Dogmill—particularly when it appeared he had sided against me because of Dogmill. Could it be that he was less of a political creature then, or that now the imminent election made his obligations to party stronger than his obligations to the law? “Do you have any idea why the judge behaved toward me as he did?”
“I don’t have no ideas at all. Not anymore. When Walter got set free by the jury, I thought all was right in the world. We had two little boys then, and my husband was at liberty and clear of the law. But that don’t last. Now both those boys is dead and our new baby has no true father, for Walter’s been struck down and no one cares who done it.”
“I care,” I promised her.
“Only because you want to save your own flesh. No, don’t make a protest. There’s no harm in it. Walter was nothing to you while he yet lived. There’s no reason you should trouble yourself of his death but that his death has troubled you.”
I looked into her coal-gray eyes. “Walter Yate saved my life. Had he not acted valiantly in his last minutes, I should be dead now too. Finding the man who killed him is more to me than my own safety.”
She nodded slowly, as though the news that her husband had saved my life were the sort of thing she heard all the time.
I took the blank look upon her face as permission to proceed with my inquiry. “Did Mr. Yate ever say why he thought Dogmill had decided to pursue him in particular in this charge of socking? It is, as you say, something done by nearly all porters.”
She laughed. “It were obvious, weren’t it? Walter wanted to rally the men so that Dogmill couldn’t abuse them no more. He wanted to make his peace with Greenbill Billy and try to get the wages to rise, but Dogmill wouldn’t have none of it. I said to him it were better he worried about his family than the porters, but he said he had to do his duty, and so he put them before us, and he ended up the way I always knew he would. There are things made for great men, and small men oughtn’t to bother with them.”
“Such things as labor combinations?”
She nodded.
“Did he trouble himself with other affairs of great men? For example, had you ever known your husband to demonstrate an interest in political matters?”
“He said once that he would have liked to have made enough money to pay his scot and lot and then vote in an election.”
“But was he involved in any way in the election that has only now commenced?”
She looked down so that I could not see her face. “Not that I ever heard of.”
I took a moment to collect my thoughts. “Do you know what has happened to his gang of porters since his death? Have those men joined with Greenbill, or have they found a new leader?”
Mrs. Yate looked up once more, and even in the dim light of the room I could see the blood rush to her face. She opened her mouth but could not speak.
“They will never jo
in with Greenbill,” a man called out, answering in her stead, “and so they have a new leader.”
I nearly started from my chair. In the darkness of the threshold stood a tall figure, ruggedly built, silhouetted by the cheap tallow that burned behind him. It took only a moment for me to recognize him as John Littleton, looking far more self-assured than he had in Ufford’s kitchen.
I half rose and bowed in greeting.
He nodded at me. “Rest assured,” he said, rather jauntily, “that Yate’s boys will stand firm against Greenbill Billy—and against Dogmill too.”
“And whose boys are they now?”
He laughed with an easy confidence. “Why, they’re Littleton’s boys now. There’s one or two other things what were Yate’s that are now Littleton’s. We do what we can to honor the man.” He winked at me with evident humor. Whatever had happened to make him the gang’s leader, it had turned Littleton into a new man.
Mrs. Yate met my eyes for an instant, a silent pleading for my understanding. I attempted, by means of my facial expression, to show her compassion, though I fear I only showed indifference.
“Go to the other room, lass,” Littleton told the widow. “The baby is stirring and wants its mother.”
She nodded and retreated, softly closing the door behind her.
“Good to see you looking so healthy,” Littleton told me as he lowered himself into his chair. Behind him, I noticed, were a series of wicker cages that appeared, as I squinted in the dusk of the room, to hold rats. Littleton, I recalled, had mentioned that he earned some coin as a rat catcher. I knew now that he employed that all too common trick of unleashing his own rats that he might be employed to remove them, which a skilled ratman could do with little more than a whistle. Such men could earn a nice bit of silver catching the same rats dozens of times over.
“Good to see you looking so prosperous,” I said dryly.
“Aye,” he answered. “There are those what would call me callous, taking up Water Yate’s place among the men, taking his place with his pretty wife. But someone had to step in, do you see? I couldn’t let Greenbill Billy have his way with those boys. Would Yate have wanted that? I don’t think so. And I could not let any cruel bastard have his way with Anne.”
