by David Liss
I responded with joy that he had been so good as to pass along this wisdom, and I begged to hear more of his philosophy of order. Thus began a long lecture interrupted only by my occasional comments of approbation. Blackburn spoke for well over an hour, and though I believed his notion of the series had some merit, it appeared to be the jewel in his intellectual crown. Rarely did his ideas transcend the matronly dictums of A place for everything and everything in its place and Cleanliness is next to godliness. Yet it was not only in these platitudes that Blackburn’s peculiarity lay. As we talked, he aligned our pots of ale. He removed the contents of his pockets, ordered them, and replaced them. He tugged repeatedly at his sleeves, announcing that there was a formula, a ratio of coat to shirtsleeve, that must be observed at all times.
In short, I began to see what I had already suspected—namely, that if his concern with order was not a form of madness, it was, at the very least, a dangerous preoccupation, perhaps caused by some sort of humoral imbalance. It also became clear to me that when I pressed him for examples of Company errors, he declined to speak any ill of the doings at Craven House. He might well hate disorder when he found it, but his loyalty was fierce. I would have no choice, then, but to loosen his tongue some other way.
I excused myself, telling him I wished to relieve myself but hated to do so in public. I believe he understood and applauded my sentiments and so I left, not to make water but instead to make opportunities.
I entered the kitchen, where I found the serving girl assembling a tray of drinks. “I wish to apologize for my acquaintance’s rude behavior before,” I said. “He is rather taken with neatness in all things, and I am sure you meant no harm.”
The girl curtsied. “You are very kind to say so.”
“It is no kindness but only common manners. I would not have you think I approved of his treatment of you. Indeed, I know him from my business, and rather than being a particular friend, he is a kind of rival to me. Tell me, what is your name, my dear?”
“Annie,” she said, with another curtsy.
“Annie, if you would offer me a favor, I am certain to reward your kindness.”
She looked a bit more skeptical now. “What sort of favor have you in mind, then?”
“My acquaintance is of rather too sober a disposition. He judges his ale too carefully, and yet I should very much like to loosen his tongue. Do you think you might be able to add a bit of gin to his ale? Not so much that he might notice, but enough to give his spirits an encouraging nudge?”
She offered me a sly grin but immediately wiped her face blank. “I don’t know, sir. It doesn’t seem right to play so upon a gentleman’s ignorance.”
I held up a shilling. “Now does it seem right?”
She took the coin from my fingers. “It does indeed.”
Back at the table the girl brought us our fresh pots. Blackburn and I talked more of indifferent matters, until he finished his tainted ale and began to demonstrate in his speech and movement that the gin was doing its business. I saw I had my opportunity before me. “For a man who has such a profound hatred of disorder, Craven House must be a difficult place to labor.”
“At times, at times,” he said, a slight slur coming over his words. “There are all sorts of wretched doings there. Papers filed in the wrong place or not at all, expenditures made without proper accounting. Once,” he said in a hushed voice, “the night-soil man was murdered upon his way to perform his tasks, and the pots were not emptied that night. The lot of them were content to let their pots sit the next day without emptying. The whole lot of them, a bunch of filthy savages.”
“Wretched, wretched,” I said. “Is there more?”
“Oh, aye, there is more. More than you would credit. One of the directors, I won’t say his name, but I’ve heard—mind you, I don’t know that it’s true—but I’ve heard he uses his shirttails to clean himself and then just goes about his business with them, all soiled as they are.”
“But surely all of the Company men cannot be so terrible.”
“All of them? No, not so terrible as that.”
The girl came and took away our emptied pots, replacing them with fresh. She offered me a sprightly wink, so as to inform me she had plied the same trick with this as she had the last.
“I think that strumpet likes me,” Blackburn said. “You saw that wink, did you not?”
“I saw it.”
“Aye, she likes me. But I’d not lie next to that, not unless I could see her take a bath first. Oh, I like to watch a woman bathe, Mr. Weaver. That’s what I like best of all.”
While he drank, he continued to inform me of other crimes against hygiene. I allowed this to continue while he consumed the better part of his fortified drink, but hearing the slur in his voice grow increasingly more pronounced, and suspecting that the conversation might soon escape my ability to shape its contours, I pushed forward, I hoped not too forcefully. “What of other matters? What of the slovenliness you implied in areas beyond personal grooming? Matters of accounting.”
“Accounting errors, indeed. Rampant, is what that is. Everywhere and all the time. You’d think they were possessed of invisible servants, magical ghosts to clean up their little messes, the way they act. And not always errors,” he said, with an unmistakable twinkle.
“Oh?”
“Indeed, your very own man—but I say too much.”
“You say too much not to continue. It would be the most cruel form of torment not to finish your thought. As we are friends, you must go on.”
“Just so, just so. I take your point. It is like the series, is it not? Once begun, it must be concluded. I believe you have learned that lesson now.”
“I have. And you must tell me more.”
“You press me strongly,” he observed.
“And you demur like a coquette, I think,” I said, as good-naturedly as I could. “Surely you don’t want to leave me upon the rack.”
“Of course not. No, I suppose I may tell you a bit more.” He cleared his throat. “Your patron—whose name I shan’t mention for one cannot be too safe—once approached me with a scheme to liberate from the books a considerable sum for his own use. It was a scheme he had already managed, so he said, with the cashier general, and he required my assistance in disguising the sum from the eyes of posterity. He had some tale of its being for an important Company project, but as he could say no more than that, I knew at once that the project was surely gaming or whoring. Needless to say, I denied him.”
“Why so?”
“Why indeed? In part because it would be a unspeakable crime to make free with the books. But there is another aspect to cooperation I found most instructive. The former cashier general, a fellow called Horner, aided your patron one too many times for his continued presence to remain comfortable. He therefore found his loyalty rewarded with an assignment to toil his remaining days in Bombay. To avoid such favors, I eschewed being so faithful a servant. I do not believe the Indies would agree with me.”
“But what of this missing sum? Did Ellershaw do without?”
“Oh, no. I found the sum missing soon enough. A rather gross effort was made to cover the trail, but it could not fool me.”
“Did you speak out?”
“In a company where loyalty is rewarded with exile to the most monstrous clime on earth, I hardly wished to evidence disloyalty. Rather, I took the opportunity to disguise the effort so well that no one else could ever find it. I would not willingly commit a crime, sir, but I saw no harm in smoothing things over once the crime had taken place.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Such entertaining tales!” I exclaimed. “Surely there must be more.”
“Well,” he said, “there has been a thing or two I haven’t liked before now—before this Greene House affair, as I style it—but I can’t say much on things of the past.”
“I beg you tell me.”
He shook his head.
I decided the time had come for a strategic disregard of Mr.
Cobb’s orders that I must inquire into the death of Absalom Pepper, yet never speak his name. He had said I must not raise the subject myself, but my interlocutor was now growing disoriented with spirits, and I believed I could disguise the matter should it come to that.
“Do you speak of the Pepper business?” I asked him.
His skin turned pale and his eyes widened. “What do you know of that?” he asked quietly. “Who told you?”
“Who told me?” I said with a laugh. “Why, it is common knowledge.”
He now gripped the sides of the table. “Common knowledge? Common knowledge, you say? Who has been speaking? How did he learn of it? Oh, I am ruined, undone.”
“Calm yourself, Mr. Blackburn, I pray you,” I said. “There must be some misunderstanding here. I do not see why mention of the importation of pepper should cause you such distress.”
“Pepper?” he said. “The spice?”
“Yes. I meant only that I believed the East India Company once traded nearly exclusively in pepper, and the change to textiles and teas must have been a true feat of organizational skills.”
He let go of the table. “Oh. Of course.” He took a hearty gulp of his ale.
I knew that now was my moment and I a fool if I did not seize it. “Yes, I meant only the spice, sir. Nothing but the spice.” I leaned backward, letting my shoulders rest against the wall. “But tell me, pray Whatever did you believe me to mean?”
NOW WAS THE MOMENT of greatest risk, I believed. I played a dangerous game, and I hardly knew the rules. He might realize I had deceived him, tricked him into an admission of knowledge—though of what, I was still ignorant—and turn against me. Or he might be drawn in. He shook his head. “I am sorry,” he said. “It is of no moment.”
“No moment?” I returned, in as jovial a tone as I could muster. “No moment, you say? Why, you appeared monstrous distressed, sir.”
“It is nothing, I tell you.”
I leaned forward. “Come now, Mr. Blackburn,” I said softly. “We trust each other, and you have sparked my curiosity. You can tell me what you believed me to reference.”
He took another sip of his ale. I cannot say why he decided to speak—whether it was the spirits, the feeling of solidarity, or the belief that, as the matter was half revealed, it might as well be fully uncovered, that it could be better hidden away. I can only say that he took a deep breath and set down his pot. “There is a widow.”
“What widow?”
“Not five or six months past, I received a sealed letter, marked with the imprint of the Court of Committees. The letter contained not a single name of a single director but only the seal of the Court itself. And it said I was to oversee an annuity to a widow—a hundred and twenty pounds a year, it was—and I wasn’t to mention it to anyone, not even on the Court, for it was a great secret that the Company’s enemies would use against us. Indeed, the letter informed me that, should this matter become public, I would lose my position. I had no reason to doubt the veracity of this threat. The payment, after all, was overseen by the same Horner, his last act as cashier general before he was shipped off to his Asiatic hell. Any fool might see that I was, through no fault of my own, at the center of a momentous and secret undertaking, and I had no choice but to comply if I hoped to avoid a most terrible fate.”
“The widow’s name was Pepper?”
Mr. Blackburn licked his lips and looked away. He swallowed hard of nothing, and then he swallowed hard of his pot. “Yes. Her name is Mrs. Absalom Pepper.”
Despite my best efforts and two more pots of supplemented ale, I could not contrive for Mr. Blackburn to give me much more information. All he knew with any certainty was that Mrs. Pepper was a widow whose upkeep the Court of Committees had chosen to support. She lived in the village of Twickenham, just outside of London, where she had a house in the newly constructed Montpelier Row. Beyond that, he knew nothing—nothing but that her situation was unique and inexplicable. The Company paid no such annuities, not even to directors. Pepper appeared to have had no connection with the East India Company whatsoever, yet they regularly sent his widow a handsome allotment and regarded the matter as being of the most delicate variety.
I continued to press as forcefully as I dared, but it soon became apparent that I had reached the limits of his knowledge. Yet here was the path that would lead to the secretmost desire of Cobb’s heart and very possibly to the freedom of my friends. I did not dare hope that I might soon be free of this troublesome enterprise, but perhaps I could use the discovery of Absalom Pepper, once I had learned something, as a means of alleviating the burdens set upon my uncle.
By the time I concluded my interrogation, Mr. Blackburn was too inebriated to make his own way home—quite near too inebriated to stand, in fact. I placed him in a hackney and sent him on his way, reasonably hopeful that the coachman would do as I had paid him and not merely rob the poor fellow.
Though I had myself taken a bellyful of drink and was not the most clearheaded, the hour was not yet late and I thought I might still pay a visit to Mr. Cobb and inform him of this latest intelligence. I first needed to think matters through and determine if such was my best course, so I returned inside to sit by the fire of the tavern and sip the remains of my final pot. As I did so, I thought better of such an excursion, for I regained enough of my senses to recall that I did not work for Mr. Cobb any more than I worked for Mr. Ellershaw. I worked for myself, and my primary employment was to disentangle myself from this opaque web. I would say nothing for so long as I could.
I called over the pliable young Annie and requested a pen and some paper, and then I wrote two notes. The first was to Mr. Ellershaw, explaining that I should not be at Craven House the next day, for I had been laid low—inspired by the plight of the unfortunate serving girl—with a bloody flux. When a man has a cold or a debilitating ache of one sort or another, he often invites unwanted unsolicited medical advice, so I pretended to a more unpleasant ailment, believing it would preclude further inquiry on his part.
My second note was to Elias Gordon, asking that he meet me in such a way that our movements could not be observed. I gave these missives, along with another coin, to Annie, who promised that the kitchen boy would run them immediately.
It was then that I caught, if only fleetingly, the eye of a smallish fellow of middle years who sat huddled in the far corner. I had seen him upon my entrance and thought nothing of him, and I would have thought nothing of him now, except that in the instant he looked away from me he looked toward Annie. It might have been of no moment, mere tavern curiosity, but my suspicions were now aroused and I performed a subtle examination of this man.
He was dressed in a disheveled brown suit, and his old outdated wig shed like a sick lapdog upon the tattered shoulders of his coat. He wore small spectacles halfway down his nose; I could not tell much of the cast of his face because of the poor lighting, yet from what I did observe he seemed nothing so much as a poor scholar. It was entirely possible that the man was an agent of some force or other and merely used the visage of an impecunious university man as a disguise. I must also consider the possibility that the man was no more than he appeared and that circumstances had conspired to make me overly uneasy.
This option sat ill with me, however, for the scholar held open before him an open octavo of black binding, at which he spent most of his time glancing. A man could avail himself of far superior lighting than where he had lodged himself, and even a man whose eyes wanted no spectacles should have a hard time reading amid the gloom this man inhabited. I could not but conclude that he was a spy, though for Cobb or the Company or some other power, I could not say.
I therefore elected to remain where I was. If he wished to follow me when I departed the tavern, I could certainly take my chances. I would either lose him entire or he would follow me back to my lodgings with no harm done. But if he rose and attempted to stop the boy, I would have to follow, because I could not allow my letters, particularly the one to Elias, to fal
l into the hands of some unknown enemy.
Once more, I called Annie over, and bade her bend down low and close, and I set a hand upon her inviting bottom. “Laugh,” I said, “as though I had just said something of the greatest amusement.”
To my great surprise, she let out a laugh without further question.
“Now, pray don’t turn around, but there is a bookish sort of fellow in the far corner. Do you know who I mean?”
“What’s this about, then?”
“It’s about you earning another shilling.”
“Oh, all right then. Aye, he’s been here all night, that one. Same as you.”
“And what’s he been drinking?”
“Nothing but milk, if you can credit such a thing. A grown man, him, drinking milk with no bread, like he was a child.”
I could believe it indeed. The boy to whom I had entrusted the letters no doubt had other chores to complete before setting out, but I now saw him leave the tavern. In an instant, the scholar rose to follow. I waited a moment, until he was just stepping past the door, and, even as I put another piece of silver in the girl’s hand, I took to my feet and after the sham academician.
When I came out to Market Hill, the scholar was already coming up hard by the boy. The ground was hard with packed snow and I should hate to have to run upon it, but run I would, if it were required.
“Hold there,” the scholar called after the boy. “Hold there, my fine young man. A word with you, and a reward for it too.”
The boy turned to look and saw, instead of a smiling and harmless fellow, a pained face as I struck the man in the back of his head and sent him down into the muddy street.
“He meant you no good, but only injury,” I told the boy. “Go deliver your messages. I’ll take care of this rascal.”
