The Devil's Company bw-3

by David Liss

  DL: I think that when you write about a character over multiple books, you have to be careful not to repeat the same personal narratives over and over again. I don’t believe in resetting the clock.

  I felt the character was done because the emotional muck I’d dragged them through must have consequences, and I could not realistically see them as continuing to have feelings for each other after everything that had come before. As for Weaver himself, I don’t need to write a certain number of novels with this character. I’ve gone back to him twice when I’ve had ideas for the character I wanted to work with and stories I wanted to tell. I have no plans to write another Weaver novel at this moment, but I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. I do think that at some point I ought to write at least one more to put a kind of period on his narrative.

  OS: The namesake of this novel is the East India Company, and its level of brutality and cynicism is often shocking. Yet at the same time, to a jaded reader from the early twenty-first century, it’s never unbelievable. How many of the company’s shenanigans did you take from real life?

  DL: I did not set out to write a historical novel in which the East India Company is an allegory for the modern corporation. Rather, in my research, I was astonished to discover just how many modern corporate practices were already in play in the early eighteenth century. The main plot of murder and deception is, of course, fiction, but the business practices I portray are all historically accurate. If anything, corporations were much more brutal in the past than they are now because certain kinds of human life (non-British, the very poor, etc.) were held cheaply, and there was no one to prosecute abuses of what we today would call human rights.

  OS: One of the many lively scenes occurs in Mother Clap’s, a boarding-house/club catering to homosexual men. Clearly, such an establishment was illegal in London at the time, yet Weaver and others know of its existence. How common were such places in eighteenth-century England, and how did they exist alongside the law?

  DL: There were several such “molly houses” in eighteenth-century England, though Mother Clap’s is certainly the most famous. And yes, they were illegal, as was homosexuality, but there was no clear means of regulating such activity. Prostitution was illegal as well, but prostitutes operated nearly everywhere and in the open, and almost always without fear of the law. Eighteenth-century London was a society caught in the throes of a strengthening, unregulated capitalist system, while older, more ideological systems of regulation (a uniform, monolithic religious structure, the monarchy, the class system) were weakening. At this point, if something was making money, and not interfering with public order (or a more powerful entity’s ability to make money), it was generally left alone. The most seriously and consistently punished crimes in this period were crimes against property.

  OS: The London you describe sounds in ways like a libertarian ideal, where the free market is untethered by government regulation—yet no one would call it utopia. In another of your novels, The Whiskey Rebels, wild libertarians in the West try to bring down the federal government’s financial system. In The Ethical Assassin, the title character uses fierce—and very compelling—social critiques to argue for his vegan lifestyle.

  All this is just to say that your books are rife with thought-provoking social observations and criticisms. Do you see this as a primary function of the novelist? (I ask this of a United Nations Artist for Integrity, remember.) And how much effect can novelists have in the video-and-Internet age?

  DL: I think my primary function as a novelist is to entertain readers. Once we get too self-important and forget that very basic role, we produce far less effective novels. That said, I believe that if I am lucky enough to have readers, I ought to write something worth reading, and to that end, I do often write about issues I think are important. In other words, I see writing about important issues as my secondary function as a novelist.

  Can we have much effect? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s the rare novel (I can think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but not any others) that radically affects a major cultural movement. On the other hand, it’s better to contribute to an important social conversation than to opt out because you don’t believe you can dominate it.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  ___

  At the beginning of The Devil’s Company, Benjamin Weaver states he is able to “adopt the most plastic of morals … when the circumstances dictate.” How does disguise help and hinder him in this endeavor? Does this mentality hold true for Weaver throughout the novel? When does “acting as something he is not” conflict with doing what he believes is right? What does he do? Does he “preserve [his] soul”?

  After Jerome Cobb first meets with Weaver and outlines the terms of his “plan” and demands Weaver’s cooperation, Weaver leaves thinking he has a choice, though he later realizes “I had no choice.” How does Cobb secure his control over Weaver? Consider the role and manipulation of choice and freedom in the novel.

  Benjamin Weaver’s uncle, a fellow victim of Cobb’s machinations, suggests to Weaver, “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.” How does Weaver use this advice to his advantage and what does he discover to be the secret to unraveling Jerome Cobb?

  Jerome Cobb’s nephew, Hammond, believes that “darkness holds far greater terrors than any monstrosity, no matter how terrible, revealed in the light.” Do you think this is true? Does Weaver? How is disguise used in the novel to engender fear and/or power?

  How does Weaver gain entry into the East India Company “fortress” and Ambrose Ellershaw’s trust and confidence?

  Does Benjamin Weaver have a weakness? Why can he not “content [himself] with a state of ignorance” as Cobb suggests?

  How do the challenges facing the “Devil’s Company” and their competitors—greed, globalization, competition, capitalism, corruption, innovation—resonate today? How have these challenges evolved?

  Ellershaw explains to Weaver that “no arsenal and no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.” Do you agree? Does Weaver? How is this statement ironic, given Ellershaw’s role in the East India Company and The Devil’s Company?

  Discuss the anti-Semitism Weaver is confronted with throughout the novel.

  When Weaver inquires after the insurance policies taken out on his life, he is asked, “How can it be diabolical when it is the law?” Consider the “oceans of absurdity” that this question invokes for Benjamin Weaver.

  What would the executives of the East India Company argue drives commerce, need or desire? How do they—and the capitalist framework—manipulate these two factors?

  How does Ellershaw defend the “Honorable Company” and why does Thurmond suggest they instead call themselves the “Devil’s Company”? How do the “Company men” view the “Government men” and vice versa? Do they have any of the same interests? What does the legislation of 1721 symbolize in their different spheres? How do both sides attempt to rectify their positions? Discuss how their positions relate to freedom, diplomacy, “the wealth of the nation,” and “the natural evolution of things.”

  Read on for an excerpt from

  David Liss’s

  THE WHISKEY REBELS

  Ethan Saunders

  I t was rainy and cold outside, miserable weather, and though I had not left my boardinghouse determined to die, things were now different. After consuming far more than my share of that frontier delicacy Monongahela rye, a calm resolution had come over me. A very angry man named Nathan Dorland was looking for me, asking for me at every inn, chophouse, and tavern in the city and making no secret of his intention to murder me. Perhaps he would find me tonight and, if not, tomorrow or the next day. Not any later than that. It was inevitable only because I was determined not to fight against the tide of popular o
pinion—which is to say, that I ought to be killed. It was my decision to submit, and I have long believed in keeping true to a plan once it has been cast in earnest.

  It is a principle I cultivated during the war—indeed, one I learned from observing General Washington himself. This was in the early days of the Revolution, when His Excellency still believed he might defeat the British in pitched battle, Continental style, with our ill-disciplined and badly equipped militias set against the might of British regulars. It was the decisive military victory he wanted; indeed, in those early days it was the only sort he believed worth having. He would invite the officers to dine with him, and we would drink claret and eat roast chicken and sip our turtle soup and he would tell us how we were going to drive the Redcoats back at Brooklyn, and the unfortunate affair would be over before winter.

  That was during the war. Now it was early in 1792, and I sat at the bar of the Lion and Bell in that part of Philadelphia euphemistically called Helltown. In that unsavory scene, I drank my whiskey with hot water while I waited for death to find me. I kept my back to the door, having no wish to see my enemy coming and because the Lion and Bell was as unlovely a place as Helltown offered—and those were mighty unlovely. The air was thick with smoke from pipes plugged full of cheap tobacco, and the floor, naught but dirt, had turned to mud with the icy rain outside and the spills and spitting and tobacco juice. The benches lay lopsided in the newly made hummocks and ruts of the ground, and the drunken patrons would, from time to time, topple over and tumble like felled timber into the muck. Perhaps a drinker might take the trouble to roll a friend over to keep him from drowning, though there could be no certainty. Helltown friends were none the best.

  It was a curious mix there: the poor, the whores, the desperate, the servants run off for the night or the month or forever. And alongside them, throwing dice upon uneven surfaces or hunched over a hand of cards spread across ripped velvet, were the gentlemen in their fine woolen suits and white stockings and shimmering silver buckles. They’d come to gawk and to rub elbows with the colorful filth, and most of all they’d come to game. It was the spirit of the city, now that Alexander Hamilton, that astonishing buffoon, had launched his great project, the Bank of the United States. As Secretary of the Treasury, he had single-handedly transformed the country from a republican beacon for mankind into a paradise for speculators. Ten years earlier, with a single stroke, he had transformed me from patriot to outcast.

  I removed from my pocket a watch, currently my only possession of value if one did not account my slave, Leonidas. I had, despite the decisions that had prevailed among the wise drafters of our Constitution, never quite learned to think of Leonidas as property. He was a man, and as good a man as any I’d known. It sat ill with me to keep a slave, particularly in a city like Philadelphia, whose small population of owned blacks numbered in the dozens, and one could find fifty free blacks for each bondsman. I could never sell Leonidas, no matter how dire my need, because I did not think it right to buy and sell men. On the other hand, though it was no fault of his, Leonidas would fetch at auction as much as fifty or sixty pounds’ worth of dollars, and it had always seemed to me madness to emancipate such a sum.

  So the timepiece, in practical terms, was currently my only thing of worth—a sad fact, given that I had removed it from its rightful owner only a few hours earlier. Its glittering face told me it was now half past eight. Dorland would have eaten his fashionably late dinner well over two hours ago, giving him ample time to collect his friends and come in search of me. It could be any minute now.

  I slid back into my pocket the timepiece I’d taken on Chestnut Street. The owner had been a fat jackanapes, a self-important merchant. He’d been talking to another fat jackanapes and had paid no mind while I brushed past him. I’d not planned to take the watch, nor did I make a habit of such things as common theft, but it had been so tempting, and there seemed to be no reason not to claim it and then disappear in that crowded street, clacking with the walking sticks of bankers and brokers and merchants. I saw the watch, saw it might be taken, and saw how I might take it.

  Even then, if that had been all, I would have let it go, but then I heard the man speak. It was his words, not my need, that drove me to take what was not mine. This man, this lump of a man, who resembled a great and corpulent bottom-heavy bear, forced into a crushed-velvet blue suit, had been invited to a gathering the next week at the house of Mr. William Bingham. That was all I knew of him, that he, a mere maker of money, nothing more than a glorified storekeeper, had been invited to partake of the finest society in Philadelphia—indeed, in the nation. I, who had sacrificed all for the Revolution, a man who had risked life in return for less than nothing, was little more than a beggar. So I took his watch, and I defy anyone to blame me.

  Now that it was mine, I examined the painting in the inside cover, a young lady of not twenty, plump of face, like the watch’s owner, with a bundle of yellow hair and eyes far apart and open wide, as though she’d been in perpetual astonishment while she sat for the portrait. A daughter? A wife? It hardly mattered. I had taken from a stranger a thing he loved, and now Nathan Dorland was coming to avenge such wrongs, too innumerable to catalogue.

  “Handsome timepiece,” said Owen, standing behind the bar. He was a tall man with a head long and narrow, shaped like one of the pewter mugs into which he poured his ales, with wheat-colored hair that curled up like foam. “Timepiece like that might go a way toward paying a debt.” He held out one of his meaty hands, covered with oil and filth and blood from a fresh cut on his palm to which he paid no mind.

  I shrugged. “With all my heart, but you must know the watch is newly thieved.”

  He withdrew the hand and wiped it on his filthy apron. “Don’t need the trouble, but I ought to send you to fence it now, before you lose it at game.”

  “Should I turn the watch to ready, I would not use it for something so ephemeral as a tavern debt.” I pushed my empty mug toward him. “Another, if you please, my good man.”

  Owen stared for a moment, his tankard of a face collapsed in purse-lipped indecision. He was a young man, not two- and- twenty, and he had a profound, nearly religious reverence for those who had fought in the war. Living, as he did, in such a place as Helltown, and moving through indifferent social circles, he had never heard how my military career had met its conclusion, and I saw no advantage in sharing information that would lead to his disillusionment.

  Instead, I favored other details. Owen’s father died in the fighting at Brooklyn Heights, and more than once had I treated Owen to the tale of how I had met his father that bloody day, when I was captain of a New York regiment, before my true skills were discovered and I was no longer to be found upon the battlefield. That day I led men, and when I told Owen the tale, my voice grew thick with cannon fire and death screams and the wet crunch of British bayonet against patriot flesh. I would recount how I had given Owen’s honored father powder during the chaos of the ignominious retreat. With blood and limbs and musket balls flying about us, the air acrid with smoke, the British slaughtering us with imperial fury, I had taken the time to aid a militia volunteer, for we had shared a moment of revolutionary comradeship that defied our differences in rank and station. The tale kept the drinks flowing.

  Owen took my mug, poured in some whiskey from an unstoppered bottle and hot water from a pitcher near the stove. He set it down before me with a considerable thud.

  “Some would say you’ve had your fill,” he told me.

  “Some would,” I agreed.

  “Some would say you’re abusing my generosity.”

  “Impertinent bastards.”

  Owen turned away and I opened the watch once more, setting it upon the counter, where I might stare at the tick of its hands and the girl who had meant so much to the merchant. To my right sat an animated skeleton of a man in a ragged coat that covered remarkably unclean linen. His face was unshaved, and his nasty eyes, lodged between the thinning brown hair of his crown and
the thickening brown hair of his cheeks, stole glances at my prize. I’d seen him come in an hour earlier and slide a few coins across the bar to Owen, who had, in exchange, handed a small parchment sack to the ragged man. Owen did a brisk trade in that greenish powder called Spanish fly, though this man, his magic dust in hand, seemed content to sit at the bar and cast glances at me and my timepiece.

  “I say, fellow, you are looking upon my watch.”

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t.”

  “Why, I saw it, fellow. I saw you setting larcenous eyes upon my watch. This very one.”

  “Ain’t,” he said, looking closely at his drink.

  “Don’t you speechify at me, fellow. You were coveting my timepiece.” I held it up by the chain. “Take it if you have the courage. Take it from my hands while I observe you rather than skulking in the dark like a sneak thief.”

  He continued to gaze inside his pewter mug as though it were a seeing crystal and he a wizard. Owen whispered a word or two to him, and the skinny gawker moved farther down the bar, leaving me alone. It was what I liked best.

  The hands of the watch moved. It was strange how a man could find himself in so morose a state. Only a few days before I had considered Dorland’s pursuit of revenge as a vague amusement. Now I was content to let him kill me. What had changed? I could point to so many things, so many disappointments and failures and struggles, but I knew better. It was that morning, coming from my rooms and seeing the back of a woman half a block ahead of me, walking quickly away. From a great distance, through the tangle of pedestrians, I had seen a honey-brown coat and, above it, a mass of golden-blond hair upon which sat a prim if impractical wide-brimmed hat. For a moment, from nothing more than the color of her hair, from the way her coat hung upon her frame, from the way her feet struck the stones, I had convinced myself that it was Cynthia. I believed, if only for an instant, that after so many years and married though she was to a man of great consequence, Cynthia Pearson knew I now lived in Philadelphia, knew where I lived, and had come to see me. Perhaps, at the last moment, recognizing the impropriety, she lost her courage and scurried away, but she had wanted to see me. She still longed for me the way I longed for her.