by David Liss
“I shall begin my search for these letters immediately,” I told Sir Owen, “and this search shall be my first priority until they are recovered. If I have any news, sir, any news at all, I shall not hesitate to send it to you.”
Sir Owen rolled the glass between his hands. “Thank you, Weaver. I flatter myself that I shall see my letters soon. You do understand, sir, that if you must ask questions of any of these scoundrels, you should make no reference to what these papers contain.”
“Of course.”
“My happiness, you see, is in your hands.” He turned to my window and stared outward. “Sarah is such a lovely woman. So very delicate.”
“I am sure you are a most fortunate man.” My words sounded to me hollow platitudes.
After making certain there was nothing else of use Sir Owen could tell me, I showed him out and began to formulate a plan of action. I decided the most effective course would be to visit some of the unpleasant institutions I knew of, in which the dark engineers of the underworld convened to discuss their business and unburden their minds in fellowship. Such a place was a gin shop on Little Warner Street, near Hockley-in-the-Hole—a place equally repulsive to the senses of smell and sight, for it was so close to that fetid sewer known as the Fleet Ditch that it was not uncommon for the entire place to be flooded with the sickening scent of kennel and waste. This gin house had no proper name, and the sign above it was merely a faded image of two horses drawing a cart—a remnant of a previous shop. Among its patrons, the house was known as Bawdy Moll’s, for its proprietress was an affectionate and buxom woman whose onset of middle years she combated with an excess of concupiscence and a minimum of attire.
I entered Bawdy Moll’s in the early afternoon; the place was then far less inhabited than in the busy nighttime hours, when impoverished men sought refuge from their lives in pints of gin sold for almost nothing. A penny or two was enough to transport the most miserable of sods to a painless realm of drunken oblivion. In the afternoon, however, the shop served a more sporadic sort—perhaps the petty thief or pickpocket seeking refuge from a job turned sour, the beggar who had chosen to surrender his pennies for drink rather than food, or the out-of-work laborer who preferred to face a senseless stupor rather than a heartless London that would care not a whit for his starvation.
There were also the visitors who came each Monday and Thursday to see the bullbaiting. On other days one could find a variety of different exhibits to be seen in Hockley-in-the-Hole. In my younger years, I had been one of them, for before I had taken to fighting exclusively with my fists, I had been part of a troupe of sword-fighters who demonstrated for paying crowds the noble art of self-defense. Such things are no longer seen today, but as a young man I had marched about the city amidst a troop of fighters clad in our poor and tattered estimation of military uniforms, drums a-beating, while boys passed around handbills detailing the thrills of our shows. During my days sword-fighting at a ramshackle outdoor theater near Oxford Street, I would risk life and limb with another man as we demonstrated our daring skill with our swords, each of us trying to best his opponent without doing him any serious harm. Despite our efforts to spare one another, I was usually bloodied and covered with cuts by the end of a performance, and I have many a scar upon my body to testify to these exploits. When the theatrical manager asked me if I wished to earn my bread by fighting with fists only, I confess I was delighted at the prospect of so painless an employment.
I suppose I was prone to reminisce about those awful times, but the gin house quickly reminded me of what life engendered in that part of town. Bawdy Moll’s had few windows, for her patrons had no wish to see the world around them, and they had less of a wish for the world outside to look in. I braced myself against the stink as I saw Bawdy Moll, who stood behind the counter talking excitedly with a haggard-looking cutpurse whose name I knew but whose acquaintance I had never sought. They both hovered over a pile of papers that from where I stood I recognized as tickets for the illegal lottery that Moll, like so many tavern-owners in that part of the city, ran from her place of business. The drawings were always biased, rigged, and small, and the revenue from them added handsomely to Moll’s purse.
Moll wore her hair high, in a grotesque parody of the ladies’ fashion. Her dress opened wide at the neck to reveal an ample if withered bosom, and the paint upon her face bespoke a woman who believed these artificial and conspicuous colorings had power not to deceive but to blind, for her skin put me in mind of bark ready to drop from the tree. Grotesque as she was, Moll was well loved, and she frequently provided me with valuable news of back streets and thieves’ dens.
Upon my entrance the cutpurse looked up from his conversation with Moll and scowled. I heard the words “Weaver the Jew,” but I could discern no more. It was often hard for me to ascertain my status among such men. I had friends within the armies of prigs, but I had enemies too—and I knew that their master, Jonathan Wild, encouraged no fellowship between their ranks and me. I assumed this man to be a fellow who took Wild’s advice to heart, for as I approached Moll he finished hard his pint of gin—throwing back a quantity that should have caused a healthy man to lose his senses—and stalked into the dark shadows of the gin house where there were always piles of straw for the poor and the desperate to crawl into and sleep off their poison.
“Ben Weaver,” Moll called out as I approached, as always speaking more loudly than she needed. “A glass of wine for ya, then, me ’andsome spark?” Moll knew enough that I would not partake of gin, and I accepted with good humor a glass of her vinegary wine, of which I sipped only enough to be polite.
“Good day to you, Moll,” I said as she rubbed my arm with a leathery hand, her sausage-like fingers clinging absently to me. There was no getting what one wanted from this woman without indulging her need to feel desirable. “I trust your pleasant company keeps your business healthy?”
“Aye, business is brisk. A penny a glass is a small business, it is, but counting the coins is a fine enough occupation, I reckon.” She gently pulled at the tie of my hair. “How many of them would it take to buy yer company, I wonder?”
“Not many,” I said with a smile that would have been unconvincing in a better-lit room, “but I find I have little time at the moment.”
“Yer always a busy man, Ben. Ye must make time for yer pleasures.”
“My business is my pleasure, Moll. You know that.”
“That’s right unnatural,” she assured me with a coo.
“What news,” I responded, as though it were the perfectly correct response to her amorous oglings, “have you heard upon the street?”
I cannot claim to be astonished that the first news upon her lips was of Jemmy’s death, for word of a murder spread like the French pox in London’s dark quarters. “ ’E was shot dead, ’e was. You knew ’im?”
“I met him but briefly,” I told her.
“ ’E wasn’t much, I reckon, but ’e ’ardly deserved to be shot like a dog, such as ’e was. Like a dog.” She scratched her head. “ ’E wasn’t much smarter’n a dog, though, was ’e? And vicious too, with a taste for young girls—young, I say—whether they would or no. Now that I think on it, gettin’ ’imself shot down was just the thing for a bastard like ’im.” She shrugged at her own observation.
“Who shot him?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.
“ ’Is ’ore,” she leaned forward and spoke in what I can only describe as a shouting whisper. “Kate Cole’s ’er name. Jemmy and Kate kept a buttock an’ twang together, but if anyone was to shoot anyone I would have thought ’e’d ’ave done ’er in, not t’other way, for she ’ad a few other coves what she kept, and she even spent a night or two with Wild ’imself.”
“She was Wild’s whore?”
“Well, who ain’t? I won’t say I ’aven’t ’ad a tumble with the great man meself, but Jemmy was a man quick with his anger, and if Wild’s to keep his prigs in line he oughtn’t to make them want to kill ’em. All’s the more wond
er that ’e done what ’e done.”
“And what has he done?” I asked.
“Why ’e’s ’peached ’er, ’e ’as. Wild turned ’is own ’ore in. Now I’ve seen ’im do it many a time and often with a prig what ’e couldn’t trust no more, but to ’peach a woman what you’ve swived not a week before shows a lack of”—she fumbled for a word—“manners, I should think. Now the poor lass is sittin’ in Newgate. How long before she gets what all women get there, I wonder? All those men there, looking for distraction. I got it sure enough in my day.”
My innards writhed as I listened to Moll’s cackling speculations, for if Kate had been arrested she would have no reason not to speak of my involvement. It was true that though she had no idea who I was, she did know what I had been after, and if she had only the slightest grain of cunning she would know that the goods I had sought were the key to her surviving the next hanging day.
“What does Kate have to say about all this?”
“I should ’ardly know.” Though I could see little humor in the question, Moll burst into an uproarious laugh that sounded to me like a seagull’s cry. “I suppose ye better go down to Newgate and ask ’er yerself what opinion she has of the matter.”
Such was my intention. So, doing my best to conceal my panic before Moll, I made some small chat with her for a little while, pretended to seek information on a house broken into, and then made my first convenient escape.
FIVE
I COULD MUSTER no considerable surprise to learn that Jonathan Wild had ’peached Kate, for profiting from the conviction of his own creatures was no small part of the key to his fortune. It was said that he held a book with the name of every felon in his employ, keeping count of numbers as though he were a merchant or a trader as much as a thief. When he believed one of his prigs to be withholding goods, he put a cross next to the name, indicating that it was time to hand the poor sod over to the courts. Once the prig was hanged, Wild put a second cross next to his name, and so the thieves of London now held the expression of double-crossing as one and the same with betrayal.
Long before I’d turned to thief-taking Wild had been plying his trade from the Blue Boar Tavern in Little Old Bailey, making a name for himself by impeaching highwaymen like James Footman, a renowned villain of his day, and by breaking up the robbery gang of the most notorious Obadiah Lemon. He brought these blackguards to justice as he later did his own blackguards, by betraying their trust and leading them to believe he was one of their brotherhood—for indeed he was, and how were the likes of Obadiah Lemon to know that a fellow-thief would suddenly appoint himself magistrate? I believe that even in the early days of Wild’s power, most everyone suspected what this man was, but crime had grown so rampant, with armed gangs of men prowling the streets like hungry dogs, and old ladies and pensioners fearing to step outside lest they be brutally knocked down, that all who lived in the metropolis wished for a hero, and Wild proved flamboyant and ruthless enough to announce himself to be precisely that. His name was in every paper and upon all lips. He had become the Thief-Taker General.
I had only been in my current trade for three months before I met Wild, but in a way it is strange that it took as long as all that. London, after all, is a city in which any man of a particular business or interest is destined to meet all others of a like mind in a surprisingly short period of time. My friends may prove his enemies, but we shall all know each other soon enough.
If it took me some months to meet Wild, I had seen him about the city many times. We all had, for Wild made it his business to be visible, showing up at fairs and the Lord Mayor’s Show and market days, riding horseback with his men in attendance, directing them to seize pick-pockets as though he were in command of some tiny army. I suppose that if we in London had some sort of body devoted to apprehending criminals, what the French call a police, a man like Wild could never have come to power, but Englishmen are far too quick to feel the squeeze upon their liberties, and I seriously doubt if we shall ever see a police on this island. Wild took advantage of this need for regulation, and I fully admit when I would see him astride his horse, handsomely dressed, pointing this way and that with his ornate walking stick, it was all I could do but to admire him.
By the time Wild and I met face-to-face, he had moved over to the tavern called the Cooper’s Arms, where he set up his “Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property.” It is with some shame that I recount the story of my meeting with Wild, for it is a story of my weakness. My new business of thief-taking had been flourishing—largely, I suspect, owing to luck more than skill, but my luck began to run thin when I set out to serve a rich merchant whose shop had been broken open and robbed of a half-dozen ledger books. Before they grew brazen, Wild’s prigs preferred the theft of ledgers and pocketbooks and other items of value only to their owners, for if such thefts went to trial, goods without an estimable intrinsic value could not command a hanging penalty.
Much like my new acquaintance Sir Owen, this merchant sought my services because he understood Wild’s game and refused to pay him to return what he had taken in the first place. Unlike Sir Owen, he was unwilling to give me double Wild’s fee, and proposed one pound per book, which I gladly accepted, for I earnestly desired the chance to beat my competitor at his own game.
I knew well the sort of coves who would take down ledger books, and I toured the gin houses and taverns and inns, seeking out men I thought might have the goods. It was at this time, however, that Wild had begun to discover the joys of ’peaching his own prigs, and with three of his army dangling at the last hanging day, the men I spoke to all kept themselves cautiously silent—none of them wishing to incur Wild’s displeasure.
I spent a full week asking questions and pressing upon weaker men, but I found no sign of the books I sought. I then bethought myself of a plan that, I now blush to own, struck me as ingenious. I would go to Wild’s Lost Property Office at the Cooper’s Arms and pay for the return of the books. Even if I made no profit of this transaction, I could hand over the property to my merchant and he would speak to others of how I could find goods taken by Wild’s men. Why I thought I could retrieve other articles in the future when I could not retrieve these now, I cannot say.
Thus, on a hot June afternoon, I entered Wild’s abode, this dark tavern smelling of mold and spirits. The great man sat at a table in the center of his room, surrounded by his minions, who fairly treated him as though he were an Arabian sultan. Wild was a man of a stocky nature—he had a broad face with a sharp nose and protruding chin and eyes that glistened like a harlequin’s. Dressed as he was, like a man of mode, in his yellow-and-red coat and neat little wig propped beneath a hat cocked just so, he looked to me like a farcical character in a Congreve comedy, but I saw right away that his frivolity was not to be taken at face value. I do not say that he played at gayness, for that would be misleading, but he had a look about him that said that, even in the midst of celebration, he might be thinking of what mischief he could perform upon the man who poured his wine.
When I entered he was in the midst of a celebration indeed; I had heard upon the streets that Wild had just that morning ’peached a gang of a half-dozen buffers—thieves that steal horses, slaughter them, and sell their skins—and he was in a jolly mood at the prospect of collecting forty pounds’ bounty a head. The moment I stepped inside I saw three villains swig down full mugs of ale. A drunken fool paraded around the room, abusing a fiddle most appallingly, but the lickerish audience stomped and danced to the music for all its chaos.
Hanging over Wild was his favorite wench, Elizabeth Mann, along with a dozen or so of his lieutenants. Among these was a miserable sod called Abraham Mendes, Wild’s most trusted soldier, and, I am shamed to say, a Jew of my own neighborhood. Mendes and I had attended the same small school as boys, and I had even maintained a cautious sort of friendship with this menacing lad who was, even by my standards, violent and dangerous. I had often seen him in the company of Wild, but I had not spoken to hi
m since I was perhaps twelve years old, and he had been exiled from our school for attempting to blind the instructor with a Torah pointer. Now he was a game-enough-looking buck—hardened by ill fortune; his face, which bore the twisted and misshapen look of a man who had been in the thick of more fights than even I had, was now a grizzly cast of vile apathy.
When I walked in, Mendes glanced over and met my gaze, as though I had arrived late for an appointed meeting. Without changing his expression, he leaned forward and whispered into Wild’s ear. The thief-taker nodded, and then slapped his hand hard upon the table like a judge banging his gavel; the fiddle ceased, the revelers stopped dead, and a tense silence descended. “We cannot allow our good cheer to hinder business,” Wild announced. “The Lost Property Office remains open.”
The wench and the bulk of his prigs disappeared in an instant, melting quietly into the back rooms. Only Mendes remained, standing quietly behind his master like a demonic statue.
Wild rose to his feet and took a few steps forward, perhaps exaggerating his famous limp. There were those who claimed that Wild falsified his lameness, perhaps to make the world think him less dangerous, but I did not believe it. I too had suffered a leg injury, and I knew the difference between a true limp and a false one.
“Please come have a seat.” He gestured toward a chair at his table. “You will excuse my companions’ merrymaking, but we have had a successful morning, Mr. Weaver.”
The sound of my own name struck my ears like a blow, and I wanted nothing so much as to flee. I had been fool enough to think that I might retrieve these ledger books anonymously, that Wild should never recognize me. I could not now swallow my pride and tell him what I wanted. I would be laughed at throughout the town. Yet it was too late to retreat, and I stepped forward, slowly lowering myself into a chair while he did the same.