David Liss - A Spectacle Of Corruption

But not forever. I would need clothing, and quickly too, for though the joy of having won my freedom coursed through my veins, making me feel as alert as though I’d had a dozen dishes of coffee, I felt dangerously cold, and my hands began to grow numb. My teeth chattered, and I shivered so hard I feared I should lose my balance and fall upon the ground. I was not happy with the prospect of taking from another what I so desired myself, but necessity outweighed whatever peccadilloes of morality troubled my thoughts. Besides, I had no intention of taking any man’s clothes entire and leaving him in my own current state of nature. I merely wished to find someone who could be persuaded, one way or another, to share some small portion of his bounty.

There is something about having been in prison, and perhaps more so in having escaped from prison, that makes a man see the familiar as new. As I made my way to the west and south, I smelled the stench of the Fleet like some bumptious arrival from the country. I heard the strangeness of the cries of the pie sellers and the chicken men and the shrimp girls, “Shrimp shrimp shrimp shrimpers!” called out again and again like a bird of the tropics. The sloppy words scrawled on the walls that I would never before have noticed- Walpole go ye to the devil and Jenny King is a hore and slut and Com and see Misus Rose at the sine of the Too Biships for sheepskins - now seemed to me the outlandish scrawl of a mysterious alphabet. But the renewed strangeness of the city took little of my attention from the discomfort of being cold and wet and hungry- hungry to dizziness- and the cries of pies and pickled fish and roast turnips distracted me something immense.

My ramble through this unsavory part of town took on the grim, disjointed tone of a nightmare. Once or twice a linkboy or mendicant spotted me and hooted, but, for good or ill, in a metropolis such as this one, where poverty is so rampant, it is not so unusual to spy an unfortunate without raiment, and I was merely taken for some desperate victim of the current poverty weighing upon the nation. I passed by more than my share of beggars, who refrained from asking me for money, but I could see by the empty looks in their eyes that they knew me to be well fed and therefore more fortunate than they. A few ladies of pleasure offered their services to me, but I explained that I had, at that moment, no money about me.

Off Holborn, I saw a man of precisely the species I wanted. He was a drunkard of the middling sort who had abandoned his friends in an alehouse somewhere and gone in search of cheap flesh. For a staggering inebriant- that is to say, a man who is not overly particular- cheap flesh is easily found, all the more so because a man in his state might prove an easy mark for a woman with an eye toward his purse or watch or wig.

This fellow, bloated, soaked to the bone, and somewhat past the middle point in life, swayed toward a dark-haired woman who could be described in sadly similar terms. In some ways, I thought, I would be doing him a favor by preventing him from an intimacy with a creature far inferior to what he would desire in a state of sobriety- one who would almost certainly take what had not been offered and leave in return that which was not desired. I emerged from the shadows, lashed out at him with a hand on each shoulder, and pulled him into the alley where I had been hiding.

“Gracious God, help me!” he cried, before I could put a hand over his mouth.

“Be silent, you drunk fool,” I whispered. “Can you not see I am trying to help you?”

My words had the effect I had intended, for he paused to consider their meaning and how this naked stranger might be trying to lend him aid. While he drunkenly measured my intentions, I was able to help myself to his coat, hat, and wig.

“Just a moment!” he shouted, but it afforded him nothing. He stood up, perhaps to chase me, but slipped in some slick filth and fell back into the alley. Still naked, but with my booty tucked under my arm, I dashed off into the night. I would be using those things but a short time, however, for I had it in my head to steal the clothing off another man next, and that would be to far more purpose.

Half an hour later, I was at last under a roof and near a gloriously hot stove, conducting a conversation marred with violence. “You can either do as I ask you, or you can be bludgeoned senseless,” I said to the footman, a strapping lad of hardly more than eighteen years.

He glanced to the other side of the kitchen where the body of the butler lay facedown and slumped, a bit of blood trickling out of his ear. I had made the butler the same offer, and his choice had been none the wisest.

“I haven’t worked here more than two weeks,” he said, in a thick northern accent. “They told me ruffians have been known to break in without a by-your-leave. There’s been hungry men at the door, begging for scraps, begging awful fierce, but I never thought to see a housebreaker till now.”

I am certain I looked a frightful sight, wearing nothing but an outer coat, a periwig that hardly covered my own hair, and a hat propped haphazardly on top- all of which were drenched. I had thought to take the wig because I believed that if my escape had been discovered, the search might be for a man of dark natural hair, not a bewigged gentleman, but I looked no more a gentleman than did a chained African just arrived in Liverpool.

“You’ll see nothing but the back of your eyelids, lad, if you don’t do as I tell you.” I ought to have moved closer to him that I might appear menacing. Instead I backed up to feel the warmth of the stove.

He noticed nothing of my movements, however. “I’ve no cause for getting myself hurt in his service,” the footman said, gesturing with his head toward another room in the house.

“Then give me your clothes,” I said.

“But I’m wearing them.”

“Then perhaps you should remove them first,” I proposed.

He stared at me, awaiting further clarification, but when he saw none was forthcoming, he let out a confused sigh, mumbled to himself as though I were his father and had asked him to slop the pigs, and began to unfasten his buttons and unlace his laces. His teeth petulantly dug into his lower lip, he stripped down to all but his shirt and tossed his clothes toward me so they landed in a pile. I gave him in exchange my recently got coat, heavy with wet, and I then donned his livery- agreeably dry, though thicker with lice than I should have desired.

My goal was not to trick his master; I would not do so for more than an instant. I believed, however, that seeing me in his servant’s garb would prove disorienting enough to make him more pliable. I also knew that, once I left the house, the livery would make a fine disguise.

After the footman had put on my coat, I tied him with some rope I found in the kitchen. “Are there any other servants in the house?” I asked him, as I grabbed a half loaf of bread and bit into it violently. It was a day old, and hard, but it tasted wonderful to me.

“Just the lass what does the cleaning,” he said, “but she’s virtuous, she is, and I haven’t done nothing with her that would harm her honor.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Where is she now?” I asked, my mouth full of bread.

“This is her night off. She’s gone to see her mother, who tends children for a great lady what lives near St. James’s. She won’t be back for two hours at least.”

I considered the possibility that he was lying- about the time of the girl’s return, not her virtue- and concluded that he had not the guile to deceive me. Unwilling to set down my bread, I held it between my teeth while I took a kitchen rag and wrapped it around his mouth to keep him silent. I then told him that over the next few days he might review the daily papers to see if anyone advertised for the coat and wig and hat. The kind thing would be to return them to their owner.