David Liss - A Spectacle Of Corruption

“Ho, there, fellow,” he said. “What business have you?”

“I’m come to see Mr. Jacob Monck, what lives here,” I said, using the name of a lodger I knew to dwell within. I also affected a heavy Yorkshire accent, hoping this would put them off my scent.

The two men approached. “What’s your business with this Monck?” asked the one who had called out to me.

“The delivering of a message.” I took a step closer.

“Whose message?” He wiped the cold rain off his face.

I did not pause for an instant. “Me lady’s,” I told him, hoping he had not done his business so well that he knew Monck to be septuagenarian and little likely to be involved in intrigues.

“Who is your lady?”

I smirked at him and rolled my eyes as I had seen saucy footmen do a hundred times before. “That ain’t none of your business, nor for you to know neither. Who might you be, who stand in my way like insolent fellows?”

“These fart catchers think themselves great gentlemen,” one of the centuries announced. “We’re Riding Officers, that’s who we be, and you are but a bootlick. You oughtn’t to forget that.”

“Go and deliver the message, me lord,” the other one said. “And I beg you pardon our disturbing you as you carry out your important task. I should hate to think I had stood between Mr. Monck and your lady’s cunny.”

I offered a sneer to the one who had spoken and then knocked upon the door; despite my haughty performance, I’d grown restless with alarm. Riding Officers: the agents who enforced the laws of customs and excise. Why would men whose role was to search for smugglers and customs evaders come in search of a supposed murderer who had broken his way out of Newgate? It made no sense, but it suggested that there was even more to the matter of my prosecution than I had yet supposed.

When I heard the doorknob turn, I had further cause for alarm, for Elias’s landlady, Mrs. Henry, would surely recognize me, and I did not know if I could depend on her silence. She had always looked upon me more kindly than is perhaps ordinary, but I was now generally believed to be a murderer, and I knew well that there would be those who might interpret my actions at Mr. Rowley’s house in none the best light.

Fortunately, I had little cause for alarm. Mrs. Henry opened the door, glanced at my face, and, as though she had no idea who I was, asked me my business. I simply repeated what I had told the centuries, and she invited me inside.

I thought she might have questions for me, or pleading words about how I must return myself to prison and have faith in the law and the Lord, but she offered none of that, only a warm smile and a gesture of her head. “Go upstairs, then. He’s there.”

Elias opened the door almost immediately upon my knocking. His eyes went wide for a moment, and then he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside. “Are you mad coming here? There are men downstairs looking for you.”

“I know,” I said. “Riding Officers.”

“Customs men? What business can they have with this?” He began to say something on the peculiarity of my pursuers, but changed his mind and instead approached a sideboard with a bottle of wine and some unwashed glasses upon it. Elias’s rooms were pleasant enough, but none the neatest, and old clothes, books, papers, and dirty dishes were spread throughout. He had several candles burning upon his writing table, and he appeared to have been at work on some project or another when I called. Though a surgeon of some reputation, Elias preferred the literary arts to the medical ones and had tried his hand already at playwriting and poetry. He was now, he had told me, at work upon a fictional memoir of a dashing Scottish surgeon making his way through the social labyrinth of London.

“Obviously, you have been through a great deal,” he said, “but before we discuss it, I must urge you to take an enema.” He held a cylinder the size of my index finger. It was brown and looked as hard as a stone.

“Pardon me?”

“An enema,” he explained with great earnestness. “It is a purging of the bowels.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the concept. But having escaped from the most dreaded prison in the kingdom, I haven’t the inclination to celebrate my freedom by shitting in your pot while you stand by, ready to examine the goods.”

“No one relishes an enema, but that is hardly the point. I’ve been doing a great deal of studying of the matter, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the best thing for you- better even than bleeding. Ideally, you would combine it with a diuretic and a purging, but I suspect you’re not quite willing to subject yourself to all three.”

“It is amazing how well our friends know us,” I observed. “You see my innermost soul as no stranger could, and you perceive that I am in no mood to shit, piss, and vomit all at once.”

He held up his hand. “Let us set the matter aside for the nonce. I have only your health in mind, you know, but I see I cannot force good medicine upon you. I suppose you shan’t object to a glass of wine, however.”

“For reasons I cannot fully articulate, that offer appeals to me more than your other.”

“There’s no need to be sour,” he said, while he poured a glass of pale red wine. As he turned to hand it to me, he seemed, for the first time, to notice my livery. “Service becomes you,” he said.

“It has proved, thus far, an adequate costume.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From Piers Rowley’s footman.”

His eyes widened. “Weaver, you didn’t go there, did you?”

I shrugged. “It seemed like the best course at the time.”

He put a hand to his face, as though I had ruined some great plan of his. He then stood up straight and breathed in deeply. “I trust you engaged in no foolish actions.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I did, however, cut off one of the judge’s ears and take four hundred of his pounds.”

Somehow, the extremity of this revelation calmed him. He cleared a pair of wine-stained breeches from a chair and sat. “You’ll have to get out of the country as quickly as possible, of course. Perhaps the United Provinces. You have a brother there, do you not? Or you could go to France.”

“I’m not leaving the country,” I said, as I lifted what appeared to be a lady’s stays from the chair nearest to me. “I’ll not run away and let the world believe me a murderer.” I tossed the article of clothing on top of the breeches and took my seat.

“What do you care what the world believes? Even if you could prove you did not kill this Yate fellow, you will still be hanged for cutting the ear off a judge of the King’s Bench and then taking four hundred pounds. The law frowns upon that sort of thing.”

“It frowns upon judicial corruption too. I am certain that once the world is made to understand that, in his corruption of his office, Rowley left me no choice, any charges against me will be dropped.”

“You’ve gone mad,” he said. “Of course the charges won’t be dropped. You can’t trample upon the law, no matter how just your motivation or logical your reasoning. There’s no fair play to be had. This is the government.”

“We shall see what I can do and what I can’t,” I said, with a confidence I did not possess.

He paused for a moment. “Four hundred pounds is a great deal of money,” he said. “Do you think you’ll need it all?”

“Elias, please.”

“Well, you do owe me thirty pounds, you know, and as you are about to be carted off to the gallows, I think it only right that I bring this up. If I am to finish this little work of fiction I’m composing, I’ll need all the help I can get.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I can’t stay here long for I told the Riding Officers outside that I was merely here to deliver a billet-doux to your fellow lodger. I will leave now and meet you in one hour at an inn called the Turk and Sun on Charles Street. Do you know of it?”