David Liss - A Spectacle Of Corruption

“Yes, but I’ve never been inside.”

“Neither have I, which is why it will be a good place to meet. And make certain you are not followed.”

“How would I do that?”

“I don’t know. Call upon your writerly muse for inspiration. Take multiple hackneys, perhaps.”

“Very well,” he agreed. “The Turk and Sun in an hour.”

I stood and set my glass down on his writing table.

“How did you get out, anyhow?” he asked me.

“Did you see that woman who embraced me after sentence was pronounced?”

“Truly, I did. A fine-looking creature. Who is she?”

“I don’t know, but she pressed a lockpick into my hand.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How very good-natured of her. You don’t know who she was at all?”

“I can only guess that, following his performance, she might belong to Jonathan Wild. Only the Thieftaker General would have a stable of pick-wielding beauties at his command. However, I won’t even speculate as to why he would wish to see me free, but then I could not suppose why he would have testified so kindly on my behalf.”

“I wondered that myself. When he took the stand, I felt certain he would do all in his power to destroy a rival. He’s treated you mighty shabbily in the past, what with sending his roughs after you to knock you down and stomp upon you. And now he pretends to admire you. It is the confusingest thing in the world, but I don’t expect you care to ask him, do you?”

I laughed. “Not likely. I have no intention of showing up in his tavern while there is a bounty on my head, to ask him if, having done me one good turn, he was responsible for doing me another. Should the answer prove to be no, I would find myself in a bit of trouble.”

Elias nodded. “Even so, if he is responsible for sending that lass to you, it would behoove you to learn why.”

“I will. In the end, I’ll know.”

“As you are no longer inside Newgate, I can only suppose that you put the lockpick to good use.”

“I put it to the best use I could. I picked the locks of my chains,” I said, “tore a bar from the window, which I used to smash through the wall of a chimney I climbed. I then broke through a few more locks, made my way up a series of stairways, and smashed through a barred window and, finally, climbed down a rope made of my own clothes, leaving me naked in the street.”

He stared at me. “An hour,” he repeated, “in the Turk and Sun.”

Ihad passed by this inn a hundred times and never entered, for it always looked unremarkable. This unremarkable quality, however, was now precisely what I sought. Inside, the tables were filled with nondescript men of the middling sort, with their rough wool clothes and their coarse laughter. They did what men do in such places- drank, mostly, but also ate their chops, smoked their pipes, and grabbed at the whores who drifted in, looking to earn a few shillings.

I took the most poorly lit table I could find and called for a plate of whatever was warm and a pot of ale. When a boiled fowl in raisin sauce was set before me, I dug at the bird with carnivorous ferocity until my face was slick with grease.

I suppose liveried footmen were not part of the usual patronage of the inn, and for that reason I received my share of curious glances, but I endured no more molestation than that. After I finished eating, I drank my ale and, perhaps for the first time, contemplated in all seriousness how I might go about extricating myself from this terrible situation, surely the worst I had ever faced in a life full of terrible situations. I had reached very few conclusions by the time Elias showed himself. He joined me at the table, hunching over as though afraid someone might toss an apple at his head. I called for ale, which cheered him not a little.

Once the drink had moistened his lips, he found himself ready to begin addressing the matter at hand. “Explain to me again why you will not flee.”

“Had I truly murdered Yate,” I said, “I would flee gladly, with all my heart. I would adopt the role of a fugitive. But I have not murdered anyone, and I won’t live the rest of my life as a renegado, afraid to enter the country that has always been my home, because someone has wished to see such a thing happen.”

“What someone has wished is to see you dead. While you live, you surely have defeated your enemies.”

“I cannot accept that. I must have justice. At the very least, I must understand why all of this has happened, and I will risk my life by remaining in London to find out. And I owe it to Yate.”

“To Yate? I thought you’d never met the man until an hour before his death.”

“It’s true, but in that hour we formed a friendship of sorts. At one instant in the fighting, he saved my life, and I won’t let his death go unpunished if I can help it.”

He sighed and rubbed his hands down along his face. “Tell me what you know thus far.”

I had already recounted to him of my early meetings with Mr. Ufford and Mr. Littleton, though I recalled those events to him and spoke also of my meeting that night with Rowley.

Elias was no less astonished than I had been. “Why would Griffin Melbury want to see you hang?” he asked. “Good Lord, Weaver. You are not cuckolding the man, are you? For if this is merely a matter of bedding another man’s wife, I will be very disappointed.”

“No, I am not bedding another man’s wife. I have not seen Miriam for nearly half a year.”

“You have not seen her, you say. Have you carried on some sort of intrigue by letter?”

I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort. I’ve had no contact with her. I would be surprised that Melbury even knew I had ever asked his wife for her hand. I cannot believe she would speak to him of his former rivals, and certainly not in a way that would be intended to spark his jealousy.”

“You can never be certain with women, you know. They will do the most astonishing things. After all, did Mrs. Melbury not surprise you entire by becoming a Christian?”

I looked away. Miriam had surprised me- to a degree that I could not entirely understand. Since I had resumed contact with my relations, most notably my uncle and his family, and returned to our neighborhood, Dukes Place, I had found myself drawn- as much by habit as by inclination- deeper into the community of my coreligionists. I attended Sabbath worship on a regular basis, said my prayers at the synagogue for nearly all major holy days, and increasingly found it difficult to violate the ancient dietary laws. I had not yet determined to observe these laws to the letter, but I had come to get a queasy feeling when I contemplated eating pig flesh or oysters or meat stewed in milk- or even the bird given to me at this tavern. I had begun to dislike keeping my head uncovered; I begged off business on Friday night or Saturday if it could be postponed; from time to time I would sit in my uncle’s study looking through his Hebrew Bible, struggling to recall the slippery language I had studied for so many years as a child.

I do not claim to have been inching toward anything a true devotee would consider full observance of the Jewish laws, but I found myself more at ease if I inclined myself toward several of them. And perhaps because, like all men, I tend to look inward and easily presume the rest of the world thinks the way I do, I believed Miriam would be so inclined as well. After all, she attended the synagogue, she assisted my aunt with holiday preparations, she never, that I could see, blatantly violated Sabbath or dietary law- not even after she moved from my uncle’s house. So why had she joined the Church?

At first I presumed it had merely been to appease this Melbury, whom I imagined as oily and unctuous, a handsome spark of better breeding than means. But later, as I contemplated Miriam’s choice, another thought occurred to me. More than once she had told me that she envied me for my ability to be like the English. I knew it was something she desired, but it was made impossible by her being a Jewess. There was an irony here, for as a Hebrew man, I could never be English, I could only be like the English. As a Hebrew woman, the opposite was true of Miriam.