The Devil's Company (31 page)

HAT NIGHT I MET WITH MR. BLACKBURN AT THE TAVERN OF HIS choosing. It was a neat place with many candles and lamps, in Shadwell near the timber yard, sufficiently far from Craven House for him to believe he was quite safe from discovery there. Inside, an unremarkable selection of middling men—tradesmen, small merchants, even a bespectacled clergyman—took their quiet drinks and meals. Blackburn and I found seats near the fire, for the warmth and because Blackburn explained that any accidental spills would dry more quickly there. Once we had sat, a handsome girl came over and asked us for our orders.

“Who are you?” Blackburn demanded. “Where is Jenny?”

“Jenny ain’t well, so I’m here for her.”

“That shan’t do,” Blackburn said. “I want Jenny.”

“It must do,” the girl answered, “for Jenny’s got the flux and so shooting blood out her arse she’s not like to live, so you’ll have to make do with me, won’t you, my sweet?”

“I suppose you will have to suffice,” he said, with evident glumness, “but you must let her know I take this most unkindly. Very well, I shall have—damn it, be prepared to listen, I say. I will have a pot of ale, but I must make myself very clear. You are to wash the pot very carefully before I am brought it. Wash it, I say, and dry it with a clean cloth. There must be no dirt upon it, nor any foreign matter in the ale. You are to make very careful inspection before I am brought what I order. Mind me now, girl. If you don’t, you’ll answer to Mr. Derby.”

She turned to me without pausing, as though such odd requests were best dismissed with no comment. “And you, sir?”

“Also a pot,” I said. “But I shan’t complain, if the amount of dirt is not above the usual.”

The girl departed and came back in a few minutes, setting our pots down before us.

Blackburn took no more than a glance at his. “No!” he cried out. “No, no, this will not do! This will not do at all! Look at this, you stupid slut. There is a fingerprint made of grease upon the side of the vessel. Are you blind not to have seen it? Take this filth away and bring me something clean.”

“It ain’t going to be clean when you’re wearing it ’pon your head, now, is it?” she asked.

My cooler temperament recognized her question as belonging to the rhetorical variety, but Mr. Blackburn seemed to take it rather more seriously. “I cannot abide such talk, for the thought of such an assault upon my person is an abomination.”

“You’re the balmy nation, not me,” the girl answered, hands firmly on hips in a well-practiced attitude of sauciness.

This exchange had gathered the attention of the bulk of the room, and now, from the kitchen, came a rather portly man with an apron across his chest, no wig, and a shaved head. He pushed through the crowd and arrived at our table. “What is this? What’s the trouble here?”

“Derby, thank Jesus,” Blackburn breathed. “This impudent baggage is serving your drink in necessary pots and mixing the contents with night soil.”

This struck me as a rather severe exaggeration, but I kept my council.

“He’s right mad,” the girl said. “It ain’t nothing but a finger smear is all.”

Derby struck the girl in the head, but not hard. In fact, he hardly hit more than hair and cap, and I knew at once it was for show. “Draw him another,” he said, “and be sure it’s spotless this time.” He turned to Blackburn. “I am sorry about that. Jenny’s got the flux, and this girl ain’t familiar with your likings.”

“I did instruct her,” Blackburn said.

Derby held out his hands in a gesture of good-natured frustration. “You know how these girls are. They grow up in filth. You tell them clean, they think so long as it lacks a cat head floating upon the top, it will do. I’ll go be sure she understands.”

“You must make certain,” Blackburn said. “Cleanliness of drinking vessels comes in three stages: the application of soap, the complete and entire removal of soap with clean water, and the drying with a clean cloth. Inside and out, Derby. Inside and out. Make certain she knows this much.”

“I shall indeed.” The fellow walked away, and Blackburn informed me that Derby was his sister’s husband’s brother, insinuating so that I could not but understand that the fastidious clerk had helped the publican out on an occasion or two when money had been hard to find. As a result, Derby indulged Blackburn’s desires, making his establishment the only one in the metropolis in which Blackburn felt he might safely drink.

“Now, sir,” he said, “as to your business, I believe you will find me your servant, and you will have just observed one of the most important principles of the orderly man’s trade: the series. Once you inform your interlocutor there are to be three components to your discourse, you have established a series, and a series, sir, is undeniable. Once a man hears the first point, he shall long to hear the remaining ones. It is a principle I have often used to my advantage, and now I share it with you.”

I responded with joy that he had been so good as to pass along this wisdom, and I begged to hear more of his philosophy of order. Thus began a long lecture interrupted only by my occasional comments of approbation. Blackburn spoke for well over an hour, and though I believed his notion of the series had some merit, it appeared to be the jewel in his intellectual crown. Rarely did his ideas transcend the matronly dictums
of A place for everything and everything in its place
and
Cleanliness is next to godliness
. Yet it was not only in these platitudes that Blackburn’s peculiarity lay. As we talked, he aligned our pots of ale. He removed the contents of his pockets, ordered them, and replaced them. He tugged repeatedly at his sleeves, announcing that there was a formula, a ratio of coat to shirtsleeve, that must be observed at all times.

In short, I began to see what I had already suspected—namely, that if his concern with order was not a form of madness, it was, at the very least, a dangerous preoccupation, perhaps caused by some sort of humoral imbalance. It also became clear to me that when I pressed him for examples of Company errors, he declined to speak any ill of the doings at Craven House. He might well hate disorder when he found it, but his loyalty was fierce. I would have no choice, then, but to loosen his tongue some other way.

I excused myself, telling him I wished to relieve myself but hated to do so in public. I believe he understood and applauded my sentiments and so I left, not to make water but instead to make opportunities.

I entered the kitchen, where I found the serving girl assembling a tray of drinks. “I wish to apologize for my acquaintance’s rude behavior before,” I said. “He is rather taken with neatness in all things, and I am sure you meant no harm.”

The girl curtsied. “You are very kind to say so.”

“It is no kindness but only common manners. I would not have you think I approved of his treatment of you. Indeed, I know him from my business, and rather than being a particular friend, he is a kind of rival to me. Tell me, what is your name, my dear?”

“Annie,” she said, with another curtsy.

“Annie, if you would offer me a favor, I am certain to reward your kindness.”

She looked a bit more skeptical now. “What sort of favor have you in mind, then?”

“My acquaintance is of rather too sober a disposition. He judges his ale too carefully, and yet I should very much like to loosen his tongue. Do you think you might be able to add a bit of gin to his ale? Not so much that he might notice, but enough to give his spirits an encouraging nudge?”

She offered me a sly grin but immediately wiped her face blank. “I don’t know, sir. It doesn’t seem right to play so upon a gentleman’s ignorance.”

I held up a shilling. “Now does it seem right?”

She took the coin from my fingers. “It does indeed.”

Back at the table the girl brought us our fresh pots. Blackburn and I talked more of indifferent matters, until he finished his tainted ale and began to demonstrate in his speech and movement that the gin was doing its business. I saw I had my opportunity before me. “For a man who has such a profound hatred of disorder, Craven House must be a difficult place to labor.”

“At times, at times,” he said, a slight slur coming over his words. “There are all sorts of wretched doings there. Papers filed in the wrong place or not at all, expenditures made without proper accounting. Once,” he said in a hushed voice, “the night-soil man was murdered upon his way to perform his tasks, and the pots were not emptied that night. The lot of them were content to let their pots sit the next day without emptying. The whole lot of them, a bunch of filthy savages.”

“Wretched, wretched,” I said. “Is there more?”

“Oh, aye, there is more. More than you would credit. One of the directors, I won’t say his name, but I’ve heard—mind you, I don’t know that it’s true—but I’ve heard he uses his shirttails to clean himself and then just goes about his business with them, all soiled as they are.”

“But surely all of the Company men cannot be so terrible.”

“All of them? No, not so terrible as that.”

The girl came and took away our emptied pots, replacing them with fresh. She offered me a sprightly wink, so as to inform me she had plied the same trick with this as she had the last.

“I think that strumpet likes me,” Blackburn said. “You saw that wink, did you not?”

“I saw it.”

“Aye, she likes me. But I’d not lie next to that, not unless I could see her take a bath first. Oh, I like to watch a woman bathe, Mr. Weaver. That’s what I like best of all.”

While he drank, he continued to inform me of other crimes against hygiene. I allowed this to continue while he consumed the better part of his fortified drink, but hearing the slur in his voice grow increasingly more pronounced, and suspecting that the conversation might soon escape my ability to shape its contours, I pushed forward, I hoped not too forcefully. “What of other matters? What of the slovenliness you implied in areas beyond personal grooming? Matters of accounting.”

“Accounting errors, indeed. Rampant, is what that is. Everywhere and all the time. You’d think they were possessed of invisible servants, magical ghosts to clean up their little messes, the way they act. And not always errors,” he said, with an unmistakable twinkle.

“Oh?”

“Indeed, your very own man—but I say too much.”

“You say too much not to continue. It would be the most cruel form of torment not to finish your thought. As we are friends, you must go on.”

“Just so, just so. I take your point. It is like the series, is it not? Once begun, it must be concluded. I believe you have learned that lesson now.”

“I have. And you must tell me more.”

“You press me strongly,” he observed.

“And you demur like a coquette, I think,” I said, as good-naturedly as I could. “Surely you don’t want to leave me upon the rack.”

“Of course not. No, I suppose I may tell you a bit more.” He cleared his throat. “Your patron—whose name I shan’t mention for one cannot be too safe—once approached me with a scheme to liberate from the books a considerable sum for his own use. It was a scheme he had already managed, so he said, with the cashier general, and he required my assistance in disguising the sum from the eyes of posterity. He had some tale of its being for an important Company project, but as he could say no more than that, I knew at once that the project was surely gaming or whoring. Needless to say, I denied him.”

“Why so?”

“Why indeed? In part because it would be a unspeakable crime to make free with the books. But there is another aspect to cooperation I found most instructive. The former cashier general, a fellow called Horner, aided your patron one too many times for his continued presence to remain comfortable. He therefore found his loyalty rewarded with an assignment to toil his remaining days in Bombay. To avoid such favors, I eschewed being so faithful a servant. I do not believe the Indies would agree with me.”

“But what of this missing sum? Did Ellershaw do without?”

“Oh, no. I found the sum missing soon enough. A rather gross effort was made to cover the trail, but it could not fool me.”

“Did you speak out?”

“In a company where loyalty is rewarded with exile to the most monstrous clime on earth, I hardly wished to evidence disloyalty. Rather, I took the opportunity to disguise the effort so well that no one else could ever find it. I would not willingly commit a crime, sir, but I saw no harm in smoothing things over once the crime had taken place.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “Such entertaining tales!” I exclaimed. “Surely there must be more.”

“Well,” he said, “there
has
been a thing or two I haven’t liked before now—before this Greene House affair, as I style it—but I can’t say much on things of the past.”

“I beg you tell me.”

He shook his head.

I decided the time had come for a strategic disregard of Mr. Cobb’s orders that I must inquire into the death of Absalom Pepper, yet never speak his name. He had said I must not raise the subject myself, but my interlocutor was now growing disoriented with spirits, and I believed I could disguise the matter should it come to that.

“Do you speak of the Pepper business?” I asked him.