A Conspiracy of Paper (34 page)

“I care nothing for any petty discomforts my inquiry brings you. And I should also remind you, sir, that I look into a matter of murder, and if you have any information that might aid my inquiry, you must offer it. If not here, or in the private place of your own choosing, then perhaps in one of His Majesty’s courts.”

Balfour studied me, and in a moment of strength that I had not been sure he possessed, he chose to disregard my warning. “Get out of my house, Weaver. I have no more business with you.”

“Very well.” I rose and tucked my hat under my arm. “I see I shall find no cooperation from you. That is your choice, but I can assure you that I am now independently interested in the death of your father, and I intend to continue my inquiry.”

“Frankly, Weaver, you may go to the deuce for all I care. What I require is that you stay out of my way.”

I smiled and stepped forward until I stood close to him—too close for his comfort. I stared, hovering over his frame. “And how do you propose to stop me, Mr. Balfour, if I should choose to do otherwise?”

Balfour stammered as he struggled to speak. “I promise you, this rudeness shall not again be tolerated.” He took a hasty step backward and struck the wall abruptly, frightening himself. “You think yourself the only man in London who knows how to defend himself? Do you think that because it would be beneath a gentleman’s honor to call you out to a duel that there are no means left to dispose of a wretch like you? Try my patience no longer, Jew. Get out.”

“You will hear from me again,” I said, as I placed my hat upon my head. “The moment I have more questions for you.”

I left Balfour standing in mute amazement, clutching his hands and certainly thanking the powers of the universe that our altercation had been without witness. For my part, I could not easily forgive this rodent who had set me upon so dangerous a course only to lose interest and obstruct my path. My anger with Balfour was so profound that I knew I should be distracted all day if I did not strike out at him, so on the way home I visited a bailiff to whom I was unknown. Assuming a false name, I swore out an arrest warrant for Balfour for the amount of fifty pounds. Nothing would come of the arrest—it would be thrown out of the courts immediately—but I took great pleasure in thinking of his confusion when spirited away from a public place by some ruffian, locked in a sponging house where he would remain until a lawyer could be procured to make the entire matter disappear.

I
N PERPETRATING MY TRICKERY
upon Balfour I was not aware that I was participating in a bit of irony set up for me by fate. As I walked the streets, attempting to divine the meaning behind Balfour’s rudeness, I noticed that there was a fellow some twenty feet back working to keep apace with me. When I first noticed him, I was not certain that he truly followed, so I increased my pace, dodging hastily between a woman pushing a cart of vegetables and an oyster woman crying her wares. From the peripheries of my vision I saw this fellow struggling to keep me in sight. My pursuer was shockingly tall, perhaps six feet and a half, and monstrous thin as well. His clothes were adequate and neat, like those of a respectable tradesman or lower servant, and his face had been recently shaved. In truth he appeared nothing like the sort of miscreant that Wild engaged in his employ, but the cove followed me for some reason, and, with my late-night encounter with the hackney coach still fresh in my mind, I would believe him as dangerous until he proved otherwise.

Keeping him at a distance as best I could, I slipped into an alley that I knew to have no other point of egress. It made its way straight for some hundred feet or so, and then with a sharp turn, ended another twenty feet on. The alley was a filthy affair, as people in the surrounding houses here emptied their privy stools from the windows above. Rats squeaked noisily as I quickly trotted my way through the filth, which clung about my boots and stockings. I concentrated on my goal; I pretended that I smelled nothing. I had no care for disgust, for the piles of excrement and pools of piss would serve as an effective ally, provided my pursuer’s stomach turned while mine remained calm.

And so it worked, for he entered the alley slowly, his own thin leather shoes providing not nearly the protection of my sturdier boots. I heard him as he trudged onward, cursing quietly as he waded toward me. Having passed the bend, I could not see him, but I listened to each slow, painful, repulsed step. I heard him slip, a splash, and then a volley of muttered oaths. If he had anything like the knowledge I had of the Covent Garden streets, he knew the alley to be a blind one and that he must find me cornered in the end. And so he moved on, suppressing a gag, startling at rats, wincing at the cold of his submerged feet. At last he rounded the darkened corner, and unable to see, he took a few steps forward, which was precisely what I had been waiting for.

I jumped down from the narrow walls above where I had lodged myself, and where this fellow had passed directly under me without noticing my presence. As I landed directly behind him, filth splattering the two of us, I pulled my pistol from my waistcoat and pointed it square in the fellow’s face.

“Now, my shitten friend,” I said with a sneer, “you will tell me who you are and why you follow me, or you will rot here unnoticed until the rains wash all away.”

He moved to drop to his knees, but soon thought better of it, and instead staggered to and fro, holding his hands together in supplication. “Don’t kill me, Mr. Weaver, sir. It’s my first time, it is, and I only want to do right.”

Taken aback, but still cautious, I asked who he was and why he followed me.

“I work for Justice Duncombe, sir. The justice of the peace, he is. He’s sent me to fetch you. It’s me first time for that, sir, as a constable.”

“And what does the justice want with me?” I asked, still waving the pistol in his face, though now more absently than maliciously.

“He wants you before his court, he does,” the poor constable sputtered, tears in his eyes. “You’re under arrest, you are.”

J
USTICE
J
OHN
D
UNCOMBE
was something of an anomaly in London’s corrupt legal system. He was a trading justice, to be sure, and would sell a verdict for even a slight consideration rather than pass an opportunity to augment his income. Yet if there was no bribe to be lost he did not, like so many other trading justices, shirk his responsibilities or rule with arbitrary cruelty. Rather, unfettered by the bonds of corruption, he chose to pursue true justice vigorously and often wisely. It was said of John Duncombe that the corruption of justice was his business, but the pursuit of justice was his pleasure.

I could not say if it was for business or pleasure that Duncombe had brought me into his rooms on Great Hart Street. I waited in anticipation, along with the constable, both of us attracting looks of derision from whores and pickpockets, until Duncombe called us before his bench.

He held his court in a largish space attached to his own lodgings upstairs. Perhaps previous tenants had once used the room for balls or other such entertainment, but now it merely housed only the most wretched of the London streets. The judge sat behind his imposing desk toward one end of the room, surrounded by his constables and clerks and servants. His desk was covered with a pile of documents, a few legal books strewn about, and a large bottle of port wine, from which he frequently refilled his glass. At the height of the afternoon, such as it was, the court was not full of the most wretched that could expect to pass through its doors. Duncombe’s custom was to handle first thing in the morning the nightly crop of prostitutes, the drunkards, the late-night mischief-makers, house-breakers, footpads, and the other criminals rounded up by the night watch.

During the day, a judge like Duncombe would attend to business held over from these criminals—such as reviewing the case of a vagrant he had committed to a few weeks of labor in Bridewell—or he would take depositions or review matters of somewhat larger consequence as they trickled in before him.

Duncombe was an aging, jowl-heavy man, with small eyes and an enormous bewarted nose. He remained in possession of only a small number of teeth, and his face collapsed grotesquely about the mouth area, giving him a look of an empty satchel dangling below a yellowing wig. I watched, but could not hear as he spoke to a woman who stood before him. She was young, filthy from the kennel of the streets, and her clothes did little more than cover the most delicate secrets of her female anatomy. Duncombe asked her questions with a stony face. She replied with sobs. Finally the justice made a pronouncement of some sort, and the woman fell to her knees and thanked God loudly. One of the constables came by and helped her to her feet and led her out as she praised Duncombe wholeheartedly. I hoped her happiness boded well for me.

“Mr. Benjamin Weaver?” he pronounced my name loudly so that his voice would carry. Duncombe scanned the courtroom until his eyes landed on me. He refused to establish any intimacy with me, though he knew me well; I frequented his court as a witness when I brought forth prigs I apprehended and visited him with some regularity to obtain warrants and to procure a constable for arrests, but Duncombe cared not much for thief-takers, and he believed I must be as dishonest as most of that trade.

“Step forward,” he intoned. “But not too much forward, if you please.”

I approached the bench and attempted to ignore the laughter around me.

“How came you to be so befouled?” he asked me. “You have frequented this court, but I believe this is the first time you have done so while covered with kennel water.”

“As I walked down the street, your honor, I found that I was pursued by a strange man. Not knowing him to be an officer of this court, I thought my life in danger. I sought shelter in an alleyway, which was, unfortunately, notable only for its filth.”

He regarded me gravely. “Do you always run from strangers, Mr. Weaver?”

“This is London, your honor. Who that wishes to stay alive does not run from strangers?”

Those who had heard my retort laughed with appreciation. Even the judge smirked a bit.

“I call you here in the matter regarding one Kate Cole, who is to stand trial in two weeks’ time for the crime of murder. Your name has been implicated in this case, and I have been asked to take your deposition.”

I believe my appearance betrayed nothing of my shock, but I felt as though I had been once again struck from behind by Wild’s ruffians. I like to think that I put my life as a criminal behind me in part because I could not condone the immorality of a criminal life. While that is true to some extent, it is no doubt equally true that as a thief-taker I did not expose myself to the haphazard rulings of the legal system. I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen of the bench, but it is no secret that our system of justice, praised throughout Europe for its severity and its swiftness, is a terrible and fearful thing, and no man, guilty or innocent, wishes to stand before it.

Thus my fear was well justified. Had I never in my life heard of Kate Cole nor knew the slightest thing of what the judge spoke, it would in no way guarantee I would not wind up dangling at the end of a rope at Tyburn Tree. I knew I would have to proceed slowly and carefully. “I have nothing to depose,” I said, trying hard to look tired and confused. “I have no knowledge of this matter.” It was a ticklish business, and while I did not like perjuring myself before the law, I felt I had no choice. To tell the truth in this matter would be to compromise Sir Owen’s anonymity, which I had promised to protect. All I could do for the nonce was to attempt to gain more time.

“You have never heard of Kate Cole?” the judge asked skeptically.

“Never,” I said.

“That rather saves me some time, then, doesn’t it?”

And it was then that I knew that this was a financial matter, not a juridical one. Duncombe would not have dropped the deposition so quickly were it justice instead of silver he chased. I took this development ill; if Duncombe was being paid to involve me in this, then any bribe I might offer, and that he would accept, would do me little good. It was the rule of trading justices to take bribes from all parties but to favor the most powerful. I was no match for Wild in this regard.

“I shall indicate that you deny all knowledge of this person and her crimes,” Duncombe said. “However, you must be informed that her trial is to take place at the Old Bailey in exactly two weeks’ time, and that you must be prepared to be called as a witness for the defense. You are not to leave London between now and that time, for this court might have need of you again. Do you understand, Mr. Weaver?”

I nodded. “I believe I understand quite clearly, your honor.”

“Then it is my advice that you bathe.”

With that Duncombe dismissed me, and after offering a sympathetic clap on the shoulder of my miserable constable, I left the justice’s offices with a feeling of dejection. In my mind I could see myself standing before the bar at Kate Cole’s murder trial. And while I was willing to lie before someone such as Duncombe, I did not feel willing to perjure myself at a murder trial in the Old Bailey. Should it come to that, I would be forced to tell the truth, and I was therefore obliged to let Sir Owen know what turn events had taken.

Duncombe had said that I was to be a witness for the defense. That meant that it was not Wild, but Kate, who had offered my name, for there was no reason why Wild would want to see a woman defended whose conviction would yield him forty pounds. Yet I could not fathom how Kate could have learned of my name, or if she had, what she had to gain by involving me without first seeking me out. She surely understood that I was anxious to keep my name out of her trial and would have gone to great lengths to do just that. It was possible that Wild had indeed thrown my name into the matter in order to play me against Kate. Was it his hope that he could hang Kate and ruin my reputation with a single stroke? I could not even begin to guess. Elias had advised that I inquire into these matters using probability, not facts, but for probability there needed at least to be logic, and here I could find none.