A Spectacle of Corruption (14 page)

“I would never do anything so treacherous. I will do anything in my power to help you restore your good name, Mr. Weaver. You need only ask it. Times are hard, I won’t deny it. Since the South Sea sunk, men aren’t buying clothes like they used to, but times are never too hard to help out a true friend.”

“You are too good.”

“But for now, sir, there is the matter of my own girl.”

We arrived in his shop, where Elias was seated at a table, drinking a glass of wine and chatting about the opera with Swan’s pretty fifteen-year-old daughter, a girl of dark hair and dark eyes and a face as round and red as an apple.

“Such a marvelous spectacle,” he was saying. “The Italian singers warbling, the momentous stage, the marvelous costumes. Oh, you must see it some day.”

“I’m sure she will,” I told him, “and I would hate for you to ruin the surprise of it, so you’ll tell her no more of operas, Elias.”

He flashed me a pout, but he took my meaning well enough and I knew he would not make himself difficult. “Good, then.” He rubbed his hands together. “We are all here, and we may begin.”

Swan sent away the daughter and closed the door. “You need only direct me, and I will do as you say.” He began picking with distaste at my footman’s livery with his long, unusually narrow fingers.

“Here is what we want,” Elias began. He rose to his feet and started to pace about the room. “Having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that Mr. Weaver must take on the persona of a man of means, one recently returned to this island from the West Indies, where he owns a plantation. His father, let us say, was always active in politics, and now that he is come to his homeland, of which he knows nearly nothing, he has decided he too would like to become a political creature.”

I nodded my approbation. “It seems a fair disguise,” I said, thinking that this persona’s newness to the isle would conceal my own awkwardness in society. “As to the clothes?”

Elias clapped his hands together. “That’s the thing, Weaver. Our worthy Mr. Swan must manage it very carefully. If you do this right, Swan, I can promise you my own business in future.”

“I can think of no greater incentive to give the man,” I observed, “than the business of a gentleman who never pays his bills.”

Elias pursed his lips but otherwise ignored me. “If Weaver is not to be recognized, there must be as little about him as we can manage that draws attention to his identity. His clothes, then, must be fashionable and bespeak his supposed station, but they must not make themselves conspicuous in any way. I want that when a man looks at Weaver, he merely thinks he has seen that kind a hundred times before and looks no further. Do you understand my meaning, Swan?”

“Perfectly, sir. I am your man.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” Elias exclaimed. “We can use the very principles of a performing trickster to hide Mr. Weaver in plain sight. Why, I believe anyone might look upon him who had seen him countless times before, and not know him for who he is. And as for the rest of the world, which seeks him out from a description of his general personage—why, these strangers will never look at him twice.”

Swan nodded. “You are right in that, sir. Very right, for in my trade I have long come to know that when we meet each other, we see the clothes and the wig and the grooming, and we form our opinions with only a glance or two at the face. But as to choosing the clothes to do what we wish, that shall not be easy. Or, rather, it shall not be easy to hit it just on target. We must be most cautious, I think.”

And here they entered into a conversation I could hardly even begin to understand. They spoke of fabrics and cuts and weaves and buttons. Swan pulled out samples of cloth, which Elias waved away with contempt until he found what he liked. He examined threads and lace and buckles; he dug through buckets of buttons. Elias proved himself as much an expert on these matters as Swan, and they spoke in their particular argot for near an hour before the course of my wardrobe was determined. Would a coat of silk or wool be more fitting? A dye of blue or black? Blue, of course, but how deep a shade? Velvet, but not
this
velvet! Of course, they could not use
this
velvet (which looked to me indistinguishable from the one they could use quite happily). And as for the embroidery—well, that would have to be just so. I believe Elias took as much pleasure from ordering my new clothes as he did his own.

“Now, regarding your wigs,” Elias announced, when he had ordered clothing to their mutual liking. “That is another matter requiring particular attention.”

“My wife’s brother is a peruke maker, sir,” Swan said. “He can do the business.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“Entire, sir. He can be trusted entire, but there is no need for him to be trusted at all. He need not know who Mr. Weaver is or that there is aught unusual about him.”

“I fear he must, for we need wigs with a singular design—that of concealing Mr. Weaver’s own hair.”

“Would it not be easier for me simply to shave my head?” I asked. Though no Samson, I admit to an attachment to my locks, which I thought rather manly. However, I was more attached to my life, and I saw no reason to burden myself with the hangman’s noose if I could squeak by with the barber’s shears.

“That cannot be,” Elias said, “for you are to make appearances still as Benjamin Weaver, and if you show yourself with a wig or a shaved head, the world will know that you are otherwise disguising yourself, and those who seek you out will look for a man in a wig. Far better for you to be blatant in your exposure so that no one even thinks to peek under the hat of a West Indian planter.”

I accepted his point, and we agreed that there was no choice but to put our faith in Swan’s brother-in-law.

Mr. Swan began to take my measurements while Elias continued to chat about how I would carry out his plan. “You will need to choose a name, of course. You want something Christian sounding, but not too Christian.”

“Michael?” I suggested, thinking of the English version of my uncle’s name.

“Too Hebrew,” Elias said, waving his hand. “There’s a Michael in your Jewish scriptures.”

“How about Jesus,” I suggested. “That should be sufficiently un-Hebrew.”

“I thought perhaps Matthew. Matthew Evans. There is a name neither unusual nor common. Just the very thing we need.”

I had no objections, so at that moment my identity as Matthew Evans pushed its way into the world through the womb of Elias’s mind. Not a particularly pleasant way to be born, but the alternatives were surely worse.

S
wan informed me that it would be some days before my first suit was ready, but he was able, while I waited, to provide me with a plain and unpretentious costume of the kind I normally wore (he was working on such a one for another customer and merely altered it to fit my frame). I could now safely dispose of my footman disguise, but in doing so I also ran the risk of being recognized, for in these clothes I looked far more like myself than I would have preferred.

The tailor then took us to his brother-in-law’s shop, where I ordered two fashionable wigs. The peruke maker offered to trim my hair somewhat to make the fit easier, but not so much that a casual observer might notice my hair had been altered. This fellow, too, said that he would work night and day to make certain my wares were ready as quickly as possible. Matthew Evans would have to wait only a little while before making his first appearance in the world.

I
n the meantime I had to procure for myself a place to stay, for I thought it best not to linger at a single inn or another for more than a day or two. I therefore found new lodgings, and though the innkeeper appeared suspicious of my lack of belongings, I bespoke a fiction of relocation and lost baggage that he found satisfying enough once I promised to pay for my stay each night in advance and for my meals as I ate them.

Thus, with a tolerable roof over my head once more, I commenced my political studies, a program that began with a visit to Fleet Street to buy several of the common newspapers. I learned less of politics than I did of myself, for I discovered that there was no more celebrated topic than Benjamin Weaver. Our British papers love nothing so well as a notable cause, and no hack writer wishes to be so unoriginal as to have the same thought as any other writer in the land, so I could not be utterly astonished at seeing my name so used. I had seen these journalistic eruptions many times in the past. Nevertheless, it was somewhat disorienting to see one’s name used so freely, with so little regard for the truth. It is a very strange thing to be transformed into metaphor.

I stood to each writer as a mere representation of his own political beliefs. The Whiggish papers lamented that so horrific a criminal as myself might have escaped, and they cursed the wicked Jacobites and Papists who aided me. The Whigs painted me a rebel who conspired with the Pretender to murder the king, though the mechanics of this plot were mentioned only in the vaguest of terms. Even I, a political naÏf if one had ever been born, could see that the Whigs merely wished to turn a potential embarrassment into a political tool.

The same held for the Tories, whose papers suggested that I was a hero, having attempted to prove my innocence in a crooked Whig court. I must be commended for taking matters into my own hands when the government had betrayed me. And as Whigs were known for their relative tolerance toward Jews (a mere side effect to a greater laxity in matters of religion), and Tories for their intolerance, I thought it interesting that neither camp made reference to my being of the Hebrew nation.

None of this, however, was as interesting as an advertisement I found in the
Postboy.
It read:

Mr. Jonathan Wild announces that he has found himself in possession of a box of missing
linen
and should very much like to return it to its wayward owner. If that gentleman will present himself at the Blue Boar tavern this Monday at five o’clock, being sure to stick to the
right-hand
side, he will find many of his most pressing questions answered.

Here was surely a hidden message, for my true family name, Lienzo, signifies
linen
in the Spanish tongue, and my first name, in the Hebrew language, means
son of the right hand.
I understood the code at once. Wild, my old enemy, the greatest criminal in the history of the metropolis and the man who had defied all expectations by defending me at my trial—this man wished to meet with me.

I would find out his intentions sure enough, but I had no intentions of walking blithely into his lair. No, I would take quite another route.

CHAPTER 9

J
ONATHAN WILD’S
secret message indicated that he wished me to call on him come Monday, but I found his note on a Thursday, and I had no intention of waiting so long for my answers. I continued to believe that the pretty girl with the yellow hair and the deftly hidden tools of escape had been his creature, but I could not know that with any certainty. I only had a hunch and the knowledge that Wild was inclined to send off pretty girls in disguise to do his bidding. But even if he had helped to orchestrate my freedom, I did not for an instant believe that he would be immune to the lure of a hundred-and-fifty-pound bounty. He could not truly expect that I would walk into his offices in the Blue Boar—a tavern located across from the Little Old Bailey, just a few paces from where my death had been mandated by law—and present myself to be disposed of as he saw fit. Wild had used me ill in the past, and even his kind words at my trial could not entice me to trust him now.

Instead, I thought to learn more of his interest in me through quite different means. I visited a butcher in a part of town where I was unknown and there took for myself some choice cuts of beef, which I noticed were wrapped in newspapers featuring a story about the notorious villain Benjamin Weaver. From there, I sat in a tavern until dark and then made my way to Dukes Place, my own neighborhood, where I had not been now in more than two weeks. It was an odd thing, being back in such familiar surroundings, hearing the chatter in Portuguese and accented English and occasionally the tongue of the Tudescos from eastern Europe. The streets smelled of food now being prepared for the Sabbath, to begin at nightfall the next day, and the air was ripe with cinnamon and ginger and, less appealingly, cabbage. Ragmen and trinket peddlers and fruit sellers cried out their wares. It was all too familiar, for I was only a few streets from my own rooms, rooms that had surely been picked clean by the state in compensation for my having been convicted of a felony. I felt a strange urge to go there, to see what had been done, but I knew better than to indulge such a feeling.

Instead, I found the house I sought, which was none the best guarded, and it was no difficult thing to slip inside a window that faced an alley and climb the stairs to my desired chamber. The locked door proved no great obstacle, for, as my reader already knows, I have in the past proved myself handy with a lockpick.

The barking and growling on the other side of the door, however, would present more of a challenge. Nevertheless, I had always heard that the man I sought made a habit of coddling his dogs, feeding them sweetmeats and fondling them like children. Here, surely, were beasts who had never tasted human flesh. That, at any rate, was the wager I had made.

I opened the door, and the creatures lunged at me—two enormous mastiffs the color of day-old chocolate—but I was ready and held out my package from the butcher. Whatever urge to protect their territory that drove them they now set aside, as they tore at the little package, devouring flesh and paper all. I, in turn, closed the door and took a place in a chair I found convenient, acting all the while as though there were nothing more natural than for me to be in this room with them. It is the trick with dogs, I had long since discovered. They are strangely canny at discovering your mood and responding to it. Act with fear, and they will lunge at you. But toward a calm and relaxed man they will show indifference.

By the time I took my seat, the meat I had purchased was gone, and now I faced no greater challenge than managing the affection of the creatures. One showed me its belly and demanded that it be rubbed. The other set its head in my lap and stared at me until I agreed to scratch its ears.

I had a trying two hours to wait in this unlikely state, breathing in the pungent scent of pampered beast, and then I heard the turn of the door handle. I could not tell if he detected that the door had been meddled with or no, but he entered the room, a candle held before him, calling out warm greetings to the dogs, who had now abandoned me that they might leap up upon their master.

The instant he shut the door behind him, I had a pistol to the back of his neck. “Don’t move.”

I heard a heavy exhalation, perhaps a laugh. “If that pistol misfires, you’ll have to face both me and the dogs.”

I shoved a second pistol into his ribs. “I am willing to gamble they’ll not both misfire. Are you?”

“Shoot me if you like. You’ll still have the dogs at your throat, and you’ll never get out of here alive,” said Abraham Mendes, Wild’s most trusted lieutenant. He, like me, was a Jew of Dukes Place and we had grown up together. While this accident of geography hardly made us friends, there was something of a begrudging understanding between us, and I was far more inclined to treat with him than his master.

“I’ve already faced down the ferocity of your beasts.”

“Look, Weaver, you may have lost all fear of my dogs, but though they do not tear you apart at this moment, rest assured that they will not hesitate to do so if I give the command or if you hurt me. Nevertheless, this show of strength is hardly necessary. One word out my mouth would have you dead and ripped to pieces. That I haven’t spoken this word should tell you I want you alive and healthy. Surely you must know after Wild’s performance at your trial that we will not go after you. You’ve nothing to fear from him or from me.”

“There wasn’t a hundred and fifty pounds to be had at my trial.”

“He has no interest in pursuing that bounty and neither do I,” he said. “I give you my word.”

I was reluctant to take the word of a man who made a good deal of his income through perjury, but I felt I had little choice, so I set aside my weapons. “Apologies,” I muttered. “But I’m sure you understand the need.”

“Of course. I’d have done the same.” Mendes lit two lamps and called over his dogs. If they felt any guilt at having betrayed their master, they showed none of it. Neither did Mendes show any resentment to the animals for their gullibility. He pulled from his pocket some dried beef, which surely paled in comparison to their earlier fare, but they made no complaint.

It was odd for me to see this man, large and ugly, with hands that appeared strong enough to crush these dogs’ skulls if he chose, engaged in such a warm display toward mere beasts. But I had long since learned that people are not the uniform creatures the novelists would have us believe but, rather, a series of contradictory impulses. Mendes might love these beasts with all his heart and still coolly unload a pistol into the skull of a man whose only crime was to be disliked by Jonathan Wild. And Mendes alone would see the consistency in such behavior.

“Some port?” he asked.

“Thank you.” I only briefly considered the possibility that he might poison the drink. But poison did not seem Mendes’s way. Seeing me ripped to pieces by his dogs was more in his line, and as he had not done this I could assume the drink to be safe.

He moved to hand me my pewter cup, but it slipped from his hand. As it landed on the wooden floor with a light tap, I understood that it was empty—and I understood that it had been a distraction.

Mendes now stood over me with a blade to my throat—a long knife of remarkable sharpness. He pushed with the sharp blade, and I backed up, feeling it cut into my skin. He pressed forward, however, and soon I was against the wall.

“Guard,” he said quietly. I did not understand his meaning until I realized it was a command to his dogs. They approached and stood at my feet, legs wide apart. They looked at me and growled but did nothing more, awaiting Mendes’s command.

The blade moved just a quarter inch, and I felt the skin on my neck slide. Not deeply, but enough that there should be blood. “I thought to let the insult go,” Mendes said. I felt his breath on my face, hot and pungent. “I understood that you believed you needed to put a gun to me, that you could take no chances until you were certain. I am not unaware of all of that, and so I thought to forget the matter. But I cannot forget it, Weaver. You put a gun to me and you threatened me, and now there must be retribution.”

“What sort of retribution do you envision?” I asked. I spoke slowly to keep the skin from moving too much against the blade.

“An apology,” he said.

“I apologized before,” I observed.

“Before you apologized to be courteous. Now you must apologize out of fear.” He stared hard into my eyes, refusing to turn away. “Are you afraid?”

Of course I was afraid. I knew Mendes to be unpredictable and violent, two qualities I did not desire from a man holding a knife to my throat. On the other hand, there was such challenge in his voice that I could not capitulate—not like he wished me to.

“I’m uneasy,” I said.

“Uneasy is not enough. I want to hear that you are afraid.”

“I’m concerned.”

He blinked. “How concerned?”

“Quite.”

He let out a breath. “And sorry?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Very sorry to have had to hold a pistol to you.”

He took away the blade and backed off. “I suppose that will have to do. You with your irrational pride—we’d have been here all day.” He turned away—to show his confidence, I suppose—and found a rag, which he tossed to me, presumably for the purpose of dabbing up the blood on my neck.

“Now,” he said, as he picked up the fallen pewter cup, “shall we take that port?”

Soon we sat in chairs across from each other, faces red from the fire, chatting as though we were old friends.

“I told Wild you would never come to meet him,” Mendes said, his scarred face erupting into a satisfied grin, “but he insisted the advertisement, assuming you saw it, would have the desired effect. And now it seems he was correct, for in truth he only wanted to pass some information along to you, and in your current state you are a difficult man to seek out.”

I could not regret that it was so. In the past, Wild’s efforts to seek me out had involved sending his men to attack me and drag me to his house against my will. “And what information would that be?”

Mendes leaned back in his chair, as satisfied as a country squire who had just finished his evening fowl. “The name of the man who has brought all this trouble down on your head.”

“Dennis Dogmill,” I said flatly, in hopes of seeing him perhaps a bit less puffed up.

He leaned forward, unable to hide his disappointment. “You are cleverer than Wild would have believed.”

“Wild thinks no one clever but himself, so I cannot bristle at his underestimating me. Nevertheless, I wish you would tell me what you know.”

He shrugged. “Not very much, I’m afraid. We learned that you had been meddling around with the porters at Wapping. Dogmill has been wrestling with the labor combinations for months, even while he sets them against one another. This fellow Yate was causing him no small amount of grief, and it’s easier to kill a porter than it is a rat.”

“That much I know. Why would he choose to blame me for the crime?”

“Wild had hoped,” Mendes said, “that you would tell us that.”

I felt the sad tug of disappointment. Nevertheless, that Wild had known to blame Dennis Dogmill for my woes suggested to me that he might have more information as well. “I wish I could. I believe that is the very key to all of this.”

Mendes gazed at me skeptically. “Come, Weaver. The truth.”

“Why should I not speak the truth?”

“There have been some suggestions in the paper that your loyalties are not to His present Majesty.”

I laughed aloud. “The Whigs are merely trying to turn an embarrassment into political capital. It was one of their judges who so blatantly condemned me against the evidence. You are not so foolish as to believe what you read in the political papers, I hope.”

“I don’t believe it, but I wonder about it. You have not involved yourself in some Jacobite plot, have you, Weaver?”

“Of course not. Do you really think me mad enough to indulge in treason? Why should I want to see any James the Third on the throne?”

“I admit it seemed to me unlikely, but these are strange times and there are plots everywhere.”

“I cannot speak for that. Until recently, I could have hardly told you the difference between a Tory and a Whig—or a Tory and a Jacobite, for that matter. I am far more interested in saving my skin than restoring a dethroned monarch—and I should be loath to see a change in a government that has treated our race so kindly.”

“I should think you would look favorably on the Whigs when the man who married your cousin’s pretty widow runs as a Tory. You once took it into your head to marry her, did you not?”

I glared at him. “Don’t think to take liberties with me, Mendes.”

He held up a massive hand. “Stay your temper, friend. I meant nothing by it.”

“No, you did mean something. You meant to prod me to see how I should react. Prod me again on this matter, and you’ll know—dogs or not—I am not to be made sport of.”

He nodded solemnly, a look—almost of remorse, I must say, settling onto his misshapen face. “Then let us go back to the matter at hand. Why have you been singled out to hang for Yate’s death?”

“I cannot even speculate. It seems there would be countless other men who would have made more convenient victims, so I can only conclude that Dogmill chose me for some purpose relating to my inquiry.” Here I told him of my service to Mr. Ufford.

“Ufford has been making trouble with the porters,” Mendes said, “and he is a known Jacobite, but that hardly seems reason enough for Dogmill to wish you to hang. You say you learned nothing about these notes, but it would be reasonable to suspect that Dogmill thinks you’ve learned something—and he would rather see you dead than reveal it.”

I shook my head. “Then why not slip a blade into my back when I am not looking? Why not have my food in prison poisoned as I awaited trial or have a guard smother me in my sleep? There are a hundred ways to kill a man, Mendes. You know that. A thousand, if he is in Newgate. Arranging for a trial and bribing a judge to misdirect a jury hardly seem the most effective. I am not convinced that what has happened to me is a mere effort to keep me silent.”