The Devil's Company (18 page)

“Now that we’ve resolved this business,” Ellershaw said to me, “perhaps it would be best for you to speak a few words to your men.”

I turned to the gathered crowd, possessing no notion of what to say. I had not known to prepare any oratory, but the situation provided me with little choice but to make the best of it. “Men,” I said, “there have been mistakes in the past, that much is true. But you have been given a difficult duty and you have been hampered by a lack of organization, and that shall plague you no longer. I am here not to torment you but to make your duties easier and more clearly understood. I hope to have more information for you shortly, and until that time I trust you will acquit yourselves as best you can.” Having nothing more to say, I took a step backward.

Mr. Ellershaw, it would seem, had no better idea than I of what to do, and we stood in awkward silence for a long moment. Then one of the men leaned to his left and whispered something in Carmichael’s ear, and that worthy let out a too loud and too shrill titter.

Ellershaw turned red at once and pointed his walking stick at the laughing man. “You there,” he boomed. “Step forward.”

He did. “I am sorry, your worship,” Carmichael said, with a nervous stammer that seemed to suggest he knew he had crossed a line. “I meant no harm or nothing like it.”

“Your meaning is your own, I can’t speak to it,” Ellershaw said. “Your behavior, however, is another matter. To demonstrate that our affairs shall be far more orderly under Mr. Weaver’s guidance than under that black fellow’s, I believe it is best that this fellow receive a stout beating. It is just, and it shall provide Mr. Weaver with a fine opportunity to use his pugilistic skills once more.”

I examined his face, hoping to find the unmistakable mask of humor. Instead, I saw only a hard determination. My agitation now ran high. How could I acquit myself to the satisfaction of Ellershaw—and so consequently my true master, Cobb—if I were to shirk from this cruel task? “That is, perhaps, excessive,” I ventured.

“Nonsense,” Ellershaw told me. “I have had men under my command, and in India too. I know something of maintaining order.” He called forth two men from the crowd to hold tight Mr. Carmichael, whose eyes were now big and moist with fear. Ellershaw ordered one of the men to hand me a thick pole of wood, some three feet long and four inches wide. “Strike this fellow about his buttocks,” he commanded me. “And feel no need to restrain. It is a sturdy piece of wood, and no mere human flesh will harm it.”

I took the plank but made no motion with it. I merely stared dumbly.

If Ellershaw saw my hesitation, he made no sign of it. Instead, he turned to the immobilized man. “You are a lucky fellow. You are about to be flogged by one of the great fighters of this kingdom. You may tell your grandchildren of this.” And then to me, “Go on, then.”

“I think it overly cruel,” I said. “I have no wish to flog the fellow.”

“But I wish you to,” Ellershaw returned. “If you wish to keep your post, I suggest you listen.”

When a man is in disguise and acting as something he is not, he must inevitably face such moments as this, though not only with such dire consequences to another human being. If I were to act as myself and do what I thought right, I must refuse my charge and so jeopardize my standing with Mr. Cobb. To refrain from flogging the innocent would be to risk my uncle and my friend. On the other hand, I could not in good conscience beat a fellow with a heavy stick just to placate Ellershaw’s thirst for thrashed buttocks.

I struggled in my mind to come to a solution, but came up instead only with a justification. I was disguised, it is true, but as myself, and I like to believe that those who knew me would think me unwilling to beat someone who had done me no harm. Mr. Ellershaw had hired Benjamin Weaver, and he could not fault me for acting as myself. If I were to lose my place, I could explain to Cobb that I wished only to act as myself, thinking the order something of a test. I hoped that would be enough to preserve my friends from harm.

I handed Ellershaw the stick. “I think a beating unnecessary,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

“You risk your situation with us,” he informed me.

I shook my head. “It is a risk I am prepared to take.”

Ellershaw glowered at me. I thought for a moment that he would beat the fellow himself, but instead he tossed the wooden plank to the ground and made a wild gesture with his hand. “Let the wretch go,” he told the watchmen holding Carmichael.

A cheer of joy rose from the men, and I heard my name called out approvingly as well. Ellershaw frowned at me and at them. “I beg you await me outside, by the front of this house,” he said, “where I trust you will offer an explanation for this mutiny.”

I bowed and took my leave among the men’s huzzahs, for they appeared to have come to love me for my act of defiance. Only the East Indian, Aadil, hung back, glowering at me with foreign menace. I dreaded finding Ellershaw once more, for I felt certain he would dismiss me, and I would be forced to explain these events to Cobb. I was quite mistaken, however, for the Company man met me with a large grin and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Finely done,” he said. “The men now love you, and they shall follow you as you wish.”

I remained speechless for a moment. “I don’t understand. Do you mean to say you desired that I refuse to flog the fellow? I wish you had made your pleasure better known, for I believed I had openly defied you.”

“Oh, as to that, you did defy me. I had no desire that you refuse, but the end result is excellent, and I shan’t make a fuss of it. Come then, back to my office. There is something of great importance to discuss.”

“And what might that be?”

He observed from my voice how ill at ease I felt and let out a little laugh. “Why, you mustn’t take this warehouse business too seriously, Weaver. What I wish to discuss with you is the true reason I’ve taken you into my employ.”

CHAPTER TEN

E CLIMBED THE STAIRS ONCE MORE. ELLERSHAW, AS THOUGH made giddy by our episode in the warehouse, had to cling to the polished banister, and once he almost fell backward upon me. When we reached the top he looked back and grinned at me, exposing a mouth full of mashed brown pulp.

Once he opened the door to his office, however, he was surprised by a fellow of some forty years, plump in body, with a round face offering a nervous grin meant to appear like a smile of familiar pleasure.

“Ah, Mr. Ellershaw. I hope you don’t mind my taking the liberty of awaiting you.”

“You!” Ellershaw cried. “You! How dare you show your face here? Did I not banish you on pain of death?”

The strange man half crouched and half bowed. “Mr. Ellershaw, I told you from the beginning that yours was a delicate concern, sir, and that you would need to follow my orders to the letter, and you would need to be of a patient disposition. I have observed that you have not followed my advice on either account, but if we begin again, I believe we may—”

“Get out!” Ellershaw cried.

“But, sir. You must believe me when I say—”

“Get out, get out, get out!” Ellershaw screamed, and then surprised us both by embracing me as though he were a child and I his mother. He smelled of chop grease and a strange, bitter perfume and felt unnaturally heavy against me. Most shocking of all, I could feel the warm trickle of tears against my neck. “Make him get out,” he sobbed.

Against my own desires, I found myself patting his back in a cold approximation of comfort. With the other hand, I flicked away the intruder, who crept backward out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Through his tears, Ellershaw began to say something I could not quite make out. At first I thought to ignore it, but when he repeated the same murmurings I told him gently that I could not understand him. He murmured in the same high-pitched, baby-bird tones once more.

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand you, sir.”

Ellershaw startled me by pushing me away violently. He glared at me from three or four paces away. “Damn you, man, do you not under-stand English? I asked you if you knew of a reputable surgeon to recommend?”

I own it took all the self-control I could muster to suppress a grin. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Ellershaw, I know just the man.”

ONCE THE INTRUDER, whom I deduced to be Mr. Ellershaw’s now-erstwhile surgeon, had taken his leave and I had provided my employer with Elias Gordon’s name, matters calmed considerably. There were no signs of the previous intimacy other than Ellershaw’s overly mannered correcting of his clothes—pulling at his sleeves, dusting off his coat, and the like. After a moment of harrumphing and ahemming, Ellershaw rang his bell and summoned a girl, fortunately not Celia Glade, to bring us some tea.

While we waited, Ellershaw refused to say much of substance, and spoke instead only of a play he had seen and the scandalous French dancers who had performed afterward. Finally, the tea arrived—the green mixture of which he had previously spoken—and I drank it with some pleasure, for it had a delicate grassy quality I had not previously known.

“Now, sir,” he began, “you have no doubt begun to wonder as to why I should hire you to oversee the watchmen when we already have such a man.”

He spoke, of course, of the East Indian, Aadil, but I had been under the impression he’d been ignorant of the man’s existence. Now I knew not how to judge if his previous actions had all been a masquerade or if he played at some much deeper game.

“I presumed,” I began cautiously, “that there had been a misunderstanding, which you chose generously to settle to my benefit.”

He slammed the desk with his open palm, rattling the china. “You think me such a fool, then, do you? You shall soon see, sir, that I am no fool. I see it all; I see everything. And I see something else as well. When the Court of Proprietors meets in just over two weeks, there is a faction that will exert its utmost power to have me thrust from my position—thrown onto the streets, sir, after all I’ve done for this Company.”

“I am distressed to hear it.”

“Distressed? Is that all? Where is your rage, sir? Where is your sense of justice? Have I not toiled for this Company from the time I was old enough to walk? Did I not squander my youth in the inhospitable climes of India overseeing the factory in that fetid hell called Bombay? Have I not, with these very hands, been made to strike dead wild natives—and not just men, mind, you, but women and children—for failure to heed my directives? I’ve done all that, sir, and more, in the name of the Company’s profits. And then I return to this island and take my rightful place in Craven House, where I lead the Company to greater success than it has ever known. After a life of service, now there are those who want me gone, who say my time is finished. I won’t have it, and with your help I shall destroy them.”

“But who are these men?” I asked, sensing I was upon something of import.

His color subsided somewhat. “That I cannot determine. They use strange and clever engines of deception to hide themselves and their motives. I know not who they are or even why they wish me gone, other than that they wish their man in my place. You see, I don’t believe I am their enemy, sir. Rather, I believe they see my place as vulnerable, and so they have set their sights on it. The destruction they have planned for me is but a circumstance of their ambition, not the cause of it.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Rumblings, sir, rumblings. You do not get to my lofty place without learning to hear them, to feel them. I know the weather before it breaks, I promise you. I’ve built my life on it. A look here, a glance there. Craven House is a place of secrets, Mr. Weaver. It always has been. We on the Court of Committees each have our separate responsibilities, but it has often been our way to establish secret committees-committees whose tasks are known only to the members. We love our secrets, and for some time I have felt that there is a committee that works against me. Those papers you found, you know. I believe they were stolen by an agent of that secret committee.”

“But surely a man who has served the Company his whole life cannot be tossed aside for losing some accounting records. It seems petty.”