A Spectacle Of Corruption

CHAPTER 2

HOW HAD I FOUND myself in so dire a condition? I could not even begin to fathom this upheaval, but I knew that my difficulties were in some way linked to the services I had engaged to render to Mr. Christopher Ufford, a priest of the Church of England, serving at St. John the Baptist Church in Wapping.

In the melancholy that had settled upon me since Miriam wedded herself to a Christian gentleman, I had left my business in a state of neglect. I hardly worked at all for some months, preferring to pass my time in drink and debauchery- or else sullen contemplation- and sometimes a combination of all. So when I received notice from this cleric the same day I received three urgent notes from my creditors, I thought it best to do as I had been promising myself I would do for some months- that is to say, shake off my stupor and resume my business. I therefore dressed myself neatly in a dark suit with a clean shirt. I splashed the sleep off my face, bound up my hair, which I wore in the style of a tie periwig, and traveled by hackney coach to York Street, at which address Mr. Ufford desired me to call upon him.

I set off that morning little thinking that I would, more than thirty-five years later, commit my actions to paper, but had I been so aware, I might have taken some additional notice of the disorderly men who surrounded me as soon as I exited my hackney in Westminster. Here were four fellows, made, unknown to them, to perform the literary act of foreshadowing. They took their positions at my four corners and sneered. I thought them nothing more than the countless thieves who haunted the streets since the South Sea Company had collapsed, taking the nation’s wealth with it. But these were a different sort of criminal.

“Which be ye, Whig or Tory?” one of them, the largest- and very likely the drunkest- of them snarled at me.

I knew that the six-week-long election season was nearly upon us, and candidates would often canvass in advance by hosting riotous parties at taverns in which lowly men such as these, men who surely did not possess the vote, might drink their fill. The reason for the politicians’ generosity was quite plain: They hoped their uncouth guests might go forth and behave just as these fellows now behaved, coarse advocates of their cause.

As it was quite early in the morning, I could only presume that these men had not yet taken their sleep. I stared at them, with their unshaved faces and ragged clothes, and attempted to measure their capacity to do me harm.

“Which be ye?” I asked in return.

The leader barked a laugh. “Why should I tell you?”

I took from my pocket one of the brace of pistols I always carried about me and pointed the firearm in this man’s face. “Because you began the conversation, and I wish only to understand the level of your interest.”

“Begging your pardon, sire,” he said, grossly overestimating my position. He removed his hat and, placing it against his chest, began to bow like a Turk.

I’d have none of this groveling. “Which party are you?” I asked again.

“Whigs, if it please you, sir,” another of the men said. “What should we be but Whigs, for we’re only laboring men, you see, and not great lords, like your honor, to be Tories. We was at a tavern with drink paid for by Mr. Hertcomb, the Whig for Westminster. So we’re Whigs now, and in his service. We meant you no harm.”

I cared nothing, and knew less, for Whigs and Tories, though I understood enough to know that it was the Whigs, the party of new wealth and little church, that might be more willing to attract men such as these.

“Get gone,” I said, waving my pistol. They ran off in one direction, I walked in the other. In an instant I had forgotten about the encounter, and my mind turned to my meeting with Mr. Ufford.

I have known very few priests in my day, but from my reading I harbored the idea of dignified little men living in neat but unremarkable cottages. I was surprised to see the lavish town house in which Mr. Ufford resided. Men who seek careers in the Church tend ever to be without prospects, either because their families have not much money or because they are younger brothers and excluded from inheritance by the strict laws and customs of the land. But here was a priest who had taken for himself the whole of a fine house on a fashionable street. I could not say how many rooms he possessed, or of what nature, but I soon found that the kitchen was of the finest quality. When I knocked upon the front door, a ruddy-faced manservant told me I could not enter thus.

“You must approach from the rear,” he told me.

I rankled not a little at this treatment and thought to comment most unkindly on his orders, but his usage was, if not common, hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the excess of wine I’d consumed the night before inclined me to irritation. Nevertheless, I cast aside my annoyance and walked to the side entrance, where a stout woman with arms as thick as my calves directed me to a large table fixed in one corner. Sitting here already was a fellow of the meaner sort, not old but aging ungracefully, grizzled about the face, lacking a wig, with nothing on his balding and close-cut pate but a wide-brimmed straw hat. His clothes were of the plainer sort of undyed linens, though clearly new, and adorned only with his pewter porter’s badge, which he wore pinned to his right breast. I could not say why, not knowing the man, but I had immediately the distinct impression that Mr. Ufford had bought the clothes for him, and recently too- perhaps for this very meeting.

Soon another man, wearing a black coat and a white cravat- a style I recognized as priestly- entered the kitchen tentatively, as though sneaking a look at a room in a house where he was a dinner guest. On meeting my eyes, he simpered briefly. “Benjamin,” he cried with great warmth, though we had never before met. “Come in, come in. I am glad you could meet me as I requested, and at such short notice too.” He was tall, inclined to be plump if not fat, and with a sunken face that resembled a crescent moon. He wore a tie wig, new and carefully powdered.

I bristled a little, I admit, at the unexpected use of my name. I had never met the man before and had no reason to expect such familiarity. I suspected that if I were to address him as Christopher, or perhaps even Kit, he would not take it kindly.

“I am honored to be able to attend you, sir,” I said, with a shallow bow.

He gestured toward the table. “Come, sit down. Sit down. Oh, yes. Where have my manners gone? Benjamin, this fellow is John Littleton. He lives in my parish and has benefited from the kindness of the Church. More than that, however, he knows the parish and the sort of men who inhabit it. I have made much use of him in recent days, and I thought you might as well.”

I turned to offer the fellow, as the priest would have it, my hand in friendship.

He took it with eagerness, perhaps relieved to see I was of a somewhat more open nature than our host. “How do ye,” he said cheerfully. “Benjamin Weaver, I seen you fight, me spark. More than once, too. I seen you beat the tar out of that Irishman Fergus Doyle, and I seen you take out that French fellow too, but I don’t recollect his name. But the best match I ever saw, let me tell you, sir, was the time you fought Elizabeth Stokes. Now, she was a great fighter of the female sort. They don’t make the likes of her no more.”

I sat next to Mr. Littleton. “The sad truth is that the art of pugilism has fallen on hard times among the ladies. Now it is all female sport, and they are made to hold coins in their fists when they fight so as to guarantee they don’t scratch out each other’s eyes. The first to unclench her fists so far as to drop the coin loses the match.”

“A rotten thing. That Elizabeth Stokes, she could lay out a punch or two.” He turned to Mr. Ufford. “A mean lass, she was- vicious as a legless rat and quick as an oiled Italian. I thought certain she would take Mr. Weaver here.”

“She pummeled me something fierce,” I told him cheerfully. “That’s the difficulty I often felt when asked to fight with a lady. Were I to lose, I would be humiliated, but when I won, there was no glory in it, for I had done naught but beat a woman. I should have refused to do it entire, but such fights always generated a hearty take at the door. Those who arranged the battles could hardly shun something so lucrative, and neither could we fighters.”

“I only wish them girls were made to strip to the waist like the men. That would make for good sport, I think, with their bubbies flying here and yon. Begging your pardon, Mr. Ufford,” he added.

Ufford’s pink skin reddened. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together as though preparing to move a pile of lumber, “how about some refreshment before we cut into the meat of the matter. What say you, Mr. Weaver? Can I offer you a hearty dark ale? It’s just the sort favored by hardworking men.”

“I have not been used to work so hard as I ought of late,” I told him, “but I should like an ale just the same.” As it happened, my head ached somewhat furious from the wine of the night before and, short of a bowl of saloop, ale might be just the thing.

“I thought he’d never ask,” Littleton told me quietly, as though passing along a secret. “I nearly died of thirst more than once as we awaited you.”

Ufford rang the bell, and the serving girl with the massive arms entered the room. She was no more than sixteen, somewhat stooped of stature, and of her face I could only say that nature had not been her most generous. But she appeared a cheerful lass and smiled agreeably at all of us. She listened to Mr. Ufford’s commands and then returned in an instant with pewter mugs filled with nearly foamless ale.

“Now,” Mr. Ufford said, joining us at the table. He held out a fine-looking whalebone snuffbox. “Either of you care for a pinch?” he asked.

Littleton shook his head. “I prefer my pipe.” He removed the mentioned device and began to pack it with weed from a small leather pouch.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to refrain in my presence,” Ufford said. “I cannot endure the smell of burning tobacco. It is both noxious and like to cause fires.”

“Is it, now?” Littleton asked. “Well, I’ll put it away then.”

Perhaps to demonstrate his superiority, Ufford made an exaggerated show of his snuff-taking. He took a pinch of the dust between his forefinger and thumb and then proceeded to sniff with a great furor at each nostril. He then dabbed at his nose and sneezed three or four times. Finally he set his rag aside and beamed at us, as if to show that he had not a speck of snuff left upon his face.

I had always found the ritualized process of snuff-taking exceedingly tedious. Men would make great shows of who could sniff with the greatest strength, who could sneeze the most cleanly, who had the best-formed nostrils. Ufford had clearly made a good showing, but he found his audience not fit to appreciate his art.

He coughed nervously and then clutched a goblet of wine, its stem a shiny silver. “I suppose you are curious to learn what task you will perform for me, yes?”

“I am eager to hear your needs, certainly,” I told him, trying mightily to demonstrate confidence. Having spent some months now in shirking my responsibilities, the wheels of my thieftaking mechanism were in need of grease.

I glanced over at Mr. Littleton. He had eyes only for his rapidly draining pot of ale, and his concentration allowed me to study him freely. I thought I knew him from some previous encounter, but I could not place the association, and that made me most uneasy.

“I fear I find myself in a bit of a situation, sir,” Ufford began. “A very uncomfortable one that I cannot resolve without help, and not help to be got just anywhere, as you will see. I have preached many times in my church- Oh, I forget myself. As a Hebrew you may not be familiar with the doings of a church interior. You see, during our worship, it is common for the priest to give a long talk- well, not too long, I hope- in which he discourses on religious or moral issues he thinks relevant to his congregation.”

“I am familiar, Mr. Ufford, with the concept of the sermon.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, seeming a bit disappointed that I had diverted him from the task of definition. “I knew you would be. In any case, I have been used for the past months to preach on a subject very near to my heart, and very near to the hearts of my parish, for it is principally made up of hardworking men on the lowest echelon of the laboring ranks. Men, you understand, who live week to week on their wages and for whom the loss of even a few days’ pay, or an unanticipated sickness that requires payment to a medical man, could bring utter ruin. I have taken their cause as my own, sir, and I have spoken out for them. I have spoken out, I say, for the rights of the laboring men of this metropolis, to earn a decent wage and to make enough to support their families. I have spoken out against the cruelty of those who would keep their workers so impoverished that the allure of quick earnings in heinous crime, the sin of whoredom, and the oblivion of gin all conspire to undo them, body and soul, yes, body and soul. I have spoken out against these things.”

“I daresay you are speaking out against them now,” I observed.

Again, Mr. Ufford surprised me by being so good-natured. He laughed and patted me amiably on the shoulder. “You must forgive me if I talk a bit much, Benjamin, but on the subject of the poor and their well-being I can hardly say enough.”

“You are surely admirable in that regard, sir.”

“It is only my Christian duty- and one that I should like to see others in my church embrace. But, as I say, I have taken on the poor as my cause and spoken of the injustices they face. I thought myself doing things for the good and right, but I find there are those who don’t like my message, even among the lower orders, the very men whom I endeavor to aid.”

Here Ufford reached into the lining of his coat and produced a ragged piece of paper.

“Shall I read this to you, Benjamin?” he asked pointedly.

“I have letters,” I told him, as I concentrated with great intensity on concealing my irritation. I was not often thought to be quite so unschooled as to be illiterate.

“Of course. Your race is a very learned one, I know.”

He handed me the note, which was written in a rough and uneven hand.

Mr. Youfurd,

Dam you and dam you and double dam you twice you black gard bich. No won cares to heer any of yore drivel so dam you and be silent or you will find that there ar those who will no how to make you silent by burning yore house down around yore ears or if stone wont burn by cutting yore throat so you bleed like the pig you ar. No more of yore speeches on the poor or you will no what the poor ar and what they can do and that will be the last thing you no before you go to hell you bich and pig. You have been warned wonce and wont again except in your being kilt.

I set down the note. “I have, in my days, heard the men of my religion deliver discourses with which I was not in full agreement. This response, however, strikes me as excessive.”

Ufford shook his head sadly. “I cannot tell you the shock I felt upon receiving this, Benjamin. That I, who have now decided to dedicate my life to aiding the poor, should be by any of them reviled- regardless of how small their numbers- is a great disappointment to me.”

“And a bit of a scare too, I should think,” Littleton suggested. “All that talk of burning and throat cutting. It’s enough to put a man on edge, it is. Why, if it was me, I’d take to hiding in the cellar like a whipped child.”

It was certainly enough to put Mr. Ufford on edge. The priest flushed and bit his lip. “Yes. You see, my first thought, Benjamin, was that if people object to my sermons so strongly, perhaps I ought not to continue speaking them. After all, I might have something to say, but I don’t believe myself so original that I ought to put myself at risk for my ideas. But then, as I reflected further, I wondered if that was not a coward’s way out. It would be far more honorable, I thought, to discover who is behind this note and bring him to justice. Needless to say, I will not be preaching on this subject until the matter is resolved. That would be, I think, imprudent.”

At once, I began to feel the thaw in the frozen machinery of my trade. I thought of a dozen men of whom I might inquire. I thought of the taverns that wanted visiting, the beggars who wanted questioning. There was much to be done in the service of Mr. Ufford, and I found myself eager to perform- not for his sake but for my own.

“Properly handled, it should be no difficult thing to discover the author,” I assured him. The certainty in my voice cheered us both.

“Oh, that is very good, sir, very good indeed. I am told you are the man to see in these affairs. If I knew who had sent it, and I merely wanted him apprehended, I am told I should go to Jonathan Wild. But they say you are the one who can find men when no one knows who they are.”

“I am honored by your confidence.” I took, I admit, some pleasure in his words, for the skills he attributed to me were hard-won. I had learned a thing or two during my difficulties in attempting to discover who had killed my father and how his death related to the great financial engines that drive this nation. Most of all, I had discovered that the philosophy behind their monstrous finance, called probability theory, had the most astonishing application for the thieftaker. Until I had learned of it, I had known of no way of detecting a villain other than by using witnesses or extracting a confession. Through the deployment of probability, I had discovered how to speculate based on who might have been likely to commit a crime, what might have been a likely motive, and how such a rogue might have attempted his misdeeds. With this new and wondrous way of thinking, I had been able to apprehend rascals who might otherwise have escaped the clutches of justice.

“You are perhaps wondering why I asked John to join us today,” Ufford said.

“I have wondered,” I agreed.

“John is someone I’ve met in my work with the poor in my parish. And he knows quite a bit, really, about the sort of people who might have sent this note. I thought he would be able to provide some guidance as you explore the lairs of the unfortunates who inhabit Wapping.”

“I don’t love to involve myself in suchlike things,” Littleton told me, “but Mr. Ufford has done me some kindnesses, and I must return what I can.”

“So.” Ufford drained his glass and pushed away from the table. “I believe we are done. You will report back to me, of course, as you progress. And if you have any questions, I hope you will send me a note, and we will set up an appropriate time to discuss the matter.”

“Do you not wonder,” I asked, “about my fee for performing these services you request?”

Ufford laughed and fidgeted uneasily with one of his coat buttons. “Of course, I suppose you will require a little something. Well, when you are done, we will see to that.”

Such was how men of Mr. Ufford’s standing were used to paying tradesmen. Inquire of nothing until the work was done, and then pay what they liked when they liked- or perhaps never at all. How many hundreds of carpenters and silversmiths and tailors had gone to their graves paupers while the wealthy they served stole from them openly and legally? I knew better than to accept such treatment.

“I require five pounds, Mr. Ufford, to be paid immediately. If my labors take me more than a fortnight, I will require more, and at that time you can tell me if you are sufficiently satisfied to pay what I ask. It is my experience, however, that if I can’t find this buck in a fortnight, I likely shan’t find him ever.”

Ufford let go of his button and cast a very severe frown at me. “Five pounds is a great deal of money.”

“I know that,” I said. “It is the reason I wish to possess it.”

He cleared his throat. “I must inform you that I am not used to paying tradesmen for services before they are rendered, Benjamin. It is not very respectful of you to ask that I do so.”

“I mean neither respect nor rudeness. It is merely the way I conduct my affairs.”

He let out a sigh. “Very well. You may call here later today. I will have Barber, my man, give you a purse on your request. In the meantime, you boys surely have a lot to discuss, and you may use this room as long as you like, provided you do not stay more than an hour.”

Littleton, who had been busy staring into his mug of ale, now looked up. “We ain’t boys,” he said.

“Pardon me, John?”

“I said, we ain’t boys. You ain’t much older than Weaver, and I know I’m old enough to be your father, provided I started my swiving young. Which I did, in case you’re wondering. We ain’t boys then, are we?”

Ufford answered with a thin smile, so condescending it was far crueler than any rebuke. “You are surely right, John.” He then rose and left us alone in the room.

During the course of our conversation, I had recollected how it was I knew Littleton ’s name. Not ten years before, he had established some unwanted fame as the principal agitator among the laborers at the Deptford Naval Yard. The mayhem caused by his labor combination had produced no small number of pieces in the newspapers.

Workers in the yard had ever been used to taking home the unneeded chunks of wood remaining from their sawings, called by them chips, which they made use of by selling or trading. The value of the chips made up no small part of their wages. While Littleton had been working in the yard, the Naval Office had come to the conclusion that too many men were simply taking pieces of lumber, sawing them into chips, and walking off with them- this to the cost of a sizable fortune each year. At once the order was given: Workers could no longer remove chips from the yard, but they were offered no increase in wages to compensate for the loss. In a stroke designed to reduce fraud, the Naval Office dramatically reduced the income of their laborers and saved a great deal of money for themselves.

John Littleton had been among the most vocal in protesting this move. He formed a combination of workers in the yard, and together they declared that they would have their chips or the yard would have no workers. Defiantly they loaded up their wooden booty as they had been used to, piled it upon their backs, and departed, passing through a crowd of men from the Naval Office at whom they hooted and called foul names. It is for this reason that so many years later, when a worker is saucy with his betters, he is said to be carrying a chip on his shoulder.

The next day, when Littleton and his fellows attempted to leave with their riches, they met with more than a parcel of foul-tongued placemen. They found, instead, a group of ruffians, paid by the Naval Office to make the workers’ defiance unprofitable. They were beaten and their chips taken for the ruffians to sell as they pleased. All escaped with little more than bruised bodies or broken heads- all but John Littleton, who was dragged back to the shipyards and beaten mercilessly before being tied to a pile of wood and left in desolation for nearly a week. Had it not rained before he was discovered, he would have died of thirst.

This incident was met with the greatest public outcry, but without consequence for Littleton’s attackers- no consequence, that is, but that it brought to a period the rebellion against the Naval Yard, and it brought to a period Littleton’s efforts as a labor agitator.

Littleton called the girl to refill his tankard and then drained it in an instant. “Now that he’s gone, I’ll tell you what you need to know, and the sooner you get the fellow and your five pounds, the more kindly you’ll think on your friend John Littleton. With a bit of luck, you might have the matter in hand by the morrow, and you may then rest as comfortably as a housewife whose husband has been cured of the pox.”

“Tell me what you know, then.”

“First off, you have to understand that this here ain’t Ufford’s parish. He’s at John the Baptist’s Church in Wapping. He don’t live there because it don’t suit his style to live in such a shitten place that smells twice as beautiful as a Tom-turd man. He has a curate what he pays a few shillings a week to do most of the parish work, and this fellow is but a drudge, a mere slave to Ufford’s whims. Until of late, he had the curate do the Sunday preaching too, but then Ufford took an interest in the plight of the poor, as he calls us, and so more of the tasks went to him.”

“And how does this help me find the man who wrote the letter?” I asked.

“Well, you have to understand that there’s a lot of grumbling going on with the dockworkers.” He proudly tapped his porter’s shield. “Old privileges are being taken away, and they ain’t being replaced by anything. Men who sock a little tobacco in their trousers or stuff a few leaves of tea in their pockets- they’re getting seven years’ transportation and told they’re lucky not to get the gallows. And now that they ain’t allowed to take from the hogsheads, they ain’t being given any wages in exchange. So they’re angry, all of them, angry as a dog with a lighted taper up its arse.”

“A lighted taper, you say?”

He grinned. “And dripping wax.”

I could understand that Littleton did not much care for this situation, for it was remarkably like his troubles at the dockyards. Such was the nature of labor all over the island. Traditional compensations such as goods and materials were being wrested from workers, but no new wages were offered in place. What surprised me was that, in light of all he had suffered in his efforts to fight for the rights of workers, Littleton would allow himself to be drawn into Ufford’s circle. But I knew that a man who is hungry will often forget his fears.

Nevertheless, the story Littleton told me made little sense. “If Mr. Ufford wants to help the laborers, why would they be angry with him?”

“That’s the puzzle, ain’t it? It used to be that all us porters caught what work we could, but then this big tobacco man- Dennis Dogmill by name- he put a stop to it. Said we should get together and come to him all at once so he could hire a crew instead of wasting his time hiring this man and that. So crews got formed, but somehow they turned from crews to gangs, and they hate one another more than they hate Dogmill, which I guess was the plan all along. You know him- Dogmill?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Ain’t nothing to be afraid of in not knowing him. It’s knowing him that’s the trouble. He’s the son of the biggest tobacco man this island’s ever seen, but he ain’t his father. No matter what he does, he can’t sell as much as the family used to, and it makes him right furious. I saw him beat a porter near to death once for not working as hard as Dogmill reckoned he ought to. We stood there, Weaver, watching it, none of us willing to walk over and stop it, though we outnumbered him something severe, but that don’t signify. You take a step toward him, and you lose your badge. You have a family, it will be without bread. And there was something more, too. I got the feeling- it’s hard to say it, but it’s so- that twenty of us would not quite have been a match for him. He’s a big man and a strong man, but that ain’t it. He’s angry, if you know what I mean. And that anger is something vicious.”

“And he is behind these gangs?” I asked.

“Not direct, but he knew what he was doing when he arranged that we should separate out as we done. There’s a whole lot of gangs now, and we don’t ever come together. Now, the biggest gangs are Walter Yate’s and Billy Greenbill’s, who they call Greenbill Billy on account of his funny lips.”

“And not because of his name?”

Littleton removed his hat and scratched his nearly hairless head. “There is that, too. Howsomever, Greenbill Billy is a nasty fellow, and it’s said he’d see the other men what want to lead the workers dead, and the workers dead too, rather than yield to another man- any man but Dogmill, that is. I suspect he don’t want Ufford sticking his own bill into the mess, since it ain’t none of his business, as he reckons it, and has no cause to jab his shitten stick in the porters’ arse pot. The priest wants the gangs to form one big labor combination to fight Dogmill, and if that happens, Greenbill Billy goes from being the most powerful porter on the quays to no more than just another turd in the pile.”

“Are the other gangs willing to set aside differences and become a combination?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Just the opposite. They compete with one another, for Dogmill’s nearly got control of the whole dock now, and he don’t let any one gang work unless it’s outbid another. So our wages keep getting lower and lower, and we’re fighting all the fiercer over these little scraps.”

“And you suspect that Greenbill Billy is behind the notes?”

“Could as likely be as not. I’m in Yate’s gang, and I know he don’t go for that sort of thing. He’s a good man, that Yate. Young he is, but smart as a pig running from Bartholomew Fair, and he seems to want to do right. And he’s got the prettiest wife I ever saw. I wouldn’t mind a wife like that, let me tell you. I’ve seen her look at me once or twice, too. I know I’m a bit older than Yate, but I still have some charms that the ladies glance to. Stripped to the waist, I look like a young man, and it wouldn’t surprise me if so pretty a girl didn’t sample the wares away from her husband, if you take my meaning.”

Feeling we had somehow lost our way, I attempted to bring him back on course. “Perhaps I should have a word with Greenbill, then.”

Littleton snapped his fingers. “That’s the thing I propose. He likes to spend his time at a tavern called the Goose and Wheel, off Old Gravel Lane, near the timber yard. I ain’t saying he’s the one who sent the note, mind you, but there’s a good chance that, if he didn’t, he knows who did.”

“Have you told all of this to Mr. Ufford?”

He winked at me. “Not so much of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said in a whisper, “Ufford is a horse’s arse, that’s why. And the less he knows and the scareder he is and the more he goes bum-firking from this place to that, the more he gives me ale and bread and a coin here and there. I’ll be honest with you, since I don’t want you hearing this elsewhere and thinking ill of me. I told him not to bring you in. I said it was because the Church don’t need no Jews to do its business, but the real reason is that I don’t want him to get his mind put at ease too quick. It’s bad for my belly. This here is winter, and there ain’t no work for the quays porters. I keep food and drink in me- and only just enough to keep off death- by catching rats off the docked ships. It’s a disgrace that a porter with a badge like me is so reduced. Now, Ufford came to me and asked could I help him, and he offered me money and food, and these clothes he gave to me too. Milking his udders is a might better than catching rats, and I don’t want to see that well dry up too fast, you understand, though he seems now to feel like he done for me all he need to and I should dance for him like a Mayfair puppet.”

“I understand you.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a shilling, which I handed to him.

“Well, now,” he said, with a monkey’s grin of strong yellow teeth, “this is as much as a fellow could ask for. I think you may have found yourself a friend, friend. If you’re so inclined, I could take you to the Goose and Wheel myself and point out Greenbill to you. He ain’t no friend of mine, and I wouldn’t want him to see me there, but I can point you all the same. Provided you buy me something to drink once we’re there.”

This matter began to have the taste of something I could complete within a day or two, and that was exactly what I needed to help return me to the rhythms of my work. “I’d be most grateful,” I told Littleton. “And if this Greenbill turns out to be our poet, or leads me to him, there will be another shilling in it for you, sure enough.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” he told me. He then took his empty pewter mug and placed it in a small sack by the side of his chair. “ ’Twere mine, once,” he explained. “Or one like it.”

I shrugged. “I can assure you I have no concern for any mugs you might take from Mr. Ufford’s kitchen.”

“Right kind of you,” he said. He reached across the table to my half-full mug, drained it, and placed it with the other in his sack. “Right kind of you indeed.”