Instruments of Darkness

6

Graves was amazed by the pace at which Mr. Chase could walk. Even with the heat of the day boiling up, and the crowds shoving each other horribly near the churning wheels of carriage and cart along High Holborn, he strode forward, and the people of London, recognizing a strong will and a firm hand, parted for him. Graves bobbed along in his wake, occasionally shouldered by those who had stepped aside for the older man, and missing his step on the wreckage and rubbish knocked about on the pavements. He wondered if he were being subject to a demonstration; an illustration of his own small powers in contrast to the solidity of his host. He was torn between resenting it, and recognizing the justice. He had been quick to calm the children in the morning, but his first sensation on seeing his name as guardian in Alexander’s will had been one of fear. He would let no man call him a coward, but this was a burden that terrified him.

Mr. Chase came to a sudden stop, and caught up in his own thoughts as he was, Graves almost barreled into the back of him. Mr. Chase paused and put his nose into the air.

“This way, Mr. Graves. I should like to talk this over with you away from the house, and I think my coffee house is the place to be.”

Graves put his hand to his pocket. He had four shillings, though they were owing to Molloy, but it would be enough to give him the appearance of a gentleman in a public place. They were not far from the coffee shop, which turned out to be a pleasant enough little house whose high bay windows were already full of customers at their pipes and papers, the long handled coffee pots set among them like the hookahs in the Arab houses by the wharf. Mr. Chase greeted half a dozen men as they entered, but found a table that would admit no more than himself and Graves in a more secluded corner, and ordered drink and pipes from a young serving girl who greeted him by name.

Graves looked about him. Each of the coffee shops that had become so much part of the fabric of London in the last years had developed its own character and its own clientele within a few months of its existence. Where Graves usually went in Fleet Street to comfort himself in disappointment, or to celebrate any victory real or imagined, the drinkers looked pinched and bitter, or loudly traded barbs and satires. One could not take two steps before a friend or casual acquaintance placed an inkstained palm on one’s sleeve to whisper gossip or complain of their outrageous treatment at the hand of a printer, or to claim they had been insulted in the ill-read and ill-rhymed verses of another. Some men scratched at their badly fitting wigs and screwed up their eyes against the smoke to try and find floating free above them the right word, the right ringing phrase to seal a paragraph, make their friends jealous and their enemies fall like so many wooden soldiers. Others boasted at broad tables of their latest commissions and future successes, apparently oblivious to the fact that none of their companions was willing to look them in the eye.

Graves always felt a twinge of sympathy when he saw the boasters, knowing, as sure as he knew himself, that their desks were dusty and the pages empty. No man who has seriously begun a work speaks of it with such pride and pleasure. Only the idea is that delightful. It was the quiet men with an air of abstraction, deep lines in their foreheads and the impression of being continually almost in tears, in whom Graves believed as writers, after his faith in the boasters and versifiers continually searching for a patron or cursing their enemies had failed.

Mr. Chase’s preferred coffee house was altogether more comfortable. The men were as well dressed as Mr. Chase himself, and mostly as broad. There were no pretensions to high fashion-the waistcoats of the gentlemen were not heavily embroidered or strung about with fobs and seals, but the cut of the cloth was universally good, and the quality fine. Graves thought of his mother’s two tabbies, sleek, happy animals, licking their paws in front of the fire when they had enjoyed a successful hunt. Business must be in general good, despite the disturbances in town. Graves could fancy he heard an underlying purr among the talk and clatter of cups, the sound of men who even as they drank and drew on their pipes were making more money than their families and other dependents could spend.

Graves looked across at his companion. “Do you think the rioters are done, Mr. Chase?”

Mr. Chase looked up, as if surprised to find he was not alone.

“Eh, my boy? Oh, perhaps. We shall know in a few hours.” He pulled at his earlobe and his eyes clouded a little. “That is Mr. Landers standing by the door. He is a Catholic with a neat little warehouse in Smithfields, and he looks a trifle wan. And there is Granger, a rival of his, in the other corner; he would set the mob on him without a second thought if he believed we would not suspect and shun him for it in future. We must wait and observe. The brewers will be nervous. Gordon’s lot have decided that brewing is a Catholic trade, and of course a distillery is the crowd’s favorite place to pillage and burn.”

Graves frowned and looked around the room again, noticing under the creamy prosperity he had observed at first, signs of abstraction and concern. The low murmur of talk seemed to change key in his inner ear and he felt a tension, overlaid by good manners and reticence, breathe through the air.

Mr. Chase sighed. “But I wish to speak of something else, my boy, touching on these children.”

Graves drew himself straight. He had formed a plan of his own since dawn, deciding to take over Alexander’s business in Tichfield Street, and manage it for the sake of the children. Whatever their new prospects, he felt he could provide them with a safe home for some little time there. He prepared to explain himself, but Mr. Chase prevented him, lifting his hand.

“I had hoped that there would be something else in that black box of Alexander’s,” he said, “something that would spare me the necessity of speaking to you myself. But I fear there was nothing, or I would see it in your face.”

Graves blushed, which drew a smile from his companion.

“Yes, I think I can read you well enough, young man. But do not let that shame you. It is good to be open in your countenance: it speaks well of your soul.” He drew at his pipe. “I have known Alexander since his first days in town. It was I that lent him the money to establish himself.” Graves tried to interject. “It was a loan only, and paid off in good time. The shop is unencumbered.” He paused again and put one fat hand down on the tabletop, lifting and dropping his fingers one by one as if observing the functioning of some new mechanical toy. “I’d give anything not to tell you what I am about to. It was a slip of Alexander’s, and-well, there it is. I cannot know it and not tell you. And I cannot unknow it now, no matter what I would like.”

Graves drank from his coffee and waited. He had never seen Mr. Chase look so uncomfortable. He kept pulling his waistcoat straight over his generous belly till Graves worried about the strain on his well-stitched buttonholes.

“Alexander did not only desert his family over love of his wife.” Graves stayed very still. Mr. Chase glanced up at him, then back to his waistcoat, turning one bone button back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “He suspected his father of something. A crime-a bad one. Something that disgusted him, at any rate. His mother died, you know, when he was just a scrap of a lad.”

Mr. Chase abandoned the button and began to draw furiously on his pipe, as if he wished to disappear behind its cloud. His eyes darted back to Graves’s brown eyes and away again.

“Can you tell me no more?” Graves looked hard at him.

Mr. Chase hunched his shoulders and looked fixedly over Graves’s shoulder.

“No. He was drunk when he told me that much. There was mention of a locket. Some tin locket.”

“Alexander was drunk?”

“He had his slips, like any man-though I never saw him touch a drop of anything stronger than punch after the children were born. It was hard for him, starting out though, and for Elizabeth. Not a life he was used to. But whatever pride he had, he set it down and set to. The first plates he made, he made a hash of, lost some pounds on it and it hit him hard that night. But I went to see him the following day and he was back at his work. He grew to love it in the end.”

Graves let himself fall back slightly against the dark wood of his little bench.

“I see. But can you really tell me nothing more than this?”

“It may be nothing. Or nonsense.”

“If you thought it all nonsense,” Graves said, “I don’t think you would have told me.”

Mr. Chase gave a reluctant smile. “Maybe. I think I am just adding my warning to Susan’s, to deal carefully with the Hall. Alexander had good reasons for staying clear, and we must be circumspect and watch over the children.”

Graves had just opened his mouth to ask something further when the door swung open. A lad in a dirty greatcoat three growths too large for him, his face streaked with soot and sweat, held it wide and yelled into the room. The blue cockade in his hat hung forward like a drunken devil urging him on.

“The mob are up and working! Look to your business, gentlemen! Down with popery!”

Several men stood. Mr. Landers crossed himself and shouldered his way out of the door. There was a general bustle as bills and coats were gathered. Mr. Chase looked grim.

“Come on, lad. Let us see what is afoot.”