Wild, do not forget. It would have been no difficult thing for him to have me arrested, or even killed.”
“No,” Elias observed, “he merely had you beaten upon the street.”
Elias’s observation was one to which I had given a great deal of thought. “Why would Wild have me beaten in public and then try to charm me in private?” I asked, half to myself, half to my friend. “He told me that his men defied his orders, but his men know full well the consequence of disobliging their master.”
“I understand you,” Elias muttered. “He wished for the world to see his men assault you.”
“I think so,” I agreed. “And why? Perhaps because he fears Rochester. He wishes to keep me upon my course, but he wishes for the world to believe that he and I are at odds.”
“If he fears telling you what he knows—if your possession of that knowledge would make it clear to Rochester that you had obtained it of Wild—we must assume that Wild knows things that no one else knows.”
“And that,” I announced, “is why I seek out Wild’s man, Quilt Arnold—the man who spied upon me at Kent’s Coffeehouse when I awaited a response to our advertisement. If I can learn why Wild sent Arnold there, I may be closer to learning more of Wild’s involvement, and that may take me closer to Rochester.”
Elias smiled. “You have truly learned to think like a philosopher.”
I swirled my wine about in my cup. “Perhaps. I promise you I shall not forget to think like a pugilist when I find Arnold. I grow tired of this matter, Elias. I must resolve it soon.”
“I heartily endorse your sentiments,” he told me, rubbing his injured knee.
“I only hope I
Elias looked down for a moment. He appeared to me to be nervous, agitated. “Weaver, our friendship frequently involves a great deal of raillery—too much, I think. When you fought in the ring, you were the best fighter this island had ever seen. I must have had the sixth sense of a Highland seer to have bet against you that day, for only a fool would have done so. As a pugilist, you turned a sport that was the province of mindless animals into an art. And when you set your mind to thief-taking, you turned something that had been the province of criminals and petty minds into an art as well. If philosophy no longer yields results, perhaps it is not because you have reached your limit to understanding philosophy. I think it far more probable that philosophy has done what philosophy can do, and you would be wise to trust your instincts as a fighter and a thief-taker.”
My face burned with pleasure as I listened to Elias’s sentiments. He did not often speak thus, and his doing so made me determined. “My instincts tell me to find anyone whom I believe to have information and beat that information from him.”
Elias smiled. “Trust your instincts.”
BUOYED BY HIS COMMENTS, I left my friend’s lodgings and traveled to the Laughing Negro. I sat at a table in the back that gave me a good view of the door, and I snuffed the candles around me to obscure my face should Arnold look in my direction before I should look in his. There was, however, no sign of him; I had to fend off the advances of several whores and gamblers, and soon I heard whispers about the foul sod who sat in the corner, not drinking enough to satisfy the barkeeper.
By eleven o’clock it was clear to me that Arnold was not to come in, so I paid my reckoning and stepped outside. I was not ten feet away from the door before I saw a shadow rushing from the darkness toward me. Perhaps I was too eager for violence, for I drew my hangar and ran it through someone’s shoulder before I realized that my assailants were but a few boys out to knock me down for my money. They had no connection with murders or Wild or the South Sea Company. This was no conspiracy, just London after nightfall. I wiped my sword blade as I laughed upon my own panic, and I somehow managed to make my way from that place without further incident.
IN THE DAYTIME Bawdy Moll’s is but a dank place of sleepy drunks and whispering prigs, but at night it becomes something else entirely. It was so full of sweaty and sickly bodies that I could barely press my way inside, and the air was thick with the stink of vomit and urine and tobacco. I could not call Moll’s crowd merrymakers, for no one came to a gin house to make merry; they came to forget and to recast misery into senselessness. They pretended they took some pleasure in it, however, and I could hear a hundred conversations, the shrill and nervous laughter of women, the breaking of glass, and somewhere in the back a player scraped a bow across an untuned fiddle.
I pushed through the crowd, as my boots sloshed in things I did not care to think of, and I felt countless fingers of undetectable origin explore my body, but I held secure my sword, my pistol, and my purse, and I made it to the bar without any serious damage. There I found Bawdy Moll cheerfully dispensing gin by the pint and collecting her pennies with equal delight.
“Ben,” she shouted as she saw me. “I ’ardly expected to see ye ’ere at a time like this. ’Avin’ a bad time are ye? Well, I’ve the cure for it, and it comes a penny a pint.”
I was in no mood for Moll’s banter. I was in a foul temper, and the stench of sewage from the Fleet Ditch was particularly rancid that night. “What,” I said as quietly as I could, “know you of a man called Quilt Arnold?”
Moll screwed up her face in displeasure; I watched her face paint crack like the earth in the summer sun. “Ye know better than to come ’ere on a busy night and ask me suchlike questions. I can’t have me customers thinkin’ they’ll be ’peached in me place.”
I slipped Moll a guinea. I had not the time to equivocate with smaller coins. “It is a matter of the utmost importance, Moll, or I should not bother you.”
She held the coin in her hand, feeling the weight of the gold. It had a power no paper or banknote could ever match. Her objection vanished.
“Quilt’s a no-good blackguard, but he ain’t the murderin’ type what I can tell. Stands close to Wild, ’e does, and does the great man’s bidding. Least ’e used to. ’E also run with that whore ye asked me for last week: Kate Cole, what ’ung ’erself in Newgate.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
She did. At least she knew of a few likely places, not one near the other, unfortunately. I surreptitiously slid her another guinea; I had violated the trust we had by making my inquiries before a crowd, and I was more than willing to pay the price to keep Moll happy.
I inspected two more places that night, but I caught no sign of Arnold, and growing tired and despondent I returned home to sleep. I began the search anew the next day, and was fortunate enough to catch him around noon, eating his dinner in a tavern Moll had told me to be a favorite daytime haunt of his. He sat at a table, shoving spoonfuls of watery gruel into his face, caring little of his bad aim or the effects it had upon his attire. Across from him sat a sickly whore, hideously in need of nourishment, who was so thin I feared she might expire as I looked on. She stared at Arnold’s food, but he shared none of it with her.
I carefully kept myself from Arnold’s sight as I hired a private room on the first floor. The tapman blankly accepted an extra shilling in exchange for paying no mind to what happened next. I approached Arnold from behind and kicked out his chair from under him. He fell hard, and much of his meal followed him. His companion cried out while I compounded Arnold’s surprise by stomping hard on his left hand, which was sloppily wrapped with a filthy bandage. He let out a howl—shrill and desperate. His whore clapped a hand over her mouth and stifled her own scream. I grabbed the stunned Arnold under his armpits and dragged him down the hall and threw him into the room I had hired. I closed the door and locked it, placing the key in my coat. The room was perfect: dark, small, and poorly lit through a window too small to admit thieves, and thus too small to allow Arnold’s escape.
His one good eye bugged in terror, but he said nothing. I had seen once before that he was not at heart the ruffian he pretended to be, and I knew his kind too well not to know how to get him feeling talkative. For good measure, and because I felt little other than anger, I picked him up and threw him hard against the wall. Too hard, I fear, for his head hit the brick, and his good eye rolled back into his skull as he collapsed upon the floor.
I returned to the bar, locking the door behind me, and bought two pints of small beer. The whore, I noticed, was now at another man’s table, and she paid me no attention. The barkeeper showed me nothing but terse indifference—something just shy of politeness. I made a note to myself to return to this place, for I liked its way of conducting business.
I reentered the room and threw one of the pints of beer into Arnold’s face. He stirred like a man awakened from a pleasing slumber. “Oh, Christ.” He used his hand to wipe the ale from his eye.
“I hope I shall not have to kill you,” I said. “I even hope I might avoid inflicting much more pain upon you, but
