that there were even several dressed like himself as costermongers.
The most impressive figure of all, though, was the tall man with sandy hair and moustache who had been lounging in a high-backed chair on the raised deck, and now stood up and leaned on the railing, looking out across the company. He was extravagantly—not quite ludicrously—attired in a green satin frockcoat, with clusters of airy lace bursting out at wrist and throat, tight white satin knee breeches and white silk stockings, and little shoes that, if shorn of their gold buckles, would have looked like ballet pumps. The babble of conversation had ceased when he got to his feet.
“That’s Copenhagen Jack himself,” proudly whispered Skate, who had positioned his cart on the floor beside Doyle, “captain of the Pye Street beggars.”
Doyle nodded absently, his attention suddenly caught by the roasting turkey smell on the warm air.
“Good evening, friends,” said the captain. He was twirling a long-stemmed wine glass in one hand. “Evening, captain,” chorused the company. Still looking across the dining hall, he held the glass out to the side, and a boy in a red coat and high boots hurried up and splashed some red wine into it from a decanter. The captain tasted it and then nodded. “A dry Medoc with the roast beef,” he announced as the boy scampered away, “and with the fowl we’ll probably exhaust the sauternes that arrived last week.”
The company applauded, Doyle as energetically as any of them.
“Reports, disciplines and the consideration of new members will be conducted after supper.” This announcement too seemed agreeable to the beggars, and as soon as the captain sat down at his own elevated table a door swung open from the kitchen, and nine men issued from it, each carrying a whole roasted turkey on a platter. Each table got one, and the man at the head was given a long knife and fork to carve with. Doyle happened to be sitting at the head of his table, and he managed to summon up enough Christmas and Thanksgiving skill to do an adequate job. When he’d slapped some onto all the plates presented to him, including the one Skate held up from below the table edge, he forked some onto his own and set to it with vigor, washing it down with liberal sips of the chilled sauternes that a small army of kitchen boys kept pouring into any glass less than half full. The turkey was followed by roast beef, charred and chewy at the ends and blood-rare in the middle, and an apparently endless supply of hot rolls and butter, and bottles and bottles of what Doyle had to admit was a wonderfully dry and full- bodied Bordeaux. Dessert was hot plum pudding and a cream sherry.
When the dishes had been cleared away and the diners were sitting back, many of them, to Doyle’s envy, stuffing clay pipes and dextrously lighting them from the candles on the tables, Copenhagen Jack dragged his tall chair to the front of the raised section and clapped his hands for attention. “Business,” he said. “Where’s Fairchild?”
The street-side door opened and a young man hurried inside, and for a moment Doyle thought that this must be Fairchild, but a surly, unshaven man had stood up from one of the rear tables and said, “Here, sir.” The boy who’d just entered unlooped a muffler from around his neck and, crossing to the front of the hall, sat down on the steps that led up to the raised deck.
The captain nodded to the new arrival and then looked back at Fairchild, who was nervously wrenching at an old cloth cap in his hands. “You were seen to hide five shillings in a drainpipe this morning, Fairchild.”
Fairchild kept his head down, but looked up at Copenhagen Jack through his bushy eyebrows. “Seen by who, sir?”
“Never mind who. Do you deny hiding them?”
The man considered. “Uh… no, sir,” he said at last. “Only I wasn’t… hiding ‘em from Marko, see, but there were these kids bothering me and I was afraid they’d rob me.”
“Then why did you tell Marko when he came by at one in the afternoon that you’d only made a few pennies?”
“I forgot,” said Fairchild. “About them shillings.”
The young man perched on the steps was scanning the crowd as though he was expecting to meet someone here. Doyle wondered who he was. He seemed young, less than twenty, in spite of his little moustache, and Doyle reflected that the original owner of that coat he was wearing, who had probably been dead twenty years, had been a much bigger man than its present wearer.
“You’re not the only forgetful one around here, Fairchild,” said the captain gently. “It seems to me I agreed to forget two similar offences of yours during these past several months.”
The young man on the steps had let his gaze stop on Doyle; he stared at him speculatively, then with something like anxiety. Just when Doyle was beginning to be worried by it, the young man looked away.
“I’m afraid,” Copenhagen Jack went on, “that we’ll have to forget some more things: we’ll forget you were ever a member of our company, and you can oblige me by forgetting the way to my house.”
“But Cap’n,” gasped Fairchild, “I didn’t mean it, you can have the five shillings—”
“Keep them. You’ll need them. Now go.” Fairchild left so quickly that Doyle knew the captain must have had some brisk way of ejecting people that didn’t want to leave as they were told. “And now,” said Captain Jack, smiling, “to pleasanter tasks. Are there any petitioners for admission?”
Skate waved his hand as high as he could, which was no higher than the candles on the table. “I’ve brought one, captain,” he roared, and his cup-rattlingly deep voice made up for the ineffectiveness of his waving.
The captain peered curiously down at the table. “Let him stand up then.”
Doyle got to his feet and faced Copenhagen Jack.
“Well, Skate, he’s certainly pitiful-looking enough. What’s your name?”
“Brendan Doyle, sir.”
When Doyle had voiced no more than the first two syllables of his reply, the young man who’d been staring at him whirled and leaped nimbly to the deck and whispered urgently to the captain.
Captain Jack leaned to the side and cocked his head, and a few moments later straightened up and stared at Doyle somewhat incredulously; then he whispered to the boy a few words which, though inaudible, were obviously something like
Doyle viewed these proceedings with mounting alarm, wondering if this moustached youth could be working for the bald-headed gypsy chief. He eyed the street door, and noticed that it hadn’t closed quite all the way. He thought, if they make any attempt to seize me, I’ll be out that door before these boys can get up from the tables.
The captain shrugged and turned toward the increasingly curious diners. “Young Jacky tells me that our new friend Brendan Doyle has just arrived in town from Bristol, where he’s done very well in the past at pretending to be a simple-minded deaf-mute. Under the name of, uh, Dumb Tom he’s milked the sympathy of the folks at Bristol for the last five years, but he’s been forced to leave there because—what was it again, Jacky? Oh, I remember—he saw a friend of his coming out of a whorehouse, and the girl the chap had been with was leaning out of an upstairs window with a… a solid marble chamber pot she was going to fling down onto the poor man’s head when he walked by underneath, as he was just about to do. Seems there’d been a disagreement about the fee, and the girl felt she’d been cheated. In any case, Doyle called to his pal from across the street: ‘Look out!’ yells Doyle. ‘Back away, my friend, the tart’s fixing to brain you!’ Well, his friend’s life was saved, but poor Doyle was overheard by everyone on the street, and in no time everyone realized he could talk as well as any of them, and he had to leave town.”
The beggars near Doyle told him he was a fine fellow, and Skate said, “You should have told me your story this morning, lad.”
Doyle, concealing his surprise and suspicion, opened his mouth to reply to Skate, but the captain raised his hand so suddenly and imperiously that all eyes were on him again, and Doyle didn’t speak.
“And Jacky points out that since Doyle hopes to take up the begging trade here in London, and since he prospered so when he didn’t speak and suffered exile the first time he uttered a word, he ought to get back into the habit of relying on gestures to communicate with. You need practice at being Dumb Tom again, Mr. Doyle. Don’t you agree?”
Everybody turned to Doyle, and he saw one of the captain’s eyelids flutter slightly. The purpose of all this must be to conceal my accent, Doyle realized. But why? And how did that boy know I’d have one? He smiled uncertainly and nodded.
“You’re a wise man. Dumb Tom,” said Copenhagen Jack. “Now Jacky tells me you and he used to be great pals in Bristol once, so I’ll let him rob us of your company for a while so he can explain our ways to you. And in the meantime I’ll consider the rest of the candidates for recruitment. Stand up, another of you!”
