The Blue Last

fishmongers in Friday Street, dairymen in Milk Street, which is where he had stopped now. He thought he might fancy a drink in the pub before him called the Hole in the Wall. On this bit of land had once been one of those prisons called counters, where the poor wretches could acquire “accommodation” according to their ability to pay. Since some weren’t poor, they got the best. But the poorest were stuck in the darkest dungeon, where the fetid air could turn to fresh only by the admission of fresh air entering through a hole in the wall. It was here also that the prisoners begged food of passersby. If there had ever been a more corrupt system than the prison system, Jury was hard put to think of one. He decided he didn’t fancy a drink after all but to go into Bread Street.

He stopped again near the corner of Cheapside. Here, if his modicum of geography served him right, was almost hallowed ground for here had stood the Mermaid Tavern until the Great Fire of 1666. He stood looking at the building here now and envisioning what had gone before, until the one peeled away and the Mermaid emerged (not, perhaps true to itself, but wasn’t the shell of one public house pretty much like another?). In his mind’s eye he entered to find it smokier, rowdier and filled with more raucous laughter and louder screams for beer than could be witnessed at his pub in Islington, the Angel. There were no women, nary a one, except for the barmaid, her breasts spilling out of her loosely laced shift.

And since his imaginings landed him in the first part of the seventeenth century-there they sat, ranged around a table, men more sagacious, less bemused than any others he could name: Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, Walter Raleigh (who had founded this “club”) and in a shadowy corner Dr. Johnson, the only one standing in case he wanted to make a quick exit and the only one as yet unborn.

Jury thought it remarkable that all of these icons of literature could be gathered in the same room, sitting around the same table. He wanted to know what they thought. So he told them the story in the photos. None of them but only half attended to him for they laughed and quipped all the while (Webster asking, “Is this, then, what the Peelers have come to? If you lit all the lamps in London could this man find his feet?”)

“You know what it sounds like?” said Webster.

“I do indeed, Mr. Webster,” said Beaumont. “Sounds like someone’s stolen my plot of The Changeling.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Shakespeare. “It’s a tale told by an idiot, et cetera, et cetera.” He banged his tankard on the table and yelled for ale through the smoke and coal- dusted air.

Ben Jonson called for “a cup o’ Canary wine, now, Megs!”

The buxom barmaid waved her hand. “My point is,” said Jury, “should I believe it?”

All seven of them sat transfixed by the idiocy of this question. Then they found it wonderfully risible.

Megs had come, laces dancing, and answered him: “If it’s belief as concerns you, sir, you just step across the street to St. Mary-le-Bow.”

“Ah, but they might come along and burn him for high treason,” yelled Fletcher.

Jury stuck to his guns, for here was more sagacity than he would meet in his lifetime: “Is it true?”

Unborn or not, Samuel Johnson couldn’t keep still. “The man’s dying, you fool; why would he waste his time talking about this impersonation if it hadn’t occurred or something else occurred enough like it to ribbon the tale round with such finery as would secure your aid. He needs your help, man, though I must say, help from you is about as necessary as t’was Chesterton’s.”

Jury did not know what he meant; Dr. Johnson did not enlighten him, but faded back into the shadows again.

Jury thought: yet there’s something in the advice he should pay attention to but, in the way of elusive clues, he could not see what.

“You’re all intuitionists.”

They regarded one another with a raised eyebrow, a questioning glance, a finger pointed in Jury’s direction.

Refusing to give up, Jury said, “Intuit. Go on.”

Donne, who had joined less in the raillery around the table, cleared his throat and said, “You undertake to help this man because you feel his story is yours.”

“Yes. No. I wasn’t posing as someone else. Not that part of the story.”

Donne waved this away, saying, “That’s merely the piece de resistance to engage your interest; it’s merely a corner turned in the real mystery and is insignificant.”

“But it’s the whole mystery. It’s the one question to be answered.”

“It is crucial only if you’re not looking around.”

“Looking around? Looking around for what? Pardon me, but you’re talking in riddles.”

“Riddles!” said Beaumont. “It’s you who’re hearing them; he’s not talking them.”

“You’re too insistent, Mr. Jury,” said Webster, “on your own notion of mystery. Probably because you’re one of these detective types such as our so-called writers in Grubb Street write about, composers of temporary poems and bad detective novels,” said Fletcher.

“The thing is, Mr. Jury, you already know that part of it. What you’d call the solution, the answer, the conclusion, call it what you will. But that’s the chaff; that’s what’s left behind in the dust. A kills B. You strive to discover A’s identity. You do and bring him in.”

“It’s not that simple-”

“Of course it is,” said Webster. “A hundred hacks in Grubb Street right this moment are writing their detective tales-”

“Century! Century!” bellowed Dr. Johnson. “There are no detective stories until E. A. Poe!”

“You’re past it, mate,” said Fletcher to Jury.

“Can’t see the woods for the trees,” said Beaumont, adding, “who said that, anyway?”

Fuck you two, Jury thought. Couple of pricks. “Thank you, Mr. Donne and Dr. Johnson. I know you’re trying to help. Unlike some others I could name.” He cast a baleful look at Beaumont and Fletcher, then asked, “Just what did you guys write?” Jury was pleased to see the pink flush across their faces.

“T’is Pity She’s a Whore,” called out Ben Jonson. “Megs, Megs! We’re talking about you! More wine! An excellent play! Ran six months in the Duchess.”

Dr. Johnson turned to bang his head against one of the tavern’s stout beams. “Century, you idiot! That theater wasn’t even built for several hundred years!”

Ben Jonson was engaged in tweaking the good Megs’s bottom, and said, “Yes, you’re right.”

“Of course,” said Shakespeare, “one wonders about Sam back there. You’re not the one to talk, Sam, for what are you doing here?”

Only silence inhabited the shadows for some moments. Then Samuel Johnson said, “Patrolling. One has to patrol. One has to oversee the literary scene. I wouldn’t mind it except for this blockhead who keeps following me.”

Then Jury watched the scene dissolve and turned his feet in the direction of Ludgate Hill. Could one feel both elated and deflated simultaneously? Apparently one could, he told himself, ruefully. It was only minutes to Ludgate and then to the cramped little streets that hemmed in the construction site. He stood looking at the blank face of it for some moments before taking out Mickey’s picture of the Blue Last.

It showed a three-storied building, much like the houses around it, gabled, dormer-windowed and with a door painted darker than the rest of the structure. It was the Christmas four or five days before the bombs fell. The Christmas decorations-the strings of lights that ran across the edge of the roof and around the downstairs windows-struck Jury as awfully sad. In front of the pub stood a man, Francis Croft, and Oliver Tynedale’s daughter, Alexandra. They stood smiling and slightly blinded by the winter sunlight. In just a few days their lives, and the lives of all the families of whoever was unlucky enough to be in the pub-all would be horribly and irrevocably changed.

Alexandra Herrick, even in this faint and awkward likeness, could be seen to be beautiful, though you had to