The Devil's Company (46 page)

“What news of her?” Teaser asked. “Did she send you to find me? I have been so concerned. She one day merely stopped attending, and I feared the worst. I feared that her family must have discovered our secret, for why else would she abandon me so? Still, surely she could have sent me a note. Oh, why did she not?”

Elias and I exchanged a glance. I looked at the floor for a moment while I gathered the courage to meet Teaser’s eye. “You must prepare yourself for unhappy news. Owl, as you style him, is no more.”

“What?” Mother Clap demanded. “Dead? How?”

Teaser sat stunned, his eyes wide and wet, and then he slumped over in his chair, one hand pressed to his head in an attitude of theatrical despair. However, I had no doubt that he felt it quite sincerely. “How can she be dead?”

The confusion of gender began to wear at me. “It is a rather complex affair,” I said. “There is much of this I myself don’t entirely understand, but there are those who believe the East India Company may have been behind the mischief.”

“The East India Company,” Teaser said, with an affecting mix of anger and misery. “Oh, I warned her about crossing them, but she would not listen. No, she would not. Owl always had to have things her own way.”

Given that the worthy of whom we spoke, at the time of his death, was married to at least three women as well as consorting with sodomites, I could not find any reason to challenge this assessment. “I know this must be a terrible shock to you,” I said, “but I must nevertheless beg you to answer some of our questions at the moment.”

“Why?” he asked, face cradled in hands. “Why should I help you?”

“Because we have been asked to find out who did this terrible thing and bring those responsible to justice. Can you not tell me why you believed the East India Company would wish him dead?”

“By whom have you been hired?” he asked. “Who wants to see justice served?”

I understood I was at a crossroads. There could be no turning back, and in truth I was tired of half lies and deceptions. I was tired of conducting half an inquiry, and I wanted things brought to a head. And so I told him. “A man named Cobb hired me.”

“Cobb?” Teaser said. “Why would he care?”

My reader can imagine how I had to contain the urge to jump from my seat. No one in London’s business or social circles had ever heard of Cobb, but here a sodomite once involved with a man with three other wives spoke the name as though it were common as dust. And yet I knew that if he were to trust me, I needed to maintain authority and withhold my surprise.

I therefore shook my head. “As to that I cannot say,” I told him, as though the matter were nothing to me. “Cobb is but the man who hired me. His motives are his own. Though it is an interesting question. Perhaps you might speculate.”

Teaser rose from his chair so quickly, it was nearly a leap. “I must go. I must lie down. I—I want to help you, Mr. Weaver. I want to see justice done, I promise you. But I cannot speak of it this instant. Give me a moment to lie down, to weep, to collect my thoughts.”

“Of course,” I said, casting a glance at Mother Clap, for I did not wish to impose on her hospitality. She nodded her assent.

Teaser left the room quickly, and the three of us were left in awkward silence.

“You made no great effort to soften the blow,” Mother Clap said. “Perhaps you don’t believe that mollies feel love as you do.”

“Of course not,” I said, now feeling somewhat irritated. Mother Clap seemed to feel that my insensitivity toward sodomites was at the root of all the world’s evils. “When it comes to delivering unpleasant news, it is my experience that no way is kind or sensitive or gentle. The news is what it is, and far better it should be out, that it might be dealt with.”

“I see you do not understand the situation. Owl was not merely Teaser’s friend, or merely his lover. Owl was his wife.”

“His wife,” I said, making a great effort to keep my voice even.

“Perhaps not in the eyes of the law but surely in the eyes of God. Indeed, the ceremony was performed by an Anglican priest, a man who moves through the world as effortlessly and as free of taint as you do, Mr. Weaver.”

Evidently, she knew little of my life, but I let that pass. “The men here marry one another?”

“Oh, yes. One assumes the role of a wife, who is forever referred to as
she
from that point on, and their match is as serious and unbreakable as that between man and woman.”

“And in the case of Mr. Teaser and Owl,” Elias asked, “was this an unbreakable match?”

“On the part of Teaser, certainly,” Mother Clap said, with a certain amount of sadness, “but I fear Owl may have been more varied in her interests.”

“Among the other men?” I asked.

“And, if you must know, among the ladies as well. Many men who come here would never, if they had their way, gaze upon female flesh again, but others have developed the taste and cannot move away from it. Owl was such a one.”

“If I may be so bold as to say so,” I told her, “I am not surprised by your intelligence.”

“Because you think all men must lust after female flesh?”

“Not for that reason, no. For the reason that Mr. Absalom Pepper, whom you call Owl, was married to at least three women simultaneously. He was a bigamist, madam, and I believe a shameless opportunist as well. It is my belief that Pepper wished to use Mr. Teaser for some means of his own. To that end, he must have seduced the poor fellow to make his heart soft and his purse open.”

“A man,” Mother Clap observed, “is always trying to open one sort of purse or another.”

She opened her mouth to elaborate but was interrupted by a loud crashing noise from outside our room. This was followed by several shouts, some rugged and manly, others in the falsetto of a man imitating a woman. I heard the sound of heavy objects toppling and more shouts, these low and with the air of authority.

“Dear Lord!” Mother Clap sprang from her chair with a surprising amount of agility for a woman her age. Her skin had grown white, her eyes wide, her lips pale. “It’s a raid! I knew this day must come.”

She opened the door and threw herself out. I heard a somber voice cry out that someone must stop in the name of the king, and another cried out that someone must stop in the name of God. I found it difficult to credit that anyone out there was acting with the authority of either.

“The Reformation of Manners men,” Elias said. “That’s why they were out here; they were coordinating a raid with the constables. We’ve got to get to Teaser. If they arrest him, we may never be able to get him back.”

He didn’t need to finish the thought. If Teaser were arrested and jailed, there was a strong possibility he would be dead before we could get to him, for the other prisoners would bludgeon a sodomite to death rather than share space with him.

I pulled my hanger from its scabbard and lunged toward the window, where I made short work of the curtain lining. I handed one strip of the linen to Elias while I proceeded to tie another around my face, concealing everything below my eyes.

“Are we planning on robbing the constables?” Elias asked me.

“Do you wish to be recognized? You may have a hard time convincing the gentlemen of London to permit you to administer an emetic once you’ve been smoked as a molly.”

He required no further argument. The crude mask—not unlike the sort I would, on occasion, resort to during my youthful days on the highway—was around his face in an instant, and together we rushed out into the fray.

Two masked men brandishing weapons must always attract attention, and here it was no different. Indeed, the constables and the mollies regarded us with equal dread. We pushed through the crowds of men engaged in the unfathomable dance of arrest and resistance, looking for our man but seeing no sign of him.

In the main hall, where once had been dancing, all was now in chaos. Some men cowered in corners while others fought mightily, brandishing candlesticks and pieces of broken furniture. Everywhere tables and chairs lay strewn in disorder; broken glass covered the floor, making islands in the pools of spilled wine and punch. There were some two dozen constables—or roughs who had been hired to act as such—and along with them, another dozen or so men of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. I could not help but reflect that men with such an interest in manners ought to act better than these. I saw a pair of constables holding a molly down on the ground while a Reformation man kicked at him. A group of three or four mollies tried to leave the room, but they were struck down by constables while the Reformation men cheered from a safe distance. The constables were bullies and ruffians, and the Reformation men were cowards. It is ever thus that the cause of righteousness is advanced.

“Teaser!” I called out to the panicked mollies. “Who has seen Teaser?”

No one heard or minded me. These unfortunates had their own difficulties, and the constables were attempting to ascertain if they should try to apprehend us or let us pass. No one moved to detain us, for there were certainly much less robust fish to be hooked. The Society for the Reformation of Manners men—they were the easiest to spy, for these were the ones who cowered and moaned if we even turned our eyes in their direction—demonstrated another attribute of those who would hide their cruelty behind the guise of religion. With such a fervent belief in their Lord, they were ever reluctant to risk being sent to meet him.

“Teaser!” I shouted again. “I must find Teaser. I will get him away from here.”

At last one man called to me. A pair of constables had him by either arm, and blood dripped in a pathetic trickle from his nose. His wig hung askew, but still on his head. One of the men who held him was in the process of showing his fellow how disgusting these mollies were—he demonstrated this by grabbing the prisoner’s arse and squeezing, as though it belonged to a succulent whore.

This poor fellow’s face was twisted in pain and humiliation, but when he saw us, he somehow understood we were not with his enemies, and some expression of sympathy in my eyes may have prompted him to speak. “Teaser’s escaped,” he called to me. “He’s gone out the front with the big blackie.”

I began to move toward the front of the house. A pair of constables moved forward to block my path, but I barreled against them with my shoulder, and they fell away easily enough, making room for me and Elias—cowering close behind me—to pass.

Once we pushed through the main room, we were mostly out of the fray. A trio of constables chased after us, but not very hard, mostly for form’s sake, so they could explain later that their efforts to apprehend us failed. No one paid these men enough to risk their lives. Arresting a pack of mollies was easy enough work, but best to leave masked bandits for the soldiers.

At the door, a pair of Reformation men stood keeping watch, but when they saw us come charging they quickly moved aside. One moved so fast he lost his balance and fell in my way, and I had to leap over him to keep from stumbling. Outside on the street a crowd had begun to gather, and they hardly knew what to make of us, but our appearance was met mostly with drunken cheers.

Fortunately the stoop was fairly well raised and gave me a sufficient view of the surrounding areas. I looked back and forth, and then I saw them. It was Teaser—I recognized him in an instant, despite the gloom of the street—and he was being pulled along by a very large and surprisingly graceful man. It was dark and I could not see his face, but I had no doubt that Teaser’s abductor was none other than Aadil.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

OLBORN IS FULL OF COUNTLESS LITTLE STREETS AND DARK ALLEYS, so it might, at first glance, seem the ideal place to make one’s escape, but many of these alleys are dead ends, and even a tough like Aadil, I reasoned, would not want to face two pursuers and manage a prisoner while pinned in a corner. I was therefore not very surprised when I saw that he ran down Cow Lane and toward the sheep pens. Perhaps he meant to lose us among the animals.

Elias and I both stripped our masks from our faces and dashed after Teaser and his abductor. Rain had begun to fall—not hard, but enough to turn the snow to slush and make the encrusted ice dangerously slick. We barreled forward as best we could upon so dangerous a surface, but it soon became apparent that we no longer had Aadil and Teaser in our sights. Elias began to slow down in defeat, but I would not have it. “To the docks,” I said. “He’ll try and take his prisoner across the water.”