The Devil's Company Read Free Page B

inform my readers of how I came to such a pass.

    I had been in Mr. Cobb’s employ for less than two days before my unfortunate encounter at Kingsley’s Coffeehouse. I received his summons on a cold but pleasantly bright afternoon, and having nothing to prevent me from answering him, I attended his call at once at his house on Swallow Street, not far from St. James’s Square. A fine house it was too, in one of the newer parts of the metropolis. The streets were wide and clean compared to much of London, and they were said to be, at least for the moment, comparatively free of beggars and thieves, though I was about to observe a change in that happy state.

    The day was clear and a welcome winter sun shone upon me, but this was nevertheless London in the cold months, and the streets were slick with ice and packed snow, turned to shades of gray and brown and black. The city was thick and heavy with coal smoke. I could not be outside but five minutes before my lungs felt heavy with the stuff, and not much longer than that before I felt a coat of grime upon my skin. Come the first break of warm weather, I would always venture outside the metropolis for a day or two that I might repair my lungs with clean country air.

    As I approached the house I observed a manservant on the street not half a block before me, walking with a large package under one arm. He wore a red and gold and pale green livery and held himself with a haughty bearing that bespoke a particular pride in his station.

    I reflected that nothing attracts the resentment of the poor with greater rapidity than a proud servant, and as though the world itself responded to my thoughts, the fellow was now set upon by a crowd of a dozen or more ragged urchins, who appeared to materialize from the cracks between the buildings themselves. These unfortunates, full of grotesque glee, proceeded to dance about and tease him like demons of hell. They had nothing more original to say than ’Tis the popinjay or Look at him—he thinks he’s a lord, he does . Nevertheless, even from my rear vantage point I could see the manservant stiffening with what I thought was fear, though I soon realized my mistake. The urchins continued their harassment not half a minute before the servant lashed out like a viper with his free hand and grabbed one of the boys by the collar of his ragged coat.

    He was a well-appointed servant, there could be no doubt of it, for his livery was crisp and clean—almost a martial style to it. For all that, he was also an odd-looking fellow, with eyes far apart and a disproportionately small nose set over comically protruding lips, so he resembled nothing so much as a confused duck—or, at this moment, an angry and confused duck.

    The boy he grabbed could not have been more than eight years of age, and his clothes were so ragged I believed nothing but soil and crust held them together. His coat was torn, and I could see he wore no shirt beneath it, and his pants exposed his arse in a way that would have been comical upon the stage or revolting in an adult mendicant. In a child, it merely summoned feelings of deep melancholy. The boy’s boots were the most pathetic thing of all, for they only covered the tops of his feet, and once the monstrous servant elevated the child, I could see his filthy, calloused, and bloodied soles.

    The other children, equally tattered and filthy, shouted and danced about, calling names and now pelting the man with rocks, which the servant ignored like a great sea monster whose thick skin repelled assaulting harpoons. The boy in his clutches, meanwhile, turned a bright purple in the face and twitched this way and that like a hanged man at Tyburn thrashing the morris dance.

    The manservant might have killed him. And why not? Who would prosecute a man for killing a thieving orphan, the sort of pest that hardly merited more concern than a rat? Though, as my reader will learn in the pages to follow, I am, when circumstances dictate,