CHAPTER 18

WITH THE COMMENCEMENT of the six weeks of election upon us, I thought to travel to Covent Garden and witness the procession of opening day. These events often have the festive atmosphere of a parade or a Lord Mayor’s show, and if nothing else I knew it would offer me something of a diversion.

I had written Elias and asked him to join me, and as we were in so public a place, I chose to appear as neither Weaver nor Evans and instead resurrected the footman’s livery for the afternoon. Enough time had passed since I’d used that disguise that I believed I might comfortably rely on it for a short period.

We first met in a tavern, that I might discuss with my friend the information I had so recently acquired. Elias, however, appeared most irritated when I first met him.

“I am sorry I ever devised this Matthew Evans character,” he told me. “I cannot visit one of my patients without hearing of how he is the most interesting man in London. I was administering an enema to this pretty little creature, the daughter of a duke, you know, and Matthew Evans was all she could talk of. She had seen him at the theater. She had seen him at the assembly. I could hardly get her to notice her poor surgeon at all.”

“If you have a young lady with her arse exposed to you and you cannot get her attention, I won’t have you blaming it on me.”

He coughed into his fist to disguise a laugh. “Well, let us discuss your situation. Have there been any new developments?”

“A few,” I said, and proceeded to tell him of all that had happened.

He stared with disbelief. “The Pretender has been in London! We must inform the government at once.”

“I said I would not.”

“Of course you said you would not. What should you say, I will betray you, so please let me go that I might do it at once? Your word hardly matters in this case.”

“It does to me. And he’s gone now, so what does it matter?”

“It matters because if he is willing to risk a visit here, it can only be to bolster support of an imminent uprising. The ministry must be made aware of it.”

“The ministry prepares every day for an imminent uprising. It will do just fine without our information. I’ll not risk my life to tell a government that means to murder me that it must prepare for a crisis that it is already preparing for.”

“You may have a point,” Elias said thoughtfully. “Rabbit it! I wish I could tell my friends this intelligence. I should be quite the fellow in the coffeehouses, knowing this.”

“You’ll have to live without being the coffeehouse fellow, won’t you?”

“Of course,” he said sheepishly. “But what you tell me changes everything, as far as you are concerned. Despite what you were told at Ufford’s house, you must consider yourself to be in terrible, terrible danger. These Jacobites have tolerated you because you’ve been useful to them, but poking around in their studies and discovering secret funding sources for an invasion and clandestine visits of the Pretender to these shores- well, it is the sort of thing that makes them nervous. You’ve got to be careful, or you’ll end up like Yate or the witnesses at your trial.”

“What are you suggesting I do?”

He took a deep breath. “Look, Weaver. You can depend upon none of these people to tell you the truth. If this Irishman Johnson is kind to you, it does not mean he is honest with you.”

“No, but he might well have harmed me and he did not.”

“Only because he thinks you may be of use to him free. He’ll harm you plenty if things begin to appear otherwise.”

“I know that.”

“Then you had better accept that all of this Jacobitical intrigue is, for you, no more than a distraction. You are exerting all your efforts in an attempt to learn the truth behind who killed Yate and why.”

“Should I not be doing that?”

“I suppose you should, yes, but as a means to an end, not an end.”

“The end, I suppose, is politics.”

He smiled. “I see you have learned something after all.”

By the time we reached the Covent Garden piazza, it was already crowded with thousands of electors and observers, many of whom flew the colors of their candidate, and many more who were only there for the diversion. The crowd was packed in tight, cheerful and surly simultaneously, in the way of London mobs. These people delighted in entertainment but always felt an inexplicably sharp resentment that the entertainment was not so entertaining as they would like, that it did not transport them from their poverty or their hunger or the pain in their teeth.

As we arrived, the Tory candidates were entering the plaza, the Whigs having already made their entry. I saw hundreds of banners rise up in the air as Melbury made his way toward the platform, and not a few eggs and pieces of fruit flew as well. During his short speech the Tories seemed to have the advantage, and more than once I saw a Whiggish heckler dragged down into the mob to face I dared not think what torments.

Elias laughed softly at my surprise. “Have you never before observed an election procession?”

“I suppose I have,” I said, “but I always thought of it as some sort of spectacle. Not having the vote myself, I never bothered to consider its political import. Now that I do, this madness seems absurd.”

“Of course it is absurd.”

“Do you not think it wrong that the nation elects its leaders in this fashion? Why, there is more danger here than at Bartholomew Fair or at a Lord Mayor’s show.”

“There’s not much difference, is there, between this and a puppet show, but that here it is people and not puppets that are banged upon the head. But at least here there are thousands who have a say in the election. Would you prefer a town like Bath, where their Parliamentarians are selected by a small group of men who sit with their roast chicken and their port and determine who will keep their bellies the fattest?”

“I don’t know what I prefer.”

“I prefer this,” he told me. “At least there’s a bit of distraction to it.”

And so, with the requisite amount of violence, the election commenced. How odd, I thought, that my hopes should depend upon a man I had once hated without knowing. But it was true enough that it was in my best interests for Griffin Melbury to carry the day. I was therefore not a little gratified when, in a coffeehouse the next morning, I heard the results of the previous day’s tallies: Mr. Melbury, 208 votes; Mr. Hertcomb, 188. The man I despised, running on the platform of a party I mistrusted, had won the first day, and though I should have wished this man nothing but ill, fate had ordained that I must rejoice in his victory.

Not two days later- and two days in which Melbury bested the Whigs in the polls- Matthew Evans received a note that I found utterly delightful. Mr. Hertcomb himself wrote to inform me that I was invited to join a group of friends- including Miss Dogmill- for an evening at the theater the following night. I suspected that Miss Dogmill was not the sort of woman who would be so bold as to initiate a correspondence with a man, although I would have been pleased had she proved herself unfettered by such restrictions. I wrote to Mr. Hertcomb at once, telling him I would join him with all my heart.

The Whig candidate arrived at my rooms wearing a suit of a remarkable shade of blue, lit up with enormous gold buttons. He grinned sheepishly at me, and I invited him in for some wine before we proceeded. If he felt any worry that the first three days of the election had gone Melbury’s way, he did not show it.

“I trust you have no geese about you, sir,” he said impishly, still amused at events now two weeks past.

“None but are at their liberty, I assure you,” I returned. I sensed at once that Hertcomb, who bristled under the harsh yoke of Mr. Dogmill, had taken a particular delight in my defiance of his master. Perhaps he had never before witnessed any man resist him so boldly, and his kindness to me might be all the rebellion he could muster. Or, I thought, he might be some sort of spy in Dogmill’s service. In either case, I knew my business well enough to welcome this man into the bosom of my friendship- and to be careful all the while I did so.