“I find that there are advantages,” I said.

“Hmm. I believe I do as well. In any event, if you do plan to continue your pretense longer, you might consider answering these letters yourself. I do not think Denny knows any of these men well enough to recognize their handwriting; I don’t believe he’s even met any of them in person. You could very easily provide him with precisely the information he does not wish to hear- that Matthew Evans is a well-respected gentleman planter who has lately left for England.”

I thought her solution a good one, though another approach I liked better occurred to me. But more of that anon. For now I rose and put the letters upon my writing table. “I thank you for these,” I said. “They may well have saved my life.”

“Then I believe you owe me something in return,” she said, rising to greet me. “You must kiss me.”

“This penalty I shall pay gladly,” I told her.

I walked to embrace her, but she held me back for a moment. “We are alone here and have all the privacy we could desire. There is nothing to inhibit us but our own inclinations.”

“I have thought the same thing.”

“Then there is something I must say to you. I know you to be a man of honor, so I wish that we might not misunderstand each other. You and I may share a fondness. We may, for all I know, share what is commonly called love. But you are not to ask me to marry you. Not out of affection or out of what you might imagine to be an obligation. I do not wish to marry- not you or anyone else.”

“What?” I asked. “Never?”

“I will not be so foolish as to talk of never, but I will talk of now. I only wished that you not misunderstand me or act out of what you might think an obligation that should make both of us uneasy.”

“It would hardly be proper for a woman of your family to marry a man of mine,” I said, with a bitterness I did not feel.

“That is surely true,” she said good-naturedly, “though you must know that such rules would not lead me to act against my own heart. If I were to marry, I can think of nothing more delicious than the scandal of marrying a Jew thieftaker. But I think I will, for the foreseeable future, avoid matrimony entirely.”

“Then I shall not force you to act against your inclination,” I said.

She smiled at me. “Besides, I do not believe I should like to marry a man in love with Griffin Melbury’s wife. Do not look at me thus, sir. I know who she is, and I saw what you looked like when you danced with her.”

I pulled away from her. “My feelings for her are not pertinent, as her heart is not free.”

“No, it is not, and that is a very distressing thing. But my heart is free, and you are welcome to make what use of it you will.”

And here I shall draw a curtain against the rites of Cupid, which are too delicate to write of and must be left to the reader’s imagination.

The hours I passed with Miss Dogmill were delightful and too quickly used. After she departed from my rooms and faced the gantlet of Mrs. Sears’s scowls, I found myself alone and the time passed most miserably. I ought, I suppose, to have been full of good cheer. I had found that this beautiful woman was more than happy to be an agreeable friend of the most amiable sort. I no longer had to pretend to be something I was not with her, and she wanted nothing more of me than my time and companionship. Certainly she was not the first young lady whose company I had enjoyed since losing Miriam to Melbury, but she was surely the most agreeable, and I did not like that emotions should be divided. Perhaps I felt false to my hopeless love by feeling such fondness for Miss Dogmill, or perhaps I only regretted the waning of the pain itself. It had been for so long all that I had left of Miriam. I hated to see it dissipate.

These reflections were shattered when Mrs. Sears informed me that there was a lad at the door with a message for me, and he would not depart until I had read it. I impatiently tore it open.

Evans,

I am in a bad way and need your help at once. Follow this boy, and lose no time in meeting me or all will be in ruins. The election- nay, the kingdom- may stand or fall on your actions. I am, &c, G. Melbury

I felt some remorse in having delighted in Melbury’s difficulties when this same man so clearly thought of me as his friend. Nevertheless, I had to remind myself that the friend he thought of was not me but a fiction called Matthew Evans. He had no idea who I was, and if he had he would almost certainly not have come to me with his problems. It might yet develop, I thought, that Melbury could resent the freedoms I’d taken with him, and he might never help me when he learned of the falsehoods I had perpetuated.

I followed the boy to an old house near Moor Fields Street in Shoreditch, and in this place I was greeted at the door by none other than the bill collector, Titus Miller. “Ah, Mr. Evans,” he said. “Mr. Melbury mentioned that you were a man upon whom he might depend, and it would seem you have shown yourself to be dependable. I have no doubt that Mr. Melbury will relish your company.”

“What is this?” I demanded.

“What it seems to be,” he said. “Most things are, you know. Most things are not deceptions but just what they seem. Mr. Melbury has been ill-natured enough to overlook some of his debts that I have bought up, so I have insisted he tarry here awhile and consider what consequences his reluctance might have on his bid for a seat in the House. Tomorrow, if he does not become more good-natured, I may have no choice but to forward his care to that of the King’s Bench- a prison where many men who have refused to meet their obligations are wont to congregate.”

So that was the nature of Melbury’s distress. He had been taken to this sponging house, and here he would remain for twenty-four hours unless he could convince someone to meet his debts. Clearly, he imagined that someone to be a wealthy Jamaican planter.

I have never loved sponging houses, and I say that while fully admitting that I have, on one or two unfortunate occasions, had the opportunity to examine their interior operations very closely. It is something of a shame to our British method of justice that a man may be taken off the street and held against his will for a full day before being turned over to the courts. During that day he must eat and drink and sleep, and for all of these accommodations he must pay the proprietor of the house far more than the market would bear if the customer had the freedom to try his luck with a competitor. A dinner that might cost him a few pence at the chophouse across the street would cost him a shilling or two in a sponging house. And thus have many men gone into debt and, finally being caught, found themselves in more debt than ever before.

I insisted that Miller take me to Melbury at once, so he led me through a house cluttered with old furniture, rugs rolled up and stacked in corners, crates and trunks unopened. Here were the goods men had bartered for their freedom.

Miller led me up a flight of stairs, down a hall, and up another flight of stairs. He then removed from a hook upon his coat a rather large key ring and, after a brief search, identified the necessary object.

The door creaked like a dungeon gate, but the accommodations were tolerably respectable. The room was of a manageable size and contained several chairs, a writing desk (there is no more important occupation for the man in a sponging house than that of writing letters to friends with money), and a rather comfortable-looking bed.

It was on that item that I found Melbury, stretched out and looking mightily relaxed. “Ah, Evans. Good of you to come.” He leaped up with the grace of a rope dancer and took my hand warmly. “Miller here would have had me writing letters all the day, but I sent only one, for if a man does not know whom to turn to in a crisis, he is a poor man indeed.”