After a few minutes he saw a man walking toward him, whistling, and before he went past Doyle asked him, a little wearily, for this would be the fourth person he’d approached, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me where Horrabin’s Punch show is playing tonight?”
The man looked Doyle up and down and shook his head wonderingly. “That bad, is it? Well, mate, I’ve never seen it play at night, but any beggar ought to be able to take you to him. ‘Course there’s never but a couple of beggars around on Sunday evenings, but I believe I saw one or two down by Billingsgate.”
“Thanks.”
The vermin Horrabin runs, he thought as he walked on, a little faster now. On the other hand, up to a pound a day if you’re willing to make some sacrifices. What kind of sacrifices, I wonder? He thought about his interview with the editor of the Morning Post, and then forced himself not to.
An old man was sitting by a wall at the corner of St.-Mary-at-Hill, and as Doyle drew up to him he saw the placard hung on his chest: ONCE A DILIGENT TAILOR, it read, I AM NOW DISQUALIFIED FOR THAT TRADE BY BLINDNESS, AND I MUST SELL PEPPERMINTS TO SUPPORT MY WIFE AND AILING CHILD. CHRISTIAN, BE GENEROUS. He held a tray of dirty-looking lozenges, and when Doyle paused over him the old man pushed the tray forward, so that if Doyle had not stopped he couldn’t have helped spilling them.
The old man looked a little disappointed that Doyle hadn’t, and glancing around Doyle guessed why; there were a number of well dressed people out strolling in the early evening, and they’d doubtless have been moved by pity to see the old man’s candies spilled on the pavement. “Would ye purchase some fine minties from a poor blind man?” he whined, rolling his eyes imploringly at the sky.
“No, thank you,” said Doyle. “I need to find Horrabin. Horrabin,” he repeated when the beggar cocked his head with a look of earnest inquiry. “I think he’s some kind of beggar master.”
“I’ve got minties to sell, sir,” the beggar pointed out. “I couldn’t turn my attention from them to trying to remember folks without a penny to pay for my time.”
Doyle pressed his lips together, but dropped a penny into the old man’s hand. Night was coming on, and he desperately needed a place to sleep.
“Horrabin?” said the beggar more quietly. “Aye, I know him. And this being a Sunday evening, he’ll be in parliament.”
“Parliament? What do you mean?”
“I could take you there and show you, sir, but it’d mean losing at least a shilling’s worth of minties sales.”
“A shilling?” Doyle said despairingly. “All I’ve got is ten pennies!”
The beggar’s hand darted out, palm up. “You can owe me the tuppence, sir.”
Doyle hesitated. “Will he be able to give me food and a bed?”
“Oh, aye, no one is ever turned away from Horrabin’s hall.”
The trembling palm was still extended, and Doyle sighed, dug in his pocket and carefully laid his sixpence and four pennies in the old man’s hand. “Uh… lead the way.”
The old man swept the coins and peppermints into a pocket and stuffed the tray under his coat, then picked up a stick from the pavement behind him and poled himself up. “Come on, then,” he said, and strode away briskly west, the way Doyle had just come, swinging his stick in an almost perfunctory way in front of him. Doyle had to take long steps to keep up.
Dizzy with hunger, for he’d lost his soup and mashed potatoes lunch at the Morning Post office, Doyle was blinking against the sunset glare and concentrating on keeping up with the beggar, and so despite being vaguely aware of a loud rattling nearby he didn’t notice the person pacing him until a well-remembered hand clutched his pant leg. He was off balance, and went down painfully onto his hands and knees on the cobblestones.
He turned his head angrily and found himself looking up into the bearded face of Skate Benjamin. The legless man’s cart had come to a halt by colliding hard with Doyle’s ankle. “Damn it,” Doyle gasped, “let go. I’m not begging and I need to follow that—”
“Not with Horrabin, man,” said Skate, an earnest urgency in his low whisper. “You’re not bad enough to thrive with that crew. Come with—”
The old beggar had turned around and was hastening back, staring so directly at Skate that Doyle belatedly realized that his blindness was a fraud. “What are you interferin’ for, Benjamin?” the old man hissed. “Captain Jack needs to go recruiting these days?”
“Give it over, Bugs,” said Skate. “He ain’t your sort. But here’s your finder’s fee anyway, courtesy of Copenhagen Jack.” He fished two sixpences out of his waistcoat pocket and tossed them. Bugs snatched them both out of the air with one hand.
“Very well,” he said, dumping them in with his minties. “On a basis like that you can interfere any time.” He cackled and set off back toward Billingsgate, beginning to tap his cane ahead of him when he was a hundred feet away. Doyle stood up, gingerly trying his weight on his ankle.
“Before he disappears,” Doyle said, “you’d better tell me whether this Copenhagen Jack of yours can give me food and abed.”
“Yes, and a more wholesome sort of each than you’d have got from Horrabin. God, you are a helpless one, aren’t you? This way, come along.”
The dining room of the beggars’ house in Pye Street was longer than it was wide, with eight big windows, each a checkerboard of squares of warped glass leaded together, set at intervals in the long street-side wall. A street lamp out front threw a few trickles of light that were caught in the whirlpool patterns of the little panes, but the room’s illumination came from bright oil lamps dangling on chains from the ceiling, and the two candles on each of the eight long tables. The narrow east end of the hall was raised four feet above the floor level and accessible by four steps in the middle of its width; a railing ran to the wall from either side of the steps, giving the room the look of a ship’s deck, with the raised area as the forecastle.
The beggars who were assembled at the long wooden tables presented a parody of contemporary dress: there were the formal frockcoats and white gloves, mended but impeccably clean, of the Decayed Gentlemen, the beggars who evoked pity by claiming, sometimes truthfully, to be wellborn aristocrats brought to ruin by financial reverses or alcohol; the blue shirt and trousers, rope belt and black tarpaulin hat, bearing the name of some vessel in faded gold letters, of the Shipwrecked Mariners, who even here spiced their speech with nautical terms learned from dance shows and penny ballads; and there were the turbans and earrings and sandals of Distressed Hindoos; and blackened faces of miners supposedly disabled in subterranean explosions; and of course the anonymous tattered rags of the general practitioner beggars. Doyle noticed as he took a place at the end of one of the benches that there were even several dressed like himself as costermongers.
The most impressive figure of all, though, was the tall man with sandy hair and moustache who had been lounging in a high-backed chair on the raised deck, and now stood up and leaned on the railing, looking out across the company. He was extravagantly—not quite ludicrously—attired in a green satin frockcoat, with clusters of airy lace bursting out at wrist and throat, tight white satin knee breeches and white silk stockings, and little shoes that, if shorn of their gold buckles, would have looked like ballet pumps. The babble of conversation had ceased when he got to his feet.
“That’s Copenhagen Jack himself,” proudly whispered Skate, who had positioned his cart on the floor beside Doyle, “captain of the Pye Street beggars.”
Doyle nodded absently, his attention suddenly caught by the roasting turkey smell on the warm air.