Blackburn took no more than a glance at his. “No!” he cried out. “No, no, this will not do! This will not do at all! Look at this, you stupid slut. There is a fingerprint made of grease upon the side of the vessel. Are you blind not to have seen it? Take this filth away and bring me something clean.”
“It ain’t going to be clean when you’re wearing it ’pon your head, now, is it?” she asked.
My cooler temperament recognized her question as belonging to the rhetorical variety, but Mr. Blackburn seemed to take it rather more seriously. “I cannot abide such talk, for the thought of such an assault upon my person is an abomination.”
“You’re the balmy nation, not me,” the girl answered, hands firmly on hips in a well-practiced attitude of sauciness.
This exchange had gathered the attention of the bulk of the room, and now, from the kitchen, came a rather portly man with an apron across his chest, no wig, and a shaved head. He pushed through the crowd and arrived at our table. “What is this? What’s the trouble here?”
“ Derby, thank Jesus,” Blackburn breathed. “This impudent baggage is serving your drink in necessary pots and mixing the contents with night soil.”
This struck me as a rather severe exaggeration, but I kept my council.
“He’s right mad,” the girl said. “It ain’t nothing but a finger smear is all.”
Derby struck the girl in the head, but not hard. In fact, he hardly hit more than hair and cap, and I knew at once it was for show. “Draw him another,” he said, “and be sure it’s spotless this time.” He turned to Blackburn. “I am sorry about that. Jenny’s got the flux, and this girl ain’t familiar with your likings.”
“I did instruct her,” Blackburn said.
Derby held out his hands in a gesture of good-natured frustration. “You know how these girls are. They grow up in filth. You tell them clean, they think so long as it lacks a cat head floating upon the top, it will do. I’ll go be sure she understands.”
“You must make certain,” Blackburn said. “Cleanliness of drinking vessels comes in three stages: the application of soap, the complete and entire removal of soap with clean water, and the drying with a clean cloth. Inside and out, Derby. Inside and out. Make certain she knows this much.”
“I shall indeed.” The fellow walked away, and Blackburn informed me that Derby was his sister’s husband’s brother, insinuating so that I could not but understand that the fastidious clerk had helped the publican out on an occasion or two when money had been hard to find. As a result, Derby indulged Blackburn’s desires, making his establishment the only one in the metropolis in which Blackburn felt he might safely drink.
“Now, sir,” he said, “as to your business, I believe you will find me your servant, and you will have just observed one of the most important principles of the orderly man’s trade: the series. Once you inform your interlocutor there are to be three components to your discourse, you have established a series, and a series, sir, is undeniable. Once a man hears the first point, he shall long to hear the remaining ones. It is a principle I have often used to my advantage, and now I share it with you.”
I responded with joy that he had been so good as to pass along this wisdom, and I begged to hear more of his philosophy of order. Thus began a long lecture interrupted only by my occasional comments of approbation. Blackburn spoke for well over an hour, and though I believed his notion of the series had some merit, it appeared to be the jewel in his intellectual crown. Rarely did his ideas transcend the matronly dictums of A place for everything and everything in its place and Cleanliness is next to godliness. Yet it was not only in these platitudes that Blackburn ’s peculiarity lay. As we talked, he aligned our pots of ale. He removed the contents of his pockets, ordered them, and replaced them. He tugged repeatedly at his sleeves, announcing that there was a formula, a ratio of coat to shirtsleeve, that must be observed at all times.
In short, I began to see what I had already suspected-namely, that if his concern with order was not a form of madness, it was, at the very least, a dangerous preoccupation, perhaps caused by some sort of humoral imbalance. It also became clear to me that when I pressed him for examples of Company errors, he declined to speak any ill of the doings at Craven House. He might well hate disorder when he found it, but his loyalty was fierce. I would have no choice, then, but to loosen his tongue some other way.
I excused myself, telling him I wished to relieve myself but hated to do so in public. I believe he understood and applauded my sentiments and so I left, not to make water but instead to make opportunities.
I entered the kitchen, where I found the serving girl assembling a tray of drinks. “I wish to apologize for my acquaintance’s rude behavior before,” I said. “He is rather taken with neatness in all things, and I am sure you meant no harm.”
The girl curtsied. “You are very kind to say so.”
“It is no kindness but only common manners. I would not have you think I approved of his treatment of you. Indeed, I know him from my business, and rather than being a particular friend, he is a kind of rival to me. Tell me, what is your name, my dear?”
“Annie,” she said, with another curtsy.
“Annie, if you would offer me a favor, I am certain to reward your kindness.”
She looked a bit more skeptical now. “What sort of favor have you in mind, then?”
“My acquaintance is of rather too sober a disposition. He judges his ale too carefully, and yet I should very much like to loosen his tongue. Do you think you might be able to add a bit of gin to his ale? Not so much that he might notice, but enough to give his spirits an encouraging nudge?”
She offered me a sly grin but immediately wiped her face blank. “I don’t know, sir. It doesn’t seem right to play so upon a gentleman’s ignorance.”
I held up a shilling. “Now does it seem right?”
She took the coin from my fingers. “It does indeed.”
Back at the table the girl brought us our fresh pots. Blackburn and I talked more of indifferent matters, until he finished his tainted ale and began to demonstrate in his speech and movement that the gin was doing its business. I saw I had my opportunity before me. “For a man who has such a profound hatred of disorder, Craven House must be a difficult place to labor.”
“At times, at times,” he said, a slight slur coming over his words. “There are all sorts of wretched doings there. Papers filed in the wrong place or not at all, expenditures made without proper accounting. Once,” he said in a hushed voice, “the night-soil man was murdered upon his way to perform his tasks, and the pots were not emptied that night. The lot of them were content to let their pots sit the next day without emptying. The whole lot of them, a bunch of filthy savages.”
“Wretched, wretched,” I said. “Is there more?”
“Oh, aye, there is more. More than you would credit. One of the directors, I won’t say his name, but I’ve heard-mind you, I don’t know that it’s true-but I’ve heard he uses his shirttails to clean himself and then just goes about his business with them, all soiled as they are.”
“But surely all of the Company men cannot be so terrible.”
“All of them? No, not so terrible as that.”
The girl came and took away our emptied pots, replacing them with fresh. She offered me a sprightly wink, so as to inform me she had plied the same trick with this as she had the last.
“I think that strumpet likes me,” Blackburn said. “You saw that wink, did you not?”
“I saw it.”
“Aye, she likes me. But I’d not lie next to that, not unless I could see her take a bath first. Oh, I like to watch a woman bathe, Mr. Weaver. That’s what I like best of all.”
While he drank, he continued to inform me of other crimes against hygiene. I allowed this to continue while he consumed the better part of his fortified drink, but hearing the slur in his voice grow increasingly more pronounced, and suspecting that the conversation might soon escape my ability to shape its contours, I pushed forward, I hoped not too forcefully. “What of other matters? What of the slovenliness you implied in areas beyond personal grooming? Matters of accounting.”