“I do beg your pardon,” Elias cut in. “I regret to have given you cause for alarm. My associate meant nothing of the sort. We have no power over your annuity and wish you no harm on that head. We merely wished to see if you could explain why you are entitled to it. Why has this money been settled upon you?”
“Why?” she asked, growing ever more agitated. “Why? Why should it not? Is that not the way of the silk weavers?”
“The silk weavers?” I burst out, though I knew I should have held my tongue. “What has this matter to do with them?”
“What has it not to do with them?” Mrs. Pepper retorted.
“Madam,” Elias cut in, “we were under the impression that your annuity originated with the East India Company.”
She stared as though we had offered her the gravest insult imaginable. “Why ever would the East India Company pay an annuity to me? What had Mr. Pepper to do with such men as those?”
I had thought to say this was what I hoped she could tell us, and I believe the words were upon Elias’s lips as well, but he too refrained. What, after all, could be gained by asking a question so obviously answered?
“Madam, we are clearly operating under a false impression,” Elias said. “Can you tell me whence the annuity does come?”
“I told you, didn’t I? It’s the silk weavers’ guild. After Mr. Pepper died, they sent a man to me who said that, as Absalom was a member of the guild and as I was his widow, I was entitled to a death benefit. You must swear you ain’t taking it away.”
“Allow me to explain,” I said. “You see, madam, we represent the Seahawk Insurance Office, and there was a clerical error with one of our claims relating to the East India Company. I will work with all my efforts to make certain the claim does not come into jeopardy, you understand. It is merely a matter of remaining orderly with the records. In any event, we believed the annuity came through the Company, but our records may be even more confused than we thought. Let me assure you that nothing you say will harm the security of the annuity. You can only aid us in better organizing our management of it.”
Now she appeared somewhat mollified. She took from her breast a locket and studied the picture inside, a picture of her late husband I could not doubt. After whispering a word or two in the jewel’s direction and placing a loving finger upon the image, she replaced it and turned to us. “Very well. I shall try and help you.”
“I thank you,” I said. “Now, if I understand you, you say this annuity is part of a common benefit provided for members of the silk weavers’ guild?”
“That is what I was told,” she said.
The very notation stretched the boundaries of the absurd. One hundred and twenty pounds a year for the widow of a silk weaver? Such men were lucky to earn twenty or thirty pounds a year, and while I knew the linen men formed combinations and looked after one another, they had no guild that I had ever heard of. It was good for me, however, that I had a contact among their number, the very same Devout Hale whose riotous impulses I had put to work in first getting me inside the East India Company. I could only hope he would be able to serve me once more-this time with information.
“Just so the matter may have no more confusion,” I said, “your husband was a silk weaver in London. Is that right?”
“That’s right. Aren’t you one as well? You said you were a weaver, did you not?”
I chose to disregard the question and allow her to continue with her misunderstanding. “Madam, you must know what your husband earned in his trade. Did it not surprise you that he would have a death benefit worth so many times his annual income?”
“Oh, he would never discuss anything so base as money,” she said. “I only knew that he earned enough for us to live well. My father persisted in his belief that a silk worker was no better than a porter, but did not my Absalom buy me clothes and jewels and nights at the theater? A porter indeed.”
“There are many degrees and levels of expertise among the silk workers, of course,” I said. “Perhaps you could tell me more of the capacity in which Mr. Pepper worked in the silk weaving trade, so I might-”
“He was a silk worker,” she said, with brusque finality, as though I somehow soiled his name by making such inquiries. And then, with a lighter tone, “He would not trouble me by speaking of his labors. He knew he did rough work, but what of it? It earned our bread, more than our share for our happiness.”
“As to the East India Company,” I said, “you know of no connection with your husband?”
“None. But as I said, I did not pry into matters of business. It would not have been seemly. You say there is no danger to my annuity?”
Though I hated to cause so agreeable a lady distress, I knew I had no choice but to present myself as her ally against possible attack, for if I wished to speak to her again, I wanted her to speak with eagerness and honesty. “I hope there will be no danger, and I can assure you I will do all in my power to make certain you continue to receive the sum.”
ON THE COACH on the way back, Elias and I spoke in quiet voices, for we shared the vehicle with two older tradesmen of unusually severe countenance. They smoked me for a Jew almost at once and spent the bulk of the trip staring malevolently. On occasion, one of them would turn to his companion and say something along the lines of, “Do you like sharing a coach with a Hebrew?”
“I never love it,” his friend would respond.
“It does not answer,” the first would say. “It is a low way to travel, indeed.”
They would then return to their malevolent staring until enough time had passed to engage in another terse exchange.
After perhaps three or four of these exchanges, I turned to the gentlemen. “I make it my habit never to toss from a moving coach a man who is above forty-five years of age, but each time you open your mouths, you cushion that scruple by approximately five years. By my calculations, and based upon your appearance, the next time you speak so rudely, I will be fully empowered to toss you without a second thought. And as for the coachman, you need not worry about his interfering. A few coins will answer his concerns, and as you know, we Hebrews have no shortage of the ready.”
Though it was unlikely that I would actually throw a man hard by seventy years onto the road, the threat of such a punishment rendered these wits silent. Indeed, they appeared thereafter reluctant even to glance at us, which made conversation somewhat easier.
“Heloise and Absalom,” Elias mused, directing my attention once more to the matter at hand. “It is a most unpropitious conflation of names, and a poem I should hate to read.”
“Mrs. Pepper hardly seemed to note the evil omens, so enchanted was she with her late husband.”
“One wonders what sort of man he must have been,” Elias mused. “Indeed, beyond his personal charms, I cannot think why the Company would pay his widow so handsomely.”
“It seems to me rather obvious,” I said. “They have done something horrific, and they wish to keep the widow quiet.”
“A fine theory,” Elias agreed, “but there is a problem with it. You see, if the Company had offered her ten or twenty or even thirty pounds a year, the story of a guild annuity might have been creditable. But one hundred and twenty? Even blinded by an inflated sense of her late husband’s worth, as is surely the case, the widow cannot truly believe that such beneficence is standard. So if the Company has somehow engineered the death of that fellow, why would it behave now in such a way as to draw attention to the very irregularity of it?”
His question was a good one, and I had no easy answer. “Perhaps the Company’s crime is so great that it favors a smothering benevolence to any masquerade of veracity. Perhaps the widow knows this guild is not the source but wishes to perpetuate the fiction of Mr. Pepper’s superiority to all other men.”