Cobb and Hammond sat across from each other at a rectangular table, not so large as to impede conversation. The table itself was filled with enough food to satisfy a company five times their number: breads and mushrooms and cakes. And while I stood there, squinting in the streams of encroaching sunlight, the two men filled their plates with every imaginable manifestation of pig flesh: rashers of bacon, links of gray sausage, slivers of ham cut so thin as to be nearly translucent, their fat glistening in the candlelight. Though I now essayed to adhere to the dietary laws of my people, I had not always done so. Nevertheless, in recent years, since my return to Duke’s Place and the eateries of the Hebrews, the smell of pork had become unpleasant to my nostrils, but that was not what filled me with such disgust. Rather, it was the carnivorous pleasure with which these men ate. Indeed, watching them put the meat in their mouths, I sensed that, had they their way, they would have preferred to rip suckling piglets from their mother’s breast and devour them alive.
Cobb looked at me, nodded, and washed down whatever was in his mouth with a reddish-yellow liquid that sloshed in an oversized crystal goblet. I took it for some sort of thin arrack punch. “Weaver,” he said, once he had swallowed and set down the goblet. “This is not entirely a surprise. Shall I have Edward set a place for you?”
“Oh, let’s not be excessive,” Hammond said, snapping upright from his plate, which he had been studying with rapt attention. Less fastidious than his uncle, he did not wait to swallow his food entire, and shards of pink ham exploded across the table. “He has no desire to eat with us, and we none with him. Let him stand there if he has something to say. And better yet, let him stand there while he listens to what we have to tell him.”
“I wish Mr. Franco released from the Fleet,” I said.
“I can understand how you must feel, Mr. Weaver,” Cobb said, “but surely you must understand our position. You have not been entirely forthcoming with us.”
“And we have been paying him. That’s the very devil of the thing, you know,” Hammond announced. “It isn’t as though we’ve simply been forcing him to do our bidding, now is it, Uncle? No, he’s received coin, and good coin too. And from the East India Company as well. And now he has the audacity to accuse us of wrongdoing because we penalize his failure to perform his duties. I daresay he’s lucky he’s not the one languishing in there, waiting to die of jail fever before Parliament can enact some foolish relief law.”
Cobb coughed gently into his fist. “You must understand my position, Mr. Weaver. Mr. Hammond is inclined to excess. I, however, am not. Nevertheless, even a patient man has his breaking point. Surely you can see that. You have been running inquiries all over London, learning we hardly know what, and you have not reported a single fact to us. You have attempted to interfere with my own communications network, and that is a very bad business.”
“The man who tried to take my letters?” I asked.
“Indeed. You treated him rather roughly, and I resent it.”
“How could I know he was in your employ and not someone with a loyalty to Craven House?” I ventured, but rather feebly, I thought.
“Oh, that is very poor,” Hammond said. “Very poor. He is like a child caught with one hand in the larder, saying he was merely attempting to slay a mouse.”
Cobb bit into some sort of apple pastry and chewed methodically. After he swallowed he looked at me very gravely, as though he were a schoolmaster scolding a favorite student for form’s sake. “I think, Mr. Weaver, that you had better tell us everything that you’ve discovered thus far. And from this moment, I’d like you to send us regular reports. I wish to hear about all elements of your dealings at the East India Company, and I wish to hear all the details of your inquiry, even those aspects which yield no results. If you spend the day inquiring of a tailor you think can tell you something and then discover he knows nothing, I wish to hear his name, his address, what you thought he knew, and what he actually knew. I trust you understand me.”
I clenched my fist and could feel my color rising, but I nodded all the same. There was still Elias, still my aunt. And there was, of course, still Mr. Franco, whom I hoped to see set at liberty. Thus it was that I followed my aunt’s advice: I took my anger and set it aside; I placed it in a closet whose door I would open someday but not now.
“I fear I have been too busy to report with any regularity,” I said, by way of an apology, “but if you wish to work out a system by which I might, to your own satisfaction, send you communications, I shall certainly endeavor to comply. As for what I can now report, I trust once I do so, Mr. Franco will be released.”
“I should think not,” Hammond burst in, having no desire to let his uncle answer this question. “We cannot let such a thing be. Weaver has defied us, so we punish his friend. If we now release the friend once he agrees to make everything right, he has no incentive to remain honest with us. He may do as he likes and think he will tell us if he must but deceive us so long as he can. No, I must insist that Franco remain imprisoned for the duration, as a reminder of what awaits the others should Weaver think himself too clever once more.”
“I fear I must agree with my nephew,” Cobb said. “I am not angry that you have attempted to deceive us. It is only natural for you to do so. You do not like this situation, and that you would press to see what you might hope to get away with is entirely understandable. But now you must learn that, though I wish you no harm, I must be resolved to do harm if that is the only way. No, Mr. Weaver, your friend must remain in the Fleet, though perhaps not forever. If, after some time has passed, I believe you have been dealing fairly with us, I will consider seeing to his release. He must remain there long enough, you understand, for his imprisonment to be undesirable. Otherwise the effect will be as my nephew has stated, and you will have no reluctance to, shall we say, do things in the manner of your choosing rather than ours. And now, sir, I must beg you to tell us precisely how you have been using your time and what it is you did not wish us to know. In other words, I would very much like to hear what you thought so interesting that you would rather withhold it than protect your friends.”
“Stop coddling him, by gad,” Hammond said. “The devilish Court of Proprietors meeting is hard upon us, and we have no notion of what Ellershaw has planned. No notion of Pepper or his-”
“Weaver,” Cobb broke in, “it is time to tell us what you know.”
I had no choice. I had to stand there, again feeling like a schoolboy, this time one brought to the front of the class to conjugate Latin verbs or read a composition. And I had a difficult decision to make while I did so, for I had to determine what, if anything, of Absalom Pepper I would reveal. This dead scoundrel, I knew, was the key to what Cobb wanted, and if I could but find the truth at the end of this dark and meandering path, I might be able destroy my taskmasters. If I was not careful, I could not believe with any confidence that they would decline to destroy me.
I therefore recited my lessons. I told them of Ellershaw and his phantom illness that bordered on madness. I spoke of Forester and his secret relationship with Ellershaw’s wife, and of my strange evening at Ellershaw’s house. All the sordid details came tumbling out of me as I attempted to use smoke and confusion to hide what I did not want to reveal. So I described how I was made to threaten Mr. Thurmond of the wool interest, of the general awkwardness of Mr. Ellershaw’s domestic situation, and even of the sadness of a lost daughter that Mrs. Ellershaw was forced to conceal. I told them about Aadil, only to say that he was hostile with an air of danger and that he very clearly wished me harm. At that point I appeared to falter, for I meant to appear to falter. I had one more piece to deliver, and I wished to appear reluctant if not entirely unwilling give up my final treasure.