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“As you are no longer inside Newgate, I can only suppose that you put the lockpick to good use.”
“I put it to the best use I could. I picked the locks of my chains,” I said, “tore a bar from the window, which I used to smash through the wall of a chimney I climbed. I then broke through a few more locks, made my way up a series of stairways, and smashed through a barred window and, finally, climbed down a rope made of my own clothes, leaving me naked in the street.”
He stared at me. “An hour,” he repeated, “in the Turk and Sun.”
I had passed by this i
I took the most poorly lit table I could find and called for a plate of whatever was warm and a pot of ale. When a boiled fowl in raisin sauce was set before me, I dug at the bird with carnivorous ferocity until my face was slick with grease.
I suppose liveried footmen were not part of the usual patronage of the i
Once the drink had moistened his lips, he found himself ready to begin addressing the matter at hand. “Explain to me again why you will not flee.”
“Had I truly murdered Yate,” I said, “I would flee gladly, with all my heart. I would adopt the role of a fugitive. But I have not murdered anyone, and I won’t live the rest of my life as a renegado, afraid to enter the country that has always been my home, because someone has wished to see such a thing happen.”
“What someone has wished is to see you dead. While you live, you surely have defeated your enemies.”
“I ca
“To Yate? I thought you’d never met the man until an hour before his death.”
“It’s true, but in that hour we formed a friendship of sorts. At one instant in the fighting, he saved my life, and I won’t let his death go unpunished if I can help it.”
He sighed and rubbed his hands down along his face. “Tell me what you know thus far.”
I had already recounted to him of my early meetings with Mr. Ufford and Mr. Littleton, though I recalled those events to him and spoke also of my meeting that night with Rowley.
Elias was no less astonished than I had been. “Why would Griffin Melbury want to see you hang?” he asked. “Good Lord, Weaver. You are not cuckolding the man, are you? For if this is merely a matter of bedding another man’s wife, I will be very disappointed.”
“No, I am not bedding another man’s wife. I have not seen Miriam for nearly half a year.”
“You have not seen her, you say. Have you carried on some sort of intrigue by letter?”
I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort. I’ve had no contact with her. I would be surprised that Melbury even knew I had ever asked his wife for her hand. I ca
“You can never be certain with women, you know. They will do the most astonishing things. After all, did Mrs. Melbury not surprise you entire by becoming a Christian?”
I looked away. Miriam had surprised me- to a degree that I could not entirely understand. Since I had resumed contact with my relations, most notably my uncle and his family, and returned to our neighborhood, Dukes Place, I had found myself drawn- as much by habit as by inclination- deeper into the community of my coreligionists. I attended Sabbath worship on a regular basis, said my prayers at the synagogue for nearly all major holy days, and increasingly found it difficult to violate the ancient dietary laws. I had not yet determined to observe these laws to the letter, but I had come to get a queasy feeling when I contemplated eating pig flesh or oysters or meat stewed in milk- or even the bird given to me at this tavern. I had begun to dislike keeping my head uncovered; I begged off business on Friday night or Saturday if it could be postponed; from time to time I would sit in my uncle’s study looking through his Hebrew Bible, struggling to recall the slippery language I had studied for so many years as a child.
I do not claim to have been inching toward anything a true devotee would consider full observance of the Jewish laws, but I found myself more at ease if I inclined myself toward several of them. And perhaps because, like all men, I tend to look inward and easily presume the rest of the world thinks the way I do, I believed Miriam would be so inclined as well. After all, she attended the synagogue, she assisted my aunt with holiday preparations, she never, that I could see, blatantly violated Sabbath or dietary law- not even after she moved from my uncle’s house. So why had she joined the Church?
At first I presumed it had merely been to appease this Melbury, whom I imagined as oily and unctuous, a handsome spark of better breeding than means. But later, as I contemplated Miriam’s choice, another thought occurred to me. More than once she had told me that she envied me for my ability to be like the English. I knew it was something she desired, but it was made impossible by her being a Jewess. There was an irony here, for as a Hebrew man, I could never be English, I could only be like the English. As a Hebrew woman, the opposite was true of Miriam.
Only look at the works of the poets, and you will see it. There is always the Jew, and there is the Jew’s daughter or the Jew’s wife. This truism is perhaps most blatant in Mr. Granville’s famous Jew of Venice, in which the pretty daughter, Jessica, need only leave her villainous Jew father and embrace her Christian lover in order to shed all vestiges of her Hebrew past. Miriam, to deploy the terminology of the natural scientists, as a woman was but a body in the orbit of the most powerful man to whom she attached herself. Marrying a Christian allowed her to become English; more than that, it necessitated it. It has happened that Jewish men marry English women, and each partner maintains the erstwhile religion. It ca
Elias, however, was far more interested in why Melbury would wish me harm. “If you have done him no wrong, and presuming that you are right and that his wife has not incited a hatred, why would he wish to destroy you? And perhaps more important, how could he possibly tell Piers Rowley how to conduct himself?”
“As for the latter, I presume that Rowley owes some sort of allegiance to the Tories, and that Melbury is a patron of one kind or another. The judge made it clear that in anticipation of the upcoming election, men must gravitate as their loyalties demand and act accordingly.”
“Indeed they must.” Elias cocked his head. “I had forgotten that you were no politician, Weaver, which is why the story is utter nonsense. Rowley owes nothing to the Tories. He is a Whig, sir. A Whig, and one known to be aligned with Albert Hertcomb, Melbury’s opponent in the upcoming race.”