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Elias clapped his hands together. “That’s the thing, Weaver. Our worthy Mr. Swan must manage it very carefully. If you do this right, Swan, I can promise you my own business in future.”
“I can think of no greater incentive to give the man,” I observed, “than the business of a gentleman who never pays his bills.”
Elias pursed his lips but otherwise ignored me. “If Weaver is not to be recognized, there must be as little about him as we can manage that draws attention to his identity. His clothes, then, must be fashionable and bespeak his supposed station, but they must not make themselves conspicuous in any way. I want that when a man looks at Weaver, he merely thinks he has seen that kind a hundred times before and looks no further. Do you understand my meaning, Swan?”
“Perfectly, sir. I am your man.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” Elias exclaimed. “We can use the very principles of a performing trickster to hide Mr. Weaver in plain sight. Why, I believe anyone might look upon him who had seen him countless times before, and not know him for who he is. And as for the rest of the world, which seeks him out from a description of his general personage- why, these strangers will never look at him twice.”
Swan nodded. “You are right in that, sir. Very right, for in my trade I have long come to know that when we meet each other, we see the clothes and the wig and the grooming, and we form our opinions with only a glance or two at the face. But as to choosing the clothes to do what we wish, that shall not be easy. Or, rather, it shall not be easy to hit it just on target. We must be most cautious, I think.”
And here they entered into a conversation I could hardly even begin to understand. They spoke of fabrics and cuts and weaves and buttons. Swan pulled out samples of cloth, which Elias waved away with contempt until he found what he liked. He examined threads and lace and buckles; he dug through buckets of buttons. Elias proved himself as much an expert on these matters as Swan, and they spoke in their particular argot for near an hour before the course of my wardrobe was determined. Would a coat of silk or wool be more fitting? A dye of blue or black? Blue, of course, but how deep a shade? Velvet, but not this velvet! Of course, they could not use this velvet (which looked to me indistinguishable from the one they could use quite happily). And as for the embroidery- well, that would have to be just so. I believe Elias took as much pleasure from ordering my new clothes as he did his own.
“Now, regarding your wigs,” Elias a
“My wife’s brother is a peruke maker, sir,” Swan said. “He can do the business.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Entire, sir. He can be trusted entire, but there is no need for him to be trusted at all. He need not know who Mr. Weaver is or that there is aught unusual about him.”
“I fear he must, for we need wigs with a singular design- that of concealing Mr. Weaver’s own hair.”
“Would it not be easier for me simply to shave my head?” I asked. Though no Samson, I admit to an attachment to my locks, which I thought rather manly. However, I was more attached to my life, and I saw no reason to burden myself with the hangman’s noose if I could squeak by with the barber’s shears.
“That ca
I accepted his point, and we agreed that there was no choice but to put our faith in Swan’s brother-in-law.
Mr. Swan began to take my measurements while Elias continued to chat about how I would carry out his plan. “You will need to choose a name, of course. You want something Christian sounding, but not too Christian.”
“Michael?” I suggested, thinking of the English version of my uncle’s name.
“Too Hebrew,” Elias said, waving his hand. “There’s a Michael in your Jewish scriptures.”
“How about Jesus,” I suggested. “That should be sufficiently un-Hebrew.”
“I thought perhaps Matthew. Matthew Evans. There is a name neither unusual nor common. Just the very thing we need.”
I had no objections, so at that moment my identity as Matthew Evans pushed its way into the world through the womb of Elias’s mind. Not a particularly pleasant way to be born, but the alternatives were surely worse.
Swan informed me that it would be some days before my first suit was ready, but he was able, while I waited, to provide me with a plain and unpretentious costume of the kind I normally wore (he was working on such a one for another customer and merely altered it to fit my frame). I could now safely dispose of my footman disguise, but in doing so I also ran the risk of being recognized, for in these clothes I looked far more like myself than I would have preferred.
The tailor then took us to his brother-in-law’s shop, where I ordered two fashionable wigs. The peruke maker offered to trim my hair somewhat to make the fit easier, but not so much that a casual observer might notice my hair had been altered. This fellow, too, said that he would work night and day to make certain my wares were ready as quickly as possible. Matthew Evans would have to wait only a little while before making his first appearance in the world.
In the meantime I had to procure for myself a place to stay, for I thought it best not to linger at a single i
Thus, with a tolerable roof over my head once more, I commenced my political studies, a program that began with a visit to Fleet Street to buy several of the common newspapers. I learned less of politics than I did of myself, for I discovered that there was no more celebrated topic than Benjamin Weaver. Our British papers love nothing so well as a notable cause, and no hack writer wishes to be so unoriginal as to have the same thought as any other writer in the land, so I could not be utterly astonished at seeing my name so used. I had seen these journalistic eruptions many times in the past. Nevertheless, it was somewhat disorienting to see one’s name used so freely, with so little regard for the truth. It is a very strange thing to be transformed into metaphor.
I stood to each writer as a mere representation of his own political beliefs. The Whiggish papers lamented that so horrific a criminal as myself might have escaped, and they cursed the wicked Jacobites and Papists who aided me. The Whigs painted me a rebel who conspired with the Pretender to murder the king, though the mechanics of this plot were mentioned only in the vaguest of terms. Even I, a political naÏf if one had ever been born, could see that the Whigs merely wished to turn a potential embarrassment into a political tool.
The same held for the Tories, whose papers suggested that I was a hero, having attempted to prove my i
None of this, however, was as interesting as an advertisement I found in the Postboy. It read: