Chapter One

Hanover Square and the Bull — Tuesday, 4 to Friday, 21 January 1785

The gentleman had found a new newspaper, and was in love with it.

It had not existed on the last day of the old year. On the first day of the new one it had come into the world from a printing-house in Blackfriars, four pages for twopence-halfpenny, under the name of the Daily Universal Register; and by its fourth number it lay on the library carpet on top of the Chronicle and the Morning Post and the Public Advertiser, which had been the gentleman’s favourites for years and were now so many leaves under a tree.

“Whole words,” he said, without looking up, when the grey coat came in. “Did you know? The man doesn’t set his type a letter at a time, as every printer has done since Caxton. He has the words cast whole. The, and and, and King, and Parliament, in lumps, ready in a case, so that the compositor need only reach in and take one out. Some thousands of them, he says, all made beforehand.” He turned a page. “He says it’s quicker. I should think it’s a great deal quicker, provided you only wish to say what’s in the case.” He looked up at last. “Sit down, Mr Grey. Or stand. You’ll stand.”

The grey coat stood by the door with his hat in both hands.

It was Tuesday, the fourth of January, and the frost that had come down at Christmas was still on London; the water-pipes along the square had burst on New Year’s Day and frozen again where they burst, so that the railings wore a row of glass beards. The library fire was built to a man’s waist. The gentleman sat among his newspapers in the claret silk with a cup of chocolate going cold at his elbow.

“Our friend in the good boots came to see me on Saturday,” he said. “He’d been at Lombard Street on the Friday morning, for the Bristol mail, as he is every morning. The watchmaker’s man came into the yard and called for a parcel, and took it, and signed for it. On a Friday.” He laid the paper on his knee. “He touched his hat to him. I wish he hadn’t. He’s very fond of touching his hat. He has very few manners, and he can’t leave those alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I told you Thursdays, I think. In November.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was misinformed.” The gentleman smiled, pleasantly. “It’s every morning, it seems. He’s been at that coach every morning since October; I’d forgotten I’d asked him to. One forgets the things one pays for by the day.” He picked up the cold chocolate, and looked at it, and put it down. “And the keepers haven’t changed their day, or their road, or their man. They’ve been at the same coach since Michaelmas, and they’re at it still.” He turned his head and looked at the grey coat with great good humour. “So that’s all right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m glad.” He said it simply, as he did not often say anything. “I find I’m very glad, Mr Grey. I shouldn’t have liked to be wrong about you. There are so few people I’m not wrong about.”

The grey coat said nothing. The fire settled. Somewhere below, in the kitchen, a girl was singing as she worked, and stopped.

“Lady Day,” said the gentleman, and went back to his paper, “is the twenty-fifth of March. I’m told there’s to be a book. I’m told it will come by the coach, because everything comes by the coach now, Mr Palmer has made it so very convenient. I’d like two faces in that yard from the first of March. His, and yours, turn about, so that the watchmaker’s man grows used to neither. When the book comes I want to know the day it lands, and the room it goes to, and who has the key.” He found his place. “Not to take it. You needn’t look like that. I’ve told you a dozen times. I only like to know where things are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go home. It’s very cold. You look perished.” He turned a page. “Whole words, Mr Grey. Think of it. A whole sentence, sitting in a box in Blackfriars, waiting for a man to want it said.”

He went down by the back stair.

The new girl was in the kitchen passage on her knees with a bucket, as she had been in November, and she did not look up as he passed, which was correct, and which he noticed she had learned. Eleven weeks to Lady Day. He went out by the area door into the frost.

The man in the brown coat was on the area steps with his pipe, without a hat, in a coat that had been brushed every day of its life and was not thick enough for January. He moved his feet so that the grey coat could pass.

“He’s glad,” said the brown coat.

“So he said.”

“I heard it from the second landing. Everything in this house carries.” He drew on the pipe and looked at the square, where a boy was sliding along the frozen gutter in front of the railings with his arms out. “You did nothing, and he’s glad. In this house that’s what passing an examination looks like.”

“I didn’t pass anything. I went home.”

“That’s what I said.” The brown coat took the pipe out of his mouth. “He’ll want you at Lombard Street.”

“From March.”

“Then you’ll be the face in the yard when it comes in.” The brown coat knocked the pipe out against the railing, carefully, so that the ash fell into the area and not on the step. “Mind your feet, Mr Grey. The bottom stair’s iced. Somebody should have salted it.”

He walked home by Swallow Street and the Haymarket and Charing Cross, in the iron cold, past the braziers at the corners and the watermen standing round them with nothing to row on, to the court off the Strand by Hungerford stairs where he had his two rooms over a pastry-cook’s.

He sat down at the table by the window without taking off his coat.

In November he had been told a lie in the library, very pleasantly, and the truth on the area steps, in the rain; and he had come home and sat at this table and written nothing to anybody. He had told himself it was sense. A man who warned the keepers about a day that did not exist would have been in the river by Twelfth Night, and the keepers no better off. It was sense. It was also what he had been doing for twelve years: knowing a thing, and going home.

And now he was trusted. That was what I’m glad meant. When a brig came into Kingroad with a lady’s book in her bread-room, he would be the face in the yard. He would follow the watchmaker’s man to Red Lion Street, which he had found himself in ’eighty-three, and up a stair he had never been on; and then he would come back to Hanover Square and stand by the door with his hat in his hands and say where it was.

Not to take it. Not yet.

He looked out of the window at the court. The pastry-cook’s boy was carrying out trays of mince pies left over from Christmas, at a halfpenny the pair, and a woman was arguing with him about whether they were stale.

He could not write to the keepers. Anything written could be read; he had spent twelve years seeing to it. He could not send by the girl in the kitchen without putting the girl in the river first. A grey coat on a watchmaker’s step in Red Lion Street would be in the library by supper.

That left the Bull.

The keepers’ man still sat at the Bull in Bishopsgate Street every Friday at a quarter to four, under the gallery, waiting for the Faversham carrier, as he had for three years. There was nothing for him there now. Rolfe had gone fishing, and the carrier brought nothing but oysters and gossip, and the man in the good boots had stopped going to the Bull in October, for Lombard Street, at two shillings a day and his breakfast.

Nobody watched the Bull any more. It was the one door in London that had been left open because everybody had stopped looking at it.

He went on the Friday, the seventh, and did not go in.

He stood under the arch from Bishopsgate Street at half past three, in the dusk, with the frost coming down and the yard full of waggons and steaming horses and ostlers swearing at all of them, and looked across the yard to the tap-room window. The keepers’ man was there, at a table under the gallery, by himself, with a chop and a pint and a book propped against the jug: small and neat, with his hair tied very tight and his head bent. He did not look up. The Faversham carrier came in at a quarter to four and roared something at the window from the box, and the keepers’ man raised a hand without lifting his eyes from the book.

The grey coat stood under the arch until the lamp over it was lit. Then he went home.

On the Monday all London knew that two men had crossed the sea in a balloon. They had gone up from the cliff at Dover on the Friday, a Frenchman and an American doctor, and come down in a forest near Calais at about the hour the grey coat had been standing under the arch in Bishopsgate deciding not to cross a yard. They had thrown out their ballast, and their oars, and their dinner, and at the last their coats, to keep up, and had landed in their shirts. A man at Charing Cross was selling a print of it, with a lady in the basket who had not been there.

On Friday the fourteenth he crossed the yard.

The tap-room of the Bull was long and low and brown, with a fire at each end and a floor of sanded boards, and a smell of beer and wet wool and the stables coming in every time the door opened. It was full of carriers and drovers and a few clerks from Bishopsgate who preferred it to the coffee-houses because it was cheaper and nobody there could read. The keepers’ man was at his table under the window that gave onto the gallery, as he had been the week before, with the same chop, very likely, and a different book.

The grey coat took off his hat, and sat down across the table from him.

The keepers’ man looked up.

He did not start. The grey coat had expected him to, and saw that he had been wrong; this was somebody who had been watched before, and had learned how to be. He looked at the grey coat’s face, and then at the coat, and then at the hat on the table between them; and he closed his book, very gently, keeping one finger in the place.

“I know the coat,” he said.

“Most people do. Nobody knows the man in it. That’s what it’s for.” The grey coat laid his hands flat on the table, on either side of the hat, so that they could be seen. “You’re the watchmaker’s man. You sign at Lombard Street on the mornings the Bristol mail comes in. You eat a chop here on Fridays and read a book you don’t turn the pages of. And there’s a clock in your watchmaker’s window that strikes a minute after the others.”

The keepers’ man said nothing at all.

“I’ve been twelve years in the wrong trade,” said the grey coat. “I’d like a year in yours.”

The potboy came past with a tray, and the grey coat asked him for a pint of the same, and the potboy went. The keepers’ man did not take his eyes off him.

“I don’t have a trade,” he said at last. “I’m a clerk. I carry things up a stair.”

“Then I’ll carry things up a stair.”

“Nobody would let you on it.” The keepers’ man moved his finger in the book. “You’re the second man since the summer to offer himself to me, you know. The other offered to pay me better than I’m paid. He hadn’t asked what I’m paid.” He looked at the grey coat’s hands on the table. “You’re not offering to pay me at all. That’s worse. I can understand a man who wants to buy something.”

“I don’t want anything of yours.”

“Then why are you at my table?”

The Faversham carrier came in from the yard at that moment, in a cloud of frost, and called across the room to the keepers’ man that there was nothing for him again, Mr Pym, nothing at all; and then saw the grey coat, and looked at him, and went off to the fire without another word.

The potboy brought the pint. The grey coat did not drink it.

“Thursdays,” he said.

Pym’s finger stopped in the book.

“In November,” said the grey coat, “the gentleman told me that his man in the good boots would stand at Lombard Street on Thursdays, from the first of December, to watch what the watchmaker’s man carried home. He told me. Nobody else in that house heard it. The man in the good boots has been in that yard every morning the Bristol mail comes in since the twenty-first of October.” He kept his hands where they were. “If the watchmaker’s man had stopped calling on Thursdays, there was only one man in London who could have told him to.”

Pym sat very still.

“You didn’t tell us,” he said.

“No.”

“You knew it was a lie, and you knew what it was for, and you sent nothing.”

“If I’d sent you anything, you’d have changed your day. And on the day you changed it he’d have known it was me. And I’d have been in the river by Twelfth Night, and you’d have had a day changed, and nothing else, and no way of knowing why.” The grey coat looked at the pint. “I’m no use to you drowned.”

“That’s very sensible.”

“It is. I’ve always been sensible.” He moved the pint an inch, square to the edge of the table, and took his hand away from it. “On Tuesday he told me he was glad. He said he shouldn’t have liked to be wrong about me. He’s putting me in the yard at Lombard Street from the first of March. Turn about with the boots. So that when your book comes in, I’ll be the one who sees it come, and follows it home, and goes back to Hanover Square and stands by the door and says where it is.” He was quiet a moment. “I’ve been sensible for twelve years. I’ve stood by a great many things, and been told nothing was to be done, and gone home, and things were done. I find I’d sooner not go home this time.”

Pym looked at him across the table for a long while.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“No. I’d think less of you if you did.” The grey coat reached inside his coat, slowly, so that Pym could watch the hand, and brought it out empty, and laid it on the table again. “I’ve nothing written. I’ll carry nothing written. So I’ll give you something it costs me to give, and you can take it up your stair and see what it weighs.”

“His name,” said the grey coat, “is Wakeling. Joseph Wakeling. He was a bruiser in the booths at Bartholomew Fair when he was a boy, before he took to this. He lodges at a saddler’s in Long Acre. Somebody blacks his boots for him every morning; it’s the saddler’s girl, and he pays her a penny.” He did not lower his voice. Nobody in the tap-room of the Bull was listening to anybody; it was a room made for not being listened to. “And on the last evening of August in ’eighty-two he was in the King’s yard at Deptford.”

Pym’s face did not change. But he put the book down on the table, and took his finger out of it, and lost the place.

“The old clerk,” he said. “Treadgold. The purser. It was in the Gazetteer.”

“It was in all of them. Accidental death.” The grey coat looked at the window, at the gallery outside it going dark. “I was sent down to him. To the mast pond, at dusk, with an offer for a paper he had in his breast pocket. The last offer. I found him at the edge of the pond, by the coping, with his stick, a little after half past seven, and I made it, and he wouldn’t take it. Put it back, he said. Twice.” He was quiet. “I told him it turned cold by the water at that hour and he shouldn’t stay. Then I walked away up the gravel to the wicket by the mast house, because my part was done, and I’d been told I might.”

He turned the pint on the table, a quarter turn, and stopped.

“I passed him at the wicket. Wakeling. Going in, as I came out. He touched his hat to me, and didn’t hurry. And when I was through, I heard him behind me on the gravel. Heavier than he’d been at the wicket, and quicker, going the other way. I didn’t turn round.” He put both hands flat on the table again. “I knew what he was for. I went home.”

Pym said nothing for a long time.

At the far fire the carrier was talking to a drover about the frost. In the yard an ostler was leading out a pair of horses with their breath going up in clouds, and somebody was singing a song about a girl in Gravesend who had married a sailor for his money, and found he had none.

“Why tell me?” said Pym at last.

“Because it’s the only thing I have that’ll hang me as well as him.” The grey coat picked up his hat. “There was a coroner, and a jury of twelve, and a verdict. If ever there’s another, I was by the pond, and I spoke to the old man, and I walked away and let it happen. That’s in your hands now. You can give it to anybody you like.” He stood up. “Now you’ve something of mine that I can’t take back.”

Pym looked up at him.

“Who else knows it?”

“Him. And me. And now you.” He put on his hat. “Ask the others. Not in writing. I’ll come on Friday.”

He went out through the yard. He did not look back at the window, and so he did not see whether Pym was watching him go; he found, crossing the frozen cobbles under the lamp, that it was the first time in twelve years he had not wanted to know.

On Friday the twenty-first there were two of them at the table under the window.

The second was a narrow upright old man in a clerk’s plain black, with a leather case on his knees, who sat very straight on the tap-room bench as if it were a pew and he disapproved of the sermon. He had a glass of small beer in front of him that he had not touched, and a glass of water beside it that he had. The potboy, who had brought both, stood at a little distance staring at him, because nothing like him had ever come into the tap-room of the Bull before.

The grey coat sat down.

“Monsieur,” said the old man. His English was careful and very clear. “Mr Pym has told me what you told him. All of it. Twice, at my request, and once more this morning, because I am old and slow.” He did not offer his hand. “I have come to look at you.”

“Look, then.”

The Genevan looked. He looked for some time, over the top of the small beer, without any expression at all, and the grey coat sat and let him, with his hands on the table and his hat beside them, as he had stood in a great many doorways and let himself be looked at by people who could not see him.

“You are not what I expected,” said the Genevan at last.

“What did you expect?”

“Something with a face.” The Genevan took a sip of the water. “We have you in our book, you understand. Not by name; we have never had a name. By a colour. In the rue Dauphine, in ’eighty. On a bridge in Amsterdam. At the brass nails in Bristol, in the rain.” He set the water down. “For four years you have been the most dangerous man in our book. And you are a man of fifty in a coat, who sits at a table and squares his pot to the edge of it.”

“I’m forty-nine.”

“Forgive me.” The Genevan inclined his head. “The other keeper sends a message. He would not come. He says that if you are what you say, you will know his face already; and if you are not, you will not have it from him.” He folded his hands on the leather case. “And he says that a man who knows the way out of one house is a man who knows the way out of two.”

The grey coat thought about that.

“He’s right,” he said.

“He generally is.” The Genevan looked at Pym, who was sitting at the end of the bench with his hands round his pint, saying nothing, as he had said nothing all week. “Mr Pym does not believe you.”

“I know.”

“I do not believe you either. I am a Calvinist. I do not believe anybody; it saves a great deal of disappointment.” The Genevan considered the small beer, and moved it an inch further away. “Mr Pym said a thing to me in August: a road runs both ways. And in November, on a Monday, when he came to me with something your girl in the kitchen had told her brother, I said to him, it appears that a man can, also.” He looked at the grey coat. “I did not know then that I would have to sit in a public house in Bishopsgate Street and find out whether I meant it.”

“And do you?”

“I mean to find out.” The Genevan opened the leather case, and took out nothing, and closed it again; it seemed to be a habit. “These are the terms. You will not like them.”

“I’ve not liked terms for twelve years. Go on.”

“You will stay where you are,” said the Genevan. “In Hanover Square. In his house, at his door, in that coat. You will do whatever he tells you, exactly as you have always done it, and you will go to Lombard Street on the first of March and stand in the yard and watch Mr Pym sign for his parcels, and you will report to him what you see. All of it. Truly. What comes into that yard, and when, is our affair.” He held up one long finger. “You will carry nothing written. Not to us, not to anybody. Not a line, not a name, not a figure on the back of a bill. If you are ever taken with a paper of ours on you, you are a dead man and we are a dead room, and I do not propose that either.”

“Yes.”

“You will come here, to this table, on the first Friday of every month, at a quarter to four, when the carrier comes in. You will eat your dinner. If you have something to tell him, you will tell him across the table, in the ordinary voice, as you did last week. If you have nothing, you will eat your dinner and go home.” A second finger. “And you will do it for a year. Not a quarter. Not until Lady Day. A year, from tonight. And at the end of it we will know something about you, and you will know something about us, and we will see whether either of us is still alive to mind.”

“And what do I have, for that?”

“Nothing.” The Genevan closed his hand. “We pay nobody for what he is. We pay men for what they carry, and you will carry nothing. You will have your dinner, which you will pay for yourself. That is all.”

The grey coat looked at the old man across the table for some time. Then he looked at Pym, at the end of the bench, who had looked up from his pint.

“I didn’t ask to be paid,” he said.

“No,” said the Genevan. “That is the only reason I came.” He stood up, slowly, and tucked the leather case under his arm, and put a coin on the table for the small beer he had not drunk. “Mr Pym will walk me to Hatton Garden. You will stay and finish that pint, which you have not touched in either of your visits. Then you will go home.” He put on his hat. “Monsieur. I hope very much to see you on the first Friday in February. I should not like to have been wrong about you.” He paused. “Somebody said that to you a fortnight ago, I think, in another room.”

The grey coat said nothing.

“Yes,” said the Genevan, and went out, with Pym behind him; and at the tap-room door Pym stopped, and looked back at the table under the window, and the grey coat saw him decide to say something, and then decide not to, and go.

He sat by himself and drank the pint. It was very bad beer. He drank all of it.

He walked home by Cheapside and Fleet Street in the dark, with the frost so hard that the kennels rang under the carts. At Temple Bar a man was selling paper balloons on a stick that went up a string and down again for a farthing. He thought of the two men coming down in a forest in their shirts, having thrown away everything they had to stay up. He supposed that when they landed they had been very cold.

The court off the Strand was dark. The pastry-cook’s shutters were up and her ovens were banked, and the smell of them came up the stair, warm, as it always did at night, the only warm thing in the house.

There was a candle on the second landing.

The man in the good boots was sitting on the top stair outside the grey coat’s door, with the candle on the step beside him and his hat on the step below, and one boot off. He had the boot across his knee and a cloth in his hand, and he was polishing it, slowly, with great care, round and round the toe, with the patience of somebody who is paid by the day and has been told to wait.

He looked up when the grey coat came round the turn of the stair. He had a pleasant face that nobody would remember.

“Mr Grey,” he said.

He did not stand up.