Chapter One

Crosby Square, Bishopsgate Street and Stanmore — Monday, 4 June 1781

Mr Rawlins, attorney, kept his office on the ground floor of a narrow house in Crosby Square, two minutes’ walk from the rooms he had let to Bensley in November. On the morning of the fourth of June he kept Bensley standing in it while every church between Bishopsgate and the Tower rang for the King’s birthday. He had a small grey face, a clean desk and a bundle of papers tied in green tape at his elbow. He did not untie it. He had seen Bensley’s purse come out of his coat, and had looked away from it as a physician looks away from a patient who has brought his own physic.

“The half-year,” said Bensley, over the bells. “To Christmas. Or the quarter to Michaelmas, if the estate would rather. Whichever suits.”

“The term ended on the thirteenth of May, Mr Bensley.”

“I was out of town.”

“Yes.” Mr Rawlins moved the bundle an inch nearer the edge of the desk. “You’ve been holding over three weeks at the estate’s pleasure, sir, and not a word. I’m afraid the estate has made other arrangements.”

Bensley kept his face as it was. He had kept it so for sixteen years in front of audiences that threw oranges, and a dry attorney in Crosby Square was not going to take it off him.

“What arrangements?”

“The rooms are let from Midsummer Day. For a year.” Mr Rawlins cleared his throat. “Paid in advance.”

“To whom?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“You were glad to be rid of them in November. You told me an executor wants nothing in this world but an empty ledger.”

“So I did, sir. I still do. A year paid in advance is an empty ledger for a year.” Mr Rawlins looked at the purse again, and away. “I did write to you. At Drury Lane. On Friday.”

“I’ve not been at Drury Lane since Friday.”

“Then the letter’s waiting for you there. It says what I’ve said, more civilly.”

The bells of St Helen’s, very near, came to the end of a change and began another. Bensley put the purse on the corner of the desk, where it could be seen.

“I’ll match it,” he said. “Whatever he paid. I’ll pay the year, today, and a quarter over for the trouble of writing to him that you’ve changed your mind.”

“It was paid in gold.”

Mr Rawlins said it as a man confesses to a small vice. He seemed to hear how it sounded, and went on more quickly.

“Forty guineas, sir, counted out on this desk on Friday afternoon. The rooms are not worth thirty. I told him so. I’m an honest man, whatever you may be thinking of me this morning. He said he knew what they were worth.” He touched the green tape. “The lease is signed and sealed. There’s nothing I can change.”

“Then tell me his name, and I’ll ask him myself whether he’d sell it on.”

“I’m not at liberty to, sir. I’ve said so.” Mr Rawlins coloured, slowly, from the collar up. “I’d be glad if you’d take your purse off my desk.”

Bensley took it off. He did it without haste, as he would have taken a prop off a table at the end of a scene, and put it back in his coat. He understood, as his hand went into the pocket, what he had just done. He had walked in three weeks late with a half-year’s rent, and then offered to pay over the odds for a first-floor set above a linen merchant’s. Mr Rawlins would say so to the next person who asked. So now the gentleman with forty guineas knew one more fact than he had known on Friday: the actor wanted the room very badly indeed.

“You may stay on at the same rate,” said Mr Rawlins, more gently, “so you may clear the rooms at your convenience. To Midsummer Day.” He hesitated. “The keys to be left here by noon on the Sunday. My clerk will be in.”

“On a Sunday?”

“The gentleman asked for them on the quarter-day. I didn’t see any reason to refuse him.”

Bensley paid the three weeks gone and the three to come. He watched Mr Rawlins write the receipt in a small careful hand, sand it and fold it, and he thanked him. He went out into Crosby Square, where the bells were still going, and stood on the flags beside the railings until he was sure his face would do what he told it.

The thirteenth of May. There had been a great deal to think about in May, and a lease had not been any of it.

Bishopsgate Street on the King’s birthday was a river with the banks gone. The Norwich waggon was trying to back out of the yard of the Bull into the teeth of every hackney coach in the City, and a drover with forty sheep for Leadenhall had met it in the gateway, so that the whole street was full of sheep and oaths and the steam off the horses. A girl with a flat basket on her head was crying cherries over the top of it all, ripe, ripe cherries, in a voice a bosun would have been glad of. The kennel down the middle of the street ran brown with a week of dry weather’s worth of everything. Somebody’s shop-boy let off a squib for the King under a hackney’s nose, and the horse went up on its hind legs, and the man on the box laid his whip across the horse and the boy in one stroke without stopping his swearing. A year ago almost to the day the mob had come down this street with blue cockades in their hats and torches in their hands, on their way to burn the Bank. The glaziers had been busy all summer. Now there were blue ribbons for the King on the stalls instead, twopence the yard, and nobody Bensley passed looked as if they remembered.

He shouldered through it to Kessler’s door. The street door in Bishopsgate Street was on the latch, as it always was in business hours. The passage smelled of damp stone and new linen. Through the glass of the inner door he could see the counting-house of Kessler and Company at work: four desks, four clerks and the long table under the window with the bolts on it. He had come in at that door a dozen times since November. In December, and again in February, before he had the street door shut behind him, Pym had been out on the stair with a greeting, a question and a piece of news. On the days Pym stayed at his desk, he had stayed there writing with one eye on the glass.

Pym did not come out.

He was at his high desk inside the glass, with his hair tied back as tight as ever, writing, and today there was no eye on the glass. He did not raise his head. Bensley stood in the passage long enough for a clerk to notice, and still Pym wrote. Then the inner door opened. It was Mr Kessler who came out, large, pink and delighted, with the watch-chain swinging.

“Mr Bensley! On His Majesty’s birthday. You’ll take a glass with us; we’ve a bottle open in the back for the King.” He took Bensley’s hand in both his own. “And where’s your brother-in-law from Maryland? He was to come and dine. I kept a turbot for him a whole week in March, and he never came. I was very nearly offended.”

“He was called away, sir. On business. Abroad.”

“Ah, abroad. Everybody’s abroad this year, and nobody’s letters come home.” Mr Kessler shook his head over it. “You’re leaving us, I hear. I’m sorry for it. You were a very quiet tenant. We never knew you were up there at all.”

“Who told you I was leaving?”

“Why, Rawlins’s clerk. He brought the new gentleman to look at the rooms. The Wednesday, it was, or the Thursday.” Mr Kessler turned. “Pym. When was it the gentleman came to see upstairs?”

“Wednesday, sir,” said Pym, without looking up.

“Wednesday. A very quiet gentleman. I thought, there’s another tenant we shan’t hear.” Mr Kessler laughed. “He stood on the stair a long time. I said to Pym, he’s counting the treads. And he asked what hours we kept. I told him: eight till seven, and Saturdays, and the King’s birthday if the King pleases.” He laughed again. “He seemed very satisfied with that.”

“Did he give you his name?”

“Not to me. Rawlins’s clerk would have it. Pym, did he give a name?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

Mr Kessler did not notice anything in that. He pressed the glass of wine on Bensley in the back room, drank the King’s health with him, and asked for news of the theatre. Bensley gave him all of it, the benefit, the house, the takings, and made him laugh twice. He came out into the passage a quarter of an hour later with Mr Kessler’s blessing and went up the stair alone.

The room was as they had left it on the tenth of March, the day the letter of credit was drawn that went into the lining of Bensley’s coat. Three sash windows over the street, the shutters half closed. Dust on the boards, a greyish-white film that showed every step taken across it since. The table in the middle. Ten chairs round it, pushed in, as the ten had left them when they went down the stair one at a time at intervals of three or four minutes.

The eleventh chair was not at the head of the table.

It was the old one, the chair that had been in the room before any of the others. Bensley had sat on it alone at eleven in the morning in December, with his hat on his knee, listening to the counting-house through the floor. In March Cheston had stood behind it all afternoon before he would sit in it. Now it stood at the middle window, turned a little towards the street, so that whoever sat in it could see down into Bishopsgate Street without leaning forward.

Bensley did not go to it at once. He stood in the doorway and read the floor.

The dust was a good witness. It showed him Rawlins’s clerk: a narrow, quick, pointed shoe that had crossed straight to each window to open the shutters and come straight back to the door. It showed him a second pair of shoes, broader, with a square toe and a heel that dragged a little. That pair had gone round the table slowly, all the way round, stopping at each chair. It had gone into the back room and come out again. Then it had gone to the head of the table, taken the old chair and carried it to the middle window. The two legs it had dragged the last yard had left two clean lines in the dust. There the shoes had stood, or their owner had sat, long enough to scuff the boards in a half-circle.

He went across, keeping to Rawlins’s clerk’s path, and looked at the sill. On the paint, in the dust, there was a clean oval the size of a man’s forearm, where somebody had leaned.

He sat down in the chair.

From it he could see all of the opposite pavement, the corner of the lane going down towards the church, and forty yards of the street in either direction. He could see the top step of the street door below him, and the head and shoulders of anyone standing on it. He sat there with his hat on his knee for as long as it took a church clock he still could not place to strike the half-hour. In that time he saw a drayman, two clerks, a woman with a basket of mackerel, a boy with a hoop and a parson. He could have described each of them afterwards to a magistrate.

Then he got up, put the chair back at the head of the table where it belonged and went down.

Pym was still at his desk. Bensley opened the inner door and went through to him, past the other three clerks, and stood at his elbow. It was the first time he had been on that side of the glass.

“Pym.”

“Sir.” Pym put down his pen.

“The gentleman who’s taking my rooms. The quiet gentleman who counts stairs.” Bensley kept his voice low and easy, as if he were asking the price of a book. “What does he look like?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“You couldn’t say, or you mayn’t?”

Pym looked up at last. He had gone the bad colour he had gone on the Fast day, in the passage, with the day-book under his arm and Bensley’s valise in front of him.

“You told me yourself, sir,” he said. “On the Fast day. In the passage. You said the best clerks are the ones who don’t remember things.” He picked up his pen again. It was not steady. “I’ve been trying very hard to be a good clerk, Mr Bensley.”

Bensley stood beside him while the other three pens went on scratching. He had said it, in February, to frighten a talkative young man into holding his tongue about a valise. It had worked. Now it had worked for somebody else as well. He could not tell, looking at the top of Pym’s tight-tied head, whether the boy was keeping quiet because an actor had once asked him to, or because a better-paid voice had asked him since, in the same words, and made him more afraid.

“You are a good clerk, Pym,” he said. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

He went out into Bishopsgate Street. He looked, without seeming to, at the opposite pavement, the lane and the forty yards either way. There was nobody on the pavement reading a newspaper. In all that shoving crowd there was nobody standing still at all, except a blind man at the church rail with a dog and a tin cup, to whom Bensley had given a penny on the way in, and who had thanked him by name. The bells had stopped. As he turned towards the Poultry, the guns at the Tower began the royal salute, and every pigeon in the City went up at once.

Cheston was in the kitchen garden at Stanmore with a hoe, among Mrs Weller’s broad beans, when Bensley came up the field path in the last of the light.

He had been in the kitchen garden most evenings for a fortnight. It was the only place at Stanmore where a man could do something with his hands that nobody else needed done. Mrs Weller had found him in it on the second evening, taking the tops off her beans for the blackfly, and had stood at the end of the row with her arms folded for some while before she decided to let him. She had not said anything. She had simply come back the next evening with a second hoe. He had been a merchant for twelve years and a justice for three, and he had never in his life been so glad of a woman’s silence.

He straightened up when he saw his brother-in-law’s face, and leaned on the hoe.

“Tell me,” he said.

Bensley told him, standing at the end of the row with his hat in his hand and the dust of the Edgware road on his boots. Rawlins and his green tape. Forty guineas in gold for rooms not worth thirty. The purse on the corner of the desk. Kessler’s turbot. Pym at his desk with no eye on the glass. The dust on the floor, and the chair at the middle window, and the clean oval on the sill where a forearm had leaned.

Cheston heard it to the end without a question. Then he bent and pulled a weed from between two bean plants, looked at its root, and threw it on the path.

“The thirteenth of May,” he said.

“I let it run out.” Bensley did not look away. “I was counting days with Fanny, and then waiting on the Swale for you, and I never gave a lease a thought. If I’d been in Crosby Square with the half-year on the fourteenth, there’d be nobody sitting at that window.”

“Or he’d have paid Rawlins fifty guineas in April to refuse you, and you’d never have known why.” Cheston went back to his hoeing. “Don’t carry it, Robert. It’s not heavy enough to be worth the trouble.”

Francina had come out of the scullery door with a shawl round her. She stood at the end of the path. She had heard enough of it from the step.

“Forty guineas,” she said. “For a year.”

“In gold.”

“Then he wants us to know he wanted it.” She came down between the rows. “A man who wants a room quietly pays what it’s worth and gives his name. A man who pays a third over in gold, and won’t give his name, is writing us a letter.”

“Saying what?”

“Saying he knows what the room’s for.” She looked at her brother. “And that he can afford to be seen knowing it.”

Jacob was at the water butt by the wall with two buckets, filling them for Mrs Weller’s lettuces, which he had done every evening since he came without being asked. He set the buckets down.

“Why a year?” he said.

They all looked at him. It was the first thing he had said.

“If all he wants is to see who comes up the stair on the one day, he takes it for the one day,” said Jacob. “Or he stands in the street with a newspaper. He doesn’t need the room for that. Why a year?”

Nobody answered him at once.

“Because he means to be there for the next one,” said Cheston. “And the one after.”

He leaned the hoe against the wall. The light was nearly gone. Over the Common the rooks were quarrelling their way to bed, and somewhere down the lane a cart went by towards Edgware, very slowly, with a man singing on it.

“The four abroad,” he said to Francina.

“Have their letters. Or will this week. The usual room, at noon, on the twenty-fifth.” Her voice was quite level. “They know one room in London, James. They were in it in March. They’ll come up Bishopsgate Street at noon, and nothing I can send now will reach them first.”

“And the six?”

“I can reach the six. It’ll cost.” She pulled the shawl tighter. “I made sixty-one calls in five days with Robert’s cards, and nobody who watched me for one day would have wanted to watch me for a second. If I go back to six of the sixty-one, three weeks after, alone, that’s a different errand. Anybody who kept my list will see it.”

“Then the ten come up that stair,” said Bensley, “and the man in the chair counts them, and sees the colour of their stockings.”

“Unless somebody stands in the street,” said Jacob.

Bensley turned his head.

“Somebody who knows their faces,” said Jacob. “And turns them aside before they reach the door.”

“I let every one of them in, in March,” said Bensley slowly. “I stood at that door five hours. I’d know them again in the dark.” He looked at Cheston. “I’ll stand in the street.”

“Your face is on every playbill in London.”

“Not the face I’ll be wearing.”

“And when you’ve turned them,” said Francina, “where do you send them? That’s the question, Robert. Not the street. The room.”

Cheston had known she had the answer before she opened her mouth. He had known it since Bensley came up the field path, and he had been hoeing beans so as not to hear it.

“The old man with the stick,” she said. “He has a room near the ’Change where ten gentlemen can go up the stair on a quarter-day and nobody in the City will think twice. And he’s one of the ten already.”

“He hasn’t decided.”

“He told me so. He told me to tell you.”

“Then you’re asking me to go to one of the ten, before the ten have sat, and ask him for a favour.” Cheston looked at the dark shape of the house. “That’s what the other side is doing, Fanny. At dinner. A kindness here, a question there, one man at a time, so that when the ten sit down some of them have been spoken to already. I’d be doing the same. With the chair asking. Every man at that table would know the chair owed one of them his room.”

“Would you rather they knew that,” said Francina, “or had their faces taken on the stair?”

He did not answer.

“There isn’t a clever way,” said Bensley, very quietly. “Is there. There’s the room with a man at the window, or there’s the old man’s room with the chair in his debt. Whichever we take, we pay for it.”

“I know.”

“Then choose,” said Francina. “I want a fortnight of the three to do it properly.”

The cart had gone. It was nearly dark in the garden. Cheston stood with his back to the wall where the hoe was leaning, and they waited for him, all three, as they had got into the way of waiting for him since March. He had never asked them to. He did not like it.

“Go on Wednesday,” he said at last. “By the front door, in daylight, and don’t pretend it’s a thank-you. He’d see through it and think the less of us. Tell him the chair has lost its room and asks for his. Tell him the worst first.” He picked up the hoe again, as if he had forgotten he had put it down. “And tell him why. Tell him there’s somebody sitting at the window in Bishopsgate Street.”

“He’ll want something,” said Bensley.

“He’s past seventy, and his father was ruined by men who carried words well,” said Francina. “It won’t be money.”

She went in. Jacob picked up his buckets and went down the rows with them to the lettuces, and they heard the water go on the ground, slow and steady, as he did it every night.

Bensley stayed.

“He’ll still be sitting there on the twenty-fifth,” he said. “Whether anybody comes up the stair or not. From eight till seven, and Saturdays, and the King’s birthday if the King pleases.”

“Yes.”

“And he’ll see me.” Bensley put his hat on. “Standing in the street under his window, in a face he’s never met, for four hours. I’ve played to a man at a window before, James. You always know which one he is. He’s the one who doesn’t clap.”