some ruffian, locked in a sponging house where he would remain until a lawyer could be procured to make the entire matter disappear.
IN PERPETRATING MY TRICKERY upon Balfour I was not aware that I was participating in a bit of irony set up for me by fate. As I walked the streets, attempting to divine the meaning behind Balfour’s rudeness, I noticed that there was a fellow some twenty feet back working to keep apace with me. When I first noticed him, I was not certain that he truly followed, so I increased my pace, dodging hastily between a woman pushing a cart of vegetables and an oyster woman crying her wares. From the peripheries of my vision I saw this fellow struggling to keep me in sight. My pursuer was shockingly tall, perhaps six feet and a half, and monstrous thin as well. His clothes were adequate and neat, like those of a respectable tradesman or lower servant, and his face had been recently shaved. In truth he appeared nothing like the sort of miscreant that Wild engaged in his employ, but the cove followed me for some reason, and, with my late-night encounter with the hackney coach still fresh in my mind, I would believe him as dangerous until he proved otherwise.
Keeping him at a distance as best I could, I slipped into an alley that I knew to have no other point of egress. It made its way straight for some hundred feet or so, and then with a sharp turn, ended another twenty feet on. The alley was a filthy affair, as people in the surrounding houses here emptied their privy stools from the windows above. Rats squeaked noisily as I quickly trotted my way through the filth, which clung about my boots and stockings. I concentrated on my goal; I pretended that I smelled nothing. I had no care for disgust, for the piles of excrement and pools of piss would serve as an effective ally, provided my pursuer’s stomach turned while mine remained calm.
And so it worked, for he entered the alley slowly, his own thin leather shoes providing not nearly the protection of my sturdier boots. I heard him as he trudged onward, cursing quietly as he waded toward me. Having passed the bend, I could not see him, but I listened to each slow, painful, repulsed step. I heard him slip, a splash, and then a volley of muttered oaths. If he had anything like the knowledge I had of the Covent Garden streets, he knew the alley to be a blind one and that he must find me cornered in the end. And so he moved on, suppressing a gag, startling at rats, wincing at the cold of his submerged feet. At last he rounded the darkened corner, and unable to see, he took a few steps forward, which was precisely what I had been waiting for.
I jumped down from the narrow walls above where I had lodged myself, and where this fellow had passed directly under me without noticing my presence. As I landed directly behind him, filth splattering the two of us, I pulled my pistol from my waistcoat and pointed it square in the fellow’s face.
“Now, my shitten friend,” I said with a sneer, “you will tell me who you are and why you follow me, or you will rot here unnoticed until the rains wash all away.”
He moved to drop to his knees, but soon thought better of it, and instead staggered to and fro, holding his hands together in supplication. “Don’t kill me, Mr. Weaver, sir. It’s my first time, it is, and I only want to do right.”
Taken aback, but still cautious, I asked who he was and why he followed me.
“I work for Justice Duncombe, sir. The justice of the peace, he is. He’s sent me to fetch you. It’s me first time for that, sir, as a constable.”
“And what does the justice want with me?” I asked, still waving the pistol in his face, though now more absently than maliciously.
“He wants you before his court, he does,” the poor constable sputtered, tears in his eyes. “You’re under arrest, you are.”
JUSTICE JOHN DUNCOMBE was something of an anomaly in London’s corrupt legal system. He was a trading justice, to be sure, and would sell a verdict for even a slight consideration rather than pass an opportunity to augment his income. Yet if there was no bribe to be lost he did not, like so