promenading round St. James’s Square, as well as several who belonged more to Hockley-in-the-
Hole.
By his exertions Saturn had evoked light, but no perceptible heat, from the rubble of coals and ashes on the hearth. That was enough—no heat was wanted. It seemed he’d only wanted something to occupy his nervous hands.
“A lot of females!” Daniel remarked.
“We call them women,” Saturn snapped. “I hope you haven’t been peering about like some damned Natural Philosopher at a bug collection.”
“We call them insects,” Daniel shot back. This elicited a gentlemanly nod from Saturn.
“Without peering,” Daniel continued, “I can see well enough that, though it’s untidy, it’s far from loathsome.”
“To a point, criminals love order even more than Judges,” Saturn said.
At that moment, a boy entered the room, breathing hard, and scanned the faces. He picked out Saturn instantly, and moved toward him with a joyous expression, reaching significantly into his pocket; but Peter Hoxton must have given him a glare or a gesture, because suddenly his face fell and he spun away on his heel.
“A boy who snatches your watch in the street, and runs off with it, does not do so out of a perverse longing to cause you grief. He is moved by a reasonable expectation of profit. Where you see sheep being sheared, you may assume there are spinning-wheels nearby; where you have your pocket picked, you know that there is a house such as this one within sprinting-distance.”
“In its ambience ’tis rather like a coffee-house.”
“Aye. But mind, the sort who’re disposed to abhor such kens as this would say its hellishness inheres in its very congeniality.”
“I must admit, it smells less of coffee than of the cheap perfume of geneber.”
“Gin, we call it in places like this. My downfall,” Saturn explained laconically, peering over his shoulder at the boy, who was now in negotiations with a fat, solitary man at a corner table. Saturn went on to give the room a thorough scan.
“You dishonor your own rules! What are you looking at?”
“I am reminding myself of the exits. If this turns out to be a lay, I shall not bother excusing myself.”
“Did you perchance see our buyer?” Daniel inquired.
“Save my fellow horologist in the corner there, and this gager next to us, who is trying to wash away his pox with gin and mercury, everyone here has come in groups,” Saturn said, “and I told the buyer that he must come alone.”
“Gager is what you call an elderly man.”
“Yes.”
Daniel hazarded a look at said gager, who was curled up on the floor in the corner by the hearth, no more than a sword-length from them—for the room was small, the tables close, and the separation between groups was preserved only through a kind of etiquette. The gager looked like a whorl of blankets and worn-out clothes, with pale hands and a face projecting from one end. Resting on the hearth-stones directly before him were a clay bottle of Dutch geneber and a thumb-sized flask of mercury. This was the first clue that he was syphilitic, for mercury was the only known remedy for that disease. But confirmation could be had by looking at his face, which was disfigured by lumpy tumors, called gummas, rimming his mouth and his eyes.
“Every snatch of conversation you overhear in this room shall be riddled with such flash cant as ‘gager,’ ‘lay,’ et cetera, for here, as in the legal and medical professions, the more impenetrable a man’s speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held. Nothing would be more injurious to our reputation in this house, than for us to speak intelligibly. Yet we may have to wait for a long time. And I fear I may fall into drinking gin, and end up like yon gager. So, let us have an unintelligible conversation about our religion.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Remember, Doc, you are my Father Confessor, I your disciple, and your portion of our bargain is that you shall help me draw nigher to Truths AEternal through the sacrament of Technology. This—” and he scanned the room lightly, without letting his eye catch on anything, “is not what I signed on for. We were to be in Clerkenwell, building things.”
“And we shall be,” Daniel assured him, “once the masons, carpenters, and plasterers have finished their work round the old Temple there.”
“That should not be long. I’ve never seen stones piled up in such haste,” Saturn said. “What is it you mean to make there, then?”
“Read the newspapers,” Daniel returned.
“What’s that s’posed