CHAPTER VI

OF CONFIDENCES AT THE “BLUE MORTAR”

CRUNN-BANG! went the squeal and clatter of two heavy street signs, as they whacked together overhead in the Strand. Crack! went another, like a pistol shot. The crashes and bangs were mingled with a heavy crunch as some sign turned over without hitting anything, or the high-pitched cree-ak of another which merely swung.

Thus a high wind whooped down the Strand from Charing Cross. It drove before it the sooty drizzle from chimney pots; it endangered hats and flapped the curls of periwigs; it set the street signs a-dance. They might be old or dirty, these signs, but their avenue brightened as the sun crept out, with crude imagery and blazing colour.

Here a red mouth gaped wide in a face the hue of a new chimney pot. There a green mermaid cavorted above the door of a cookshop. Eyes, dog’s heads, three drunken fishes at once, bobbed up and down in flashes of crimson and purple and gold, while wind and soot fought each other and then whirled together.

But the din of the signs was hardly greater than the din made by those who walked or rode. The Strand, once a stately thoroughfare of noblemen’s town houses with their backs to the smoky-sparkling Thames, had been invaded by commerce even before the Great Fire nine years ago had gutted the farthest Cheapside and Eastcheap.

Here, where the kennel or sewage ditch sent up heavy vapours from the middle of the street, iron-rimmed wheels crashed on cobbles amid the oaths of drivers. Street hawkers screamed their wares. A tinker beat his call on a brass kettle. They were outdone by the shouts of apprentices, who leaned out over half-doors or walked up and down outside the shops.

“Cloth, sir! Like velvet; pray touch it; yet but one-fourth the price!”

“Lily-white vinegar! Lily-white vinegar!”

“Have you a brass pot, iron pot, skillet, kettle, or frying pan to mend?”

“And a finer bawdyhouse,” proclaimed Lord George Harwell, yelling into his companion’s ear, “I never saw in my whole life! None such as Mother Creswell’s; faugh!”

“Er—better?”

“A true Temple of Venus, scratch me! I’ll tell you. … Curse it, Nick, take care where you walk! You’ll be under those wheels or down in the kennel! Hah! Back again!”

This sort of thing had been happening for a long time, ever since he and Fenton walked east along Pall Mall. They had passed the long wall of very high, thick hedge which bounded Spring Gardens on this side, turning a little southwards, and emerged into a huge open space whose dry earth was scored by the boot marks of soldiery.

“Now look you, Nick!” George began his first protest.

His companion’s eyes were glazed and half-closed. As they moved across the open space, he began slowly to turn round and round as he walked. When his eyes encountered anything which seemed vaguely familiar, he would silently open and close his mouth as though confirming its name.

George had begun to grow nervous. He laid a hand on his companion’s arm as they neared the equestrian statue of Charles the First across the open space.

“Damme,” said George after deep pondering, “but you can’t have pot-walloped so much claret before you went from home. I saw you.”

Fenton, motioning this aside with a fierce gesture, pointed his finger.

“To the north,” he said. “Those are the Royal Mews, where the soldiers are quartered?”

“Ay. As though you’d never heard the tattoo beat from there!”

“To the northeast: the Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-field?”

“What else? But …”

“And southwards,” said Fenton, turning completely round to face a street there, “is King Street. On the left—”

He swept his hand towards an old, dingy straggle of red-brick buildings, half-obscured by blowing smoke and grey sky and stretching half a mile between King Street and the riverside.

“Whitehall Palace,” said Fenton. He moved his hand to the other side. “On the right, those iron railings and the hedges hide the King’s private garden, with all St. James’s Park beyond it.”

“Nick, Nick, the back of your own house looks on the Park! ’Tis the Park. Where else is one?”

Fenton was still staring straight down King Street, at a square tower of red and blue and yellow bricks, with a weathercock spinning at each corner. Though it stood exactly in the middle of the street, it had a large arch for a way-through to Westminster.

“That is the Holbein Gate,” said Fenton, slowly turning. “And to the southwest: that must be a way into Spring Gardens.”

Most of George’s worry lifted, and he began to chuckle. If Nick professed not to be acquainted with Spring Gardens, the scene of Mr. Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (and a brisk fellow always got love there, scratch him!), then Nick was not in any fit of moody-madness. Nick was but excellent well drunk. George’s chuckle deepened to a roar.

Whereupon, unexpectedly …

“Don’t mock at me, I beg,” said Fenton with a face so pale that George stopped short, mouth open. Fenton moistened his lips. Glancing eastwards towards Northumberland House, the New Exchange, and the mouth of the Strand, he turned back again. He stooped down beside the statue, and picked up a handful of dust and earth. He let it sift away through his fingers.

“I am here,” Fenton said.

But George had forgotten all this, as they struggled through the throng on the north side of the Strand. Happily he was about to describe his dream of all bawdyhouses when Fenton, still staring round, nearly slipped under the wheels of a funeral cart with mourners, and had to be hauled back.

“Now hark’ee, Nick,” advised George, who was not angry but perturbed, “I care not a groat what any man may do in his cups. That’s but in the way of pleasantness. But …”

“I ask your pardon,” said Fenton, trying to get the soot out of his eyes. “My head is cleared of fumes now.”

“Good! Then ye’ll know better than to gape and gawk and stare, else—”

“I tumble into the kennel?”

“Not so much that. But here’s a rough crew, no less: these tatterdemalions, Abram-coves, street rogues, even the porters. They’ll …”

Across George’s voice, drowning it, hooted the noise of a pig-killer’s horn. One of the many youthful shoeblacks, lurking in alleys with their mixture of soot and rancid oil, saw the state of George’s shoes and darted out at him. The heel of George’s hand sent him flying.

“They’ll take ye for a country bumpkin newcome to town. Or for a mounseer (which is what they call a Frenchman); and that’s worse. They’ll put a trick on ye; they’ll pelt ye with ram’s horns or kennel stuff; they’ll come at ye like hornets. Then your face turns black; you lug out your sword; and the devil’s to pay.”

“I shall take care, George.”

“Admittedly,” Fenton was thinking, “these great goblin street signs were a matter of simple necessity. Since so many persons can’t read, especially the porters, names or numbers would be no good. But what an artistic pride the owners must take in them! The tavern with its red lattice, the coffeehouse with its lantern hanging outside …”

Whap went a sword scabbard against the back of his knee. Half the throng seemed to be wearing swords; as they hurried, they kept on tangling or stinging you unless you carried yourself with care.

Fenton, still trying to keep the soot from his eyes and the kennel reek from his nostrils, woke up and really looked. He clutched at his hat, but it was safe. Both his hat and George’s were skewered to their periwigs with long golden pins, or they would have flown away long ago.

Another gleam of sunshine pierced down through the haze. Fenton saw a fop being carried in a sedan chair, amid sneers of the tatterdemalions. He saw sober citizens in camlet cloaks, worsted stockings, and buckled shoes.

There would be, he knew, no rich merchants with their gold chains and grave fur gowns. These belonged in the farthest City, where brick houses had been built after the Fire to replace the old wooden ones. Involuntarily he looked upwards, then across the street at the old houses with their gables of black timbers and once-white plaster, far overhanging the path underneath.

A window lattice was pushed open there, then the other side of the lattice. A somewhat comely slattern of sixteen, yawning and with hair dishevelled because she was newly risen, had not troubled to don much attire. She surveyed the street without interest, scratching herself with one hand while she held a tankard of small beer in the other.

“That’s it!” burst out George, who had been pondering deeply and now followed the direction of Fenton’s glance. “Now I call it to mind!”

“What do you call to mind?”

“Why, man, the Temple of Venus! I desired to tell you …”

“Speaking of Venus, George,” interposed Fenton, with all his perplexities on him, “what if I told you I have decided to have done with all women save Lydia?”

“Hey?”

“What if I told you that? What would you say?”

George’s brown eyes rolled sideways. He gave a huff of his stoutening chest. When he lifted a hand to his neckband, the glitter of his rings was reflected in the eyes of street rogues against the wall.

“Why, then,” said George, “I should inquire politely after the health of Meg York.”

“True; Meg. She will leave my house tomorrow.”

There was a strange expression on George’s face.

“Meg—will go? Whence?”

“I cannot say. Oh! Except that she is to be kept by one Captain Duroc, of whom I know nothing.”

“Is she so?” muttered George, and his left hand dropped to his sword hilt.

“The question I … Hold! We are near to our destination.”

Fenton stopped dead in the throng, and nearly had his head knocked off by a barrel of lard on the shoulder of a hurrying porter. The noise was still so great that he was compelled to shout, as he and George had been shouting at all times.

“We must be near, else we have already passed it. Ahead there,” and Fenton pointed to a long line of grey gloomy pillars along the south, “is old Somerset House, with St. Clement’s facing us beyond.”

“Old Somerset House?” retorted George, giving him once more a perplexed look. “D’ye know of a New Somerset House?”

“Not yet. That’s to say,” Fenton deftly corrected himself in his yell, “the place is old and dank, you’ll confess. Now do you study the left-hand side of the road, and I’ll study the right. Dead Man’s Lane is beside the Savage’s Head, which I take to be a tavern.”

“Tavern!” said George, and spat scornfully. “The place is a shop; they vend tobacco and make snuff. I have led you to it. Look up at the sign ahead.”

The sign, not fifteen feet in front of them, swung and creaked and obediently whirled over to face them. On it was depicted a long, brown, horrible face, presumably the artist’s notion of a red Indian, showing two sets of ferocious-looking teeth with a long clay pipe gripped between them.

Dead Man’s Lane, like so many lanes and courts and alleys winding back from the Strand, had for its entrance an arch about ten feet high and eight or nine feet across. Its tunnel was of smooth stone, stretching back some twenty feet to support the small house above.

Towards the end, where the tunnel widened into a broader lane, there stood against the wall twelve red-leather fire buckets, in two lines of six each pressed together; grimed, weather-stained, and full of foul water.

Both Fenton and George stumbled inside the tunnel, coughing to get the grit out of their lungs and brushing smuts from their waistcoats. The wind stood still; there was not a breath of it. Well inside this tunnel, the howl and babel sank to a low growl. You could speak in an ordinary tone. By mutual consent the two friends stopped for a breather.

Again George seemed to be pondering.

“Hey, those fire buckets!” he said carelessly, but with a crafty glance at his companion. “Now how did they come there, d’ye think?”

“Come, George! Your wits are surely fuddled.”

“My wits, ecod!”

“Why,” Fenton told him in a casual way, “since the Fire there have been I-don’t-know-how-many royal edicts that each merchant, however small of business, must keep a fire bucket on the premises. Don’t you remember, George?”

“I … I …”

“But truly, good fellow, these fire buckets are a devil in narrow huddlings. They will drench the goods; often, to his great wrath, they will drench the buyer too. Set them quietly away! What constable or even magistrate will trouble his head about them, save at a playhouse?”

“Ecod, you are Nick Fenton!”

The other pretended amazement. “And did you doubt that?”

“Nay, not doubt; but …”

George’s voice trailed. He waved his hands, ruffles flying. When he did not understand a thing, it seemed monstrous and un-English; he turned swiftly from it.

“Now, Nick. As touches the matter of Meg York—”

“I can tell you only she goes tomorrow. And, which I forgot a moment ago, she says this Captain Duroc hath lodgings for her in Chancery Lane. If you desire to keep her …”

“Keep her?” roared George, with a huff of anger and deep injury. “Curse you, Nick, I desire to wed her!”

“Wed—Meg?”

“And wherefore not?” Again George puffed out his chest, in the purple coat and white-satin waistcoat with gold buttons. “Meg is a lady of quality, kin to your own wife. She needs no dowry; I have the rhino in plenty.” Here George grew embarrassed. “Certes, I know of her relations with you …”

“Luckily or unluckily,” thought Fenton, “I don’t know.”

“But give me the name of one high-born lady,” challenged George, “saving only Queen Catherine or Lady Temple or—or certes Lydia, who hath not been put on her back a dozen times by some brisk fellow! ’Tis but female frailty, betrayed to unlawful embraces. ’Tis the custom. And I am a man of my time.”

Here George shifted his feet uneasily, looking at the dirt floor of the tunnel.

“Nick,” he blurted out, “d’ye think she’ll have me?”

“Oh, I make little doubt of it. If I hesitate, it is because I wonder whether you are well advised in this.” Fenton could not be sure of his own feelings. “God’s body!” he said. “Twice in the past twenty-four hours I have been at point of killing the damned woman: once with a chair, once with a sword.”

George was vastly amused.

“Bear up, good friend!” he chuckled. “’Tis but the sweet heart’s diverting humour.”

“No doubt. Yet you may find it less diverting, George, should she drive a dagger through your ribs or … or prepare you hot mulled wine with arsenic.”

Now remembrance lit up George’s bulging eyes.

“Arsenic!” he said. His mind seemed to shy back. “Ecod, that’s why we’re here! I had forgot.” George cast a quick look at his right hand to see whether it had swelled up and turned black, which it had not.

Whereupon he turned and strode forwards into Dead Man’s Lane.

The lane itself was no more than twelve feet wide, having on its right a high dead wall of darkened bricks which at some places bulged with long cracks. It ended, thirty feet away, in a half-turn to another lane barred by a locked gate, iron-railed and -spiked, which made it all but a dead wall.

On the left ran the long open front of a hay-and-grain dealer’s. Though the whole lane had a pleasant stable-like atmosphere, nobody showed face at the hay dealer’s. They saw only an empty cart and a long stone watering trough. There were a number of shops in the row, but the newcomers saw only one: a blue door, with a sign of the Blue Mortar.

George swung round.

“Where in all this is the reason?” he asked, a reddish bar of anger across his forehead under the flaxen peruke. “There’s none poisoned at your house, Nick, else he would have been took up by a magistrate! You durst not say (I’ll defy you!) that Meg—”

His companion’s grave countenance stopped him.

“I cannot tell,” Fenton said wretchedly. “For a long time I had thought so: I speak plain. Yet today I strongly doubted, and doubted again. Who am I, or any man, to say, ‘Such a person would do this,’ or ‘Such a person would do that’? George, I don’t know.”

“I’ll discover—”

“No! Leave all speech to me.”

Fenton pushed open the blue door, into small and dingy premises which had nevertheless a rather large window of wavy glass set in round leaden circles. The wavy glass sent a faint greenish light on the little space before a dark-stained oak counter, with its dingy brass scales. The apothecary himself, a little wizened man who wore his own iron-grey hair under a black skullcap, was behind the counter poring over an open ledger. He looked up through oblong steel-rimmed spectacles as his visitors entered.

“A good day to you, gentlemen,” he said, in a voice that creaked like a street sign. He bowed, but with no cringing. “And how may I serve you?”

The apothecary, Master William Wynnel, was at heart a merry, bouncing, excitable little man, who decades ago might have done well as ropedancer or tumbler at Bart’s Fair. But long years had set a mask on him. He regarded them with lips pursed out and a look of sad severity, as though his learning were too much for him.

“Master Apothecary, my name is Fenton.”

“Have I the honour,” said the other, again bowing without obsequiousness, “of addressing Sir Nicholas Fenton?”

“If you are pleased to call it honour, I am Nicholas Fenton.”

It did in truth please the old apothecary, who found himself treated as he felt he ought to be treated.

“You are too good, Sir Nicholas! And you are come here …?” The inquiry lifted.

Fenton reached into his big right-hand pocket. Over the packet of arsenic was now the small but heavy purse, with a drawstring, he had taken from Giles before he left home.

“I would buy knowledge,” he said.

Opening the bag, he flung out part of its contents. Gold guineas, gold angels each worth ten shillings, broadpieces, silver rolled and rattled on the counter.

Little William Wynnel drew himself up.

“Sir,” he replied, “I am apothecary and chymist, this being (I must inform you) a skilled mystery, below only that of the chiurgien or the doctor of physick. Put by your money, I beg, until we discover whether I possess … the sort of knowledge you wish.”

There was a silence. George, opening his mouth to roar, was stopped by a below-the-counter sign from Fenton. Fenton acted from a precise purpose.

“Your words are just,” he said, sweeping the coins back into the bag, “and I am rightly rebuked. Master Apothecary, I ask your pardon.”

Both George and the apothecary stared at him. A handsome apology, from a nobleman whose line went back beyond the third Edward, seemed such condescension that it won over the apothecary and all his confidence. He would have told any secret.

“First,” continued Fenton, replacing the bag in his pocket and carelessly drawing out the packet of arsenic, “I believe you sold this?”

Master Wynnel took the packet and studied it.

“Indeed I did,” he answered promptly. “Had I wished to hide the fact, Sir Nicholas, I would not have marked my shop design so plain. For (I must inform you) it is no offence against the law to sell arsenic. Near all our houses are infected with vermin, viz.: rats, mice, large and small insects or the like, which must be got rid of. ’Tis left to the apothecary, his judgment and cunning questions, to determine the buyer’s honesty.”

This was true. Nevertheless the old man’s eyes shifted and struggled with dread.

“Yet I hope,” he said, “there hath been no … ill fortune? No … no …?”

“None at all,” Fenton reassured him, with a smile. “Observe how much arsenic remains! I explore the matter only to teach my household good rules of thrift.”

He could just barely hear a stifled gasp of relief. All the apothecary’s portentous airs and pursed lips had gone. He was an eager, bouncing little man, eyes glittering behind the spectacles, anxious to help.

“Can you call to mind,” suggested Fenton, “the date when this purchase was made?”

“Call to mind? Nay, sir, I can tell you (as we say) instanter!”

He flew at the open ledger in front of him, whipped over two pages, and set his finger on an entry.

“The date,” said Master Wynnel, “was April 16th. A trifle more than three weeks gone.”

“Yet could you know … though ’twould be a wondrous thing … how much arsenic is gone from the packet now?”

“Wondrous? Nay, Sir Nicholas! Here!”

The apothecary flew at the old brass pair of scales. Putting the packet into one scalepan, he placed a very light pebble on the other.

“Here are ill-balanced scales,” he fussed. “I am too poor a man for … Still! Let us make it a matter of (say) three or four grains that are gone.”

“And the original amount you dispensed?”

“’Tis in my book. One hundred and thirty grains.”

Evidently they doled out poison with a ladle. But this would just cover the three-weeks’ time, the amount administered, to account for Lydia’s symptoms.

“Now the devil fly away with all this!” blurted out George. “What we desire to know—”

“Softly!” said Fenton, with a warning look. “Gently, or you spoil all.” He turned back carelessly to the apothecary. “The name of the buyer, now …”

“Nay, sir, she would give no name.”

The shop, though grimed and dingy, was pleasantly flavoured with the scent of some drug Fenton could not identify. At the ominous word she, it was as though a noose had fallen round Lord George’s neck.

“Yet she is of your household,” the apothecary said to Fenton. “Or so I think.”

“True. Describe her.”

“The girl, for I dare not call her wench, was of good, meek, modest deportment. Her age may have been eighteen or nineteen. She had a shawl round her shoulders, and clogs on her feet. Ay; and she had most remarkable dark-red hair, which did flame in the sun. I could tell her for honest and virtuous as soon as I clapped eyes on her.”

“Kitty,” whispered George, and struck his finger tips softly on the counter. “D’ye hear, Nick? Your cook-maid. Kitty.”

Fenton’s expression did not change.

“Yet surely, Master Apothecary,” he said, “you must have pressed her with questions: as, how she came there, who sent her, and so on?”

“That I did, Sir Nicholas!” affirmed the other, leaning over the counter and giving a crafty leer. “As you shall hear! She said to me she wished to buy arsenic, ‘as much as should go into the largest pocket.’”

Then the apothecary excitedly acted it out.

“‘Come, my dear,’ says I, all a-wheedle, ‘now why do you desire that?’ She said ’twas for the rats, very large rats. They were a-swarm in the kitchen of the house, she being a poor servant; they ate food, and chewed away wooden stuff as well, and put her in great fear.”

“Pray continue.”

“‘Then tell me, my dear,’ says I, like a father (thus), ‘who are your master and mistress?’ She replied that they were Sir Nicholas and Lady Fenton. Certes, Sir Nicholas, I had heard much of you because of your swor … your high repute i’ the House of Commons. ‘Who bade you go and seek poison?’ says I. ‘Why,’ says she, ‘my lady mistress.’”

“Lydia?” muttered George in amazement, and stared at his companion. Fenton remained impassive.

“‘Now then, my dear,’ says I, ‘a last question.’ And I regarded her with cunning wisdom, thus. ‘Do you describe for me,’ says I, ‘your mistress.’”

“Master Apothecary, are you acquainted with my Lady Fenton?”

The little man spread out his hands.

“Sir, sir, have I that honour? No; the trap of it lay thus: not in what she might say, but how she did say it. Would she stammer and hesitate, or speak sweetly plain? Would her eyes shift, or meet mine in candour? Ah, it sufficed even for my cunning!”

“And how did she describe my Lady Fenton?”

“Why, sir, as I should have expected. As being something tall, with lustrous black hair in abundance, with grey eyes oft changing colour, and a skin milk-white.”

Now the silence stretched out unendurably.

“That’s not Lydia!” said George, in a low, half-strangled voice. “That’s … that’s …”

“Softly, George! —Master Apothecary, did the girl chance to mention the Christian name of this lady?”

“Nay, sir, she … Stop!” muttered the apothecary, and clucked his tongue. “Lord, I had forgot! ‘If you doubt me,’ says she, raising a ripe upper lip to smile, and plucking at the buttons of my coat in modest friendship, whilst I—Hem! ‘If you doubt me,’ says she, ‘the first name of my master’s true mistress, for the moment, is Magdalen or Meg.’”

Fenton lowered his head.

On the counter, unnoticed till then at his left, lay the apothecary’s thick walking-stick of twined carved oak. Absently he picked it up and weighed it in his hand.

Well, he had expected most of this. It was in Giles’s record. But he had been compelled to test it, since Meg’s name was not mentioned there. It was only hinted at, so very intricately and so like a puzzle that long, close study could alone bring out the hidden meaning.

But then, as Fenton was discovering, so many, many vital things were not in the manuscript! He had to grope in blindness. In fact, the record was all but useless except when …

Then, so to speak, the shop exploded.

“Liar!” George suddenly shouted. “Liar! Knave! Jack-fool!”

With a big hand George lunged across the counter for the apothecary’s throat. The scales toppled, and went over on the floor with a crash. The apothecary, trying to keep some loincloth of dignity, scuttled along behind the counter in the other direction. He rounded the edge of the counter, and stood behind Fenton.

“George! Softly! Be quiet!”

But George, frenzied and attempting to scare the apothecary still more, did the usual thing and tried to scare him with a lie.

“There’s been murder done,” he cried, “and you’ll be took up, too! I’ll see you at Newgate! I’ll see you at Tyburn Tree! I’ll see the cart drawn from under you …”

Then the words ripped out.

“Damn ye, George! Be silent!”

Lord George Harwell stopped dead, left hand in the air and right hand crossed on his sword grip. It was the first familiar tone, or speech, or bearing, or what you like, which he had observed in Nick all that day.

The crooked veins in his temples stood out like blue cords. His face had grown more swarthy, and he was beginning to smile. Sir Nick’s hands, set some way apart on a heavy oak cane, gripped it tightly and more tightly, as he held it horizontally against his waist.

Yet to George, more superstitious or perhaps more sensitive than he looked, it seemed that some invisible thing bestrode Nick’s shoulders; or was inside him or round him. It was as though this fought to make him drop the cane, yet he would not yield.

“Take care, Nick!” cried George. “When you fall in this mood …”

Meanwhile the little apothecary, scuttling towards the door to get them away in some fashion, glanced to the left out of the large window. This window, because of wavy glass, was all but opaque to the others. But Master Wynnel, who felt himself under Sir Nick’s protection, moved close to it, looking first left and then right.

And he shivered worse than he had shivered before.

“Sir Nicholas—” he began. He turned round, and shied back at the sight of the face that met him.

“Nay, man!” said Sir Nick, in a low soft growl which he strove hard to make kindly. One trembling hand dropped from the cane, and fumbled at his pocket. “Here are a couple of guineas for you; take them!”

It was far more than the apothecary could dream of earning in a month.

“Since I know they tell lies against you,” said Master Wynnel, “I’ll take them and not deny I need them. But, sir: you must not go from this house as yet. Let me make you comfortable in my poor back parlour.”

“Not go from the house? How not?”

“Court gentlemen may not know that off Fleet Street, hard by the Temple, there is a foul district called Alsatia.”

“Is it so?” murmured Sir Nick, showing his teeth.

“This Alsatia is a legal refuge, a sanctuary, even for those guilty of the foulest crime. The worst is called bully, or bullyrock, since …”

George dived at the window, putting one eye to it. Almost immediately he found a space of clear glass.

“The rogue on the left,” gabbled the apothecary, “hath drawn back against the shops near the end of the lane. I can’t see him now. But the other man, on the right by the arch that leads to the Strand …”

“I see him,” said George.”

The man lounged against the old dark-brick wall, just inside the arch and at right angles to it. He lounged negligently, his right shoulder against the wall; arms folded; legs crossed in such fashion that the tip of one ruined shoe rested on the ground. There was a long broomstraw stuck in his mouth; and, as he chewed it, his lip rolled in a perpetual sneer.

Of body he was very tall and lean. His tattered coat was fastened tightly to his body with pewter buttons to the neck. His rusty greenish breeches were laced to rusty greenish stockings, so that all, including the coat, seemed one tight-fitting garment. In an old scabbard he wore a new sword (its steel-lace guard a-glitter in a shaft of sun) which someone had bought for him. His wide low-crowned hat had a broken brim, but fastened to the side of the crown was a rosette of green ribbon. Under it the broomstraw still rolled with that perpetual sneer.

He was loud-mouthed, without pity or bowels, the dread of all sober men—Bully of Alsatia himself.