"You alright, Walton?"
"Been better, Stockton."
"Shall I help you to your feet, or do you prefer the frozen mud for the moment. You do not look as comfortable as you might like."
"Agreed, this position is not in any way ideal."
The man who now went by the name Walton was looking up from the mud, sporting what was likely to be good size egg on his head, and a fair number of bruises that would be invisible beneath his coat, but readily apparent to those who know how to look for such things. He managed to struggle to his knees, and I helped him to his feet. We were not to be seen keeping company too often, but as he was my ticket to a better life, I thought the idea of keeping him alive seemed eminently sensible. Damn, this charade was making me talk like one of them, or more likely, what I would be if we managed to pull this off.
My employer, in reality, Mr. Bingley and not Mr. Walton had made his enquiries carefully, but he already knew of my 'habits' before he approached me that day a month prior. I was not in the least happy to learn he knew of my origins, and the fact that I had not entirely left them behind when I managed to become his coachman. The elevation from sometimes thief, sometimes gambler, and sometimes other things that need not be detailed here; to a respectable coachman for a rich tradesman had been made as most of my elevations in life, through stealth, guile and lies. The man was newly elevated to his position, fatherless and protected by arguably the stupidest elder sister I had ever had the displeasure to meet, and another elder sister who followed her like a mongrel dog. The husband attached to the other sister would not have survived five minutes where I came from… but, come to think of it, none of them would.
When Mr. Bingley came asking me to return whence I came, I thought my scheme had come tumbling down, and wondered what other rich chucklehead I could work on. I enjoyed being a coachman, particularly as it gave me at least even odds of surviving to my thirtieth birthday; something that my old life sadly lacked.
Bingley, as I was now instructed to call him when in 'polite company', wanted me to guide him through a manhunt, which would most likely pass through all of the worst rookeries in London. The scheme was mad… absolutely barking mad, and not all that likely to succeed either, but he was determined. He was trying to find a specific man, who was going by another name, who truly did not want to be found, and was very good at hiding. The man had a visit to debtor's prison or a nice jaunt to France with the army waiting for him should he ever be discovered, and was understandably disinclined towards making either appointment. For all we knew, he might even have a noose all set up somewhere or other, and that is nothing to the debts waiting to be collected by those who could make him long for the fields of France. We had to flush him out, and we had to do it soon. Bingley had no idea how to do it, but thought I just might.
The prize he offered in exchange was not only the life of a coachman, but the life of a gentleman. Not a rich and idle gentleman such as himself, but enough money placed in the four percents to keep me in a style that might allow me to take a wife, raise a few children and my grandchildren might even be fully respectable one day if we managed to keep our noses clean. It was a prize hard to pass up, even if the chances of one or both of us ending up dead were not to be dismissed lightly.
You may wonder at how a man such as myself has the words to describe this endeavor using words like 'endeavor' which rarely pass through the lips of a coachman or a thief. Therein lies a story for another day, but suffice it to say that my time in the rookeries taught me more than one skill that was necessary for survival; and the most urgent of those was the ability to appear to be what you needed to be at the moment. Words are weapons, and I had armed myself better than my contemporaries, having a mother that was much smarter than most. Her tumble from the gentry to the whorehouse had been abrupt, but she was a tough old bird and had managed to remember a few lessons.
Bingley thought it would take a month to teach me the words, the dress and the mannerisms; but in the end all he had to do was buy me a bunch of expensive clothes. The mannerisms came along with them, and we set to our task mere days after he sold the townhouse.
I had to admit that once he elevated me to the status of a 'gentleman friend', I thoroughly enjoyed the entertainment of the sale of his townhouse, which was part and parcel of his plan, as it was necessary for it to be widely generally thought that he was on a downward slide. I was there to watch the ensuing chaos, and had to work hard not to laugh.
"Charles, you cannot possibly sell the townhouse and all my decorations. I have worked years to make it a perfect place!"
"And why should I not sell them Caroline? I paid for them, or is there something here I am unaware of that came from your portion?"
We both knew how ridiculous that notion was. His sister had been decorating and redecorating the townhouse for years. I of course had never been inside with myself being just a coachman, but Miss Bingley provided nearly all of our entertainment prior to that. The best part was watching her fawn over that Darcy fellow, and there were bets launched both above and below stairs in more than one great house about how long it would be before she attempted a compromise, and whether or not she would succeed. My own money was riding on sometime this year, and the man tossing her out on her ear; as I thought Darcy was made of sterner stuff than most of my compatriots did. Most of the servants had never learned to recognize the look of a man who was amiable enough, but had a backbone of steel when it was called for.
"What has gotten into you Charles? I shall not stand for this. Not for one more minute! You must desist immediately!"
"I agree Caroline! Most emphatically! You must leave my disagreeable presence right now. In fact, I have already taken the liberty of having your trunks packed, and the coach is sitting outside to take you to Scarborough. Goodbye Caroline."
With the sale of the house, Bingley had in fact deliberately sold all of his sister's decorations and the new mistress of the house looked as if she had been invited to live in the palace, while his sister looked like he had grabbed her heart with his fist and ripped it out through her throat. The screaming fit that ensued with her dismissal to distant relatives was a masterpiece of theatre to behold, and I knew that it would be worth years of entertainment below stairs. I found it entirely amusing that even though she had personally screamed at me over some imagined failure of duty more than a dozen times, and tried to dismiss me twice; she had no idea I was her coachman once I was in my new clothes. I thought perhaps Bingley was testing me to see how well I could act when the heat was on, but it would take more heat than Caroline Bingley to bring me to any grief.
With the house gone without a second thought, Bingley began execution of the next part of the plan, once my money was safely placed with his solicitor where I could get at it after our little adventure, or it could be delivered to my kin if things went badly, and we were off.
Bingley was a master of the drawing rooms and parlors of the gentry, and he was widely considered an 'amiable man', which most of us considered the same as a chucklehead… but, I can tell you this. When he set his mind to it, the man could spread balderdash with the best of them. Talking for a half hour without coming within a league of the truth was no harder for him than discussing the previous winter's hunt, or the quality of his new shooting rifle. He even described in quite some detail yet another rifle that I knew did not exist, just because he could.
"Say, Bingley I heard that you sold your townhouse."
"Yes, cursed nuisance these townhouses. You know I have been planning to buy an estate, and now seems a good time."
"Jolly good show. Where exactly is this estate?"
"Well, you see, I have my eye on several and am just greasing the skids so to speak."
On and on it went like that. He never overplayed his hand. He never said things that were not to his purpose, and he never got caught out. I was introduced as a gentleman of some standing from a vague and ambiguous direction… somewhere that had odd manners and odd ways of speaking, but not an accent so heavy you could not make sense of it. Passing me off as a Scotsman or Irishman seemed like it might be amusing, but much too difficult. Best to keep your lies simple, and as close to the truth as you can. Manchester was mentioned, as well as a few places in Derbyshire or even occasionally Cornwall, as well as other counties I had never heard of that I suspect Bingley had just heard in some other wild stories.
By the end of a fortnight, the circles he traveled in started hearing about the sale of his home, and a hint there, a sour look there, and he was next considered to be on the slide to ruin. I had a bit of a chuckle to think about how this was to affect his sister, but he seemed to have put her out of his mind entirely. She was now so unimportant to him that he gave not the slightest thought to her, which I thought would pain her much more than if he had deliberately decided to ruin her. It served her right. She should have married when she had the chance. Oh, she was not destitute. Her dowry was still far more than I, my children and my grandchildren would ever amass; but she would have to learn to live with the idea of being what she actually was, rather than what she dreamed she was.
"Did you hear about Bingley? I heard it in the greatest confidence so keep it to yourself. Had to sell his townhouse you see. Big debts. Mistress on the side. Man will be destitute."
"Hardly surprising for a man with roots so close to trade. Should never have let him in."
With the story in the upper circles in place, we started our hunt for our query in the ah… shall we say, lower circles. As with any hunt, the hounds had to make a lot of noise and circle around mostly aimlessly trying to cover the area before they could get the scent, and that is where we started.
We started in Rat's Castle with a series of card games. The secret to this type of hunt is that you have to be able to move in the circles the hounds must search, and to do that you have to fit in. For the gentry, that had to mean you were either well off and in it for the sport; which usually ended with your throat cut, or you were on your way down and desperate to make a soft landing or claw your way back up. We chose the latter story.
Walton let it be known that he was a man with some money, or enough to cover his wagers, but that he was somewhat in desperate need to win more often than to lose. He also occasionally let it slip that his name may not be precisely 'Walton', so that he could leave enough scent of blood to bring out the predators. That was the dangerous part of this game. We both knew that there was not the slightest chance we could actually find our prey. He know this area better than even I did, he was a man who had spent as much of his life lying as I had, and seemed at least as good at it from the stories I heard. Besides that, he was a man who did not want to be found. Bingley's idea of sending 100 men with piles of money to find him was laughable. No, we had to insure that the man would find us!
Of course, nobody ever learns to cook without getting burned, and Bingley had overplayed one hand, which earned him a good beating but not a knifing. It could have been worse, and St. Giles was quite likely to be, once we got there in a few days or weeks.
He replied surprisingly calmly, "Not that good of a show there, old chap; but I know not whether it helped our cause or hurt it."
I thought about it a moment, and then said, "We need to show weakness. I suspect it helped, but you may want to find a better way to appear weak."
I saw him thinking about that for a moment, then he shrugged his shoulders, grimaced at the pain and said, "I have an idea for that."
I helped him to his feet, and dragged him off to the less than reputable boarding house where we had our lodgings. It was all part of the act, but he certainly was not acting. He would look the part of a man who had been given an education via fists tomorrow, and the story would get about. The beating would serve its purpose.
On the morrow, we would begin our campaign in yet another gambling den, with yet another bunch of disreputable men and the women that hung about with them. More stories would be spun, more balderdash, more blood on the water, more confusion about whether the two of us were confederates or enemies.
Our man would hear about us sooner or later, and we had laced just enough truth into Walton's balderdash to make us a tempting target… or at least, that was our design. We did not appear to have ready cash, but we tried to make it seem as if we had ready information for the type of man that was just enterprising enough to understand it. The specific names and facts that were let loose into the wind would mean nothing to anybody in the slums except our quarry, but we hoped he would smell the profit and come running for his share.
In the meantime, we would continue to water our gin, lose steadily but not remarkably, move from place to place like ghosts on the wind, and hope our little friend picked up our scent. As I said, it was just like a hunt, except the fox and the hounds would have to trade places from time to time. I only hoped that when it finally came time for the hunter to pull the trigger, I was not taking the role of the fox.