Beneath London Read Online Free PDF Page B

quality. Treasures of the meanest sort lay beyond the shop window: chipped china cups, foreign coins, dusty glassware, a hodgepodge of bric-a-brac, and a basket of severed porcelain dolls’ heads – awful things with staring eyes.
    Shoes lay heaped in bins inside the shop, and an array of petticoats, gowns, shawls, and old coats hung from wooden rods affixed to the ceiling. The store was apparently empty of customers, and the shopkeeper was attentive to his work. Beaumont’s eyes returned to the clutter of items in the window, where there lay a nine-key, four-part German flute with ivory and silver filigree, the fine-grained wood polished to a luster by handling. He stared longingly at it, having pawned his own flute, not as nice as this one, some months back. German flutes were neither rare nor expensive, even to a person of modest means, but he couldn’t afford the flute no matter what he was offered for the watches, which represented several days’ careful labor. He had been hungry and cold so often these past months that he had become like the ant in the fable: for every shilling he spent, he put two away for tomorrow, even if it meant that on two-shilling days he went hungry. Still and all, he had eaten his fill of bread and cheese just now in Rodway’s Coffee House, meat being too dear, and so hunger was a remote worry.
    He heard the rattle and squeak of loose wheels now, and looking up toward Lower Thames Street, he saw a costermonger wheeling a hot potato cart in his direction, compelling him to step up onto the shop’s stoop among a litter of ironmongery in order to let the cart pass. “Watch your poke in that there shop,” the boy said to him without looking up. Beaumont was tempted to stop him, to buy a potato that he didn’t want, but he stepped noiselessly into the shop instead, seeing that the shopkeeper’s back was turned. He leaned in toward the broad window-sill, his hand darted out, and he grasped the flute lightly, flipping it round and thrusting it up the sleeve of his coat, and then letting it slide back down into a pocket sewn on the inside of the sleeve for just such a purpose. The flute lay there snug and safe by the time the shopkeeper, a surly-looking dark man in a leathern apron, with the face of a dried French prune turned and looked at him with evident disapproval.
    “I’ve got these time pieces, Squire,” Beaumont said to him, and he drew the watches out of his purse, lining them up in a neat row on the counter. Lying beneath the dirty glass was an array of costume jewelry, virtually all of it pinchbeck rubbish, and a half-dozen decorated snuff boxes. No doubt the proprietor kept the real wares somewhere else, another shop, perhaps.
    The man grunted by way of reply when he saw the watches. He picked up the best of the three and snapped it open, looking at the interior of the cover, which was unfortunately engraved with its owner’s initials. Shaking his head doubtfully, he examined the other two. “How does a villain of your size come by
three
silver pocket watches?” he asked. “Half a watch would do the likes of you, I should think.”
    “My old grandfather died yesterday,” Beaumont told him. “That’s how I came by them. They were his.”
    “What was his name, then? Old Scratch, I don’t doubt.”
    “Bartholomew Compton, your honor, of Dove Court in the Seven Dials. He was uncommon fond of knowing the time of day, and used the one watch to check the accuracy of the other two.”
    “And yet the one watch is engraved with another man’s initials – an ef and a zed. That’s mighty curious – suspicious some might say.”
    “Not at all, sir. He couldn’t read nor write. It’s the great pity of the world, for he would have been a great man, else.”
    The shop door opened just then and a squalid, thin woman who was losing her hair in patches came in wearing a worn cotton gown raveled at the neck and sleeves. A tiny, fair-haired girl trailed at her heels, her eyes on