Before Ruddock had gathered his senses, Paul and Huckvale were two streets away, walking side by side towards the shooting gallery. The plan had worked. Paul had dropped a heavy coil of rope into the river then hidden behind an upturned rowing boat on wooden trestles. While Ruddock was distracted, Huckvale had run forwards to push him from behind before scampering gleefully away. It would be the second time in twenty-four hours that the man would have to explain to his wife why he’d come home dripping wet.
‘He won’t be following you for a little while,’ said Huckvale, laughing.
‘No, Jem, I fancy that we dampened his ardour.’
Jubal Nason was embittered. After a relatively blameless life as a lawyer’s clerk, he’d made the mistake of falsifying an account in his favour, albeit involving a very modest amount. Unfortunately, he’d been caught in the act. At one stroke, he’d lost his job, his reputation and his chances of being employed elsewhere at the same wage. Though he’d escaped prosecution because of his previous good conduct, he’d been shunned by the legal profession and forced to fall back on whatever work he could get as a clerk. Jobs were few and far between, often reducing him to the role of scrivener for some illiterate client. Over a period of weeks, for instance, he’d been compelled to write meandering love letters on behalf of a middle-aged butcher trying to woo a moneyed widow who – since she, too, was illiterate – had to have the touching billets-doux read out to her by an obliging female friend. Nason found it galling to further someone else’s romance when his had withered on the vine. The sudden decline in his income had sharpened his wife’s tongue and turned her into a block of granite at night.
It had all changed. Instead of working at a desk in an office where he had status, he now operated from his own small, drab, cheerless house where he had none. Instead of wearing a smart suit, he was reduced to putting on one that had seen substantially better days. Worst of all, he was at the mercy of the acid-tongued Posy Nason, a full-bodied termagant who was unable to accept her husband’s fall from grace and who dedicated her life to punishing him for it. When she came bustling into the room, he tensed instinctively.
‘Do you have no work today, husband?’ she demanded.
‘I’ve a client coming in an hour.’
‘That means you earned nothing at all this morning.’
‘There’s money owing to me, my dear,’ he lied. ‘And I have prospects.’
‘That’s more than I have,’ she said with a vehemence born of deep resentment. ‘I used to have a husband who cared for me enough to work hard at a respectable profession. All he does now is to copy out things for people too stupid to do it themselves and write letters for lovesick butchers.’
‘Things will improve.’
‘Why you left the position you already had, I’ll never know. You had some standing there. The only thing you do here is to get under my feet.’
Keeping the truth about his dismissal from her had been difficult but he’d managed it somehow, inventing a rigmarole about the firm for which he worked deciding to reduce the number of its clerks. Nason lived in fear that one day his wife would learn the appalling truth that her husband had, as a result of his folly, been summarily thrown out of a job he did well and condemned to lead a harsher existence. The few refinements he and his family had enjoyed were now things of the past.
In her daily litany of complaints, Posy never let him forget the fact.
‘When did I last have a new dress?’ she asked, truculently.
‘You already have a serviceable wardrobe, my dear.’
‘What’s fine about fading colours and ill-fitting apparel?’
‘You look well in whatever you wear,’ he said, trying to pay her a compliment.
‘No woman is at her best in rags.’
‘If your dresses are worn, repair them.’
‘I’ve been repairing them these past six months but you’ve been too busy to notice. You’ve let me down, husband.’
‘I’ll atone for it in some way.’
‘Well, you won’t do it by keeping such strange company as you do,’ she said, contemptuously. ‘That coarse, pig-faced butcher was bad enough with his demand for letters to entrap a widow but the three men who came here the other day were even worse. They looked like the lowest villains. We shouldn’t have such dreadful people in our home. Do you have to do business with a black man?’
‘I’ll work for anyone who’ll pay me, Posy.’
‘Have you really sunk so low?’
The question was like a stab through the heart and he lacked the strength to conjure up an answer. Nason had lost his self-respect and it rankled. Head on his chest and eyes closed, he waited until his wife’s rant finally abated. When she stormed off to the kitchen, he was able to breathe a sigh of relief and find solace by reading the newspaper he’d borrowed from a neighbour. It took his mind temporarily off the collapse of his fortunes. After working his way nostalgically through the details of the sort of court cases in which he was once tangentially involved, he came to an item that made him quiver with interest. A reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of two American prisoners of war who’d escaped from Dartmoor and who were known to be in London. They were named as Thomas O’Gara and Moses Dagg. A brief description was given of each man.