The System of the World

The City of London
LATE AFTERNOON

HE WAS PRESENTABLE. He was amiable. He’d been taught to sign his name-assuming Jones really was his name-on command. Beyond that he was, and always would be, perfectly illiterate. This rendered it out of the question that Seaman Jones of the good ship Minerva would ever be an officer, or a man of commerce.

Jones did not chafe under his limitations-if he was even aware he had any. They had picked him up in Jamaica. His story at the time was that he was a wholesome North Devon lad who had been abducted from the shore round Lynmouth by a boat-load of sailors from a Bristol slave-ship anchored in the Channel-in other words, that he’d been press-ganged-and that, after a run to Guinea to pick up slaves, he had jumped ship in Jamaica. They had always assumed that Jones would jump ship again one day, and avail himself of his first chance to get back to his family farm on the edge of Exmoor. But that had been years ago. Jones had proved immune to the temptations of Exmoor on several occasions, as Minerva frequently called at Plymouth, Dartmouth, and other ports convenient to his supposed homeland. Indeed, he gave every indication of being perfectly content with his lot aboard Minerva. There had been some trouble with rowdiness at first, providing a hint as to what Jones was running away from, but as years and voyages had gone by he had ripened into a steady, reliable, if somewhat limited crewman.

So on the liability side of Jones’s account, to illiteracy could be added a mysterious, probably criminal past, and a want of ambition. He had, however, one asset that was not possessed by the officer who was walking next to him up Lombard Street: he was a white-skinned Englishman. From time to time Jones was called upon to make the most of this asset by dressing up in a pair of breeches, leather shoes, a waistcoat, a long watch coat of a somewhat nautical cut, and a very plain horsehair periwig. This was the sort of get-up that a ship’s officer might keep stuffed in a footlocker while crossing an ocean, and pull out after dropping anchor in some harbor, so that he could go ashore and look minimally decent in the eyes of money-scriveners, victuallers, ship-chandlers, and insurance underwriters.

If these two were to hail a hackney coach and travel a couple of miles west to the new streets round Piccadilly and St. James, where shopping rather than shipping was the order of the day, their roles, in the eyes of most casual strollers, might be reversed. For people with an eye for clothes would notice that Dappa’s actually fit him, that they were of recent make, well cared for, and cleverly picked out. The lace around his shirt-cuffs had never been dragged through beer-foam, goose-grease and damp ink; his shoes shone like wax fruit. The sophisticated toffs of the West End would then take in the fact that Dappa was older, that he was alert to everything going on around them, and that when they came to street-corners Dappa went where he would, and Jones followed. Jones looked about himself curiously, but he was not really paying attention in the way that Dappa was. A West Ender, watching this procession of two stride past, might conclude that Dappa was a Moorish diplomat from Algiers or Rabat, and Jones his local guide.

But this was not the West End. This was the City of London. They were only a stone’s throw from Change Alley. No one paid much heed to clothing here, unless it was as a truly vulgar and shocking exhibit of wealth. By that standard both Dappa and Jones were invisible. Dappa, darting ahead through the crowd of money-men, was assumed to be the servant-a meat souvenir picked up on a trading-voyage-beating a path through the jungle, as it were, and keeping a shrewd eye for hazards. Jones, strolling in Dappa’s wake, was obviously the master, and what might in other settings have been seen as a stupid or vacuous expression could be taken, here, as the meditative phizz of a financial savant who was trying to plumb the meaning of the latest trend in Sword Blade Company share prices, and couldn’t be bothered to dress himself elegantly or indeed to find his own way down the street. His absent-minded way of taking in everything around him was proof that his was a mind tuned to follow the divagating strains, and quiver in sympathy with the startling chords, of the Market.

Or so Dappa told himself, to check his own impatience, when Seaman Jones paused to chat up a pretty orange-girl on a street-corner, or reached out to accept a handbill from a dirty, bawling pamphleteer. When they came at last to the doorway of Worth’s Coffee-House on Birchin Lane, just across the way from the Heraclitean riot of Change Alley, Dappa fell to the rear. Jones strode forward and entered the coffee-house first. A few moments later Dappa was pulling Jones’s chair out for him as he seated himself at a vacant table, and scurrying after a maid to make Mr. Jones’s desires known.

“We are early,” Dappa told Jones after he had got back to the table with the coffee, “and Mr. Sawyer is ever late, and so make yourself comfortable, as I cannot. After this, there’s no more leisure until we reach Massachusetts.” And Dappa took up the pose of a servant, standing behind Jones, ready to dart forward and tend to emergent needs.

Everyone else in the place was either involved in a conversation or, if alone, reading something. Worth’s Coffee-House was the haunt of a sub-species of petty financier who provided bridge loans, and other, less easily explained financial instruments, to the shipping trade. Of the singletons scattered about the place, some were salts consulting tide-tables or almanacks. Others looked like money-scriveners or money-goldsmiths. Their choices in reading material leaned towards London newspapers. Jones, here, was the odd man out in that he could not read at all. But at the corner of Gracechurch and Lombard, he had accepted a libel from a nasty tub-faced tout who looked and smelled as if he’d washed his face with rancid tallow, and who had bestowed an evil look on Dappa as he’d walked by. Jones had rolled it up and carried it here in one hand, looking for all the world like a man of affairs toting a Bill of Exchange to be redeemed. But now, in an effort to blend in with this literate crowd, Jones unrolled the handbill and smoothed it out on the table, and bent over it, aping the poses of the readers around him.

He had it upside down! Dappa bent his face toward the floor, and stepped forward so that he could discreetly knee Jones in the arse. But Jones was quicker than Dappa gave him credit for. Though he knew nothing of letters, he had figured out on his own that the document needed to be spun around. For this bill was illustrated: at the top of the page was a fist-sized blot of ink, a butcherous woodcut of a savage black-skinned man with spraying dreadlocks. His throat was clasped in a white lace cravat, his shoulders dignified by good English tailoring. Printed beneath this portrait in crusty letters an inch high was the word