No Good Deed 45

Of course, though I had silenced the man the moment he attempted to utter the name by which, however briefly, he had known me, that did not mean that my own curiosity about Cletus Camborne Esquire had abated in any way. When last encountered, the others in my company were convinced beyond persuasion that the man before them was one Septimus Coble, a man whose fortune I had not quite inherited and whose gravestone we subsequently visited. Whoever he might - or might not have - been, he remained the man I had first encountered as owner of a Fantoccini entertainment, which he was in the habit of pushing on a handcart through London streets with the aid of a hurdy-gurdy man. There remained still in the man's cadences and consonants something of the Central-European; although I could not say – no more than previously – whether he were Jew or Romany or Magyar thief. However, this did not matter, save that, perhaps, in frontier towns or among rude mechanicals, he might have had to answer to the name 'Dutch'.

On the point of broaching the subject of any past meetings, I was thwarted by the entrance to the long room being thrown uncommon wide, and a bellow coming through it in simultaneous fashion with a bizarre figure, clothed in attire fashionable at some point in society. Whether this point was identifiably geographical or temporal, I was hard put to say.

'Hi, halloo! Barkeep, whiskey, now if you will,' were the words thrown so forcibly into the air, that Camborne had flinched.

I took a moment to take in this phenomenon. From the waist down he appeared to have dressed in approximation of one of Dumas Père's Musketeers. The trouser legs bunched heavily over boots whose tops were turned down most hap-hazardly over the calves. His upper part owed little more to the modes of the day, being a once-white shirt with no manner of collar in evidence, covered by a top-coat which may once have been in possession of a bifurcated tail, but which now could only offer one long swatch to the rear, alongside its crudely truncated companion.

He fixed me with a shining eye which suggested that he maintained a supply of medicinal spirits in whatever part of the ship he lodged, and enquired,

'Join me, Sir? I feel even on these inland waters, every sailor deserves his wine of height? Don't you?'

The peculiar combinatory spectacle of his dress was as nothing, to the auditory surprise effected by the commingling of accents from the Liffey and the Thames which infused his words. I found it most bizarre; as though a parrot had been taught the vocabulary of a gentleman, but not the diction. He did cut a handsome figure, topping my own stature by an inch or two. I could imagine a certain kind of shallow female considering his looks appealing - for a man of fifty or so. He held out his hand,

'Sir Garrick Cattermole, theatrical manager and actor!'

His words made the long trip from Temple Bar to Cheapside in the course of this short sentence and I would have wagered the man was no more a Knight Baronet than a Chinee Mandarin. Nonetheless, I grasped his hand and shook it, offered him the name of Anson Northrup and pushed my own bottle of whiskey towards him.

'Action is eloquence, Sir.'

It was not in him merely to speak; he could not help but declaim. He saw me flinch at the volume at which he did so, and I wondered if he knew he put me in mind of other words from the Swan of Avon, wherein one might 'dote on his very absence.'