taken a terrible risk with that final bet, but I’d had no choice in the matter. My life had depended on it.
Early that morning my landlord and three other creditors had burst into my room and clapped an action on me for twenty pounds in unpaid rent and other debts. The warrant had given me just one day’s grace to pay enough to satisfy them. If I failed I would be arrested at once and thrown in gaol.
Little frightened me in those days. I was five and twenty and death seemed a distant, hazy thing. But I knew three men who had been sent to a debtors’ gaol in the last year. One had died of a fever, another had been stabbed in a fight and only just survived. The third had passed through the prison gates a fat, cheerful fellow and emerged six months later a grey, stuttering skeleton. He refused to say what had happened to him and there was a look in his eyes when we pressed him… as if he’d rather die than speak of it.
And so I’d flung on my clothes and run out into the brightening streets to call in every debt and favour I could think of. When that wasn’t enough I’d pawned everything of value, until my room was stripped as bare as a maid on her wedding night. I saved only two items of any worth – my dagger for protection and my best suit for deception. (A little swagger and a few gold buttons will open most doors in London.) My creditors had demanded half what they were owed as proof they would see the rest in good time. As the sun set I counted out what I had made: two guineas and a handful of pennies. Hardly a quarter the sum I needed.
It was then that I was forced to do what I had been avoiding all day – I turned to Charles for help. We had been as close as brothers at school and at Oxford, but in the last few years our friendship had faltered. My old companion in mischief had become the Reverend Charles Buckley, a civil, sober gentleman who gave afternoon lectures to enraptured old ladies at St George’s on Hanover Square. All of this was well and good, I supposed, until he’d started to lecture me on my own behaviour. I was not an enraptured old lady. I had not seen him for several months.
Charles lived with his patron, Sir Philip Meadows, in a large house near St James’ Square. It wasn’t a long way from my lodgings but my footsteps were slow and heavy as I walked along Piccadilly. I couldn’t bear the thought of burdening him with my troubles, and worse – I knew he would forgive me for it in a moment. I was on the brink of being ashamed of myself – an uncomfortable feeling.
