Murder by Candlelight Read Online Free Page B

the “cryptarchs” or secret rulers of London’s gaming netherworld. These black legs, though they were outwardly allsmiling affability, looked upon Thurtell as little more than “a good flat”—a “flatty gory,” a naïf to be plundered. Behind his back they called him the “Swell Yokel” and were eager to get “a slice of his blunt (cash).”
    Mr. Lemon and his minions were deeply versed in all the arts of crooked gaming, and Jack Thurtell was soon near to being bled dry by them. At last he could take no more; exasperated by his continual losses, he questioned Mr. Lemon’s good faith. The prudent villain soothed his victim’s rage and suspicion with a conciliatory invitation. Would Thurtell like to come down to Wadesmill, where the boxer Tom Hickman was in training? Naturally, Thurtell leapt at the chance. Hickman was the foremost pugilist of the day, ferocious “even to bull-dog fierceness,” and known as the “gas-light man” because his punches “put the lights out.”

    * In the eighteenth century, a “black leg” was a turf swindler, but the term came later to designate other varieties of swindling rogues: more especially, the “sharper” or fraudulent gamester.
    â€  Some patricians, so far from discouraging their sons from gambling, took pains to initiate them in the costly amusement. Among these was Henry Fox, Lord Holland, who educated his boys, Lord Shelburne wrote, with an “extravagant vulgar indulgence.” In the spring of 1763, Lord Holland “could think of no better diversion than to take Charles from his books, and convey him to the Continent on a round of idleness and dissipation. At Spa his amusement was to send him every night to the gaming-table with a pocketful of gold; and, (if family tradition may be trusted where it tells against family credit,) the parent took not a little pains to contrive that the boy should leave France a finished rake.” Charles James Fox was fourteen years old at the time, and a scholar at Eton. On the other hand, it is said that the Duke of Wellington became a member of Crockford’s only in order that he might blackball his son, Lord Douro, in the event he sought election to the club. The Duke, who thought nothing of the satire of cartoonists, admitted that there was one caricature of himself that genuinely pained him—Douro.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Rake’s Progress
    flesh’d villains, bloody dogs
    â€” Shakespeare
    W adesmill, a pleasant village on the road from London to Cambridge, stands not far from Ware, the old brewing town. Thurtell went down in the company of Miss Dodson and took rooms in the Feathers, a coaching inn still extant. It was a brilliant time. “Squire” Elliot, Hickman’s principal backer, was there; so, too, was Baird, the proprietor of a hazard table in Oxenden Street. Thurtell was in his element, and he soon devised a training regimen for Hickman: “exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise.” But after a hard day of physical exertion, a little play could do no harm, and in the evenings Thurtell took his seat at the card table.
    His luck had changed for the better. Mr. Weare, whom Thurtell knew from Rexworthy’s, had joined the company, as “neat and cleanin his person” as ever. Whether he brought his gun and hunting dogs with him—Weare was fond of a day’s shooting—has not transpired; but Thurtell was doubtless gratified to find himself beating the veteran player so regularly at Blind Hookey.
    Weare affected the character of a lawyer—more precisely, of a solicitor; and he had chambers in Lyon’s Inn, the nursery of such luminaries of the Bar as John Selden and Sir Edward Coke. But he was not a lawyer. A “man of low birth” and “slender education,” he had started in life as a tavern waiter. Later he found a place in a gaming house, got up a thinnish