The Speckled Monster Read Online Free Page B

attaching itself to the fledgling club that met at his tavern.
    At these once-a-week gatherings, a sprinkling of dukes, earls, and lesser lords discarded enough of the brittle niceties of rank to mingle freely with gentlemen soldiers and politicians, doctors and lawyers, painters, poets, and playwrights. There was even one man of their company “in trade,” as they said a little dubiously of merchants: their host was the round-faced, jovial Jacob Tonson, publisher and bookseller of many of the day’s finest volumes.
    The lure that drew men of such disparate rank together was politics: to a man, they were Whigs, which meant that by the touchstones of the day, they were liberal. While they believed in the rightness and necessity of a monarch, they also fervently believed that the king must share real power with Parliament. A decade earlier, it had been these men, along with their fathers and uncles and brothers, who had engineered the Glorious Revolution that had set the current king and his poor late queen on the throne.
    At present, however, the men munching mutton pies at the Cat and Fiddle were not discussing politics. They were discussing women.
    Dr. Samuel Garth stood, swept aside his red cloak, and raised his glass to a countess:
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    She o’er all hearts and toasts must reign,
Whose eyes outsparkle bright champagne.
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    To shouts of laughter and approval, everyone drank. Once each year, the company met to cast ballots on the subject of beauty. Those ladies voted London’s fairest of the fair had their names inscribed with a diamond on a drinking glass. Then they reigned as “Venuses of the Feast,” the celebrated subjects of the club’s toasts for the entire ensuing year.
    These earthly goddesses were never present. Instead, their absent eyes, lips, and lovely cheeks, their wit and Whiggish politics, were put forward as excuses for the men to drink deep among an exclusively male and increasingly raucous company. The Kit-Catters spent at least as much time celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, as they did praising Venus and her capricious son Cupid.
    Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax and king of the quick rhyme, took a turn:
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    Fair as the blushing grape she stands,
Excites our hopes and tempts our hands.
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    From across the table, the earl of Kingston eyed Halifax lazily. “I know of one lady,” he said, “who outshines your whole list like Romeo’s Juliet, trooping among crows.”
    Next to him, Thomas, Lord Wharton, banged down his bowl of wine. “Name her, my Lord Lady-Love,” he challenged. “Or do you mean to keep her to yourself until you can make a small rearrangement to Caesar: I saw, I conquered, I came? ”
    Amid jeers and groans of laughter, Kingston smiled. Unlike Wharton—who, it was rumored, had proved devil enough to take his pleasure with a woman on an altar—Kingston groomed a reputation as an elegant and envied rake. His friends did not feel the need to lock up their wives and daughters when he came to call.
    â€œHe’s luring us into folly, more like it,” roared Dr. Garth. “Meaning to make laughingstocks of us by linking us to some draggle-tailed Drury Lane drab.”
    No amount of catcalling, however, could get Kingston to reveal the lady’s name. In the end, his fellows rejected his nomination.
    â€œOn what grounds?” demanded the earl.
    â€œNo one else has ever seen the lady,” shot back Lord Halifax.
    â€œThen you shall see her!” cried Kingston.
    Moments later, several footmen scurried into the street and swarmed onto the earl’s coach, which sped away. Emerging at the bottom of the lane, the coachman turned his back on the foul open sewer of the Fleet Ditch to the east and clattered west down the thoroughfare of the Strand. A hundred years earlier, when Queen Elizabeth ruled the land and Shakespeare ruled the stage, great lords had lined this street with their palaces that bore