Free The Vice Society by James McCreet Page B

After leaping from that window at Milton-street, I had fled to one of my habitual locations: the Cathedral coffee house, just a few steps from the writers’ paradise and purgatory of Paternoster-row and in the very shadow of St Paul’s. Assuredly, I would not be returning to that lodging house – not least because a constable of the Mendicity Society had been situated nearby (there, and at the false widow Burgoyne’s) lest I do so.
    I am, as will have been discerned, a writer: of begging letters by necessity, of newspaper copy by inclination, and of novels by destiny. The reader may have been acquainted of late by a work of mine detailing a case in which Mr Williamson, then Detective Sergeant Williamson, was a prominent player. I would like to say the sensation of that work has made me a rich man, but I was obliged to sell my copyright at perilously short notice to save myself from an impending stay at Whitecross-street debtors’ gaol. The publisher, I hear, has become a moderately wealthy man.
    So, once again, I had been thrown upon the cold and blackened bosom of the city to sustain myself. There, amid the cacophony of traffic, the choking smoke, the faceless crowd and the inhuman masonry, I was once more to chase stories to fill my stomach – at least until the Mendicity Society tired of pursuing ‘Mr Mann’.
    O, there are bodies I could apply to for charity, but I cannot tolerate plaintive letters to the Literary Fund so that those ‘literary’ men can sneer at my body of work and deny me ten pounds because I am not a ‘writer’ in their eyes. I would rather chase the fire engine, loiter at the magistrates’ court and gain access to the public inquest than take their charity.
    Thus, at the windowseats of the house, I ordered a tongue sandwich with plenty of mustard and looked absently through the day’s papers. Behind me, the noisy throng smoked and drank: penny-a-liners talking fantastical rubbish about the book of theirs that was sure to be printed by Such-and-Such publishers of Paternoster-row, or the article of theirs that was certain to run uncut in all of the following day’s press. At talking they are artists; at writing, they are talented talkers.
    Before me, the city was framed within the plate-glass window – an animated canvas containing everything a man could desire to fill his nib: the omnibuses bristling with top-hatted and bonneted passengers; the magdalenes with their insinuating winks; the false beggars preying on tourists; the street boys always one penny away from the grave; the lonely death in the upper room; the fallen horse and the splintered bone; the duke with dung-splashed legs; the thief with the duke’s watch in his palm.
    And the unnamed, unknown murderer walking there among the crowd – just another face, just another fare, just another man with the power and the intention to take the life of others. It could be any one of them, for any man or woman can kill. One might not think it, or will it, but there is evil in us all. It remains hidden and buried in those of a healthy mind, but if one should uncover even the outermost tip of that darkness within, it will grasp tentacularly and draw one in, deeper and deeper until wrong seems right and the most depraved longings are confused with the higher emotions. Lust, greed, ire, envy . . . these are the tips of the tentacles that lead to the rotting blackness at the core of everyone.
    Take, for example, the young fellow sitting beside me. With a yearning and almost desperate gaze, he watched every attractive lady walk past, casting his eyes hungrily at their ankles. He scanned every torso in hope of the momentary movements of clothing against their forms. A bachelor, perhaps, or an unsatiated young husband. Such insensate desires take hold of a young man and, if unmoderated, motivate him to acts that would ultimately affront his morality, deny his religion, shame his family and bring calumny upon his name.
    If I was in need of a