*You sure about that, Stirling?' shouted Horatio. *Maybe it was a visitation from the bottle. Too much port can have that effect.'

The reverend reddened and carried on. *A great angel came from the clouds and roused me from my bed.'

*What did this angel say?' mocked Horatio, making no attempt to disguise his disbelief.

*He said, "Stirling, you must tell the people of Pagus Parvus to beware, for the devil has come among you and he is tricking you with his wiles and his filthy lucre."'

*Wiles and filthy lucre?' laughed Elias Sourdough. *What language does he speak? Is this angel from a foreign country?'

*Money,' said Stirling impatiently. *The devil is among us and luring us with his money.'

*There's only one devil in this town and we don't see his money,' said Job Wright, the blacksmith, and he pointed in the direction of Jeremiah's house. At the same moment the upstairs curtain twitched and Stirling wondered if perhaps he should have gone a little further up the hill.

*Not Mr Ratchet,' he hissed, then raised his voice, *but Joe Zabbidou, the Devil's p.a.w.nbroker.'

He said this with great feeling, at the same time shaking his clenched fist at the sky. There were gasps all round and Stirling realized that finally he had their full attention. Unwilling to lose this advantage he hurried along.

*Joe Zabbidou has come to us without warning, appearing from nowhere in the night, to entice you all into his shop with his fancy goods.'

Ludlow, who was watching all this from Horatio's doorway, raised his eyebrow. *Fancy goods? A chipped chamber pot. Hardly.'

*What does he intend to do with us?' asked Lily Weaver.

*What does he intend to do with us?' repeated Stirling out of habit.

He had not antic.i.p.ated this question when he had been preparing his speech. He had not thought that he might be challenged. He couldn't recall such a thing when he was in church; granted most people were asleep then.

The silence was deafening.

*Erm, well, let me see, ah yes, once he has lured you he will take you over to his side, the Dark Side.'

Unfortunately for Stirling, this was where he lost his tenuous hold on the audience. Pagus Parvians did not consider the Dark Side in any way threatening. They had not forgotten those long Sunday sermons from years ago when the reverend bored them half to death droning on about the very same subject. They began to shuffle their feet and talk to their neighbour or walk away. Desperately Stirling tried to recapture the moment. Jeremiah had promised him a case of the best port.

*If you go over to the Dark Side, then you will be lost forever and will burn in the fires of h.e.l.l.'

*At least we'd be warm,' shouted Obadiah, and the crowd laughed.

*Do not jest about the devil,' warned Stirling, in a final attempt to hold them. *You never know when he is listening.'

*Hang about, Reverend,' said Ruby Sourdough. *Here comes the beast himself. Why don't we ask him about this Dark Side?'

Joe was indeed coming down the street at his usual jaunty pace. He had the grip of a mountain goat. Right now one or two of the villagers were wondering whether his shoes did in fact conceal those telltale cloven feet.

*Morning all,' he called and smiled. *Did I hear someone mention my name?'

Although Stirling was not being taken seriously, it did seem to some a rather curious coincidence that Joe had turned up at this particular moment.

*'Ere, listen to this, Mr Zabbidoof,' said the youngest Sourdough, at the front of the crowd. *Stirling says yore the devil come 'ere to burn us all in 'ell.'

Stirling protested immediately. It had never been his intention to actually confront Beelzebub, merely to slander him in his absence. *I didn't say that,' he protested hurriedly. *It is a sin to tell a lie, lad.'

*Yes 'e did,' said Elias Sourdough to Joe. *'E said you were gonna loor us wiv your tricks and wiles.'

Joe smiled. *I have no tricks. You know what I am, a p.a.w.nbroker. Have I ever pretended or acted otherwise? As for wiles, you are welcome to come and look for them. Perhaps they are in the window?'

At that everyone burst into raucous laughter. Stirling scowled, picked up his box and slunk away.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Fragment from The Memoirs of Ludlow Fitch Stirling's performance in the street was the talk of the villagers for three whole days. As far as they were concerned, the reverend's humiliation was just one more in the eye for Mr Ratchet (who had watched the entire scene from his window, barely concealed behind the curtain) and another victory for Mr Zabbidou. The battle lines might as well have been drawn in the snow.

There was no disputing Pagus Parvus had given Joe a warm welcome. It could be measured almost from the moment he defied Jeremiah Ratchet. This initial enthusiasm had not waned a" just the opposite, it had increased immensely. Now at the very sight of him the villagers behaved as if he were royalty. I swear upon my evil Pa that I witnessed more than once some fellow kneeling before him. Poor Joe, he could not go from one end of the street to the other without being stopped a dozen times by well-wishers enquiring after his health and his business and even Saluki. Joe was always polite. His manner was consistently warm and friendly, but I could tell that this adulation was beginning to trouble him.

*I did not come here to be venerated,' he mumbled.

As I lay during long sleepless nights the same question turned over in my mind: *What did you come here for?' I knew by now that things were not, and could not be, as simple as they appeared. A man arrives out of nowhere in an isolated village and hands over money from a bottomless source for worthless objects and secrets. It didn't make sense to me, but whenever I tried to ask Joe about his past he refused to engage and immediately talked about something else.

I wondered whether Joe's aversion to all the attention was modesty and I paid little notice to his discomfort. While he tried to avoid the limelight, I bathed in his reflected glory. When I walked the streets of the City I was n.o.body: in Pagus Parvus I was prince to Joe's king. Of course, Joe was the one they wanted to talk to, his was the hand they wished to shake, but they spoke to me too, if only to say good morning. It made me smile. If they had ever seen me in the City they would have crossed to the other side of the road.

Perhaps it was the fact that the village was so isolated which made Joe (and me) even more special. But, special or not, I had a feeling that as long as Jeremiah Ratchet was in Pagus Parvus it wasn't going to be enough.

Our days were always busy. I had my jobs to do and Joe had his, but we were never rushed. Being in the shop sometimes felt like being in another world where everything happened at half speed. I never saw Joe make a hurried movement; there was no urgency to his life, but, for all that, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that we were waiting for something to happen.

In the late afternoon, when it was quiet, Polly and the Sourdoughs would have been and gone, we would both sit by the fire and enjoy the warmth and the comfort it brought. At such times I couldn't imagine ever returning to the City.

*I'm never going back,' I said to Joe one night.

*Never say never,' Joe replied quickly. *All things change.'

Certainly my fortunes had changed. In my eyes Joe was the father I had always wished for. I had new clothes which he had given me. As for my rags, we both enjoyed watching them burn on the fire. At least once a fortnight I relaxed in front of the fire in a huge tin tub filled to the brim with hot water, and every day we had two decent meals. The Pagus Parvians had proved most hospitable and hardly a day pa.s.sed without some sort of food parcel being left on the doorstep: rabbits, pigeons, sparrows (a delicacy in these parts, marvellous stuffed with onion and alium) and occasionally a whole chicken from the butcher's.

*Bribes,' laughed Joe. *They think if they feed me I will change my mind.' He didn't, but he still threw the meat in the pot.

As the harsh memories of my previous life faded my mind started to play strange tricks on me. I began to worry that life was too good. Surely a boy such as I, with my past and the crimes I had committed, deserved punishment not reward? Joe tried to rea.s.sure me.

*It's common enough to think like that,' he said, *to feel unworthy of good fortune, but have you forgotten what I said to you about luck?'

*You said we make our own luck.'

*Exactly. You made yours by coming here. Now you work hard and you deserve what you have.'

*But I never intended to come here,' I insisted. *It was chance that Ratchet's carriage was outside the Nimble Finger.'

*But it was you who chose Jeremiah's carriage.'

*What if I had gone down the hill instead of up? I might have worked with Job Wright shoeing horses. Then you would have taken on one of the Sourdough boys when they came up to see the frog.'

*That is a possibility,' said Joe, *but the Sourdough boys are slow-witted.'

*I can only do that because I went to Mr Jellico.'

*But you sought him out.'

And so it would go on, in circles, until one evening Joe asked, *Are you happy here?'

*Yes.'

*And if you could go back in time, to the City, what would you change?'

*I don't know,' I said. *If I had done something different then I might never have met you.'

*Exactly,' said Joe with finality. *Everything that happened to you, bad or otherwise, ultimately brought you here.'

There the conversation ended because the shop door opened and someone called for service. Joe always woke at the sound of the door, no matter how deeply asleep he seemed, but in case he didn't Saluki gave a violent belch whenever she heard someone approaching. I felt it was a warning.

For a frog, Saluki was good company. When I had the chance I liked to feed her, to watch her tongue shoot out across the length of the tank and, almost too quick to see, the bug or grub or insect would be gone. I had not taken the lid off the tank again since that first day. Joe had forbidden me to do so and I didn't want to touch her. Occasionally he took her out and held her in the palm of his hand. He would stroke her back with such gentleness and she seemed to glow and burped softly. I hadn't forgotten what he had said about gaining her trust and I hoped that one day I would.

I remember those days in the shop well, warm and cosy, away from the cold outside world. But of course the outside world still came knocking at the door. The villagers were obviously grateful for everything Joe had done for them and gradually, one by one, they were freeing themselves from Jeremiah's iron grip. But their previous desperation was now replaced by anger a" that Jeremiah had treated them so badly for so long, that he had taken so much from them, that he had kept them living in fear. As each managed to pay Jeremiah back the money they owed, they wished to pay him back in other ways too.

One night we had a visit from the local physician, Dr Samuel Mouldered. I wasn't surprised. After all, Joe had sought him out the previous day, as he did all his midnight customers, and invited him up. Like most, he had an interesting tale to tell.

Samuel Mouldered was a rather morbid man with a permanently gloomy expression on his face so his patients never knew if they were to live or die. They may have been alarmed to discover that often the doctor did not know either. You see, Mouldered wasn't a doctor at all, just a convincing quack who was on the run from a posse of duped customers who had discovered that his miracle cure was little more than boiled nettles and corked wine.

Pagus Parvus was an ideal hiding place for such a man. To be fair, Mouldered was quite harmless. Since coming to the village some ten years ago he practised medicine on the premise that most illnesses burned themselves out over the course of seven days. Thus he prescribed his miracle cure (now a more palatable mixture of honey and beer) for a week's duration and on the whole achieved quite remarkable results. As for death itself, no one ever questioned the unusually high occurrence of heart attacks in the area. They trusted the doctor and his diagnoses.

Samuel Mouldered's greatest fear was that Jeremiah would discover his secret.

*I cannot promise that Jeremiah will never find out,' Joe had said, *but he will not hear it from us. You have my word.'

Joe held the door open, but Mouldered seemed reluctant to go.

*The man is a monster,' he declared. *For years we have suffered at his hands. The villagers want revenge. I know they hope you will help them.'

*What can I do?' asked Joe quietly. *I am merely a p.a.w.nbroker.'

*That's not what they think,' muttered the doctor as he stepped into the street. Joe merely shrugged and handed Dr Mouldered a purse of coins.

*Vincit qui pat.i.tur,' called Joe after him, but he was already out of earshot.

I looked at him.

*Who waits, wins.'

I listened to Dr Mouldered's confession, writing it all down as was my duty, but I was uneasy. I asked Joe again if he didn't think we should do something.

*People's lives might be in danger,' I said. *Dr Mouldered doesn't know what he is doing.'

Joe was adamant. *He's not doing any harm. And there is no one else in the village who could do his job.'

I protested some more and Joe had to remind me that we were in the business of keeping secrets.

*How long do you think we would last if we gave away this information? The business would be in ruins.'

The business, I thought. What business? We certainly weren't making a profit. Surely the money had to run out eventually and what would happen then? But I had slipped into this way of life so easily and I couldn't bear the thought that it might change, so I kept my doubts to myself because, whether or not I understood what was going on, I was unwilling to do anything that might upset Joe.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Jeremiah Has a Plan Jeremiah Ratchet was close to his wits' end. He had had just about enough of Joe Zabbidou's apparent disregard for his standing in the community. His business, his lifestyle, his pleasures were all in jeopardy because of that man. He could hardly bring himself to say his name and even then he could only spit it, usually accompanied by a shower of brown stringy saliva and crumbs. Jeremiah liked to mull things over at dinner.

Jeremiah rarely ate in his magnificent dining room and usually took his meals in the study with a dinner tray on his lap. It was a room of generous proportions, though badly lit, and shelved from floor to ceiling. Each shelf was packed tightly, bowing under the weight of an extensive array of books. Jeremiah was a collector. He loved to have things, sometimes for no other reason than that. He was not much of a reader, mind; he found the concentration required quite a strain on his head. As a rule he only kept books that he thought would impress others or increase in price. As a result the t.i.tles tended to be obscure and either full of facts that he didn't understand or plots that he couldn't fathom. Jeremiah was a fine example of the sort of person who knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

In his study Jeremiah bit into a mouthful of lamb and chewed thoughtfully on Joe Zabbidou. The man was a complete menace. Earlier that day Job Wright had come up to Jeremiah outside the baker's and presented him with a purse of money that covered over half his debt. Then, after lunch, Polly told Jeremiah about the pair of horseshoes she had seen in the p.a.w.nbroker's window and Jeremiah knew that once again Joe Zabbidou had been at work.

*They're lovely and shiny,' Polly had said innocently. *I should imagine Joe paid very good money for them.' She left the room quickly and Jeremiah was certain he heard her sn.i.g.g.e.ring all the way to the kitchen.

*I should have thrown him out that very first day,' he said ruefully. *I left it too late.' But even Jeremiah suspected that it would never have been that easy.

Jeremiah realized of course that his tenants' sudden ability to pay was directly linked to the display in the p.a.w.nbroker's window. He reckoned, however, that Joe could not possibly finance everyone's debt and that sooner or later he would be out of business and then everything would be back to normal. But Joe did not operate within the usual constraints of commerce.

Jeremiah shook his head slowly. *How can a man thrive when he pays a small fortune for worthless junk?' he asked himself every day. And every day he waited for Polly to come back from the Reverend Stirling's so he could hear the latest report on the shop window. And every day it plunged him deeper into depression. How it had pained him to call upon Stirling for help when he had proved to be little better than useless.

*What shall I do?' moaned Jeremiah as he saw his income dwindling further, for once all the arrears were paid, he couldn't possibly survive on rent alone.

He still had money in the bank, inherited from his father, but it had been greatly depleted over the years by his frequent gambling. Jeremiah's high living had a price. He owed money to his tailor and his hat maker, to his wig maker and his boot maker, and he preferred not to think of the debts that were mounting at the card table.

There was blackmail, of course. Since he had unearthed Horatio's little secret there had been no shortage of fresh meat in his kitchen. And until recently there was Obadiah and the grave robbing. Unfortunately, as far as grave robbing was concerned, things weren't looking too good at present and not only Joe was to blame. Jeremiah's bodys.n.a.t.c.hers (who also doubled up as bailiffs during the day when Jeremiah needed help with an eviction) had brought him the bad news a couple of nights ago.

*The anatomists in the City don't want the old bodies no more,' said one of the bodys.n.a.t.c.hers. *They want fresh young ones.'

Jeremiah groaned. *Don't they understand? There aren't any young corpses in Pagus Parvus.'

*It doesn't have to be a problem,' said the other man carefully.

*How do you mean?' asked Jeremiah.

The wily pair exchanged knowing glances, which was not easy through their black face masks, and burst into throaty laughter. *Well, let's just say there's a young lad up the hill, in the old hat shop, who would make a nice specimen.'