Read Online Keeping Bad Company by Caro Peacock - Free Book Online

left to them. Of course, the public weren’t allowed into the committee but there was nothing to stop anybody lingering in Westminster Hall. I thought I’d just wait there to watch Tom come out. If he looked reasonably composed and had people with him, I should keep in the background and not ever let him know that I’d been there.
    Inside, the hall was like a cathedral – stone-flagged floor, great wooden roof beams, dim light from small windows high up. But the atmosphere was alive with men walking and talking, quietly in conspiratorial groups or calling to each other loudly, like boys in a playground. Frock-coated servants of the House hurried around, with messages for MPs. Ordinary people, nervous in best clothes, stood on the edge of things, probably hoping for a word with somebody willing to listen to their problems. Lawyers in wigs and silk gowns swept past, clerks loaded with papers trailing behind them. There must have been two or three hundred people there, dwarfed by the size of the hall, and only a few women. Other committees beside the one I was interested in were sitting in various rooms off the hall and each one had its own group of men waiting outside. In one group, some of the faces between the tall black hats and white stocks looked more sun-browned than the rest. A clerk confirmed that, yes, this was the East India committee. I found an inconspicuous place by the wall, where I could keep the door to the committee room in sight and waited.
    It was the glint of the thing that caught my eye. In the dim light, with most of the men in black coats, it flashed like a sudden jet of water. A group of men, five or six of them, had come in to the hall and were walking in my direction. The tallest one was leading the way, the others following him like courtiers. He was perhaps in his early fifties with a square, forceful-looking face. His broad nose looked as if it had been broken and reset badly. Even in this setting, there seemed a piratical air about him, as if he’d be in his element superintending the firing of cannons. Dark eyebrows with traces of grey jutted over narrow eyes that were moving all the time, as if observing the people round him then discarding them as not important enough for lingering. None of these were the first things anybody would notice about his appearance. What was drawing most of the eyes in this part of the hall, as well as mine, was the ornament he wore on the lapel of his coat: a diamond hawk as big as a woman’s hand, with ruby eyes and talons. On a man who was otherwise in conventional business clothes it should have looked absurd, but the fierce beauty of the thing and the confidence of the man wearing it made it look like a declaration of power.
    A buzz went through the group waiting outside the committee room. Some of them walked up to the man. I didn’t need the ‘Hello McPherson’, to tell me who he was. He asked a question I couldn’t hear and nodded at the answer. Watching him, I didn’t at first notice the man who was walking in our direction from the far end of the hall. As he came closer I saw it was Mr Griffiths, strolling along and looking up at the great roof beams as if simply out for a constitutional walk. I guessed that, like me, he’d come to meet Tom and probably had no idea that McPherson was there. Then one of McPherson’s group noticed him and said something. McPherson had been chatting to his neighbour, but instantly his head came up. Almost at once his posture became challenging, bull-like, feet braced, eyes glaring. Almost at once, but not quite. I doubt if the men around McPherson saw it, but from where I was standing I had caught the first expression on McPherson’s face and it had looked very like alarm. By then, the men around McPherson had gone quiet and were all staring at Mr Griffiths. It must have been a shock to him when he looked down from the roof beams and caught that collective stare, but he