I knew Susan and her friends, not the salaciousness of the material, were responsible for much of this. In me they had found a valuable medium – I amplified and spread their message. More than that, I was their most prolific recruiter. As such, they made heroic efforts to sell and to otherwise encourage the reading of my work. I was pleased. But until my meeting with the Aldermen, I regarded the spread of Susan’s cause to be somebody else’s bounty, and somebody else’s problem. After my meeting, I had a better sense of what I had gotten myself into.
Which Alderman said what for the balance of the meeting is immaterial. What they made me understand, and not easily, with all the scratching and whispering and maneuvering, was that I was stayed from writing any more Accounts whilst my conduct was “investigated,” and whether or not my license was revoked, and other remedial measures taken if appropriate, would depend on what actions I took before the next hanging day. One forceful suggestion was that I publish a retraction of all of the eight most recent Accounts, identifying them as fiction. Another was providing a list of the names of the “assistants” who had helped me “research” the Accounts; the names of any others who volunteered to “assist” in “research” for the next batch, and the names of whomever were de jure or de facto “leaders” of these “research assistants.”
In my rare opportunities to speak, I mumbled this and that about my non-involvement (my de jure non-involvement, as it were) in any league of “assistants” prowling the London streets researching and selling criminal biographies; about the essential (if not quite de facto) truth of every one of the contentious Accounts, and about my freedom of speech as an Englishman. Only the last made any of the scratching, whispering and