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Hercules Buildings toward the river.
    â€œLook at his cocky step,” Maggie said. “And did you see the color in his cheeks? And his hair all mussed? We know what he’s been up to!”
    Jem would not have described Mr. Blake’s pace as cocky. Rather he was flat-footed, though not plodding. He walked steadily and deliberately, as if he had a destination in mind rather than merely setting out for a stroll.
    â€œLet’s follow him,” Maggie suggested.
    â€œNo. Let him be.” Jem was surprised at his own decisiveness. He would have liked to follow Mr. Blake to his destination—not the way Maggie would do it, though, as a game and a tease, but respectfully, from a distance.
    Miss Pelham and Anne Kellaway were still glaring at the children from their positions. “Let’s be going,” Jem said, and began to walk along Hercules Buildings in the opposite direction from Mr. Blake.
    Maggie trotted after him. “You’re really comin’ with me?”
    â€œMiss Pelham told me to see you to the end of the street.”
    â€œAnd you’re goin’ to do what that old stick in a dress wants?”
    Jem shrugged. “She’s the householder. We’ve to keep her happy.”
    â€œWell, I’m goin’ to find Pa. You want to come with me?”
    Jem thought of his anxious mother, of his hopeful sister, of his absorbed father, and of Miss Pelham waiting by the stairs to pounce on him. Then he thought of the streets he did not yet know in Lambeth, and in London, and of having a guide to take him. “I’ll come with you,” he said, letting Maggie catch up and match his stride so that they were walking side by side.

7
    Dick Butterfield could have been in one of several pubs. While most people favored one local, he liked to move around, and joined drinking clubs or societies, where the like-minded met at a particular pub to discuss topics of mutual interest. These nights were not much different from other nights except that the beer was cheaper and the songs even bawdier. Dick Butterfield was constantly joining new clubs and dropping old ones as his interests changed. At the moment he belonged to a cutter club (one of his many occupations had been as a boatman on the Thames, though he had long ago lost the boat); a chair club, where each member took turns haranguing the others about political topics from the head chair at a table; a lottery club, where they pooled together on small bets that rarely won enough to cover the drinks, and where Dick Butterfield was always encouraging members to increase the stakes; and, by far his favorite, a punch club, where each week they tried out different rum concoctions.
    Dick Butterfield’s club and pub life was so complicated that his family rarely knew where he was of an evening. He normally drank within a half-mile radius from his home, but there were still dozens of pubs to choose from. Maggie and Jem had already called in at the Horse and Groom, the Crown and Cushion, the Canterbury Arms, and the Red Lion, before they found him ensconced in the corner of the loudest of the lot, the Artichoke on the Lower Marsh.
    After following Maggie into the first two, Jem waited for her outside the rest. He had only been inside one pub since they arrived in Lambeth: A few days after they moved in, Mr. Astley called to see how they were getting on, and had taken Thomas Kellaway and Jem to the Pineapple. It had been a sedate place, Jem realized now that he could compare it with other Lambeth pubs, but at the time he’d been overwhelmed by the liveliness of the drinkers—many of them circus people—and Philip Astley’s roaring conversation.
    Lambeth Marsh was a market street busy with shops and stalls, and carts and people going between Lambeth and Blackfriars Bridge, toward the city. The doors to the Artichoke were open, and the sound poured across the road, making Jem hesitate as Maggie pushed past the men leaning