I got up, backed off the road, and someone kicked me in the brain. I jumped and turned around and it was a popeyed corpse hanging from a gibbet. Herb had shot me to a prominent place, all right — Tyburn. I hadn’t been in London in years (rotten with fallout residues) and certainly never in 1770, but that gave me my bearings. Tyburn had been turned into Marble Arch. I was on the outskirts of eighteenth-century London. No Bayswater Road, yet; no Hyde Park; just fields, trees, meadows, and the little Tyburn creek meandering. The city was on my left.

I walked down a path that would someday be Park Lane and turned left into the fringe of houses. They became thick and crowded when I reached a cow pasture that would become Grosvenor Square. A Saturday-night market was in progress. Hundreds of barrows and stalls illuminated by flaring torches, grease lamps with flags of flame, humble tallow candles. Roars of hucksters: “Eight a penny! Stunning pears!” “Chestnuts all ‘ot! Penny a score!” “Beautiful whelks, penny a lot!” “Fine warnuts, sixteen a penny!” I was hungry but I didn’t have any current coin; just two pounds of refined gold.

I remembered that Brook Street led off the north side of Grosvenor so I took that route asking for a writer named Chatterton. Nobody ever heard of him until I came across a Flying Stationer hung with broadsheets offering “The Life of the Hangman,” “Secret Doings in Soho,” “The Treacherous Servant,” that sort of thing. He said he knew Chatterton. The kid wrote long-song poems for him at a shilling ea., and he pointed out the house which had no business to be standing.

I ran up the crumbling stairs, convinced I’d fall through at every step, and burst into the attic with a merry, “Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold!” (Thomas Hood, 1799-1845) The kid was writhing on a pallet in the last agonies of arsenic poisoning. “Ah-ha!” I thought. “He’s dying. He knows he’s dead. If I can save him maybe we’ve got another Moleman for the Group.”