Act I

THE CURTAIN RISES

In a court-yard in the City of London, which was No Thoroughfare either
for vehicles or foot-passengers; a court-yard diverging from a steep, a
slippery, and a winding street connecting Tower Street with the Middlesex
shore of the Thames; stood the place of business of Wilding & Co., Wine
Merchants. Probably as a jocose acknowledgment of the obstructive
character of this main approach, the point nearest to its base at which
one could take the river (if so inodorously minded) bore the appellation
Break-Neck-Stairs. The court-yard itself had likewise been descriptively
entitled in old time, Cripple Corner.

Years before the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, people
had left off taking boat at Break-Neck-Stairs, and watermen had ceased to
ply there. The slimy little causeway had dropped into the river by a
slow process of suicide, and two or three stumps of piles and a rusty
iron mooring-ring were all that remained of the departed Break-Neck
glories. Sometimes, indeed, a laden coal barge would bump itself into
the place, and certain laborious heavers, seemingly mud-engendered, would
arise, deliver the cargo in the neighbourhood, shove off, and vanish; but
at most times the only commerce of Break-Neck-Stairs arose out of the
conveyance of casks and bottles, both full and empty, both to and from
the cellars of Wilding & Co., Wine Merchants. Even that commerce was but
occasional, and through three-fourths of its rising tides the dirty
indecorous drab of a river would come solitarily oozing and lapping at
the rusty ring, as if it had heard of the Doge and the Adriatic, and
wanted to be married to the great conserver of its filthiness, the Right
Honourable the Lord Mayor.

Some two hundred and fifty yards on the right, up the opposite hill
(approaching it from the low ground of Break-Neck-Stairs) was Cripple
Corner. There was a pump in Cripple Corner, there was a tree in Cripple
Corner. All Cripple Corner belonged to Wilding and Co., Wine Merchants.
Their cellars burrowed under it, their mansion towered over it. It
really had been a mansion in the days when merchants inhabited the City,
and had a ceremonious shelter to the doorway without visible support,
like the sounding-board over an old pulpit. It had also a number of long
narrow strips of window, so disposed in its grave brick front as to
render it symmetrically ugly. It had also, on its roof, a cupola with a
bell in it.

"When a man at five-and-twenty can put his hat on, and can say 'this hat
covers the owner of this property and of the business which is transacted
on this property,' I consider, Mr. Bintrey, that, without being boastful,
he may be allowed to be deeply thankful. I don't know how it may