By night they filled the taverns and coffee houses of the city and only the small hours of the morning witnessed their final retirement into the small brothels of evil repute where alone they could obtain lodgings.
There were hundreds of these men about the London streets during the few years which followed the Restoration. The great plague had decimated them somewhat, the fire of 1666 had scattered some of them broadcast, but in this present year there were still a goodly number of them about. They were the terror of the night watchmen and the despair of the ill-organised and inefficient police-patrols, and rendered the lesser streets of the city well-nigh impassable to quiet citizens and to decent women.
And it was amongst these men that Michael Kestyon was most often to be found; shouting with them by day, drinking and gambling with them by night. Michael Kestyon, cousin to my lord of Stowmaries and like him descended from those who in mediæval days had writ their name largely on the pages of history: Michael, the ne'er-do-well, the wastrel, the profligate: Michael the idler who strove in such company to forget that he had been born a gentleman, and that he held a claim to the title and estates of Stowmaries which many thought was passing just.
CHAPTER XII
Oh, the strife
Of waves at the stone, some devil threw
In my life's mid-current thwarting God.
—Browning.