Читать книгу Daniel O'Thunder - Ian Weir - Страница 13

JAUNTY

DANIEL’S ESTABLISHMENT was in a dilapidated stretch of the Gray’s Inn Road, where Holborn slouches into the East End with patches on its elbows. There was a low public house on the corner, and a worse one three doors down, with eyes in low doorways watching slantways as you passed. There were costermongers hawking this and that from barrows, such as you’d find in any street, and flower-girls, and of course the customary assortment of beggars, most of them missing limbs or wits. Outside a butcher’s shop was one poor wretch whose arms and face and neck were covered in hideous festering sores—which is to say an expert practitioner of the Scaldrum Dodge, by which hideous sores were simulated with soap and vinegar. A few hours from now, you’d be liable to meet this same fellow in a tavern half a mile away, miraculously cured and enjoying a plate of sausages. I tipped my hat to such artists, and if I were flush I might even toss ’em a coin, for I have always respected a professional.

Finding the place had required a deal of asking, and a deal of tramping about the streets, followed by a deal more asking and another few miles’ expenditure of boot-leather. But I was accustomed to such expenditure, being an old infantryman. I’d expended boot-leather across half the world, in the service of Empire, God, and Dooty. Or so at least they’d told us at the time, and Tom Lobster in his red coat doesn’t ask, does he? No sir, he does not. Being told what to do—and what to think—and who to shoot—is plenty good enough for the likes of Tom Lobster. So he just marches where they send him, and shoots where they point him, and then ducks.

I was with the old Forty-Fourth, if you’re asking. That’s where I’d encountered Daniel in the first place. He was just a lad when first we met, a great laughing boy of fifteen, while I was an old campaigner twice that age, with a store of splendid tales—some of them even true—and the finest side-whiskers in the regiment. And yes indeed, it was that Forty-Fourth—cut to ribbons in Afghanistan in January of 1842. The Khoord Caboul and the infamous retreat to Jellalabad.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Just now, I’m telling you about a Saturday afternoon in the late spring of 1851, on the Gray’s Inn Road.

Next to it, above a second-hand clothing shop, was a doctor’s surgery. So on your approach to Daniel’s establishment you might hear the shrieks of some poor soul having his boils lanced or his leg sawed off. A few more steps and there it was, a little yellowing cardboard notice propped in the window: O’Thunder’s Academy of the Manly Arts. Beside it was another card, advertising instruction in Swordplay, Pistolry, and Pugilism, and stuck below this a scrap of paper with carefully printed letters—you could practically see the man who printed them, tongue clamped between his jaws in concentration—assuring the reader: “Persons of quality will be given the utmost tenderness, for which reason mufflers are provided, that will effectually secure them from the inconweniency of black eyes and broken jaws.” The building was an ancient creaking thing with a list to starboard, as if it had itself suffered the inconweniency of one too many whacks to the coconut, and was about to topple sideways. Like the sawbones next door, O’Thunder’s Academy was above. So up I went, a flight of narrow creaking stairs, and stepped through the door.

IN MY SALAD days when I was green, I met an old-timer or two who could still remember Jack Broughton’s Boarded House in Oxford Circus. This had been a great theatre of battle, where instruction was offered by day. By night displays of skill with sword and fist attracted vast hordes of punters. One night the great James Figg fought a three-stage duel with Ned Sutton, the Gravesend pipe-maker, who once shaved it overly fine while demonstrating his technique with the short-sword, on account of which his opponent suffered the inconweniency of having his nose sliced off. First there was a battle with backswords, and after a gentlemanly break for port they boxed, and finally they brought the cudgels out. Figg was bloody and reeling when he delivered a sudden blow that broke Sutton’s knee and secured a famous victory, to the great delight of all, excepting of course poor Sutton himself, and the punters who bet on him. But then no situation can be perfect, for then you wouldn’t be in London at all, but in Heaven. And if you were in Heaven, then you’d have been no friend of mine, and I fear we’d have very little in common—but here I go, I’m prattling. I freely confess it—I’m a talker. I like people, you see—I just like ’em, I like to be around ’em. I’m told I’m fond of my own voice too, and I fear there may be some justice in that. I put it down to being Welsh on my mother’s side—I have a Welsh singing voice too, if I may say so, a fine Welsh baritone—so put the two of them together and you’ll just have to bear with me.

O’Thunder’s was not such a place as old Jack Broughton’s. It was just a rectangular room, sagging in the middle, with a few small cracked filthy windows and a retiring room in back, all of it smelling of sweat and liniment and piss. The piss-smell was a bit off-putting but entirely understandable, especially when you paused to consider what they were doubtless doing to themselves this very moment next door at the surgeon’s. There were benches and chairs along one wall, and swords and mufflers piled up in a corner, and a table with pistols laid out. Just inside the door a very large party in a chimney-pot hat sat hunched on a stool, looking for all the world like something you’d encounter underneath a bridge, girding its loins for billy goats. He had a battered metal cashbox on his knee, to collect money from the clients as they came in, or possibly as they staggered out, having suffered some degree of inconweniency, despite the best intentions to the contrary. But the battered cashbox was nothing compared to his face.

“Yeh?” said he, through a pair of split lips.

He looked me over. Or rather one eye did—the other was drifting up towards the rafters. Both eyes were blackened, though, and half-closed, which gave them something in common. In fact his whole face was a mass of spectacular lumps and welts.

“Good God,” I exclaimed, for I couldn’t help it. “What does the other man look like?”

“’E looks,” said the large party, “like salvytion. Is that what yer ’ere for? Or t’other?”

I may have looked perplexed, as I took a moment to try and disentangle this.

“I’ve been syved, myself,” said the large party. He cleared his throat, and proceeded to bear witness. “I was a norrible sinner, right up until last week. I drank and I fornikyted and I laid wiolent hands upon uvvers. I was a-going to Hell, and the Devil had prepared my plyce. But then the Light of God bust through the clouds, bruvver—it bust clear through and sat upon my head, in the person of Captain Daniel O’Thunder. So now I’m syved, just like you can be syved, and I printed that note.”

“Note?”

“In the winder. Down the stairs. That was me. I wrote that note with this wery ’and.”

“Ah, yes.”

“D’ye like it?”

I assured him I did—I liked it of all things—for despite the rosy glow of salvation there was the stirring of something down deep in that eye that you didn’t want to prod.

“And is by any chance the Man Himself here present?”

His eye veered away before he answered, his attention being caught by a disturbance on the other side of the room. A thing of rags and tatters was trying to impress upon two harried ladies in grey cloaks and bonnets that it was owed a bed to sleep on, and was here to claim it. The thing of rags and tatters was more specifically a female person of the Cockney Irish sort, which is to say the loudest and most argumentative sort, especially when they’re reeling drunk, which this one was. She’d gotten it into her head that O’Thunder’s Academy of the Manly Arts was in fact a mission, run by Christians who’d welcome in the dregs from the streets, and feed ’em and clean ’em up, and send ’em back to the world sober and hopeful of a fresh start in life, and welcome ’em back a week later roaring drunk and worse off than ever. And the remarkable thing was, she was absolutely correct.

I’d heard it from the landlord at the Horse and Dolphin. My old friend Daniel O’Thunder had found the Lord, he said. Or the Lord had found Daniel O’Thunder, which worked out to the same thing. This much I knew from my last meeting with Daniel nine years earlier—what I didn’t know was that the close relationship between Daniel and Heaven continued to thrive. For who would have suspected that Daniel would show such fortitude? And this planted a certain Idea in my head. Did the landlord (I asked casually) happen to know where Daniel might be found? And indeed he did. It seemed that Daniel was operating a ramshackle little academy of pugilism that had the distinction of being the only one in all of John Bull’s England—as far as was known—that also served as a ramshackle little mission society, ministering to the creatures of the streets. This meant there was a mingling of two very different purposes, as when a respectable patron of the academy going out would encounter a park woman or a badly fallen dollymop coming in. This could lead to awkwardness, and occasionally to sharp words, and not infrequently—so the landlord gave me to understand—to the patron and the dolly-mop striking up an understanding and disappearing together into the retiring room, where they’d be subsequently discovered in lively interchange by another patron, or else by one of the evangelical helpers, such as the two grey-cloaked ladies. These, I later learned, were a pair of middle-aged spinsters named the Miss Sherwoods, Peggy and Esther. They were committed to their charitable work, God bless ’em—and completely committed to their belief in Daniel O’Thunder. They actually saw him as a latter-day apostle, which goes to show you yet again that human beings have amazingly constituted eyesight and will see the most remarkable things.

Just at the moment, they had their hands full with the Cockney Irish party, who was holding forth at full volume—the gist being that she wanted the bed she was owed, and wanted it now. Then she sat abruptly down on the floor, flopped back, rolled over, and commenced to snore. Miss Esther (the older and rounder of the two) exclaimed “Lord bless us,” while Miss Peggy muttered something that may have been less Christian. But after a moment’s indecision they concluded that there was only one man for the problem at hand.

“Captain O’Thunder!” they called.

And Daniel O’Thunder came in from the back room. It was the first time I’d laid eyes on him in nearly a decade. He nodded a general greeting in my direction—the way you’d acknowledge the arrival of a stranger—before abruptly realizing who it was.

“By the Lord Harry,” said Daniel.

“It’s grand to see you too,” said I. “You’re looking well, Dan. Fit as a fiddle.”

He was in fact looking jowly and florid, the way a big man does as he’s going to seed, and older than I’d been prepared for. It’s odd how you can leave a friend for nine years, then feel surprised when he turns up looking a decade older. In fact, you feel betrayed, as if he’s aged you along with him, and personally dragged you a decade closer to the grave. But I didn’t say any of this, of course. You don’t say such things to an old friend, even one who didn’t look quite as joyful to see me as he might have done—and especially considering the nature of my errand.

Tell the truth, Daniel looked as if he’d seen a ghost, and promptly excused himself to attend to the Cockney Irish party. She was snoring loudly now, and lying in a small but spreading puddle, which commenced its contribution to the overall aroma of the place. But Daniel paid no mind at all, and picked her up, as easy as you’d pick up a kitten. It pleased me to see that he still had his strength—although this was to be expected, since old prize-fighters always hold their strength to the end. It’s the speed that goes first, and then the wind, and then the coordination, till finally they just stand stiff and splay-legged like slaughteryard cattle while a young man chops ’em down.

“I’ll do that, Captain!” the newly saved troll was exclaiming. “That’s dirty work—let me!” He had risen to his feet as Daniel had entered the room, and was now bounding towards him like a great galumphing Newfoundland dog. The look on his face was absolute devotion.

“No, Tim Diggory,” said Daniel, “it’s not dirty work at all. There’s no dirt where the Lord’s work is to be done, and nothing to flinch at in a fellow human soul. But here you are, so we’ll do it together.”

While they went off into the back, I made myself pleasant to the Miss Sherwoods, offering amiable observations about this and that and the other—the weather and the price of ribbons—for I’m the sort of man who’s at ease wherever he finds himself. When this petered out I amused myself by looking round at the pictures on the walls. O’Thunder’s Academy was decorated with pictures both religious and pugilistic in nature. It was a remarkably eclectic mix, such that St Peter shouldered up against Molyneaux, and gentle Jesus with his lamb appeared to be gazing straight across at a portrait of Mendoza, stripped to the waist and set to settle someone’s hash.

“Daniel Mendoza,” I said, to the Miss Sherwoods. “Before my time, but the old-timers say he was one of the greatest of them all. He was champion of England until soft living caught up with him, alas, along with Gentleman Jackson, who seized him by the long dark hair with one hand, and battered him senseless with t’other. The other gentleman,” I added, indicating the picture of Jesus, “I believe you know already. But do you know what the two of them had in common?”

“They were both warriors,” said Daniel, who had returned in time to hear this question. “They both fought fearlessly, asking no quarter, regardless of the consequences.”

“Ah, there you go,” said I. “There you go—Daniel puts it in a nutshell. Lacking his sure grasp of the essence of things, I was simply going to say: they were both Jewish, and a credit to their people.”

Daniel had recovered from his first shock at seeing me. Now he found a smile and extended his hand. It was like taking hold of a bag of nuts. As with all old prize-fighters, every bone in those hands had been broken, at one time or another. For Daniel had been a pugilist, of course, after the two of us had left the Army. I had been a trainer of pugilists—and still was.

“My old friend John Thomas Rennert,” said Daniel, almost as if he meant it. “After all these years. Welcome, brother—and doubly welcome if you’ve come to confess your Christian faith and join us in our work. No? Ah, well—for I can tell by your merry laugh that this is not the case. Or at least not yet, for who can say when the Lord may come to each of us, and rap upon our door, and call upon us to open? But welcome nonetheless. I’ll pour you a glass for old times’ sake, and we’ll sit and chat awhile in fellowship. After that you’ll be on your way, for I’m sure you’re a busy man as you always were. And these days I have myself so very much to be getting on with.”

That voice again, after all these years. I’d half-forgotten what an instrument it was. Daniel could always talk. So could I, of course, as I’ve confessed already—but that was talking in a different way. I could talk the sparrows down from the trees. Daniel could halfways convince them they were eagles.

He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of the pale and a single mug. “For I no longer have truck nor trade with spirituous drink,” he said. “If you cast your mind back, perhaps you’ll recall the reason why.” A shadow crossed his face, and of course I remembered vividly. “Nine years sober,” he said, quietly. “Since that morning in Bristol—you were there, John Thomas—when God reached out and lifted me from the mire.”

“Then I compliment you on your resolve. Your very good health,” I said, raising my brandy, and added with a wink: “Captain O’Thunder. For I understand it’s ‘Captain’ these days.”

He gave me a look. “I am many things these days, John Thomas, and Captain is one of them. But I’m not at all the man you used to know.”

He had taken me to a little sitting area off in a corner, with a bench and a rickety wooden chair. It happened to be out of the immediate earshot of the Miss Sherwoods, who had gone back to mending hand-me-down clothes, and also the Diggory party, who had returned to sit with the cashbox by the door. For no man is comfortable when his past comes strolling up the stairs to introduce itself to his new friends, especially a man with a past like Daniel’s.

“I can see that you’ve changed indeed, old friend,” said I, privately doubting this very much. For none of us ever changes, not really. “And yet in one important particular, you’re exactly the same man as ever. You’re fit, as I said already, as a fiddle. You look as fit as the man who licked Long John Jurrock in fifty-two rounds—remember that? You look as if you could step into the ring this afternoon, against the Tipton Slasher himself.”

Daniel laughed out loud. “The Tipton Slasher? My friends would carry me out in a horse blanket, John Thomas, half a minute after I stepped in. I haven’t fought in nearly a decade. I’m fat and thirty-three years old. I feel it, brother—and more than that, I look it. So why don’t you tell me what this is about, and what you’re angling towards, so I can shake your hand one last time and wish you well and be done with it?”

A smile remained on his face. But there was a resoluteness too, that hadn’t been there in the old days. I wasn’t sure I liked that resoluteness.

“What you’re saying is true enough, Daniel—or part of it, at any rate. You’re not as young as you were—who is?—and perhaps you wouldn’t stand for long against the Slasher. But the fact remains, you retired from the prize-ring too soon. You departed from the green faerie circle before you’d had a chance to reach your prime. I’ve mused upon this many times, these past nine years—I’ve thought upon it with a lingering sadness, Dan—I’ve wondered often and again, ‘What might Daniel O’Thunder have achieved, had he stayed with the game just a little while longer?’ And I wager you’ve done so too.”

I leaned forward, for now I was in my stride, and closing in on the quarry. “You’re a fighter, Daniel—that’s what you are, and always will be. And I have a Proposition.”

“You always did, John Thomas. The answer is no.”

“Hear me out. It concerns a young man I’ve taken an interest in, called Spragg the Ruffian. You’ve heard of him? I see you have, for he’s been mentioned in the sporting papers. Well, we’ve fought him a few times up North, and he’s done well. A strong, strapping lad—not much in the way of technique just yet, but he’s learning, and he can deliver a blow. He bested the Croyden Drover— remember him?—and stretched out the Onion Boy, flat as a mackerel, after twenty-seven minutes. So now it’s time to bring him South, closer to London, for that’s where the potential for glory lies, and reputations are to be made.”

“You mean, that’s where the money is.”

“I don’t deny it. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’—except it don’t get given, does it, Daniel? It must be purchased, with coin of the realm. So. It’s time for the Ruffian to be introduced to the wider sporting public. More than that, it’s time to find out what he has for bottom, for he hasn’t been tested yet. I need a man who’ll test his chin. I also need a man who’ll draw the Fancy. And you still have a name—no, don’t be modest, you do. You had a certain little popularity in your day, and there are those who remember. Most of all, I need a story that I can tell. For that’s what it is—beyond the fine old English art of self-defence, and the hearts of oak, it’s the story that draws ’em in. I admit this freely, because we’re old friends, Daniel. It’s always been honest-as-the-livelong-day between us, and I intend to be honest now.”

The shaggy head was cocked to one side, and there was a little smile on that great ugly mug. If fighters weren’t ugly when they started, they were ugly when they’d finished—or more to the point when the game had finished with them. The cauliflower ears, and the flattened nose, and the knots and lumps like boles on a tree trunk. But you could see a kind of nobility in a face like that, if you chose to. Give him credit, Daniel O’Thunder had a kind of nobility.

And now it was time to bring this home.

“Daniel, I’m afraid I must shock you. For whatever you’ve been told about the character of Spragg the Ruffian—whatever rumours you’ve heard about riotous living and addiction to all manner of vice and abandonment—it’s worse. I don’t say that his heart is bad, for few men’s hearts are truly so, not rotten clear through. But he’s fallen into a bad way of living, Daniel. He’s a braggart and a bully and a man of violent outbursts. When you tax him with his duty to his fellow man, he sneers. And when you speak of the Judgement that awaits us all, he laughs in your face—for Daniel, he don’t believe in God. And that,” said I, building towards the very nub of it, “that is the match I want to make, and the story I want to tell. Spragg the atheistic Ruffian, against O’Thunder the evangelist.”

Daniel was silent for a moment, musing. “Preacher O’Thunder, God’s Warrior, that sort of thing?”

“I was thinking,” said I, “of Battling O’Thunder, and his right hand the Hammer of Heaven.”

He moved his jaw a bit, from side to side, as if trying out the feel of it in his mouth. “That’s good,” he admitted. “I have to say, brother, it has a ring.”

“It rings like the bells of St Paul’s.”

And now I played my trump. “Daniel, I’ve spoken to the Ruffian. He says if you can beat him, then he’ll admit that he’s been wrong. He’ll amend his ways, and accept the Lord who is Saviour of us all. So how’s that—eh? How’s that for a story? And more than that, it’s a young man saved from a life of depravity, and snatched clear out of the Devil’s grasp. So let me hear you say no to an opportunity like that.”

“Let me see,” said he, “if I’ve got this straight.”

“Of course you have, Daniel. Dead-straight, for there’s naught that’s crooked in it.”

“You’ve got a young fighter with a rising reputation, but no character to speak of,” Daniel said. “So you’ll cook up this story of yours, and match him against an old warhorse—a decade out of the ring—who’ll go off at odds of ten to one, or higher. The Ruffian gets paid to lose the match, and meantime you’ve wagered everything you’ve got on the old warhorse. But you’re not finished yet. For lo and behold the warhorse has become a celebrated old nag, and more than that he believes he won the fight fair and square—he actually believes he’s rediscovered his youthful powers. So you persuade him to make another match. You match him against the real article, a genuine contender, and spin the story that he’s on his way to the Championship of All England. Then you wager all you’ve got—and more—on the contender. For of course this next fight isn’t a cross—it’s on the up-and-up—and the warhorse is naught but a wind-broke jade on his way to the knacker’s yard. So John Thomas wins a pot of gold, and no one loses at all—excepting for all those who were duped, and wagered the wrong way. And of course the warhorse himself, who had his few remaining wits a-beaten out of him—and his integrity too, which he gave away, just gave it away, for he hadn’t even the sense to put a price on it.”

Well. I made no return for some while, for what can you reply to such cynicism?

“Old friend,” said I at length, “you wound me.”

“John Thomas,” said he, “I know you. Brother, you’d have matched your grandmother against Cribb, if you could have thought of a way to get the old girl up to the line of scratch.”

I began to feel a certain desperation. I needed money badly, for reasons we don’t need to enter into just at present. And this was a solid scheme—the best I’d been able to come up with.

“Look: one fight, against the Ruffian. A purse of twenty guineas to the winner—half to you, half to me. I plan to wager my share on your good self, and I’d urge you to do the same. Ten guineas at ten to one—a hundred guineas—and you use it all for God’s own work. A hundred guineas to feed the poor, or clothe the naked, or whatever holy purpose you prefer. Think of the lives you could save—think of the souls you could save—and then tell me no, that your conscience is too nice, and the Lord don’t want money that was wagered at a prize-fight.”

He looked at me with sadness, and shook his shaggy head. “Just listen to yourself, John Thomas—like Satan himself in the wilderness, tempting Our Lord. Not that I’d ever mistake myself for the One—I hasten to say it—and not that you’re the other. No, you’re not the Devil, brother—just a crafty old sharper with an eye for the main chance and an angle to work, same as you always were.” The smile had faded completely. “And now it’s time for you to leave. Go with my blessing and the assurance that we’re still friends, John Thomas, and always will be, for I bear no malice at all against any man in the world, and certainly none against you. But go at once, brother, before I kick you down the stairs.”

I suspect he’d have done it, too. But suddenly there was a sound of shouting on the street below. A moment later there were footsteps, and then a ragged apparition burst through the door. It was a lad, sixteen perhaps, in scarecrow clothes. He was a printer’s devil, apparently, filthy and stained with ink.

“And here’s Young Joe,” said Daniel warmly, his face lighting up. “Have you finished with our printing, then?”

“I need somewhere to hide oh Cap’n please oh Lord they’re right on my heels!”

He was in a state of pure panic, and Daniel grew dismayed.

“Who’s after you, young Joe?”

There was a rusty brown blossom on the scarecrow’s breast. Daniel’s face began to grey, as if with awful premonition.

“Is that blood, Young Joe?” he said. “It is—that’s blood that’s dried upon your shirt. What’s happened? Are you hurt?”

“I never did what they’re saying! It isn’t true it wasn’t me I’m a good boy Cap’n help me!”

Too late, for more voices were shouting, and more feet thundering up the stairs. A man burst through the door, followed by two Peelers. He pointed and cried out, in triumph and revulsion.

“There he is—the one who done the deed. He butchered that girl like a calf!”

“I didn’t!” the printer’s devil cried, and burst into tears.