not abide the Devil.”
The next blow was flush on Tim’s jaw like chopping wood. Tim’s legs gave a wobble, and then down he went like an ox in a slaughteryard.
“And look how strong the Devil is still.”
Tim was struggling to rise to his knees again, grovelling for his cudgel. So the Irishman dropped onto his haunches, which put a stop to whatever the Devil had in mind, since the haunches were on Tim’s head.
The stairs were packed with gawkers now, peering and exclaiming, and trying to get a glimpse of what was going on through the bodies wedged in front. In the midst was two nice-dressed older women in grey cloaks and bonnets, fluttering wide-eyed with distress and making little strangled cooing sounds like doves. It crossed my mind to wonder what on earth they was doing in a place like this, but like all the rest I couldn’t take my eyes off the Irishman. His face was broad and ugly and red with breathing hard, with side-whiskers like hedges and a nose like a knob of gristle. But there was something about him that made you hold your breath and pray he’d look your way.
“That’s it!” shrieked Luna. “Now kill the bastard!” She was standing in the doorway, clutching bits of her dress to cover herself.
But the Irishman shook his head in sorrow, as Tim give off little muffled protests from underneath his hindquarters.
“Kill him? No, we’d never do such a thing as that, for he’s our own poor brother. We love him and we forgive him—not because he deserves it, but just because it’s in our power to do—exactly the same as our Lord forgives us, even though we none of us deserve it, not for a second. We don’t deserve from him anything at all, but he loves us still, the Lord Jesus, no matter what we do in return. And one day he’ll come back, and on that blessed day he’ll beat the Devil like a yellow dog.”
That voice of his—I’d never heard anything like it. The words soared out of him like birds. I thought: I could listen to this voice forever.
“Yes, Our Lord will beat the Devil till all the welkins are ringing with his howls. Then he’ll fling him down into the Pit and bar the doors, and that’ll be the Devil done for once and all. But until that great day dawns, brothers, the battle’s in our hands— brothers and sisters too, for we’re all battlers together, battling for the Lord. So when you see the Devil, you stand up to him, and twist his nose, and fetch him a clout to rattle his teeth, and let him know what he’s up against! For the Devil’s a great coward, brothers and sisters—he won’t stand against a healthy Christian. And now I’d like us to sing. We’ll raise our voices in a hymn together, and we’ll make this house resound with a gladsome noise—all of us singing lustily, including our brother here I’m sitting on, for he has gone quiet now and still, and I believe this to indicate that the peace of our Lord has come upon him at last.”
There was uneasy exclamations at this point. One of the Dove Ladies caught the Irishman’s eye and fluttered enough to indicate that Tim wasn’t still from the peace of God upon him. It was more that the Irishman’s hindquarters was upon him, and he was suffocating. So the Irishman got up instanter, with a sound of dismay. Mother Clatterballock arrived at last just in time to see this— Mother C having wheezed her way up three flights of stairs. She exclaimed, “Christ Jesus, ’e’s squashed Tim like a bug!” But a bit of brandy got Tim restored, and sitting up again, with all the wildness squashed right out of his eye. The Irishman looked relieved.
“Are you a madman, then? Or just a fool?”
It was the tall icy gentleman in black. He was standing behind me in the doorway to my room, staring at the Irishman. His smile was wintry and mocking, but there was something else too—like he’d seen the Irishman before, and was trying to place him. The Irishman seemed like he might be thinking the same thing in return, cos they neither of them moved for a moment or so, the way two fighting dogs will do when they meet by accident. Stiff-legged and bristling. Waiting to see if the other will lunge, or pass by.
“I am a man who goes here and there,” said the Irishman, “in the name of the Lord. If that makes me his fool, then it is my honour to be so.”
“And what does the Lord’s fool call himself?”
“My name is Captain Daniel O’Thunder. And who, brother, are you?”
The tall icy gentleman looked him slowly up and down again, the way an actor does on the stage, to show contempt.
“I am one who is beyond you,” he said. “Utterly.”
He put on his hat, and raised his lip, and shouldered through the press of gawkers. They all flinched back to let him pass.
“May the Lord bless you and keep you,” the Irishman called after him, “and mark you for his own forever.”
The tall icy gentleman looked back, and raised his lip again. Then he passed down the stairs—clip-clop—and was gone.
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,
