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
