name’s Rennert, though my friends call me Jaunty. And if you’d care to stand us a drop of the daffy, I’d be honoured to count you among that number, and tell you tales all night.”
I was no longer listening. I was in fact on my way out of the door, for the room had all at once grown hot, and the claret was curdling in my stomach. But as I lurched out I had the most extraordinary conviction that the eyes in that engraving were following me. And moments later, as I disgorged the curdled claret onto the cobbles and straightened with a feeling of clammy relief, it came to me in an overwhelming flash of certainty.
I lurched back into the Nag and Fish, to discover that my new acquaintance Mr Jaunty Rennert had inexplicably disappeared. It wasn’t until some while later that I discovered that a small but rather valuable item—a silver snuff-box, with the masks of comedy and tragedy etched on the top and bottom—had disappeared as well, from my vest pocket. This discovery brought with it the memory of a hand being placed on my side and guiding me to a better look at the picture, and suggested a plausible reason for Mr Jaunty Rennert’s abrupt departure.
But in this moment I was hardly thinking of snuff-boxes. I was staring thunderstruck at the face, in the engraving. That face and the hand reaching out. And now I knew.
It was the face I had seemed to glimpse that dreadful night outside Scantlebury Hall, as the rocks had given way beneath my feet. The laughing face of the warrior archangel.
O’Thunder.
I WAS STILL unsettled when I arrived back at the theatre, but marginally more steady on my feet. Bagpipes were wailing as I slipped through the backstage door, and cabers were thudding. This meant The Vampire was well into its second act, and Edmund Cubitt had been left to struggle unaided through three costume-changes. Doubtless I would pay tomorrow, but tonight the spirit of bitter rebellion seethed.
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