“Yes!”
They stare: a convocation of stoats contemplating a rabbit.
Bathsheba’s bottom lip quivers.
What happens next is assuredly an hallucination. I seem to see young Geoffrey stepping forward. Inexplicably, he seems to be wearing a peasant smock and carrying a basket of baguettes. He points a finger in righteous venom, as if standing in the shadow of the guillotine.
“J’accuse,” says the Cabin Boy.
“What?” I exclaim, bewildered. “What’s he saying?”
The room gives a lurch, and steadies. Geoffrey is himself again, and he is lying through his teeth.
“ . . . and I was hurrying home with my brother, Sir, when I heard my sister screaming. We ran to help her, thinking she was being murdered by ruffians, or tortured by Red Indians, so terrible was the cries. Instead we found her in the embrace of the curate, him standing right there, rutting in his lust with his bottom bare and horrible, and shouting, ‘Scream all you please, my Pretty, for I only like it better when you do!’”
All eyes are upon me. Sir Richard and his brood, and their ancestors upon the walls, and the ferrets and the stoats. Such eyes as I have glimpsed in my darkest dreams of perdition.
“Do you have anything to say,” says Sir Richard, “before sentence is passed?”
“Sentence? This is no court!”
“This is the manor court, convened by ancient baronial privilege, and I am the baron.”
“You’re all mad!”
Or else I am. But things are happening very swiftly now.
“Kill him!” cries Bathsheba, bursting into tears. “Kill him—but geld him, first!”
Little Dick reaches out. But in moments of crisis we discover what we are made of, and this moment confirms what had been intimated in the Battle of Butcher’s Apprentice—to wit, the Revd Mr Beresford is descended from warriors. If not actual warriors, then at least the sort of men who could survive a skirmish on the fringes of the main conflagration—men who could raise their heads a few breathless moments after the last cannon had echoed into silence, and look around, and blink, and exclaim: “Are we done, then? By the Lord Harry, that was almost too close for comfort.”
I duck my head and charge, butting Little Dick in the solar plexus. He staggers back, trout-faced. The window—quick! The Cabin Boy skitters to block my way, too late. A bound and a leap and a shattering of glass, and I am through the window headlong and landing with bone-jarring impact.
All air is driven from my lungs. Howling wind and lashing rain. Somehow I am back upon my feet. But there are shouts behind me, and a gunshot. Christ! I am running now, running blind. Then the ground is gone beneath my feet. I pitch forward. A sickening sensation of falling—and falling.
Even in my wild confusion, I know what this means. There is a sheer cliff on the windward side of Scantlebury Hall, and I have blundered over. Now there is nothing but the icy black sea and the jagged rocks below.
But now comes the most incredible moment of all. I swear this to be true. In that moment of horrid realization—plunging helpless, like a minor rebel from the fields of Heaven—there is a light in the darkness. I seem to see a shining face, and a hand reaching towards me. In my confusion it seems to me at first that this is the visage of blessed stained-glass St Kea, paddling to my deliverance on a boulder. But it is another face entirely. A man’s great laughing face, lumpen and scarred from old battles but somehow beautiful nonetheless, with a lopsided jaw and a tumult of yellow hair. The face of a warrior archangel, and a voice like the flight of eagles, saying: “Fear not, brother, no never fear at all, for I am with you always.”
“Who are you?” I cry.
He says: “O’Thunder.”
IT WAS EARLIER that night when I seen the Devil, outside the theatre. The Kemp Theatre, north of Holborn, near King’s Cross. He was on the corner, passing out handbills. Or not the Devil himself, but one of his demons, spindly and wretched and black with sulphur smoke. Leastways that’s what I assumed, cos what else would he be, outside a theatre? An actor, got up as one of Satan’s henchmen, passing out handbills for the play.
But he wasn’t. I realized when I got closer and looked again— the sulphur smoke was ink. So he was a printer’s devil, an apprentice in a print shop. Apparently he wasn’t much good at it either, cos he’d got inkstains all over. He was skinny and shabby, with hands that stuck out the ends of his sleeves and trousers that come halfway up his shins, and it wasn’t handbills for the play he was giving out. It was tracts—you know, the Christian ones, all about living a better life and what happens to you if you don’t. Well, I don’t live the one, so I can hardly afford to care about the other, can I? So I ignored him and elbowed my way in with the crowd, and I’d never have give him another thought the rest of my life, if it hadn’t been for what happened later.
I always loved the theatre. I loved it more than practically anything. Back then, all those years ago when I lived in London, I’d go nearly every night of the week. I’d go see any kind of play, even Shakespeare. I seen Charlie Kean play Hamlet once, and Macready, and afterwards I went with one of them. Not Kean or Macready, but one of the others. We went to a night house nearby, and had a drain or two of pale, and then took one of the little rooms. Nothing happened much, even though I gave it a good try. It just dangled there like a wrinkled stocking, between his skinny old shanks. But he paid up like a gentleman, and we drank some more, and he blubbered a bit and called me his own dear child who reminded him of his salad days when he was young and the world was full of hope—yes, he talked like that—so perhaps he got his half crown’s worth. If he didn’t, ah well. Fuck ’im.
But the ones I really liked were the melodramas. Mrs Dalrymple used to take me when she was alive, and now that she was dead I’d go to the theatre with one of the other girls, or lots of times just by myself. A highwayman and a lass, and a toff who was really the villain, and a first-rate murder and a duel, and everything going horribly wrong before turning out right in the end—those were the plays for me. Or the ones that made you shriek out loud, with blue demons dancing, and red demons rising up, and the Devil disappearing with a BANGthrough a hole in the floor. This particular night—the night I’m telling you about—it was a play about two Corsican brothers. The one gets foully murdered by a villainous French toff, and of course the other has to take revenge. It was the first time I’d seen it, so naturally I had to watch it close.
“This is wrong.”
A voice in my ear.
“What?”
“These are bad places.”
It was him—the Printer’s Devil. He was right behind me in the crowd.
“I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t have come, and neither should you, such places lead us into wickedness.”
He spoke like that, a low worried voice and the words all spilling out on top of each other. He was staring
