terms with the Rat Man, to please him or at least not quarrel with him. She didn’t know if it was possible for them to spend a whole afternoon together, especially one involving rats and dogs, without quarrelling.
‘I hope we have understood each other about the nail,’ he said, his face turned away from her in the shadowy cabin.
‘The nail, sir?’
‘You mustn’t be gentle with it, you understand? You must push it as deep inside as your finger will go.’
‘I’ll do me best, sir.’
‘You needn’t worry about hurting me.’
‘I won’t, sir.’
‘And don’t pull it out until …’ He turned even more sharply away from her, as though he had just spotted someone of his acquaintance passing by in the street. ‘Until it’s over.’
‘How can I be sure of that, sir?’
He turned to face her then. His mouth was set hard. The scarred flesh on his face was pale, while his cheeks were flushed and mottled.
‘The last rat will be dead,’ he said.
The Traveller’s Rest was on the other side of the world. The cab had to cross the Thames to get there, past Waterloo, where Clara had been once or twice with her mistress, and then farther still. The pub itself, when they finally reached it, hardly seemed to warrant the length of the journey. It impressed Clara as a low sort of establishment, the kind where shiftless men drank with serious intent. The atmosphere was brewed thick with pipe smoke and alcohol fumes, and the regulars hunched low as if to take the occasional breath of oxygen from somewhere under the tables. A patch of floor where the floorboards had rotted away was crudely mended with planks of a different colour, the jagged edges covered over with tar. The fireplace was choked with ash and amber embers. Several of the gaslights were turned off or had ceased to function, and the scarcity of glass in the room meant that it wholly lacked the mirrored conviviality of the pubs Clara frequented. Instead, dark brown wood stole the light and refused to give it back.
‘I don’t like it here,’ she whispered to her companion.
‘This isn’t what we’ve come for,’ he whispered back. ‘What we’ve come for is downstairs.’
Clara couldn’t see any stairs. She craned her head around a pillar, and saw only more half-sozzled men staring back at her from their drinking stations. She had expected a bright, theatrical-looking banner hung up to generate excitement about the impending rat fight, but there was nothing of the sort. Indeed there was scant decoration on the walls – just a few curling handbills advertising recently bygone entertainments in more salubrious-sounding establishments than The Traveller’s Rest. There was also a hand-lettered notice saying ‘BEWARE OF SODS’.
Mr Heaton walked up to the publican. They nodded at each other without a word, shook hands … or perhaps a coin was being passed from one man to the other. Then the publican, Mr Heaton and Clara passed through the room to the very rear, where the publican pulled open a trap-door in the floor. A flight of stairs was revealed, illuminated by a light of unclear origin. The tobacco vapours of the room below met those of the room above, and swirled into each other.
The cellar, when Clara had allowed herself to be led down the stairs, was really not such a dismal place. In fact, it suited her better. Despite its subterranean location, it seemed less claustrophobic than the drinking den upstairs, and was much better lit, with a dozen oil lamps at strategic points. The rough stone walls were painted white, to enhance the illumination.
The cellar was mainly given over to the rat pit. There were several rows of wooden seats pushed against the rough stone walls, but no-one was sitting in them. All the spectators – some twenty in all – stood around the edge of the pit, which was more like a raised wooden tub. It was octagonal, waist-high, and about nine feet in diameter. The publican made his way over to a barrel almost as tall as himself, a barrel made for flour rather than wine or beer, to whose lid he laid his ear. Not quite satisfied, he peered into one of several holes drilled in the lid, squinting clownishly.
‘Seventy-five of the best in there,’ said a man wearing a top hat without any top on it.
‘We could use a hundred,’ said the publican.
‘A nundred of these beauties takes more than one man to catch.’
‘You used to catch a hundred for us.’
‘That was before himprovements in sanitation.’
‘Well, I hope these are big ones.’
‘Big? Comb their fur a different way and they could pass as ferrets.’
Mr Heaton laid a finger against Clara’s upper arm to get her attention.
‘I’m going to fetch Robbie now,’ he murmured near her ear. ‘Things will move fast from here on in. Remember what I’ve asked of you.’
She nodded.
‘Take your glove off, then,’ he reminded her.
She looked down at her hands, self-conscious at the idea of removing her gloves in a public place: everyone would instantly assume she was a woman of low breeding. But then she realised she was the sole female in the cellar, and that each man must surely already have judged her to be a whore. She pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, and no-one took a blind bit of notice. She could have thrown her skirts over her head, and still the assembled spectators might have kept their attention squarely on the business at hand. Some of the men were already leaning their elbows on the rim of the rat-pit, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder. Clara wondered how it was decided who should lean on the rim of the pit and who should goggle over their shoulders; did it depend on how much they’d paid for admission? Several of the customers were rather handsomely dressed, with shiny buttons on their coats, immaculate hats, fashionable cravats that cost fifty times more than the grubby cotton scarf worn by the rat-catcher. Clara doubted these gentlemen would ever set foot in a place like The Traveller’s Rest, were it not for the scuffling, squeaking contents of the keg.
‘All right, gentlemen,’ announced the publican when Mr Heaton had disappeared into an anteroom beyond the cellar. ‘We have two dogs this afternoon, Robbie and Lopsy-Lou. Less rats than we might’ve hoped. How shall we divvy up the day’s proceedings?’
This provoked a roisterous babble of bets and disputation.
‘A shilling on Robbie to kill five in fifteen seconds!’
‘Two shillings on Lopsy-Lou to kill twenty in fifty seconds!’
‘Here’s a shilling says twelve of twenty’s still kicking after half a minute!’
‘If we’ve only got seventy-five rats, it should be three matches of twenty-five each.’
‘That muddles everything!’
‘Twenty is a good number.’
‘It don’t go into seventy-five.’
‘All my bets is calculated on twenty.’
‘We know all about your bets. You expect to see blood for sixpence.’
‘We
