“No.”
“They’ll break it like a toy! Dick, I won’t let you do it! I won’t leave!”
“You have no choice, Caroline. Don’t you hear what’s happening?”
For a few seconds they had been conscious of a vast irregular shuffling—mingled with women’s lamentations or cries of protest—moving in procession, south to north, along the passage behind the boxes.
There was a light knock at the door, which opened immediately.
Lord Alvanley stepped in. The round-faced little peer was smiling, his open snuffbox in his left hand.
“My dear Darwent,” he said, as one who utters congratulations, “you were quite right. They’re trying an attack on the upper boxes from the south stairs, because the stairs are wider there. Most of the linkmen attached to the theater are guarding the north door. We can get the ladies down quite comfortably.”
“Good!” said Darwent. “What about the other tiers of boxes?”
“Warned, my boy. Warned. But all the attacks, except here, will be dummy attacks.”
From the stage opened a yellow eye of fire, illuminating Alvanley as he lifted a pinch of snuff and really reached his nostrils. There was a heavy crash, amid screaming, as a wooden flat fell. But the red buckets swung in a chain: killing that blaze, strangling it as acrid smoke drifted across the pit.
“And now, my lady?” Alvanley said politely to Caroline.
“I won’t go! I won’t!”
Through the open box door, at the back, Darwent could see shuffling or hurrying a parade of ladies. Most of them, as they passed the box, glanced in. He saw them dimly, in a haunted light, as though pages flickered in a dim-colored album.
Lady Jersey, head high, marched like Queen Boadicea. Lady Castlereagh, her blue eyes not now fearful but very curious, glanced at Caroline and then at Darwent and then at the couch, before someone shoved forward her diamond-glistening shoulders.
Raising laments about her husband and her dog, little Lady Sefton was hurried forward too. Pretty Miss O’Neil, the female star of Drury Lane, was openly weeping; not because of the fight, but because she had been interrupted in her first visit to the box of a real nobleman.
“I won’t go, I tell you!” Caroline was insisting. “They’ll kill him!”
“They may not find it,” smiled Alvanley, “quite so easy as they think.” He looked at Darwent. “But he will need help, I believe.”
“I am much beholden to you,” said Darwent. “But I think not.”
A man’s voice, muffled and far away at the south end of the passage, rose above the din.
“Make haste!” it shouted. “For God’s sake, make haste!”
Alvanley instantly shut up his snuffbox, thrust it into his pocket, and put his head out past the door.
“What’s up?” he called back.
“Five of the Fancy … somebody like a coachman … halfway up these stairs now . …”
Then, sickeningly, a kind of squelch, as of a fist, hit his face.
Sheer panic quivered through that press of rustling skirts and broken fans, and through some of their escorts as well. They did not shuffle; they began to run.
“Gently!” soothed Alvanley. “Gently, now!” Without further ceremony he picked up Caroline by the waist, whirled her out into the passage, and let the rush carry her along. To Darwent it seemed that the whole theater, the tier above as well as the tiers below, shook to a faint thunder as that gay-colored company rushed for the north stairs.
“Gently!” Alvanley cried again.
Plunging in at the end of the procession to shepherd it, he was lost to sight. Darwent followed him at the end, picking up a tearful lady who had lost a necklace, and setting her in the right direction. Over everything a great, calm voice, which was only that of a theater-attendant but sounded like a deity’s, spoke in remote bass tones.
“My lords, ladies, and gentlemen. Let there be no haste, I pray. There is not the least occasion for haste.”
But there was. Darwent, almost at the north end of the passage, realized he should not have left that box, where he had promised to wait.
He swung round, and hurried back again.
At one step he hesitated, wondering if his courage would hold. Again he touched the small sword at his left hip. It differed from the ordinary court sword only in that it was true steel, and not brittle alloy. Alfred the footman had brought it from the fencing school; and, when Darwent returned to his hotel to dress for the opera, he had contrived to fit it into the gold scabbard.
Darwent resumed his walk along the passage.
Through thin partitions, by yells and the smashing of scenery, he knew that fighting in the pit had redoubled. Yet, as a man walks a tightrope between life and death, he had a strong illusion.
It seemed to him that this passage, this whole tier of boxes, now lay as silent as it was deserted.
On his left curved the wall of box doors, most of them closed. On his right ran the straight facade of immense, arched, dust-furred windows, each with a tiny lamp beside it, which looked out over the Haymarket.
To Darwent it seemed that no one moved, no one even breathed. He could hear his own footfalls on the gritty boards. He could …
Look out!
Because of the curve in the wall, he was within a dozen feet of his enemies before he even saw them.
Just in the middle of the passage, some distance back from the door of box forty-five, the driver of the blue coach stood facing him.
Behind the coachman stood three men, features indistinguishable in this light. But at one side of him, next the Haymarket, stood a figure made broader by short fustian jacket and corduroys: Broad Henchman, the lightweight, a harder hitter than many above his weight class. On the coachman’s right, next the box doors, stood that powerful so-called middleweight who could never scale below twelve stone; they called him the Nottingham Peach.
There was just room for the three of them—Nottingham, the coachman, and Broad Henchman to stand abreast across the width of the passage. The coachman’s features were masked, except for glistening eyes. All the others wore broad, fixed grins. None of them moved; none of them spoke.
Darwent moved out into the passage, facing them from a dozen feet away.
(If they make a rush now he was thinking, I am finished. I must not even draw the sword yet, lest it bring down a rush. The gamble I take, sixty to forty in my favor, is that the coachman will not wish to act too soon.)
Still Darwent did not draw
Stripping the white gloves off his hands, he thrust them into the open front of his waistcoat. He walked slowly towards the enemy.
And, silently, it was as though his thoughts were answered.
The coachman’s left hand, covered by a rotted leather glove, went up to warning. “Hold hard!” it said, as though he controlled too-eager dogs or held sledge hammers balanced on a cobweb.
(No, thought Darwent, you want no quick face-pulping or snap of a broken spine. You would have the leisureliness which pulls the wings from flies. You would set one of them on me, first ….)
Deliberately, within three long paces of them, Darwent stopped.
Darwent heard their breathing. Very clearly, now, he saw Broad Henchman’s cauliflower ear and bony features, upper lip lifting as his fists lifted. He saw the immense bulk of the Nottingham Peach, who often trained on gin and was half-fuddled now: thick neck, thick cropped head a little inclined, as though listening for some very good joke.
But never did Darwent take his eyes from the coachman’s. And the coachman’s eyes began to turn, which was as good as a signal ….
Then Darwent drew.
The rasp of true steel out of a scabbard was like the rasp and flinch of a file drawn across teeth. At the same moment the coachman’s right elbow jabbed into the left elbow of the Nottingham Peach.
“Get him!” was the unspoken message.
Nottingham straightened up, his small eyes narrowing. Above the belt round his heavy stomach he wore onl
y a very dirty sleeveless shirt of gray wool. His immense arms, like a man’s legs, shaded in color from faint pink above the biceps down to a redness like dried beef at the heavy fists.
“Ho?” he demanded, with a bellow of mirth.
Up went his fists, each a little way out from his face and spread a foot on either side: elbows crooked, a-dance with mirth and gin. The fingers of his left hand were a little open to seize that toy sword blade, his red right fist was a-quiver to send in the gravedigger.
Nottingham took one step forward, he took two steps …
Somebody cried out a warning, much too late.
Darwent’s lunge and return-to-guard was so adder-swift that the light seemed to flick only once on the blade. All they heard was the slight stamp of the lunge.
But the needle-sharp blade, stabbing under the biceps tendon of Nottingham’s right arm just above the elbow, also cut into the brachial artery which feeds blood to the hand. Nobody, including Darwent himself, could have told you those terms. But well Darwent knew the effect of the thrust.
From Nottingham’s right arm spurted a long jet of bright-red arterial blood. Another followed, and another, splashing out across the coachman as well. Staring at the arm, Nottingham clapped his left hand over the wound. The blood only flew wide and, as Nottingham moved his hand, spurted up into his own face.
Darwent, facing him sideways at guard position, nevertheless held the smallsword low and unmoving. A little way behind him and to his right was a great arched window. The tiny white lamp by this window threw a single spark of light on the blade.
Nottingham, partly recovering his wits, uttered a roar of rage. He lifted his fists again, and whirled on Darwent.
Again the blade flashed out and back, tearing the artery wider. Blood jetted more heavily: against the recoiling coachman, reddening the cauliflower ear of Broad Henchman. The Nottingham Peach, again arrested, held up his right fist and stared at it with a crumbling look. He saw the red fist turn corpse-white before his eyes.
Darwent spoke clearly.
“Put a turncot on that at once,” he said, “or you’re a dead man in ten minutes.”
Nottingham was almost insensible to pain. It would have taken an ax to fell him. But this was different. This he did not understand. This crazed him.
“Godamighty!” he screamed.
Whirling round, the greasy blood still jetting, he flung past his companions and raced toward the south stairs from which he had come. One of the fighters in the back row—Darwent could see only a white head and a dirty orange neckcloth—ran after him and tried to stop him.
Nottingham’s savage wipe, with the left arm alone, flung him against a closed box door whose panels splintered like matchwood as Orange-Neckcloth went through backwards. Orange-Neckcloth, half-cracking his skull against an overturned table as he fell, rolled over into silence as Nottingham disappeared.
“Well, gentlemen?” inquired Darwent. “Who comes next?”
Just behind him he heard the snick of a blade whipped from its sheath. Darwent’s heart rose up in fear until he saw it was only Alvanley, breathing hard, at his right side with court sword drawn.
“I told you …!” Darwent protested.
“My dear Darwent,” said Alvanley, as blandly as he could while panting. “I know you’re not in need of assistance. At the same time …”
At the same time, the coachman’s left elbow dug into the right side of Broad Henchman. And Henchman, either wary of the too-dangerous Darwent or so blind with rage he could make no choice, flew at Alvanley instead.
It was a bad attack, throwing him off balance.
Simultaneously Henchman’s left hand shot out to grab the sword blade, while his right fist aimed a round arm at the side of the head. His left grab missed the blade by a foot and a half, as people do. Again the light point winked on a blade. Alvanley, unconsciously dodging the right fist as he lunged, without compunction stabbed him through the heart.
(And now, faintly, the coachman’s eyes began to change.)
The two bruisers behind him saw the sword point, almost clean, jump up under Henchman’s shoulder blade. They heard the faint bone crack as Alvanley instantly wrenched it out again. The only puzzle was that the brittle steel alloy did not snap off short.
“Think-yer-got-me-eh?” snarled Henchman.
Death was on him like a cold sweat. But a man in a rage is not always stopped by a death wound. Henchman plunged forward between Alvanley and Darwent, both fists flailing. Dimly he seemed to realize he had missed them both: he half wheeled round, seeing before him the great window, dust-covered and with many panes and joinings, where his own image faintly rippled.
“Gotcher!” said Henchman. His sledge-hammer left fist struck that window an instant before, his body struck it; and the window, from top to bottom, cracked and splintered.
Link boys, in the wet black street where carriages crushed up against the edge of the pavement, heard the crash from above. Their links, flaring yellow, moved backward in a wide circle, like ripples on dark water. A street organ, so familiar here as well as in Oxford Street, instantly stopped grinding out Lillibulero. Henchman fell in the midst of the link circle, and never moved again.
“Alvanley!” Darwent said sharply.
“At your service, my boy.” Two swords were at guard-position.
“When I count three,” said Darwent, “we charge them together. Agreed?”
“Agreed!”
“Either kill, or put them out of business so they’ll never fight in a roped ring again. Agreed?”
“Agreed!”
(It is impossible to put them out of business without killing, unless your sword has edge as well as point. But will they understand that?)
“One!” counted Darwent.
The coachman’s shoulders, as though twitched by panic, sent a twitch down through the moldy green cloak. Without taking his eyes from Darwent, he stretched his left hand behind him and groped—groped for help, groped for protection, from a flat-nosed, eye-scarred middleweight whose red flannel underwear was stuffed into pepper-and-salt trousers and top boots.
“I ain’t afraid of anybody that fights English,” suddenly bawled the man in the red underwear. “I’ll meet any man wiv ’is fists.” His mouth fell open; incredulity baffled him. “But damn French monkey tricks …”
“Two,” said Darwent—and the scalepans dipped.
Again shouting he feared nobody who fought with fists (which was true) the man in the red underwear turned and bolted. His companion, whose face Darwent never saw or remembered, hesitated, wavered, and bolted after him.
Only the coachman remained. The coachman’s right hand, in the rotted leather glove, crept toward the right-hand pocket of his cloak.
Darwent advanced toward him. What weapon the coachman held he did not know, and (in his present light-headed rage) did not care.
“Do you kill him now?” inquired Alvanley, in terms of purely academic interest, “or exactly what?”
Darwent stopped. The coachman’s eyes were murderous.
“I should prefer,” said Darwent, “only to unwrap him. To hold him out and dangle him, as the image of a so-called gentleman, before I kill him in a fair fight. Only a little injury, now, a slight wound …”
And then all his plans went wrong.
As Darwent said, “slight wound,” he made a lightning low lunge to pierce the leg just above the kneecap, where there would be no boot whatever costume the enemy wore under the cloak.
But the Nottingham Peach, old Nottingham’s blood, struck hack in revenge. Darwent’s right foot slipped on the blood-greasy floor. The sword point missed by inches. He fell heavily on his side, bounced to his feet like an india-rubber cat—and was just in time to dodge what the coachman threw full in his eyes.
What flew at him was a thick handful of black pepper, ordinary black pepper. It can drive like a black hornet cloud; the use of it was then a French criminal’s trick. Only a few grains pierced the corner of Darwent’s
left eye, yet they stabbed and maddened like needles into the eyeball.
“Boxes!” Alvanley shouted suddenly.
“‘Boxes,’” mimicked an unrecognizable voice, sneering under the coachman’s muffler.
They did not have him trapped, as they thought. He was within door-handle reach of the empty box forty-four. Whipping open the door, the coachman darted inside before-you could have snapped your fingers.
Darwent—losing seconds while he vainly rubbed at his left eye—rushed in after him. In the coachman’s pocket had been a round tin of pepper, half full and lid off. He had dragged the tin out of his pocket, evidently to throw again. But he dropped it on the floor when he saw Darwent, and leaped for the top of the box ledge.
There, cloak flying like a bat’s membrane, he jumped over.
From below, even above the fighting turmoil, Darwent heard some one’s scream of agony as the coachman’s feet struck head or flesh. Craning over the ledge, he saw a circle widen and hack itself out, even among packed heads, for a cleared space in which lay an old man with a curiously twisted neck.
Darwent put down his sword on the box ledge; He picked up the tin of pepper, swearing aloud that somebody, should get dose for dose. Then, before the open space should close below him, he vaulted over the ledge.
He landed three tiers below, jarred but without injury, at the back of Fops’ Alley. Alvanley, sword sheathed, landed be side him just before the mob closed in. For the first time Alvanley had lost his temper.
“What d’ye play?” he snapped. “Damme, don’t you know we can’t catch him now?”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve hemmed us in. Look there!”
At the back of Fops’ Alley there was no ground-floor box. Where there should have been a box, an arched passage led to the outer doors or the way upstairs again. That passage swayed with disheveled pitites, their clothes in rags, who had either joined the fight or struggled to get out.
Over it the heavy gilt-crowned baton of a Bow Street runner rose and fell; rose and fell.
“I made a mistake. But I propose to find the swine,” said Darwent, “nonetheless.”
“How can you find him?”
Darwent pointed upward.
The Bride of Newgate Page 21