by Robin Blake
Not all cock-fights unfold in the same way, which, as the fancy will tell you, is what makes the game into a sport. Often there is an initial phase of wary circling in which the birds try a few tentative attacks. But this is not invariable. Some birds launch into the fight with everything they’ve got from the moment their feet land in the straw, their flightless wings cocked, their spurs and beaks slashing as feathers fly up and float in the air between the gouts of flying blood. The initial attacker is not always the winner, however. Staying power, gameness or stomach are thought by many to count for more than early aggressiveness, which is even reckoned a fault by some, a sign of juvenile inexperience. Wily old birds of the ring are practised at defence and happy to wait for the first storm of attack to blow itself out before moving in themselves to strike the killer blow. One way or another, the contest is decided when a bird goes down and is no longer able to fight back. Often he is dead, or beyond help, though defeated birds may be nursed back by their owners to fight another day. In many cases these survivors, if they profited from the first experience, can go on to win the next time.
The Sultan of Scrafton’s all-important contest was listed towards the end of the programme, so for much of the time Fidelis and I were spectators. Once the sequence of fights was under way, I felt disinclined to watch each one as it came along, but observed instead the extraordinary passion of the crowd. This was quite beyond anything one sees in elections, mad-houses or even the racecourse. I am persuaded that the volume of hoarse, hellish noise, the flying spittle, the obscene curses and imprecations, the tears and the abandon are all multiplied by their confinement to the cockpit’s small and circular space.
I felt Fidelis’s elbow nudging me and saw that Captain Strawboy had arrived, accompanying Lord Strange and two or three other young men, all of them drunk. No sooner had they settled into their places than Strawboy spotted us and made his way over.
‘Dr Faustus is most pleased with himself this morning,’ he said. ‘He is crowing with delight to be taking on a rival doctor.’
He laughed, then added laconically.
‘And one that will inevitably lose the prize, and also our wager, I am afraid. I suppose you’ll be good for the money, Fidelis.’
My friend was incensed. He jumped to his feet and stood nose to nose with Strawboy, his fists tight.
‘Only a scoundrel would ask a gentleman such a question.’
‘Oh let us not fight, you and I,’ said Strawboy, negligently. ‘We have our gamecocks to do it for us, after all.’
He spun round and returned to his companions, who were now cheering Lord Strange as he carried his gamecock Hector Hardrada to the side of the pit.
‘Are you by any chance good for the money, Luke?’ I asked.
He turned to me, still furious.
‘He was taunting me – goading me. Oh, it is very unwise of him. He does not know which bird will prevail, he cannot, and if it is mine I will make him choke on those words yet.’
‘But are you good for the money?’
Fidelis’s expression softened.
‘It is five hundred pounds, Titus. I can manage that but there are another five hundred or so in side-bets. Let us say I shall be a very penurious doctor indeed if the Sultan does not do me proud.’
The master of ceremonies now called the next bout, between Lord Strange’s Hector Hardrada and the first of Jon O’Rorke’s fighters, a bird called Sir Lancelot. The latter’s owner, freed since yesterday from the House of Correction, was a striking sight at the ringside, holding his bird in the bating position for the prescribed sixty seconds, his face a mask of intense concentration. Sir Lancelot was a tawny fowl, with deep red comb and wattles to outmatch his master’s own bright ginger hair, and he was straining with some spirit to get at the opposite fowl, as if O’Rorke’s own fierce will to overcome was being transmitted into the bird through his finger-ends.
Moments later O’Rorke and Strange heard the bell and released their birds. There was no preliminary sparring but an immediate clash so ferociously equal – with first one and then the other gaining the advantage – that even after a full minute of tangled and bloody conflict no one could have predicted the outcome.
I looked at O’Rorke at the side of the ring. He was jiggling uncontrollably up and down, his features distorted, his cheeks red with arousal, his fists pounding the rim of the parapet, and his mouth open howling from uninhibited blood-lust. These transports did not last long, however, for now Strange’s bird gave up the fight as abruptly as he had hurled himself into it, flopping down into a submissive posture, wings outspread on the straw, and no longer attempted to reply to the assaults of the beak and spurs of the other. Half the house gave a collective groan while the other half roared with delight. Within a few more seconds the contest was done and O’Rorke’s bird was crowing his supremacy.
That the dismissed servant O’Rorke could bring a bird of his own to the pit and defeat Lord Derby’s heir shows the levelling nature of the pit-side. Indeed one may speculate that it’s for this reason and not the savage blood-letting that so many call for cock-fighting to be suppressed. The surrounding gallery behind the top row of seating is no less easy-going in matters of class, wealth and education. Here men of all stripes meet and argue, wager and drink together, and in doing so quite forget, for a while at least, the distinctions that normally divide them. Who is to say this is a bad thing? Not me.
I was walking around this gallery five minutes later on my way from the jakes, seeing several that I knew including the captain of the Maid of Man and Dr Harrod, accompanied by a sallow youth – his son Abel. Then I came face to face with the surveyor Joss Kay.
‘You said you were not a follower of the sport,’ I said.
He pulled a sour face.
‘No. I do not like it very much, as it has little of improvement in it.’
‘Do you not approve after all of how the birds improve by careful breeding?’
‘I may have said they do, but for what? The bird is a fighting engine, good for nothing except quarrelling and killing or being killed. And when it is killed the flesh is bitter and stringy to eat.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Let’s say I am diverted by the sight of so many men in tears. Are you fighting a bird yourself?’
‘No, I am second to Dr Fidelis. You’ve finished surveying the Marsh, then?’
‘The Marsh? Who told you that?’
‘I saw you at it, did I not?’
‘But I told you at the time, I was merely practising. I was setting up my apomecometer.’
‘Whereas I know that you were taking real measurements and I strongly suspect those measurements covered the whole of the Marsh.’
The heat of the cock-fighting had perhaps made me speak with less reserve than I might usually.
‘Why would I do that?’ he challenged.
‘I don’t know – perhaps you don’t yourself.’
He came closer to me and spoke into my ear.
‘I have been sworn to secrecy. What I know and what I do not know is also a secret.’
He was speaking most decisively. I patted his back in a companionable way.
‘As long as we agree you have apomecometrised the Marsh for reasons still to be determined, I will make an end to it for now. But it bears on a case I was engaged in, Kay, and in a way I still am.’
I went back to my seat and found Fidelis missing. I glanced at the programme and realized that he must have gone down to the bird room to collect his contestant. The Sultan of Scrafton was on his way to the pit for the next fight.
‘Gentle-men,’ shouted the master of ceremonies two minutes later, in his laborious and oddly emphasized manner, ‘we announce the tenth bout of the morning, which is for a challenge cup of gilded silver to the value of ten guineas, and to contend for it will you please welcome the first contestant, FROM the cockyard of Dr Luke Fidelis, and weighing in at one pound and fourteen ounces, I give you: thee Sulta-an of SCRAFTON.’
No contest is won on splendour alone. It was not until Fidelis reached out and gathered the Sultan back into his arms that his opponent’s name rang from the mouth of the master of ceremonies to remind us he must prove himself in action.
‘Gentlemen, once again will you now welcome his opponent, FROM the cockyard of Captain James Strawboy, and weighing in at two pounds and two ounces I give you: Doctooooor FAUSTUS.’
More cheers, more waving of hats and programmes, accompanied Strawboy’s champion as he stalked to and fro in the straw, flicking his head this way and that as if to say any challenge, any test, and he was equal to it. Faustus was not as beautiful as the Sultan; not as bursting with aristocratic hauteur; and certainly not as colourful, being largely white. On the other hand he had one big thing in his favour: he was two inches taller and, on the scales, four ounces heavier.
I was, without realizing it, sitting on the utter edge of my seat and straining upwards to see everything that could be seen.
The two cocks were now presented in the bating position, to get them properly set. The timekeeper held up his watch with one hand while the other hovered over his handbell. Fidelis’s face was uniformly taut, white and strained, but exactly as the bell rang and he released his bird, he puffed out his cheeks and two bright spots of red came on to them. The die was cast – but which way would it roll?
The Sultan and Faustus took a cautious approach from the start. They were behaving as if they felt they were well matched, despite Faustus’s advantage in size. This way and that they went for twenty seconds, then thirty. Soon they must engage. Cocks that do not start to fight within sixty seconds are both scratched and the contest called null.
That humiliation was avoided a few seconds later when the Sultan made a furious attack. He raised both wings and went in talons first, trying to slash with the metal spurs on his heels that augmented the somewhat smaller ones that nature provided him with. Faustus dodged with his own wings upwards and turned the Sultan around.
For a moment a flush of excitement passed through my own body. My throat was dried and constricted, my heart worked harder and I heard a yell – my own – burst suddenly out. The Sultan had got a beak-hold on Faustus’s wattle, who in turn was trying to peck out the Sultan’s eye. Twisting this way and that, striving to get the other bird off its feet, they both lost their footing and came down together to a great shout from the crowd.
What emerged from that storm of beating wings and slashing spurs was that the Sultan somehow achieved supremacy. He seemed to screw around in an instant, levered himself upright, and was now standing on top of the other bird’s body, stabbing down on to it with murderous slashes of its beak and claws. At that moment (though I did not realize it until later) I understood what previously I had found incomprehensible – the ecstasy of the crowds in Rome’s Colosseum, their frenzied joy in the gory defeat of lions, the dismembering of Christians and the evisceration of gladiators. Blood was being spilt and I was excited, heady, charged up with what I can only call demonic joy. I cannot explain it, as I am a peace-loving man in most respects. It is simply the fact.
It was over and the Sultan of Scrafton had won his ten guinea prize and a hundred times more in bets for his owner. I said to him, as we jostled our way out of the cockpit at the end of the programme, ‘That was extraordinary, Luke.’
‘You have become a convert to the game?’
‘No, but I’m sorry to say that I did enjoy it. I trust I satisfactorily carried out my duties as your Second.’
‘That was your only duty – to enjoy it.’
‘I hope the Sultan’s eye is not badly hurt. It was one of his handsomest features.’
‘It may be entirely saved. I am hoping it appears worse than it is.’
‘And what will you do with all that cash?’
‘I believe I shall buy myself a home, Titus, and become a devoted householder. It is a prime example of your Dr Mandevil’s philosophy: vice leading directly to virtue.’
Chapter 24
THAT NIGHT WE ate our Michaelmas Eve dinner of roasted goose, after which we sang songs until midnight and the next day lay late in bed, getting up only when it was time to go to church.
‘Oh, take me for a walk,’ said Elizabeth, after the service. ‘It is such a fine day and there is an hour or more before dinner. Let’s go and see how work is progressing on rebuilding the Inn at the wharf.’
So we made our way in the direction that had become so familiar to me in the last two weeks. At the wharf we found the old inn was being replaced by rising wooden spars and connecting struts that would be the framework of the new building.
‘The skeleton of the Skeleton Inn,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I hope they will not change the name.’
A figure came into sight from Watery Lane, and headed straight on to the wharf itself. He wore a cap, a great coat and carried two wicker baskets. It was Jon O’Rorke.
I called to him. The dismissed servant strolled over to us with something of a swagger and we exchanged greetings. I introduced Elizabeth.
‘Your lady wife, is it?’ he said, looking her up and down. ‘And very nice, too.’
‘What brings you down here?’ I asked.
‘I’m bringing the last of my things to the boat – my fighting cocks,’ he said. ‘I have everything else on board.’
‘Are you leaving?’
‘Yes, I’m off, never to return. I sail by the Maid of Man. There’s nothing for me here and I go back home with a few guineas in my pocket, which is satisfactory.’
‘I’m sorry you have been dismissed.’
‘I am not. I have been a good enough servant, but I have higher aspirations.’
There was a shout from the quayside.
‘I must be away,’ said O’Rorke. ‘The tide’s turned and they’re sailing.’
Again he nodded his head towards Elizabeth, this time a little more deliberately, and said in a slow, savouring way, ‘Madam, there is in your eye something that promises a man great pleasure. I congratulate you – and you sir. Good-bye and good luck.’
We saw him on board and then watched as the crew went through the routine of casting off, hoisting canvas and bearing away on the turning tide. The water was just past its fullest; the river was swollen and the mud banks and shoals well covered as far as the eye could see. We waved and the figure standing in the waist of the ship raised his rustic cap in farewell.
* * *
Over the next night September gave way to October, with the new month breaking dry and breezy, though with the ever-present promise of showers. Indeed, by dinner time, rain had fallen with sudden, brief ferocity, after which the extraordinary news began to spread around town that Abraham Scroop was missing. It seems he had ridden to Kirkham in the early morning to speak to the mason about his infant son’s gravestone. Three hours later his riderless horse came cantering back through Ashton and into the end of Water Lane.
The first presumption was that Scroop had been thrown when his horse spooked at an unexpected noise, or reared when a dog snapped at its pastern. Kirkham is some seven miles distant and it was thought that surely, given time, the rider himself would turn up alive, albeit bruised, footsore and ill-tempered. After another couple of hours and with still no sign of him the alarm was raised, which shortly reached the centre of town. Thereupon a mounted party assembled in the Market Place with the object of going along the Kirkham road to search for him. The party, made up of fewer than a dozen riders, had been raised by Dr Harrod, who had heard of the emergency on his return from a round of country calls. I decided to join the searchers myself and, a few moments after I had done so, Fidelis too rode up with the same intention. Blowi
ng a short brass horn, Harrod called us into a ring around him.
‘We shall ride directly to Kirkham and, if we do not find him along the way, we shall scatter with each man returning by a different route so that one of us must find him. Everyone should have a hunting horn to assist communication.’
The still country air felt cleansed, for, after a gusty start to the day, there had been an hour of rain around midday and now, in stiller air, sunlight picked out beads of water hanging in the hedgerows. From time to time a game bird got up out of the hedge and rattled away into the distance, squawking and scattering the water drops behind it.
‘Perhaps that was the cause of the accident,’ observed Fidelis. ‘His horse startled.’
‘He may have been taken into some wayside cottage and is being tended as we speak with vinegar and brown paper,’ I said.
There were a few such dwellings along the road and we enquired at each of them but no one had seen Scroop, either horsed or on foot. Nor did we meet him on the road, or find him lying in the verge.
* * *
So we arrived at St Michael’s churchyard in Kirkham, where we dismounted beside a fresh and unidentified heap of earth – the Scroop infant’s resting place. Harrod had sent a man galloping ahead with orders to fetch the stonecutter with whom Scroop had had his appointment, and now we all gathered around to hear the man, a wiry fellow with a blind eye and a crooked back.
‘Oh ay, Mr Scroop were here,’ he said. He gestured in an actorly way at the bare mound of earth, much moistened by the recent rain.
‘He fetch me here to this spot and told me the words to be carved on his little laddie’s stone. Then we talked about what kind of lettering I had to cut, and how to set the stone.’
He dug in the pocket of his leather apron and produced a paper covered with writing.
‘See here, he’ve writ it all down, which I needed him to, so odd it was, the inscription he wanted.’