The Hellfire Conspiracy

25

“I shall cover all bets,” he repeated, “At ten to one odds”

I frowned, or would have if my brow wasn’t filled with waxed cotton thread and covered with fresh plaster. I couldn’t believe my ears. Perhaps I was hallucinating. I was in no condition to box soon, if ever, and Barker never bet. He thought it wrong for a gentleman to make wagers of any kind. And what odds! Did he think I could improve enough to beat Clay in a month?

The men parted and Clay came closer. He wore a blue-and-red-striped silk robe over his shoulders and looked as fresh as if he’d been only skipping rope. His father, I noticed, was smiling at me in a condescending way as he came forward.

“You think your boy shall be up to it?” Hesketh asked.

“Certainly,” Barker said.

“Very well,” his lordship said, after his son nodded confidently back at him. “Where and when?”

“Here and now,” Barker responded.

“What?” Hesketh said with a laugh. “You’re mad. Your lad’s done for the night. Probably for the week.”

“Do you concede the rematch, then?”

“Of course not!” Hesketh barked. “But two more rounds and your boy could be dead. You have a responsibility to look after him.”

“My responsibility, your lordship, is my own affair.”

“But Queensberry has left. There is no official from the boxing fraternity to referee the match.”

“So much the better,” Barker answered. “The gloves are off this time, gentlemen. Anything goes, no holds barred, unless, of course, your boy is not up for such sport.”

Hesketh looked about for a second. He was considering whether to decline the rematch. After all, Clay was on top at the moment, and he knew not what dirty tricks Barker might have taught me. But no matter what the conditions, it is bad form to turn down a challenger; and by doing so he would deny the men standing there, many of whom were friends and influential men, an opportunity for what they saw to be easy money.

“Very well,” he said at last. “We accept the challenge. But who shall referee?”

“The choice is yours, sir.”

Hesketh called up the crony with whom he’d been talking to be referee, and the ring began to clear. Barker climbed down, and I pushed myself up into a standing position. I accepted the fact that, like a gladiator, I was being sent back into the ring no matter how much pain I was in. The Guv climbed between the ropes and, seizing one of my gloves, unlaced it.

“I have trained you now, Thomas Llewelyn, for almost a year and a half. You were at a disadvantage going into this match with your hands in these mitts, but they are now coming off. You came here to seek revenge today-don’t attempt to deny it-and you failed. It may be wrong of me, but I am giving you a second chance. You can trounce this popinjay, if you remember all that I have taught you. Otherwise, I shall be several hundred pounds poorer. If you don’t win this match, you might as well pack your bag and go back to Wales, for your name shall be ruined in London for years to come. Nothing you can possibly do could ever repair it.”

A bellow welled up out of my gut, all the anger that was still festering in my soul.

“No anger, Thomas, it does no good. Just get the work done. Are you ready?”

“Yes!”

“Remember all I’ve taught you, lad. Now take this man down.”

We were called into the center of the ring again, and, though he had just defeated me, there was an uneasy look in Clay’s eyes. Perhaps it was due to what he saw in mine. We went back into our corners and the bell rang. I turned and charged.

Clay, now gloveless, threw a left, hoping to open the cut over my eye again. I caught his wrist and twisted it, bending his entire frame downward. I caught him once or twice with kicks to the right side of his face, then thrust him into the corner and began to pummel him, not with gloves like sacks of sand, but with bare knuckles like grapeshot. I could not let the man land a punch. It was time to put the odious Palmister Clay out of commission.

Seizing his head with both hands I fell back with my foot against his abdomen, kicking him over me into the center of the ring. Then I rolled over, took his right arm, and thrust my feet into his chest and neck, tugging on the arm for all it was worth. The limb was about to come out of the socket. Clay’s only choice would be to tap the mat and accept defeat. Or so I thought.

Clay flailed his body about. He raised one of his legs and then brought it down hard on my chest. Once, twice. I had no choice but to let go. We staggered to our feet and without hesitation attacked at once. Gone were the gentlemanly arts of the British boxing fraternity.

“Form!” Barker growled from the sideline as he’d done a thousand times in our practices. I stepped into a cat stance, most of my weight on my back leg, arms curled in front of me. Clay threw a punch that I caught between my forearms for just long enough to kick him in a place the marquis had definitely excluded from his rules. I heard the men about us groan in sympathy and hoped I made a few men approach the bet takers in the room with changes in their bets.

Stepping gingerly now, Clay swung at my head with his right, the one that had caused such devastation earlier. I got out of the way this time, blocking it with my left, and caught him in the chest with a palm. An open hand is not a weapon in Western culture, but Barker taught me how effective it can be when thrust into a solar plexus. My opponent’s face was now scarcely a foot from mine, and there was a look on it I had never seen before: consternation. No doubt it was the same expression he had so recently seen on mine.

My mind went back two years then, to the day he’d caught me picking up a sovereign from his mantelpiece. I hadn’t actually taken it yet, but I was considering it. The coins had sat there for weeks, while my wife, Jenny, was fading away from tuberculosis, in desperate want of a doctor’s attention that I could not afford. I remember the look of triumph on his face when he caught me. I’d punched him on the chin, more a reaction of nerves than an attack; but his friends had seized me, and Clay administered a beating. Now it was my turn, but the bell rang just then.

I leaned against my corner and glared at my opponent, while Barker issued orders in my ear. I was snorting like a bull and not paying much attention. I’d become an animal. The bell rang again and I burst out of the corner.

Clay got in a few blows, but I was beyond feeling them anymore. As I was not trained completely in boxing, he was not trained in how to fight against gang members or foot-pads. He clapped me on my injured brow, hoping to open it again, but I countered with a chop to the mastoid that felled him. I stepped away reluctantly, hoping he wouldn’t get up. The referee moved forward and began to count him out. Clay was game, however, and up again at the count of three.

Clay jabbed at me again, but his arms were getting tired. I lashed out with a perfect right, an actual boxing move that caught him on the tip of his pointed chin. He stepped back, but I followed and caught him a second right on the temple. Then, as we each took one more step, I swung my left out in a perfect arc, a move I didn’t think I had in me. My hand turned mid-motion, knuckles out, and I raked Clay across the nose. I watched him go down. He was out cold before he hit the canvas.

There was silence, then a cheer. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps some of the men in the room did not care for the bullying ways of Clay pere or fils, that perhaps they found the duo as odious as I. I moved back as his lordship’s friend stepped in and reluctantly counted Clay out. Then he raised my sweaty arm just long enough to show I’d won, and turned back to Hesketh’s side. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by men shaking my hand and pounding me on the back.

I nodded and grinned away at the men chattering in my face. My stitches had come loose and I was bleeding again, so I was led over to the doctor for more patching. Barker mopped my face with a slight smile under his brush of a mustache, like he’d known I’d win all the while.

“How’d I do, sir?” I finally asked.

“Terribly,” he informed me. “Your form was sloppy and your moves erratic. It’s a wonder he didn’t see every move coming. But, all in all, satisfactory.”

This is what counts as high praise with Cyrus Barker and I drank it in like wine. Effusiveness is not one of his qualities. It is a sign of the drubbing I’d taken that I stood still for stitches with no anesthetic. Had the doctor tried it that very morning in the warehouse, I’d have protested to high heaven.

Barker arranged with one of the well-established betting gentlemen to deliver our winnings to our offices the next day. I could no more imagine the Guv walking about with a bag full of gambling swag than I could the Archbishop of Canterbury, but I knew he hadn’t done it out of the desire for money. Rather, he’d risked the loss of it for me. He’d given me the opportunity to lay to rest a ghost that had haunted me for over two years.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, but the doctor took the remark for himself.

“Not at all. You’ll be right as rain in a few days. Take it easy and rotate your head slowly every couple of hours or your neck muscles will seize up. You’ll be black and blue and three shades of purple come morning, but I reckon you’ll live.”

“Come, lad,” my employer said.

Barker led me back to the dressing room. My muscles were seizing up by the minute and I needed help getting into my clothes. After that, we stepped out into the blessed cool air of a July evening. The Guv helped me into a hansom and out of it again when we reached Green Street. I vaguely recall shrugging into my nightshirt before settling onto the hard, lumpy mattress and into a deep sleep.