Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

HAD BEEN in London for nearly two years by this point, having fled there from Cornwall when my old life collapsed in ruin. For of course you have already made the requisite connection. The Revd Mr Beresford, pursued by Furies—this actor Jack Hartright, with his murky past and distinctive horseshoe-shaped scar—by God (you’ve exclaimed) they’re one and the same man! And so they are—or rather, so they were, for as I set this down four decades later I find I have transformed once again, and call myself by a third name. It is a dark one, this third name, but that need not concern us at present, for just now I am telling you of the bygone events of 1851, by which so much was set in motion—some that was great, and some alas that was terrible.

      I won’t describe in detail my flight from Cornwall. Suffice it to say that there was a chance outcropping of rock along the cliffs below Scantlebury Hall. It broke my fall, although it broke my ankle as well, so badly that it never really healed. There was a friend who found me and took me in—Young Ned Moyle, bless his true heart—keeping me hidden and nursing my injuries until I could walk again, and then arranging secret midnight passage over the waves. Picture in your mind a cutter setting out from Sawle, and a young man shrouded in a cowl. Imagine an unseasonable storm arising, with such ferocity that the sailors began to mutter with white rolling eyes that there was surely a Jonah on board, carrying God’s curse. But picture safe harbour at last, and a post-carriage rattling through the night, and then finally there I am: stepping out into London under cover of darkness, with neither friends nor resources beyond a last few shillings and my own frail certainty that a new day must eventually dawn.

      Going home to my family in the north was clearly no option. My father had intimated prior to my departure to Cornwall that arranging for my curacy was pretty much the last effort he could be expected to make on my behalf, although I should certainly write if I ever became a bishop. Besides, that was the first place the Scantleburys would look for me. No, it had to be London, where a man could dwell unnoticed amongst the teeming masses, and create himself anew. And on that first morning, as I gnawed a sticky bun from a coffee stall in the Strand, I felt that there was hope. London was vast and surging and bellowing—half the world, it seemed, was upon this thoroughfare alone. Carriages jostling, and pedestrians streaming, and costermongers with their barrows and their bullhorn Cockney voices, rising above the cacophony: Ni-ew mackerel, six a shilling . . . Wi-ild Hampshire rabbits . . . Fine ripe plums! No one pausing, and no one caring, and most of all no one noticing—not noticing the marks of deformity upon the poor, or the mute despair upon the faces of many, or indeed the fugitive priest who was sidling away from the coffee stall without having paid his penny.

       “Oi!”

      This from the stall-keeper, a burly oaf in an apron, who turned with a gentleman’s change just in time to see our hero disappearing into the throng like a river otter into bulrushes. The rushes closed behind me, and I was gone.

      I confess to my shame that there were various such episodes in those first days and weeks in the metropolis, for after all a man must survive. But a chance meeting with some players in a public house led to a few pennies for passing out handbills advertising the Kemp Theatre’s new season, which led in turn to the discovery that the theatre manager, Mr Edmund Cubitt, required a secretary. This invaluable person would handle the great man’s correspondence and keep the books in order, and might in addition be required to appear on stage from time to time when an actor was indisposed—“indisposed” being a theatre term meaning “even drunker than the rest of them.” Naturally I clutched at the opportunity, although soon enough I discovered that the position involved other duties as well, such as washing the great man’s linen and mending his hose, not to mention putting up with his moods and indulging his maunderings, for it turned out the great man was in fact a mediocre man at best—indeed in many ways an utterly paltry and inadequate man—not least when it came to appreciating dramatic literature.

      I had written several plays. I had done so in a joyful creative fever, having discovered that dramatic poetry was my true and genuine gift. I had scribbled them by guttering candlelight, often working clear through the night until dawn. My writing made the rest of it bearable—the moods and the linen, and the orange peels flung at my forays onto the stage—and as I completed each play I would convey it with buoyant hopes to Mr Edmund Cubitt, who wanted his supper at six o’clock.

      But on this particular evening, he was not eating supper at six— or at seven o’clock either. By the time eight o’clock chimed, I’d been sitting for three hours in the corner of an unfamiliar public house. Having bolted from the theatre in high dudgeon, I had chosen the pub at random. It was dingy and dim, even by the standards of such houses, with a fire in a great stone fireplace that flickered upon the denizens and gave them rather the appearance of robbers in a cave. This impression was not completely fanciful either, for it turned out that this was a notable haunt of the sporting crowd. It was called the Horse and Dolphin, or more commonly the Nag and Fish. The walls and the mantel were festooned with sporting memorabilia, and pictures of horses and dogs.

      I paid no attention to any of this. I sat in my corner, drinking my claret and brooding.

      Perhaps my first few plays had indeed been lacking. One had for instance been a melodrama after the manner of Boucicault, about a virtuous young vicar who is falsely accused of a crime. I could accept that this was an apprentice piece, glittering here and there with flecks of gold, but admittedly the work of a Poet still finding his stride. But my new play—the play I sat clutching tonight—was different. John, Baptist; or, The Devil Distraught: a five-act drama that broke new ground in its treatment of the early life of the prophet—portraying him as a compelling but undisciplined youth, chafing in the shadow of a saintly brother, who was nearly undone by the erotic fascination he exerted upon women in general, and on one of them in particular, the duplicitous daughter of a Galilean pirate. But he redeemed himself, abjured the Devil, single-handedly cleared a path through the spiritual wilderness for the coming of the Lord, and finally triumphed in a last desperate battle against his Old Enemy, who came to him at the eleventh hour in the form of the beauteous Salome and sought to seduce him to his ruin. It was a work of truth and terrible beauty, despite the inability of Mr Edmund Cubitt to see this: Edmund Cubitt, purveyor of tartan ghouls to the illiterate, a man who tooth-picked his soul each morning in case stray bits of poetry had lodged there.

      Except Edmund Cubitt was right, and as I reread the play I knew it. John, Baptist was a turgid sham, filled with wooden characters and leaden discourse, stinking of spilt poetry. And nothing I would ever write would be one whit better, because I had no talent. This was nothing but an illusion I had conjured, in my desperation to reinvent myself after that Cornish debacle. But it was time to face the truth about myself. Or at least to face a few selected glimmers of the truth, since this is really what we mean when we commit ourselves to self-knowledge, with all the tearful fervour that accompanies such moments. We won’t face the whole truth until we are dragged out shrieking upon Judgement Day itself, when each one of us will find himself loathsome—oh yes we will, my friend—beyond all hope of enduring.

      LOOKING BACK ACROSS the years—scribbling these lines in my crabbed old hand here in Whitechapel, four decades later—I have to shake my head. What a preposterous youth I was! Hunkered in that public house, wallowing in self-pity, and scourging myself with self-hatred. Ecce homo, behold the man: the disgraced priest, fled to the metropolis and hiding under an alias like a rat in a bolt-hole—not that a rat has an alias, nor indeed a bolt-hole, but we’ll let that pass by—and now shaken to his very foundations by the discovery that his plays were drivel. Dear absurd self-aggrandizing idiot boy.

      But at the time it seemed shattering. I was drunk enough—on claret and despair—to make a Gesture. Thus I bolted to my feet and shouldered to the stone fireplace, where a gingery man stood warming his hands. Ignoring him, I consigned John, Baptist to the flames, watching with savage satisfaction as my fondest hopes writhed and blackened and expired. With a bleak little snarl I turned away, but in doing so I lost my balance, and reached out to brace myself against the low table behind. That’s when I saw Him upon the wall. He was reaching out to me.

      Prominent amongst the sporting pictures were images of pugilism: portraits of bare-knuckle fighters in sparring poses, and dramatic drawings