Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

the actual to the Ideal. The one on the left was hunched down, coiled to launch a blow at his opponent’s midriff. He was the shorter and stockier of the two, swarthy and black-haired and snarling with bad intent. His opponent arched over him in an elegant parabola. He was fair and perfectly formed and beautiful, this second pugilist, in the way that rugged men can have beauty. His left fist was held low, and with his right he was reaching over and past his hunched opponent, as if reaching out towards someone he had just seen in the crowd. His lips were slightly parted, and his eyes had just begun to widen, as if in surprise and welcome at whoever it was he had glimpsed.

      But there was distress in his eyes as well. The artist had caught a moment late in the fight, for the ravages of terrible bare-fisted blows were evident on both men. When you looked more closely you saw that a ragged cut had been torn open on the fair man’s brow. Evidently the cut had been inflicted just an instant before, because it was clean and white; the blood had not yet begun to flow. Thus the distress—and yet it wasn’t distress, not quite. I gazed for fully half a minute before realizing what those eyes in fact contained. It was an enormous empathy—a great sorrowful complicity in the suffering of the world. This fighter recognized that his pain was commingled with your own—and he was looking straight at you. In his pain and sorrow, he was reaching out to you.

      He was reaching out to me.

      Evidently I’d exclaimed this out loud, because there was a chuckle at my elbow. “Reaching out to you? Naw, mate—he’s missing with his right, is what he’s doing.”

      It was the gingery man who had been warming his hands. He regarded me with wry amusement.

      “Missing him with the right, and dropping his left into the bargain, daft Irish bog-trotter, which was a terrible habit he had. And that’s what ended the fight, about an eye-blink later. The Gardener landed him a doubler to his liver—that being the Gardener on the left, there—Tom Oliver, the Battersea Gardener, famous for his sweet peas and nectarines. He followed that with a leveler to the conk, and that was that. Down goes our man like a toppling tree, and nothing I can do will bring him back again.”

      “You?”

      “I was his second, that afternoon. There I am, right there.”

      He pointed to the picture—guiding me to a closer look with a hand on my side—and there he was indeed, just outside the rope by one of the ring posts. The man who stood beside me tonight was older—fifty years old, perhaps; his hair was thinning, and his whiskers were patchier than they once had been. But he was unmistakably the man in the sketch: frozen forever in an attitude of dawning horror, arching back and raising his hands as if to ward off the blows that were about to rain upon his champion, with all the wide-eyed woefulness of St John at the foot of the Cross.

      “We did what we could, of course. Carried him to the corner, and blew brandy up his nose, and at the end of thirty seconds we carried him back to the line of scratch and prayed he’d stay upright when we let go. But down he went—flat down on his phiz in the mud—and that was that. Well, the Gardener’s friends hurried over, and I held up our man’s hand so the Gardener could shake it, for that’s what you do. You shake the man’s hand—partly for sportsmanship, but mainly in case you’ve killed him. The handshake can be cited in court to prove there was no hard feelings, y’see, and with luck the judge will reduce your sentence accordingly. All goes well, it’s six months for manslaughter—but if you’re not careful it can be worse. It’s a terrible thing when a man gets killed in the prize-ring—tragic beyond measure, for they’ll throw the seconds in jail as well. But nobody died that day, thank the Dear, though Daniel never fought again, and doubtless just as well. Do I presume that you’re a sporting man yourself?”

      I was not in fact a sporting man. And yet I knew the man in the engraving—I’d seen that face. But where?

      “My name’s Rennert, though my friends call me Jaunty. And if you’d care to stand us a drop of the daffy, I’d be honoured to count you among that number, and tell you tales all night.”

      I was no longer listening. I was in fact on my way out of the door, for the room had all at once grown hot, and the claret was curdling in my stomach. But as I lurched out I had the most extraordinary conviction that the eyes in that engraving were following me. And moments later, as I disgorged the curdled claret onto the cobbles and straightened with a feeling of clammy relief, it came to me in an overwhelming flash of certainty.

      I lurched back into the Nag and Fish, to discover that my new acquaintance Mr Jaunty Rennert had inexplicably disappeared. It wasn’t until some while later that I discovered that a small but rather valuable item—a silver snuff-box, with the masks of comedy and tragedy etched on the top and bottom—had disappeared as well, from my vest pocket. This discovery brought with it the memory of a hand being placed on my side and guiding me to a better look at the picture, and suggested a plausible reason for Mr Jaunty Rennert’s abrupt departure.

      But in this moment I was hardly thinking of snuff-boxes. I was staring thunderstruck at the face, in the engraving. That face and the hand reaching out. And now I knew.

      It was the face I had seemed to glimpse that dreadful night outside Scantlebury Hall, as the rocks had given way beneath my feet. The laughing face of the warrior archangel.

      O’Thunder.

      I WAS STILL unsettled when I arrived back at the theatre, but marginally more steady on my feet. Bagpipes were wailing as I slipped through the backstage door, and cabers were thudding. This meant The Vampire was well into its second act, and Edmund Cubitt had been left to struggle unaided through three costume-changes. Doubtless I would pay tomorrow, but tonight the spirit of bitter rebellion seethed.