Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

and the Devil’s whip-hand flailing—thundering around the turn and down the stretch to the last gate, the storm raging both within us and without. We were up and over and tumbling down the other side, utterly spent and lying limp as rags. And then, just as triumph began to give way to the first cold stabbings of remorse— that familiar sick lurch into self-loathing—just at that very point, I felt an icy gust of wind. The door was open, and someone was standing in the doorway, holding up a torch.

      “Bathsheba?!”

      It was her younger brother, the Cabin Boy. Behind him loomed Little Dick. I exclaimed, grabbing at the blanket to cover myself. Despite my confusion, I expected to hear Bathsheba’s voice, uttering furious oaths and ordering them out.

      “Help,” whispered Bathsheba.

      “I beg your pardon?” I said, bewildered.

      “I tried to fight him, but he forced me.”

      “I did not!”

      “Oh God, oh God, oh God, my Virtue.”

      I sprang to my feet. But a sledge-hammer fist came whistling, and the world exploded into blackness.

      THIS IS WHERE my account grows unreliable. The memory of what happened next has the swooning unreality of nightmare; I have been forced to conclude that some of it—much of it?— was pure hallucination, brought on by that first concussive blow. But I have pledged to tell my tale to the best of my ability, and so here is what I seem to recollect.

      I am swimming back to consciousness. A vast echoing room, with great rough wooden beams, lit by torchlight. A cavernous fireplace, and tapestries on the walls, and animals stuffed and mounted: the heads of stags and boars, and the entire forms of smaller predators—ferrets and badgers and stoats—frozen forever in attitudes of coiled malevolence. Among these are human portraits: bloated grandsires with bulging eyes, and cold-eyed viragos as coiled and malignant as the stoats.

      Even in my disorientation, I can guess whose ancestors these were. This shrine to slaughter and misanthropy is Scantlebury Hall, and here assembled are the current denizens. Sir Richard on a vast oaken chair, with Little Dick louring beside him. Bathsheba recumbent nearby on a low divan, wrapped in a blanket and managing to look shattered, attended by the curly-haired Cabin Boy.

      I struggle to my knees.

      “Look here,” a voice says woozily, as if from a good distance. Apparently it is mine. “I don’t—you can’t just—dear God in Heaven.”

      The voice that replies is like metal grinding upon stone. “The charge against you is as follows. That you did lie feloniously in wait for a virgin of unimpeachable character, viz. my daughter, upon whom you did perpetrate an act of savage assault and rapine, in such a manner as to place you beyond any appeal to common humanity, and all hope of mercy in this life or the life to come.”

      Sir Richard Scantlebury, Bart.

      “A charge? What are you talking about?”

      “How do you plead?”

      “I didn’t touch her!”

      This is not of course strictly true. A stammered emendation: “I mean, yes, of course I—well, you know. And it was wrong— a priest—obviously. A shitten shepherd—a disgrace to the cloth—I condemn myself utterly. But we walked down that path together, and I swear I am not the sort of man who would ever—just ask her!”

      “You ask me to believe,” grates Sir Richard, “that my daughter— what—seduced you? That she participated in the act? Of her own volition, and without protest?”

      “Yes!”

      They stare: a convocation of stoats contemplating a rabbit.

      Bathsheba’s bottom lip quivers.

      What happens next is assuredly an hallucination. I seem to see young Geoffrey stepping forward. Inexplicably, he seems to be wearing a peasant smock and carrying a basket of baguettes. He points a finger in righteous venom, as if standing in the shadow of the guillotine.

      “J’accuse,” says the Cabin Boy.

      “What?” I exclaim, bewildered. “What’s he saying?”

      The room gives a lurch, and steadies. Geoffrey is himself again, and he is lying through his teeth.

      “ . . . and I was hurrying home with my brother, Sir, when I heard my sister screaming. We ran to help her, thinking she was being murdered by ruffians, or tortured by Red Indians, so terrible was the cries. Instead we found her in the embrace of the curate, him standing right there, rutting in his lust with his bottom bare and horrible, and shouting, ‘Scream all you please, my Pretty, for I only like it better when you do!’”

      All eyes are upon me. Sir Richard and his brood, and their ancestors upon the walls, and the ferrets and the stoats. Such eyes as I have glimpsed in my darkest dreams of perdition.

      “Do you have anything to say,” says Sir Richard, “before sentence is passed?”

      “Sentence? This is no court!”

      “This is the manor court, convened by ancient baronial privilege, and I am the baron.”

      “You’re all mad!”

      Or else I am. But things are happening very swiftly now.

      “Kill him!” cries Bathsheba, bursting into tears. “Kill him—but geld him, first!”

      Little Dick reaches out. But in moments of crisis we discover what we are made of, and this moment confirms what had been intimated in the Battle of Butcher’s Apprentice—to wit, the Revd Mr Beresford is descended from warriors. If not actual warriors, then at least the sort of men who could survive a skirmish on the fringes of the main conflagration—men who could raise their heads a few breathless moments after the last cannon had echoed into silence, and look around, and blink, and exclaim: “Are we done, then? By the Lord Harry, that was almost too close for comfort.”

      I duck my head and charge, butting Little Dick in the solar plexus. He staggers back, trout-faced. The window—quick! The Cabin Boy skitters to block my way, too late. A bound and a leap and a shattering of glass, and I am through the window headlong and landing with bone-jarring impact.

      All air is driven from my lungs. Howling wind and lashing rain. Somehow I am back upon my feet. But there are shouts behind me, and a gunshot. Christ! I am running now, running blind. Then the ground is gone beneath my feet. I pitch forward. A sickening sensation of falling—and falling.

      Even in my wild confusion, I know what this means. There is a sheer cliff on the windward side of Scantlebury Hall, and I have blundered over. Now there is nothing but the icy black sea and the jagged rocks below.

      But now comes the most incredible moment of all. I swear this to be true. In that moment of horrid realization—plunging helpless, like a minor rebel from the fields of Heaven—there is a light in the darkness. I seem to see a shining face, and a hand reaching towards me. In my confusion it seems to me at first that this is the visage of blessed stained-glass St Kea, paddling to my deliverance on a boulder. But it is another face entirely. A man’s great laughing face, lumpen and scarred from old battles but somehow beautiful nonetheless, with a lopsided jaw and a tumult of yellow hair. The face of a warrior archangel, and a voice like the flight of eagles, saying: “Fear not, brother, no never fear at all, for I am with you always.”

      “Who are you?” I cry.

      He says: “O’Thunder.”

• LONDON, 1851 • NELL

      IT WAS EARLIER that night when I seen the Devil, outside the theatre. The Kemp Theatre, north of Holborn, near King’s Cross. He was on the corner, passing out handbills. Or not the Devil