‘Gentlemen, are you ready?’ The adjudicator called out to them both. ‘On my count, you will take your first step.’ They had already determined what the rules of the contest would be: ten steps, to be taken at the adjudicator’s prompting, then turn and fire. Pyke hoped Maginn would fire into the air.
‘One.’
With his back facing Maginn’s, Pyke took his first step and looked around the deserted street. A nearby gas-lamp hissed and flared, producing a dull light that barely illuminated the area directly beneath it. At the man’s count, he took another step and then another, trying to clear his mind and concentrate. The whole thing was absurd, but someone was about to fire a loaded pistol at him in anger and thus the potential for danger remained. Briefly he thought about Felix and Jo, wondered whether they knew what was happening or not.
‘Seven.’
Pyke curled his finger around the trigger and took a deep breath.
‘Eight.’ He took another step.
‘Nine, and…’
When he turned around, he could barely see Maginn in the gloom. The man’s stovepipe hat was the most recognisable thing about him. He heard the shot before he saw the barrel of Maginn’s pistol raised towards the night sky. Carefully Pyke took aim and squeezed the trigger; he couldn’t see immediately, but he could tell from the gasps of the crowd huddled in the doorway of the bookshop that he’d hit the target. Later, he would hear how the stovepipe hat had flown from Maginn’s head and how the journalist had stood there, rooted to the spot, too frightened even to blink.
That was when he saw the glint of metal and heard a click. As he turned around, there was a flash of exploding gunpowder and momentarily Hunt’s cadaverous face was lit up, his hiding place in a smaller alleyway revealed. Too stunned to move, Pyke felt a rush of air through his ears as he waited for the shot to tear him apart. It never happened. From less than five yards, Hunt had missed his target. Pyke sucked air through his clenched teeth, tasting the acrid sting of gunpowder at the back of his throat.
The pistol clattered on to the cobblestones and Pyke saw that Hunt had sprung from his hiding place and was running away. He decided against pursuing him.
Back inside the shop, Pyke looked for Maginn but couldn’t see him. He found Jo and Felix talking with Godfrey. Most of the crowd had left by now, perhaps as a result of the argument and the duel, and Pyke tried to play down what had just happened. He wondered whether any of them had actually seen the hidden shot that had been fired, or knew how close he’d come to being killed. Perhaps Godfrey did; he was much too effusive in his praise of Pyke’s bravery. Jo and Felix said very little, and when it was suggested that they call it a night and go home, Pyke offered to hail them a hackney carriage on Piccadilly.
Outside, in the gaslight, Pyke noticed that his hands were still trembling. He looked up and down the darkened street for any sign of a passing cab and noticed Maginn stumbling into a side alleyway. Godfrey had seen Maginn, too, and placed his hand on Pyke’s arm. ‘Come back with us to my apartment.’ But Pyke could feel the anger he’d been trying to repress billowing up inside him. Maginn had challenged him on a point of principle, but all he’d really wanted to do was give Hunt the chance to shoot him dead. There was no honour in that; no honour in shooting a pistol at another man’s back from five paces. Suddenly he despised the Cork man for all his piousness and his false desire for ‘satisfaction’. Pyke found Maginn in the alleyway; he was fumbling at his breeches. A frightened prostitute was trying to free herself from his drunken grip. Maginn had knowingly colonised the moral high ground and now here he was harassing a street-walker. The hypocrisy was too much for Pyke to bear. Maginn raised his hand to slap her, but Pyke caught it, pushed the woman to one side and swung his fist into Maginn’s face, dislodging two teeth in the process. Spitting blood, Maginn tried to defend himself but Pyke landed another blow, this time to the side of his head. Maginn fell forward and Pyke brought his knee up to the man’s face. The prostitute disappeared farther into the alleyway. Pyke wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his frock-coat. Maginn was lying on the ground. That should have been the end of it but Pyke’s thoughts turned to Mary Edgar, who had been cut up and left to rot by the side of the road, and then to Emily, who had been killed by a single rifle shot to her neck. He took a deep breath and kicked Maginn hard in the stomach, then again. He heard a noise and turned round to find Felix standing there, speechless, his face white with terror.
‘Felix.’ He paused, not knowing what else to say. Maginn, still on the ground, gave a muffled groan.
Godfrey and Jo stepped into the alleyway and saw Maginn lying at Pyke’s feet, with Felix trembling in front of him.
Pyke looked down and noticed that the ends of his boots were glistening with Maginn’s blood. He wanted to make his son understand what had happened but the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. He saw the fear and revulsion in the boy’s eyes. Pyke wanted the ground to open up and swallow him.
It had always amused Pyke that Holywell Street got its name from a holy well that stood in the vicinity and that pilgrims bound for Canterbury used to drink from; it amused him because ever since the radical presses had been disbanded or moved underground and the Jewish traders had relocated farther east to Spitalfields and Petticoat Lane, the street had become the centre of the city’s trade in pornography. He would have liked to have seen the pilgrims’ reaction to the lewd etchings and lithographs and snuff-boxes detailing men and women engaged in obscene sexual acts.
Outwardly, little had changed on the street since Elizabethan times — it had escaped the worst ravages of the Great Fire and the lath-and-plaster houses with their lofty gables, overhanging eaves and deep bays were throwbacks to another era — but the air of gloom and disrepair had a modern countenance, as did the open manner in which some of the proprietors peddled their smut. None went as far as to display lewd engravings in their windows or place the latest ‘limited edition’ from Paris on the lean-tos outside the shops, but the lingering scent of grubby licentiousness pervaded the immediate environment. Pyke had even heard it called ‘the vilest street in the civilised world’.
Jemmy Crane’s bookshop occupied a tall, four-storey building on the north side of the street. Outside, wooden trestles supported neatly stacked piles of antiquarian books and above the door a crescent moon sign gave the shop a veneer of respectability.
‘What can I do for you, sir? May I say you look like a connoisseur of bedroom scenes. Am I warm, sir?’ The elderly man behind the counter had a shambling gait and studied Pyke through the monocle attached to his left eye.
‘I want to see Crane.’
The man gave him a kindly smile. ‘Oh, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’
‘He’s not here?’
‘Mr Crane has asked not to be disturbed.’
Pyke pushed past him and made for the back of the shop, shouting Crane’s name. He had made it as far as the staircase when a man appeared at the top of the stairs, his face displaying a mixture of curiosity and irritation.
Crane cut a dashing, rakish figure and looked younger than his forty years. His hair was ink-black and his skin was smooth and free from wrinkles. He had full, plump lips and a leering, sensuous smile that put Pyke in mind of Pierce Egan’s Corinthian rakes Tom and Jerry: the kind of man who both looked down on the filth and degradation around him, yet wallowed in it, too. Dressed like a dandy, he wore a tight-fitting brown frock-coat, a frilly white shirt, blue cravat and matching waistcoat over brown trousers.
Behind Crane, silhouetted at the top of the stairs, was a much burlier, rougher creature, waiting to be told what to do.
‘To what do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Crane spoke in a clipped, polished accent, his tone, dripping with condescension.