A fellow came in late and chose a seat at the end of a bench three rows below Daniel. It was another Nonconformist, dressed all in black, with a broad-brimmed hat. He was carrying a basket, which he set down on the bench in front of him, between his feet.
The gentleman who’d come out in the coach stood up, resting a scarred hand on the pommel of his small-sword, and stared at the newcomer. Daniel found the gentleman’s profile annoyingly familiar but could not quite place him. Whoever he was, he was clearly of a mind to go and eject this Nonconformist, who was as out of place here, as he would have been at the Vatican. The only thing that held him back-literally-was his companions. The ladies seated to either side of him exchanged a meaningful glance behind the skirts of his coat, then reached up in perfect unison, as if they were mirror images of each other, to lay gloved hands on the gentleman’s forearms. The gentleman did not take kindly to this at all, and shook his arms free with such violence that Daniel flinched, afraid that the fellow was going to elbow the ladies in the faces.
This imbroglio-in-the-making was interrupted by an announcement that “The Duke of Marlborough” was in the house. Everyone save the gentleman, Daniel, and the Nonconformist cheered. A score of groundlings were shooed out of the path of a gaudy-painted cart, a booth on wheels, which was being backed into the ring with a ponderous slowness meant to build excitement and enhance wagering.
The gentleman, preparatory to sitting down, put his hands on his arse to smooth the skirts of his coat. He glanced back behind the stands and looked moderately surprised. Daniel followed his gaze and noticed that the coach-and-four was no longer there. For this, the most plausible explanation was that the coachman had decided to move to some place quieter and not so crowded with Bankside rabble; it was certainly the case that many horses would be spooked by the entertainment that was about to begin.
Daniel turned back to look at the gentleman, who patted his belly, blindly groping up the length of a fat golden watch-chain that traversed his brocade vest, and pulled a time-piece out of a wee pocket. The watch-chain had several shriveled brown charms dangling from it-rabbits’ feet? The gent flipped open the lid of the watch, checked the time, and finally sat down.
They had missed nothing: only a mock-pompous ceremony of dragging a length of chain out from under the door of the wheeled booth, and fixing it to a massive stake driven into the ground. Now, finally, the door could be opened to reveal the Duke of Marlborough. And here was where Mr. Kikin and his companion suffered a great let-down. For the Duke might be large, by the standards of European black bears, but he was a runt compared to the brown Siberian monsters that chased people around Muscovy. Worse yet, when the Duke’s muzzle was pulled off by an intrepid trainer, and he opened his mouth to roar, it was obvious that his fangs had been filed down to harmless nubs.
“The Duke’s most fearsome foes: Harley and Bolingbroke!” shouted the master of ceremonies.
A pause for effect. Then the door of an enormous kennel was winched up, like the portcullis of a donjon. Nothing happened. A squib exploded inside the kennel. That did the trick: out came Harley and Bolingbroke, a matched set of poodles with white periwigs strapped to their heads. They rushed out half-blind and deaf, and went separate ways; Harley headed for the edge of the ring, Bolingbroke for the center, where the bear knocked him down with one blow of his paw, then rolled him over on his back and brought the other paw down with a sort of scooping motion.
A big spongy piece of poodle viscera was silhouetted against the white sky. It was throwing off a helix of blood-spray as it spun end-for-end. It seemed to be hanging motionless in the air, which gave Daniel the idea it was headed straight for him; but then it plunged and struck, with palpable momentum, into the bodice of the powder-blue silk gown currently being worn by one of the gentleman’s two lady companions. From there it tumbled into her lap and lodged in her skirt, between her thighs. Daniel pegged it as a lung. She had the good sense to stand up first, and scream second.
This performance, from the detonation of the squib to the almost as explosive ovation given by the groundlings in acclaim for the lady’s role, covered an elapsed time of perhaps five seconds.
The one lady now had to be taken aside and comforted by the other. As their coach had gone missing, this had to be done there in the stands, in full view of all present. It made a sort of side-show to the long-awaited main event: the big dogs were unleashed into the ring. First King Looie and King Philip. They made straight for the bear, until the bear noticed them and stood up on its hind legs; then they had second thoughts, and decided to see what might be achieved with a hell of a lot of barking. Marshall Villars and King James the Third were then let go, and pretty soon it had begun to look like a fight.
The crowd of groundlings were now in a frenzy equal to that of the animals. So much so that they did not notice, for several seconds, when the dogs and the bear stopped fighting, and began to ignore each other. Their muzzles were down in the dirt.
The dogs’ tails were wagging.
The crowd stopped shouting, almost in unison.
Bits of red stuff were hurtling into the ring from somewhere near Daniel, and plumping into the ground like damp rags.
All eyes noticed this and back-traced the trajectories to the Nonconformist. He had stood up and set his basket on the bench next to him. Daniel noticed now that the basket was blood-soaked. The man was pulling great hunks of raw meat from it and hurling them into the ring.
“You men, like these poor beasts, do fight for the amusement, and toil for the enrichment, of men such as this wretch-Mr. Charles White-only because, like these beasts, you are hungry! Hungry for succour, of the physic, and of the spirit! But prosperity temporal and spiritual is yours to be had! It falls from heaven like manna! If you would only accept it!”
To this point the meat-flinger’s performance had been entertaining, after a fashion, and they’d particularly liked it when he’d called a gentleman a Wretch to his face. But in the last few moments it had taken on the aspect of a sermon, which the groundlings did not care for at all. They all began to murmur at once, like Parliament. Daniel for the first time questioned whether he would get out of Rotherhithe today in one piece.
Mr. Charles White-perhaps asking himself the same question-was sauntering diagonally across the stands, casting meaningful looks at several of the blokes who were running the place. From this, and from what the meat-flinger had said, Daniel collected that White was the owner, or at least the backer.
“Splendid proposal, old boy! I do believe I’ll take a bit of this, thank you very mumph.” White’s final word was muffled by the Nonconformist’s left ear.
Now, the removal of said ear was a close re-enactment of a similar undertaking Daniel had witnessed twenty-odd years earlier, in a coffee-house. The hand that gripped the victim’s head, twisting him this way and that to worry the ear off, still bore an ugly stigma from Roger Comstock’s dagger. Daniel had no desire to see such a thing again. But the groundlings were fascinated. This was in other words a shrewd bit of crowd control on White’s part, in that it gave his audience some value for their money; the only value they were likely to get, today.