‘Now, where might you be going, young lady?’ asks a whiskery old man. His skin on her wrist is like a leathery bark, and she twists herself free.
‘Take your hands off me!’ she snaps, her heart lurching.
‘All right, all right, nobody’s trying to interfere with you! I asked a question, that’s all.’ He slurs his words slightly but his eyes are bright and if he wanted to stop her, Cat sees, he could.
‘I’m here to see George. George Hobson,’ she says, tipping her chin defiantly. ‘He’s in there, isn’t he?’
‘What are you? His woman? Daughter? I thought he had none,’ the man asks curiously.
‘What I am to him is my business. Are you going to let me through or not?’ The man studies her for a moment, chewing thoughtfully on the bedraggled remnants of a cigarette.
‘You know what this is, do you?’ He eyes her dubiously and hooks his thumb at the door. Another roar goes up from beyond it. Cat’s heart beats faster. She clamps her mouth shut, nods briskly though she can’t think what she will find in this restricted room. ‘Go on then, but you’ll not make a scene or I’ll have you out on your ear, got that?’ He leans over, lifts the latch and presses the door open, just wide enough for Cat to squeeze through. Biting her lip, her hands in fists, she does so.
The room is blue with smoke, airlessly hot, and the ceiling even lower and all of wood, like the walls. Cat’s view is barred by ranks of men, their backs turned to her, all jostling and cheering and stamping and wincing, waving their arms, their fists, their pocket-books. Cat skirts the edge of this crowd until she spots an opening, worming her way, unnoticed, to the front. She does not recognise him at first, the smiling man who blushed when she discovered that he couldn’t read. Now he is stripped to the waist, his thick torso slick with sweat and blood. Light shines from the curves and contours of his body. His hair is plastered to his head, and blood comes freely from a cut above his left eye, drawing a bright line down to his chin. But his opponent looks in worse shape. This other man is taller than George, but does not have his solid build. His long arms are thinner, though the muscles stand out along them like knots in rope. Both of them have made their knuckles bloody red and ragged.
When his opponent lands a punch, George absorbs it with an outward rush of breath, and does not falter. He moves smoothly, weaving like a cat, ducking his head like a bird, more graceful than a man of his size should be. Cat watches him, quite mesmerised. She has never seen anybody look so alive. She breathes deeply, catching the salt of sweat on her tongue; hears the smack of bone on flesh, of knuckles sinking deep somewhere giving, and a collective groan from the crowd in sympathetic pain. Cat presses up against the ropes of the makeshift ring, grasping the rough hemp tightly in her hands as she yells out her support. How different, how powerfully real he seems, compared to the fat policemen in London; the cherubic vicar; her own thin and bony self.
Another punch and George begins to bleed from one nostril, sweat flying as his head snaps to the side. His shoulders slump and blood vessels stand proud along the muscles of his arms. Ugly pink bruises are blossoming around his ribs. But his expression is calm, one of steady deliberation. He knows, Cat senses, exactly what he is doing. What he should do next, what he has doubtless done before; all oblivious to the strain of it and the fatigue and the pain he must feel. His opponent’s face is fixed into a grimace of effort and aggression. George is waiting, she sees. Using the other man’s aggression against him. Making him feel frustrated and eager to wade in, to get the job done. Letting him land a few big punches, letting him see the path to victory, making him impatient for it, making him careless. George waits, he weaves; he blocks a blow that would have closed his right eye – just in time, letting it glance from his face as if next time he might not be fast enough. It works. The other man steps in, drops his guard, pulls back a swing that he means to be the final punch of the night. He takes a fraction of a second to wind up, to twist his whole body behind the blow. When George strikes, his arm moves so fast it’s hard for the eye to follow; an upper cut that hits the taller man under the chin with a force that snaps his head back on his neck. The man drops abruptly, stunned, and lies propped upon his elbows, all bewildered.
George stands poised, but his opponent sinks slowly onto his back, and out of consciousness. The roar goes up again, deafening, shutting out thought; and without realising it, Cat adds her voice to it, a triumphant yell for George’s victory. Money changes hands, men shake their heads, George is passed a mug of beer, is clapped on the back; somebody throws a blanket over his shoulders which he shrugs off at once, accepting instead a stool to sit down on and a tatty piece of muslin with which to wipe his face. Cat makes her way towards him, wide eyed and inexorable.
‘And I thought you such a gentle soul, when I first met you,’ she tells him, without preamble. George frowns at her for a second, then smiles, recognition flooding his face.
‘Cat Morley, who speaks so well and cusses even better,’ he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Though he is tired and bruised, there’s a gleam in his eye, and Cat recognises it. The same gleam that sent her sneaking out of The Rectory in the dark. ‘I didn’t think to see you here.’
‘There’s precious little entertainment in this town, it seems,’ she says, wryly.
‘True enough. I’d have thought you’d be kept in of an evening though, saying your prayers with the vicar and his wife?’
‘Have you been asking about me?’ Cat demands.
‘Maybe I have, and what of it? It’s you that’s come and sought me out, after all.’ George smiles.
‘True enough.’ Cat echoes him. She smiles, a quick flash of her small, white teeth. ‘Do you always win?’
‘Not always. Most of the time, though I say it myself. There’s few around here who would bet against it, but every few weeks a fellow comes along who thinks he can knock me down.’ George gestures at the loser of the fight, still lying where he went down, and apparently forgotten.
‘Won’t somebody take care of him?’
‘His people are somewhere hereabouts. They’ll pick him up by and by, if they’ve not fallen down themselves,’ George assures her.
‘So why do you usually win? That man had longer arms than you, and he was taller. But you beat him easily.’
‘Not that easily.’ George dabs at the cut on his brow, the muslin staining red. ‘What these other fellows don’t seem to know, you see, is that it’s not how hard you can hit that’ll win you the fight, it’s how hard you can be hit.’
‘And you can be hit hard, can you?’
‘My father saw to it. He trained me from an early age,’ George says, still smiling but the gleam fading from his eyes.
‘Well, my father was always kind to me, and somehow that was worse,’ Cat says, folding her arms.
‘I heard something said about your father,’ George admits.
‘Whatever it was, it was wrong, I promise you that.’ She stands in front of him, only a fraction taller even though he is sitting down. ‘So, will you buy me a drink with your winnings, or won’t you?’