The Hellfire Conspiracy (19 page)

W
E ARRIVED IN CHENEY STREET IN SCARCE
enough time to begin the match. I was still anxious to conclude my personal matter against Clay, but the combination of Ona Bellovich’s disappearance and the bullet that had grazed me was giving me a headache. I wanted to get the fight over with once and for all, even if I took a drubbing.

The German Gymnasium in King’s Cross was the cleanest athletic building I had ever seen. Where was that stale odor of male perspiration, wet towels, and old leather one always found in such establishments? Leave it to the Germans to replace it with bleach and carbolic.

Our fight, I would even say our feud, was not publicized; but a number of men had come to see the match anyway, perhaps a result of Clay’s bragging. Though this was an establishment for amateurs and betting was forbidden, it was not difficult to spot the bet takers in the audience.

In the dressing room, I found that Barker had provided an outfit for me: a pair of silk drawers in black, a white cotton singlet, and a pair of rubber gymnasium shoes. Only the gloves were old.

“The softer they are, the harder they’ll feel against Clay’s face when you put them there,” Barker explained.

“I—I don’t know what to say. Thank you, sir.”

Barker shrugged it off. Being thanked always made him uncomfortable. “We can’t have you in shabby togs. It makes the agency look second-rate.”

I felt more confident once I’d changed. Looking at myself in a full-length mirror, I could say I looked like a boxer, if only a bantamweight. I was clean-limbed, with no fat on my frame; and almost two years of training under Barker had packed a layer of muscle across my arms and chest. I was in the best physical condition I had ever been, and I prayed it would be enough.

Stepping into the ring, I began to warm up, trying to project an air of confidence. I wanted the anonymous men standing about to think I was a serious fighter, because if they were confident, perhaps it might rub off on me. Though it was far too late to say it, particularly after I’d wished so hard for this fight, I was beginning to have my doubts.

Clay came in just then, looking as superior as ever. I noticed he’d put on a stone or two since I’d known him at university, and he showed signs of dissipation. Too many rich meals, late-night drinking bouts, and keeping up with the needs of two women told in his somewhat baggy eyes and slight paunch. I’d like to say we were evenly matched, but his arms were still much longer than mine, and his many supporters in the audience told me that he still boxed here.

This was no prizefight and there was little fanfare once we entered the ring. The referee—a short, pugnacious-looking older man with side-whiskers and a truculent manner—called us together brusquely. He looked familiar, and then I realized why. Our referee was the Marquis of Queensberry himself, creator of the famous rules of boxing. He had to be a crony of Lord Hesketh, I wagered. I looked through the crowd and saw his lordship smoking a cigar at the back, speaking with a haughty fellow with curling hair and a patrician nose. The marquis told us he expected a fair fight, and we agreed and went to our corners. Cyrus Barker was in mine, I was glad to see, with a stool, a towel, and a bottle of water. He stood behind the post in his shirtsleeves, though he still looked dapper in his waistcoat. When I reached him, he turned me and whispered last-minute instructions.

“Remember, lad, let him come to you. Change positions often, left to right. Stay on the balls of your feet, and when you hit, hit cleanly and put your shoulder behind it. Throw off any clinches. Go, and Godspeed.”

At the bell, I dashed out of my corner. Clay took advantage of his longer reach early, jabbing first and following up with solid punches. I danced out of the way of most and caught him a jab once or twice. He gave me one full in the stomach; but in the next clinch, I caught him a good one in the ribs. We began to sweat though we were scarcely a minute into the fight.

“I’ll see you in the gutter yet,” he muttered under his breath.

“Only if you’re looking up,” I told him.

At that moment, I would have given even odds, but I was being optimistic. He hooked me suddenly, catching me on the side of the chin, and I felt something give in the back of my head. I still battled it out, but I felt wobbly and there was a ringing in my ears.

I switched positions, leading with my right fist, but I couldn’t remember all the things Barker had told me.
I couldn’t possibly lose,
I told myself as we pummeled each other with a flurry of ineffectual blows.
It wouldn’t be fair or just.
But as Barker has told me on numerous occasions, don’t expect fairness or justice on this side of the grave; that is what the other side is for.

Clay kept poking me with his long stinging left, but it was slowing. I batted it out of the way several times; but whenever I stepped under it for a volley of my own, there was his right, quicker and more lethal, a coiled serpent waiting to strike.

The bell sounded, and Barker shoved the stool between the ropes. I could hardly believe that only three minutes had sped by. I’d gotten in only one really clean punch, yet I had fared well enough. However, when I moved my head, I felt as if there were gravel in the base of my skull. All the while, Barker was issuing more instructions in my ear.

“Don’t telegraph your punches, lad. He can see them coming. Fire them off cleanly. When you get under his guard, hook him or give him the uppercut.”

“His right, sir,” I said, gasping for air. “It’s good.”

“Redirect it, then. Take it on the shoulder or the elbow. Then go for his stomach. Keep dancing; you’ll soon wear him out. You’re in better condition than he. Don’t swallow this.”

He put the bottle to my mouth. I swirled the water about and spat it over the ropes. Then the bell rang and I charged in again.

Palmister Clay was more confident now on the strength of the one good punch he’d gotten to my chin. I, on the other hand, was determined to shorten the odds, so there was a furious exchange of punches that we each absorbed. It was a typical amateur bout, two young men trying to prove themselves, throwing punches that landed nowhere. That is, until near the end of the round when I stepped under and gave him a smart uppercut that everyone saw. Though Clay was not rocked by it, there was an appreciative sound from the crowd.

Then disaster struck. Clay got in another jab, and when I blocked it, he came in with a right that opened up my left brow. A split brow is the end of many a fight, and I feared this was going to be one of them. Clay was the first to draw blood. Suddenly, the audience, the same men who had been cheering me on not a minute before, became a pack of baying hounds. I was now their prey.

My opponent redoubled his efforts, but I was more inconvenienced by the trickle of blood than harmed. I began an assault of my own to show him how much fight he was still facing when the bell rang again.

There were no instructions this time. A doctor climbed up into my corner and applied a hasty sticking plaster, while Barker pinched the cut to staunch the blood. My heart was pumping too hard to notice or care about the pain. I kept telling myself that this was for Jenny. Barker was mopping my face as the bell rang, and I launched out into the ring again.

Something was different about this round. My arms and legs felt sluggish, as if weights had been attached to them, and I was dizzy. Blast it, it was only a little cut. The one I had from Miacca’s bullet was longer. I launched a hook at Clay’s odious head, but he parried it easily, and his first jab knocked the new plaster off. What blood was not going down into my eye, I actually saw spraying outward in droplets. The next I knew I was against the ropes, he was assaulting my stomach, and I could do little to prevent him beyond guarding my head with my forearms. I felt my knees buckle and saw the marquis waving Clay away. He was counting me out, but it sounded like he was in the next room. I’ve been called pigheaded before, and that day was no exception. I pushed myself back onto my legs and lurched toward him again. I planned to get him with a classic combination of jab-jab-punch, when suddenly Clay’s glove came over mine and downward, a kind of reverse uppercut that landed on my chin. The next I knew, I was flat on the canvas, my head ringing. Cheers went up, and there was scattered applause. Clay had won. As it turned out, I hadn’t even been conscious during the ten count. The marquis held Clay’s arm aloft while his father, Lord Hesketh, climbed into the ring, a satisfied smirk on his face. Barker lifted me up by the shoulders and seated me on the stool a final time.

So that was it,
I thought.
I’d lost. There would be no punishment for what Palmister Clay had done to Jenny and me, no retribution for the final days we never had together, as she choked out her life in a dilapidated tenement.
The knowledge was as bitter and caustic as a draught from the Lake of Fire itself.

Barker and the physician crowded over me, blocking my vision of Clay’s triumph. I felt the tug of the needle and thread as my brow was stitched. The ring was full of gentlemen, standing about discussing the match dispassionately, as if I weren’t there. I wanted to crawl off somewhere and die. I wanted to go home and lick my wounds, not to the warehouse, not even to my room in Newington, but to Wales.

“Gentlemen!” Barker’s voice bellowed above me. I lifted my head as best I could and looked at him. He had stepped up on the outside of the corner, a foot on either side of the pole, his knees balanced against the ropes. “Gentlemen! A challenge! We demand a rematch!”

I looked at the crowd in front of me. Everyone was looking at the Guv as if he were out of his mind. I had just been outclassed, and handily. To put us together in the ring a second time seemed superfluous. The better man had already proven himself.

“What is your challenge?” Hesketh demanded. “That your boy here shall stand within the next half hour?”

That brought a rough chuckle from the crowd. I must have been a sight. Momentarily, I wanted a mirror, then thought better of it.

“I demand a rematch, sir,” Barker growled. “And I shall cover all bets myself.”

“I
SHALL COVER ALL BETS,” HE REPEATED, “AT
ten to one odds”

I frowned, or would have if my brow wasn’t filled with waxed cotton thread and covered with fresh plaster. I couldn’t believe my ears. Perhaps I was hallucinating. I was in no condition to box soon, if ever, and Barker never bet. He thought it wrong for a gentleman to make wagers of any kind. And what odds! Did he think I could improve enough to beat Clay in a month?

The men parted and Clay came closer. He wore a blue-and-red-striped silk robe over his shoulders and looked as fresh as if he’d been only skipping rope. His father, I noticed, was smiling at me in a condescending way as he came forward.

“You think your boy shall be up to it?” Hesketh asked.

“Certainly,” Barker said.

“Very well,” his lordship said, after his son nodded confidently back at him. “Where and when?”

“Here and now,” Barker responded.

“What?” Hesketh said with a laugh. “You’re mad. Your lad’s done for the night. Probably for the week.”

“Do you concede the rematch, then?”

“Of course not!” Hesketh barked. “But two more rounds and your boy could be dead. You have a responsibility to look after him.”

“My responsibility, your lordship, is my own affair.”

“But Queensberry has left. There is no official from the boxing fraternity to referee the match.”

“So much the better,” Barker answered. “The gloves are off this time, gentlemen. Anything goes, no holds barred, unless, of course, your boy is not up for such sport.”

Hesketh looked about for a second. He was considering whether to decline the rematch. After all, Clay was on top at the moment, and he knew not what dirty tricks Barker might have taught me. But no matter what the conditions, it is bad form to turn down a challenger; and by doing so he would deny the men standing there, many of whom were friends and influential men, an opportunity for what they saw to be easy money.

“Very well,” he said at last. “We accept the challenge. But who shall referee?”

“The choice is yours, sir.”

Hesketh called up the crony with whom he’d been talking to be referee, and the ring began to clear. Barker climbed down, and I pushed myself up into a standing position. I accepted the fact that, like a gladiator, I was being sent back into the ring no matter how much pain I was in. The Guv climbed between the ropes and, seizing one of my gloves, unlaced it.

“I have trained you now, Thomas Llewelyn, for almost a year and a half. You were at a disadvantage going into this match with your hands in these mitts, but they are now coming off. You came here to seek revenge today—don’t attempt to deny it—and you failed. It may be wrong of me, but I am giving you a second chance. You can trounce this popinjay, if you remember all that I have taught you. Otherwise, I shall be several hundred pounds poorer. If you don’t win this match, you might as well pack your bag and go back to Wales, for your name shall be ruined in London for years to come. Nothing you can possibly do could ever repair it.”

A bellow welled up out of my gut, all the anger that was still festering in my soul.

“No anger, Thomas, it does no good. Just get the work done. Are you ready?”

“Yes!”

“Remember all I’ve taught you, lad. Now take this man down.”

We were called into the center of the ring again, and, though he had just defeated me, there was an uneasy look in Clay’s eyes. Perhaps it was due to what he saw in mine. We went back into our corners and the bell rang. I turned and charged.

Clay, now gloveless, threw a left, hoping to open the cut over my eye again. I caught his wrist and twisted it, bending his entire frame downward. I caught him once or twice with kicks to the right side of his face, then thrust him into the corner and began to pummel him, not with gloves like sacks of sand, but with bare knuckles like grapeshot. I could not let the man land a punch. It was time to put the odious Palmister Clay out of commission.

Seizing his head with both hands I fell back with my foot against his abdomen, kicking him over me into the center of the ring. Then I rolled over, took his right arm, and thrust my feet into his chest and neck, tugging on the arm for all it was worth. The limb was about to come out of the socket. Clay’s only choice would be to tap the mat and accept defeat. Or so I thought.

Clay flailed his body about. He raised one of his legs and then brought it down hard on my chest. Once, twice. I had no choice but to let go. We staggered to our feet and without hesitation attacked at once. Gone were the gentlemanly arts of the British boxing fraternity.

“Form!” Barker growled from the sideline as he’d done a thousand times in our practices. I stepped into a cat stance, most of my weight on my back leg, arms curled in front of me. Clay threw a punch that I caught between my forearms for just long enough to kick him in a place the marquis had definitely excluded from his rules. I heard the men about us groan in sympathy and hoped I made a few men approach the bet takers in the room with changes in their bets.

Stepping gingerly now, Clay swung at my head with his right, the one that had caused such devastation earlier. I got out of the way this time, blocking it with my left, and caught him in the chest with a palm. An open hand is not a weapon in Western culture, but Barker taught me how effective it can be when thrust into a solar plexus. My opponent’s face was now scarcely a foot from mine, and there was a look on it I had never seen before: consternation. No doubt it was the same expression he had so recently seen on mine.

My mind went back two years then, to the day he’d caught me picking up a sovereign from his mantelpiece. I hadn’t actually taken it yet, but I was considering it. The coins had sat there for weeks, while my wife, Jenny, was fading away from tuberculosis, in desperate want of a doctor’s attention that I could not afford. I remember the look of triumph on his face when he caught me. I’d punched him on the chin, more a reaction of nerves than an attack; but his friends had seized me, and Clay administered a beating. Now it was my turn, but the bell rang just then.

I leaned against my corner and glared at my opponent, while Barker issued orders in my ear. I was snorting like a bull and not paying much attention. I’d become an animal. The bell rang again and I burst out of the corner.

Clay got in a few blows, but I was beyond feeling them anymore. As I was not trained completely in boxing, he was not trained in how to fight against gang members or foot-pads. He clapped me on my injured brow, hoping to open it again, but I countered with a chop to the mastoid that felled him. I stepped away reluctantly, hoping he wouldn’t get up. The referee moved forward and began to count him out. Clay was game, however, and up again at the count of three.

Clay jabbed at me again, but his arms were getting tired. I lashed out with a perfect right, an actual boxing move that caught him on the tip of his pointed chin. He stepped back, but I followed and caught him a second right on the temple. Then, as we each took one more step, I swung my left out in a perfect arc, a move I didn’t think I had in me. My hand turned mid-motion, knuckles out, and I raked Clay across the nose. I watched him go down. He was out cold before he hit the canvas.

There was silence, then a cheer. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps some of the men in the room did not care for the bullying ways of Clay
père
or
fils,
that perhaps they found the duo as odious as I. I moved back as his lordship’s friend stepped in and reluctantly counted Clay out. Then he raised my sweaty arm just long enough to show I’d won, and turned back to Hesketh’s side. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by men shaking my hand and pounding me on the back.

I nodded and grinned away at the men chattering in my face. My stitches had come loose and I was bleeding again, so I was led over to the doctor for more patching. Barker mopped my face with a slight smile under his brush of a mustache, like he’d known I’d win all the while.

“How’d I do, sir?” I finally asked.

“Terribly,” he informed me. “Your form was sloppy and your moves erratic. It’s a wonder he didn’t see every move coming. But, all in all, satisfactory.”

This is what counts as high praise with Cyrus Barker and I drank it in like wine. Effusiveness is not one of his qualities. It is a sign of the drubbing I’d taken that I stood still for stitches with no anesthetic. Had the doctor tried it that very morning in the warehouse, I’d have protested to high heaven.

Barker arranged with one of the well-established betting gentlemen to deliver our winnings to our offices the next day. I could no more imagine the Guv walking about with a bag full of gambling swag than I could the Archbishop of Canterbury, but I knew he hadn’t done it out of the desire for money. Rather, he’d risked the loss of it for me. He’d given me the opportunity to lay to rest a ghost that had haunted me for over two years.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, but the doctor took the remark for himself.

“Not at all. You’ll be right as rain in a few days. Take it easy and rotate your head slowly every couple of hours or your neck muscles will seize up. You’ll be black and blue and three shades of purple come morning, but I reckon you’ll live.”

“Come, lad,” my employer said.

Barker led me back to the dressing room. My muscles were seizing up by the minute and I needed help getting into my clothes. After that, we stepped out into the blessed cool air of a July evening. The Guv helped me into a hansom and out of it again when we reached Green Street. I vaguely recall shrugging into my nightshirt before settling onto the hard, lumpy mattress and into a deep sleep.