Chen repeated his attack and once more Hawkwood countered.
“Again,” Chen said patiently.
They practised the sequence a dozen times, without pause, by which time the handle of Hawkwood’s tipstaff was slick with moisture from his palm. Chen, on the other hand, looked as if he’d just awakened from a refreshing afternoon nap.
Hawkwood had often wondered about Chen’s age. The man’s features were, like his skull, smooth and hairless. He could have been any age between thirty and sixty. It wasn’t as if the city was knee-deep in Chinamen that Hawkwood could make a well-informed judgement. Lascars there were a-plenty; many of them ensconced within the East India Company barracks along the Ratcliffe Highway. But Chinamen were still something of a rarity and could probably be numbered if not on the fingers of one hand then certainly in the low rather than the high hundreds.
Hawkwood and Chen’s paths had crossed three months before at, of all places, a horse fair on Bow Common.
Hawkwood had gone there with Nathaniel Jago who, to Hawkwood’s astonishment, had expressed interest in buying a horse. He had a hankering, he’d told Hawkwood, to invest in a carriage so that he and Connie Fletcher could take five o’clock drives around Hyde Park with the rest of the swells.
Connie Fletcher was a former working girl turned madam who ran a high-class bagnio off Cavendish Square. Jago and Connie had been keeping company for nearly a year which, by Hawkwood’s reckoning, had to be some kind of record. Hawkwood had tried to envisage Jago and Connie surrounded by the cream of London society all trying to cut a dash along the tree-lined avenues, and had failed miserably.
He suspected that the idea of riding in a carriage had been more Connie’s dream than Jago’s, in an attempt to garner some degree of respectability, for when they had served together in the Peninsula, his former sergeant’s aversion to anything even remotely connected with equestrian pursuits had been legendary, and that included, in some instances, cheering on the cavalry. Horses were good for just one thing, Jago had told him, and that was as a supplement to rations, and only then if chickens were in short supply and the beef had turned maggoty.
Hawkwood wondered if this new-found hankering was a precursor to an attempt by Connie to persuade Jago to make an honest woman of her. Now, there was a thought to keep a man awake at night.
In the event, neither of them need have worried, for the quality of horse flesh on offer had been nothing to write home about: scrub horses and sway-backed mules for the most part. So, with Jago grumbling that he’d have to wait until the Barnet Horse Fair to continue his search, they’d turned their attentions to the peripheral entertainments, one of which had been a boxing booth. Other than its size – it was considerably larger than either of its immediate neighbours – there hadn’t been much to distinguish the tent from the rest of the tawdry marquees with their fortune tellers, palm readers and freak shows, had it not been for the placard above the sagging entrance which, in florid and faded lettering, proclaimed: Billy Boyd – The Bethnal Green Bruiser – Challenges All Comers!
Against his better judgement Hawkwood had allowed Jago to drag him into the tent, where they’d been confronted by the reek of stale beer and even staler bodies and a roped-off square of canvas around which a couple of dozen rowdy onlookers had, over the course of the afternoon, watched a succession of rough-hewn labourers and jack-the-lads try their hand at pummelling another man senseless; their incentive being the three guineas on offer if they managed to remain upright for the duration of the three two-minute rounds, and a five-guinea purse if they succeeded in, as the booth owner put it in his sales pitch, knocking the champion on to his arse.
Not that any of them had stood a cat in hell’s chance. Boyd, a stocky, broad-bellied mauler with a balding scalp, broken nose and knuckles lined with calluses, had stood there knowingly, hands on his hips, watching as, one by one, his deflated opponents were carried from the ring in varying degrees of pain and disability, very few of them having managed to land so much as one decent punch. Looking on, it had been hard to fathom why any man in his right mind would have wanted to climb over the ropes and take him on in the first place.
It had been the late end of the afternoon. The number of prospective challengers had gradually dwindled away and the tout had been on the verge of calling it a day, when the slight built, strangely dressed figure stepped out of the audience and made his way to the ringside.
Someone close by had let go a snort of laughter. Hawkwood heard Jago say quietly and with some awe. “Well, now, this should be interestin’.”
Without doubt, it was the orange coat with its high collar buttoned up to the chin that had drawn the eye; as bright as a sunburst compared to the clothing worn by the majority of men in the tent. The coat wearer’s looks were just as arresting as his attire.
In the booth’s dim-lit interior, his skin had seemed to be infused with an almost ethereal saffron tint. Hawkwood had also been struck by the man’s uncannily symmetrical features, in particular his oval face, shaven head and deep brown, almond-shaped eyes. His demeanour had been odd, too. There had been a curious serenity in his gaze and a stillness in the way he’d held himself. He’d seemed oblivious to the reaction his arrival had caused, though he must have been aware of it.
“It’s a Chink!” a gravelled voice had offered helpfully.
“Well, ’e ain’t from bleedin’ Chelsea!” another wit had shouted.
“Either way,” Jago murmured in Hawkwood’s ear, “he’s a long way from home.”
The tout had looked back at his man, unable to keep the grin off his face. The response had been a dismissive shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, “He’s paid the entrance money, it’s his funeral.”
When Chen climbed into the ring, he’d done so in a hushed silence born out of the crowd’s curiosity and collective assumption that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Another challenger, who hadn’t even had the sense to remove his coat, was about to receive a sharp and painful lesson in the noble science.
“Not sure I want to see this.” Jago had been on the point of turning away. Hawkwood, though, stayed where he was. He wasn’t sure what prompted him to remain, other than the look in the Chinaman’s eyes, which had intrigued him.
At the sound of the bell, the champion had exited his corner with all the confidence of a seasoned fighter; a man prepared to give short shrift to any upstart – young or old – who had delusions of unseating him. The crowd was about to be treated not only to a contest between champion and the challenger but a pugilistic exhibition as well.
It hadn’t turned out that way.
Billy Boyd liked to toy with his opponents by allowing them a few opening punches to bolster their confidence, before returning a sequence of light, irritating taps to let them know they’d probably made the wrong decision. That was usually enough to incite the challenger into firing off a salvo of haymakers that had no hope of landing but which gave the champion legitimate rein to retaliate with increasing force. Boyd was more than happy to let the challenger think he was going to last the three rounds before finally moving in and disabusing him of such a foolish notion.
Faced with the Chinaman, Boyd, for the first time in his career, had found himself flummoxed, not least because his opponent made no attempt to attack or put up a protective guard. Instead, all he did was assume a peculiar stance not unlike some kind of strange, one-legged bird. Then, holding his right hand close to his waist in an inverted fist, he raised his left arm to shoulder height, palm open towards the champion, fingers hooked as if it were some kind of claw. Settled, features immobile, as if he had all the time in the world, he waited.
By the time Boyd realized he’d been duped, it was too late. Even as he stepped forward, drawn by this most unlikely of opponents to initiate contact instead of the other way round, some sixth sense must have triggered a warning. But by then he was already committed. Even as he aimed an exploratory