Twelve rats dead, thirteen, fourteen. Mr Heaton was hard up against Clara, his arm nudging hers. The cellar was delirious with desperate noises: heavy breathing, the squeals and skitterings of doomed rats, the taloned patter of dog feet, hoarse cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘There!’
It was over all too soon. Robbie lunged at the last rat, broke its back with a snap of his jaws. A great cheer went up, and the time-keeper punched his fist in the air. Clara gasped, slumped against the rim of the rat pit, whose metal surface she found she was gripping with both hands.
The aftermath was messy. Not because of blood or saliva (Robbie had been remarkably clean) but because there was disagreement among the spectators over the deadness of some of the rats. A forlorn specimen was fished from the ring and laid on the floor at the men’s feet. One man alleged that the creature only had its back broken, rendering it immobile, but that it was still alive: he had seen it choke for breath. Another man stamped on the rat’s tail, arguing that if it had any life left in it, the pain would surely summon up some reaction. There was none. A second contentious rat was retrieved from the arena, having allegedly been spotted breathing. Although limp and unconscious, it seemed to be very much alive; its abdomen was palpating visibly. Two of the men who had bet against Robbie insisted that he’d failed to kill his quota. Another man proposed that the match be resumed just for a few seconds, to allow Robbie to kill this last rat in whatever time it took – to which the two dissenters objected that it would obviously take the dog only half a second to kill a rat which was insensible, but that he ought to’ve done the job properly the first time. The rat-catcher, who had been regarding the creature philosophically all this while, suddenly bent down and slit open the rat’s belly with a knife. A grisly sight was revealed: a tangle of foetal sacs, shiny as sausages, each containing a squirming baby rat, fully-furred and almost ready for life.
‘’Ave we got a puppy wants to learn a trade?’ quipped the rat-catcher, and the good spirits of the company were restored.
With one exception. Mr Heaton left The Traveller’s Rest before Lopsy-Lou even had her chance to perform. He pleaded a stomach upset, and indeed he did look ghastly, his face a mixture of bone-white and beefsteak red. His fellow sportsmen protested that he must stay: Robbie was a champion and would surely be given a third match after Lopsy-Lou had done her dash. Lopsy-Lou’s owner hinted that Mr Heaton’s sudden illness might indicate a greater regard for his already-pocketed winnings than for the inherent value of watching two noble dogs compete. But Mr Heaton was not to be persuaded. His digestion, he insisted, was very bad. He shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was in bed within the hour.
Without speaking to each other, Mr Heaton and Clara walked side-by-side out of the pub. Mr Heaton hailed a cab at once, and for a moment Clara was afraid he would leave her standing on the footpath while he sped away. But he opened the cabin door for her, with stony-faced courtesy, and waited for her to climb in.
‘You broke your promise,’ he said, as soon as they were seated and the vehicle was in motion.
‘I forgot, sir,’ she said.
‘I reminded you,’ he said. ‘Twice.’
‘I couldn’t take my eyes off the dog and the rats, sir. It was my first time.’
He sighed deeply, and looked out the window. Night was falling. Shopworkers were hurrying home. A lamplighter was doing what seemed like callisthenics, stretching his back and arms in preparation for the task ahead.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Clara. She surmised that Mr Heaton was too much of a gentleman to demand his ten shillings back, but thought it was just as well to show contrition, so that he might take pity on her.
‘What’s done is done,’ he said, in a tone of bitter melancholy. He seemed to be retreating into a world of his own, a place where he alone could go. Clara found this more discomfiting than if he had loudly chastised her in the street.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said again, peeking surreptitiously at whether he was softening towards her. He appeared not to have heard.
The cab joined the traffic bound for Westminster, rattled across the bridge, passed the houses of Parliament. The tall buildings blocked out the sun, bringing on the night all the quicker. Mr Heaton unfastened his overcoat, unbuttoned the coat he wore underneath, and pulled out a tobacco tin from an inside pocket. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling for what seemed like a very long time, he tilted his head back against the back wall of the cabin. It was then that Clara saw the deep scar on his neck, just under his beard-line, running almost from earlobe to earlobe. The scar was perfectly semicircular in shape, except for a hiccup caused by the Adam’s apple. It was punctuated all around by other scars: cross-shaped white dots where someone had crudely stitched the gaping flesh back together. The dots looked as if buttons had once been sewn there and fallen off unnoticed.
‘What happened to you, sir?’ Clara asked.
He exhaled smoke until it hung around his head like a fog. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking his gleaming, bloodshot eyes.
‘Happened?’ he murmured absently.
‘Someone hurt you, sir.’ She pointed at his neck, almost touching him. He smiled but didn’t respond.
‘Was it robbers, sir?’
Again he smiled. ‘You might say that.’ He took the deepest possible puff of his cigarette, making it glow fierce in the dimness of the cabin.
The hansom rattled on. Through the window on her side, Clara saw a landmark she recognised from that lost period of her life when she used to meet with another lady’s maid called Sinead at a tea-room near Charing Cross Station. She knew where she was now, more or less. It wouldn’t be very long before they were back in St Giles, so she started rehearsing what her parting words to Mr Heaton ought to be, whether she should affect a breezy tone or a solemn one; whether a third apology might melt him or whether she’d milked contrition for as much as it was worth; whether she ought to suggest that they attempt to do this again next month, despite her honest intention never to clap eyes on him again. Just when she was deep in thought, debating the wisdom of perhaps giving him some sort of kiss on the cheek the instant before sprinting to her freedom, he spoke again.
‘I was in the Battle of Peiwar Kotal.’
‘How terrible, sir. Was that in India?’
‘Afghanistan.’
Clara had never heard of the place. Admittedly her schooling had been scant and she’d entered into service almost immediately afterward, and her mistress, for all her wealth, knew nothing about anything. Clara strained to recall if Mr William Rackham, her mistress’s husband, had ever uttered any informative pronouncements about Afghanistan in her earshot. But thinking of the pompous windbag who’d dismissed her with a damning letter of reference – a letter of reference so poisonous that she’d spent more than three years trying to get decent employment with it, only to be driven to her current line of work – made her deaf, dumb and blind with anger.
‘I don’t know much about history, sir,’ she said.
He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘It was last year, actually.’ Turning his face close to hers, he examined her features as though evaluating, for the first time, her desirability as a woman. ‘You think I’m an old man, don’t you? I’m younger than you are, I’ll wager.’
‘I wouldn’t wager against you, sir.’
He broke off his gaze and slumped back in his seat. His melancholy pout and wispy beard struck her, all of a sudden, as boyish. He was fine-boned and slender, after all. Whatever he’d endured in battle had added ten, twenty, thirty years onto his age.
‘How