A Ruse of Shadows, page 13
How well Mrs. Watson understood that feeling of pressure, of valuable time leaking away unstoppably. A man’s athletic career might be as brief as a pretty girl’s stint on the stage, and his future almost as uncertain. “You aren’t worried about Mr. Underwood coming back and being displeased with you?”
Johnny E. began peeling peanuts again, the already shelled and uneaten peanuts in his palm having disappeared. Into a pocket? “What was I supposed to do, let my sister go hungry or stop buying medicine for my mother?”
“What about your two mates? You said you can’t afford to wait for Mr. Underwood. What about them?”
“Mumble and Jessie? They are looking for him.”
“Have they found out anything?”
“Nothing much. They spoke to his accountant and said the accountant didn’t know anything either.”
Someone brayed with laughter again, the shrillness of the sound overriding the general din of the pub. It was Mr. Gore the grocer, and he stopped as abruptly as if someone had stuffed a sock in his mouth, to stare in amazed dismay at the man with the neck tattoo.
“Do you know where this accountant is?”
“Somewhere in the City of London. Mumble and Jessie know the exact address. Do you need to talk to the accountant?”
“You never know. Sometimes an accountant knows more about a man than his wife does.”
“Well,” said Johnny E., his expression almost as blank as Miss Charlotte’s usual countenance, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
Oh, this child.
Mrs. Watson girded herself for more teeth-pulling. “So Mumble and Jessie, even though they haven’t found out much, are still carrying on with their search?”
“That’s right.”
“What propels that search? Affection or some other reason?”
“They don’t need money as much as I do. And—” He glanced at his new sponsor, who now looked as if he needed Lawson’s support to stay upright. “I’m not sure someone like Mr. Gore would have taken them on, even if they were willing to go with him—not that he was enthusiastic about me either.”
He meant that his new sponsor, the grocer, hadn’t been too happy about associating with an Italian.
“What makes Mumble and Jessie more difficult to place?”
Johnny E. looked toward the door, as if he hoped someone might show up. “Well, Jessie is a girl—some sponsors don’t want girls, and Jessie doesn’t want anything to do with most of the rest. And Mumble, you might as well know this now, Mumble is Gypsy. Or maybe half-Gypsy, but he looks all of it.”
* * *
Lawson brought Mr. Gore the grocer back just then and told Johnny it was time to prepare for his fight.
The boxer and his sponsor departed, but a good quarter hour passed before Lawson escorted the women down to a surprisingly large basement. The place must have been where a former publican had once made his own ale. But more and more pubs these days were supplied by large breweries, which negated the need for brewing equipment on-site.
Close to a hundred spectators crowded around the ringed platform, and more were coming in—still no badly scarred man. The place began to smell of too many bodies crammed too close. Mrs. Watson’s heart jammed her airways once she saw that Johnny would be fighting the man with the neck tattoo, who had five inches and ten times that many pounds on him.
The boxers entered the ring. A shirtless Johnny looked even scrawnier—hardly any muscles separated his skin from his skeleton—while his opponent was a fortress of brawn.
A bell rang, and the bare-knuckle match began.
The big man grinned, launched himself at Johnny, and knocked him to the ropes with a single blow. Mrs. Watson flinched.
Cheers erupted. Boos, too.
Were the spectators booing because they might lose their wagers or because they’d heard rumors about Mr. Underwood having used unscrupulous means to secure victories for his boxers?
The big man pursued Johnny to the ropes and punched at his face. Johnny sidestepped the attack, pivoted with remarkable speed, and while the man was still turning around, landed an uppercut to his jaw.
Lawson bellowed in approval. Mrs. Watson did not cheer; she only dreaded the next blow that would land on Johnny.
Vaguely she remembered that in her salad days she’d attended boxing matches on the arm of a protector and relished the bouts with a gleeful bloodlust. Now every time the big man’s fists connected with Johnny, even if Johnny successfully parried the blow, she felt her skin abrade, her skeleton rattle apart. Every time Johnny managed to punch his opponent, however, she was sure that it could do no more harm than a baby waving its tiny hands in the air.
“He’s no natural pugilist,” said Miss Charlotte in Herrinmore’s voice and accent.
“But what a fighter,” answered Lawson.
There was no beauty to his style, only a spectacular endurance for pain, a willpower that Mrs. Watson would have termed desperation if it didn’t also have a certain inexorability to it.
It was as if Johnny decided that he was going to outlast his opponent, and that was that.
By the end of the fight, both of his nostrils had to be plugged with cotton to stop his nosebleed, he had a nasty cut to his right cheek, and his lips, too, were swollen and bleeding, but he was still standing whereas his much more formidable-looking adversary was on the floor.
Even those who had booed him in the beginning clapped, almost as overwhelmed as the defeated man, still wheezing and gasping inside the ring.
Minutes after his victory, with the next match beginning, Johnny was already dressed and walking out, stopping only to collect the supper that Miss Charlotte had ordered, in the now largely empty taproom.
“Not staying to watch the other fights?” Lawson caught up with him, Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte trailing a few steps behind.
“My shift in the morning starts at six.” He no longer had cotton in his nose but still sounded heavily congested.
“Let me send you home in my carriage then.”
Johnny gave them a suspicious look, but the lure of an earlier bedtime overrode his reservations. “All right.”
He gave an address near Saffron Hill, less than half a mile north of where they were.
“You fought well,” said Lawson once the carriage was on its way. “If your friends are as good, I’ll be impressed.”
Johnny, who had been studying the slender, bracketed vase that held a stem of pink hydrangea, glanced at him and said, “They’re better.”
“Even the girl?” Mrs. Watson exclaimed.
“Jessie is fierce—I wouldn’t want to go up against her. And Mumble, he can tell what a man is going to do in the ring before the man has worked it out for himself.”
Lawson nodded with a credible look of satisfaction. Johnny’s face, which had remained wooden even when battered by large fists, crumpled for a moment.
Mrs. Watson’s heart clenched. This child, who was responsible for a family of five and probably had no time between work and training for his boxing matches—was it possible that Mumble and Jessie were his only friends?
“If they come to Manchester,” she said impulsively, “they’ll like it. I’ll look after them, I promise. And you can write to one another and stay in touch. It costs only a penny to send a letter.”
“People like me don’t write—and we don’t have friends in faraway places. When they leave, they might as well be dead to me.” Johnny turned his battered face back to the vase. “But I’ll take you to see them tomorrow.”
* * *
The next evening, the two women picked up Johnny, who worked as a bricklayer by day, from a surprisingly fashionable address not far from their hotel, where a row of shops had been torn down to make room for a new department store that was just beginning to take shape.
Before the boy emerged, ready to leave, Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte, who was once again disguised as Herrinmore, the nonexistent Mr. Nelson’s lackey, managed to speak to the foreman for a good quarter hour, largely due to the strength of Mrs. Watson’s smiles and the splendor of her lilac promenade gown.
Sherlock Holmes and company said nothing about boxing but passed themselves off as representatives of a certain ladies’ charity, making sure that the recipients of their largesse were working hard and looking after their families instead of squandering donated funds on drinking and gambling.
The foreman was obliging. “Ah, Johnny Esposito, good boy, that one, doesn’t say much, works fast, and builds walls better than bricklayers twice his age. You almost can’t tell he’s an Italian.”
Or rather, he used a casual pejorative for an Italian. Mrs. Watson was fiercely glad that Johnny wasn’t within earshot, even if he must have already heard too many such insults in his young life.
She had braced herself for the olfactory assault of sharing close quarters with a man who had been working outside all day, but Johnny had scrubbed himself and changed into patched but clean clothes. A trace of perspiration still clung to him, mixed with the scent of soap powder—the smell of honest labor.
“The foreman doesn’t mind your face like this, Mr. Esposito?” asked Miss Charlotte once they were in the carriage, sounding like a clergyman’s son who had gone to a second-tier boarding school.
There hadn’t been enough time for the cuts and bruises from the night before to fade.
Johnny shrugged. “I told him my old man gave me a belting, and he thought it was funny.”
Mrs. Watson didn’t think it was funny at all. Had his late father beaten him? Had he protected his mother and his younger siblings from the man’s wrath? Was that how he had acquired his remarkable capacity for pain?
“Long day for you?” she asked. The mother hen in her wished she could fold him under her wing and keep him warm and safe.
Johnny shrugged. “Same as every other day.”
Twelve long hours per shift.
He seemed to approach life as he approached boxing in the ring, with a numb endurance. Did he not want anything besides keeping his family alive?
Their destination wasn’t another gymnasium but a small meeting hall that had been hired for the evening. Chairs had been pushed to the walls, and two pairs of boxers were in the middle of sparring. Mrs. Watson’s gaze was immediately drawn to two young women, one in a tennis costume, the other in a blouse and a billowy pair of bloomers.
Both were tall, both had wide eyes and high cheekbones, both wore boxing gloves and moved fast on their feet, but it was immediately clear that one was largely defending and the other hard on the offensive.
“Come on, don’t just block. Land a blow for once!” cried the young woman in bloomers.
“Is that Jessie?” Mrs. Watson murmured.
“That’s Jessie,” replied Johnny.
“I’ll try that as soon as your fists stop flying thick as a blizzard!” retorted the other young woman, whom Johnny identified as a Miss Greengard.
Miss Greengard, despite not being anywhere as good as Jessie, was athletic and spirited. And when Jessie slowed down for a moment, her gloved fist jabbed at Jessie’s jaw. Jessie blocked it easily, but the attack earned Miss Greengard an earnest “good try.”
Her brother Mr. Greengard, on the other hand, seemed fundamentally ill at ease in a face-to-face conflict. Nevertheless he fought on, his teeth gritted, his features scrunched together in a perpetual grimace.
“Remember your feet,” said Mumble, a slender, dark-haired young man whose complexion and features reminded Mrs. Watson of the handsome population of Punjab and Rajasthan. “Relax your shoulders. Good, just like that.”
He did not mumble at all but spoke with a case of near over-enunciation, his voice surprisingly deep for one so young.
“Who are the Greengards?” asked Miss Charlotte.
“Rich people,” said Johnny simply.
He was studying the two young men. Mumble did seem to know exactly what his opponent meant to do next. And there was not only intelligence to his boxing but elegance, too: He moved with the deadly agility of a shark.
Miss Charlotte’s gaze flickered between Johnny and Mumble. Mrs. Watson noticed that Johnny wasn’t studying both the male boxers but only his friend Mumble.
“And how did the rich Greengards come to Mumble and Jessie for tutoring?” she asked.
“They came to a fight night—Miss Greengard was having trouble finding a female instructor. At the time, Mr. Underwood had only me. But after he took on Jessie and Mumble, he tracked down Miss Greengard and asked if she still needed a woman for sparring. She said yes and Mr. Underwood put her together with Jessie. And then her brother decided that he liked Mumble better than his own instructor.”
Miss Charlotte hooked a thumb on the fob chain of her watch. “Is this why Mumble and Jessie aren’t as desperate to find another sponsor? Because they still have the Greengards as a source of income?”
“The Greengards don’t live in London year-round. But then again, Mumble and Jessie don’t need money the way I do.”
Mrs. Watson cast another glance at Johnny; he was again looking at Mumble.
But not for long, as the practice session finished before another ten minutes had passed—apparently the rich young people had an evening function to attend and must head home and get ready.
Once they had left, Johnny presented his friends, Jessica Ferguson and Absalom Waters, whose faces were still slightly damp from a quick washing-up, to the visitors. Miss Charlotte, after a few compliments on their dexterity as boxers, invited everyone for supper at a nearby hotel.
When they were shown into the private dining room, the boxers looked around at the silver-blue wallpaper and the large plaster medallion on the ceiling, full of swirls and curlicues. Jessie appeared pleased by the thorough prettiness of the décor, Johnny discomfited, and Mumble curious but dispassionate.
Mrs. Watson’s attention was ensnared for a moment by a brooch that Jessie wore as a hair ornament: a memorial brooch, made of loops of laminated hair that simulated the shape of a flower. The strands used in the brooch were almost the exact same auburn as Jessie’s own hair, pulled back into a large bun at her nape.
“My employer extends his apologies,” said Miss Charlotte after the company had taken seats at a table that easily accommodated twelve. “He had to go back to Manchester earlier today for business. In the meanwhile, I am to squire his beautiful lady about London and look deeper into the matter of your sponsor.”
Johnny and Jessie both glanced at Mumble, who, after a moment, said, “If you’ll pardon me for the observation, sir, ma’am, you seem more interested in Mr. Underwood than you are in us.”
Mrs. Watson’s heart plowed into her sternum, but Miss Charlotte only smiled. “Very astute of you, Mr. Waters. You see, my employer, Mr. Nelson, is the only one who can assess your merit as boxers. I cannot do that, so my responsibility is to make sure that should he take you on, he would be, in fact, acquiring assets and not liabilities.
“To assess the quality of an investment, it is best to learn as much about it as possible. For example, we know that you, Miss Ferguson, are an assistant cook at a tea shop, and that you, Mr. Waters, work as a bookbinder’s apprentice. The bookbinder is extremely pleased with your pursuit of excellence and your appetite for knowledge, Mr. Waters. The owner of the tea shop is stingier with her praise, but even she had to admit she couldn’t find much to fault in Miss Ferguson’s work.”
Johnny shot to his feet, his face ashen. “I didn’t tell them anything about you other than that you’re good boxers!”
He was speaking to Mumble. Mumble looked him over for a second, then calmly gestured for him to sit down. Johnny opened his mouth as if he wanted to further defend himself, but complied.
“Indeed,” said Miss Charlotte, “Mr. Esposito has been most discreet in his dealings with us. But none of what I said about you was terribly difficult to find out.”
Mrs. Watson, in fact, had been the one to ferret out everything today. She’d spoken to the two young people’s employers even as they were in the back working, without the bookbinder or the teahouse owner realizing that she’d sought information on a specific person at the establishment.
“So you see,” continued Miss Charlotte in her role as the quietly shrewd Herrinmore, “even though I cannot vouch for your ability as boxers, I can gauge your reliability as individuals—and you are good people to have. About Mr. Underwood, however, I have been unable to gather anything concrete. No one seems to know what he did—or even where he lived. I found a single address, a flat, but the owner said he moved out years ago and left no forwarding address. And that during the five years he lived there, he always paid rent three months at a time in advance, therefore the landlord never had reason to demand letters of character.”
“So you are looking for letters of character for Mr. Underwood?” asked Jessie. When not shouting in the middle of a bout, her voice was soothing—dulcet, almost.
Both Jessie and Mumble turned toward Johnny. There was nothing accusatory in their gaze, but Johnny still squirmed. “I already told them yesterday that he was good to us, to all three of us,” he said, again speaking to Mumble.
“I think,” said Mumble, “that our hosts wish to hear specifics.”
Johnny’s jaw moved. He stared at the finger bowl in front of him. “I don’t know that I’d have been able to keep my family alive if it hadn’t been for Mr. Underwood. Winter before last, both my mamma and my little sister fell ill. He raised my stipend so we could move to a better place, somewhere not so damp and cold. And they got better almost right away.”
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