Rebellion. James McGee

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      Chapter 2

      Hawkwood waited for the attack. He knew it was coming and he knew it was imminent. Timing his retaliation would be crucial.

      The inscrutable expression on his opponent’s face wasn’t helping matters.

      It seemed to Hawkwood that Chen hadn’t moved a muscle for at least five minutes. It was as if the Chinaman was carved from stone. Neither did he appear to be breathing hard, which was just as disconcerting, but then in their brief association Hawkwood couldn’t recall a time when Chen had ever broken sweat.

      While he, on the other hand, was perspiring like a pig on a spit.

      It wasn’t as if the room was warm. In fact, it wasn’t really a room at all. It was a cellar and it was situated beneath the Rope and Anchor public house which sat in a grubby lane a spit away from Queen Street on the border between Ratcliffe and Limehouse. Tallow candles set in metal brackets around the walls and in a wagon-wheel chandelier suspended by a rope from the centre of the ceiling were the only sources of illumination.

      The rest of the walls were bare save for a row of metal hooks by the door, from which were suspended Hawkwood’s coat and jacket and what looked like an array of farming implements and a selection of tools that would not have looked out of place in a blacksmith’s forge.

      The cellar’s flagstoned floor was covered by a layer of straw-filled mattresses, thin enough so as not to hamper movement and yet of sufficient bulk to absorb the weight of the cellar’s occupants and to prevent injury were they to stumble and lose their footing. They were also there to dampen sound.

      Aside from Hawkwood and Chen, the cellar was empty, though anyone entering who happened to glance over their shoulder towards one of the darkened corners would have been forgiven for thinking there was someone standing in the shadows watching proceedings. A closer inspection, however, would have revealed the figure to be merely a crude wooden effigy. Though even that description would have required a degree of imagination, for the effigy was in fact nothing more ominous than an oaken pillar into which had been inserted four limb-shaped spars. It had been constructed to represent a man’s body with arms extended, but to the uninitiated it looked more like a leafless tree trunk.

      Chen launched his strike. He seemed to do it with a minimum of effort and without a noticeable change of expression. In fact he didn’t so much move as flow. Candlelight whispered along the blade as the knife curved towards Hawkwood’s belly.

      Hawkwood stepped into the attack and drove the tipstaff against Chen’s wrist, turning the blade away.

      Both men stepped back.

      “Good,” Chen said softly, his face betraying no emotion. “Again.”

      Unlike Hawkwood, Chen was wearing neither shirt nor breeches but a wide-sleeved, indigo-coloured tunic cinched about his middle by a black sash. The tunic reached to Chen’s thighs. Beneath it, he wore a pair of matching blue trousers, tucked into a pair of white leggings. His feet were shod in a pair of soft-soled, black canvas slippers.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ