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СКАЧАТЬ him a quick smile and ducked inside the public house.

      Hilditch descended the last few steps and regarded the boy. ‘I suppose you are hurt?’

      The boy dusted off his thin clothes and shrugged. ‘That wasn’t hardly nothing. I’ve had wuss’n that. It’s all over anywise. I won’t remember this once it starts upstairs.’

      They pushed past the men at the doorway and others who lined a cramped corridor and entered a packed bar room in which was a crush of bodies and a fug of tobacco smoke, stale beer and unwashed linen. Glasses toppled from slops-laden tables as Henry Hilditch was drawn through a mangle of sandy corduroy, scarlet uniform and spittle conversations.

      ‘Is this the singular spectacle we have come far to see? These people, this pandemonium?’ Hilditch shouted, for the bar room was loud with cursing and laughter, soldiers’ songs and the insistent barking of dogs.

      ‘Just you foller me and you’ll see,’ the boy called back as he held open a door.

      They mounted a narrow staircase and entered an upper chamber whose area had been greatly enlarged by the removal of a central wall, which arrangement obliged those passing the length of the room to step nimbly through the surviving uprights of a timber frame. Old doors and timbers mounted upon barrels served as tables, and on rough-hewn chairs and makeshift settles were already installed some thirty-five or forty patrons all contributing to a bedlam of chatter and contention. Beyond the timber wall-frame was a room in which more men were grouped about a cleared area of better illumination.

      The boy showed Hilditch to a table where an army officer in an unbuttoned tunic sat already and on which there seemed little room for anything more than the Staffordshire bull terrier which stood upon it. The soldier, prising open its jaws so that its saliva pooled on the table, acknowledged Hilditch’s arrival with a curt nod as he conversed with a smock-coated man who held his hat doffed beneath his arm.

      ‘Strong teeth, you’ll agree, Cap’n?’ He parted the dog’s legs and cupped pendulous testicles in his hands. ‘Two onions in a string bag, eh? He’s all dog, Cap’n, just what you want for the fancy!’

      The soldier, applying a flaring Lucifer to his pipe of tobacco, kicked the dog from the table and rested polished boots in its place. He removed the pipe and spat out a shred of tobacco. ‘Teeth and testicles are very well, but many’s the good-looking cur that hasn’t earned his meat when set to it.’ He turned to Hilditch. ‘What say you, sir?’

      Henry Hilditch struggled to sort and arrange the loud tumult of strange sights and sounds: the shifting curtain of corduroy, fustian and bombazine; the children appearing with tankards of ale and disappearing with pots and coins; the abnormal number of dogs straining on strings or held in their owners’ arms, or peering out from under coats, whose apparent ancestors – petrified in a full range of aggressive poses – were preserved and displayed in glass cases on shelves above.

      The soldier nudged Hilditch. ‘Well, sir, what say you? Which is the top dog tonight?’

      ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Hilditch, as if he would much rather avoid conversation and be left to himself.

      The boy, who had been awaiting a convenient moment to speak, now held out a hand to Hilditch. ‘You’ll feel more yourself with a drink inside you. A gent like you would take some port, I ’spect? Or maybe some French brandy? Give me a bob or two and I’ll see to it.’

      The soldier’s moustache brushed Hilditch’s ear. ‘You keep close, is that it? Well, that might be the wisest course.’

      The boy was tugging upon Hilditch’s sleeve like a restless puppy. ‘Drink, sir? There’s champagne, I believe.’

      ‘Champagne, that’s the ticket, eh!’ said the officer. ‘No beer and porter for us, eh, sir?’

      ‘What will it be, sir, brandy or champagne?’ said the boy, extending again his small hand.

      ‘No drink,’ said Hilditch. ‘Not while I am about my business.’

      ‘What’s that? You’ll not take a drink with Jack Ratcliffe of the Life Guards?’

      ‘No drink, thank you,’ said Hilditch, and in retreating behind his coloured spectacles provoked the soldier to swear and then to rise unsteadily.

      ‘Rum sort of fellow you are, sir,’ he said and stepped through the frame and into the area beyond, in which someone was ringing a bell. The boy remained at Hilditch’s side and sighed theatrically. ‘It is conventional to take a drink first,’ he declared. ‘You must have the drink, you know.’

      ‘This has been a mistake,’ Hilditch was saying as the noisy crowds about him pressed into the adjoining chamber. Some peered at him closely as they passed and others laughed at remarks made by the captain which evidently had concerned the newcomer. Even when abroad, Henry Hilditch had never felt such a stranger. He realised that he had been unprepared for such an Odyssey and wished for nothing more than to be safely returned to the West End. When he had first taken in this room, he had been delighted at the abundance of exotic subjects, any one of whom would most likely make a memorable portrait for the Messenger. Thoughts of over-leaping Henry Mayhew had raced through his mind. He saw An Entomology of the Working Classes, by Henry Hilditch. And if just one of these denizens of the streets and alleys of the East End had noticed a strange girl newly come among them … But as quickly as these thoughts fled had come the unsettling fear that he had crossed some invisible line and that his presence here was suspected and unwelcomed by all about.

      ‘If you will just see me back upon the high road …’ he said to Daniel, but immediately he was swept up by the tide of men and women who were crowding through one room and into the other, where, guided by the boy, he now found himself pushed and pulled until he was pressed hard up against the wooden siding of a circular pit about twelve feet in diameter. The pit was empty, though about its walls men were wedged tightly and behind them were others, pushing, shuffling and arranging themselves into positions of better vantage. The larger part of the audience stood upon furniture, sat upon a billiard table or swung their legs from the sills of high windows. Hilditch, hot about the collar, feeling not only the discomfort of his own strangeness, was nauseous too as he breathed the cloying atmosphere of decaying teeth, poor ale and dogs. As he became more accustomed to the scene he perceived that the only object of any interest at that moment to those other spectators whose pipes and elbows hung over the siding was himself.

      ‘’E won’t see much with ’is blinkers on!’ commented a stout woman as someone at Hilditch’s back ran a hand over the pile of his coat and observed that it must have cost a bob or two. It was unbearable to be the focus of such attention and to feel like a bug under glass and yet, Hilditch mused, perhaps, in their own way, these people were admiring him. They had already marked him as different. Conceivably, they might think him a princely stranger come among them for a mysterious purpose. Preoccupied in this way, a sudden blow to his shoulder took him unawares.

      ‘Mind yer back!’

      Unnoticed by Hilditch, a man carrying another, larger dog had made his way through the crowd behind and now knocked him roughly as he passed. The dog was offered over the barrier and dropped into the pit.

      ‘Here’s a capital dog for someone,’ said William Saggers as he stood in the centre of the ring, which was lit from above. He uncoiled a length of rope and threw it over an oak beam, from which depended a great iron fitting with six flaring flames. No sooner was the rope tied off than the animal broke free, leapt into the pit СКАЧАТЬ