The Last Suitor. A J McMahon
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side where he knocked on a door. A panel in the door slid back, a face appeared to inspect the arrival, and with a rattle of bolts the door was opened and No Tin and his men went through.
No Tin and his men walked along a corridor toward Jolly’s room, their feet dragging a little as they neared an occasion they dreaded. Jolly’s door stood open as always. No Tin stopped ten paces from the open door and pulled on a cord hanging down from the ceiling. A far-off tinkling sound was promptly followed by a bell ringing beside No Tin, signalling permission to enter. No Tin and his men moved forward and entered Jolly’s room.
Stepping into Jolly’s room was like stepping into a red cave. The walls were covered in plush red velvet; the curtains were made of more red velvet; the ceiling was painted red, with golden chandeliers hanging down; the floor was covered in a variety of red carpets, and the large painting on the wall behind Jolly’s desk showed a volcano belching red flames and dark clouds into the air.
Mr Frank “Jolly” Jollison looked up as they entered, smiling, and obviously in a good mood. No Tin knew that this good mood would not last given the news he brought. ‘So how’s pickings?’ Jolly asked them, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumb to remind them, even if unnecessarily, such was his good mood, that pickings meant money.
‘We was robbed,’ No Tin told him, angry and fearful at the same time.
Mr Taggart “Tagalong” Longman happened to be there that night, sitting at the side, and on hearing this, he threw back his head and laughed.
‘Think it’s funny, do you?’ No Tin snarled, giving him a look sharp enough to cut him open.
‘Funny?’ Tagalong queried. ‘My dear man, it is hilarious.’
‘Robbed?’ Jolly queried in his turn, his eyes narrowing and his face becoming an angry mask. ‘You trying to pull a fast one, No Tin? Is that what you’re about? Because let me tell you what I’ll do to you, you bag of pigeon excrement.’ Jolly then detailed a number of physical procedures that he was about to apply to No Tin that were no less unspeakably brutal than they were unimaginably painful.
No Tin knew this was not idle talk and so he hastened to explain. ‘We was robbed,’ he said again, and the nods and dispirited demeanour of his men backed up his claim.
‘Who robbed you?’ Jolly asked.
The same question had been on No Tin’s mind. ‘We dunno, boss,’ he said. ‘There was these two gents walking down Octave Alley, all peaceful like they were out for a stroll, and then one of them, he didn’t do nothing, but the other one, he just took us all down. You never saw nothing like it, nothing.’
The vigorous nods of No Tin’s men throughout were like a silent Greek chorus, but then Helmold “Mould” Nowles, the man with the scar, spoke out, ‘He just took us all down, then he just cut No Tin’s wand just like that!’ He clicked his fingers in the air for extra emphasis.
‘He was like nothing else, boss,’ Gregory “Grog” Caley added, determined that the unbelievable wandfighting ability of their would-be victim would fully justify their failure to bring home the expected ill-gotten gains of that evening. ‘It’s no-one could take him down, no-one, I’m telling you.’
It took some time for Jolly to get the full story from them, for his men were more at ease with the application of violence than with the ordered presentation of facts, but in time he came to be fully informed as to what had happened.
Jolly sat there for a while, thinking about this. The others in the room knew better than to say anything at a time like this, so they waited in silence.
Jolly had clawed his way up from the bottom of the gutter to be, if not out of the gutter, at least perched on its rim enjoying the good things of life. He was a rich and powerful man who ruled the underworld of New Landern. In his own way, he was as rich and powerful as the grandees of New Landern, who were its rulers, except that his wealth and power were not expressed in exactly the same way. Like the ruling class of New Landern he had plenty of strada in cash, and like them he also owned properties, and like them he had those who served him, and like them he had a position to maintain which was dependent on the integrity of his reputation. But there the similarities ended, for where they paraded around in the sunlight he lived in the shadows; where they were multiple, he was singular, for he did not allow the existence of rivals; where they prided themselves on being known to all, Jolly made no external show of his existence. Most of the ruling class of New Landern, living as they did in their fine houses, had never heard of him. Those who had heard of him were either involved with the processes of law and order or were themselves visitors to his underworld to partake of the pleasures of gambling and prostitution which he controlled.
Jolly knew what he was and where he was and he was satisfied with that. No-one crossed him and it was important that no-one should ever do so. Jolly knew that what had happened tonight to No Tin and his men was more than an inconvenient loss of money. It was a direct threat to Jolly’s power. He knew that the story would be all over New Landern in a flash, and people would fall over themselves laughing, just as Tagalong had done, and the joke would be at his expense. Jolly knew that once people started laughing at him, it was the beginning of the end.
The question was: could he stop the story getting out? Jolly knew that if he forbade No Tin and his men from telling anyone what had happened, they would fail to obey his order. There were five of them, with all of the companions which that entailed, plus the loose talk of drunkenness; it would only be a matter of time before his order was disobeyed. He would then be in a position of having been failed to be obeyed which would weaken his authority. Jolly was wise in the matter of ruling men and women. He knew that authority depended as much on what orders were not given as on what orders were.
Jolly came to his decision. ‘Be here at six o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he told his men coldly. ‘Now get out!’
10: 20 PM, Monday 2 May 1544 A. F.
Nicholas was young and naïve, but he was also intelligent enough to know that he was young and naïve. He knew as he and Ben walked away from Octave Alley that he was in a situation that required an alert attention to detail and context rather than a reliance on past preconceptions. He stole a look at Ben as they walked along. Ben’s face was set in shock and his posture rigid. Nicholas decided that it might be wisest to say nothing to Ben right now so the two of them walked along in silence.
Nicholas surreptitiously checked his wand now and then to track the movements of the five robbers they had left behind them. Whether or not they were sufficiently intimidated by his wandfighting prowess to now leave him alone or whether they would seek revenge, was an unanswered question. He decided as he walked along that he needed to know more about them, which was why he was checking their movements. Although he could detect wands at a distance, using a secret of wandlore that went back to the first baron Daniel himself, he could not identify them, so the only way for him to know which of the hundreds of thousands of wands flickering in his mind like fireflies in the macchato space of New Landern were the four wands of the five robbers was by tracking them continually. This was why he had so generously returned the wands of the robbers to them by throwing the wands on the ground.
As they neared Grenville Street Nicholas suddenly stopped and said, ‘Oh, no, I forgot.’
‘You forgot what?’ Ben asked, coming out of his reverie.
‘Never mind,’ Nicholas said, who couldn’t be bothered to try to make something up right then. ‘You go on ahead. I won’t be long.’ With that, he turned and walked away. Ben called after him, but Nicholas ignored him.
He tracked the robbers he had fought in Octave Alley as he walked along, always able to keep out of sight, until they arrived somewhere and their movements were much slower and jerkier, as if they were entering a building of some kind. Nicholas fixed their location and made his way towards it. As he came around the corner, Nicholas realised the men he was following had gone into the large building ahead of him. The building had a sign hanging off a pole jutting into the street which showed a rosy-cheeked man with a rural smile holding a tankard of beer in one hand and a hunk of cheese in the other. Above