At a commotion in the doorway, the artist turns his attention away from his companion and toward the troupe pushing inside, singularly out of place, he would say; for like him, they appear to be people of quality. Three men: one tall and thin, one short and fat, and one mature, accompanied by a perfectly delightful young woman (who has the good breeding to look appalled), and rear-guarded by a portly, redheaded capital-looking fellow, holding high a white ferret. Why, this must be the owner of champion Mike. How rich! He has been hogging a table near the pit, but on seeing this fascinating entourage, he beckons them over to join him.
“There’s a table,” Miss Watson points out, relieved to see one genteel face in this wretched establishment.
“Take it! Take it!” Whilky shouts over the crowd. “I’ll put up this dress and join you in a minute. What would you like to drink? First round’s on me.”
As he orders up three ales and a lemonade, the actors from “Cholera Morbus” make their way through the crowd to the free seats pit-side.
“Glad to make your acquaintance, glad to make your acquaintance,” the gentleman gushes as introductions are made all around. “Couldn’t help but notice that you looked a touch out of place.”
“Out of place?” Miss Watson exclaims, rolling her pretty brown eyes. “If Desdemona might be considered ‘out of place’ among the Moors.”
“You are of a theatrical bent, I see,” smiles the young man, congratulating himself on his acuity. “You are perhaps thespians by profession?”
“How discerning!” Miss Watson turns to the others in amazement. “We were just on our way to London, but—”
“No! Don’t tell me!” The young man throws out his hand to stop her. “Just tell me how close I come.” He studies each face closely for a moment, then closes his eyes and begins.
“You are a talented troupe of players, performing in all the grand houses of England and Europe, feted by the press, toasted by your aristocratic audiences. You might play any theatre you desired, in any kingdom, for any price—but. Not content to gratify the rich and powerful only, you feel a need to take your work to the People, to give a little back to the Dispossessed of this great country, and so you come here to stage a masterpiece, something edifying and ennobling—a gift to the common crowd. But how could you know that at last you have reached a town without a soul, a town without the faintest stirring in its thick, barbarian chest? You play your hearts out, giving the performances of your lives—trying, trying to reach them—but do they appreciate you? No! They yawn and boo, too bestial to realize your transcendence. With the last of your meagre resources, you’ve booked passage to London, where at least intellect will come if the call be given. You’ve been brought here to await your coach by that man who accompanied you—owner of Mike, Champion Ratter, who is favored to beat Banquo, Fat Tom’s Border collie!”
On that triumphant note, the young man finishes, to the applause of a deeply impressed Miss Watson. Except for the part about a masterpiece, this gentleman was uncannily correct. What a relief it will be to reach London and take up their work again there.
“I am amazed. Simply amazed,” Miss Watson breathes. “Mr. Mortimer, has this young man not been spying on us for a week?”
“Indeed, it seems he has,” replies the credulous old gentleman. “Pray, sir, what is your profession? Are you not a spy?”
The young man shakes his head. “Call me a spy if you will, sir. If so, it is only into human nature. I am a Student of Life—no more can I claim. I’ve come here to add to my book on the workingmen of England: their pursuits and their pastimes, their dreams and disappointments. By chance I learned of this ‘event,’ and knew my book would not be complete without a section on the prototypical pastime of Ratting.”
“Ayr ye speaking of my Mike?” Whilky Robinson asks, approaching the table laden with drinks. “There was no lemonade, miss,” he says respectfully to Miss Watson. “I got you a sherry instead. Whoever’s laid no money on my Mike’s got no right to speak of him.”
“Let me remedy that immediately, sir,” says the Student of Life gallantly. “Five shillings to win.”
“Tha’s the spirit,” shouts Whilky, who gets part of his brother’s house cut on all wagers, plus whatever pot Mike should win. “Ye’re a fine lad!”
“And for my five shillings, sir, would you allow me the honor of interviewing Mike’s owner?”
“Me? Fer what?” asks Whilky suspiciously. “Ayr you with the census?”
“Good God, no!” exclaims the Student of Life. “I am writing a book on the common man, so that his more fortunate brothers might know and understand his ways. I dream of a bridge spanning the great gulf that yawns between rich and poor, and hope to lay the keystone, if you will, with my humble book.”
Whilky looks doubtful, but it is flattering, after all, to be put in a book, and who knows, if the book is published and people read it, they might find their way to his lodging house, and that would be good for business. With that in mind, Whilky agrees; the other gentlemen settle back to listen, but Miss Watson, wanting nothing less than to hear this cretin’s life story, picks up the Student of Life’s discarded newspaper and peruses the advertisements.
“Now then,” says the excited Student, “how old are you?”
“Forty-three,” Whilky lies, being but forty-one. It is a harmless lie, one that matters not at all, but that is why it is fun to tell it.
“And you are a ratter by profession?”
“No. I am—”
“Wait! Let me guess!” the Student of Life interrupts his own interview mid-sentence, and begins sketching as he speaks. “My new friends here can tell you how good I am with histories. Now let me see. … Judging from your cocksure swagger and that scar behind your ear, I would wager you spent some time as a highwayman, am I right? A regular two-pistol, cutlass-carrying outlaw, sticking up coaches along the Great Northern Road! You were quite abandoned, don’t deny it. One day, as I see it, while in the process of robbing the mail coach, your cutlass nicked the throat of a young lady and she quickly bled to death. You grabbed the basket at the poor lady’s feet and immediately rode off, consoling yourself with thoughts of her riches. How startled were you then, when tearing open the basket you found not precious booty, but a sickly mother ferret, nursing four squirming young! Your murdered lady had stopped the coach not three miles back to rescue this weasel family, and was going to turn them loose on her estate. You were about to strangle the wretched creatures in your rage, when one—Mike, your future companion—looked up and licked your hand. In that moment your hard heart melted. I shall raise up these poor foundlings, you vowed, and forswearing banditry altogether, you have learned to find your thrills not on the road, but in the Ring!”
Whilky stares at the triumphant Student of Life incredulously, then down at his drawing. It is vaguely himself set upon a horse, holding a pistol in one hand and a basket of ferrets in the other. For the first time in his life, Whilky Robinson is speechless.
“Is he not amazing?” asks elderly Mr. Mortimer, having sat enraptured by the story.
“I think you’d make a fine subject for a play,” interjects Mr. Eliot wickedly. “I imagine your character—played by myself—a virile highwayman and champion ratter, secretly loved by a thorny English rose of high family—naturally, played by Miss Watson—whom you spurn but ultimately enslave.”
“I like it! I like it!” Whilky nods. “My late wife was the natural daughter of the vestry treasurer.”
“If you want a subject for a play, here is a far more suitable one,” Miss Watson interrupts, folding the newspaper to display a printed petition, and imagining herself in the role of its authoress. “Here is theatre taken from real life: a woman sacrifices herself and her own reputation for the sake of her fiancé, a struggling and misunderstood doctor. You could put one of your signature bad-taste touches upon it, Mr. Eliot, and torture it into a fine little melodrama.”
“Let me see that.” Whilky ungraciously rips the paper fr
om Miss Watson’s hands. An appeal to the enlightened citizens of Sunderland, by Miss Audrey Place. This isn’t the Miss Audrey Pink has been mooning over, is it? The charity woman who is to marry the sawbones? He quickly scans the petition with its scant number of signatures and stalks away, leaving the actors and the Student of Life to wonder at his rude and abrupt behaviour.
“Give me the keys to upstairs,” Whilky demands of his brother John. “I need to check something.”
“There are people up there,” answers John.
“Just give ’em.”
John hands over the skeleton key to Gustine’s former room and the two others he rents by the hour. Whilky storms upstairs and unceremoniously unlocks the door on a lace-maker’s upturned buttocks and a red-faced apprentice’s erection.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he says, and taking up the Argand lamp from the floor, sets about scanning the old papers John uses to line the walls. The lace-maker, apprentice, and Whilky are all in luck tonight, for Gustine’s former room was papered some six months ago, and the engagement announcements from last April are pasted horizontally below the window. Miss Barrows to wed Mr. Kenneth Kitely. Miss George to wed Mr. Theodore Barkes. Miss Place to wed Mr. Henry Chiver, MRCS. There it is! Dr. Chiver of Nile Street, Sunderland, son of the widowed Mrs. Edmund Chiver. Well, I’ll be damned.
“Henry Chiver!” Whilky bounds down the steps, waving the newspaper overhead, bellowing at the top of his lungs: “Henry Chiver!”
“Henry Chiver what?” asks John Robinson, as the bar falls silent.
“Henry Chiver’s the name of the man who violated me! Henry Chiver is a bloody body snatcher!”
“He’s the one who came after me with a knife,” shouts Robert Cooley, far along in his cups. “Put me mate Jack Crawford in a vat of acid and looked to flay me alive!”
“I’ll teach him to come into my house and take my lodgers!” Whilky roars. “I’ll set the constables on him so fast he’ll wish he’d never heard of Mill Street.”
“Sorry to tell you, my agitated friend, but the stealing of bodies is not illegal.” The Student of Life has flipped back in his notebook, and is looking over some notes. “I interviewed one of your fine constables a month back about thievery and petty vagabondage here in Sunderland, and I have a whole list of things that are and are not considered property. And a dead body is not considered property.”
“You are telling me these doctors can steal our dead as they please?”
“Well,” reads the Student, “you could prosecute for the theft of her winding sheet.”
“God bloody damn!” shouts Whilky. “What is this world coming to?”
“Heigh-ho!” cries the Student of Life. “Here are the rats!”
Though Whilky seethes, the subject of doctors must be dropped for the moment while the rest of the bar turns its attention to Franklin Hobbs, Sunderland’s beleaguered rat catcher. It’s difficult to hold Mike back when he catches the aroma of panicked vermin; Banquo, too, scents his enemy, and sets up furious barking, delighting his contingency. Even Miss Watson looks up from her piece of newspaper to take a sip of adulterated sherry and watch the contestants muster. “The barbarity of it!” murmurs she to the entranced Student. “The depraved blood lust!
“Oh, but it is a necessary evil,” whispers the Student of Life, leaning in a little too close for Miss Watson’s comfort. “Did you know our scientific community estimates a typically lascivious rat pair, over the course of a year, mates no less than ten times, producing in each litter an average of twelve healthy offspring. If their libertinism be not disrupted, either by the male’s frenzied cannibalism of his young or through humankind’s intervention, within four short years the original pair of rats could claim nearly three million progeny. Imagine! And we speak only of Adam and Eve. What of all the other Romeos and Juliets, Paolos and Francescas scampering through the sewers of Sunderland? Would they not soon overrun the earth? Rat baiting is philanthropic, miss, it is merciful; why, it ranks right up there with capital punishment for the greater human good.”
Miss Watson bows to the Student’s superior wisdom, but feels the topic of rat procreation too beneath her to pursue.
Meanwhile, John Robinson, as master of ceremonies, has climbed into the pit and, without fear or disgust, plunged his hand into the cage. Two at a time he pulls fifty rats out by their tails, leaving them dazed and disoriented inside the brightly lit circle. Some of the poor gray creatures wander the ring, sitting up upon their hind legs and sniffing at the spectators; some scale John Robinson’s pant legs until he must shake them loose. Most surge together into hillocks, forcing the master of ceremonies to blow little avalanches apart, for rats hate nothing so much as being blown upon, and will scatter at human breath. Banquo strains against his collar, thrusting his long pointy snout between the pickets of the ring, for which liberty he is soundly bitten.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Rat fanciers and curious spectators!” John Robinson shouts, and the place falls somewhat silent. “Tonight, contending for the title of Crown Prince of Ratters, the collie Banquo, seconded by Tom Brown.” (Wild applause). “And Sunderland’s current champion, Mike the ferret, seconded by his owner, Whilky Robinson.” (Applause even wilder).
“Lay your wagers one and all!” calls John as the crowd tosses its meagre shillings and pennies into a corner of the ring. “Times are tight, but don’t hold that against the poor contestants.”
As challenger, it is Banquo’s privilege to go first. Fat Tom drops him in the ring and much to the audience’s delight (and his owner’s horror), the posh collie immediately retreats in terror. The lights, the noise, the mound of rats: he sniffs and retreats, jerking back in alarm when several large sewer rats break from the pack and leap for his already lacerated snout. His fear lasts only moments, though. More like the Scottish Douglas than Macbeth’s pitiful rival, he is soon seized by battle-madness and quickly becomes a fury of barking, yelping, lunging mayhem. At the side of the pit, his second, Fat Tom, shouts instructions—Drop it, don’t shake it like a rag doll, you damned dog! It’s dead! It’s dead! Move on to the next!—until his five minutes are up. Blood drips from the collie’s long matted fur, and he licks his paw where a vindictive rat locked on and wouldn’t let go. Fat Tom takes his dog in his arms, rubbing his mouth with peppermint water to ward off any abscesses, while the remaining wounded rats are dispatched and pushed aside. John Robinson tallies the dog’s official kill. Thirty-nine in all. It is a fair showing and the number to beat.
“Please, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Mortimer, Mr. Webster,” Miss Watson pleads. “May we go?”
“Go now?” asks Eliot incredulously. “Before the Highwayman Ratter Robinson has had a chance to show his stuff? Avert your eyes if you will, Miss Watson, but I would not miss this for the world.”
The dead rats swept into a corner, John Robinson counts out another fifty. All the more panicked for having witnessed their brothers’ demise, these rats tear around the ring, bouncing off one another and trying desperately to scale the sides. John calls Whilky and the current champion Mike to the ring.
“You love me, boy, don’t you?” Whilky demands, massaging his ferret’s coarse white coat. “It’s us against them, right? I want you to think of every rat like a sawbones. You get every last one,” he growls, and tosses the sleek white weasel into the fray.
In squealing terror, the rats flee Champion Mike, but he, like the dutiful son, performs exactly as commanded. One doctor. Two. In seconds, ten doctors decapitated. With the ferret’s first strike, the Student of Life’s hand flies over his pad, but as fast as he draws, his talents just aren’t up to the whiplash speed of the champion. So much closer to the rats in height, Mike does not have to stoop, but lashes forward for the strike, then is instantly on to the next. Fifteen. Twenty sawbones dispatched. Whilky shouts with glee.
“Kill ’em, Mike!”
“Crown Prince! Crown Prince!”
“Off with their heads!”
Where Banquo was all frenzy a
nd zeal, Mike is calm precision, swiftly decapitating and moving on to the next. He spares no thought for the crowd of wildly cheering patrons, feels not the rain from their sloshing mugs of beer. A champion if there ever was one; no creature alive could be more methodical and determined in the kill. The rat is my enemy, therefore the rat must die. This is how Mike dispenses justice—with no thought and no hesitation.
The Student sketches: boggling eyes and gummy snarls. An elbow in a woman’s back. A sharp knee pointing to money changing hands beneath a table. The Student sketches everything he sees. There a swinging red uvula; across the pit, flying spittle; sweat-stained armpits beside him; the arched eyebrows of the distressed actress. Like the French Revolution, so a ratting at the Labour in Vain, postulates the Student, pausing to jot a note. The poor taking their revenge on those who terrorize them. And at their center, La Guillotine Mike!