Factotum

taffies and glairs for them all.

'Perhaps our new friend might better like the entertainments below…,' Avarice offered, only somewhat mollified at his largesse, her voice heavy with suggestion.

'Um… yes, certainly.' Rookwood rose. 'Collect your earnings, Master Bookchild; allow me to show you the other delights here.'

'I shall come with you,' Eusebus declared. 'I always do better at dogging than the table, anyway…'

Gathering his winnings by shaking handfuls into the ample pockets of his gorgeous new coat, Rossamund followed the two young men out. Going by stairs to the floor below, his two hosts led him along a broad passage and down a double flight right into the foundations of the Broken Doll.

'If my sire had sent me to the abacus to learn counting as I had wished for, rather than the athenaeum,' Eusebus whispered drolly to Rossamund on the way, 'I would do better at the table, I am sure.'

'Certainly, Master Euse,' came Rookwood's quiet rejoinder. 'Yet if you were a mathematician they would never let you within sight of a table.'

'So the Lots have spoken, then!' his lanky friend retorted. 'Like my nanny-pander used to sing me:

Multiplication is vexation, Division is as bad The Rule of Three doth puzzle me And practice drives me mad!

Alas, I am a student of nature now. Better dogging for me, brother!'

The pair of young swells laughed as they halted two floors lower before a pair of heavyset footmen standing guard over an ironbound door. One footman was holding the portal open for a couple emerging from the dark beyond, the woman in her tentlike finery clearly upset, hiding her blotched cheeks behind a frilled kerchief. 'Why did you bring me here?' she was demanding, voice tremulous. 'Why did you bring me here? I'll never be able to forget that poor-' A sob rendered the next few words unintelligible. 'I'll be telling Mother-make no mistake, sir!'

Her partner in neat velvet frock coat was bent about her, muttering rapid apologies. 'I thought it might be a lark, a variation on the usual salons… The Archduke himself is rumored to come here on occasion-even owns a share here! And you so often complain of the tedium of our usual settings… Don't tell your mother-we shall go to Sachette's next vigil's eve and you shall order whatever you will from the vin-compte…' He gave Rossamund a brief, almost imploring look, as if the young factotum might somehow relieve him of his distress.

'The night was already started?' Eusebus enquired of the doorman when the troubled pair had moved on.

'It's yer happy ev'ning,' one footman replied, looking them up then down. 'The first bout's already begun and we was about to lock the doors and keep everyone safely shut in. But for such select young gents we'll make an exception.' He smirked, with a touch to his forelock. 'You'd best gallop along, sirs, if you want to make it for the next bout. Hope you like long stays, 'cause we won't be letting you out ag'in till half the bouts are done-can't have folks strolling in and out all night as they please,' he concluded.Then, with narrow and meaningful scrutiny to Rookwood's fine pistols, he added, 'Them irons better be filled with sack.'

Rookwood made a face as if to say, Since when are they not? and passed the fellow a flashing silver coin.

Ogling the fine cut of Rossamund's clobber, the other footman let him by with a wink.

Rossamund gave a puzzled nod and hurried through.

Immediately beyond they found a tight descending stair-almost a furtigrade-leading to another equally black door. Rookwood pulled noisily on the door's brazen knocker.With a subdued thump the door opened and a young thin-faced doorman stepped out, all polite smiles and expectation. He raised a hand. 'I am afraid you must wait, sir.'

Through the doorway behind him was a dark blank like the throat of some ravenous sea-nicker. A tingle of sorrow shivered down Rossamund's backbone-an almost threwdish kind of distress. Here?

A tiny bell made its tiny silvery tinkle, and they were let onward down a closely spiraling stair of stone, its walls covered with black leather dimpled and glistening. Smelling strongly of subterranean chalkiness and animal hide, the air here grew decidedly colder with every curve down. Rossamund could hear the bubble of water through the leather and rock, and he imagined the immemorial currents pressing against eroded brickwork without.Were they under the harbor itself?

'Have you been dogging before, Rossamund?' Rookwood asked chattily.

'Ah, no, sir, I have not…,' he answered, beginning to feel out of place. 'What is it?'

'Ahh, you shall see. The night ends on a high note for you, sir!'

Achieving the bottom, they passed along a long brick passage lit with oil-burning cressets whose heat made the lime-painted walls sweat. Heavy-proofed men regarded them searchingly as the tunnel took them toward cheering: angry, almost hungry and unwontedly wild.With every yard the threwdish grief waxed, becoming a great weight of confusion and distress and frustrated rage. What manner of event could produce such a terrible cacophony of soul and sound?

'Come along, Mister Bookchild.' Rookwood grinned. 'By that ovation the first fight must be ending.This is a spectacle one of your caliber and trade will surely relish.'

The other end stepped onto a wooden boardwalk that made a circuit behind a whole edifice of stall-boxes, very similar to those at the Hobby Horse. A great array of people were sitting in them: high and low, rich and poor, teratologist and naivine, thrust rudely together, all hollering at whatever was occurring below them with singular fascination. As Rossamund observed, the whole mass erupted into a great whooping cheer, hands flung up, little tabs of paper flying and falling like the rare snows of deep Hergott winters.

'The cubes bet in a frenzy and the pigeons watch in high spirits!' Eusebus cried, looking happily to the celebrating crowd of said cubes-the true gamblers-and pigeons-the mere spectators. 'Excellent evidence for an excellent night!'

A woman in thick face paint and a too-tight stomacher-dress greeted the older two with a saucy curtsy as if she knew them well and passed small white-daubed paddles to them. Rookwood shouted something in her ear, and she thrust a paddle into Rossamund's grasp, crying, 'Goodly evening, little lordling. Wave your pug to pose your stake! Chance your gooses wisely!'

Bemused, the young factotum took the pug and inched forward in the wake of Rookwood's and Eusebus' passage through the throng until they came to a high balustrade.

'The dogs!' Rookwood held out a presenting hand, eyes twinkling with excitement, while Eusebus pushed along the front row of the stalls to find seats.

Full of bawling, exuberant souls, some clapping each other on the back and others with face in hands, the stalls ran about the entire circumference of a large quadrangle, going up and down for several more stories. Below them all was a square pit cleft in halves by what appeared to be a brown iron gutter; new blood was soaking into the hard-packed floor. A proud-looking fellow strutted about its circumference, heavy chain gripped in fist, leading an enormous brindle tykehound, its gagged muzzle dripping gore, its still heaving flanks rucked and bleeding. Flowers and coins and paper rained on the brute stupid beast-half dead from whatever ordeal it had just faced-and its beaming owner. A servant came out to grovel for the spoils, and the man and his dog exited through a heavy iron door in the far corner to the farewell of one final hurrah.

The noise of the audience settled to a pent hubble-bubble.

With a sinking feeling, Rossamund beheld the remains of what must have been a grisly desperate clash. He had little love for dogs, but to watch them tear each other apart was not his notion of entertainment. Steeling himself for an unpleasant spectacle ahead, he looked glumly about the crowd.

Far across on the opposite side were a set of canopied boxes hung with leaf-hued taffeta. In them sat a congregation clad almost uniformly in dark green and black. Mostly secretaries and spurns, they were gathered about a fellow proud in peacock silks and curly periwig of spotless white.

'Pater Pontiflex Maupin,' Rookwood said in Rossamund's ear. 'He is the owner of the Broken Doll and has major interest in this place,' he said, rolling his eyes at the pit, the stalls and all the ruckus with them.

Sitting on the right of this man was a young dandidawdler in a vibrant harness of blue-green stripe with pink, his throat thickly enfolded in a tortue, a high neckerchief of white cotton. Most remarkable was his silver wig, its fringe twisted up into a pair of horns, its tail long and thick like that of a horse and held by greasy black ribbon. The wig twinkled under the cosmos of bright-limns hanging by hook or chain from the convoluted scaffold of heavy beams that held up the weight of the city far above.

Upon the other side sat a singular woman swathed in black with a flaring collar of black feathers making an