He set his glass down.
He found the stairs at the back of the tavern, past the kitchen passage, where a stout man in a canvas coat stood at the foot of them with the settled authority of someone whose sole occupation was the accurate assessment of strangers.
The man looked at Anthony for three seconds, then stepped aside.
The basement was low-ceilinged, loud, and better lit than it had any right to be, with four lanterns strung at the corners of an improvised ring. The crowd was pressed in close, three deep at the rope, and the noise had the particular compressed quality of a space too small for the volume it was asked to contain.
Against the near wall, a compact man in a brown coat was working a slate board. Anthony crossed to him.
“Next bout,” he said.
The man in the brown coat turned. His eyes moved over Anthony, making a rapid assessment. He was evaluating Anthony’s height, build, and air of experience rather than baseless confidence.
“Third bout,” the man said finally. “Big fellow, Harwick. Fights out of Aldgate.”
“Is he any good?”
“Good enough that the last man who asked me that question left more slowly than he arrived.”
“I’ll take it,” Anthony said.
The man studied him for another moment, in the manner of someone revising an estimate upward. “Name for the board, sir?”
“Keating.”
He wrote it without comment.
Anthony handed his coat to a boy near the post and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
Harwick was not from London. This was evident before the bout began, in terms of the quality of his stillness and in his hands, which had been built by the work of the practical rather than the decorative variety. He was broad through the shoulder, thick at the neck, and he regarded Anthony across the ring with the focused, dispassionate assessment of a man solving a problem.
Anthony had one thought, and it was this:good.
He had not been entirely honest with himself, in recent weeks, about why he kept coming back to rings like this one. But tonight, he was. He was here because this was the only endeavor that demanded the whole of him. A competent opponent consumed him entirely: the reading of the stance, the calibration of rhythm, and the split second of distance and angle that left no space in a man’s mind for anything that was not immediately, urgently in front of him.
He had not slept well in two days. He had not slept well since he saw Lady Caroline at the Black Boar. He was a man of considerable discipline, and the discipline was not, at present, performing to his usual standard.
Anthony found that he had run out of patience for thinking about the reasons why he could not control his musings.
Harwick came forward with a right-hand lead, testing.
Anthony slipped it, moved left, and read the man’s rhythm in the recovery: right-hand dominant, planted heavily on the back foot, a slight forward lean before the big shot. Harwick had the kind of tell that became invisible at speed but was legible to a man who was paying close attention.
Anthony was paying close attention. He filed it and moved.
The crowd had noise for everything, and he heard none of it.
They went two exchanges at feeling-out pace, each man calibrating the other, and Anthony took a body shot that arrived with rather more authority than he had anticipated. He acknowledged it with a private, grimly satisfied sense that this was what he had come for.
“There it is.” Harwick’s breathing was already working. “Thought you’d gone soft.”
Anthony said nothing. He reset, breathed, and found the left shoulder.
The tell held.
In the third exchange, Anthony went inside on the lean, absorbed a glancing right that he felt in the back of his teeth, and put three short, precise shots into the ribs with his full weight committed behind each one. Harwick grunted and shifted, and the crowd came forward in a collective lurch that compressedthe noise into something physical, a pressure against the eardrums.
Anthony stepped back and let the man find his ground.