Page 37 of A Ruse of Shadows
Even those who had booed him in the beginning clapped, almost as overwhelmed as the defeated man, still wheezing and gasping inside the ring.
Minutes after his victory, with the next match beginning, Johnny was already dressed and walking out, stopping only to collect the supper that Miss Charlotte had ordered, in the now largely empty taproom.
“Not staying to watch the other fights?” Lawson caught up with him, Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte trailing a few steps behind.
“My shift in the morning starts at six.” He no longer had cotton in his nose but still sounded heavily congested.
“Let me send you home in my carriage then.”
Johnny gave them a suspicious look, but the lure of an earlier bedtime overrode his reservations. “All right.”
He gave an address near Saffron Hill, less than half a mile north of where they were.
“You fought well,” said Lawson once the carriage was on its way. “If your friends are as good, I’ll be impressed.”
Johnny, who had been studying the slender, bracketed vase that held a stem of pink hydrangea, glanced at him and said, “They’re better.”
“Even the girl?” Mrs. Watson exclaimed.
“Jessie is fierce—I wouldn’t want to go up against her. And Mumble, he can tell what a man is going to do in the ring before the man has worked it out for himself.”
Lawson nodded with a credible look of satisfaction. Johnny’s face, which had remained wooden even when battered by large fists, crumpled for a moment.
Mrs. Watson’s heart clenched. This child, who was responsible for a family of five and probably had no time between work and training for his boxing matches—was it possible that Mumble and Jessie were his only friends?
“If they come to Manchester,” she said impulsively, “they’ll like it. I’ll look after them, I promise. And you can write to one another and stay in touch. It costs only a penny to send a letter.”
“People like me don’t write—and we don’t have friends in faraway places. When they leave, they might as well be dead to me.” Johnny turned his battered face back to the vase. “But I’ll take you to see them tomorrow.”
?The next evening, the two women picked up Johnny, who worked as a bricklayer by day, from a surprisingly fashionable address not far from their hotel, where a row of shops had been torn down to make room for a new department store that was just beginning to take shape.
Before the boy emerged, ready to leave, Mrs. Watson and Miss Charlotte, who was once again disguised as Herrinmore, the nonexistent Mr. Nelson’s lackey, managed to speak to the foreman for a good quarter hour, largely due to the strength of Mrs. Watson’s smiles and the splendor of her lilac promenade gown.
Sherlock Holmes and company said nothing about boxing butpassed themselves off as representatives of a certain ladies’ charity, making sure that the recipients of their largesse were working hard and looking after their families instead of squandering donated funds on drinking and gambling.
The foreman was obliging. “Ah, Johnny Esposito, good boy, that one, doesn’t say much, works fast, and builds walls better than bricklayers twice his age. You almost can’t tell he’s an Italian.”
Or rather, he used a casual pejorative for an Italian. Mrs. Watson was fiercely glad that Johnny wasn’t within earshot, even if he must have already heard too many such insults in his young life.
She had braced herself for the olfactory assault of sharing close quarters with a man who had been working outside all day, but Johnny had scrubbed himself and changed into patched but clean clothes. A trace of perspiration still clung to him, mixed with the scent of soap powder—the smell of honest labor.
“The foreman doesn’t mind your face like this, Mr. Esposito?” asked Miss Charlotte once they were in the carriage, sounding like a clergyman’s son who had gone to a second-tier boarding school.
There hadn’t been enough time for the cuts and bruises from the night before to fade.
Johnny shrugged. “I told him my old man gave me a belting, and he thought it was funny.”
Mrs. Watson didn’t think it was funny at all. Had his late father beaten him? Had he protected his mother and his younger siblings from the man’s wrath? Was that how he had acquired his remarkable capacity for pain?
“Long day for you?” she asked. The mother hen in her wished she could fold him under her wing and keep him warm and safe.
Johnny shrugged. “Same as every other day.”
Twelve long hours per shift.
He seemed to approach life as he approached boxing in the ring, with a numb endurance. Did he not want anything besides keeping his family alive?
Their destination wasn’t another gymnasium but a small meeting hall that had been hired for the evening. Chairs had been pushed to the walls, and two pairs of boxers were in the middle of sparring. Mrs. Watson’s gaze was immediately drawn to two young women, one in a tennis costume, the other in a blouse and a billowy pair of bloomers.
