Chapter Two
Hounslow, West London
The field outside Hounslow smelled of trampled grass, tallow smoke, and the particular sourness of several hundred men who had been drinking since noon.
Isaac Rowan stood at the edge of the makeshift ring, four posts driven into the earth, a length of rope strung between them, nothing so grand as the purpose-built rings some promoters favoured these days.
He let the noise of the crowd wash over him without truly hearing it. He had learned long ago not to listen too closely before a fight.
The shouting, the wagering, the men calling his name as though they owned some piece of him for having bet their week's wages on his fists, none of it mattered once the first blow landed.
Only the ring mattered then. The ring, and the man across it, and the simple, brutal arithmetic of who would still be standing when it ended.
"Isaac," Tom said. "Are you listening to me?"
Isaac blinked, turning his head to find his oldest friend watching him.
Thomas Mercer had been built for the ring himself once, thick through the shoulders, hands like ham hocks, a nose broken so many times it had given up any pretence of straightness.
But a decade of London's poorest neighbourhoods and one bad knee had retired him from fighting and installed him permanently at Isaac's side instead.
"I heard you," Isaac said. "Coleman's been training with a Bristol man. Favours his left."
"I said that ten minutes ago," Tom chided. "What I said just now was that Lord Palgrave's put two hundred pounds on you, and if you lose he'll likely have my kneecaps for it."
Isaac said nothing as Tom squinted at him.
"You've got a face on you like a man walking to his own hanging, Isaac. What's the matter?"
Isaac looked past him, out over the crowd assembling along the roped perimeter.
Dockworkers and costermongers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with gentlemen in coats too fine for a field outside Hounslow.
They were all drawn by the same hunger to watch two men beat each other bloody for their entertainment and their coin.
He had fought in front of crowds like this a hundred times. He could not have said, if asked, precisely why tonight felt different. Except that lately, it always did.
"I keep wondering," he said slowly. "Whether this is all there is.
Whether I fight Coleman tonight, and some other man next month, and another after that, until my hands won't close into fists anymore or someone younger puts me on my back for good, and that's the whole of it. The whole of what I've made of myself."
Tom stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head.
"God's teeth, Isaac. You've got two hundred pounds riding on you tonight and half of London's underworld watching, and you've chosen this moment to have a philosophical crisis?"
He clapped a broad hand on Isaac's shoulder.
"This is the only thing you've ever been good at," he continued.
"That anybody respected you for. You know that as well as I do.
Fighting bought your mother her rent when your father died.
It's bought every meal you've eaten since you were sixteen years old.
Whatever else you might be wondering about, wonder it after you've put Coleman on the ground, eh? Not before."
Tom had never had much patience for melancholy, his own or anyone else's, and there was a comfort in that. He was a solid, unchanging thing in a life that had given Isaac precious few of them.
Isaac nodded, rolled his shoulders, and let the last of the doubt settle somewhere beneath the surface.
"Put Coleman on the ground," he repeated. "Right."
"That's the spirit." Tom grinned. "Now go earn Lord Palgrave his two hundred pounds, so he doesn't come looking for my kneecaps after all."
The fight, when it began, unfolded the way most of Isaac's fights did, which was to say, badly for his opponent.
Coleman was younger, faster than Isaac had expected, and the Bristol training showed in a left hook that caught Isaac twice across the jaw before he adjusted for it.
But youth and speed had never been enough on their own, not against a man who had spent fifteen years learning exactly how much punishment his own body could absorb and precisely how little it took to end another man's night.
By the fourth round Coleman was breathing through his mouth and favouring his ribs.
By the seventh, his guard had begun to drop a fraction lower each time he threw that left. Isaac waited for the opening, then took it.
Coleman went down in the eighth and did not rise before the count finished.
The noise that followed was deafening. A wall of sound, cheering and cursing in equal measure as money changed hands across the field.
Isaac stood in the centre of the ring with his knuckles split, his ribs aching, and the particular hollow exhaustion that always followed a fight. Win or lose, the violence was spent and nothing was left behind but tiredness and the metallic taste of his own blood.
"That's my boy!" Tom was already climbing through the ropes, grinning wide enough to show the gap where a fist had once taken two of his teeth. "Although Christ, Isaac, that left of his had me worried for a minute there—"
"Wasn't worried," Isaac said, though his voice came out rougher than he intended.
He let Tom half-carry him toward the makeshift bench where the purse was already being counted out.
The purse was substantial, the largest of the year, and by the time they had made their way to the tavern where fighters and gamblers traditionally gathered after a match, Isaac's split knuckles had been wrapped and the worst of the ache in his ribs had settled into something merely uncomfortable, rather than agonising.
The tavern was loud and smelled of ale and roasting meat. It was packed with men still flush from their winnings or nursing their losses. Isaac let the noise of it settle over him like a familiar coat while Tom secured a table and ordered enough food for four men.
It was there, between the mutton and the second tankard of ale, that Isaac found the moment to do what he had intended since the purse was first counted.
He caught the eye of a boy running messages between tables and pressed several notes into his hand along with quiet instructions, watching him disappear toward the door before Tom noticed.
"What was that?" Tom asked, around a mouthful of bread.
"Nothing."
"Isaac Rowan, I've known you since we were both small enough to fit in a coal scuttle. I know your nothing." Tom's eyes narrowed, and then softened as understanding arrived. "That's for Sullivan's widow, isn't it. The lad you're sending."
Isaac said nothing, and Tom did not press further.
Sullivan had died in the ring eight months past, a bout gone wrong in the way bouts sometimes did. He'd left behind a wife and three children in rooms not far from where Isaac himself had grown up.
Isaac had been in the crowd the night it happened.
He had not been able to do much for Sullivan then.
He could, at least, do something for the family now, and he preferred to do it quietly, without the tavern turning it into another story about the great Isaac Rowan and his soft heart, a heart he had spent years convincing most of London he did not possess.
"You're a strange one," Tom said, not for the first time. "Break a man's jaw for sport and give half your winnings to widows within the same hour."
"Someone has to."
"Someone does," Tom agreed as he refilled his tankard.
Just then the tavern door opened and a man, out of place among the fighters and gamblers crowding the room, stepped inside.
He was perhaps fifty, dressed in sober black wool of considerably finer make than anything else in the tavern, his boots polished despite the mud outside, a leather case tucked beneath one arm.
He paused just inside the doorway, surveying the room with the particular discomfort of a man who has wandered somewhere he does not belong.
The tavern, quick to notice anything that smelled of law or debt, quieted around him in a slow, rippling hush.
"I am looking," the man said, into that sudden silence, "for a Mr Isaac Rowan."
Every head in the tavern turned.
Isaac felt the weight of two dozen stares settle on him at once. Beside him, Tom had gone very still.
"That's me," Isaac said, setting down his tankard. "Who's asking?"
The man crossed the room with his case held before him like a shield.
"My name is Mr Harrow, of Harrow and Finch, solicitors, representing the estate of the late Baron Rowan."
He set the case on the table and withdrew from it a sheaf of papers bound in ribbon, official-looking seals pressed into red wax at each fold.
"I have spent the better part of four months attempting to locate you, sir. I confess I did not expect to find you in quite these circumstances."
"Locate me for what?"
"I am here to inform you that the eighth Baron Rowan, Edmund Rowan, died four months past without legitimate issue," Harrow explained.
"Extensive genealogical research undertaken by this firm, at the instruction of the Rowan estate's trustees, has confirmed that you are the closest surviving male heir to the barony and its associated properties. "
Around them, the tavern had gone still, every ear straining toward the table.
Isaac stared at the solicitor.
"That's a joke," he said finally. "Someone's paid you to have a joke at my expense, and I'll thank you to tell me who, so I can return the favour."
"I assure you, sir, this is no jest."
Harrow spread the documents across the table.
"Your grandfather, Mr Rowan, was one Henry Rowan, second son of the fourth Baron Rowan. He eloped, some sixty years past, with a woman in service to his family, your grandmother, and was disowned in consequence, his name struck from the family's affairs."
Isaac listened in quiet disbelief.