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more pleasure and more glee.
    And then, all at once and without warning, it ends.
    The pummelling ceases. The four men step back. The doctor assumes at first that this must be due to boredom or even exhaustion or that their employer—she who requested the beating—has ordered them back indoors to attend to other duties or to some other unfortunate.
    Yet none of these things are true. Struggling up, the physician sees that another man—one whom he takes at first to be a stranger—has come amongst them.
    The newcomer is tall, dark-haired and clad in black. His face is obscured by shadow. Evidently, he is strong for one of the men has already been sent sprawling onto the ground and another is staggering backwards after the delivery of what the doctor guesses to have been a swift and brutal upper-cut. It is as though a circle of enthusiastic amateurs have been interrupted by some wilier and more experienced professional. The third of the thugs moves towards the newcomer who, with a whirl of black cloth, his frockcoat fluttering about him like a cloak, parries the attempted blow and sends the ruffian to the ground, nose bloodied, spitting teeth, squealing like an infant. The violence happens both obscenely quickly and with improbable slowness.
    The newcomer speaks, authoritative, declamatory: “I believe that you gentlemen have done enough for tonight. I believe that you have all drunk your fill.”
    As he is talking, the boldest of the doctor’s tormentors practically throws himself at the speaker, running hard at him from behind. The black-clad fellow turns fast and delivers a blow to his attacker’s gut. A groan and the ruffian sinks, in a single, undignified motion, to his knees.
    “I would ask you all politely to disperse.”
    The men on the ground stumble back to their feet again. They hang back, deciding their move.
    One of them speaks: “Why are you doing this?”
    “My motives are not for you to know.” A strange, alien smile.
    “You’re a gutter-creep. A nightingale.”
    The tall man replies, with a kind of verbal lunge: “Disperse. My next request shall not be so courteous.”
    A long pause, pregnant with the possibility of further violence. Somewhere deep in the rookery, a baby cries out. A rough voice demands silence and an instant later, the wailing ceases.
    In the end, there is no need for action. As one, the men make their choice. They wheel about, flee and are gone. The clatter of their footsteps soon fades.
    The rescuer steps forward and extends his hand. “Dr Polidori?”
    “It’s you...” The doctor gasps. “Isn’t it?”
    “Let me help you to your feet.”
    “Thank you. Thank you.” Polidori lets himself be aided, allows himself to be pulled up and dusted down, feeling all the while as if every part of him has been broken and trampled upon. “Sometimes,” he murmurs, “we wondered if we’d dreamt you. If we hadn’t somehow summoned you up from our imaginations. But that isn’t so, sir? Is it?”
    “In truth,” says the black-clad man. “I cannot be certain.”
    “Are you quite well?” Polidori, though aching and raw, is filled with concern. “You seem a little out of sorts.”
    “Quite well, thank you. Yes. For the time being.” And Matthew Cannonbridge smiles as if in muted happiness.
     
     
    C ANNONBRIDGE AND D R Polidori walk together through the streets, the handsome man strolling with natural grace, the chubby physician moving with a fragile survivor’s gait. Hurrying away from the low district of the rookery, they move into a more respectable quarter, from poverty to a quiet affluence, from corruption into apparent health. The city here is still, the honest majority of her population abed.
    They pass few other human beings—a tottering reveller, a bearded beggar, a pair of vergers from the Cathedral—but no one stops or questions them. These men aside, the cobbled streets are theirs alone, the echo of their footsteps sounding almost impertinent in the cloistered