The opera always made Jack restless. He was no stranger to the playhouses of London - their plush velvet drapery, their gold and varnished wood, the musical chime of ice in a glass in their saloons and the shallow and gilded pockets of their patrons, easy prey to a quick hand in the press of a crowded vestibule or crush room. That had been the sport of his youth, the idle summer nights spent vagrant, sauntering up from the belly of London that was his birthright into her glittering West End, a gang of flash boys with slicked hair and stolen watches roaming Soho, Piccadilly, Covent Garden, making coarse suggestions to the ladies who stood on the corner of Regent Street, and in the theatres, making victims of any trinket within distance of a sharp snatch, to be fenced - or worn with gloating pride - when they retreated with the dawn, back past the uptown's nec plus ultra and into the sooty darkness of Whitechapel, where the law feared to tread.

Later, when Jack had grown out of his scrawny urchin frame and into his adult muscle, and been devoured by the science, bare-knuckle boxing, as young men flash and desperate so often were, the theatres had become the backdrop of a different type of theft - of hearts and of tongues, as Jack hunted for patrons to back him in the fights, and accompanied his older sister, Cynthia, nightly on the make. It was a higher quality of John she could pull in the west, wealthier and better-spoken, a type easily impressed by her striking beauty and much easier deceived by Jack's act of protective jealousy as Cynthia - Sissy, to him - flirted with them, easier trusted when it was a private carriage that pulled up to take her away, and - should she choose instead to bring them back to the flat that Jack shared with her, waiting in the kitchen with a deck of cards for her work to be done in the bedroom above - easier frightened, threatened and subdued by a furious brother pounding on the door, dragging them out by their half-hosed ankles and demanding money for his sister's tainted honour, or else throwing them down the outside staircase to fare for themselves and flogging their clothes at Petticoat Lane the next Sunday.

It was this duty, as her chaperone and bodyguard, that he fulfilled this evening at the opera, although Sissy did not have to pross tonight. She was here on invite. Some chap - and he was a chap - called Rupert, if Jack’s memory served; he vaguely remembered being there when the two of them had met at the racecourse some weeks ago, but that was where his knowledge ended, a single glance at the man's haw-haw wax-tipped moustache dooming him to insignificance in Jack’s mind; he had no interest in learning anything further of Sissy's man-toys, the walking purses they were. He was paid well enough for escorting her without committing any of them to memory, in the room afforded between her men and his barbering and boxing, and in these trips to the theatre or the racecourse, a soiree, a garden party, the pop of champagne corks, and the attention of beautiful women stolen from the arms of their husbands, just for a minute - for a minute was all he needed.