That night, the tension on the city's streets finally broke into violence. 

It started – appropriately enough – at a fighting-house, although The Bell was really just a large parlour with peeling wallpaper and smoke-grimed air. 

It had been an establishment of some renown, once. When the railway was first being built, all the workmen and engineers had drunk there. And the custom of men with reliable pay-cheques had allowed the proprietor to put on fights with prize-money of a hundred pounds a side.

But the fancy railway-men had long-since gone back to London, and these days, The Bell's only claim to fame was that the General sometimes drank there, sometimes regaled the regulars with stories about the rebellion in India, and sometimes watched the fights with an expression of bored longing which everyone assumed would one day compel him to get up and enter the ring.

These past few nights, he had been very quiet, but that was little wonder. Everyone in the room knew the police were after him. But it was a point of honour that nobody at The Bell would have dealings with the police. You were safe here as long as you weren't a snitch, and didn't cheat at cards. Every other crime could be borne quite cheerfully – even boasted about – at The Bell.

There were no fights on the card tonight. Even the whores walking up and down between the tables were subdued. There had been a half-hearted attempt to shove some acts onto the stage, but they'd been booed off very quickly, and the audience had gone back to their muttering.

It was usually Ted Warner who found that his voice was the one still going when everyone else had fallen silent – just as he was usually the last one standing in a bar-room brawl. Unfortunately, he let the triumph of both situations lead him down some very stupid roads. The ears of a listening crowd dragged things out of him – boasts and rash promises that he couldn't back down on, because he didn't want to be thought of as the sort of man who backed down.

"It's a bloody disgrace," he was saying, because it was one of the words he always reeled out at moments like this. He had climbed into the centre of the ring, and was thundering from it like a preacher at a pulpit. 

"My brother works at the town hall, an' 'e says the police haven't searched a single human house. They break into the slums and trash them, using the little mother as an excuse. And meanwhile, all those cellars and vaults at the University go unsearched. If it was one of their bloody churches that'd been pillaged, they'd be doing something about it, but because it's us – because the little mother is ours – they couldn't give a damn."

He paused to scratch his elbow. Ted was a new-breed, and his demonic heritage had left him with occasional patches of scaly skin. They were greenish-black with an opalescent sheen, and floated like islands on the rest of his skin, making him look partly bejewelled and partly diseased. Consequently, when he scratched at the scaly patches on his elbow, there was a harsh, scraping sound, which attracted the attention of everybody in the room.

When he was sure all eyes were on him, he continued. "I'd like to wring their scrawny little necks. I could put the whole University on its back – Proctors and Bulldogs too – if they'd stop cowering in their halls and face me like men."

He was relishing the silence that followed this pronouncement – already lining up the next boast in his head – when a calm, flat voice spoke into the hush. 

"So what are you going to do about it?"

Ted stopped and stared. The General had climbed up to the side of the ring, and was leaning casually on the ropes. There was a sudden, unnatural hush – not just of people not talking, but of people holding their breath.

"What do you mean, what am I going to do about it?" said Ted, placing an indignant hand on his chest. "Why is up to me?"

"Because you're talking the loudest," said the General. He looked mild and earnest and patient, as though he was just a reasonable man trying to make a reasonable point. But there was a worrying kind of suppressed enthusiasm in his voice.

"Yeah, well," said Ted, unnerved by the silence, but unable to stop himself. "That's cause I aint some old has-been who sits out every fight, trying to preserve 'is reputation."

The General gave him a tentative smile. "Is the fighting important to you? Is this something we're going to have to get out of the way before we go any further?"

There was a noise from the crowd. It was too excited to be coherent, but the general gist of it seemed to be 'yes'.

Ted grinned, assuming they were eager to see him beat up the old has-been. He leaned back against the ropes and motioned for the General to step inside.

The General sighed and climbed in. There was no swagger, no preparation. He didn't stretch, or roll up his sleeves, or raise his guard. He still looked like a man in the middle of a debate, hoping to hammer out some fine point of logic.

"If I win, can I make a few suggestions?" he asked. "Firstly about your fighting technique, and secondly about the riot you're clumsily edging towards?"

Ted didn't know what to say to this, so he responded with his fists. And he remembered thinking, as he rushed forwards, how odd it was that the General didn't raise his hands, or make any move to defend himself. Ted had been expecting him to duck under his arm and try to deliver a few body-punches while he was down there. But he just stepped back a pace and kicked out at one of Ted's legs.

And he was a small man – obviously wiry and tough, but he had no bulk to speak of. How much force could be behind one of those kicks?

Yet it must have been aimed at the exact tendon responsible for keeping Ted on his feet, because his legs instantly turned to jelly, and he tumbled down just in time for his face to collide with the General's other knee. He felt a horrible, hot crunching in his nose, and his mouth filled up with blood from the inside and the out.

Ted half-sprawled, half-staggered backwards, clutching his nose. He used the ropes to haul himself up again, and raised his hands to ward off any blows, but the General was keeping his distance. In fact, the General was clinging onto the ropes on the opposite side of the ring, as though trying to prevent himself from rushing forwards.

"The first point," he said, letting go of the ropes finger-by-finger, "is that you care too much about the crowd. The crowd doesn't matter. Let me show you what I mean."

He bounded up to Ted, blocked his first punch, and then leapt up and drove his elbow into Ted's collar-bone. It was the most excruciating pain Ted had ever felt, and he was amazed it only knocked him to his knees, rather than driving him like a peg six feet into the ground.

"Hurts, doesn't it?" said the General. "How many times do you think they'd let me hit you like that before anyone climbed in here to intervene? Be honest."

He leaned down – perhaps hoping to hear a response – but only a kind of wet, gurgling sound emerged from Ted's lips.

"You'd be dead before one of them even muttered a 'steady on', wouldn't you?" said the General brightly. "That's what I mean when I say they don't matter. They don't matter, because they can't help you. Only you can help you. You know that instinctively when you're in enough pain but, the trouble is, I don't think anyone's ever put you to that much inconvenience before. There are problems with being the best fighter among your peers – and I should know, because I was."

He pulled Ted to his feet, dodged an uppercut, and punched him in the side of the head. But, somehow, Ted sensed it wasn't as hard as it could have been. It was a cheerful, merry little head-punch, as though the General was ruffling his hair and calling him a scamp.

"Of course, I wouldn't be saying any of this if I didn't think you were promising."

He turned to the crowd, leaving Ted to sag against the ropes and wonder whether it was all over. His usual reaction would have been to get back into the fray as soon as possible, but pain and confusion and a grudging sense of admiration were forcing him to question this instinct. The General thought he was promising, did he? He had said so in front of the whole room, hadn't he? It might be a good idea to hang back and see what else he had to say. At least until his head stopped spinning.

"Now," said Jack Cade, leaning on the ropes, and addressing the wide-eyed crowd. "About this riot..."

***

Twenty minutes later, Ted's bleeding nose had been staunched, and his nerves had been steadied by a few complimentary shots of whisky. 

Everyone seemed to think he had been honoured, rather than beaten up. He had been the General's first sparring partner in five years. He had even been advised not to re-set his broken nose, so that his appearance would be a constant reminder of this moment.

The General seemed to have taken a liking to him, too, because he had pushed him down into the chair beside him, while the crowd gathered round and listened to his plans for getting the city's attention.

"Here's what I suggest," he was saying, ignoring the glass of whisky that had been placed at his elbow. "It won't do any good to march through the streets and clobber a few policemen. The important people will just close their windows and turn back to their port and cigars. If you want to get their attention, you've got to threaten what they care about. The museums, the libraries, the gorgeous architecture. They've taken something sacred from us, so let's take something sacred from them."

"It won't exactly make them sympathetic to our cause," Ted grumbled.

"I don't want their sympathy, I want their terror," said the General. He was toying restlessly with a pack of cards on the table – perhaps to avoid picking up the whisky – but his voice was as calm as his movements were not. "Sympathy is useless, but terror gets things done."

"So here's what we'll do. We'll use the back-streets and the sewers to get around. No stepping out into the open, no engaging with the police. No shouting slogans. I want the sound of their burning treasures to be the only thing they can hear. We'll start with places far from the river, so that it'll be harder for the police to put out the fires – and far apart, so that they'll be dashing all over the place, unable to concentrate their efforts."

"And how are we supposed to get into these buildings to burn them?" said Ted.

"Well, there are a hundred ways. We can be crass and go for smashed windows, or we can plant dynamite in the sewers under the buildings' foundations. I know a man at Headington quarry who can get us enough dynamite to raze the city to the ground, if we're tempted to become excessive."

Ted was too muddle-headed to realize it now, but he would later come to the conclusion that this was the appealing thing about the way the General plotted. He knew what he wanted to get done, but he also left the finer details up to your own creative imagination, as though a riot was a work of art, and every rioter an artist.

"Once you're inside," he went on, "steal anything you can carry, even if it doesn't look valuable. Eventually, we'll take everything to Cambridge. Plenty of antiquarians and collectors there. And, even if the Cambridge men decide to take the moral high ground and give back the stolen artefacts, it's still the last thing an Oxford Professor wants – charity from his rivals." 

The General picked up the whisky glass and then put it down again. It was strange, to see his face so grim and implacable, and his hands so nervous. "That's how you get a scholar's attention. You hurt him. You just have to know how."

Ted couldn't think of any objections to this, and nor did he feel inclined to quibble. He would never normally have wanted to follow anyone but himself – and yet here was a man with even bigger boasts, and even grander delusions. It was impossible not to get swept up in the excitement he generated, even if the restless hands were a little worrying. Once or twice, he was sure he had seen the General dig his fingernails into his own thigh underneath the table.