Overview

Every year swordsmen from all across Europe travel to London’s great Bartholomew fair to compete with one another. Every year the dazzling young Duke Alexander Melmoth wins. He wins so often that winning has become as stale as the rest of his life, but he’s used so used to having his way in everything he doesn’t know how not to win.

John Hardluck has no fancy Spanish rapier or fine silk fencing clothes. He looks more like a pirate than a gentleman with his cold grey eyes and his scars and grey weathered cape. You’d never guess that ten years ago he was a footman who grew too close to his Master and paid the price of the young aristocrat’s cowardice, falsely accused of theft and turned out on the road. Duke Alexander is astonished to be bested by the ragged stranger before all of London, and more astonished still when he recognizes him as the young man he destroyed.

The customary prize for the winner of the day’s match is ten guineas, but John Hardluck refuses it in favor of a more archaic reward—One night of his defeated foe’s life.

One night in which to teach his former master what it means to be brave, and what it means to yield to pleasure and to pain.