Oliver argues his case all the way to the room at the Lamb and Lark, predominantly the fact that pickpocketing skills like his are more of a liability than an aid, but his doubts are dismissed. Jack is quite taken with the idea, and nothing will change his mind. "Confidence," he says, as they climb the staircase and traipse along the narrow landing, "is what all of it comes down to, in the end. And remember, if you feel a bit of a tug: just because you felt it, it don't mean your mark did. A distracted mark don't feel all manner of things."

"On a crowded street. I highly doubt that Manns is going to be sufficiently distracted by simple conversation."

Jack gives an odd grin. "Don't you believe it. If the eyes don't see it, the mind don't notice it; that was what we was always taught. If his eyes and his thoughts is elsewhere, he won't notice your hand at his pocket."

"I do believe it, though; that's the problem."

"Please yourself." They stop before the door. Jack pats at his coat in a somewhat theatrical way. "Now, who'd've thought," he declares, "that I'd forget where it was that I had my own key? Oliver, be a gent and hold the rest of my sundries while I search for it."

Oliver's recurring feeling that he's missing something, somewhere, passes over him, but he holds out his hands for Jack to disgorge his pockets into. Some loose coins and a fat-looking wallet are deposited on him, closely followed by a second wallet that looks strikingly familiar. So do the handkerchief and the pocket-knife that accompany it. When the watch changes hands for the fourth time that week, he says, "Jack," so reproachfully that the other man opens his eyes very round and wide in feigned innocence.

"Yes, Oliver?"

"These are my sundries."

"Well, ain't that a surprise! How d'you suppose that it could have happened? I must have lifted 'em without you noticing while we was engaged in simple conversation."

"All right. Very well. I'm not afraid to admit it when I'm wrong. It can be done. But I'm the one who you're suggesting attempts it with Manns, and I don't have your touch." Oliver returns his own possessions to their appropriate places, placing them in particularly carefully, although he's under no false impression that they won't vanish again when he least expects it. "These really are yours, I presume?" he asks, referring to the remaining wallet and coins.

Jack secretes the money away in an unrevealed location inside his coat, then takes the wallet, and flips it open to display the contents. Inside are a number of leaves of fine paper, folded and printed so as to have the appearance of banknotes if glanced at in a hurry; Oliver would have certainly taken them as such. Confidentially, he taps the side of his nose. "Keep a nice-looking wallet out in the open where anyone can have at it, and your real cash under wraps. Best advice ever given by one dipper to another."

"Except that I'm not a dipper. But thank you all the same."

"Give it time, give it time." A key appears in Jack's hand, and he rattles it into the door-lock and lets them both in, turning it prudently again behind them. The care that he takes to lock them in leads Oliver to assume that there are valuables about, and so it proves to be the case. Jack turns out samples of all kinds of artefacts that shine and sparkle as he makes his way around the room; gold seals, rings, brooches, gold and silver pencil-cases. They surface from every imaginable hiding place. Pinned inside his linens so as not to fall even if the clothing were shaken. Inside a large book that's no longer a readable volume but has had a shape cut out of all but the first and last few pages so as to transform it into a cunning box. On the floorboards beneath a bottom drawer that he lifts out. He unrolls a cloth on the table and spreads out a selection of them, gleaming beneath the lamp that he lights like starlight; like a swarm of exotic insects. Accustomed as he himself is to such things, Oliver's forced to admit that there's an enchantment in seeing them heaped together like this.

"Nice, ain't they?" Jack says.

"Extremely. Are they all from burglaries?"

"Some of 'em," Jack says, carelessly. "Hooked the rest. Always like to keep my hand in. Easier than when I was a kinchin - all it takes is a few nice togs to look the part. You look like you belong where you are, and you're never the one what a feller looks at when his wallet goes for a walk." He takes the fabric of Oliver's coat-sleeve between his thumb and forefinger, and tugs lightly. "That's how it's going to work for you. Who'd think there was anything rum about the good doctor?"

"It might look rum when the good doctor begins trying every single pocket. I'm sure that Manns carries his key, but I don't know where it is."

Jack releases the sleeve. "And what are you going to do about it?" he says.

Oliver opens his mouth to reply with something of an acerbic nature, but hesitates as he realizes that the question is largely rhetorical. "Why don't you tell me?" he says, on the assumption that Jack will derive great enjoyment from doing so.

"You're going to fan him. Touch the outsides of his pockets and check what's in there. If you was on the street you could bump into him, like it was accidental, but I'm pretty sure you can find an excuse to put them physician's hands wherever you like and he'll stand there and let you get away with it. Dream come true, that is. Was you watching when I put my wallet away?"

"No, not really."

"Come here."

Oliver complies, circling the table to bring them face to face. He's beginning, he thinks, to understand a little of what Jack refers to as 'the thrill of the chase'. There's a certain sense of anticipation not entirely unlike the prospect of fucking. How much of this is brought about purely by his lessons in larceny and how much by his tutor, he finds it near impossible to say, but he recognises it: the heightened awareness and the question, pleasurable in itself, of whether and when the event will occur; whether he'll succeed in his desire. Their eyes meet, and he sees the interest gleaming in the other man's.

"So," Jack says, "where d'you think that it is?"

Oliver considers this carefully. He doesn't recall Jack raising his hand again after slipping the coins away, so it seems unlikely that the wallet would have taken the same route. "Outside coat pocket," he says.

"Certain of that, are you?"

"No," Oliver admits.

"And so you shouldn't be. Feel for it."

Oliver reaches out his hand. Before it can find the pocket, however, it's swatted away quite roughly. "And just what d'you bloody well think you're doing?" Jack demands.

Oliver blinks, half-startled. "I beg your pardon?"

Jack's features relax into their natural state again, and he rolls his eyes. "Oliver," he says, patiently, "that's what anyone's going to say what sees your hand going for his pocket like it was the last bread roll on the dinner table. Don't let him bloody see you! Use some of that matter what I know you've got behind them lovely brown eyes."

Instantly, Oliver sees what he might do, but he allows his face to arrange itself in a modest expression. Although he lacks such innate dexterity as Jack, he isn't altogether lacking in ingenuity, and he feels that any skills he possesses in this area may originate from his brain more than from his fingers. "Oh," he says, mildly. "I understand, yes. Perhaps I could try it from behind, the first time?"

Jack mutters something which sounds very much like, "Chance'd be a fine thing," but waves him on. Oliver begins to move around him, placing one hand briefly on his shoulder as he does so in the reassuring manner of one individual passing another, as if he means either to steady them from falling, or keep them at a respectable distance. "Do excuse me," he says, and as he edges past, he draws the fingers of his other hand across Jack's coat pocket, as if it were all part and parcel of the same action. And there it is, the squarish shape of the wallet.

"I felt that," Jack remarks, apparently to nobody in particular. Being positioned behind him, Oliver only has the back of his head in view, not his expression. He's wondering whether or not Jack meant for him to try a different tactic, when the other man turns to him, and he can see that his mouth is slowly stretching into a very approving smile. "But it was still fine work," Jack adds, "very fine indeed."

Oliver returns the smile, feeling strangely exhilarated. Of all the ways in which he's ever wished to impress, thieving, or the preparation for it, is the one that comes as a surprise. "Shall I try to take it?"

"Wait a bit." Jack leans over the table, sorting through his spoils, choosing some; considering and then discarding others. He begins to tuck them away all over his person, bedecking and adorning himself with silk handkerchiefs, cufflinks, and all the trappings of a potential victim of wealth. A watch goes into his right waistcoat pocket, and a pair of gold spectacles into his left. A snuffbox joins the wallet in his coat. Finally, he produces his door key, brandishes it very pertinently, and returns it from whence it came. "You watch," he says, "and then you copy. Come and have a walk with me."

Quizzically, Oliver joins him, and they parade up and down as though they were two gentlemen of means on their morning stroll. Before they have travelled more than a length or two of the room, however, Oliver finds his own handkerchief being brandished before his face. He's left so utterly lost for words that he simply stops and looks at Jack; pickpocketing, he feels, is one thing, but Jack must have talents akin to those of a magician. Even with no distraction in the way, he had never felt the item go. Jack smiles in a modest sort of fashion.

"Fogles are for beginners," he says, and hands it back. Still eyeing him, Oliver moves to replace the handkerchief in the same pocket, then thinks better of it, and switches it to another. They fall back into step. Jack appears to find how closely Oliver is watching him very amusing. He slings an arm about him. "Lesson number two," he advises, "is that a man can't feel two things at the same time; it's the way what the mind works. One strong touch means you're numb to the other one. If you was to bump him, it's that what he'll feel, and not your hand going in his pocket."

Oliver turns his head to observe the hand at his waist, which is giving him a squeeze that he can't help enjoying. "These all sound like excellent theories, Jack, but I have to say once more that I'll believe it when I see it happen."

As if in reply to his challenge, his handkerchief promptly appears again, dangling provocatively from his companion's hand. "Believe it now?"

Oliver cedes the point. "Yes. But you must admit that you weren't playing fair just then."

"I never play fair." Jack passes back the handkerchief again and releases him, then walks a little way ahead. He tweaks the corner of his own silk wipe further out from the pocket of his frock coat, so that it lolls like the tongue of a dog. "I'm asking for it," he says, without turning around.

Oliver subtly increases his pace, shadowing him, step for step. He finds himself deliberating the merits of a quick snatch at the object, and those of attempting to draw it out slowly and gently. The first method would create a narrower window for possible detection, but, on the other hand, it also seems to him that the second would make his actions less likely to be felt in the first place. He moves to make a grasp at the handkerchief, but, at the last moment, Jack abruptly shifts his path to the left. Frowning faintly, Oliver tries again, but each time, Jack's agile rear seems to manage to keep itself just out of his reach. If he steps in one direction, Jack immediately steps in the other, for all the world as if he were possessed of eyes in the back of his head, and no matter how intelligently Oliver tries to pre-empt him, he always seems to make the wrong choice. Jack begins to whistle a merry little tune. Finally, after some minutes of this, he stops so abruptly that Oliver almost walks into him.

"Oliver," he says, "don't go against me, follow me."

"Surprising as it may be, that's what I'm trying to do."

"No, you ain't. Well, you might be, but you ain't going about it in the right way. You're watching my pocket; you ain't watching my body or my feet. Look, hold onto me. Use the hand you ain't going to dip with."

Oliver takes a firm hold of his shoulder. Jack shifts under his hand as he takes a step sideways, drawing Oliver along with him, letting him predict his motions with both his eyes and his touch. When he next steps forward, they move fluidly, like two unconventional dance partners. They dance well together, Oliver thinks, as the other man meanders about the room and he follows, astonished at the ease of it when he pays the proper attention. He suddenly has the conviction that he's never danced as well with anybody as he does with Jack.

"Try it," Jack says. Oliver catches at the handkerchief, and as soon as he has the corner in his hand, Jack immediately orders, "Now, let go of me, and stand still." He stands. Jack begins to walk away, and, as he does so, the remainder of the handkerchief is pulled smoothly from the pocket without Oliver having to make an ounce of further effort.

"That, Oliver," Jack says, over his shoulder, "is called, letting your mark do your work for you."

Oliver exhales, and laughs a little. "So, hardly a show of skill on my part," he says, yet he does feel more co-ordinated. His fundamental fault is that his natural patterns of thought are too logical, and the task in hand requires a certain degree of instinctive response during which the perpetrator, rather than spending too much time thinking, simply does.

"You'll come to it," Jack says, confidently. He swipes back the handkerchief, folds it, and replaces it. "Now," he instructs, with the briefest of grins, "pick me clean."

The two of them are like boys, set on a game of tag. Oliver seeks while Jack apes the mark, then the tables are turned and he becomes the pursued. Jack shows him how to not delve too deeply for a wallet, but to pull on the lining of the pocket, lifting the wallet higher so that it can more easily be slipped out. How to hold out a coat so as to create a shield for your actions behind it. Oliver finds himself almost forgetting for moments at a time the purpose behind his unusual studies and simply enjoying the play, as, practised as Jack is, he's not yet above being playful at times. By the time that Jack has emptied half of his pockets, with increasingly fewer pains to hide his activities, Oliver is starting to feel as though he's been subtly poked, pinched, stroked, groped, and handled to a degree that must constitute gross indecency with a man and that he ought to vehemently object to. Instead, he has merely an irrepressible and slightly wicked urge to respond to the baiting. Jack's hand snakes under his coat from behind, in search of his waistcoat pocket, and Oliver surprises him with a step backwards to let them both enjoy for a moment the feel of Jack's front pressed to his back through the wool. Warm breath stirs the fine hairs on his neck. Released, he turns around to find Jack gone. He follows him as he saunters down the room and falls into step just a little behind his elbow, so that when he swings his arm between them, he makes a preliminary push of the wallet out of the pocket, the way that he's been shown. The corner of it rises into view, and Oliver dips, plucking at it gently with first and second fingers, but Jack thwarts his ambitions. His hand darts down and grabs Oliver's wrist.

"Last lesson but one," he says, "don't try picking a pocket in front of a mirror."

Oliver looks up, only just now registering the fact that they're standing perfectly in line with the mirror with the gold-leaf frame that hangs rather surprisingly and splendidly upon one wall. Jack winks at him in the glass, and he stifles a smile. "And I thought that I was doing so well."

"Oh, I'm very excited about your future performances." Jack gently creases the loose skin on the back of Oliver's hand, massaging it in little circles. Oliver watches the tiny movement as executed by their mirror counterparts, thinking how it feels more improper to watch than it does to feel. They seem clandestine observers of a private moment between two other men. The initial mild tingle of interest that he had felt when Jack touched him at home, earlier, starts to become warm and nothing short of delectable, yet, at the same time, formless, as if his body wishes to act but requires guidance to its destination.

"I've found it quite exciting, too. But I'm curious about what my final lesson involves."

Jack's fingers move away from Oliver's. He turns, and scratches his head a little. "Well," he says, "that's up to you, ain't it? Depends on whether you know what you want."

"What I don't know is whether it's right or not."

"With all respects, Doctor B., you started deciding for yourself what was right and wrong when you told me that we was going to thieve off one of your patients together."

Oliver shakes his head, faintly. "How do you always know just what to say to me?" he asks.

"'Cause I say what you can only think." Jack takes a step closer.

For the first time, Oliver is vaguely relieved that they're not of perfectly equal heights. He knows for certain that, if they were, Jack's eyes staring parallel into his would be more than would allow him to retain what remains of his sanity, but the other man looking up at him in sultry fashion is little better. "And what am I thinking about now?" he asks, softly.

"About this, I reckon." Jack reaches up to slide his hand around the nape of Oliver's neck, pushing his fingertips into his hair. "And definitely about this," he goes on, using his grasp to pull them flush against one another. Very, very wickedly, he nuzzles Oliver's jaw, breathing over his skin. "Am I right?"

Oliver feels himself shiver, treated once more to an adolescent rush of newness and wonder, this time made all the more pleasurable by the accompanying confidence of manhood. He's known touches from Jack both casual and sudden, but it's the deliberateness of this touch that arouses him; how methodical it is. "Yes," he answers. "But this too."

He slowly draws back. Jack's mouth brushes across the corner of his, teasing. Oliver's astonished at how simple it is; how all he needs to do is to turn his head just fractionally to catch at it with his own. And how all that's needed is one, perhaps two, of these testing, darting little motions before he finds himself instinctively guiding his friend in to meet him, just as Jack guides him. "Yes?" Jack asks, and Oliver nods, shocked and decisive, Yes, again; more. And then Jack's lips are on his, doing what Oliver's been accustomed to doing with women, but with the subtle strangeness and the differences of texture and taste that come from doing it with a man. Through the stunned awareness that he's kissing another man - kissing Jack - a little awkwardly but with some passion, Oliver's yet conscious of one of the most palpable contrasts between being with one and being with a woman. Jack responds to him with neither of the expected actions of submitting, or attempting, through reluctance and rejection, to force submission on him. Rather, he pushes and challenges him at every step; encourages Oliver to best him, and relishes any attempt. One who has always been determined to remain gentle with women, he realizes that Jack's desires would be, rather, akin to his own. He would not want them to be gentle at all.

The thought causes such a powerful and base urge to well up in him that Oliver pulls his mouth away, less concerned about what Jack might initiate than what he himself might. With effort, he manages to release his grip on the other man's shoulders. The two of them stand, looking at one another, chests still heaving a little. "Well," Jack says, in a matter-of-fact tone, but the way in which his eyes are dancing betrays him.

"Well," Oliver manages to reply.

"That was quite nice."

"Thank you."

"Bit soft. You ain't never been away from girls." Jack's voice has taken on a rough, husky edge. "Nothing we can't get sorted out, though," he adds, his gaze moving to where his hand still rests on Oliver's neck. It slides downwards, beneath the collar of his coat, and begins to push it off his shoulder.

For a moment, Oliver wants nothing more than to take his oldest friend in his arms and let all that's happening go on doing so, whatever may come to pass. The familiar hot cloudiness is starting to build up in his mind that tells him to let the consequences go to hell. He closes his eyes. Then he exhales, and puts a hand over the top of Jack's.

"Jack," he says, "not now. Not yet."

"Oliver, there's a bloody great bed over there, and it ain't only for sleeping in. And what's more, I'd be happy to give you a demonstration of the fact."

"I know that you would. And I thought that I'd say yes. But -" Oliver stops, and sighs once again. "I'm a coward," he says.

"You ain't scared of anything. You wasn't a coward as a kinchin, and you ain't now, or you wouldn't be a doctor. All that bleeding and sweating and shitting turns my guts, always has. I only had to look at it up close once, and I'll be buggered if I'll ever do it again. But you do it all the time, for people what you don't know and don't give a toss for. You do that, and you don't have to put yourself down 'cause of a few nerves."

"What makes me a coward is that I can accept it in you, but when it came down to it, I couldn't accept it in me. I'm not afraid of the law. I'm afraid of myself."

"I say what the owner of a prick likes to do with it ain't nobody's business but his own and who he does it with. And you're just a healthy feller with a prick, to put it simple. You ain't got to be perfect. You're close enough to that already."

Oliver shakes his head, with the faintest of smiles. "And you're incorrigible."

"I ain't planning to change, either." Jack's thumb moves gently against Oliver's palm for a few moments before both of them release their hold. "Oliver," he says, after a pause, "it ain't all that much different. And a lot less hard work, if you ask me."

"The last time that I looked, it was. As you mentioned yourself, I am a doctor."

"Everybody's got to start somewhere. You had to work out how to be nice and do things right the first time you was in a cunt, didn't you?"

"I've always found them to be rather different to cocks, though. That's how the two fit together, believe it or not."

"If you know how to please your own cock, you could please mine just as well. We'd get to the rest later."

"The rest, being?"

"Whatever you happen to feel like making it at the time. When you're fucking a girl, it comes down to rules in the end - though I grant you that there's some of 'em what are prepared to bend them rules quite adventurously. When you fuck a man, there ain't no rules. You broke 'em all when you decided that you was going to fuck him. You just do what feels good."

Oliver realizes that it's been quite some time since it crossed his mind that he's standing in the private room of a thief, diligently practising his own part in another robbery. If there are rules to be lived by, he must have at least seriously infringed a good number of them himself already. He finds himself thinking of the indignity levelled at such simple tools as his stethoscope, and how vociferously Doctor Snow's cholera paper was rejected, simply because his suggested route of transmission is unpleasant to contemplate. Perhaps rules, if they must be broken in the pursuit of professional or personal truth, are meant to be so.

"Jack?" he asks.

"What?"

"If I were to say that kissing you felt very good indeed, and that I'd like to do it again, do you think that you could live with that?"

Jack tilts his head, as if pretending to deliberate this. Then he nods, slowly. "Think I might be able to put up with it. If you was to make it a good one, that is."

Oliver puts his arms around Jack's waist; Jack does the same to him, only a little lower. Their mouths meet in a long, searching press. Jack manages to give a certain area a surreptitious fondle. "You're improving already," he remarks, when they part.

"I know. And you should know better than to fall into your own trap."

"Come again?"

Oliver lifts his hand. In it, he holds Jack's wallet with its counterfeit money. "Although you were right, when you told me that a man who was sufficiently distracted wouldn't watch his pockets."

Jack looks very briefly bemused. Then the expression is replaced, rapidly, by a broad grin. "Got it wrong when I said you was close to perfect, though."

"How so?"

"You ain't just close. You passed the winning post a long time back."