It was also a gesture of respect of the kind one swordsman accords another. Kerr’s eyes narrowed as he saw it. He wasn’t quite sure, suddenly, just what he had gotten himself into, but one thing he knew for certain. The only thing he could do was fight his way out of it.
Twenty-Seven
Sick disbelief hovered in Sonia’s mind. This could not be happening. Quarrels might end in duels, but there were strict rules to be followed, safeguards to be set in place. The arrangement going forward was like some barbaric forerunner of such practices, a mere bloodletting in which the hand of God must decide the victor.
Jean Pierre sent the captain of his guard for a matched set of rapiers. Tremont, with apologies to her and her aunt, removed his long frock coat and waistcoat and began to turn back his shirtsleeves. Maidservants scurried to clear the table and push it to the wall then remove the chairs. Jean Pierre led Sonia and her aunt to one side of the dining salon, next to the table, and Kerr’s guard ranged themselves alongside the other.
Kerr stood alone.
Sonia’s heart ached to see him there in the empty center of the room, surrounded by enemies. His hair was matted to the back of his head by dried blood; his shirt was spotted with rust-red stains, his trousers torn and crude sandals loose and split. Despite it all, he was more valiant than any man in the room, more armored in dignity and courage. He faced them down and waited for his fate with his fists knotted at his sides. And his silver-gray eyes, as he met hers, were clear and steady. They promised he had not forgotten his vow to keep her safe, and would not abandon it even now.
Or so she wanted to think. It might be nothing more than a fancy brought forth by her need.
“Sonia, ma chère,” Tante Lily said with compassion in her voice as she leaned close, “I believe we should withdraw. This is not a spectacle for ladies.”
Rouillard turned his gaze upon her. “By no means. I won’t allow it.”
“But our presence cannot be necessary.”
“I disagree.” His smile held cold spite. “It’s essential.”
Sonia had suspected as much. Jean Pierre wished her to witness what he expected to be Kerr’s defeat. It was the main point of the exercise.
It wasn’t the whole point, however. That much was soon made clear.
“Shouldn’t you send for a blacksmith to remove the shackle from my opponent?” Tremont made the inquiry in grave tones, his gaze on Jean Pierre as he folded his sleeves to the elbow.
“I don’t believe so.” Sonia’s betrothed did not bother to hide his amusement. “He offered to meet me wearing it. He can do the same with you.”
The captain of the guard returned then with a sword box under his arm. Placing it on the table near Rouillard, he unfastened the latch and laid back the lid. Tremont picked up one of the pair of rapiers and sighted along its blade as he spoke again. “You can’t be saying you think me unable to prevail unless my opponent has a handicap?”
Some intimation in Tremont’s tone, pleasant as it had been, drove a degree of the satisfaction from Jean Pierre’s face. “Certainly not. But why throw away an advantage when it’s given to you?”
“Fairness,” Tremont said, setting the first rapier aside and taking up the other. “Honor.”
“Oh, those. Very useful at times but a liability when life or death is at stake.”
Sonia, hearing the deadly intent in her fiancé’s voice, felt her blood congeal in her veins. Frantically, she tried to think of some way to stop the madness.
Tremont flicked a glance toward where Kerr stood with his feet spread and his chain curling behind him. “Life or death, is it? What of the concept of first blood?”
“What use is that to me?” Jean Pierre gave an abrupt laugh as he looked at Kerr and away again. “The Kaintuck devil will never leave me in peace. I prefer to be rid of him, once and for all.”
A soft snort left Tremont. He turned slowly, rapier in his hand as he sighted down it, turned until it was pointing at Jean Pierre’s belly. “This duel is irregular enough, taking place as it is without mediation, minus seconds or a doctor. More isn’t required.”
Jean Pierre eyed the rapier, licked his lips. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am not a murderer,” Tremont answered with quiet precision. “Remove his shackle or fight your own duel.”
Tante Lily gripped Sonia’s arm, her nails biting into the skin. She barely felt it as she waited for Jean Pierre’s answer.
He darted a look toward Kerr and back again. “You can’t mean it.”
“I assure you, I do.”
The quick anger of a weak man appeared in his eyes then. “Have it your way. It’s your funeral.”
Tremont replaced the rapier in the case, smiling grimly down at it as he seated it in its satin bed. “Or not,” he said.
Time ceased to have meaning. Events moved forward at an alarming pace even as they seemed to take an age to be accomplished.
A maidservant was sent for the key to the shackle on Kerr’s ankle. She returned with the valet who made short work of removing it and hauling it away with its attached chain. At Tremont’s request, lines were drawn on the floor in accordance with accepted practice for meetings of honor, markers to show the limits of advance and retreat. The two principals took their places. Each chose a rapier. Their blades swept up and down in salute.
“Mademoiselle Bonneval,” Tremont called from where he stood. “Have you a handkerchief?”
She fumbled one from the pocket at her waist, her fingers sliding over the pocketknife that weighted it before she drew out the bit of lace. “I do, yes.”
“Excellent. You will call for the guard position, pause until we are ready, and then drop the handkerchief as the signal to begin.”
She didn’t want the responsibility, couldn’t bear to think the two men would fight on her command. Still, who else was there for the office? Not the guard captain who had joined his men where they had propped their weapons against the wall as they exchanged spirited wagers over the outcome. Her aunt was too high colored, as if on the verge of apoplexy. Jean Pierre could hardly be trusted to make it a fair start.
No, she had to do it.
They were waiting, Kerr and Tremont. Shoulders squared, heads high, they watched each other, assessing—what? Will, perhaps, along with stamina and intention. Nothing in the stance of either man hinted at the desperate nature of the contest, nothing gave notice that in a few minutes one of them could die.
Sonia cleared her throat with a low rasp, swallowing against the tightness that threatened her breathing. Closing her eyes, she drew a quick breath, called out in clear instruction.
“En garde!”
Two blades flashed upward in unison, coming together at their tips with a bell-like clang. They held steady, welded in place by the muscles of both men that corded their forearms under layers of skin and coverings of fine dark hair. Their eyes clashed as well, narrowing in concentration that seemed to exclude all else. Breathing in steady repose, they waited.
Sonia’s fingers on her handkerchief trembled, tightening into a death grip as she lifted it high. They would not unclench. She could not make them, could not bear to begin this vicious contest.
Her hesitation lasted a moment, became two. A murmur ran back and forth across the room.
Kerr allowed his attention to stray in her direction. He met her eyes once more, his own dauntless in its encouragement. He gave an almost imperceptible nod.
The handkerchief dropped from her fingers, fluttering free. It rippled in a draft of air from the open French doors, swayed, sank to the floor.
Tremont sprang into an attack. Kerr parried with a hard scrape of blades that struck sparks in an orange rain. With a powerful bunching of shoulder muscles, he threw the other man back.
“Well done,” Tremont said. “I had wondered at your level of expertise. Now I know.”
“It’s a beginning,” Kerr said.
Tremont laughed, a short sound of real amusement. “As you say.”<
br />
They settled into a round of moderate advances and retreats as they felt each other out for strengths and weaknesses. The tapping of their blades was rhythmic, like a clanging of bells as it bounced off the walls and out the doors to echo in the stone-walled courtyard below. Neither man was breathing hard as yet, but the sheen of perspiration washed their faces and dampened their shirts in a triangle across the back.
Sonia didn’t want to watch but neither could she look away. She was mesmerized by the display of raw male power, fascinated by the speed with which they moved and the bright, flickering dance of the swords.
They seemed tireless, almost inhuman in their endurance. They lunged, feinted, shuffled back and forth with their footsteps whispering on the floor. Attack, parry, riposte, the moves they made were as formal as a minuet. Advancing and retreating again and again, they seemed to see nothing except the blades in front of their faces and their opponent’s eyes behind them. They drove each other, invited and defended as if they had no audience, and needed none.
Following a particularly hard-and-fast exchange, Kerr laughed, a breathless sound. “You have some skill yourself, Tremont. Are you sure you aren’t a maître d’armes?”
“My father had that title but not I. He trained me for other things.”
“Congratulate him for me. He’s a good teacher.”
“I would do that, but he’s dead.”
“Not by the sword.”
“Rather by an idiot with a pistol and a quart of strong drink in him. There was not an ounce of honor in it.”
Jean Pierre, at Sonia’s side, exclaimed under his breath with impatience. “End it,” he called out. “For the love of le bon Dieu, end it.”
Sonia felt very nearly the same. The snick and grating slide of blades tore at her nerves. The whistling of them made her cringe. The leaping twists to avoid a thrust, the sway of the torso to let bright death slide past made her heart jump and shudder as if her own body was at risk.
More than that, she thought Kerr was tiring. His frown came and went, deepening with every passing moment. Sweat trickled along the taut muscle of his jaw. A wet, red trail slid down his neck, staining his shirt in a widening patch. And it was impossible to say whether it was from the dissolving of the matted blood in his hair or the reopening of his scalp wound. Almost without noticing, she slid her hand into her waist pocket and closed her fingers around his pocketknife as around a talisman, for the comfort and the trust in the miraculous.
Tremont’s gaze rested on Kerr’s stained shirt for an instant. He redoubled his efforts, becoming more aggressive in his attacks. Kerr parried, but his movements were not as clean, his ripostes lacked their crisp edge.
Abruptly, Kerr slipped on the tile floor, or so it appeared. Sonia screamed. Tante Lily moaned and clamped her hands to her mouth while Jean Pierre exclaimed in triumph as if he thought the match at an end.
Tremont thought it as well, for he leaped forward.
He met a snapping strike like the whip of a scorpion’s tail. A rent appeared in his shirt at the waist, and rapidly turned red. Kerr recoiled with no sign of faltering. He lowered his blade, waiting.
“Touché,” said Tremont, pressing a hand to his side, exhaling on a short laugh as he looked down at his reddened fingers. “You fooled me.”
Kerr inclined his head, his features perfectly composed. “But is it enough?”
“Never!” Jean Pierre shouted. “Begin again.”
“Shall we?” Tremont asked.
“Your call.” Kerr’s face was impassive, the tip of his rapier resting on the floor.
Tremont looked down at the blade in his hand, turned it back and forth so it caught the light. “My curiosity is satisfied, I believe. And I can think of better uses for a sword.”
“Curiosity?” Kerr stood loose limbed and at ease, though no one seeing him would make the mistake of thinking him unwary.
Their voices dropped so low then that Sonia had to strain to hear them. The guard looked at each other and shrugged their puzzlement while leaning on the rifles they had lowered as the duel progressed. Jean Pierre scowled, inclining his upper body closer as if he could not make out what they were saying at all.
“My besetting sin, curiosity,” Sonia heard Tremont say. “It’s time to put it aside and return to the business that brought me here.”
“Contraband? Specifically arms and ammunition?”
“You might say so. Actually, it was the traitor who has been running them between Mexico and our sovereign nation, the sometimes great and often benighted United States of America.” He lifted a shoulder, his smile a model of irony. “My employer, if you will.”
There was more, but Sonia missed it. Hope burst inside her, crowding out all else.
Immediately thereafter, the two duelists turned as one and strode, shoulder to shoulder, toward Jean Pierre. Their swords were ready, their eyes merciless, and there was no one to stop them.
A hunted expression appeared on Jean Pierre’s face. He cursed, flinging a panicked stare at his guard. His mouth opened to let a scream burst from his throat. “Fire your weapons! Fire! Shoot them for the love of God!”
Sonia moved like a silk scarf unfurling, swinging where she stood and drawing out the pocketknife she held in the same moment. She stepped against Jean Pierre and pressed the lethally sharp blade to the pulse that hammered in his thick neck.
“They fire, and you are a very dead man,” she said in clear sincerity. “Countermand the order. Now, mon cher.”
Twenty-Eight
On a sultry morning eight days later, Kerr and Sonia left Vera Cruz. With Tante Lily, they boarded a Spanish merchantman loaded with corn and tons of some kind of white, rocky ore. It was Tremont who delivered them to the dock in an ugly little carriage called a volante that he borrowed from their host of the past week, a gentleman who still used his Spanish title in spite of Republican ties.
This marquis, an elderly man, tall, thin and possessed of a luxuriant white beard he wore in a point at his chin, was apparently a friend of Tremont’s with acquaintances among Washington’s ambassadorial elite. He had also quickly become a conquest of Tante Lily’s. Dressed impeccably, though with a quantity of gold lace on his waistcoat, he presented her and Sonia with bouquets of roses, verbena and oleander tied with yards of ribbon for their voyage, along with his profuse apologies that more of his friends and acquaintances had not come to bid them farewell.
Sonia was just as glad to be spared further speeches, salutations and protestations of the grand pleasure of their company. She only wanted to make for home, putting distance between her and the red-sand hills of Vera Cruz.
Their progress would not be swift. Fears of a blockade had slowed the arrival of the usual steam packets from American ports. Reluctant to stay kicking their heels in Vera Cruz for a moment longer than necessary, they had booked passage for Havana on the Spanish sailing vessel. Still, they should make port in two weeks, transfer to a steamer there in due time, and be at the mouth of the Mississippi in another week after that.
So they stood on the deck, waving to the marquis and Tremont, braving the sun for a last glimpse of the black-and-red walls of the Fort San Juan de Ulúa, the block-like houses behind the city walls, the church spires and great, flapping zopilotes that fought over carrion on the sand dunes rolling away from the incredible blue of the water. The lines holding the ship were cast off. They drifted away from the dock, were towed toward open water. Sails billowed above them then. These caught the wind with a resounding crack and they were away.
Tante Lily, standing at the railing next to Sonia, closed her eyes and breathed her thanks to a higher power while making the sign of the cross. When she opened them again, they were more luminous than usual. She turned to Sonia, but her tearful joy faded as she searched her face. “We will soon be home, where you can see your papa again and all your friends, ma chère. Are you not in ecstasies?”
“Of course,” she agreed, summoning a smile. “I’m just a little ti
red, that’s all.”
“As well as a little sad, yes? It’s always difficult to leave new friends and I’m sure you feel, as I do, that Monsieur Tremont is such a one. There was the voyage we shared from New Orleans, and then he has been so very kind since…since the business with Jean Pierre.”
Those few words—how they brought it all back: the candlelit dining room where the smells of garlic, oil and caramelized sugar lingered, the two men facing each other with swords in hand, the terror and the rage. Sonia had wanted to kill Jean Pierre as she held the pocketknife to his neck. The need had clawed at her, shaken her body from her head to her toes. She had, in that moment, understood something of the bloodlust that sometimes gripped men on the field of honor.
It was Kerr who had stepped close to put a calming hand on her arm and take the knife from her trembling hand.
What happened afterward was a blur. She hardly remembered being escorted from Jean Pierre’s house or arriving at that of the marquis. The days since then seemed disjointed somehow. She had slept the clock around, and did the same the next night, and the next.
She still could not get enough rest. She had spoken to a few people in the days just past: Tremont, the marquis’s daughter who was past fifty but looked no more than five-and-thirty, a number of townspeople who had called. Everyone had been so kind, so intent on banishing any unfavorable impression she might have gained of their fair city.
She could not remember exchanging more than a dozen words with Kerr.
He seemed to be avoiding her now. Alone at the prow of the ship, he faced the ocean instead of the land they were leaving behind. He looked well, dressed in a new frock coat, waistcoat and trousers made by the marquis’s tailor at Tremont’s behest, a gift in repayment for the mild concussion received at his orders. The gray broad-cloth matched the depths of his eyes and made his shoulders look as broad as the ship’s beam.
It also made him appear unapproachable, impossibly forbidding. He had been that way since it became clear they would be returning together to New Orleans. He fulfilled his duty as her escort, as he seemed to think it continued still, but not an iota more. Beyond the occasional discussion necessary to the position, they seldom spoke, were never alone. All personal contact was at an end.
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