Were those two slim, erect, implacable figures whose coats lay beside them on the sand really Sir James and Hugo Davenall? At this distance, in this strange, stark, unearthly border-zone between sea and land and sky, they could have been two strangers, two characters posed on an unfinished canvas, whose future an unseen hand was about to paint upon the mist that framed and rolled about them.
‘Attention!’ roared Major Bauer. At the word, the two figures cocked their guns and held them towards the ground.
Something was paining Freddy’s right hand, something he had held too long in a grip whose ferocity he had not noticed till now. Opening his hand, he glanced down and saw that the object was the coin he had tossed earlier with Bauer. There was the Austrian Emperor’s head to prove it. As his grip slackened, the coin fell away from the mound of his thumb and settled the other way up in his palm. And there still was the Austrian Emperor’s head – embossed on the other side of the coin.
James had given it to him. And Bauer had called. And it was double-headed. And Bauer was to time the signals. The significance began to hammer at the doors of his brain. And then he understood. But, as he did so, there was a shrill blast on the whistle. And the two figures started walking.
XIV
‘Quinn was dead. There was nothing to regret in that. But his death was as irrevocable for me as it was for him. It ensured that my stolen life as Sir James Davenall must end. As if to declare that it was so, I took from my pocket the cigarette-case Quinn had given me – the silver monogrammed case that had belonged to the real James Davenall – and pressed it into his lifeless hand before fleeing across the fields.
‘I reached Newmarket station in time to catch the last train to London. During the journey, I measured the consequences of Quinn’s death for those I loved and those I had wronged. It was not the charge of murdering him I feared, but what it would lead to. The winding entrails of our whole conspiracy would be dragged into view. Constance, whom I loved and whom I was sworn to protect, who had trusted me when others had called me a liar, who had loved me when she did not need to, would suffer more than I would and would go on suffering, long after my punishment was past. Wherever justice lay, it did not lie down that road.
‘Then it came to me. I could not go on with the pretence, but neither could I rescind it. I could not continue as Sir James Davenall, but I could be remembered as such, for a dead man can neither lie nor tell the truth. Only that way could the justice I desired be served, for only that way could Constance’s trust in me be saved.’
XV
‘Give that whistle to me!’ Freddy shouted, scrambling to his feet. ‘God damn it, Bauer, you’ve played us false!’
The whistle was clenched firmly between Bauer’s teeth, but still he managed a ghastly mocking smile before closing his lips around the mouthpiece and blowing the second signal. As Freddy lunged towards him, he feinted to one side, then thrust his right foot between Freddy’s sand-logged stride and swung both arms hard against his shoulder. Freddy was sent toppling, sliding helplessly down the soft and sucking wall of the dune, swinging his head back as he went to glimpse the inverted image of two black-clad figures closing on the white expanse of beach.
There could only be a few yards between them, yet still the third signal had not come. They were homing on each other in the upside-down, double-headed, looking-glass convergence of a treachery he could not understand. No man could miss another at such range. No man, indeed, could fail to kill.
At the foot of the dune, Freddy rolled over and raised himself on all fours. The two figures had stopped walking. There was no space between them, no gap of yards or chance of error. He filled his lungs to shout some warning or protest, but it was too late. The third signal rang out – and was swallowed by the roar of a single gunshot.
XVI
‘Hugo agreed readily to play the part I had prepared for him. He, too, knows the truth now, but he will never be able to tell it, because to do so will be to confess to a murder. He had to be told, because otherwise he would never have trusted me to do what I said I would. But never fear. The secret is safe with him.
‘It seems strange to say it, but I am grateful to Hugo. Had he not challenged me to a duel in the first place, I would never have realized how well such an end would serve my purposes. Well, for what I owe him, he will have his reward. He will have back all that I took from him: the money, the title, the property, the name. He will be restored to his inheritance. And he will be welcome to it.
‘Hugo means to bring Freddy with him as his second. Poor Freddy. He will be the only one of us ignorant of the true purpose of our meeting. To him, and the world when it is told, it will merely seem that the Davenall feud has claimed its final victim. And so it will have, in its way. We cannot know which of the two guns Gervase used in that other duel to seal the secret, more than forty years ago, but I hope, for what it is worth, that it is the one I carry. This time, you see, only one gun will be fired. And it will not be mine.’
XVII
Freddy was running across the beach. It was too late, far too late, but still he ran, the only moving figure on the whole frozen reach of tide-encroaching sand.
Hugo had dropped the gun. It lay at his feet, its barrel buried by the force of its fall. He was breathing hard, mouthing words he could not say aloud and staring down at the lifeless body of Sir James Davenall, whose right arm, stretched out in the moment of death, had cast his own weapon to where the swift and silent rim of the advancing sea had claimed now another yard of sand.
Freddy pulled up. He hardly dared to step closer. He should have known the bloody wreckage the shot of a duelling pistol at point-blank range would make of a man’s face. But the reality was worse, far worse than his racing mind had guessed as he had run from the dune. Nor was even the sight of torn flesh and smashed bone the worst of all his realizations. For that he had to look not at the face of a dead man but at the face of one living.
Hugo said nothing. He did not need to. The furtive twitching of his lips, the anxious wiping of his hands, the guilt-shot darting of his eyes: they all proclaimed it loudly enough. Freddy had not watched a duel. He had witnessed a murder.
XVIII
‘I have no doubt I shall be able to find someone desperate enough to act as my second – at a price. And I feel sure we can rely on Hugo. The only question that remains, therefore, is whether you, too, will agreed to stand by me, Trenchard.
‘You have read the letter I mean to send to Richard. It will suffice, I think, to win you your liberty. And, whatever Richard suspects, neither he nor anyone else will feel able to disbelieve the last words of one about to die. Though some may continue to doubt my identity, they will not prevent me being buried as Sir James Davenall. Constance will never understand why I agreed to fight Hugo, but at least she will never have cause to doubt that she is Sir James Davenall’s widow.
‘I have come to you for her sake. At first, she may be too grief-stricken to face you but, as time passes, she will have need of your support. Who else can I ask to help her but the father of her child, the man who was once her husband – and may be once again?
‘This is neither bravery nor madness. If I stay, I am a dead man and Constance is a ruined woman. If I flee, I only spare myself by making her suffer more. So what choice do I really have? This way, Hugo gets what he wants and so do I. This way, nobody will ever be able to prove that I was not James Davenall. It is a strange thought, is it not? The impersonation will be complete – in the living and the dying.’
As the ninth strike of the hour faded into silence, and with it his recollection of everything that Norton had told him, Trenchard stepped back from the window. He took a deep breath and passed one hand across his face. It would be over now, there could be no doubt of that. For Norton, the pretence would have ended at last. Whereas, for Trenchard, it was just about to begin.
XIX
Some spreading limb of the rising tide had slid in across the sand until, reaching the dead man who lay in
its path, it spread the dark stain of his blood with bewildering speed into every bubbling pool and runnel of the shore.
With a groan of horror, Freddy started back from the red and rippling line of water, but Hugo seemed not to notice as it lapped accusingly at his feet. Then Major Bauer stepped between them, oblivious to the spectacle. Like some buzzard come down from his branch to pluck the carrion clean, he stooped over the body, reached into one of the waistcoat pockets, pulled out a tightly folded wad of bank-notes and turned back to Freddy, smiling grimly.
‘What the …?’ Freddy stammered. ‘What the devil … are you doing?’
Bauer slipped the wad into his coat. ‘My fee, Herr Cleveland, for services rendered.’
‘Your … fee?’
‘I have done all that he asked of me. We agreed the fee in advance.’
‘Good God.’
‘Accept my apologies for the double-headed schilling. Its use is normally limited to the casino. Keep it as a memento.’ Then he tossed his head, sniffed and glared past Freddy towards the dunes. ‘You must excuse me, gentlemen. I see that we have company, which I suspect I shall find uncongenial. You will forgive me if I leave you to explain what has happened.’
With that, Bauer strode off across the beach. Freddy watched him for only a few seconds before looking in the opposite direction. Two people, a man and a woman, had emerged from the track between the dunes and were hurrying towards them. Freddy recognized them at once, even in this place where he would least have expected to see them: Richard and Catherine Davenall.
‘Do you know what he did, Freddy?’ Hugo said suddenly. ‘Do you know what he did, the instant before I pulled the trigger? He smiled. God curse him, he smiled.’
Freddy looked down at the body on the sand. The bloodstained water was rising around his stretched and lifeless limbs. Soon he would be afloat. If his smile had existed other than in Hugo’s imagination, it was no longer visible. But the cause was, as Freddy could clearly see. The bullet had done more than kill Sir James Davenall. It had changed his features beyond recognition. No man could say now with certainty who he really was.
Epilogue
I
It was seven years, almost to the day, since William Trenchard had looked up from the croquet bench in his St John’s Wood garden and caught his first glimpse of the man the world now remembered as Sir James Davenall; nearly six since a duel on the Belgian coast had ended, yet also preserved, the most daring imposture ever to deceive an English court of law. What posterity said of Sir James Davenall remained, for all this lapse of time, a fiction. But of that, as of much else, posterity was unaware.
It was five years since William Trenchard, restored to the family firm following his release from Ticehurst Asylum, had opened a newspaper one morning on the jolting top deck of an omnibus and read with dismay of the collision in a fog-bound London street which had claimed the life of Sir Hugo Davenall. The subsequent inquest had returned a verdict of accidental death, though whether the jury would have opted for suicide had they known the odium and ostracism which had been Sir Hugo’s reward for killing his brother in a duel is impossible to say. For of that, as of much else, the jury was unaware.
It was three years since the death of his father had made William Trenchard a wealthy man in his own right, able to abandon Trenchard & Leavis to his brother’s keeping and fulfil an old pledge by seeking out Sir James Davenall’s widow at the villa in Provence where she lived in secluded mourning. Ernest Trenchard, for one, had viewed William’s determination to visit his former wife as the sheerest folly. But of William’s real motives, as of much else, Ernest was unaware.
It was just over a year since Emily Sumner had been taken aback by the news that her sister had agreed to remarry her former husband and become Mrs William Trenchard once more. Constance’s explanation – that she did not wish Patience to grow up as the daughter of divorced parents – had seemed to Emily’s mind scarcely adequate in the face of William’s proven infidelity. But of the true nature of William’s infidelity, as of much else, Emily was unaware.
It was six months since William and Constance Trenchard had been rejoined in matrimony, before a handful of guests, in a civil ceremony at Aix-en-Provence. Richard Davenall had served as William’s best man, which might have seemed an odd choice in view of their previous differences. But of those differences, as of much else, there had been a healing of which all but they were unaware.
It was a fortnight since William and Constance Trenchard, having installed Patience at her new boarding school near Lucerne, had embarked on a leisurely tour of Switzerland which was the nearest they had come to a second honeymoon. What better way, they had thought, to lay to rest the sadnesses of seven years? What indeed? They could hardly be blamed for their error. For of the risk it exposed them to, if of nothing else, they were unaware.
It was only an hour since William Trenchard had left Constance resting in their hotel room in Lugano and taken a stroll along the lakeside into the town. There he had bought a drink at a quay-front café, lit his pipe and admired the view of the lake and its enfolding mountains, bathed in mellow late-afternoon light. It was the last day of September 1889, but there seemed no other endings than that to detect in the mild Swiss sanative air. Nor had William Trenchard cause to suspect that there might be any. Of the strange timings of fate he, like everyone else, was unaware. He did not know, nor could he, that seven years sufficed for the mischief of a moment to run its course. He did not know, but, in less than an hour, he would.
II
A tall bulky figure was standing with his back to me at a nearby confectionery-kiosk. Something in the way he carried himself, some haughty jerk of the head as he turned away with his purchase, struck me as familiar and made me watch as he ambled to a lakeside bench, subsided into it and began unwrapping his chocolate.
It was many years later, in circumstances he should have foreseen, that William Trenchard completed a written account of the events which reached their quietus that seemingly unportentous Sunday afternoon in Lugano. His reason for writing such an account was as understandable as its effect is appropriate, for it ensures that to him belongs that which once seemed so conclusively to have been denied him: the last word.
For several minutes, I went on watching him, waiting to be certain that he was who I thought. Seven years older, certainly, but outwardly not much altered: a large fleshy figure clad in cream linen, breaking off squares of chocolate and swallowing them greedily whilst squinting out across the lake from beneath the brim of a straw hat. Sunlight glinted at me from a signet ring on his left hand and flashed on his watch-chain as he reached down to check the time. His lower lip protruded in a significant gesture when he saw what it was, and then I was certain. He was Prince Napoleon Bonaparte.
I doubt he would have recognized me without being prompted, and I wish now I had refrained from jogging his memory. But there seemed no good reason to let the chance pass. Neither of us had profited by the circumstances of our last meeting: a little commiseration seemed suddenly in order. I finished my drink, rose from the table and walked across to him.
‘Good afternoon, Prince. Do you remember me?’
He looked up with a petulant frown. His eyes narrowed. Then he smiled faintly, though whether in greeting or in recognition of a pleasing irony I could not tell. ‘William Trenchard. Quelle coïncidence.’
‘May I join you?’
‘By all means.’
I sat down beside him. ‘It’s been a long time. We’ve not met since—’
‘Spare us both the recollection, mon ami. What brings you to Lugano?’
‘Mere pleasure. And you?’
‘The same … you might say.’
‘You’re staying here?’
‘I have a friend who owns a villa on the other side of the lake. I expect to be collected in my friend’s launch …’ He peered into the distance. ‘Very shortly.’
‘It’s a beautiful place.’
‘Do you think so?’ H
e looked at me in brief but piercing scrutiny. ‘When you live in this country because your own will not have you, mon ami, its charms fade rapidly.’
‘Even so—’
‘Even so, there are compensations?’ He nodded. ‘Yes, it is true. There are.’ Once more, he stared out across the lake. This time, his eyes seemed to find what they sought: the wake of a small steam-launch, approaching diagonally from the opposite shore. At sight of it, his mouth set in some crooked amalgam of a frown and a smile, as if he were uncertain whether to be pleased or disappointed.
‘Your friend?’ I asked, gesturing with my eyebrows towards the distant craft.
‘Yes.’ Abruptly, he rose from the bench, filled his lungs with air and smiled down at me. ‘Will you walk with me to the landing-stage, Trenchard? It is not far.’
I agreed and we started southwards down the long avenue of lime trees which followed the shore of the lake. The Prince kept glancing to his left as we went, checking, I assumed, the progress of the launch, whose engine I could hear growing steadily closer.
‘Tell me,’ he said, after we had covered several yards in silence, ‘do you ever hear news of Catherine Davenall?’
‘Never. As far as I know, she still lives at Cleave Court, but as privately as ever.’
‘No doubt she took Hugo’s death badly.’
‘No doubt she did.’
‘The newspapers implied it was suicide.’
‘Did they? I understood from reports of the inquest that he strayed into the cab’s path because of thick fog.’
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