Absolute Honour

by C. C. Humphreys

He thought the Irishman was going to go for him then, saw his colour change, his hand drop to the sword at his side, almost wished him to draw it. He knew he couldn’t take this man, not yet, but a part of him wanted just one more try, and he pushed himself away from the table to give himself room.

  Once more, Red Hugh controlled his temper. It took some deep breaths before the sword hilt was released and the Irishman rose to his feet. ‘I know a little of what you are feeling,’ he said. ‘For I have felt such madness myself, born out of war and killing, jealousy and betrayals, as you see them.’ He put a hand to the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes. For one insane moment Jack was tempted to leap at him. Then the eyes opened again. ‘It was after one such time, only two years ago, that I returned to my country half-crazed and there I met a beauty and a kindness I had not encountered in years.’ He shuddered. ‘I abused that kindness, took what I had no right to take, a sin that has sent me to the priests in search of a forgiveness they can never grant, one that I can only strive to atone for in my own way.’ He leaned down, his voice now a whisper. ‘But I assure you, boy, if you are tormented, then welcome to my circle of hell.’

  He turned to the door, and Jack thought he’d go through it and that would be that. Instead, he paused, turned back. ‘Shall I tell you something else, Jack Absolute, before I go? About my cousin? And Bath?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘The plot I laid against you there, with regard to her, I’d hoped to separate entirely from my political affairs. I simply wanted to make amends to one I love and had sinned against; and to make you truly appreciate one worth the appraisal. I thought to help you both to marry for love and money. Oh aye, Honourable Jack, for money has always to be a part of it when you are as poor as she is.’ He shook his head. ‘But I did not order her to seduce you in Bath. And she did not tell me or anyone of your approach to her in the church here or of your rendezvous. Indeed, she slipped the guard I placed on her. For she needed you to know one thing at least – that if you were betrayed, she was not the betrayer.’

  Then he was gone, his footsteps reverberating down the stairs before the door was closed and bolted again. Jack was left to his thoughts and, after only a short while, some tears.

  It took three days to climb out of his despair, back to his anger. Three also to acquire the words he knew he’d need from his little-used Italian grammar. When he was ready and the least taciturn of the guards, a fellow of about his own years, came with his supper, he asked him. The man had a little English but he found Jack’s request hard to understand, immediately presuming it was of the kind Red Hugh had said the young man would require.

  ‘Woman,’ he said, smiling lasciviously. ‘Il signor want woman, si?’

  ‘Woman, no,’ Jack replied. ‘Man.’

  The guard looked surprised, then shrugged. ‘Uomo? Va bene.’

  ‘No, no! Signor, not … I need …’ Jack stepped closer, searching for the newly acquired words. ‘Il maestro … di spada.’ He made a gesture as if lunging with a sword. ‘For exercise, yes?’ He breathed deep, raised his arms beside him and shook them. ‘Exercismo, si?’

  Understanding came. ‘Ah, capito. Exercismo! Con il spaddacino. Si!’

  He turned to go but Jack halted him. ‘Molto importante,’ he said. ‘Il maestro sinistra. Capiche? Sinistra.’

  The man nodded, understanding the request if not its reason. ‘Ah, si, si, capito!’

  Glad you do, thought Jack, as the door closed. For what I need most in the world is a left-handed fencing master.

  – FOUR –

  The Prisoner

  Desperately Jack flung himself back, his feet pumping to drive him away, the speed of them the only thing keeping the sword point from his chest. His own blade – though he moved it frantically – was almost useless. He’d allowed the man to get close in again; once there, he was rarely dislodged without striking.

  Sucking in his chest, he lunged back, bringing his blade up almost horizontal to his body and jerking his wrist hard right. The threatening point of his opponent went outwards, just enough. Coming en garde again in sixte, Jack maintained contact, held his opponent’s weapon there. The man halted, and Jack’s other hand reached back for balance – and encountered wallpaper.

  Damn the fellow, Jack thought, breathing deep, watching the man’s eyes. A flick of them, signalling renewal, and he’d have to find something else, though it was hard to think what. In the eternity of the previous ten seconds he’d driven all the way across the room, had the Italian almost as cramped as he was now … and then, somehow he’d given it all away, failed to make that final thrust, been driven all the way back.

  ‘So,’ the man said, slowly disengaging his blade. He walked back to the centre of the room. ‘Again.’

  Jack came forward, wiping the sweat onto his sleeve. It was hot work anyway, but early summer had brought back the intense Roman heat he’d almost forgotten through the long winter and chill spring.

  He saluted, came en garde. Immediately the master took one step back. For months now Ubaldi had done thus, compelling Jack to attack. This was done at Jack’s request, for he knew that if he ever again crossed swords with the man who’d incarcerated him there, he would have to be the one to take the initiative. But it was hard always to act first, not react. It was also the lesson he needed to learn. Twice now the Irishman had taken him, easily. It could not happen a third time.

  The pace back signalled something else. Ever since Jack had told il maestro that the man he sought had trained in the French school, the Italian’s national pride had been stirred. It was the only time Jack had seen him expressive about anything, explaining and demonstrating how the French liked to stay out of distance, picking off their opponents as they came in, or exploding in a sudden charge and lunge. The Italian way – the superior way, Jack was assured – was to get in close and let wrist, blade, speed and sudden changes of tempo do the work: stop him getting to you, close in and kill. With his step back, Ubaldi was once again assuming the French – the Irish – role.

  Jack waited till his breath was close to normal. Then he stepped a pace right, assuming the position he must have if he was to take a man with a sword in his left hand – for that man, used to fighting right handers, delighted in keeping them square on and open. The right hander, to have any hope, had to deny him that advantage. He was ready to attack, yet he waited. In the first months of tutelage, with the impetuosity of his years, he’d gone at it hard and immediate. And he’d been punished, not only in a swift riposte against him, but in the manner of it, the steel of even these blunted small swords whipped hard against the over-extended arm, the foolishly exposed shoulder or breast. In those months Jack’s body had been a tapestry of blue and yellow bruises. Not so lately. Il maestro hit him, of course, but less often and only direct. The need to punish foolishness had passed with the snow.

  He’d also learned to think, not one move ahead, nor three, but seven, at the least, yet always prepared to adapt, as an unexpected riposte changed his course. Yet thinking only got one so far. The real skill, he had discovered, was not to think at all.

  He lunged, low, a reach for the groin, flicking around the blade that dropped to meet him and immediately launching for the face. The man gave ground, swinging his point out wide, offering his inner arm. Jack didn’t fall for it. Instead he attacked, covered ground and got inside where the close work began. It looked like impetuosity, and it was meant to; it carried a risk and Jack took it.

  Swords flashed through late-afternoon sunbeams, steel beat on steel. Ubaldi tried to regain his distance but Jack wouldn’t let him, driving the man back till he was again almost touching the wall. The Italian’s ‘role’ was swiftly dropped. He was fighting now for the hit, executing, with his immense skill, complex combinations of parry and riposte.

  And then the hit came. A slipped parry, a turn of the wrist, a thrust from underneath. ‘Hah,’ cried Jack, as his sword tip touched flesh. Ubaldi was ‘dead’.

  A grunt came, an acknowl
edgement and the only praise Jack ever received. He had learned to distinguish between the man’s grunts. This one was almost effusive.

  Both men straightened.

  ‘Again?’ Ubaldi said.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he replied in Italian, the one other skill he’d part-developed over the months. ‘It’s late.’

  Another grunt. ‘We practise the move?’

  Jack shook his head. Every master had his own, special moves. Tricks almost, deadly ones, that drew pupils once their effectiveness had been proven on the duelling grounds. Ubaldi’s was indeed ingenious, and Jack had been made to practise it relentlessly, almost every day, for months now. It was awkward, so it had to become second nature. He was sure that if he didn’t have it by now he never would.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he replied, reaching out his hand, sad in the lie. This man was the closest thing in Rome to a friend Jack had, the only man, other than the uncommunicative guards, that he saw. But if all went well, this would be the last time that they met.

  Ubaldi collected his weapons. Even blunted ones, tipped in cork, were forbidden by the Roman Inquisition whose prisoner Jack ultimately was, favouring the Jacobite Cause just as the Pope did, even down to holding the Old Pretender’s enemies. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, bowing, then went to the door and hammered upon it. It took only a few moments for the grille to be pulled back, the guard to see Jack standing, arms spread innocently wide, in the centre of the room. Bolts were shot, the door opened, il maestro left and Jack glimpsed the guard before the door slammed shut. It was Lorenzo, as he hoped it would be. Not because he was a pleasant man – the reverse, he was the surliest, the one most ready with petty cruelties – but because he was the only guard Jack had ever seen drunk and then, on those two occasions, the only one who had failed to check Jack every hour of his watch. The Roman Inquisition terrorized its servants to do their duty well. But a man’s Saint’s Day came, after all, but once a year, and tonight it was Lorenzo’s.

  Jack looked around him. As prisons went, this was sure to be one of the more comfortable, reserved for the elite of offenders against the Catholic Church and Papal States – or their favoured allies. He had a bed and changes of linen, adequate food, unlimited wine, even if he was abstemious with that on all but a few occasions. He could have had women, and some nights he’d been tempted. But a woman had brought him to Rome and, sullied though she was in his memory, he knew he would not forget her with drunkenness and whores. There was only one way to achieve such oblivion, and that was beyond this pretty cage, at a sword’s point.

  He ate, slept a little, awaking with each tolling of the bell of the nearby monastery. At two in the morning, with the grille bolt just slammed and the guard’s slurred singing receding down the stairs, Jack rose and dressed swiftly. He’d accustomed his eyes to such light as there was but anyway had practised everything relentlessly in this darkness for weeks. He had only not filled his satchel before in fear of one of the frequent searches. Now he did, with a change of clothes and his eating knife. The Jacobites, despite their searching, had not found Jack’s last reserve of scudi, three gold coins woven into the hair of his wig. These he transferred to a pocket. Then he pulled his chair over to the wardrobe and clambered on top of it.

  His fingers found the slight ridge where his plasterwork joined the decoration of the ceiling. The whole piece gave. In truth, he’d always been somewhat amazed that his construction had never tumbled in, that no guard had spotted a trail of gouged plaster on the floor, a lick of glue around a rococo flower. His request to have a book of classical sculptures and the wherewithal to copy them had been at first refused, then, with persistence, granted, though the results were extensively mocked – he was no artist, the busts and heads around the room testimony to that. But this corner of moulding was a piece of art! Admiring it more than he had any work of Michelangelo, he lowered it carefully to the floor.

  He thrust his head up into the attic space, breathing in the musty, dust-heavy air and listened. Nothing moved in the room below, the one next door to his that had been unoccupied now these two months. Heaving himself up, he edged along the beams, relying again on the experience of doing this again and again ever since he’d first broken through the ceiling. He came to the area near the far wall that he’d chosen as suitable and, taking out his knife, began to gouge out the plaster between the beams.

  It took longer than he’d hoped and there was noise he could not help. Balanced on the two beams, sweat began to run from him, dripping from his nose and chin into the expanding hole. Whether it was the dry plaster’s soaking, the hydration of the horsehair with which it was threaded, or Jack’s increasing effort he could not know, but suddenly, a section the size of his fist gave way and fell, followed by one even larger. It reverberated in the room below, like a shout in a confessional. Panicked, Jack scrambled back across the beams, out of the hole and onto his wardrobe. He heard running footsteps in the corridor as he dropped to the ground, landing hard on his fake plaster moulding, shattering it. Covering himself with a sheet from the bed, he ripped the head off one of his latest efforts, a bust of Caesar, and laid it onto the floor, just as the grille in the door shot open.

  Eyes reflected the light of a lantern held out there. ‘Eh, what are you doing? What happened?’ Lorenzo the guard said in Italian.

  ‘I went for a piss,’ Jack replied. ‘I knocked this over.’

  ‘What? Come over here. What you say?’

  ‘Piss.’ Jack approached slowly. ‘Broke this.’

  The guard eyed the shattered statue. ‘This make noise?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘See?’ He dropped the head and it landed with a reasonable thud on the floor. ‘Thus fell Caesar,’ he smiled.

  The man was obviously no classicist. ‘Good. Ugly thing,’ he said, his face relaxing.

  Jack pressed his nose to the grille so the man wouldn’t be able to see too much else. This close he could tell Lorenzo had definitely been celebrating his Saint’s Day. ‘Good wine?’ he asked, but the guard merely grunted, stepped back and slammed the grille, nearly trapping Jack’s nose. He waited till he heard feet descend the stairs before he pushed away from the door. He wanted to lie down but somehow he forced his legs to follow his previous route.

  Holding himself between the wooden roof beams, he slowly lowered himself into the next door room, bending his legs to land on stockinged feet. Retrieving his boots and satchel, previously dropped, he tiptoed to the door of the empty room, paused and listened. Nothing! Putting on his boots, he reached for the door handle, then pulled.

  The door did not give. He pulled harder. Still it did not budge. He jerked, tugged, all to no avail.

  They had locked it! They had locked the door of an empty room and all Jack’s plans were as shattered as the plaster on the floor around him. On the floor in his room, too, he suddenly remembered. He had a hole the size of a man in his ceiling and he’d crushed the thing that concealed it. Wherever he looked, discovery lay.

  Glancing around the room, surprise replaced panic for a moment as he realized he could see. Moonlight was coming in through half-open shutters. It lit a room in disarray, not just from the shattered ceiling. This room was not occupied because it was being worked upon. Tools lay about. A large iron grille was on the floor …

  He looked up. One of the windows was still barred but the other wasn’t. In three strides he was across, edging onto the deep sill, pushing the shutters fully open. He looked down upon a courtyard and took his first breath of freedom.

  Joy lasted a mere moment. He was still three storeys up. A swift, vertigo-inducing glance told him that, should he even have the courage, there was nothing to place his feet upon on the wall’s smooth face, no way down … unless …

  It took him but a moment. With the help of a workman’s trestle, he was once more in the attic. For the fourth time he shimmied along the beams, slid through the hole and lowered himself into his own room. Rapidly gathering up all his sheets and blankets, he forced them ahead through bo
th holes and returned, yet again, the way he’d come.

  He thought the trestle, wedged under the window, would hold his weight. He was less sure of the knots. A sailor aboard the Sweet Eliza had tried to teach him knot-craft but he had obviously failed to pay sufficient attention for every hard pull seemed to separate the cloths. Finally he settled on the simplest knot and tugged and tugged to test it. It seemed well enough. Yet he knew the real test would only come when he was dangling from the ledge.

  Shuddering, he threw the material out the window. It did not touch the ground, though from his height Jack could not see how large the gap was. As he tried to ascertain it, the monastery bell tolled again. Three o’clock. He hoped that Lorenzo was downstairs, comatose from honouring his namesake saint. But even if he wasn’t, even if he was already approaching Jack’s door, there was nothing to be done now. Try to escape, they’d told him, and your ease is over, perhaps even your life. The Roman Inquisition brooked no insurrection.

  With the satchel flung over his shoulder, a last grimace and a determination only to look up, Jack lowered himself over the edge.

  The sheet gave a lurch as his weight pulled the trestle snug to the window. One hand shot up, gripped the crumbling stone above him; one held to cloth. He clung for a minute, poised to scramble back up at the slightest ripping sound. But when none came, still reluctant, he put his second hand upon the sheet.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered, ‘the quicker, the better.’

  Sweat poured down his face and he found it hard to ungrip his hand each time he had to reach. Then he placed his feet together, snagging cloth between them and the strain eased just slightly. He reached the next sill down, stood for too long breathing deeply, then began to lower himself again.

  He was halfway to the next floor when he felt a slight giving; the next moment, shrieks came – his and the sheet’s – as the material parted. He slipped, his feet encountering the stone of the sill below, and he flung himself forward, hands scrabbling at the shutter. One slid off, the other reached, while his kicking legs, seeking the stonework, caused the shutter to swing out from the window. Desperate, he grabbed the shutter, held on, and dangled there, looking between his feet at the sheet coiled into a spool far below him. The drop was twenty feet at the least.