Major Sharpe, carrying the second pistol, marched over and handed it to Darwent. The major’s eyes were as blank as a blind man’s. But a tinge of apology touched his harsh voice.
“My lord, will you be good enough to remove your cloak and hat? —Throw them on the ground; thank you. Now please raise your right arm, and turn your right side towards me.”
Darwent did so. “Why are we doing this?” he demanded.
“A mere formality. So that we may be sure there is no padding on the side you turn towards your adversary in—” Major Sharpe, who had been slapping his hands down Darwent’s right side between armpit and waist, seemed to remember something. He stood up straight, like a spring released.
“My lord, have you never been out with the pistol?”
“No.”
“But I understood …no matter now. You will note that Mr. Fletcher goes through the same formality with Sir John. The scarlet plume on the white busby twitched as Major Sharpe swung his head round. “Satisfactory, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Positively, sir!”
Major Sharpe glanced up at the sky.
“The challenged party has of course the choice of position with his back to the sun. But there is no sun. Have you a choice of position, my lord?”
It was difficult to keep his voice steady, but Darwent managed it.
“None at all,” he replied, weighing the pistol in his hand and feeling its fine balance. “Let my second decide.”
“Then I think, Mr. Fletcher, we can pace off the distance and place our men?”
That was done, too.
Buckstone’s little eye gleamed, and he threw away his cigar.
Darwent found himself standing in the large open space, nearly free of mist except the mist veiling distant trees, and the faint-moving white carpet which sent up smoke round his ankles. The air smelled of rain. Again he tested the fine balance of the pistol. Jemmy Fletcher was whispering and jabbering in his ear.
“No, old boy! No! Don’t stand fullface to him!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Stand sideways, with the right side of your body towards him! Your right foot a little forward; toe facing him; weight on the left foot. Here, damme, let me place you! —There!”
“Very well, Jemmy. But why?”
“Gives him a narrower target, that’s why! Everybody does it. Look at Jack!”
Darwent raised his eyes. At thirty-six feet, and at first glance, Buckstone seemed to be unnaturally close: almost on top of him. Body turned sideways, right knee advanced, Buckstone was listening to a curt word from Major Sharpe.
Mr. Mowbray, the surgeon, was standing a considerable distance back, away from the duelists but at a point midway between.
“Now why,” the surgeon was reflecting, “why won’t they take advice and not stand sideways? A pistol ball through the side is almost certain to strike some vital organ.”
Darwent’s thumb was on the hammer of the pistol. The hammer drew back with a soft, easy, melodious click. An answering click showed that Buckstone had done the same.
“Got to go now, old boy!” Jemmy was babbling in a thin, high voice. He clapped his principal on the back. “The Major’s leaving Jack, d’ye see? Get in first shot and you may wing him. Oh, damme! G’bye.”
Jemmy hastened away.
And he was alone with Buckstone, on a fair field at twelve yards, with the white mist drifting about their ankles.
Major Sharpe, swinging the cloak back from his shoulders as he strode toward the surgeon, revealed the dark-blue Hussar uniform with the horizontal lines of gold braid. He took up his position with the surgeon on one side of him and Jemmy on the other. He put his let hand on the hilt of his straight saber under the short dolman over the shoulder.
His voice, though not loud, seemed to rasp and ring in that silent place.
“Are you ready, my lord?”
Darwent drew the rain-scented air deeply into his lungs.
“Ready!”
“Are you ready, Sir John?”
Buckstone, cunning of eye, his beefy figure all in black except for white breeches and cravat, stood sideways with his pistol hand pointed at the ground.
“Any time!” he said.
“Then fire as you please!”
The surgeon’s hand, inside the black bag, quickly and in succession touched probe, forceps, and laudanum bottle.
Birds bickered faintly in the trees behind the three witnesses. A light breeze, born nowhere, smoothed across the carpet of mist and sent up billows like smoke. Three seconds passed; then six, then eight. Both duelists were still motionless, weapons pointed at the ground.
Major Sharpe looked from one of them to the other. He had seen many things in an affair of honor, but never this. His wrath boiled over, and all his correctness fell away.
“What the devil’s the meaning of this?” he shouted. “Why don’t you fire?”
Darwent spoke loudly and very clearly, without taking his eyes from Buckstone.
“Major Sharpe,” he said, “I believe Sir John Buckstone is usually good enough to allow his opponent the first shot. This time I await his fire.”
Buckstone’s ruddy face turned livid with rage.
Buckstone, in fact, made a move to dart out his arm rigidly and fire. But he saw Darwent’s smile, and wouldn’t take first shot.
“Jack’s losin’ his head!” moaned Jemmy Fletcher, suddenly and incredulously. “Oh, damme, he mustn’t lose his head!”
Major Sharpe’s head twitched round, the scarlet plume fluttering.
“Are you Sir John’s second, Mr. Fletcher?”
“No, no! I …”
Major Sharpe, cold and bleak from every wrinkle in his face to every wire of his red side whiskers, again looked from one to the other of the duelists.
“Since you seem to wish for more danger, gentlemen,” he said, “then you shall have it. I propose a measure which is not customary. But it is not new, and it is entirely within the code.”
Major Sharpe paused, drawing back his lips over well-set false teeth.
“I propose to count slowly to three. This will give you time to aim. At the count of three, you will both fire together. Is it agreed?”
Both contestants nodded. Jemmy moaned. Major Sharpe smiled.
“One!” he called curtly, and lifted his right hand.
Buckstone’s hand swung up to position, arm rigid and extended, aiming dead for the center of the forehead.
Darwent, thirty-six feet away, saw the steel muzzle of the barrel enclosed in its polished wood and mother-of-pearl. Beyond it Buckstone’s little eyes seemed to be glazed with concentration, the weals on his cheeks stood out, but those eyes flickered when Darwent’s weapon remained pointed at the ground.
The light breeze strengthened, drawing veils of mist from trees far away and whispering amid leaves.
“Two!” called Major Sharpe.
Mist rolled before the breeze. Far behind him Darwent heard faintly a new noise: a grinding, then a very slow click-clack. The sails of the windmill had begun to move. A bead of sweat ran down Darwent’s cheek.
“This ain’t a duel!” cried Jemmy. “This is murder!”
Darwent’s hand raised carelessly to about the height of his waist, still taking no aim. Buckstone, eyes bloodshot, tried so violently to keep his aim steady that the pistol muzzle wavered, steadied, and wavered again. Darwent saw it waver. So did Major Sharpe.
“Three!”
As Darwent’s hand whipped out to fire, the two shots came so nearly together that only one cloud of birds rose squeaking and twittering from the trees.
Buckstone’s aim was a hairline too wide. Darwent heard the hornet hum of the bullet before it screeched past his left ear. At the same moment Buckstone—shot squarely through the right knee cap—seemed to kick out backwards with both legs, his face a mask of wonder, before he fell face down with a thud into the mist-carpet.
His right hand, pistol gone, rose and clawed in the air above the spurti
ng mist. Then he thrashed out with both hands. The surgeon raced toward him, taking out the laudanum bottle.
Overcoming a vast weakness, Darwent walked slowly over to where Major Sharpe and Jemmy Fletcher were looking at him. Darwent’s greatest weakness had not yet come.
“It is for your principal to decide, sir,” he addressed Major Sharpe, “whether there shall be another exchange of shots.”
The other two paid no attention to this. Overhead the sparrows circled, and they heard the slow click-clack of the windmill sails.
“You told me,” Jemmy almost whispered, “you’d never touched a pistol in your life!”
“Pardon me. I said I hated pistols. I asked you to suppose, for the sake of argument, that I had never touched one.”
Buckstone screamed. He could not help it. Buckstone was fighting the surgeon, rolling, while Mr. Mowbray tried to force the laudanum bottle between his teeth.
Major Sharpe pointed. “Was that shot a lucky accident, my lord?”
“No, sir. I could have killed him when you said, ‘fire as you please.’ I did not wish to kill him.”
“But—!”
“Only to smash his vanity and insolence. To serve him as he served the poor damned pigeons he called out. The score is paid.”
Darwent extended the pistol, butt foremost, toward Major Sharpe.
“You told me, Lord Darwent, that you had never fought a duel.”
“Nor have I.” He repressed a shudder. “But on an island called Crosstree, where an ammunition ship was wrecked with no explosion because the powder was wet, there was almost no food. Only scrawny, wild birds as elusive as a speck at twilight. Six hours a day, for eight long months on end, we practiced with the pistol so that we should not starve.”
Gravely Major Sharpe took the pistol from Darwent’s hand, and bowed.
“You were challenged, Lord Darwent,” he said, with what might have been a bright bleak smile. “You withdrew your right to this,” he touched the saber at his side, “and agreed to pistols. —Your very obedient servant, my lord!”
“Yours, sir,” answered Darwent, returning the bow.
And he turned round and walked slowly, rather unsteadily, in the direction of his carriage. A heavier wind began to sweep away the mist as a broom sweeps, and the world was green again.
Chapter XII
Speaks Mainly of Caroline’s Eyes
IT WAS A QUARTER to eight in the morning when the red berline drew up before number thirty-eight St. James’s Square.
All through that drive home, trembling from what is nowadays called “the black reaction,” Darwent huddled inside his cloak and was silent. Jemmy Fletcher, who sat uneasily beside him, also remained silent until Jemmy alighted in Pall Mall.
“About that wager, old boy. I’m afraid I can’t pay you.”
“Wager?”
“The wager of who would,” Jemmy bit his lips, “fall in the duel.”
“You weren’t intended to pay it, Jemmy. It was a matter of sarcasm.”
“Eh? Oh! Yes. But they won’t like it, you know!”
“Who won’t like what?”
“Jack’s friends,” the other burst out. “They won’t like it at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to look out for trouble!”
“It is a curious fact, Jemmy, that you fail to curdle my blood. Patrick, drive on!”
When the carriage stopped before Caroline’s house, under a grayer and heavier sky, Darwent pulled himself together and became his own man. It was necessary. He had scarcely ascended one step before the front door was opened.
But, as a circumstance almost unheard of, no footman touched the door. It was flung open by fat, slovenly old Hubert Mulberry; and behind him stood Caroline.
“Lad, lad, he didn’t hit you!” the lawyer croaked hoarsely, and shook his fist in the doorway. “Stop! Are you hiding a wound under that cloak? Did he hit you?”
“No. —How’s Dolly?”
Slowly Caroline turned away, putting her hand on the newel post of the stairs.
Mr. Mulberry, checked in mid-flight, looked evasive.
“She’s dead,” said Darwent. “Or dying. Isn’t she?”
“Now, now, Dick!” urged Mr. Mulberry, as though warning him against such loudness outside a decorous door. “There’s no call to think that. The sawbones is locked in the room with her. He won’t say much; but sawbones won’t, case they’re wrong. He says he’ll have word this morning. Besides …”
“Besides?”
“Well, Dick, don’t fret too much before the event! We’ll spike his guns. But the fact is: you may be arrested again, and put in Newgate.”
“Newgate!” Darwent exclaimed, after a long pause. “Because of this duel with Buckstone?”
“No, no, no!” Mr. Mulberry rubbed at the fringes of hair on his forehead pushing them back so that all his gray-brown hair stood up like a grubby crest. “But—lad!” he added in alarm. “Buckstone didn’t hit you. Did you kill him?”
“No. I starred his kneecap, as they call it.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Mulberry, and a creaky bellows seemed to gurgle in his throat. “Why don’t you come in?”
Newgate! Dolly! If the whole half-drunken nightmare began all over again …
Darwent went into the foyer. Alfred, after taking his hat and cape, closed the door. Caroline turned round from the newel post, her eyes lowered.
“Have you breakfasted, my lord?” she asked.
“Only black tea at Stephen’s. But I don’t think I could swallow food now.”
“Then at least,” said Caroline, her voice rising a little, “sit down with Mr. Mulberry and your other friend.” She indicated the front room on the ground floor, at his left. “I ordered breakfast prepared for them in the dining room. They sought you first at Stephen’s, and then here.”
For the first time Darwent sensed the oddity of the situation. Caroline and Mr. Mulberry, he could have sworn, would be mutually antagonistic from the moment they met: Caroline haughty and indifferent, the lawyer with sulky defiant lip. Yet they stood here like friends.
In fact, everything had changed. From the instant he pulled the trigger and shattered Buckstone’s kneecap, it was as though all hatred and even dislike washed out of him. It was as though he really had been suffering, as Caroline had said, from a kind of madness.
“Mr. Mulberry and your other friend,” observed Caroline, “think you had better hold a council of war to save you from a new danger.” She raised her eyes and cried out, “You have had so much war!”
Darwent looked at the disreputable old lawyer, who was studying both of them.
“Will you go into the dining room, Mr. Mulberry? I shall be brief.”
Mr. Mulberry seemed not quite to like this, but the door closed behind him. Darwent looked at Caroline.
“You welcomed my friends,” he said in a statement rather than a question.
“Of course. Even—” And her head made a gesture upward, as though to an Amber Room on the floor above her bedroom.
Such a power of sympathy seemed to flow from Caroline that it warmed his heart. Her day dress of sprigged muslin, the sprigs of tiny pink-and-blue flowers against white, glimmered in the dim foyer. She wore her hair in bands across the forehead, drawn to a knot behind: exposing her ears, as he had seen them yesterday evening when a certain white bow-knot …
Darwent stretched out his hands, and she took them. He gripped her fingers hard.
“May I speak frankly with you?” he said.
“Need you ask that?”
“In one thing, Caroline, you are right. I have had enough of war. I swear before God that I will never fight another duel as long as I live!”
(He could not guess at the events, rushing toward him now, which would make him break that oath.)
“Yesterday,” he went on, “I thought myself a mighty fine fellow, no doubt: stuffed and starched for vengeance, full of hate. I did not even see how ridiculous I was. For what, when you faced them, were these terrors?
“Buckstone, the unbeatable! God’s wounds! You had only to take a snap shot at him, when he lost his head as you hoped; and he rolled over like a ninepin and screamed like a snared rabbit. And you, Caroline …”
She interrupted him.
“May I speak frankly too? And without namby-pamby words?”
For answer he gripped her hands harder.
“Before I met you—yes, in Newgate Prison! and wondering how you might seem if they cleansed and dressed you—I distrusted all men. Not because I was cold. Not because I had never known desire; yes, and been tortured by it.”
Caroline raised her eyes very briefly, but with spots of color under the cheekbones, and lowered them again.
“It was because,” she went on, “I thought them oafs and boors, who took a wife as a sailor takes a strumpet. But worse! Since the wife must remain his slave, his servant, the worshipful admirer of his idiocies, until death do them part. You ask me why I changed my mind, or began to change it, when I met you? I don’t know why; but I know the truth.”
“Caroline, I ….”
Caroline stopped him, pressing her hands to her temples and shaking her head. And yet, he thought, no man alive could doubt the tenderness of her eyes.
“Acknowledge one thing,” she pleaded. “Acknowledge it, even if you speak a lie! You did not truly mean all you said last night?”
“Last night?”
“That I would have you killed. That I would think to poison you. That I would even entice you … true; I did; I own it; for a different reason … but that I would entice you to keep an inheritance. You don’t believe!”
“No! I don’t believe it!”
“Then prove what you say.”
“How?”
“Escort me,” Caroline answered unexpectedly, “to the Italian opera tonight.”
“Of course, if you wish it! But,” memory troubled him, “wasn’t there mention of your going last night?”
“I did. With Will Alvanley. I tried to imagine he was yourself; and oh, miserably, I failed! You’ll keep your promise?”
“Yes,” said Darwent.
Dropping Caroline’s hands, he reached out and gripped her shoulders. At the same moment, the door to the dining room opened. Hubert. Mulberry noted the scene, and what it was likely to mean, without remarking on it.
The Bride of Newgate Page 14
