The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  The second man turned his attention to Bottoms and tried his best to be conciliatory.

  “Really, sir,” he began, wiping his face which seemed to be sweating in the chilly morning breeze, “this is a trifle offense to fight over. One man accidentally bounces into another and it leads to this? Sir, I’m sure you’re a reasonable man and that your intentions are honorable. My friend is prepared to accept an apology, even to acknowledge that the accident was partly his fault, if doing so will avoid bloodshed. There’s no cause for anyone to be shot or killed here. No cause at all.”

  Bottoms swelled up like a bullfrog and said in a loud voice, “Is he a coward then? Does he intend to hide behind you, or will he face me like a man?”

  There was no possibility, once those taunting words were spoken, for anything but bloodshed to follow, and the two men, shielded by their seconds, went through the courtesies of examining each other’s pistols to ensure that they were standard unrifled dueling weapons. Each man took off his coat with an air of finality and gravity, handed it to his second, who in turn gave him the pistol, primed, loaded, and cocked. In the swirling fog, which made visibility difficult, the men stood back-to-back, holding their pistols at the ready against the chest, and began to pace off, with the exaggerated and ceremonial struts of warring roosters, the distance from which they would fire.

  “One, two, three, four,” the second chanted as the two men walked the required distance. “Do not move until both men have fired,” the second warned Lord Hemmings.

  At fifteen, the second stopped and declared loudly, “Turn and aim at my command. Do not fire until I say ‘fire.’ Any man who disobeys this rule will be shot down. Remember, you are gentlemen and must be prepared to die like gentlemen.”

  Backs to each other, separated by some thirty feet, the two gentlemen remained standing still, as if frozen there.

  “Turn and aim!” bellowed the second.

  With ceremony that went so smoothly the moves might have been rehearsed, the two men pivoted, faced their enemy sideways, one foot behind the other, their shoulder and arms extended, at the end of which the hand grasped and aimed the pistol. It was a pose that presented the smallest possible target to the field of fire. To hit a duelist in the heart who assumed this posture was next to impossible. To inflict a belly wound was likewise unlikely. More probable was that the shooter would be hit in the shoulder by a ball; it would be simply rotten luck if the ball struck him in the face or the throat.

  The pistols of the era could be rigged with a hair trigger that fired with the slightest pressure of the finger. Bottoms had chosen to adjust his pistol to the maximum sensitivity of the hair trigger. As a seasoned duelist, he knew that a trigger that was hard to pull could cause a shooter to jerk just as he drew a bead on his target.

  For a millisecond the two English lords were posed like mannequins in a shop window, their hands extended at each other and tipped with a loaded dueling pistol while personal eternity hung in the balance.

  “Fire!” barked the second. A deafening shot blasted the morning, jolting Bottoms into a pirouette like a ballet dancer. For a fleeting moment he spun on his own axis, his eyes widened in horror and surprise. Then he toppled over and began to fall. His pistol discharged like a thunderclap as he tumbled to the ground, the ball knocking Hemmings off his feet and flat on his back. With the returning silence came the pungency of gunpowder and sudden death.

  “Bottoms, you idiot,” Lord Hemmings groaned from the ground, “you shot me!”

  Bottoms lay dead on the ground, beyond caring about whom he had accidentally shot. There was a dark hole between his eyes where the ball had entered his skull, leaving behind a pulpy wound. Blood poured out of his forehead and festooned his face with a lurid red ribbon.

  Hemmings, mortally wounded in the chest, lay writhing on the ground, sputtering with indignation. He tried to sit up but dropped helplessly on his back like an overturned beetle.

  Alexander and his two seconds stood over the wounded lord.

  “The idiot shot me!” Lord Hemmings cried, his voice sounding like it came from a dark, empty cavern.

  Alexander, unscratched, strolled over to his fallen adversary and measured him with the glance of a hunter sizing up dying prey.

  “I don’t even know the chap’s name,” Alexander muttered.

  Lord Hemmings groaned and felt a sudden spasm of spite and hate against Hartley Fudges who was probably somewhere enjoying breakfast while his lordship was bleeding helplessly to death.

  “It’s your brother, Hartley, who is behind this,” his lordship whispered, for he was gasping for breath like a long-distance runner at the end of a marathon. “I’m dying and beg your forgiveness.”

  “I forgive you,” Alexander murmured.

  Hemmings smiled and went into a spasm of coughing, thick clots of dark blood pouring out of his chest wound. “I’m cold,” he whispered, shivering.

  Then he died.

  The three men left the dueling grounds with the nonchalance of picnickers, talking over the events of the morning in hushed voices. They took a little-used path to avoid encountering other dueling parties that might later link them to the two corpses they left behind. Their luck held up. They met no one coming into the grounds. They were seen by no one as they departed.

  Vagrants who sometimes slept out in the park stripped the two bodies clean, and to add confusion to the ensemble, they threw the naked corpses into the thick shrubbery where they lay unnoticed for at least a fortnight. When the bodies of the two dead lords were found, nature had been unrelentingly about her grisly business of digesting and transfiguring flesh, making identification difficult. By then it was nearly impossible to tell who they were, whether English or Egyptian, and what they had been in their lifetimes. Apparently no one missed them, because no one notified the authorities that they were gone. It was as if they never were.

  After a brief inquiry, it was ruled that Lord Hemmings and the Earl of Bottoms had killed each other in a duel. The bodies of the two men were buried in Potter’s Field. And the case was closed.

  CHAPTER 5

  Alexander Fudges, on any given day, was only a so-so shot. He could hit the side of a barn with a pistol from thirty feet away, but it was unlikely that from the same range he could hit the barn door. No one could have foreseen that he would kill the Earl of Bottoms with a single shot; that Bottoms, in the act of falling, would accidentally shoot Lord Hemmings in the heart; and that in his dying confession Lord Hemmings would implicate Alexander’s own brother in the duel. Indeed, when Alexander had fired, his hand had been shaking so badly that the bead at the tip of the barrel of his pistol that served as its gunsight had been dancing in midair as jerkily as a moth bobbing near the flame of a candle. Yet the shot had been so uncannily accurate that Alexander left the dueling fields believing that God Himself had fired it.

  Even though Alexander was a backsliding member of the Church of England, he had read the Bible all the way through at least once and had a good idea what God wanted of His English sheep. He believed the Almighty was a stickler for the Decalogue, expected regular church attendance and generosity when the collection bag was passed, and urged all of us to get along with our neighbors and be charitable to the poor. Alexander made up his mind to observe all these stipulations, and more, and fully intended to give a florin to the next mendicant he passed who begged him for alms. A florin, which was two shillings, was certainly generous. However, the sidewalk beggars he passed that morning were still too sleepy to beg and consequently got nothing, for Alexander also believed that giving unbegged-for money encouraged idleness.

  “I can’t believe what happened,” Alexander kept muttering as he and his two friends slogged through the morning mist on their way back from the bizarre duel.

  “It was a miracle, if ever there were one,” said one of his friends.

  “Two miracles,” gushed the peacemaker. “Three if you count the confession.”

  The three men trudged on grimly and
speechless like a pod of turtles. When the peacemaking second suggested a celebratory glass of ale, Alexander declined and said that he would prefer simply to go home and have breakfast in peace. Shortly after that, he and his seconds parted company and Alexander retreated to his room at the club. So much was on his mind that he entered the club with the heavy tread of someone lugging an enormous, invisible burden.

  * * *

  For Hartley Fudges, the day of the duel crept past like an arthritic snake. Unlike his brother, Hartley did not usually have his own room unless he was entertaining a woman or had come into a windfall from the gaming table. For the most part, he slept in a chair in a common room of the Fox and Hounds along with a dozen or so other men. Most of the time he found the arrangement crude but tolerable. To a young man of twenty-three, haphazard lodgings were as much an adventure as an ordeal. The exception to this outlook was a time like now when he wished to be alone. Then his only recourse was to rent a room for the night, if he could find one, or go and sit on the primitive pit toilet which reeked so noxiously that after a few minutes of exposure, one felt perilously close to suffocating.

  He spent the whole day at the Fox and Hounds, starting when anyone walked in, expecting to see Lord Hemmings at any moment. By the time darkness had fallen and the Fox and Hounds was bubbling over with fellowship and good cheer, Hartley Fudges knew that something had gone ghastly wrong. As the evening progressed, he became more and more morose and unsociable until, abandoned to his funk by his usual flock of fair-weather drinking friends, he found himself marooned in a corner with only a tumbler of bitter ale for company. Eventually, in spite of the noisy roistering and laughter exploding like firecrackers all around him, he fell into a deep sleep and began a loud snoring.

  He slept through the entire night and did not hear the pub close or the occasional loud arguments that sprang up among the drunken men but were quickly squashed by the landlord. Silence gradually descended over the room and those who had rented chairs settled in for the night, and all through this commotion and the dying hubbub, Hartley heard nothing.

  He had a dream. It was a curious dream, not coherent and intact but disjointed and shattered like broken crockery, and in it something was poking him in the back. His eyes snapped open, and he beheld his brother Alexander standing over him, prodding him with a walking stick and looking very severe.

  “You!” Hartley Fudges sputtered, rubbing his eyes as if to erase an annoying specter.

  “Me,” Alexander said simply.

  Hartley looked around him, unsure of where he was or whether he was awake or dreaming. Scattered throughout the room—pleated, folded, crumpled, and twisted around chairs, sprawled on the floor, or propped up against a wall like casualties strewn on a battlefield—were a dozen slumbering, disheveled men, among them a marquis, an earl, a viscount, and a duke or two, all of whom gave off the effluvia of stale beer and dried sweat, and from whom came an unsynchronized rumbling, wheezing, and whistling.

  “Good Lord,” muttered Hartley groggily, “where am I?”

  “In hell,” his brother said.

  * * *

  In the dawn light, with the great heart of London merely fibrillating instead of pounding its customary robust daytime beat, the two brothers took a walk. At first Hartley balked at going but Alexander insisted, and after wrangling about it for five minutes, they stepped out into early-morning London. In another hour or so, the city would be teeming with grubby workmen, stylish ladies, cavalier gentlemen, messenger boys, butchers, horse-drawn carriages, hawkers and peddlers, pickpockets, beggars, streetwalkers, sedan chairs, and livestock, but in the morning mist its tangle of streets sprawled out damp and empty. Only the occasional horse-drawn taxi rattled past on the dirty arterial streets, while from the capillaries of lanes and mews dripped small clumps of workmen into the square. Wearing the deadpan, deliberate look to which aristocrats are bred, the two brothers strolled as if they were savoring the crisp morning air before it became befouled by the day’s industry.

  “Your paid assassin is dead,” Alexander said evenly, “and I know the whole story, thanks to the confession of Hemmings. It’s no use denying your involvement. I know everything.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. Papa is in town, and I saw him last night. We are both agreed that you should leave England immediately.”

  “And go where?” Hartley asked.

  “To Jamaica. He’s written a letter introducing you to a schoolboy chum who manages an estate there. The man will give you a job that will keep you out of mischief. It’s your chance to start anew and make your fortune.”

  “And if I refuse to go?”

  “I’ll press charges against you for attempted murder. I have sworn witnesses to your friend’s confession before he died.”

  They walked on quietly for a few edgy moments.

  “What happened to Hemmings?” Hartley asked.

  “Both men are dead.”

  “How can they both be dead?”

  “I killed the duelist. The other chap, the second, was accidentally shot by his friend. Their blood is on your hands.”

  Hartley stopped in his tracks to glare at his brother. The other stopped also and the two men scowled at each other.

  “You get everything,” Hartley groused. “I get nothing.”

  “I didn’t invent primogeniture,” Alexander snapped.

  “You benefit from it.”

  “As would you if you were the firstborn. We must obey the rules of society whether we like them or not.”

  “I won’t go,” Hartley said firmly.

  “Suit yourself,” replied Alexander. “But if you’re found guilty of attempted murder, you’ll either be hanged or transported to Australia.”

  They walked a little farther, then turned around without talking and headed back in the direction in which they had come.

  “What did you do with the bodies?” Hartley wondered.

  “We left them where they had fallen,” Alexander answered with a yawn.

  They walked some more cloaked in silence.

  “Do you know why your plot failed?” Alexander asked. “It failed because God watches over me and protects me and will not allow anyone to harm me.”

  “I wish your God would mind His own business,” Hartley grumbled.

  “He does. I am His business,” Alexander said triumphantly.

  When they arrived at the doorstep of the Fox and Hounds, they did not wish each other goodbye or shake hands or reminisce or exchange hugs as brothers might do. Instead, they stared into each other’s eyes defiantly and probingly like enemies sizing each other up before the next battle.

  “If you change your mind, you can send a message to my club. A ship called the Mermaid sails in seven days for Jamaica and Father and I have reserved a berth on it in your name. I advise you to be on her when she sails.”

  With that, Alexander turned on his heels and began to walk away. But he abruptly stopped and pivoted to make eye contact with his brother.

  “By the way, I wouldn’t try to murder me again, if I were you. I’ve already given the statement to the police implicating you. Should anything happen to me, you’ll hang.”

  “It was nothing personal, Alexander,” Hartley called after him. “It was just an idea I had to try.”

  “I assure you, my dear brother, that had you succeeded, I would have taken it very personally.” Pausing, Alexander added, “Don’t come back. There’s nothing for you in England.”

  And then he was gone.

  London was beginning to wake up in increments, its streets slowly coming alive with pedestrians and horses. Weak, waterish, and without warmth, the February winter sun peered blurrily down on the city like a nearsighted eye squinting through a dirty monocle.

  * * *

  In effect, Hartley was being sent into exile. Such was the commonplace fate of the second son. Between Alexander and Hartley had never existed any particularly strong ties, and whatever incipient love each might have felt f
or the other during the years in the nursery had long ago been blasted to smithereens by the harsh reality of primogeniture. Hartley felt that he was being dumped on Jamaica, an island he had never particularly wanted to visit. He knew it from his reading to be a quarrelsome, rebellious island with a large population of fractious slaves who were constantly in revolt. The mortality rate from yellow fever among new arrivals to the island was astonishing. Within three months after arrival, more than half the newcomers would be dead. The only good thing that could be said about the island was that it was the world’s largest producer of sugar and a source of fabulous wealth. In 1750, for example, Jamaica produced half the sugar consumed in Great Britain. So ostentatious was the wealth of its plantation owners that the saying “as rich as a Jamaican planter” was a simile commonly heard among the chic habitués of London’s drawing rooms.

  A few hours later found Hartley sitting bleary-eyed in his chair at the Fox and Hounds, trying to decide what to do about the ultimatum Alexander had given him. The truth was that there was no compelling reason for Hartley Fudges to remain in London. He had no job and intended to get one over his dead body. Now that the widow had rejected him, he had no prospects for marriage. His mother was dead and although he was near to his father, Hartley was too old for that kind of paternal closeness. He had a bushel of drinking friends and other acquaintances who might best be called fair-weather cronies. But he had no one close enough to him to be expected to weep over his grave. There was no good reason why he couldn’t leave the city.

  At one o’clock in the morning, he made up his mind. He would give up London and try his luck in Jamaica. A drinking friend of his appeared at his table for chitchat.

  “I’m going to Jamaica,” Hartley said softly.

  “Oh, good show,” the fellow chirped, finishing his tankard of ale. After reeling in place for a few moments, the man asked plaintively, “I say, where the devil is that anyway?”