Most Secret (7 page)

After looking round sharply, as though to make sure they were unobserved, the captain led Kinsmere into this passage. It was gloomy here; gnats buzzed in their faces.

And then:

“Stop!” cries the captain, half wheeling.

“With right good will,” says my grandfather. He halted with his back to the kitchen wall. “But how now, Bold Sir Captain and Cock of the Sneerers? Do you deign at length to mark the bumpkin’s existence? Hath it penetrated into your noodle that I am alive?”

The other seemed almost convulsed.

“Alive!” he repeated. “Alive! It breathes; it moves; it speaks almost intelligibly, as though the clod were a human being. Yes, poor bumpkin! You are in some sense alive, let’s allow, though for your insolence to me you are not like to remain alive. Now hearken well, good lout, while your betters shall put a question. You wear a sword, like so many who can’t use ’em. You wear a sword, but do you know swordplay?”

“Yes. A little.”

“‘A little,’ says he. A little!” Again the captain seemed almost convulsed. “Come, here’s a jest. Come, gods and omens of all this earth, here’s a jest most monstrous rich! Of swordplay, the lout saith, he knows a little. Ay, good bumpkin, I may guess how very little. And yet, if the thing can be managed discreetly or without noise, I may take pity. I may award you more honour than you deserve.”

“More honour than I deserve? What honour?”

“The honour,” retorted his companion, “to be spitted through the guts by my sword.”

And he lunged forward, breathing hard in Kinsmere’s face. With his gloved left hand he pinned my grandfather’s right shoulder against the wall.

“I address you, bumpkin,” he said loftily.

“Remove your hand! Desist! Stand back!”

“Have you ears, oaf? I said I address you!”

“The words were heard. Will you remove that hand?”

“I use my pleasure at all times.”

“Do you so?”

“Indeed I do,” said the captain, leering close.

And that did it.

“I have pledged myself to good deportment. I have sworn an oath to use civility towards all. And yet, by God, this goes something too far. For the last time, will you drop your hand?”

“Ay, good zany. But I drop it, mark me, only the better to do
this.”

The captain’s left hand fell. His right hand, also gloved and its fingers open, he swung round savagely to whack Kinsmere across the side of the face.

That blow never landed, being parried by an upflung left arm.

Kinsmere’s left hand darted behind the captain’s back. His right hand shot out, fingers closing round the underside of his companion’s bony jaw. His hand cradled that jaw as a man nowadays might cradle a cricket ball. Bracing himself, settling a little with weight on his right foot, he opened both shoulders in a mighty throw.

The captain, for all his muscular surefootedness, flew backwards across the passage as though caught beneath his jaw by the heaviest of all mallets they used at the game of
pêle-mêle.
The heels of his gambado boots made squashing noises on muddy cobblestones. His hat fell off. His back struck the wall of the Great Hall. His sword scabbard rattled as he sat down hard in mud.

And Kinsmere, feeling a lightness in the legs as well as a great hollow inside his chest, swerved sideways with left hand dropped to sword hilt.

“Shall we try,” says he, “how devilish little I know of swordplay? Lug out, Cock of the Sneerers, and we’ll despatch our business now.”

Yet he scored very little of triumph.

The other man rose up instantly, hat on again, all poise and menace, no whit of assurance lost. From the direction of the Thames, into which all the town’s refuse was emptied, a foul smell arose and blew through to poison the good steam of cooking.

But it was the captain who held attention in that dim passage. Towering, formidable, his every movement betraying the expert swordsman without pity or bowels, he circled catlike against what light entered from the river end.

“Lug out, you say?” His utter and low-voiced contempt was like a blow in itself. “Lug out, eh? Is that what you’d do?”

“I said it, yes! Why not?”

“With three royal edicts to forbid duelling, with the king as fixed against it as a man may be in this world, you’d provoke a brawl in the very premises of Whitehall Palace? Dog! Spawn of the dung heap! Draw but half an inch of iron from that scabbard there, and I will not even stir myself to spit at you. I will summon guards, as I would have done for the other scum, and have you clapped into a gatehouse gaol where you belong. And yet you need not think to escape me, oaf. You have jeered me, which is not done with impunity; you have dared to lay hand on me, which is not done at all …”

“Now, damme,” says Kinsmere, “but what mighty grandee have I so offended? Who are you, bold fellow at employing your mouth? How do you call yourself?”

“My name, oaf, concerns you not. My deeds shall concern you much. Are you acquainted with Leicester Fields?”

“I saw Leicester Fields today.”

The captain moved forward, facing Kinsmere with one shoulder lifted high and the gnats round his wig.

“Leicester Fields, the north side towards the Dead Wall,” he said, “and the clump of trees within the gate? Eh, lout? There will be a moon this night. Shall we meet there, eleven of the clock as men of breeding do, to settle the differences between us?”

“Yes!”

“You’d dare venture this, poor fellow?”

“I would not miss it.”

“There need be no seconds to fight beside us.” Here the captain all but spat in his face. “Shall I call
my
friends to meet the cattle
you
would bring, and demean myself before all? But ’twill not take long, I warrant. A pass or two, and I run you through the guts. Or, in meantime, should heart and courage fail together …”

“A truce to boasting, Corporal Ninnyhammer,” snapped my grandfather. “Go on much more in this strain and, royal edict or no, there shall be a whack across your chops to make you lug out HERE.”

“And if I shout for the Yeoman Ushers?”

“Then shout, God damn you!”

The captain opened his mouth; had he uttered a sound, Kinsmere would have sprung for his throat. Again hatred flared between these two, another lighted match to a powder train. For all this cavalryman’s disinterested manner, he had an almost maniacal light in his eye. Then both controlled themselves.

“Shall we set the seal on our bargain, then?” jeered the captain, lifting his right shoulder still higher. ‘Tonight? Leicester Fields? Eleven o’clock?”

“Tonight! Leicester Fields! Eleven o’clock!”

“Through the guts you shall be punctured, mark me again. Through the guts you shall be punctured, and die slowly. I can trouble myself with you no longer until then.”

The captain turned round. Dismissing all, contemptuous of all despite the mudstains on his coat and breeches, he marched straight and high-shouldered towards the water stairs. You heard the noise of his boots on the steps; then he was gone.

“Young sir,” interposed a new voice, “may I beg the favour of a word with you?”

In from the Great Court end of the passage, attempting a complicated kind of bow as he did so, lounged a burly, middle-sized, middle-aged man of remarkable ugliness.

He had a portentous air and a rumbling voice. He was dressed in rich if slovenly fashion: plum-coloured velvet coat above wine-stained waistcoat of canary yellow, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and a finely carved hilt to his rapier. The coils of his brown peruke enclosed a countenance high-coloured with tippling, battle, and hard weather. And the newcomer’s presence brought reassurance. Even his ugliness was of the fetching and engaging sort; it compelled your liking even as you grinned.

“Eh, now!” continued this newcomer, surveying Kinsmere with a ruminating eye. “Forgive me; do forgive the impertinence I utter! But—are ye strung on a wire of tautness, may it be? Does that heart knock at your ribs, and your legs know a certain trembling at the knees?”

“In candour, sir, I must own to being a trifle distraught. Should it not be so; do you mean? Is this caitiff behaviour after all?”

“Nay, don’t say it!” returned the other. “Don’t think it, even, since you are much mistaken. I too am a man of peace, though I seem always to walk incontinent towards trouble. And yet, for all my many years of finding broils or being found by ’em, I feel the same knocking heart and the same light legs on each occasion.”

“Well?”

“Forgive me, young sir, but I saw it all. I saw your broil with Pem Harker …”

“Pem Harker?” demanded Kinsmere. “That’s the tall fellow with the nose and the bad manners?”

“It is.”

“What’s his station, then? Who is he?”

“Captain Pembroke Harker, First Dragoon Guards, is a man of rare good birth. He is much at Whitehall, more particularly in the Matted Gallery. He hath some esteem, and is indulged by nearly all …”

“Because he is so well liked, can it be?”

“No, for the very reverse cause,” says this burly newcomer, “Pem Harker, d’ye see, is the sort o’ type”—he turned it into a French word, pronounced
teep
—“for whom most people will stand aside, and to whom they’ll even grant a mort o’ favours, because they
don’t
like him at all. We have all known the teep, have we not?”

“Truly we have.”

“Well, then! I saw and heard. And what you did was bravely done. But Pem Harker? Harker set on you with great deliberateness, to force a quarrel. Why did he do this?”

“I don’t know, for the life of me; I can’t say!”

“We must discover it; we must sound the depth of this business. Harker swore he would run you through the guts; and I dare vow he’ll make a tack at it. But not, it may be, in quite the way you think he will. Eh?”

“Sir,” Kinsmere cried out, with bewilderment thickening round his wits, “I have no doubt you are certain of your own meaning. I am not. However, I thank you for the compliments you pay.” And he bowed.

“Yet we must sound the depth of the business, believe me. That’s one reason why … Come!”

Here the burly stranger, showing considerable agility for all his stockiness, wheeled round and bowed in reply. At something of a flourish he led Kinsmere back into the sun and smoke and commotion of the Great Court.

“… one reason, good my lad, why I desired a word in your ear. Now permit me,” adds he, with a manner of stiff and profound courtliness in contrast to his great voice and many-coloured face, “permit me one further impertinence. You have engaged yourself to fight a duel with Pem Harker?”

“I have.”

“Tonight, at eleven of the clock, in Leicester Fields?”

“It was so agreed.”

“Ah!”

The other man screwed round his thick neck out of a cabbage-leaf series of laces, peering in a mysterious manner up and down the courtyard. Then he lifted a large forefinger, tapped it twice against his nose, and smiled still more mysteriously.

“Come, then, here are perplexities! Unless word of honour be set at naught, you are to meet Harker this night in Leicester Fields. Well, so am I.”

“What’s that you say? Did the damned fellow challenge you as well?”

“He did. For the same time, at the same place, and also without seconds or witnesses. Wherefore, being old and skilled in the ways of war and statecraft, I must ask myself—mark, alas, the Gallic influence!—I must ask myself the reason on’t. Eel muh fo demanday,” roared out the burly man, with a somewhat non-Gallic accent, “why Captain Pembroke Harker, First Dragoon Guards, should be at such pains to pick a quarrel with two people in our trade …”

“
Our trade,
is it?”

“Ay, ecod, what else?
For
the same place,
at
the same hour, in hole-and-corner fashion to boot! There you have it in a nutshell, perhaps with hints of what’s a-brewing. Sir, do I speak plain now?”

“Sir, you do not.”

“Ah, discretion!” rumbled the other, again tapping his nose. “You’d be oon omm tray discreet, I know, and it does you credit. Still! In some matters, permit me to say, you use small discretion at the best o’ times. Wearing that ring, now! Harker’s motives we don’t know; but ’twas the sight of the ring set him on you.”

“Now, what a fiend’s name
of
the ring? Had Harker a mind to steal it, do you think?”

“ ’Tis possible; all is possible, no doubt, though this would add but fresh perplexity. Come! Be advised by me. You are young; you are new to the trade of—you are new to the work. Allow me to present myself,” says he, taking off his flat-plumed hat and sweeping it across his chest. “I am Bygones Abraham, at your service. Sir, will you drink?”

“Sir,” my grandfather replied right heartily, “those are the first comprehensible words I have heard you speak. I will drink.”

“But we’ll not betake us to a tavern, where we might be overheard. No, never. I have been given lodgings in the palace,” announced the man called Bygones Abraham, brushing up his moustache with much complacence. His thick chest swelled. “Which should mean (you apprehend?) a new errand ere long. By your leave, then, shall we visit my lodgings for a bone santy?”

“By
your
leave,” says Kinsmere, “and with much pleasure, we will.”

Beyond a hope that he had not encountered a wandering lunatic he did not reflect overmuch on the matter. Grinning, chuckling, with every exaggerated courtesy Bygones Abraham led him across the Great Court. But on one thing his new friend insisted. He must remove the sapphire ring from his finger and conceal it in an inner pocket.

“For it would be a plaguey ill thing, you concede, if in evil hearts suspicion were roused of you, or of me, or of a certain exalted figger whose name we don’t speak unless ’tis needful. Hey?”

Thus Kinsmere was escorted under the arches of the brick gallery, where stood the private coaches and sedan chairs. Beyond this gallery, in a huddle of buildings at the far side of the Great Hall, double doors opened into a foyer full of liveried attendants. In this foyer—dusky, illuminated only by small windows of stained glass, but richly carved and painted—a noble oak staircase rose up from the black-and-white flags of the floor.

A throng of people, gaudy in their plumage, had begun to drift down these stairs. Certain doubts assailed my grandfather. He had promised Mr. Stainley he would not mingle too freely with …