by Paul Butler
I delayed picking it up. Even with two doors between us, he was close enough, I thought, to hear the rustle of its opening. But then, what was to be gained by not knowing the contents? There is a limit to mental torture and there comes a time when a man decides that a persistent fear has dogged him long enough, that if his enemy will not deliver the blow he has been threatening, then the man may as well take the initiative and bring that blow upon himself. It had occurred to me that the time was coming fast and that I could not, in any case, get through the four days leading to my wedding date without reaching the aforementioned limit.
I bent down, picked up the letter, and moving to the fire that already burned strongly, broke open the seal. The missive was short:
My dear Frederick,
Let me say at once how very delightful your Anne has turned out to be, and how sincerely I wish I could be happy for you at once. No man of sense or morals could wish such an alliance to be broken when it so clearly brings together two people of compassion and sensitivity. The only task remaining for me is to extricate those feelings that have remained buffeted and confused. But in this regard I crave your indulgence, my friend. I will need your help one last time, so that I may either throw myself into your felicity with the unequivocal and full-blooded heartiness expected of a groomsman, or, if my presence is too great a distraction to your peace of mind, slip quietly away with some excuse too urgent and too plausible to be questioned. All that I ask, dear Frederick, is that you come to my room when you read this. After this night, I promise, all will be as you would desire it.
Yours in friendship,
Oliver Mason.
I sat down upon the bed, letter in my hand. A rush of breeze came down the chimney shaft. The flames gave a low bow and then shot defiantly back into life. Should I burn it? I struggled to recall the reasons for destroying and not destroying such documents, and wished Mrs. Smith were here to advise me.
Listening to the hiss of the flames, I thought through the problem. Mrs. Smith had kept the first letter for me so pressure could, as some last resort, be brought to bear on Oliver. I had destroyed the second letter myself because I saw no such benefit from its preservation. The remnants of its blackened embers were still visible behind the grate, beckoning me to consign the third in my hand to the same fate.
In truth, I simply did not want any of these messages to exist, and it was the simple urge to destroy that compelled me now. He had promised an end; he promised to slip away quietly leaving a plausible excuse. Of the two options he had mentioned, I by far preferred this one. I picked up the iron rod, opened the grate and let the letter fall. Tomorrow he would be gone, and I must cover all tracks that suggested unfathomable secrets lay between us. I would retrieve the first letter from Mrs. Smith in the morning and would destroy that too. Surely my reputation would be well enough safeguarded with all the testimonials she had gathered. And with Anne as my wife, years would pass and any suggestion of impropriety or wrongdoing would fade from the minds of those who had once heard the rumours. The whole incident would be scorched from my memory too, like the letter whose corners curled and blackened in the fire. I was almost there, almost at the point where I could join this road to safety and freedom. The promise made me feel like a slave at the moment when iron shackles give way to the hammer and chisel.
Smoothing myself down before the mirror, I felt the flutter of nerves and a sense of anticipation. The man in the glass seemed much younger than I had imagined myself of late. There was rawness and vulnerability in the reflection that would put me at less than my thirty-three years. My imagination, it seemed, had added an age between the present with Anne and the past onboard the Laconia with Oliver Mason. But in linear, arithmetic terms the amount of time was trifling. I should not be surprised that Oliver Mason’s claim on me had not been broken as easily as I would have liked.
I moved quietly from my room to the landing, closing the door without noise. Nothing stirred below me and all was in darkness save for a strip of bronze light showing under Oliver Mason’s door; obviously he was waiting. I wondered at the function of our meeting. The idea of talking frankly about those sentiments whose existence even on paper made my flesh burn was oppressive in the extreme. My hand touched the handle but I could not make myself turn it. I must be quiet and calm, I told myself. I must listen to all he had to say. I might express regret for his suffering and confusion. He had intimated that we might emerge as friends, that there would be “unequivocal and full-blooded heartiness” and, although I could not see this, I must not let him know too forcefully such a consequence was quite beyond possibility. I must humour and soothe him as if comforting a madman. The floorboard gave a yelp beneath me and I knew it was time to move. I opened Oliver Mason’s door and stepped inside.
The bed was before me, its quilt undisturbed. Oliver was to the left facing the hearth, his hands upon the mantelpiece. He was quite naked, his limbs gold in the flames. I had forgotten how the subtle curvature of his muscles marked him as an Adonis; for the moment, I could not breathe. He turned and came towards me.
“Thank you for seeing me, Frederick,” he said. His eyes seemed even darker than usual, their pupils enlarged in the dimly-lit room. On the mantelpiece from where he had come, I now noticed a curious array of glasses, a slim carafe and another receptacle, hardly larger than a vial.
Picking a nightgown from the bed post, he held it above his head. I watched as his ribs and sinews disappeared into the falling garment. My throat relaxed as the hem reached his knee, but a dull weight tugged below my heart. I felt suddenly parched and wondered about Anne. Would she ever stand naked before me as Oliver Mason had done? The simple muslin gown she had worn tonight had made her a pleasing figure, like a modest nymph. But, although I could tell the shape of her breasts well enough, the band below this freed the fabric from the contours of her waist and hips and legs. Tonight, as always, Anne’s shape below the chest was a mystery of uncharted lands. It was hard to believe that such wonders existed at all, so inaccessible were they to either sight or imagination of man. I thought about the time on board the Laconia and at Oliver’s house in Highgate, and wondered whether Anne’s flesh would ever yield, rise, and tumble with the same abandon to the licence of my hands and lips.
“Your note,” I said. “You needed to see me.”
He backed away, head bowed, and sat down on the end of his mattress.
“I’m sorry, Frederick, sorry about it all.” He did not look up at me.
“But what do you need?”
Now his gaze did lift to meet mine. His eyes were moist. He gave a helpless shrug. “I can hardly explain myself, Frederick. One moment I want to tear at the fates which have taken you from me, to scream on the mountaintop of injustice and hypocrisy, but the next…” His voice became very soft and defeated. Then he smiled. “The next I want to hug you to me, tell you that my love for you is like that of a brother and mean it, mean it with every fibre of my soul. It’s a question of which wins out.”
I stared at the tassels edging the rug by his bed. “I think I am the last person who can help you, Oliver. This conversation, your letters, you know these things cannot continue. Even if I were not getting married they could not continue.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes, I know.” His smile was both bitter and humorous, as if — like myself earlier at the dinner table — he was viewing himself and his situation from a distance. “And yet asking me to change myself so suddenly and so completely is like asking my heart not to beat. We did not have a proper leave-taking, Frederick, remember?”
“Yes, Oliver, I remember.”
“You had heard from your sister, Sophia,” he said, crossing his legs. “She and her husband were to rent the Somerset property of the Elliot family and she wanted you to visit.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew you would likely come across Anne Elliot?”
“It did cross my mind, though I�
�.” Suddenly words had become enemies. I found myself searching for ways to express myself that would be least likely to wound. “I had no reason to hope or expect anything from her.”
His eyes fixed me and I realized I had been unsuccessful. There was hurt in them.
“Why could you not confide in me then, Frederick?”
I lifted my arms, but it was more than a helpless shrug; the gesture meant to take in me, him, the room, and our situation. It was meant to convey the impossibility of such a confidence in light of all his reactions since. He understood me immediately.
“You think it would have brought about disaster, Frederick. You think we would have argued and become bitter, but you are wrong. It is the furtiveness and the deceit in your actions that have imperilled our friendship.”
I must have taken a step backwards as he seemed to soften.
“I do not mean to be too hard, Frederick, but you of all people must understand that, no matter what the admiralty would make of our friendship, honesty and trust were always at the centre of what lay between us. It was not what you told me that caused my recent lapses of judgement. It was what you did not tell me.”
I swallowed, felt the heat of the room rise. The flames in his hearth leaped higher. Of course, I realized, he was right. Honesty, complete and ungrudging, had been the centre of us; it had all been noble, trusting, and generous. I had once even come close to telling Oliver about my lost love for Anne Elliot; such had never been the case with either my brother Edward nor my sister Sophia.
“I am sorry, Oliver,” I stammered. “I failed you. I failed us both.” I raised my arms again. “But what can I do now?”
He was thoughtful, gazing at the same point at the edge of the rug, the same knot of tassels, where my own eyes had rested. I remember thinking that no battle by land or sea was as unpredictable as human communication. Just a short while ago, he had been apologetic and I had been the one with the upper hand, the one most likely to set out demands. But now, with no new information available to us, the situation had been turned on its head.
He looked up suddenly. “We can end this part of our friendship as we should have done in London, Frederick. We can be the people we really are one more time, and then, once this sacrament of lovers’ parting is achieved, we can begin upon a new friendship, one of acceptance and unfeigned mutual support.”
I turned to the door behind me. I did not mean to leave, but perhaps I was thinking of Harville and his wife, Sophia and the Admiral, sleeping below us. Perhaps I was making sure that they had not all contrived to move in complete silence and in utter darkness through the corridors and up the stairs to make up an audience of witnesses. As my eyes were on the door, I heard the rustle of nightgown upon flesh. I turned and Oliver was naked again.
20. PLATO
I smelled the smoke before I glimpsed the flames balling beyond the branches. Straightaway I knew it was Henry’s barge. I slithered down the hill, armless, one hand holding the sack of coin to my belly, the other tugging the strap that secured Lucy to my back. Stumbling on a root, I dropped to my knees. An unearthly sound — like a hurricane hitting a shoreline — met my ears. Through the black branches, I saw the cause: Rosita, her ribs oiled with sweat, her eyes wild with terror, leapt and tore against her tether, buffeting the barge as she did so against the bank. In her panic her hooves clomped so close to the land’s edge I thought she would tumble into the water.
I unstrapped Lucy and felt under the canopy of branches for the softest tufts of grass. As I laid her down, she babbled and her arms closed upon my finger so that I could not immediately pull away. The sack of gold came loose, coins tinkling together and spilling to the ground. Lucy let go at last and nestled into her blanket. I rose and skittered down the last few yards to the bank where Rosita, aware of my presence and further panicked by it, rose on her hind legs, then fell heavily, nostrils flaring, only to rise again, tugging hard on her reins, pulling the barge against the bank again and fanning the flames with the movement. Smoke rose already from her tail and mane.
A sheet of fire raged from the rear end of the barge’s cabin, and small orange spots danced along the deck rail. The heat made me stumble backwards and cover my eyes. But then there came a moan from within the cabin — a sound undeniably human.
“Henry!” I shouted.
A flying hoof came within a foot of cracking my skull. I dodged and scrambled closer to the water. Rosita’s mouth was foaming now and small flames were rippling on her back.
The sound came again, a cry rather than a moan this time — and definitely from within the cabin. A knot tightened deep inside my gut. I had hoped Henry might appear from the trees behind me. I had hoped he might provide an explanation for the fire and tell me of his plans to save his horse and other possessions. But it was up to me alone. I ran a circle around the animal and jumped from the bank onto the front end of the barge, both hands gripping the deck rail and one foot dangling in the cool water. The opposite knee ground upon the deck and I threw my arm over the rail — an ambassador into danger.
The wood here was hot and smoking but not yet in flames. I clambered fully over, peering into the cabin that was alive at the far end with fire. Henry was inside, hood drawn back, mouth open. His eyes blinked at me.
Why was he not trying to escape? It seemed as though he was reclining in a chair, back settled upon the wood. A pipe and a book would complete the picture of relaxation. And then I saw the rope. It was coiled around his chest three times and again around his wrist. It was not a chair back against which he reclined but the inside wall of his cabin. Another length of rope attached him tautly to his bench of cadavers. The grey blanket covering them — five or six, by the shape they made under the cloth — smouldered at the far corner.
I scrambled to the cabin entrance, covering my mouth from a sudden whirl of smoke.
“Where’s your knife?” I shouted.
Henry nodded down to his shoes.
Another gust of smoke blinded me but I flung myself through it and groped in his boot’s hot leather until I found the handle. Pulling it out, I checked the blade then hacked against the tightest of the ropes — the one that connected Henry to his grim cargo. The dry hemp split to the blade more easily than I had expected. It soon gave way, freeing Henry’s left hand and loosening the topmost loop around his chest. The smoke had changed direction now, giving a clear vision of the cabin space, the orange-tinged walls, the tufts of hair and scalp poking out from under the blanket and the lapping flames against the far wall. But we were in constant jolting motion, and an ominous vibration went through the boat. At any moment, it seemed, Rosita might shatter the body of the vessel against the bank and plunge us into the dark river. I sank the knife between Henry’s chest and the middle rope and pulled towards me. Again some of the fibres broke straightaway and another tug made the remaining coils go slack. Henry stood now and pulled his right hand free from the final loop. A funnel of flame burst its way towards us, robbing my breath and singeing my earlobe. Bubbles of flame showed around Henry’s hood. I pulled him out of the cabin and onto the front deck. He resisted at first, though not enough to stall our progress.
“My money,” he said, pointing vaguely behind us towards the growing inferno. “It’s all in there.” But his tone was defeated. He would not go back.
I marshalled him gently to the edge, knowing well enough the pain of the dispossessed, and then kicked at the deck rail until it broke and collapsed into the river. “Now!” I yelled, tugging him as I jumped. He half fell, half stepped and we broke the water’s surface more or less together. The mud of the riverbed sucked at my feet and I stood firmly, the freezing water up to my chest. Henry stared at me with glassy eyes. The spots of fire around his hood twinkled away into sparks. Upon the water’s edge, beyond the barge, a high plume of flame seemed to dance and cavort of its own volition. Then I realized this was Rosita. The beast on fire chortled, turned, and wr
enched upon her ropes. The barge followed, heaved from its mooring and turning in a circle. Wood juddered and then collapsed and sparks rose into the night. An oddly familiar smell, like pork upon a spit, filled the air. I thought of Henry’s cargo. There was a loud snap, the shiver of buckling wood, and then another snap, and the burning horse galloped free like a comet, a trail of fire and smoke hurtling along the riverbank into the heart of the city. The unmoored inferno now circled away from the bank, drifting into the centre of the current.
Henry whimpered, and I looked, half-ashamed, to see his face streaming with gold-tinged tears. I tugged at his arm and pulled him toward the bank. No words for now. Time to return to Lucy. Henry said nothing but followed, shivering, casting a backward glance at the funeral pyre of his livelihood. I caught also a gaze upriver towards the path of his burning horse.
I picked my way up the bank, Henry in tow. Lucy’s babbling helped me to find her. She was sitting up, eyes alive with the reflected flame; she must have seen some of it. I bent down and pulled her to me, taking the belt and strapping her to my back.
“Who tied you up, Henry?” I asked. My throat was hoarse with the smoke.
“Harville.” He spoke as though he’d just emerged from a fantastical dream and was as surprised as any listener at its details.
“Captain Harville?” I had stooped to collect my sack of coins, but halted now, my fingertips touching the cold metal. “Harville?” I said again. “But why?”
He sniffed and wiped away some tears with his coat sleeve. The light from the fire below us was enough to show the dazedness in his expression. There was a whoosh and a scatter of sparks flying upward. The smell of pork intensified.
“Henry!” I said. “Why?”
This time there was a shift in his features; something had occurred to him. “If I tell you that, I will be giving you all the information you came to pay me for.”