by Mark Slouka
“Off early, as always,” said Coffin. “Wouldn’t do to keep the—”
“We have discussed this, Abel,” said Hunter.
“That’s all we do is discuss, discuss—”
“Yes we do, and I would ask you kindly not to interfere until we have had the chance to explain our position.”
“Bloody ridiculous, if you ask me.”
“Thank you. Now if we may …”
He paused, then turned to us. “Gentlemen, I see no point in circumlocution”—here Coffin snorted derisively—“so let me address myself directly to the matter at hand. It is something of which we have spoken numerous times, something I am sure will not come as a—”
“But we are being so mysterious, Monsieur Hunter,” said Dumat with a small, nervous laugh. “It is nothing so …”
“Monsieur Dumat, please. It is, as I say, something of which we have spoken numerous times before—regrettably, to little effect. Remonstrate with you as we may, we make no progress. We are left, therefore, in the unfortunate position of having to make our position clear in terms that allow for no misunderstanding.” He cleared his throat. I was barely listening. Why couldn’t we discuss whatever it was later? I glanced at the clock on the mantel.
“In short, I believe I am correct in saying that the three of us here are in agreement on one point, namely, that your visits with Mademoiselle Marchant, though excusable for a time, have not had the beneficial effect we might have expected, and may, in fact, be exerting a depressing influence on your career. Let me be frank: What was amusing once is so no longer. What was once merely diverting is now increasingly seen as scandalous, if not actually depraved.” Here Hunter raised his hand, as though to forestall questions that none had raised. “I am well aware, of course, that the public is a fickle mistress.” His lips thinned. “But so she is, and we must accommodate her as best we can.”
“To the point, cut to the point,” groaned Coffin. “For the love of God.”
“Therefore, as Mister Coffin and I feel we bear some responsibility for your continued success (as well as the financial burden, I might add, of securing the carriage now used almost exclusively for your excursions), we feel we have no choice but to withdraw that privilege. In doing so, we hope to force you to see your visits to Mademoiselle Marchant for the unhealthy obsession they have become, and—”
“All we are saying,” interrupted Dumat, “is that there are certain, ah, considerations that you, at your age, cannot be expected to be aware of. Youth is innocent, impressionable; as a result, the picture it makes of the world is often colored by its inexperience, and by the time the facts have come out of hiding, it may be too late.”
“Precisely, precisely,” agreed Hunter. “As your guardians, and not just your business associates, we feel we have erred in allowing you too much liberty for your age. For the time being, therefore—and I hasten to add that we take this step entirely for your own good—we will be revoking your traveling privileges until such time as—”
“You can’t do that,” I said, surprised at how shamefully close to the surface the tears already were. “You can’t do that.”
“We can’t?” said Coffin, leaning forward like a dog about to lunge. “And who’s going to stop us, eh?”
“Abel, please …”
“We can do whatever we bloody well please, my boy, and don’t you forget it.”
I looked at Hunter. “I’m afraid Mr. Coffin is right,” he said.
My brother said nothing.
I stared at them all, listening to the dull drum of my heart. “We’re late,” I said. “We have an appointment with Mademoiselle Marchant.”
“Will you listen to the little lord,” laughed Coffin.
“If you’ll excuse us.”
My brother hadn’t moved.
“There is no carriage,” Hunter said quietly.
“We’ll hire another,” I said. “Come on.”
“With what? You have no money!”
“Come on!” I said again, wrenching my brother toward the doorway. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Lords don’t need money,” I heard Coffin say behind us. “They just use their influence, didn’t you know that? Or they turn a few handsprings to earn their fare.”
We were jammed in the doorway now, me pulling with all my might, my brother, like a troubled birth, presenting a shoulder to the doorframe. “Come on!” I cried, weeping openly now, wrenching at him. “What is the matter with you?”
“I don’t want to go,” said my brother.
I didn’t give up until I had dragged him like a dead body all the way to the front door. Pushing off against the sides of the walls with my feet (for at some point my brother had simply let himself sink to the floor) weeping with rage and humiliation, I managed to reach the top of the staircase. Grasping the rungs of the banister and pulling myself hand over hand like a cripple, I propelled us over the edge. Half rolling, half jarring, we reached the ground floor. The bottom hallway was wider, but by grasping on to the legs of furniture or pushing, as best I could, against the polished floor, I at last reached the front door. Raising myself up on one arm, blubbering and cursing, I grasped the knob.
It was only then that the full hopelessness of the situation hit me. I couldn’t, I realized, move both myself and my brother’s body (passive under my cuffs and kicks and slaps) far enough to open the door. And even if I could, what then? Where would it end? Did I intend to drag him a mile and a half through the blackened snow and horse dung of the February streets? Straining to pry open the door, stopping only to beat my brother about the head, I finally collapsed like a child and wept. So undone was I at that moment, so lost and defeated, that I barely noticed it when Coffin and Dumat, raising us to our feet and draping our outer arms around their shoulders, walked us back up the stairs to the sofa by the hearth and covered us in blankets.
I let myself be still. Sitting there, listening to my brother breathing quietly beside me, I could feel the wetness drying on my face. I couldn’t fight them all. I didn’t want to. I could hear them talking about us, sounding strangely far off:
“Are they all right?”
“I had no idea he would take it so hard.”
“I thought he might.”
“Mother of God, I’ve never seen the like of it in all my days.”
“I thought he’d kill them both, going down the stairs like that.”
“She’s got his head all in a muddle, the poor little bastard.”
At last I opened my eyes. There was nothing else to do. Coffin was standing off to the side, looking again like the Captain Coffin we had first come to know on the Sachem. I could hear Dumat tending to my brother’s cuts. Hunter handed me some water.
“Drink this,” he said. “Go ahead. You have to drink.”
I drank.
“Are you warm enough?” I nodded. He turned to Coffin: “Abel, get a glass of wine for this boy.”
They seemed genuinely taken aback, concerned. And though I’m ashamed of it now, the truth is that at the time I was so broken that I allowed myself to be taken care of by them. I welcomed their clumsy, father like ministrations as though they had just rescued us from some great trial rather than been the cause of it; as though, having gone through that morning’s events together, we had somehow grown closer.
We stayed in their rooms late into the afternoon. Food appeared and was taken away. At some point a physician came in and examined us briefly—were we ill?—then stepped into the hallway with Hunter. “Shock to the nerves,” I heard him say in response to Hunter’s mumbled questions, and then: “difficult to say,” “rest,” “any undue exertion,” “not at all,” followed by the sound of his footsteps receding down the hall. I didn’t care. I felt only sadness—deep, abiding—and the dumb, animal-like relief that comes to those who have gone through some great strain. Something had snapped—I knew that. We would not be going to see her that day. Or the day after. And whenever I thought of not seeing her face, or he
aring her voice, the pain welled up as though a hot, swollen sponge buried in my chest were being squeezed, emptying its contents into my veins. But then, like a cold, clear wind, came forget-fulness, rest. Freedom from pain is a powerful thing. Capitulation, when one is young and afraid and exhausted, can beckon like a warm bed at the end of a hard journey.
I accepted the water; I took some food. I sat quietly beside my silent brother (it would be days, I knew, before we would speak), grateful for the blanket across our laps. I thought of nothing. It is only now that I see that absolution, even when offered by one’s enemies—no, particularly when offered by one’s enemies, by those who, an hour earlier, had their knees in our backs and our faces in the mud—can come to seem like the sweetest thing on earth, a benediction of the rarest sort. Left alone to rest, we sat in the darkening room as the reddened hearth emerged in the gathering dusk and a small, vindictive rain began to spit against the glass. Somewhere inside of me, Sophia’s face—her laugh, her heart—still glowed like a dying ember; but I was too tired to revive it, and by the time they returned to find us asleep, the room was cold and the fire just a scattering of sparks across the grate.
VI.
For nearly a week I didn’t answer her letters, merely sending word that we were ill and would write as soon as we were able. I didn’t know that she came to our door that following Tuesday morning, intending to see us, and was politely but firmly turned away. Nor did I receive the increasingly desperate letters she wrote to me; these, I can only surmise, were intercepted by Hunter or Coffin. When, nearly two weeks later (still not having written, for what could I write?), I did receive a letter from her, its tone was so intemperate, so angry and confused, that it inspired in me only a perverse resistance. “I ask only this,” she had said, “that you write and explain to me what is happening, that you allow me to plead our case. I ask this right, this mercy, only because you yourself, due to some weakness or misunderstanding, appear either unable or unwilling to do so.”
Taking a certain pleasure in the drama of the gesture, I folded the letter—hastily written in her once-familiar, less-than-perfect hand—and threw it on the fire. As I did so, I imagined I saw a look of surprise, almost a wince, cross my brother’s face. Was he growing soft now, having driven me to this in the first place? Flush with cruelty, I drove the letter home between the coals with the curved tip of the iron and watched it slowly shrivel in the heat, then flash into flame.
I knew that she had suffered at least as much as I had; risked and lost much more. I had heard of her battles: of the broken engagement, the public embarrassments, the fiancé who had denounced her. Pluvier had laughed at the notion of a duel: “At whom would I fire, monsieur? And killing one, would I then be forced to murder the other? It is too absurd! Honor is only an issue between men; I submit that my honor is no more at stake in this matter than if Mademoiselle Marchant had had her affections stolen by a pair of trick poodles or … or Siamese cats.”
More than once I had asked myself why a woman in her position would willingly endure so much. Now I knew. Now, thanks to the good Professor Dumat, I understood how cunningly corruption can align itself with love, twist and grow into the other until the two are inseparable and the only thing left is to cut both at the base. The scales had slipped from my eyes, and if the sight that greeted me was a bitter one, well, so be it. I would embrace the truth, though it made me ill. I would wrap myself in it as the saints had wrapped themselves in the rags of lepers.
The truth. The truth. It would be years before I learned that the devil—who knows his business, after all—has gotten along so well in the world because he never fails to come dressed as the truth.
“My good friends,” Dumat had said to us that cold February afternoon, “I would have preferred to put off this conversation until some later date; until you were older, perhaps, a bit wiser in the ways of the world.” He smiled ruefully, then laid the pipe he had been smoking on a tray beside his chair. “But you have been thrown—quite precipitously, I’m afraid—into a complicated world. A world in which things don’t always appear as they are. A world that can hurt you very badly.”
He paused, picking his words carefully. “This is an ungrateful task. I know that you do not trust me, that since I failed to take your side against Monsieur Hunter and Monsieur Coffin, you feel I am not your friend. I will not try to change your mind. I will only say, in regard to that matter, that the gentlemen in question are perhaps neither as guilty as you imagine nor as innocent as I might wish.” The coals crumbled in the hearth, briefly lighting up the room. “A cold day,” said Dumat. Behind him, a few dead leaves rose in a gust of wind like a small flock of sparrows, even as an actual sparrow—like a bit of cloth with a beak and legs—settled on the sill.
“But whether you trust me or not doesn’t matter, really,” Dumat continued. “We none of us have a choice. If you had a father”—at this I could feel my brother stiffen beside me—“I would gladly step aside and let him do his duty, though I trust and believe he would have performed it long before this. As it is …” He leaned forward, gentle, sincere, almost whispering: “You have been born with a gift, my friends; a gift, like great beauty, or supreme intelligence, that cannot be returned in this life. This gift sets you apart from your fellow man. It shapes the world around you. It imposes burdens and confers privileges. And there are times, I suspect—particularly now, when you are young—when those privileges seem small indeed and the burdens more than you can bear.
“I understand that. I understand—possibly better than anyone you will ever know—the burden you carry.” Dumat leaned forward, his voice rising with conviction. Until now I had only been half listening, less interested in his actual words than in the apparently unconscious gestures that accompanied them like the hand music of the deaf. “I understand,” he was saying now, “because Nature—or God, if you will—has seen fit to bless others as she has blessed you. Because you are not alone. Now and again Nature chooses to separate the individual from the common mold”—here his long, pale hands seemed to pull apart two invisible pieces of dough—“presses her thumb into the form while it is still wet”—a thumb turning into invisible clay—“and shapes something entirely new. A rarity. An exception. Something we in our stupidity and fear call a monstrosity. But we are wrong, my friends. You and your kind are a prodigy, a wonder”—hands expanding in helpless amazement—“the very word of God. And who are we to assume, in our ignorance, that just because that word is inscrutable to us”—squinting eyes, brow gathered in concentration—“a hieroglyphic more profound than any found on the scrolls of Alexandria, it holds no meaning, is not”—sharp white index finger pointing to the ceiling—“divine in origin?”
He sat back. “But I see by your smiles—no, don’t try to deny it, I do not hold it against you—that my strong feelings on this subject are making you uncomfortable. Forgive me. Your discomfort speaks well for you; the truly superior are always discomfited by an excess of flattery.” Pausing, he reached for his pipe, turned it in his hand, then set it down again.
“I must speak frankly, my friends, as a man speaks to his fellows.” He sighed, then looked directly in our eyes for the first time that afternoon. “You are no longer boys. I know that.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I know that in the privacy of your thoughts, you imagine things—all manner of things—that bring you pleasure and make you ashamed, and this is as it should be.” I could feel Eng shift uncomfortably.
Dumat cleared his throat. “What you cannot be expected to know, however, is that the members of the fairer sex—and I speak now of well-born women as well as their less fortunate sisters—not only share your thoughts but, in some circumstances, under certain peculiar conditions, turn what is natural and wholesome into something twisted and rank. In these cases, the seed, if I may, instead of emerging from corruption, instead of leaving its base origin and blossoming, in the fullness of time, into the love sanctioned by God and man alike, grows morbid and rots.
> “I say again: You cannot be expected to know this. No one can hold you accountable, at your age, for failing to imagine the strange spears that can spring from this corrupted soil, the odd suckers and stipula that can grow on the fairest flower.” Here again Dumat paused for a moment and looked at the ground to our right, a look of genuine sadness on his face, then rallied to the task. “But you must know. You must know, my friends—and I wish to merciful God there were someone else to tell you this—because your gift is of that class of things that, on occasion, and when encountered by an unhealthy soul, can corrupt the seed in its bed.”
“I don’t understand.” Increasingly agitated, my brother had suddenly sat up straighter on the divan. These were the first words, beyond a simple yes or no, I had heard him utter in days. “I don’t understand what it is you are …”
“Simply this: that there are certain women in the world who—”
“Are you referring to Mademoiselle Marchant?”
“I am speaking in general …”
“Because Mademoiselle Marchant—”
“My dear friend, calm yourself. I do not know Mademoiselle Marchant. I am speaking in general terms only. How these general truths apply to specific cases or particular individuals, that I cannot say.”
“Because my brother and I will not have you speak badly of her. Do you hear? We will not have it.”
My throat tightened suddenly; I resisted the temptation to look over at him. Dumat was waving both hands as though clearing a window just in front of his face. “You misunderstand me. Please. I had no intention of casting aspersions on—”
“What did you want to tell us, Monsieur Dumat?” I said quietly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my brother glance at me in surprise. I did not look at him.
Dumat gave me a curt, tight nod. “No more than this: That there are in this world certain unfortunate women, certainly deserving of our pity, in whom the principle of attraction has been corrupted; turned, as it were, against itself. They are drawn by what repels them.” Again Dumat’s voice began to rise, as though beyond his control. “They seek out the morbid, the sick, even the cruel, in precisely the same way their healthy sisters seek out what is honorable and whole. They are a horror, an abomination, and yet, though they themselves often recognize the perversity of their natures, this perversity, this corruption, by Nature’s cunning, is often very nearly invisible from without. Like the viper, whose coloration allows it to blend with the fallen leaves in which it lies, this taint is indistinguishable from the surrounding beauty in which—”