Slipper

by Hester Velmans

  TWELVE!

  The coach explodes into a thousand pieces, and they bump to a grinding stop. For a few moments, dazed, they lie on the ground, lifeless. Slowly they open their eyes. Behold! There is their coach, a few feet away from them, in the ditch. Only it has changed into a pumpkin again, a humble pumpkin, smashed in the mud. Sad, deflated, they turn and look at each other. There is mud there too, on the chin, cheek and forehead…but there is something else as well. It is a flash of light, the sparkle of a single tear, in the other’s eye.

  And then hope returns. For it is suddenly clear that no matter how bleak things may seem now, that pumpkin, or one just like it, is capable of turning itself into a magic coach again, and take them on many another joy-ride to many another glittering ball.

  To sum up, then: this was no ordinary night. It was a night without end, a night without time, a night that was doing everything in its power to prolong the ecstasy, to draw itself out elastically, to behave as if there were no tomorrow and love were never-ending. Every time Lucinda and John dozed off (and doze off they did), it wasn’t long before the night would prod them, sending a message (a barking dog, a braying mule, a mosquito humming in their ears) to remind them that the warm flesh intertwined with theirs was a treasure too precious to be used for so common a pastime as sleep; and so they would shake off their drowsiness and continue their relentless exploration of each other.

  Over the ham and the suet pudding (the best they had ever tasted, they decided), John and Lucinda found time to tell each other their innermost secrets, and here was the most miraculous thing of all: they discovered that no matter what the subject, their views were identical down to the last detail, so that it grew almost embarrassing to have to exclaim with delight and a mouth full of food, time and time again, “So do I!” Or, “Isn’t it?” Or, “I know just what you mean!”

  It was now clear to Lucinda that for the first time in her life she had stumbled upon another human being who was of like mind in every respect, and who was therefore just as smart and wonderful as she was. Is that not the best thing about love—that, given the license to adore someone else, you can see yourself so becomingly reflected in another’s lovestruck eyes?

  “Have you ever felt like this before?” she asked. She knew, of course, that it was unlikely for a man of John’s age never to have lain with another woman, but it was nevertheless critical that she be the only serious, the only true object of his passion.

  “No, of course not,” he reassured her. “Although I thought I was in love with someone once. I was completely obsessed. You remind me very much of her.”

  “Oh?” A tiny pang of jealousy started whetting its blade on her heartstrings. “Who was she?”

  “It was a long time ago. She was my betrothed.”

  “You…your wife?” she asked, alarmed.

  “No!” he said quickly. “No, Please don’t think I…I should explain. The marriage had been arranged, but it never took place.”

  “Ah,” sighed Lucinda, relieved.

  “It was only when she ran off with another man that I realized how much I wanted her.”

  She cradled his head in her arms and started rubbing his back, the way Bessie used to, when she needed comforting. She noted that there was hair on his shoulders, where Henry had none. It gave her an inexplicably satisfying thrill. But she felt his heaviness, and tried to focus on his confession. She felt his disappointment as if it were her own. She was well acquainted with the sting of unrequited love, after all. “She was mad not to want you,” she crooned.

  “I wasn’t much of a prize,” he said bitterly. “She was absolutely right. I was a dolt. I did her a great disservice. A great injustice.”

  There was a long silence. Lucinda’s curiosity finally got the better of her self-control, however.

  “I want to know everything about you,” she whispered into his buttery hair. “Please tell me about this—this maid who broke your heart.”

  He shrugged. “I’m afraid it was I who broke hers.”

  He glanced up and saw the stricken expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry. I’d rather not. It’s not a pretty story…”

  “I understand,” Lucinda said quietly. She was just starting to find out that losing your heart is only the beginning; that there can be so much more to lose as well.

  Daybreak, when it finally came, found them sitting in the opening of the tent, watching a gaudily backlit sky arrange and rearrange its implausible colors along the horizon. A chirpy chorus of delirious birdsong hailed the dawning of a brand new world. Lucinda felt a little drained by all this perfection. John was telling her which parts of her anatomy he found the most appealing, and his hand rested on one of the places he had so described.

  “So—your betrothed, what did she look like?” she interrupted him, lightly. She couldn’t help it.

  He grunted. “You are not going to let that rest, are you?” he said.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said quickly.

  He stared into the distance. “She looked—well, she looked a bit like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “It struck me when we first met, the resemblance. But you—you’re much prettier.”

  “Oh.”

  “And she was never real to me. Believe me. She was just a lovely idea that was promised to me. I had only seen her twice. I was very young, a mere boy. And a hothead. It wasn’t love. It was jealousy. Of the other man, I mean.”

  “Well,” she said, “if it wasn’t really love, there’s no reason not to tell me about her, is there?”

  He sighed. After a pause, he said, “Yes. I must tell you. But it is something I am not very proud of. I don’t want you to think badly of me.”

  “I would never, ever think badly of you!” she cried.

  He shook his head, frowning apologetically. “It was an error of my youth—I was a different person then.”

  Lucinda snuggled against him. She understood his motivation for wanting to appear faultless to her. Of not wanting to shatter the image of perfection. But nothing, nothing John had done in his youth could ever dismay her. He was perfect. She just wanted to be able to dismiss this rival from the scene, that was all. She wanted to hear her described; draw her own comparisons; then lay her to rest.

  “Tell me. Please?”

  “All right. I was not even sixteen. My relatives arranged it because, as I told you, my parents died when I was very young. They said it would be a very good match; she came from a wealthy family, and had a good portion. She was pretty…”—he stroked Lucinda’s curls—“I liked the idea of being married to her. But she was just a child, and it was decided that we would wait until she was of an age to decide for herself.”

  “And then?”

  “And then—well, the next thing, she had—given herself to another.”

  “She married someone else?”

  “No. Worse. Her parents were against it. She just ran off with him. Bolted.”

  “Oh, John,” she sighed, sharing his mortification. She grabbed his hand, but he pulled it away and stood up, stretching self-consciously. He stood in the tent opening, gazing out at the stirring camp.

  “That wasn’t the end of it. I was in a rage. I thought I was the laughingstock of the county. I could think of nothing else. I paid a man—a spy—to find out where they had gone. Eventually he tracked them down for me. I went there and found them. Challenged him to a duel.”

  He glanced over at Lucinda. She put all her heart into a wry, encouraging smile. He turned away again and closed his eyes a moment.

  “I never meant to kill him. I wanted to draw blood, my blood, I wanted her to see me bleeding, I wanted her to take pity on me. But that isn’t how it turned out.” His voice was so hoarse that she had to strain to hear him. “Suddenly—I saw him lying on the ground, gored by my sword…”

  “Oh, John!” Her heart ached for him.

  He laughed bitterly. “Of course she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She
couldn’t stop screaming. She was great with child. His child. I was so ashamed, so sorry for what I had done. The shock brought on her pains. I’m ashamed that I did not stay—It was my turn to bolt. I could not face having to answer for what I had done. “

  At the end of his story, they were both quiet. Very quiet. Lucinda’s mouth was dry. She hated that Jezebel who had hurt him so much. John was well rid of her.

  And yet…Why did the story sound so familiar? Something about it was a little close to home. She found herself asking,

  “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. I had to flee. I left money for my rival’s burial, and for a midwife for his lady. I ran off and joined the army, in France. It was quite a few years before it was safe for me to return to England. I did try to contact her family then, but they were no help. They’d disowned her, you see.”

  Lucinda said nothing. It was John who broke the silence. “It was then that I vowed never to take a life again. That was my penance: to save lives instead. I apprenticed myself to a barber-surgeon. And here I am.”

  Lucinda’s head was spinning.

  “What was her name?” Her voice sounded muffled inside her head.

  “Her name?” He turned around and knelt down by her side. “What does it matter?”

  “I’d just like to know her name.”

  “Olivia. Lady Olivia Steppys.”

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  Lucinda’s heart snapped shut, one segment at a time. She could observe, as from a great distance, her happiness extinguishing itself in slow motion. With enormous dignity, like a sheet of burning paper crumpling majestically into ashes.

  “Lucinda.”

  He was leaning over her, an uncertain grin on his face. Was she teasing him? She had gone so quiet, all of a sudden.

  She looked up, and tried to smile. She felt unbearable pity for him, for both of them.

  He could not make out her mood. He tried to get his hands under her arms, which she held rigidly by her side, to tickle her.

  She neither laughed nor protested. She stood up, and pulled her cloak tightly around herself.

  “I must go down to the river now, to wash,” she managed.

  “What’s the matter? I’ll come with you.”

  “No. Go see to the wounded. I will come by later,” she lied.

  And she made her way carefully, purposefully, down to the river.

  43

  A MISCARRIAGE OF FATE

  Maastricht capitulated a week later, and as soon as the king was bored with inspecting and showing off his new prize, the camp began to break up.

  “What now, lamb?” said Bessie.

  “What, Bess?”

  “We can’t stay here moping. Everyone is leaving. It’s time to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “Lamb. I know you are upset, I know you are suffering. But please—don’t make it harder than it is. I think it’s for the best. There is enough money left for our passage.”

  “Whatever you want. I don’t care.”

  Bessie sighed, and began tidying up the tent. Her lamb had been sunk in a sullen stupor for days, and she was not snapping out of it. Bessie was glad, of course, that Lucinda had finally come to her senses about Captain Beaupree. Although the final indignity was that the poor girl had been robbed of the pleasure of letting him know it, since Henry had apparently decided, quite on his own, to deprive himself of her company. There had been no summons, no apology, no acknowledgement of any kind. Once, snarling at Bessie to leave her alone, Lucinda had hinted that there had been a last-ditch marriage proposal the night of the assault, but Bessie found this hard to believe. In any case, even if it was true and the subject of marriage had indeed come up, the captain evidently now preferred to forget that it had ever happened.

  But that fiasco was overshadowed by something far more upsetting. Bessie truly didn’t know whom to feel sorrier for, her poor lamb or that poor Mister Prynce, who was flapping around the infirmary like a freshly beheaded chicken, poor soul, getting in the way and scaring away the patients.

  Twice, three times that awful day last week he had returned to their tent looking for Lucinda, and had left with increasing bewilderment when an apologetic Bessie had had to turn him away. At that point Lucinda had not yet told her what had happened, but Bessie knew there was something very, very wrong. She had been able to wring it out of the girl in the end.

  Sitting in a corner that night, peeling carrots, she’d watched Lucinda groom her hair vacantly, methodically, like a cat.

  “It is strange, isn’t it,” Bessie had begun, lightly, “how one’s humors can change so quickly —”

  Lucinda gave an exasperated sigh, irritably acknowledging that Bessie was starting to probe.

  “Just the other morning, for instance, Lieutenant Prynce seemed so elated—well, I have never seen him like that. He was fairly bursting out of his skin.”

  “Ha!”

  “And next thing I know, he comes looking for you and you make me send him away, pale as a peahen, a lost soul.”

  “Perhaps he is a lost soul. Or a peahen.”

  Bessie started slicing the carrots with her knife, deftly, against her thumb. The slices plopped into her apron. “Pet. If anything has happened between you two—perhaps you will tell me, so that I’ll know what to say to him. I mean, if he didn’t behave like a gentleman, I’ll—”

  Lucinda snickered bitterly. “Oh, he behaved like a gentleman, all right!”

  “Well, whatever he did to you, I should like to know. I don’t know what to say to him. Consider my position.”

  “All right,” shouted Lucinda. “All right! You should know that…”—a harsh growl emerged from her throat—“I hate him. And so should you.”

  “You hate him! Lamb! If you’d said you hated the captain, I’d quite understand. But why him?”

  “I hate him even more than I hate the captain!”

  “Lord! What did he do?”

  “I despise him. He is my mortal enemy.”

  “Come, lamb, it can’t be as bad as that! What did he do to you? Tell me!”

  “He killed my father.” She said it almost flippantly.

  Bessie laughed. “He killed your father! Lamb! Why do you say these things? You know your father is long dead…”

  “That’s what I mean. John—Lieutenant Prynce. Killed him.”

  “You don’t mean…”

  “Is it so hard to understand?” yelled Lucinda. “I found out that your dear Mister Prynce is the man who was once my mother’s betrothed. He told me so himself. The rejected suitor who killed my father, you know, in a duel, just before I was born.”

  “Oh!”

  There was a long, aghast silence.

  “Does he know?” Bessie said at last.

  “What?”

  “That you are the offspring of—”

  “No. I’m not going to tell him!”

  “Oh, pet!”

  “The funniest thing is,” said Lucinda mirthlessly, “that I thought I had finally found the one, the only man I could ever—”

  “Lamb! Don’t think that! You’ll see, you are so young yet, and there are so many herring in the sea…”

  Lucinda’s outraged snort cut short that familiar line of reasoning.

  After Bessie informed him of the fortuitous prenatal connection between Lucinda and himself, John no longer came looking for Lucinda. He did go looking for Beaupree, and spat in his face, and was called out, and met him and his second early the next morning in a lonely hollow on the other side of Kerkum, and received a flesh wound in the thigh just moments before the duel was broken up by the Duke of Monmouth, who arrived on the scene in the nick of the time. (Since there had been some stalling on Beaupree’s part, we cannot blame Prynce for suspecting his adversary of being responsible for the breach of secrecy). After being forced to listen to a stern lecture and made to give his adversary a sullen embrace, he was ordered to pay him two thousand pi
stoles and a silver platter in reparation. Finally he was allowed to hobble back to the infirmary tent.

  It was Bessie who bound up his leg. Nothing was said between them, but it was clear from the way she shook her head, and the tenderness with which she attended him, that she was hoping he would pull himself together.

  He tried, he really did try, but it was hard, because of the bitterness of the blow fate had dealt him, exacerbated by the great quantity of liquor that was finding its way down his numb gullet and befuddling his aching brain. In truth, as he confided to a fellow drunk at one of the canteens, he was afraid that the minute his hands stopped shaking he might very well have to pick up his barber’s tools, slice open his own chest and cleanly amputate the ice-cold heart that was surely growing gangrenous in there.

  Slouching around the partially dismantled camp, he would suddenly bray with laughter at his preposterous predicament. His true love was the daughter of the maid who had spurned him; her father, the youth he had foolishly killed in a duel! But instead of joining in the laughter, the people just looked away. They did not jeer at him. They did not seem to notice what a buffoon he’d become. A massive, massive miscarriage of fate had befallen him, and yet it had created not a stir, not a whisper. No one pointed at him, no one gossiped, no one sniggered. He suddenly grew furious. He lunged at a soldier who, instead of paying attention, stood polishing a bayonet. The man backed away politely. John sat down heavily in the dust and buried his face in his knees. Life was one catastrophic farce. That’s what it was about, wasn’t it? It was about being given a glimpse of paradise, and having the gates slammed shut in your face. And then to have your friends mutter, Ah well, that’s life, old man, and with unseemly alacrity avoid your depressing company altogether. The joke of it was that you couldn’t blame anyone else, because it was all your own damned fault…