I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I have,” says I, “but I will gladly accept yours.”

  She inclined her head politely, and I know she hated me with all her heart. But smooth as butter, she promised, “Within a week after the task is done, on grounds I shall choose. Without witnesses, of course.”

  There seemed to be nothing to say to that. I opened the door to show her out. She glided through and, in the foyer, with her back to me and her body unmoving, she said softly, “Just once.”

  I said, “Why, of course, milady. Just once.”

  She bowed her head and left my house.

  5.

  “WHAT IS IT, SIR?” said Lance, bending over the bed solicitously.

  Barrowbridge kept his eyes closed, but some of the pain left his face. “Nothing. My tea’s cold.”

  Lance looked at him for a long moment and said, “Why are you telling me this unhappy tale?”

  “What? What?” Barrowbridge blinked up at him. “Why—I’ve told you. For my sake, because ultimately a man must confess to himself the stature of his follies. For your sake, because you must be warned. I smell it in the breeze, in the tack you’ve taken. … You have set a course, eh? I’d not be able to dissuade you from it?”

  Respectfully but firmly, Lance agreed.

  Barrowbridge shrugged. “There you are, then. If you will not avoid the enemy you must know him.”

  “Or join him,” Lance amended, and smiled.

  “Ah, well, well,” huffed the old man, “yes, there’s that. But then you must know him even better, eh?”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” said Lance. “And I think I’ll nip down while it’s boiling and send the boy ’round to fetch Piggott and the carriage. Have I your leave?”

  Barrowbridge looked at him with amusement. “You please me, boy; you do indeed. …You need my permission about as urgently as you need my scrofula, and well you know it. And you know I know it. Na, what you’re saying is that if I’ve a yarn to spin, I’d best get on with it and be done, because you want to be on your way to Lady Blanton’s. I read you well, lad, I read you well. Mind that you never let another human being read you as I do.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” said Lance again, and went out

  “And did you do the task?” asked Lance, when they were settled again.

  “That I did. The church was at Lainston in Hampshire, and if you’ve never heard of Lainston you’re no different from me twenty years ago. I rode to Aldershot the very day Miss Chudleigh visited me, slept at an inn, and was off for Lainston early in the morning. I recall it like a bad dream; I needn’t tell you that my life’s works have mostly been accomplished at the other end of my spine, and riding a mazurka-gaited hirehorse at a canter for most of two days did little for my good humor. I remember missing the track a number of times, once to find myself face to face with a fingerboard directing me to Nether Wallop, I give you my word! I wheeled and walloped away from there.

  “Lainston’s not far from Winchester, and close by the River Itchen; yet once there you’d believe yourself on another planet, or at least in another age. The church is one of those English indestructibles, where the New Chancel was put in Anno Domini 943 and the rest of the building was flung up by the mound-builders. The living must bring the curate all of four pounds per annum.

  “I found him in the churchyard on his four bones, pulling weeds. He was a saint-faced youngster with eyes all watery from years of staring at irregular Hebrew verbs. I came up at a gallop and wheeled my mount and slid off all dusty and grim. I identified myself briskly as Lascombe, Exemplification Officer of the Prothonotary’s Office, Cantab., jingled my fobs in his face, and demanded to know if his parish register had been monished.”

  Lance straightened up. “ ‘Monished?’ ”

  “A word I’d invented on the way down. It smacks of correction and punishment, and it seemed to me to sound like a word one ought to know.”

  “So it does.”

  “It did to him, poor chap. ‘Oh dear,’ says he in that dove-coo which so often results from the mixture of goat-cheese with scholarship. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I don’t—I can’t—oh dear.’ So I marched him to his little sacristy and had him take down the registers for the past fifty years, telling him sternly, ‘A third of the registers in England remain unmonished, and the Bishop is not pleased.’ ‘Oh dear,’ he coos, and off I send him to his weeds with the faithful promise I’ll have every book monished good as new by noon. So off he went, grateful as can be. The rest was simple; I’d four phials of ink with me, all different and ready to be used or blended, and a dozen quills sharpened a dozen ways. Luck gave me a blank half-page just where I wanted it, and there in what I flatter myself is the old vicar’s hand, with what is indistinguishably his own quill, I put the entry of August 12, 1744, Augustus John Hervey and Elizabeth Chudleigh; and there it stands, I’m sure, to this very day.

  “I sent my compliments and the news over to Miss Chudleigh as soon as I returned, and spent most of the next four days plucking the hairs out of my nostrils and reblocking my wig, and kindred activities. At length a boy came with the message: ‘I’m to say the word “Lainston,” and you’re to come with me,’ and I had my horse brought and followed the boy on his ancient white mare. The boy spoke never a word until we reached the edge of Kensal Green, where in those days an old livery stood. It was deserted but not abandoned, a tight old structure which has since burned down, doubtless from the burning shame I carried at the thought of it.

  “The boy then said, ‘You’re to wait here,’ and rode off down Harrow Road, and that was the last I saw of him. I dismounted and stood in the gloom—it was after teatime and growing dark—feeling that I must be the only illuminated thing in the dark landscape, ay, and with all my intentions lit up for the world to read as well; and then I began to feel as if I’d been made the butt of a joke, and would be left standing here until St. Swithin’s Eve. But I heard a tapping, and stood off from the building to look up at it, and there in a bit of a round window in the upper storey I saw a fluttering of white handkerchief. I led my horse around the building and tied him in an ell away from the road, and tried doors until I found one which yielded. I stood blinking inside until I became aware of a horn lanthorn standing on the floor making a little ring of dim light on the boards at the foot of a ladder.

  “Lance, Lance, I’d not be recalling all these details, or relating them, if it were easy to think of what followed!

  “So up I went to milady’s boudoir, and it was a dusty feed-store; and there was milady, barely to be discerned, and her peignoir was a riding-habit, stiff and high-necked with a great covering skirt, and her scented couch a mass of straw with a clean horse-blanket thrown across it. Her act of welcome was a single billow of the habit, which readied her; her word of love was, “Go on, then,” in a flat, cold voice.

  “No gentleman could have proceeded from that point. No gentleman, for that matter, would have found himself in such a circumstance. I, however, was not and am not a gentleman; and proceed I did, shambling and self-aware like a schoolboy taking a dare.

  “It was a chilling experience. I had not, of course, expected ardency … wait, lad, I am lying to both of us. I had expected ardency; everything I am, everything I came from, quivers in awareness of its low station, and this very lowliness demanded a response. Failing ardency, I suppose distaste would have been a response. Fear would have been a response. Disgust, nausea, terror … anything; but there was no response.

  “It ended because I could bear that no longer and for no other reason, d’ye follow me? I knelt there a-nostriling out my temper like a foundered horse while she calmly rose, a simple act which, unassisted, dressed her decently for the street. I saw her moving toward the ladder, and gasped out that she must wait.

  “She stopped and waited. ‘Certainly, Barrowbridge,’ says she. It had been “Mr.” Barrowbridge at our first meeting.

  “I pulled myself together and got straightened up and went to her. ‘We made a bargain,’ I told her. I fe
ar I let myself be angry; what is it Balthazar says about anger?”

  “It is most difficult to halt while running at the double,” Lance quoted.

  ‘True enough; but I was thinking of Every onset of passion is a digression from rational conduct. That’s the one I proved that day, ay, and like a student with a theorem, gave proof of my proof. So like a farmer haggling over a cracked pot at the Haymarket, ‘We made a bargain,’ says I.

  “ ‘We kept it,’ says she.

  “ ‘What—that?’ says I, in a rage.

  “ ‘Just so,’ says she, and the first I know I’m advancing on her is when she sets the lash of her riding-crop against my breastbone. Did you know you can hold back a man three times your weight that way? ‘Listen to me, Barrowbridge,’ she says in a voice like hailstones melting in the back of your collar, ‘I’ll deign to explain myself to you once, but once only. ’Twas yourself who made this act a matter of commerce, not I. You named the price, and you collected. What else you expected I neither know nor care; I am morally certain, however,’ she says, ‘that when you spend a sixpence for a purchase you pay out the money itself and do not wrap the coin in cloth o’ gold. You’d no right to ask anything more than the price you set. You’d little right to ask even that of a desperate client who could get help nowhere else and wouldn’t have the time to if there were another place. As to the—transaction itself, any simpleton knows that if I buy Mary’s radishes, I want her radishes more than I do my money, else I shouldn’t buy; she in turn wants my money more than she wants her radishes. In any trade I want to get a bit more than I give; in this—’She nods towards the horse-blanket—‘I could get nothing from you. I had then no choice but to give—less than nothing.”

  “Then you confess you had me to Lainston and back for nothing!” I bellowed at her.

  “ ‘I so confess,’ she says, with a glint in her eye. ‘I did it because I thought of a way, even as you would happily take anything I have without paying anything important for it. But you can’t think how to do it. Take care,’ she says suddenly; she must have seen something in my face, for by then I was fair livid, ‘I warn you, Barrowbridge, take care. We have had one interchange; I call us even-up, and you’re bellowing in pain. Do anything else to me and we’ll be even again on the instant, with you bellowing louder. That will happen and happen until you agree with me on what even-up means.’ ”

  “Lance, did ye ever see a great hulking ox of a fellow going about all day knocking littler men about, just to prove he’s a great hulking ox? So it is with the behavior of fools, who can be depended upon for a greater folly each time someone proves them foolish.

  “I patted aside her riding crop and went for her; I confess it, I lifted this hand to a woman. Lift it? I made a cannon of myself and fired the fist at her like an iron ball.”

  Barrowbridge lay breathing hard; then, “And she wasn’t there,” he whispered, his face echoing the exact amazement of that long-gone day. “She melted away into the shadows at the side—and head-first, down the ladderhole I went. My hand clawed a moment at the nigh edge, but she must have been waiting for just that, for she fetched me such a lick with the crop on the back of that hand that she took out a piece the size of a Dutch dollar.

  “Next I knew I was opening my eyes on her as she bent near me and took up the lanthorn. We were on the ground floor, she composed as a cantata and I a-sprawl and broken on the boards. ‘It’s even-up again, Barrowbridge,’ she tells me sweetly, ‘and you’ve nothing to fear. But—make no other gesture, or you’ll have the like of this again. And again after that, if you’re fool enough, world without end.” And she blew out the light; I heard the split-door open and close quietly, and then I do believe I fainted.”

  Lance made a soft noise that was not a word. “Small wonder you wanted to warn me.”

  “I’ve told ye only the first part, the smallest!” croaked the old man. “Ah, lad—never fear; I’ll not keep you all night with the rest of it. The rest took longer, but takes less telling.

  “When I was up and about with a chip out of my pelvis (and who’s to know how much that contributed to my present state as the years got to it?) and had a dislocated wrist in order again, I was not a well man, and vowed I would not be until I taught Elizabeth Chudleigh what I took ‘even-up’ to mean.

  “I had one thing with which to belabor her, and that was the task I’d fulfilled at Lainston. I’d not dare to mention that, of course, and involve myself; but the facts behind it—the marriage itself—that could trouble her a great deal, especially now that the sick earl was well. You go about waving proofs of things held secret, and you’ll cause trouble; this truism applies as well to open secrets.

  “I made a short list of influential folk—clerks to M.P.’s, nameless folk who had the ear of the Church, and the like, and made the rounds with my authenticated rumor: Elizabeth Chudleigh was indeed wed to Augustus John Hervey. It would spread and widen, and at length some enemy she had would take the trouble to go to Lainston and see the records, and the rumor would be truth, and the whole structure she had built would totter.

  “Or so I deluded myself.

  “On the first day of this campaign I passed the word to four people. On the second day I went to a chap called St. George, who’s a printer in the firm which does the Monthly Review, and gave him my item, being quite sure he’d pass it along to someone in The Club. ‘Ah yes,’ says he, ‘not an hour ago another chap was in here with proof positive she wed young Pulteney, Earl of Bath, four years ago,’ and laughs in my face. Not a little taken aback, I trotted around to the Fish and Staff on Fleet Street, where so many great of the time dined, and had a word with the innkeeper. Yes, he’d heard my tale of Bristol’s brother; he’d heard it, matter of fact, four times since last midnight; two people had told him the same about Bath, and there was a powerful rumor about that the Duke of Hamilton, who had been a great admirer of Elizabeth Chudleigh in the early days, had married her as well.

  “I ran about London like a zealot with an end-of-the-world revelation, wild-eyed and laughed-at. It came to me far too late that Elizabeth Chudleigh, with twenty times the resources I could command, ten times the vindictiveness, and (I now confess it) twice the intelligence, was spreading my story for me, thirteen to the dozen, until it became an old joke, an absurdity; and for good measure she was spreading yarns about others as well, so no one would know what to believe.

  “The following day I received a letter from her. It was unsigned, but it was unquestionably hers. It said only, En garde! in cheerful script; and while I stood there turning it over in my hands and wondering what it was I must be on guard against, a great hairy bailiff came whacking at my door with the news that my lease had been held invalid and I must vacate. Even the extent of my knowledge of the technicalities of rental could not save the situation, and out I went. I settled again soon elsewhere—four ruddy times I settled again, but there was no escaping the implacable pursuit. There was nothing to connect her with any of it, and nothing was ever done past the bounds of profound nuisance. But so many things, so many different things! I’ll swear she was responsible for a basket of rotten eggs delivered to me one day, and another delivery—would you believe it—a pack of hunting dogs, howling and hungry, ordered by someone who had forged my signature; ay, and the statement with them, sixty-eight pounds twelve and six, payable on the spot.

  “Removing so abruptly made it nigh impossible for clients to find me; those who did began to slip away, usually for reasons not divulged to me. They simply did not return. I collared one on the street one day, a chap who was attempting an action to keep his brother out of debtor’s prison for eighteen pounds. Someone had given him eighteen pounds—a simple device.

  “So came I to Bermondsey, in this muck and mud; and not long afterwards I received another of the short cheerful missives: Even-up again, it said, and thereafter she let me be.”

  “A witch.”

  “A cheerful witch,” Barrowbridge agreed. “A joyous, cheerful, resourc
eful and unforgiving witch. This I’ll say of her: she gives warning and she announces surcease, and sticks by both. I think it’s a matter of principle.

  “Now then, I’ve said my say; I’ve bared my soul and, I trust, warned you sufficiently. I wish I could say I’ve warned you away altogether, but I can see I have not.”

  “As usual,” said Lance reverently, “you are quite right, sir.”

  Barrowbridge laughed at him, “Damn you,” he said affectionately. “Now tell me, Lanky, what you’ve planned for her. Mayhap I can be of some assistance.”

  “Would you, sir? Would you really? Even if it helped her?”

  The old man looked up at him gravely. “ ’Twas more than a quip, Lanky, when I told you of my death. I’m a hulk now, helpless in this bed and on that chair; I’ve known these past twelve months or more that I’ve overstayed my tenure at the head of this organization of ours. I’d never ask you for a pension and you’d be a fool to give it to me. I’ve made you earn your porridge twice over; you’ve every right to expect the same of me. I can no longer do anything for myself by commanding you; you can, I think, do a great deal for yourself by commanding me.”

  “Ah, sir!” cried Lance, quite overcome.

  “Before you make that fine straight spine of yours all soggy with an excess of emotion,” said the old man acidly, “let me add that with the death of my dignity, a number of other qualities are now deceased, most notably my foolishness. At long last freed from that lifelong curse, I may say here and now that I am no longer a fool, and I know clearly that the instant I become a hindrance to you, you’ll drop me like a hot brick.”

  “Never!”

  “Nonsense, boy! ’Tis the way I raised ye, and the way I want ye to be. Now, to work. Tell me your plans.”

  At the top of the High Street, Southwark, Piggott wheeled to the side and stopped. He opened the boot, found the folded cloak and tossed it to his pensive passenger, “ ’ere’s the bridge, Lanky, and ’igh time the bug become a butterfly.”