Despite what he knew about her, he could not help loving her. He wanted to put his arms round her. But he took her hands instead.
“Look at my eyes,” he answered, “and tell me whether I’m in a condition to fight.”
There was a pause. “Yes,” said Caroline. She looked away, and then back at him. Her cheeks were flushed. “May I stay here,” she begged, “and watch you win?”
“If that is your desire, you may.”
“Now, God’s teeth!” roared Mr. Mulberry. Being fond of Caroline, he had been flapping about her like a very large old hen. Now he bawled at the room.
“The lady can’t stay,” he said. “If you must be fools, if you won’t stop to think on more important legal … why, damme, you wouldn’t let a tavern wench see a sight like this! Even old Bert Mulberry knows it!”
Firebrace lifted his upper lip.
“This man is quite right,” he agreed.
Alfred, at his elbow, cradled the hilts of two sabers over his left arm, and offered them. Firebrace chose one at random, and propped it upright against the wall beside the door, while he tore off his own disreputable coat, waistcoat, cravat, collar and slung scabbard.
“Unless,” Firebrace’s red-stung eyes made him add with a smile, “the rumor about Lady Darwent is really true.”
Caroline whirled round. “May I ask what rumor, sir?”
“Since you compel me to mention it, that you would prefer Lord Darwent’s absence to his continued existence. In that case, of course, you will remain because …”
“No, sir,” replied Caroline. She spoke, clearly and very sweetly. “I remain because he will make you appear to be an absolute novice.”
“Will he?” whispered Firebrace. Then, aloud: “Stand back!”
They stood back, all of them.
While the cambric shirt showed off Firebrace’s strength and his immense length of reach, he studied the position. If Darwent insisted in remaining in that place with his back to the wall of the next house, they would fight across the width of the room rather than down its length. And at the end of the room, about six feet out and parallel with the window curtains.
That made no matter! Many an uninitiate would have been surprised at the thoughts in Firebrace’s brain.
For duelists with the saber, as with the rapier, seldom move much either backwards or forwards. Saber-play, like rapier-play, is not continuous; it comes in short, sharp bursts. Sabers do not “ring”; their noise is a clunk-clunk mingled with the clang or slither of the parry.
“The saber, my lord,” Alfred said at Darwent’s elbow.
Darwent, who had been looking at Caroline after stripping off his own coat and waistcoat and empty slung scabbard, drew his eyes back.
“Thank you, Alfred. A very fine balance.”
And so it was. The upper edge of the saber was dull, flat, lifeless. The lower edge, razor-sharp, tapered to a sharp point. Darwent, feeling the straight hilt, tightly grasped the leather-bound haft. It was solid, but not too heavy.
From across the room came a burst of laughter.
“Gad, that’s good!” exclaimed Firebrace, though his infernal eyes would water.
“What is, old boy?” asked Jemmy eagerly.
“Nothing at all!” Firebrace assured him with a very grave face.
For he had just seen his adversary without coat or waistcoat. This fellow, Firebrace admitted to himself, was well made. But he seemed on the slight side, and he was not overly tall; he was just the sort for a battering attack, since Firebrace could not be called fast on his feet.
The beginning of a saber duel, at that time, was almost as Standardized as an opening at chess. You led, as a rule, with a forehand cut to the head or shoulder. But Firebrace, the crafty, had devised different tactics.
His custom was to demand: “No salutes or ceremonies?” To which the adversary would almost always agree. Instantly Firebrace, though not quick, would leap forward and send a backhand—not forehand—cut to the head. His battering was under way before the adversary recovered poise.
And Firebrace thought of it tenderly now.
“Ready?” he called across the room, and snatched up the saber from the wall behind him.
Jemmy Fletcher scurried over to join the other spectators just beyond the chandelier.
“Any time at all!” Darwent called back.
The two combatants began to move forward—slowly, in a straight line, guards down.
Both wore sweat-soaked white cambric shirts, with three pearl buttons at the wrist. Both were in black small clothes, Darwent’s gold knee buckles gleaming against Firebrace’s diamond buckles. The light made a dull shine on the saber blades.
Firebrace towered, his large long curls of reddish hair a-gleam. Darwent risked a side glance toward Caroline, which he should not have done; all noticed the fierce intensity of his gray eyes.
The combatants, moving more slowly, stopped about six feet from each other.
Mr. Mulberry, who contemplated expressing emotion by driving his fist through the crown of his hat, bawled out at them.
“There’s work to be done this night! Why must you take so long with your japery?”
“We shall be quick,” said Firebrace, with slight moisture in his eyes.
“Agreed!” said Darwent.
“No salutes or formalities?” Firebrace demanded quickly.
“Agreed!”
And Firebrace sprang forward, driving a backhand cut to the head.
It was met with a parry which almost numbed Firebrace’s arm from wrist to shoulder, with a streak of pain at the elbow. That time, once only, Darwent failed to “carry” a cut, saving strength. But he meant it to warn against battering. Firebrace, off balance, just managed to parry the forehand cut which flew back at him.
Both men hesitated, their heads moving a little from side to side. Then Firebrace lunged with the point. He heard as well as felt through his arm the sh-r-ung as the blade went wide. Darwent’s saber edge—unorthodox, backhand—seemed to sweep horizontally above Firebrace’s eyes as though to cut off the top of his head.
“Oh, Gummy!” blurted old Townsend, who was still picking his teeth with a knife blade. He cut his mouth, and the knife clattered on the floor.
Darwent had leaped back, panting, his saber at guard. Firebrace felt no crush of pain, not even a seeping of blood.
But something, which tickled with a bitterness of humiliation, tumbled and brushed and speckled down over his face. His large reddish coil of hair, shorn off cleanly like other bits of hair, began to unshred before it feathered along the floor.
“I think,” Darwent said politely, “you mentioned something about shaving my pate?”
Firebrace did not reply. He merely plunged in to batter.
There was a short, murderous burst of play, two cuts and two lunges on both sides. The clung-clunk moved up and then down, each stroke picked out by a dull gleam on the blades. Feet shuffled on boards, and suddenly rose to a maniac stamp-dance which stopped dead.
Abruptly play stopped too. Both adversaries studied each other.
Firebrace’s eyes were streaming, either with tears of pepper or tears of rage. He could see, but just barely see.
“Guard yourself!” said Darwent, breathing hard. “’Ware tricks!”
Instantly, with his own brand of swiftness, he feinted a backhand cut to Firebrace’s right shoulder, and lured the other blade wide. His saber swept up vertically, and sliced down the side of Firebrace’s left cheek.
Now the best swordsman, in fact, cannot shear off a heavy side whisker. Hair is too resilient; the blade, for all our talk, not sharp enough; and the steadiest eye may remove the cheek as well as the whisker.
But Darwent’s slash was very fair. Large tufts and pieces of hair, as well as the whole end of the whisker, flew wide amid very tiny blood pricklings against a roughened skin.
“You damned …!” shouted Firebrace; and stopped for breath.
Four times more the blades hacked or sl
ithered. The terrified Caroline, who could not look but could not keep her eyes from it either, for some reason put her hands over her ears.
Then Darwent feinted again. Firebrace, always rearing up like a great mastiff above a bull terrier, did a half wheel to the right as his saber lashed nearly to the ground. He was wide open. Darwent’s crosscut sheared down his right cheek as well, with much the same bits-and-pieces effect as before.
“I say, to all good people present,” shouted Mr. Mulberry, as though he were beginning to read the riot act, “this must stop, as in Latin, instanter. I further say …”
Darwent, who had backed away again, spoke from behind saber guard.
“Listen to that, Firebrace.” He spoke quietly, gently, compellingly. “You’re blind; you can’t see now; I don’t want to hurt you. You needn’t give up; but give over! There’s no dishonor in stopping play now!”
As Firebrace towered over them—his puffy red eyelids streaming, beaten to a standstill, ridiculous with his shorn hair and patchy whiskers—he still had about him some quality of the pig-headed heroic.
“Give over, eh?” he whispered.
Alfred hurried forward toward Firebrace.
“Yes, sir. If you will allow …”
Firebrace merely flung out a side swing of that weighted razor edge.
Alfred saved his life only by dropping flat on the floor, and then rolling quickly out of reach. A quivering ran through the prisms of the chandelier, like a chatter of glass teeth. One candle fell, amid grease and fire. Firebrace’s dim eyes peered round and round for Darwent.
“Where are you?” he shouted, launching cuts at the air. “Come out and fight!”
Deliberately Darwent threw his saber on the floor. Unarmed, he moved back into that space he had occupied at the beginning, his back several feet out from the wall.
“Dick!” screamed Caroline. “What are you doing?”
Curse it, couldn’t they understand? If the near-blind Firebrace threw a heavy cut at Darwent, or rather at the wall behind—old unpainted wood backed by a three-foot brick wall of the house next door—the saber would be wrecked or torn from Firebrace’s grip. It was the only way to avoid playing Blind Man’s Buff against a madman with a saber.
“I’m here!” Darwent called back, waving his arms in the air. “Can’t you see me now?”
“Got you!” gritted Firebrace, craftily finding that dim shadow. And he ran forward, swinging up his arm as he ran.
Darwent, on edge to dodge, picked out every detail of Firebrace’s face—red puffed eyes, open mouth, thick-corded neck—as he saw that giant charge straight at him.
If his foot were to slip, or he failed to move at the proper moment …
“Got you!” Firebrace repeated.
His saber whirled up, for an overarm cut to split down the middle of Darwent’s skull. Darwent, seeing that nightmare face and blade towering at a three-foot distance, slipped out and under just as the strokes fell. Even Firebrace’s sight caught the wall looming up ahead. He tried to check himself, but it was too late.
What happened then stunned Firebrace as much as it stunned the watchers.
For there was no brick wall beyond the paneling.
Firebrace’s sword sheared through that old paneling, brown-tinged only by age, as through soft pinewood. It went so far that a part of the hilt got stuck inside; it wouldn’t come out no matter how Firebrace tugged.
It was the end of Firebrace. Shoulders sagging, bewildered, he stood there with not even a spark of interest.
And up rose Mr. Hubert Mulberry, pointing with one hand to the saber in the wall and holding up his white hat with the other.
“Ayagh!” he said. “And now will you give over, Dick? Now will ye stand and hear reason? Don’t you see the finger o’ the Almighty pointing straight at truth?”
Darwent looked round. Eyes, as bewildered as his own, fixed on that sword cleft and—yes! a very faint glimmer of light shining through.
Caroline’s hands, touched with dried mud, were clasped together. John Townsend pressed a reddened rag to the cut at his mouth. Thomas and Alfred stood without expression. Jemmy Fletcher, it is regrettable to state, lay full length on the floor in a dead faint.
“Listen, lad!” pounced Mr. Mulberry. “Don’t you see now what cozened and wheedled you, on the night of all your adventures with the blue coach?”
“No! What was it?”
“It was the power of darkness,” the old lawyer said grimly.
“The power of darkness?”
“Ay; just that!” Out thrust Mr. Mulberry’s red-roughened face, with the grayish-brown hair stuck to the forehead. “You sought a ‘lost room’! A room bewitched and hocussed overnight! Well! D’ye know where it is?”
Here Mr. Mulberry pointed with his hat to the cleft in the wall.
“It’s, in the front room of the house next door,” he said. “And split my britches! you’ve been sitting beside it the whole time!”
“No!” said Caroline. She hesitated; then there was silence.
But Darwent’s mind, as he opened his mouth to deny it too, caught at curious hints and memories which had been swirling there for some time.
“Alfred,” he said, “yes; and to Thomas. Mr. Firebrace seems tractable. Will you take him to some other room and bathe his eyes and keep him there?”
“Yes, my lord,” answered Alfred. “But if I may suggest it, about the eyes: wouldn’t Mr. Hereford be the best gentleman for that?”
“Mr. Hereford! Is he still here?”
“Yes, my lord. He has been—questioning. Certainly his carriage is still at the door.”
Darwent merely nodded, and they escorted out the numbed Firebrace. Darwent, his mind boiling, swung round toward Mr. Mulberry.
“Stop!” roared that gentleman, facing him like a loaded cannon. “I’ll speak, Dick, and you’ll answer. What did that coachman do to you, on the night of May 5th?”
“But I don’t …”
“Why, I’ll tell you. He drove you from Hyde Park out into the country, though not as far as Kinsmere, and he drove you straight back into London to St. James’s Square!”
“He didn’t. I can swear—!”
“Stop,” said Mr. Mulberry, coolly putting on his white hat. “Now answer your own questions, Dick, which you put to us in this very room at breakfast. Mind, now! Even I admit I don’t know why they should smash you over the head before Fletcher put you in the coach ….”
“But I do,” retorted Darwent.
“Eh, lad?”
“I learned it,” Darwent replied, “when I was talking to Tillotson Lewis. He suspected the firm of Frank Orford and Company; he was investigating, and he wrote to tell them so. They were compelled to abduct him—or me, as it happened—when they saw him. To knock him out in case he struggled! To treat him as a prisoner until they discovered how much he knew of them!”
“Ah!” breathed Mr. Mulberry with satisfaction. “And now, Dick, to business! To the ordinary customers they didn’t have to knock out!—You admitted (eh?) you could understand why they’d be tied with soft bonds, and their eyes tightly bandaged.
“But why did they sling you in a hammock, Dick, when you could just as well have sat in the coach? Above all, why did they stop up your ears so tightly you could only faintly hear a scream beside one ear?”
“Well? Why was it?”
“Because the coachman was driving you back to London,” said Mr. Mulberry, “after a small excursion into the country. If you were slung in a hammock, you couldn’t feel the difference between the jolt over some bad paving and a jolt on a country road. Above everything, you couldn’t hear a street noise to tell you that you were back in town. And you didn’t, did you?”
Again the obvious smote Darwent between the eyes. But he couldn’t believe it; he wouldn’t believe it, because …
“I swear to you,” he cried out, “that I was at Kinsmere House in Bucks!”
“By your own admission, lad, had you ever been inside it be
fore?”
“No. But I saw the countryside. I saw that signpost …”
“Ah!” pounced Mr. Mulberry. “As the sages say, here’s it. When you were driven out three-quarters of the way to the village. of Kinsmere, you were allowed to work your eye bandages loose once or twice. And you saw the signpost by moonlight?”
“Yes!”
“Now this happened on the drive out there, before you found Orford’s body?”
“Yes!”
“For the sake of argument, Dick, let me quote your own words. ‘I had one glimpse of a cluster of finger posts,’ you said, ‘with Kinsmere in reversed letters.’ Reversed letters, Dick? On a finger post?”
White-haired, red-waistcoated Townsend, who had staunched the bleeding at his mouth, emitted what for his voice might have been a crow’s note of mirth. It was Caroline who spoke.
“But when you drive towards a place,” she said, “the lettering reads forward in the ordinary way! You think you see reversed letters only when you leave. And you know it because they’re on a finger post. Dick you were being driven ….”
“Back to London,” the lawyer growled in assent, “with an aching head and a fuddled sense of time. Ay! And if you don’t credit old Bert Mulberry,” he added fiercely, again stabbing his hat in the direction of the wall, “I beg you to go next door and see the room you saw that night!”
Darwent went cold to the heart; he could not have said why.
“But that house is locked and shuttered! Who’d have a key to it?”
“I would,” said Mr. Mulberry. “Damme, Dick, have you forgotten you told me yesterday to find a furnished house for … for …”
Hubert Mulberry could not possibly have known Dolly was dead. What instinct, or flow of thought moved in his brain, behind the bloated old face, Darwent could not tell.
But Darwent flung it aside too.
“You didn’t mean,” he said stupidly, “to get lodgings next door to … to …”
“No, lad. But when I hear that same day of another house that belongs to the Kinsmeres, another house shut up for two years: why, I scent the lost room. And I’ve a devilish good excuse for getting a key.”
The Bride of Newgate Page 27