by B. Y. Yan
The Lady of May-Tulip
by
B. Y. Yan
THE LYNCHMAN’S OWL: THE LADY OF MAY-TULIP by B.Y. Yan Copyright © B.Y. Yan 2016 Book and Cover Copyright © by B.Y. Yan 2016 All Rights Reserved.
Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.
Follow B.Y. Yan (twitter @B_Y_Yan) at http://bigbinofideas.wordpress.com
&
Amazon Author Page
ISBN: 978-0-9952592-0-1
Other Works by B.Y. Yan Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited:
Eye of the North Wind – the epic fantasy of a crippled secret defender of the wasteland king
The Lynchman’s Owl Serials – the Steampunk Noir Superhero who vanished twenty-years ago; but twenty-years later somebody has come looking…
Origins
Issues 1 (A Lynchman’s Owl)
2 (Legend of the Hour)
3 (Death of the Owl)
4 (Ibbu Harold Bailey)
5 (The Owl Returns)
Collection 1 (includes issues 1-5: the Complete Origins)
Adventures of the Owl
(Mercy of the Mighty)
(The Gorilla Press)
(The Lady of May-Tulip)
(Dead Cell) Forthcoming - September 2016
(The Empress’s Diaries) Forthcoming - October 2016
The Lady of May Tulip
To the Lady herself he will always be her gallant prince. And to the end of her days she will think of him as her shining silver knight on a snow-white horse, galloping over a green field to sweep her away from despair in her most troubling hour. This despite them having never met in person, nor will they ever exchange the briefest of ideas by a spoken word, or share the smallest iota of air in the same occupied space in their respective lifetimes. It is a strange thing then that the good turn one stranger may do for another, simply on the merits of an unexpected opportunity coming to pass.
“It is a disgrace, plain and simple!” cried Hungary Mandalin, slapping at the newspaper in his hand as he sat sipping at his coffee after brunch. He, baron and Lord of the Coal Coast, irredeemable tyrant in the eyes of his subjects, and by night the roaming nightmare vigilante known as the Lynchman’s Owl, was decrying the ill-treatment of someone else—a woman, of all creatures—in utter outrage to his servant. Yamcey, beloved cousin and head-bottler at Gildboors, the gargantuan ancestral home of House Mandalin, raised one quizzical eyebrow from the door.
“Who, my lord?”
In reply the baron rattled the newspaper in his direction, as if that should have explained everything. “You know who, Yamcey,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t pretend you don’t. If you really didn’t know, you would have said, ‘what’ instead of ‘who’. It’s all over, don’t you know? He’s done it again.”
“You must mean Lord Cudgmore.”
A nod from the baron. “Indeed, old Cudgel has been up to his tricks, and she is suffering for it again! Sit down in this chair across from me, Yamcey. It is such a good morning that I feel might be embellished further by a bit of conversation between close friends.”
“Gossip, you mean, sir,” said the valet.
“Surely one who devours tabloids so voraciously cannot begrudge another for keeping up with a little celebrity chatter ever now and then,” Hungary laughed, “And I have had precious little to occupy myself as of late. My duties as regional overseer is made tedious by uncharacteristic peace up and down the coast, and my tenure as your stupid Owl character is robbed by an unprecedented decline in interesting incidents in which he might be called upon to take an active hand. Crime, sadly, is at an all-time low. So if you will do anything today, my good lad, it will be to humor me with your companionship over this sorry business. After all, it is due your efforts that my affairs—both judicial and nocturnal—have been taken care of so completely that I have nothing else to do with my time.”
Again the butler raised one astounded eyebrow from the door, but we will note a smile—not a large one, mind you—was very nearly breaking out over his thin lips. When the baron waved him over to the chair again he readily obliged, sliding into the seat with surprising grace, given his obvious deficiencies—that of a crutch which supported him in place of one missing hand (the left) and most of a leg.
“So,” said the baron, leaning over his knees towards his man with his hands clasped together, “What do you make of this hubbub?”
Briefly the servant glanced towards the discarded newspaper. He gave up a noncommittal shrug.
“It is a tragedy, to be certain. But it is one in which we all of us are powerless to mend. She married him of her own free will, after all, and left these shores for his willingly. What has happened since is, sadly to say, out of our collective reach.”
“But she is still much loved,” the baron pointed out. “I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it in the history of the kingdom. She was a national idol if there ever was one.”
In this, his man did not disagree. And one look at the picture framed in the center of the newspaper’s front page would have convinced you as well, for this was a delicate face well adored by the public, and have been for the last fifteen years.
The picture, we will note at once, was an old one. The lady was then a maiden nineteen years of age, tall and graceful, and already a winner of hearts and minds all over. From the frigid northern expeditions to the hottest southern reaches of the realm there was not one soul who could, in good conscience, claim to hold any grievance or dislike of this prodigy of music and the performing arts. She was a ballerina at four, a concert cellist at nine, and by fourteen an established master of the piano and theatre. Her father was the last scion of an established noble line, well-loved for their generosity, and her mother an academic explorer who has brought fame and fortune to every establishment she had ever been associated with. We must add to this delightful description of her household that she was also an only child, the miracle of loving parents passing into a somewhat advanced age for childbearing before the crowning jewel of all that they were to ever achieve was let into the world.
As for the maiden herself, we will suffice to say that there are not enough words in the vocabulary of the world to describe her charms. She was as lovely a creature as there ever was one to walk the earth, blessed with both the compassionate nature of a true giver as well as the daring bravery of an adventuress. In her short spell she counted amongst her friends and admirers the noblest dukes of the land to the most pitiful of workmen, whom she loved in equal measures without bias or prejudice. She then, was of that breed of women who elevates her sex and indeed, her entire species, by virtue of membership. For every man, woman and child she was friend, lover, daughter and sister; and it would only be a gross underestimation of her influence to say that she was, at that time, the heart and soul of the kingdom.
All these things were well known to the baron, who listened nodding with approval as his man went on.
“Following her tenure in the Royal Pegging Opera Troupe, for which she won every accolade by her interpretation—against her own gender, no less—of the daring dragon-slayer Humphrey of the Lost, she had become a national symbol every bit as valued and cherished as our colors and our flag. There was, very plainly speaking, not a dry
eye in the realm by the time the curtains fell.” Idly the butler tapped his long fingers against the handle of his crutch. “Even our king was at one time a much frustrated suitor. But such was her charm that she turned him down without consequence beyond his own unending melancholy. A tragedy that for one who has loved so broadly, and was so loved in return by all those whose lives she touched, the only one to rise above the world in her eyes to win her heart was this monster.”
“Cudgel,” the baron ground out between his teeth. He spat on the floor.
“Lord Cudgmore,” nodded his man.
Again the baron spat on the floor.
The butler sighed wearily, looking on the smudges.
And herein we come to the crux of the matter that the lady in question, a tulip in May, that noble and most beautiful of flowers in the best month of the year, was eventually plucked by a foreign hand of all things. But no one will deny that Lord Cudgmore was, fifteen years ago, a specimen in his own right. He came to these shores, then only a junior advisor to the foreign ambassador at the time, but already with prospects of rising high in his career despite his humble beginnings. And perhaps it was indeed this dichotomy of character traits which drew her eyes to him, that there was in all the civilized world a mind, ambition and consideration to rival her own. Whatever the results of her deliberations, she went with him willingly following a year of courtship on the very eve that the two beleaguered nations were to go to war. Her father perished from mortification and shame. Her mother sold their estate and is today a manager of a nunnery with some small successes. The nation, as it stood on that bleak October evening when the news broke, was heartbroken that their sweetheart chose to abscond with her lover. And when at last they were married in November of that same year, on those shores not our own, the people collectively wept for their loss.
“But at least we won that war,” said the baron philosophically. “And really, I’m still of the mind that we are perhaps all of us to blame. If we had not hounded her so incessantly about it, perhaps she would not have chosen to leave us when she did.”
“So you say,” his cousin replied blandly. “Personally I never saw her charms much.”
“Oh come off it, Yamcey,” said Hungary. “Everybody loved her. In fact, they are still making busts of her—though I am told her countenance in marble and clay has become sadder with every passing year. She was swindled by a first-class deceiver and stolen from us.”
“It was her decision to make,” his man said.
“I’m not denying it,” nodded the master of Gildboors, heaving a heavy sigh. “But only perhaps that she is paying too heavy a price for it now.”
“So then, he has abused her again?”
A nod from the baron. “You’d think as a nation there would be collective rejoicing—vindication at last for our judgement of his character years before. But as far as I read there is only a profound outrage, matched by sadness at the sorry sight of such a beloved soul being beaten down and crushed.”
Yamcey nodded. “They have loved her, and they have despised her. It is only right that for hearts so flung from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, we will arrive finally at sympathy for her current plight. Who was the do-gooder this time to alert the newspapers?”
“A lawyer,” laughed his cousin, “if you can believe such things.”
“Oh?”
“A divorce attorney.”
The butler furrowed his brows. “As far as I understand of their laws, a divorce will be impossible for her to obtain without the consent of her husband expressed in writing—or a proper criminal charge which puts him in the dock, at which point she might claim negligence.”
The baron nodded. “So it is, Yamcey. And you may add international law to your pedigree of unrealized talents. It is a sad state of affairs that in our Age beating a woman is completely agreeable legally (especially if she is your wife) if not entirely socially. And over there the license, according to this column I have read, specifically ordains her as his property, though one which is forbidden from being sold or lent. Oh surely to your cold, indifferent mind you will say she could read well enough on her own, and knew well the terms she was agreeing to when the knot was literally tied between them. But those of us who are not so heartless find ourselves pained by the outcome. It took a decade of torture at the hands of this villain before things have come to a head.”
“And this lawyer has, in the face of his own impotence to do anything for her, instructed her to go public?”
“Indeed,” nodded the baron. “But it was born out of a desire to do some good. I have it from several papers that she went seeking his counsel in secret with one of her intimates. It would not be the first time she has done so, but it was, without a doubt, the most well publicized by the time all is said and done. When she was told in no uncertain terms there was nothing to be done for her, she apparently broke down in his office. Reaching for his letter opener she tried to slash up her own face, the source of her troubles in her thinking, you see, and reports vary on whether or not she managed to nick her perfect lips or delicate chin before she was overwhelmed by the attorney and her own friend. But all accounts agree that during the struggle her sleeve went up her arm, and on it the lawyer saw bruises, welts and burns aplenty to move him to action. It was he who went to the papers, apparently without her consent or knowing, and the result we have now is one of an outraged nation shaking our collective fists westward in defense of her tainted honor while she, in all probability, suffers his backhands behind closed doors as punishment for her defiance.”
Hungary Mandalin leaned back in his chair, and across from him the butler closed his eyes in silent contemplation. For a long while they did not speak, until the silence was broken at last by a sigh from the baron.
“It is a tragedy any way you look at it, that the best and kindest of hearts should not live out her days in happiness. If I were twenty years younger”—here he falls into a melancholy state, with his eyes downcast and distant— “well, the less spoken of roads untraveled the better, if you ask me. And a decade ago, or thereabouts, when I could have perhaps made a difference, she was but a maiden and I had my own daughter to worry over then.” He looked up towards his cousin, a half-ironic smile playing over his lips, “Ah! But Yamcey, were you to stand in for me in this case, you who have never married, never learned to love. Perhaps even your frigid heart might be won over by so exquisite and rare a creature. Tell me you would not have brought the Lynchman’s Owl out of retirement one last time for her sake. It would have been the worthiest cause for that monster of your imaginations to have ever undertaken.”
“I would have hardly bothered,” his man replied blandly. “As I have said before, it was her own decision which led her down this sorry path, and we all of us must learn to shoulder our own responsibilities.” He shrugged. “And if you will remember, fifteen years ago I was already like this”—he raised his left arm and waved the empty sleeve idly— “so it could hardly have helped things.”
“Yes, yes,” nodded his cousin. “The Olgessian did you a number and made you retire. Good for that, I still say, for your disfigurement is a small price to pay to put the demon at rest forever. But today, Yamcey? Today I am thinking your Owl might still do some good in my hands.”
“Oh?”
The baron nodded. “Indeed. Say, if we should arrange a trip overseas and drop in on old Cudgel unexpectedly. Wouldn’t that be a nasty surprise for our own enduring symbol of ill-fortune to find him and deliver a measure of justice?”
“By jumping through his window while he sleeps and soundly thrashing him about his own bedroom while she looks on?”
“Well, in a word, yes. That.”
“You do realize, my dear cousin, that when it is all said and done she would still be married to him. And even if you were to break every bone in his body and render him an invalid she would still have to wear out her days by his bedside.”
“But—”
“Till death do th
ey part, Hungary. Before that we are all of us powerless.” Yamcey smiled piteously. “After all, who would have won this war of attrition between husband and wife if it took to stooping to attempted murder—by an otherworldly fiend, as the peoples of both countries would readily believe—in order to bring the thing to a conclusion? In one stroke you would have made the villain a martyr for all time, and doomed the lady herself to be forever branded a conspirator to the wicked deed. It is a stain on her honor that she will never live down.”
“Ah!” cried the baron with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Spoilsport!”
His servant bowed in his seat.
“Well,” said the baron after a moment, “Now that you have sobered me up from wringing some sort of heroics out of this mess, perhaps we had better get on with things as they are, eh? After all, life goes on, and to the best of my knowledge the world never stops turning just because of one person.” With his head supported idly on one hand he seemed to put the thing out of his mind. “Go on then, Yamcey. What does my timetable look like today?”
In this he saw his cousin’s stone countenance suddenly shattered, as if he could not contain some private amusement he was holding to heart.
“You are to have a full day ahead of you, sir. And luckily as not—I cannot say which—you will indeed have a chance to air out your grievances on her behalf.”
“Who?” asked the baron, much perplexed.
“The Lady of May Tulip, my lord, for whom it seems indeed the world might suddenly stop turning.”
Hungary positively started. “What?”
The valet nodded. Now the tickle of a smile was plainly tugging on one corner of his mouth, and his evident mirth was laid out bare for all to see.
“What trick are you playing at now, Yamcey?” his master asked suspiciously.