Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  The only matter that gave him pause and caused him to hesitate very briefly was the book still held in his hand. He was tempted to stoke the fire with it, to use this record of Puritan commerce and zeal to fuel the coming conflagration. How fitting it would be … but then he recalled an archbishop he knew down in London, an old crony of his, who went in for antiquarian collectibles such as this one. A potential investor in his newest venture, as well. Fenwick slid the journal into his pocket and strode over to the cinématographe. Raewyn, confused and frightened, bolted in front of him, and he grabbed her savagely by the arm and hurled her aside. Self-righteous chit. As Roland surged forwards to help her, Fenwick cracked him in the face with his elbow and the boy whirled into the side of the machine, driving one of the cranks hard into his eye. Grif and Avice were involved in some sort of tussle. Good. Smoke was pouring through the entranceway and Fenwick saw his chance to stage a clean exit by way of it. He grabbed the footage from the day’s shoot and snapped it in a tin, trapping his stars forever: Grif and Avice, wedded in miniature, caught on strips of celluloid like two wriggling insects stuck on a coil of flypaper.

  “I’ll save you,” Grif gallantly shouted to Avice.

  Unfortunately, his intended heroics were compromised by the trousers wrapped around his ankles. He stumbled, reaching out to her as she turned away from him, and just managed, with all the finesse of a caveman, to grab her by the hair. He sank his yearning fingers into the untidy, upswept knot of it, and then, to his horror, pulled a great hank of it right off. His embrace was too inept, his touch so clumsily destructive, it seemed he couldn’t help but pull her apart. He clutched the soft dark mound in his hand as she tossed him a quick withering look over her shoulder.

  “Christ,” she said, lifting the skirt of her dress to cover her face, a protective veil, as she made a dash for the front door. Then, “Shit,” she said, rattling the hot handle, pounding on the door with her fist. “Damn, damn, fuck.” Her language sorely reduced in the mounting heat of the room, everything but profanity boiled away. She reeled around the bar, desperate as a trapped bird. She could feel her life spinning out of the ends of her fingers, uncontrollably. Her bobbed hair stuck out like nerves. She spotted another doorway.

  “No,” Grif called after her, stuffing his pockets with his claim of her slithery, drifting self. “Not that way.” He might have forfeited intimacy with his wife, but he knew this hotel, and she was heading not out of danger but for the coffin-sized closet where Roland kept his cash box and his accounts. She didn’t heed him, or refused to out of habit, but flung open the door and ran in. He hitched up his pants and followed on her heels, luckless as a trailing shadow.

  “Get away,” she spat at him, “don’t touch me.”

  He had to. There wasn’t much choice. They had stumbled into the secluded and suffocating interior of a fire trap, a private prison within a prison. There was no escape, for the door had slammed shut behind them, and they heard a rat-like scratching and scraping noise as someone outside turned the key in the lock.

  Before pocketing the key, Fenwick allowed himself one last brief, but pregnant, dramatic pause in which he reflected upon the tidiness of this little scene. Death would marry them finally. It would resolve all their problems, and reunite the impossible warring—and wearying—couple. This consummation was to be their ultimate freedom, and they would even enjoy an afterlife of sorts in his picture. (And, conveniently, not be around to lodge a complaint or demand their share of the profits.) Truly, this was a fairy-tale ending for Punch and Judy. Fenwick liked fairy tales—they were so disturbing, and gory. Not that he wanted one for himself. What he wanted, and would get, was life, a deep, inebriating draft of it, deep as the lake he was shortly going to cruise over on his way to, where, New York … or California? Yee-haw! That was the wonderful thing about life: it was not a rigged fantasy, not a dreary melodrama, and in it a villain with talent had a sporting chance. Who said life wasn’t fair? He’d get away with this. Already he could hear the rising tide of voices outside, the honest townsfolk come to the rescue, his anyway, as he was soon to slip like a breath of fresh air through the window they were so helpfully smashing open, the very threshold to his new, lavish existence. Once he was through, no one would ever see him again.

  Except, perhaps, at the movies.

  No one heard them banging on the walls, the door, shouting themselves out of breath and hope. The hotel had been abandoned to its unruly guest, and outside the whole town was gathered and working furiously to evict it, with water drawn from the lake and from horse troughs, with pails of beer from the Mansion House, and even with a few tears. It’s not that they thought so highly of Roland’s oddball establishment, but they were fighting to contain the disaster, to keep it out of their own homes and businesses.

  An elderly man took a moment to crouch over Hugh’s prone body, reaching to take his pulse, then raising himself back up with a hurried sign of the cross.

  “First one here to help,” another man said. “Never figured him for a good Samaritan. Poor sap.”

  “That barrel sure made a hash of his face.”

  “Nah, doesn’t look much different, you shoulda seen ’im before. You want his gun?”

  “Might as well take it, eh? Won’t need it where he’s gone.”

  Wherever Hugh had gone, and whatever the nature of the reward he was about to collect from his heavenly benefactor, Avice, stubbornly digging her heels into this earthly plane, had no intention of following her makeshift partner, or of lining up behind him.

  “Can’t you break the door down?” she growled at Grif out of the close, dark and increasingly airless space their marriage had become.

  “No. Too heavy. Roland fixed a good solid one here.” Grif bruised his shoulder trying to budge it but had to concede defeat—yet another manly act the groom had failed to perform. He stooped down and with shaking hands caulked the cracks in the door with her hair. He could at least try to keep out the smoke, try to prolong their lives for a few breaths more, now that for the first time what precious air trickled into his lungs came directly from hers. He was willing to think of it as congress, even if she regarded it as one more indignity.

  Crouching, penitent, he had to resist the urge to wrap his arms around her legs, to bury his face in her skirt. He knew he should beg her forgiveness, and that this was his last chance to do so. He didn’t deserve it, nor did he think she would give it. She would withhold her forgiveness from him because it was all she had left of her own. Avice had opened herself up and thrown everything away—family, future, honour, respectability, ease of mind, lightness of heart. If he had his silver pen with him, some source of light and paper, or even a pale, visible stretch of his own arm, he would write the truth on it as Hattie had instructed him to do. The truth was that he was about to die at her feet like a dog and he was not sorry for it. Singed nails and hair, boiled eyes, skin curled back like parchment, cooked organs, charred bone—he was prepared to bequeath himself utterly, if only as ashes, to his lawful wedded wife. He would never leave her now.

  Avice wasn’t ready to accept her inheritance—as useless dead as alive, might have been her sentiment—nor was she anxious to etch her own will on her arm. If she had his silver pen, she’d be jiggling it in the keyhole trying to spring the lock. She was intent, listening.

  “Did you hear that?” she gasped. “A noise, right outside the door?”

  “What?” He rose quickly, facing her, close enough now to catch her tongue, sharp as it was, in his teeth.

  “You deserted me,” she said. She had come such a long way to say it.

  “I did.” He wanted to crawl through her pores, each a portal to the unknowable depths of her. He could strain himself through her, and leave the dregs of his miserable being behind.

  “And you’re sorry.”

  “I am.”

  “You are that,” she said. “You’re a shit.”

  He’d heard worse. He was worse.

  “But then, so am I.
” A surprising enough admission, to which she added, “You could hold me, you know, if you don’t have anything better to do.”

  Her words were measured, and ironic, but her body submerged in the darkness seemed to drag beneath them. A dense, compacted grief emanated out of her, out of the blackness of her mouth and eyes, and off her skin. A mortal bitterness. It was unbearable, even repellent. Surely he would not fail her again?

  He raised his hands to run them up the length of her arms, to enfold her, but then, by some liberating agency—spiteful or merciful—or simply because of inadequate carpentry, the door blew open and part of the floor gave way. She disappeared out of his tentative embrace as if she were no more substantial than a wraith.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  best man

  “Lost in the fire” was a phrase that would stay with Roland Avery for the rest of his life, a familiar saying in his personal vernacular that became a storeroom of sorts, a handy verbal place to locate any number of missing objects. The collection of kidney stones that came to him from Dr. Carruthers, lost in the fire, the Spode soup tureen with the cracked lid and the bird-of-paradise pattern, lost in the fire, the hand-me-down Lord Aberdeen sack suit, lost in the fire. His inventory of perished goods included both the material and the immaterial, as he also lost the sight in his left eye and the particular view of the world it commanded. He didn’t, luckily, lose his ambitions, his goodwill, his voice or his spiritual capital. Foolish or not, his faith in humankind came through the blaze scorched but intact; that faith, fed by optimism, he saw simply as a discipline worth maintaining. Nor were all his losses irretrievable, for his stock-taking led in the aftermath of the fire to record-keeping of a different order. He himself began to keep a daily journal, and in doing so discovered the pleasures of living doubly: once in the air and then again on paper, where experience can be rejigged, patched up, or shaken like a child’s bank for its concealed treasures.

  Grif Smolders appeared in his friend’s book often, head bobbing up between the lines or stepping unexpectedly out of the anonymity of the margins … as he did presently, in the flesh, turning a corner onto Water Street, arriving like a restless, wind-driven scrap. He spotted Roland, who was standing in front of what was now a blackened gap in the wall of buildings on the street. For days after the fire an acrid smell hung over the town. It clung to clothing and hair, a nesting and unsettling fragrance, an eau de feu. The Dancing Sun, capable of housing only the odd breeze now, continued for some time to distribute burned flecks of papery matter that swirled up and floated away like black moths. Grif paused a moment to peel one of these off his cheek, then raised a hand in greeting and headed toward Roland, his restrained smile teased into a looser one, as it always was by the boy hosteller. Landlord of ashes, but Roland wasn’t about to dwell on that, or in it. Buildings can be resurrected, but bodies only clandestinely as lumber for doctors’ studies. Apostate but still courteous to whatever higher powers might be listening in, Roland murmured a quiet Deo gratias, grateful that he didn’t have to add Grif to his inventory of losses.

  “Roland, that eye patch is very becoming.”

  “Yo ho ho.”

  “I’m not sure it’s suitable, mind.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you’re the hero. Seems I’m the one who’s always being rescued. I’m helpless as a girl.”

  “I’ve never met a helpless one of those yet. Besides, I told you already, I didn’t mean to rescue you. How was I supposed to know you two were having it out in the closet? I was after my cash box. Couldn’t very well let that go up in flames, could I? Just glad I had a spare.” He held up his bracelet-sized ring of keys and jangled them. His hotel might be utterly unlocked, as open and free as the sky, but he could still make music. And not only that—“Can’t start a family without funds, you know.”

  “There’s plenty of time for that,” Grif snorted. “You’ll be a millionaire, I bet, before you don the yoke.”

  “I doubt it. Unless I have an exceptional week. Been playing a few hands at the Mansion House.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I am. This Saturday. You’re invited, of course. Would you consider being my best man? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Oh yes. Raewyn’s idea, actually. And, well … it’s good timing. Her first communion dress still fits.”

  “I’m … how old is she? Eleven?”

  “Twelve in November.”

  “She’s too young … you’re too young.”

  “Perfect match, then.”

  “I thought she was against marriage.”

  “Not any more. She’s become extremely interested in it.” Roland blushed a little at this. “Claims she has it figured out.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about congratulations.”

  Grif hesitated, but only for the time it took to clear his head of stark surprise, of misgiving, of unexpected envy. He thought of the young nurse, crisp and pretty in her puffy-sleeved uniform, who had ministered to him during his short stay in the hospital. She had healed his burns, the surface ones at least, with the salve of her gentle touch, her kindness, her ready laugh, her undemanding presence. He wasn’t mistaken that her attentions to him had been more than dutiful. She had even given him a stylish new jacket that she said her brother had outgrown, but that he suspected had come less indirectly from Turner’s Dry Goods. He brushed an ash from the sleeve of this very jacket (it was natty), then reached out to grasp Roland’s small, plump hand in his own. “I’d be honoured to be your best man,” he said. “Congratulations. Even if she is a mick.”

  “She could be a Hindoo for all I care,” laughed Roland. “Or worse, a Presbyterian.”

  “Will the crow be there?”

  “Ring bearer. Even found the ring himself. Somewhere.”

  “I’ll be.”

  Turning to gaze into the ruin of the Sun, into what charred structural remains were left standing, Grif understood that Roland would have no problem at all in building a marriage and a family, and would do so with the same care and eccentric detail that he had lavished upon his hotel.

  “God, I’m sorry about—”

  Roland shook his head, decisively, absolution for the crime.

  “What will you do with it, this property? Sell it?”

  “Never.”

  “Rebuild?”

  “That’s the plan. Not another hotel, though. I’m thinking about getting into the moving picture business. A theatre of some sort.”

  “You figure there’s a future in it, then?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Whatever happened to the intrepid Mr. Nashe, do you know?”

  “Not really. Wasn’t seeing too straight at the time.”

  “Some in town are saying that he perished in the fire. No one seems to remember seeing him leave the building.”

  “I doubt that. I would have found some trace of him in the ashes.”

  “His wolf’s teeth.”

  “Grinning at me. I’ll have the last laugh, though. I’m positive I can build one of those machines, an improved one, with an even better design.” And then, Roland might have added, he would have replaced his lost vision with a new projecting eye. He’d have one eye to look inward with and one to look out.

  “You know your biggest mistake, Roland? Besides letting me stay at your hotel, that is.”

  “Tell me. I can take it.”

  “The name. You should have christened it something else. The Empire, the Queen’s, the Victoria—they would never have caught fire.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind when I’m naming the new building. How about The Lucky Dog?”

  “The Dream Palace.”

  “The Croesus Theatre?”

  “The Paradise.”

  “The Pretty Penny? Well, I’ll work on it. You know your biggest mistake, eh, Grif?”


  “Yes. Letting Avice slip through my hands once again. Failing her—once again.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “She could have been killed.”

  “Ditto. Blame it on the ants. Or me—I should have done something about them. Meant to.”

  “Ants?”

  “Carpenter ants. I thought you took an interest in the creepy-crawlies. The floorboards were infested. Look on the bright side: she took a tumble, got burned some, busted her arm, but she did survive. At least she can’t beat the snot out of you now, not for a while, anyway. So … I was thinking, since you’re winning this round, why don’t we have a double wedding on Saturday? You two can get remarried. Why not? Forget what you’ve been through—she’s as much at fault as you, remember—and try it again from the beginning. Clean slate. What do you say?”

  Grif exhaled what felt like the whole poisonous cloud of smoke he had sucked into his lungs during the time it took to drag a bellowing Avice (he had her by the broken arm) out of the subterranean pit she had tumbled into when the floorboards gave way beneath her. Remarried? What an idea. A picture came into his head of the two of them inflicting fatal damage on any church that dared to join them in the sacrament of matrimony. Two contrary antipathetic elements. He saw pews crashing, statuary tumbling, heads rolling, guests fleeing for their lives.

  “Wouldn’t work, Roland. We’re not meant for each other.” He shrugged. “We don’t get along.”

  “Have you spoken to her since the fire?”

  “No. You think she would even look at me?”