I relaxed again, glad that they were someone else's problem and not mine.
Wrong you are entirely, Johnny Boy, I thought with disgust as the door to my chamber abruptly opened. Water sloshing about me, I sat up and turned to face the intrusion.
There were three of them, all masked, but that caused no alarm in me. Titled men often wanted anonymity while cavorting outside of their class, and I assumed this lot were no different. They were cloaked, gloved, and muffled to the ears, and their hats obscured the rest. All I could see was a bit of mouth and nose and little enough of those.
The men spilled unsteadily into the room, still laughing at whatever obscure jest had just been made. I debated whether it was worth the trouble to call for assistance or deal with them myself.
"We're in the wrong room," one of them observed, stopping to stare at me. "Not unless they've got uncommonly ugly wenches here."
"That's a man, not a wench," said another with heavy humor. "Though it might not make any difference to you."
The third member of the party whooped in appreciation. For the joke, I hoped. I tried to look past them to see any sign of help, but the view was blocked by their bodies.
"Gentlemen," I said, "as you can see, this room is already occupied
"Right you are-by us," declared the wit. "So you can just remove yourself."
I ignored his ridiculous command. "Perhaps your room is just next to this one. If you but look, I'm sure you'll find some very impatient ladies waiting for you there." Quite an assumption to make on my part, but I wanted to be rid of them. There was a draft coming through the open door.
"Don't I know you, sir?" he asked peevishly, stumbling forward.
"I doubt it, sir." Two more steps and he'd be in the bath with me.
"Yes, I do, you're Percy Mott, aren't you?"
"My name is Barrett, and I'd very much appreciate it if you"
"His name's Barrett, lads."
And with those words, spoken in an unexpectedly stone cold sober voice, the comedy forthwith and bereft of no other warning changed to calamity.
Like an idiot, I still tried to finish my sentence, but the words died on my lips when from the folds of his cloak he smoothly drew forth a primed dueler and aimed the muzzle right at me. Though not faster than thought, he was certainly faster than my thought. I had less than an instant to react, but the pure shock was sufficient for me to waste it. Few others would have had the presence of mind to do aught else but stare as I did for that blink in time between seeing his pistol and the tardy arrival of comprehension of his purpose.
But there it was: a blink and nothing more.
Then, at the distance of two short paces, he fired right into my chest.
The roar of discharge did not impress itself upon my senses so much as the powder smoke. The acrid stuff seemed to fill the whole room more thoroughly than the deafening noise. I saw, rather than felt, the ball reaming through me, leaving behind a great blood-spurting hole. My body gave a violent jerk, then collapsed, pitching heavily forward into the water. I had no time to even bring my arms up; I could not feel, much less control them. With all my inert weight I struck the shallow step with my forehead, feeling and hearing the shattering crack of the impact with my whole being. Paralyzed, I lay as one dead for an unutterably long period during which I lived lifetimes of undiluted agony.
Voices and shouts and alarms went unheeded somewhere above him. In the confusion the pistol shooter and his companions would find easy escape.
But he didn't care about them.
It was impossible for him to care about anything.
He simply was not able.
All inner awareness had been brutally compressed down to nothing, and what had once been Jonathan Barrett was replaced by a blazing sphere of misery. He didn't exist anymore, only his pain. Perhaps in a hundred years or so when the pain went away he might think about returning, but no sooner.
His body floated facedown, bobbing and bumping against the sides of the bath, arms and legs dangling and useless in the bloodied water. People swarmed into the room, raising more noise. Somewhere a frightened woman wept, another tried to calm her. A large man seized one of Barrett's arms and turned him over, then dragged his motionless body from the pool. Others stooped to help or backed out of the way. Water streamed from Barrett's nose and open mouth. His open eyes were fixed in place like those painted on a doll.
He could not move, only lie where they left him. The humiliating helplessness should have brought him great distress, but nothing, no thought or action from within-for both were beyond him-no pleas, no prayers, no tears of anguish from without could break past the bloated wall of pain that had fixed itself between him and the rest of the world.
The large man pressed an ear to Barrett's immobile chest, then pronounced him dead. Comments were made about the blood in the pool and the singular lack of any kind of wound showing on the body. Other people joined the press to see for themselves and ask what had happened. They questioned the two girls who had been with Barrett, but could learn nothing useful since both had been fast asleep. Then all talk stopped when an unanticipated tremor ran through Barrett's body, and it gave a powerful cough, dislodging some water clogging its throat. This inspired a fresh bout of commotion as they concluded, with reasonable doubts attached, that he might be alive after all.
The wall of pain was marginally shrinking, but Mr. Barrett was too prudent a man to rush right back into things again. He waited, in no hurry to try answering the frantic questions being flung at him by these absurd strangers.
They weren't inside his body; they had no hint as to what it was going through, and until the ordeal was finished, they could damned well wait themselves.
Then his cousin Oliver was there next to him, and care and concern for this one man's fear prompted Barrett to attempt a response. The wall of pain between them was thinner, perhaps enough now to allow him to speak past it and be heard.
"M all ri' he mumbled, lying.
That held things together for a little, kept them busy. Coverings were thrown upon his nakedness, a pillow was slipped under his head. The jarring involved in the latter nearly sent him farther away, but hovering just within him there existed a vague but compelling need to remain where he was. Exactly why was out of his ken for the moment.
"God, he's cold as a corpse," Oliver urgently observed to no one in particular.
"This will help," said a woman.
"No, don't do-"
But the deed was already done. Someone-probably the woman-poured what seemed like a gallon of brandy past the lips of Mr. Barrett.
"Told you," she said with more than a small degree of smugness in her tone as Mr. Barrett's otherwise numbed and lax body twitched and rolled over into a fit of forceful and messy coughing.
That burning, vile, hideous excuse for drink accomplished what all the coddling and sympathy could not - brought me straightway back into the thick of things, groaning and cursing and holding my exploding head. This caused some relieved murmuring among the crowd. A man who could still curse his pain had a good chance of surviving it.
Exhausted by the business, I eased onto my back again. Whatever good feeling had been mine while in the company of Yasmin and Samar had vanished completely. I was shaken to the core and trembling despite the coverings heaped over me.
Between weakening spasms as my body sought to rid itself of the poisonous brandy, I managed a feeble scowl for my benefactress, Mandy Winkle, who knelt on one side of me with a flask in her hand. She scowled right back, but with much more ferocity. Couldn't blame her for it, this sort of row could not only get her closed down, but land her in Bridewell.
Oliver regarded me with much more compassion (mixed with barely controlled terror) and strove to find out if I really was all right and if I might give an account of what happened to me. I assured him of the partial truth of the one, but had to be circumspect about the other.
"One of the bastards shot at me." My voice was so faint I hardly kne
w it.
"Shot at you?" he echoed.
"Missed. Hit my head when I ducked." Dear God, but hadn't I just? I wasn't able to decide which had suffered the worst of it, my head or my chest. They pounded and ached for all they were worth, though in different ways. One at a time I might have managed with considerably less hardship to myself and others, but both at once had been too much.
"Who was it?" demanded Mrs. Winkle, bristling with anger. Whether it was for me or for my attacker was hard to judge.
"Don't know. Masked. They were all together. You must have seen. Did you not know them?"
Some of her anger faded. "They were new ones or pretended to be so. I've an eye for faces, but that doesn't work when the face is covered. Why in God's name did they shoot you?"
I could not give a good reply, only adding again that I'd not been shot. A blatant lie, for I'd been caught square in the chest, but it was important-I remembered why, now that I maintain the fiction that the shootist had missed.
"You must be wrong, sir," she said, glancing at the pool. "There's blood aplenty in that bath or my name is Queen Charlotte."
I followed her gaze and saw the water was not a faint pink as before, but a decidedly nasty and unmistakable red. The pistol ball had inflicted a substantial portion of damage to my flesh, but that same flesh had quickly healed itself, a miraculous but painful process made worse when my head struck the tile steps. Either injury should have caused me to vanish, thus sparing me from much discomfort, but I had a lurking suspicion the wine had yet again mucked things up.
Oliver stared at me all wide of eye and open of jaw. I'd told him in full about my past experiences with pistols and rifles, and he'd apparently just worked out what had really happened. Afraid he might blurt something, I fastened him with my gaze and shook my head once. He gulped and cleared his throat.
"Nosebleed," he pronounced in good imitation of the pedantic tones used by all physicians when they were absolutely certain about something, particularly about something beneath their notice.
"Nosebleed?" asked Mandy.
He nodded emphatically and with a delicate touch pried one of my eyelids up with his thumb as though he were giving a normal examination to any of his other patients. "Oh, yes. My poor cousin is frequently subject to them. Alarming, but harmless. This one must have been brought on by this unconscionable attack."
Mandy snorted, either in acceptance of or derision for his diagnosis; it was hard to say. She then noticed all the people who had crowded in and barked an order for them to remove themselves. While she was occupied, Oliver caught my eye and mouthed the word Mohocks, drawing up his eyebrows to make it into a question. I nodded once, We frowned at each other.
"I very much would like to go home," I whispered.
"Are you able to?" he asked, astonished.
"I should be. And if not, I will be anyway."
Mandy had overheard. "Lord bless you, sir, but you can stay until you're more recovered." I could see in her face that this invitation was anything but what she really wanted to say. Hers was a reluctant hospitality, her desire for us to immediately leave coming hard against common Christian charity and the natural wish not to lose a client with such deep pockets as my cousin.
"You're very kind, but it's best that we go so you can put your house in order as soon as may be."
"Perhaps," Oliver added, "you might have one of your men hire a carriage from somewhere to take us home."
Not quite successful at hiding her relief at this proposal, Mandy promised to see what she could do and left to do it. On her way out she cleared the room of remaining stragglers.
Oliver continued to kneel by me, playing the part of attending physician, but as soon as the door closed his shoulders drooped and he released a great sigh. He favored me with a very close look.
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yes, though I've been better. I just need a little time."
"What really happened?"
"I was shot. Dueling pistol. You'll likely find the ball still in the bath."
He went back on his heels, biting his lip. "Dear God. And there's no mark on you. How can that be?"
"I'll ask Nora, should I get the chance."
"And I shall thank her, should I get one as well. If not for her you'd be - His gaze flicked to the pool, then he suddenly rose up to pace the room. He'd passed the point of being able to hold in his emotions any longer and was in sore need of expressing them. "Of all the vicious, cowardly..."
I rested and let him rant against my would-be killer. I'd have indulged in some myself, but was yet feeling a bit frail. Strength would soon return to me in full measure, if only peace of mind could come as well. The horror I'd been through had made that impossible, nor would I know peace again until I'd dealt with the instigators of this outrage.
When Oliver had divested himself of the worst of his anger, I asked for his assistance to stand, which he instantly provided. The pain in my head was more of an unpleasant hindrance than the one in my chest, for it affected my ability to balance. I excused myself to him and sought relief by briefly vanishing. Again, though difficult to achieve, it worked a charm on both complaints, but upon returning, I found I'd traded two specifically located hurts for an overall weariness.
"You look perfectly awful," he said. He didn't look too well himself, but at least he was dressed or nearly so with only a partially tied neckcloth and some buttons left undone. He must have finished early with his evening's entertainment.
"Which is exactly how I feel, but I think a little refreshment from any stable in the city should fix me up again." Something unpolluted by wine, I silently added.
He looked at the pool again. "But I thought... that is... didn't you... with the girls?"
"As it happens I did. That's my blood, not theirs."
"Oh, that's all ri-I mean... but I thought when you were with them you..." He turned a fierce pink about the ears.
Good lord, no wonder he'd looked so odd when Mandy had pointed out the state of the water. "I'm not so wasteful as that, Oliver. Now stop being so miserable. What's in the pool happened when I was shot. I need to replace it soon, then I'll be fine. Are the girls all right?"
"I don't know. I suppose they must be."
"Look into it, will you? They were asleep, but may have seen something after the shooting."
He was reluctant to leave me, but though tired to the bone, I was able to fend for myself. I was dressed, feeling the better for it, and ready to leave at his return.
"They're right as rain, though quite frightened," he said. "They didn't have anything to tell me, sad to say. The wine they drank left 'em fairly befuddled so they're only just now understanding what's happened, and even they can hardly believe it."
"Then including you that makes four of us."
He grunted. "You must have made an impression on them, Coz, for they were most concerned about your well-being. I tried my best to assure them of it. I think they'll have a warm welcome for you the next time."
"Much good it will do either of us. Mandy Winkle won't let us within a mile of the place after this."
"Oh, she'll settle down. She's not happy over what's happened, but knows none of this is your fault. We had a short talk, and I fell in with her idea that the men were thieves after your purse."
"That's some good luck."
"Don't crow too soon about it. She understands more than she's letting on to the others. If the bastards were real thieves they'd have been busy stealing from everyone, not roaring through the place with their playacting, then blazing away once they'd identified you. Mandy knows this, knows they were trying to kill you, but she's not keen to let it gel out. It's bad for business. You're not planning to report this to any magistrate, are you?"
"Much as I'd like to, it wouldn't be practical. I've nothing to tell them that wouldn't eventually do injury to our family if the whole story got out. Besides, the courts generally keep daylight hours."
"Then that's a relief for all of
us, as Mandy's not keen having the law in, either. We'll also not have to worry about her carrying tales. She's as close as a clam when it suits her."
That was good to know. "What did you see of any of this?"
"Damned little. I was in one of the dry rooms toasting the health of the wench I'd been with when I first heard them." From that point his account was similar to my own experience, of hearing the progress of joking and laughter up the hall that ended with a pistol shot. "Then it was women screaming and people getting in the way of each other. I saw the last of the bastards tear past me-he was in a mask so it must have been one of 'em. Didn't think to stop him or give chase, just stood there like a sheep." He scowled, going pink again with shame.
"Thank God for that," I told him, causing him to look up for an explanation. "They might all have been armed. If they've got the kind of cowardly brass to walk in and shoot a man in his bath, then they won't think twice about cutting down another trying to stop their escape. You did well by doing nothing and I'm glad of it."
P N Elrod - Barrett 4 - Dance of Death Page 18