Since the Surrender

by Julie Anne Long

  Chase’s head throbbed with contradictions and complexity and difficulty. These were, of course, his favorite things.

  Perversely, despite the disappointment and frustration, he had hadn’t felt more charged with purpose in years, and he went downstairs so early and sober that he startled the maids.

  At breakfast he found a reply from his efficient sister Genevieve, apparently delivered by a frantic messenger.

  Dear Chase,

  Thank you for your typically effusive letter. Urgency a bit alarming, but only to me, as Mama is accustomed to alarming things from the men in the family. V. pleased to discover edifying yourself with art. The painting does sound hideous. I have never in my life heard of Rubinetto and do not recall this particular painting being a part of the Montmorency collection, although they possess other respectable pictures. Please ask someone to translate his name into English for you, as I blush to do it in this letter. Do you already know? Are you teasing me? Is our cousin the vicar handsome? This is very important. Do not come home until you know.

  Much love, your sister,

  Genevieve

  Despite the fact that he’d been banished, Chase smiled.

  Of his sisters, Olivia was fiery and Genevieve gentle, but he sometimes suspected the fiery ones suffered the most, and that the gentle ones merely needed just the right gust of wind from life to become fiery. He worried about both of them.

  Rubinetto, he knew, meant “cock.”

  He poured nearly an urn of coffee down his gullet and finally got out the door.

  He’d thought the fresh air would enliven his mind and spirits, but the air was as dense as a sweaty blanket, which did nothing for his mood. His clothing would likely be glued to him by the time he reached Kinkade, and he wished he’d thought to bring a fresh shirt to change into before he called upon Rosalind.

  He wanted to throw off the entire world like a sweaty blanket.

  Still, he walked. Swiftly, scarcely limping at all.

  But his Covent Garden destination took him once again past the ragged square outside the Montmorency Museum, where the day became much, much worse:

  Because a puppet theater was erected in the square.

  He slowed, as one would, should one encounter a carriage accident with bodies strewn everywhere.

  Punch wasn’t just having a go at Judy. As luck would have it, this was a more elaborate affair. On a stage, two marionettes were engaged in a spastic dance—their arms somehow linked, their legs kicking somewhat in unison, which he supposed indicated a talented puppeteer, otherwise they would have ended in a knotted heap of rattling limbs on the stage, but which didn’t matter in the least to him. That anyone would wish to be a puppeteer astounded him.

  He suppressed a primal shudder and began to turn to go back the way he’d come.

  But then, by God, if he didn’t hear, in a pair of horrible puppety falsetto voices:

  “And if you thought you’d never see

  The end of Colin Eversea

  Well come along with me, lads, come along you’ll see

  The pretty lad is mighty glad

  That you were right—he’s free!

  Everybody!

  Oh, if you thought you’d never see—”

  Obediently, everybody did indeed launch into song.

  Chase struggled not to clap his hands over his ears. He did pull his hat down a little more snugly.

  For God’s sake. It never, never ended.

  Granted, it was an insidiously infectious tune. While Colin was in prison and his release had seemed likely, Chase and his brothers had invented their own verses, mostly concerning his sexual prowess, his body odor, his intelligence. Things of that sort. He imagined performers throughout England found it a pity to waste a perfectly good melody simply because Colin hadn’t been hung by the neck until dead after all, as scheduled, and had carried on writing verses.

  Chase wondered, in a moment of flailing horror, whether there would be numerous new iterations as Colin grew older.

  He could think of one now:

  If you thought you’d never see

  The glamorous Colin Eversea

  Up to his shoulder in a cow—

  Come along with me, boys! Come along with me!

  The crowd cheered and clapped their approval of the song, and the marionettes bowed and curtsied in their revolting loose-jointed way, batting wooden-lidded eyes, sweeping wooden arms across their wooden tums in bows.

  He stopped short of stampeding away through the crowd; he did take two determined steps through it, hoping his height and breadth would inspire people to part for him. A hat had appeared and seemed to be traveling through hands, no doubt initiated from behind the puppet stage, and the clink of coins cheerfully volunteered joined mingled laughter and cheers.

  People snugly wedged him.

  He eyed the crowd like a battlefield to assess the best way to clear a path, and was contemplating bringing his walking stick down on the instep of the man next to him by way of beginning when the puppety voices began squeaking out another song.

  It felt as though they were dragging their puppety claw fingers down his spine.

  He tossed a glance over his shoulder, unable to resist it. And discovered the song came with a gay little dance, more like a reel this time. Two puppets were approaching and retreating from each other on the stage.

  “High diddle diddle

  The cat and the fiddle

  The cow jumped over the moon

  The little dog laughed to see such a sight

  And the dish ran away with the spoon.”

  That silly child’s rhyme about intrigue in old Queen Bess’s court? The masses certainly could be cheaply entertained.

  He tried again to move. He was still solidly wedged. He turned his shoulder, thinking he might begin to sidle, but the bulk of a gentleman seemed to magically spill into the space he’d created.

  A crescent moon, painted gold, suddenly dropped down over the stage, twisting on its wire, shining like a curved blade in the sun. Five silver stars followed—bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce—and then came the inevitable cow. This was a marionette, a big, bulky, soft-looking animal, and it was to jump over the crescent moon by whomever was jerking its strings.

  Chase was desperate to get away before a puppety dish and spoon joined the party.

  With an effort of will he squeezed between two large women and a round man in a blue coat who were rooted like trees by the show and oblivious to the one person in the crowd pointing away from the stage. It was unworthy of him, but did it: he brought the stick down—lightly, but warningly—inside the boot of a man standing there. The man shifted a very little.

  And in this rugged fashion—wending, elbowing, employing his walking stick—he managed to reach the outskirts of the crowd when a second verse started up:

  “High diddle diddle

  The cow’s in the middle

  And the angel’s playing a tune

  All the lords laugh

  At the gels on their backs

  All underneath the half-moon.”

  Chase froze.

  Very reluctantly, very slowly, he rotated back toward the puppet theater. The hair at the back of his neck prickled alertly. He pulled his hat farther down over his eyes to shield them from the sun and stared at the stage.

  The rest of the crowd was smiling and clapping, delighted by this new verse.

  The clapping finally died away and the clustered audience dispersed, trailing away one by one or in happy, cheaply entertained pairs, still laughing, some still singing.

  At last just he and marionettes remained in the square.

  He could clearly see the little puppet theater again from his distance of about fifteen feet.

  The puppets remained on the stage, side by side as if in peculiar puppety solidarity against this solitary large and mortal human made of meat and bone gazing at them. Apart from a breeze that lifted the edge of the female puppet’s frock, they were entirely motionless,
which meant they were being held motionless through the will of someone holding their strings—otherwise the breeze would have swayed their fragile limbs, too, and they would have dangled in a grisly way, like freshly hung felons. Behind those clunky wooden lids edged in bristly little lashes, two pairs of large, flat turquoise eyes…

  Stared at him.

  He studied the puppets, taking in the details to keep his flesh from crawling. The male puppet had a nose as formidable as an oar. Not quite the crescent moon that Punch’s chin and nose created as they curved up and down to meet each other; still, quite phallic, and quite a deliberate deformity. Not at all amusing, as far as he was concerned. Their complexions were smooth, with a matte luminosity, carved and polished in an exaggerated parody of human features—long chins, huge eyes. Their faces were painted in brilliant colors: bulbous crimson cheeks and huge, pouting crimson lips, enormous turquoise eyes, each with a black pupil square center. The female puppet’s bright yellow hair was fashioned of something fine, perhaps silk thread, and wound up on her head in a style that his sister Genevieve would have approved of and would never have been able to achieve on her own.

  Neither of the puppets blinked.

  For a good thirty seconds Chase stared them down as though they were enemy spies. The peculiar prickling sensation at the back of his neck amplified. As if bristly little marionette eyelashes brushed against it.

  Brrrrr.

  He whirled on his heels and crunched off over the cobblestones the way he had come, thumping down his walking stick. He thought he could feel their wooden gaze on the back of his neck.

  The cow’s in the middle.

  Just a bastardization of a nursery rhyme, surely. But he hadn’t any children, and he could not be expected to know the current verses.

  Cows are whimsical, he told himself. And ubiquitous. The cow had jumped over the moon, after all, in the first verse, a verse everyone knew. Unsurprising that it should do things in the second verse as well.

  The angel’s playing her tune.

  And angels…

  Well, angels were simply everywhere and in everything, too. Fireplace carvings, cornices, hymns, altar cloths, stained glass windows.

  Paintings. Brothels.

  Underneath a half-moon.

  There was indeed a half-moon in that painting.

  All of those things were in that hideous painting at the Montmorency Museum. The one allegedly donated by Kinkade. The one Rosalind was fascinated by.

  All the lords laugh at the gels on their backs.

  The image struck him as sinister, though this could have everything to do with the fact that it was sung by puppets.

  The crowd clearly didn’t see it that way. But they weren’t viewing it through his particular lens.

  Chase drew even with a portly man, who was buffing an apple against the front of a grayish shirt as he walked. He recognized him from the puppet crowd. The man stopped and slowly, deliberately, opened his jaws to guillotine the apple. Chase said, “They’re quite good, aren’t they?”

  The man clapped his jaws shut with a start and looked up to find the tall Captain Eversea gazing down. He grinned disarmingly. Not the usual response to him, Chase reflected, but perhaps the puppets had put the man in a good mood.

  The man jerked his thumb behind him, but declined to turn his head back toward the theater. “Them puppets? Dead right! Funny, ain’t they! D’yer ’ear the bit about Colin Eversea?” The man inhaled ominously—Chase reared back in preparation—and then came out with bellowing joyfulness: “Oh, if ye thought ye’d nivver see—”

  “I. Heard. It!”

  The man blinked in astonishment.

  Chase cleared his throat; he hadn’t meant to bark. “That is, yes, I heard it,” he hurriedly added with what he hoped was convincing cheeriness, “‘La la la, everybody sing!’ I in fact stopped to watch the puppets because I heard the song. One of my favorite tunes.”

  He was struck by the fact of this: he had stopped because of the song.

  He had the sense he should squirrel the thought away and examine it in privacy.

  Or perhaps Rosalind was affecting his powers of reasoning.

  “Was there for ’is ’angin, Mr. Eversea’s. They did a whole show fer it, the puppet theater did, ’ad a little puppet scaffold, wi’ a wee noose danglin’—”

  “Very skillful, indeed,” Chase interjected hurriedly. A song commemorating the event was one thing; he found a pantomime of Colin’s near-hanging a trifle less whimsical. “I’m sorry to have missed it. Do they sing Colin Eversea’s song very often? The puppets?”

  “Nivver ’eard ’em sing that particular song before today. ’E’s free now, Mr. Eversea is, wasna guilty a’tall! Imagine that. Wonder what ’e’s about now?”

  “I wonder, too. Do you, sir, know anything about the puppeteers?”

  The man’s shoulders heaved up and down in a shrug, and as if he could wait no longer, his hand catapulted toward his mouth and he cleaved the apple in half. His next sentence was muffled by masticated fruit. A fine spray of juice accompanied his words, drizzling over Chase like a Sussex fog.

  “Nah. I dinna know. I jus’ watch, and gi’ a penny when I’m able. They pass the ’at around a’ the end, like.” He held the remaining half of apple out to Chase with an eyebrow arched in question. Chase demurred with a slight shake of the head. The man shrugged again, just one shoulder this time, and, to Chase’s relief, swallowed.

  “Are they here often, then? The puppeteers?”

  “Two, three days o’ th’ week when the weather is fine.” He beamed approvingly up at the sun beaming agreeably down upon them.

  Helpful information. “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s Martin, and perhaps I’ll see ye again.”

  “I’m…Mr. Charles. I’ll be here tomorrow, if the weather is fine.”

  “Splendid!” Mr. Martin was pleased to meet a fellow marionette admirer, and they parted with an exchange of civil bows, Martin jauntily whistling the tune about Chase’s brother, and Chase knew he was doomed to hear it in his head all day.

  Colin would have been immensely amused.

  Martin paused to click the heels of his big boots before heading cheerfully into the Mumford Arms, just as someone else was being heaved out of it. Someone who, from the way he rotated like a lopsided wagon wheel on his two feet, arms windmilling gracelessly before he landed on the ground, had been in there all morning.

  Chase took one final look over his shoulder.

  All traces of the puppet theater were gone, and the square was empty apart from a black cat slinking alongside one of the weathered buildings, weaving in and out of rain barrels as if for the sheer pleasure of being thin enough to do it.

  Chapter 11

  The Final Curtain was an ominous name for a pub, Chase thought, but as long as they served strong drinks they could have called it the Devil’s Arse for all he cared. It was clearly filled with ambitious actresses and opera dancers and men with cash to spend upon them. They could have easily eliminated half of the chairs; the women, it seemed, preferred to sit on the laps of men.

  Kinkade was standing in the rear near an empty table, as though guarding it. Perhaps in deference to the fact that he hadn’t reminisced with Chase in a good year or so, he hadn’t an actress in his lap. Chase was quite, quite touched.

  “Injure your leg dancing again, Eversea?” Kinkade said by way of greeting, when he saw Chase threading over to him.

  “Injure your mirror by looking into it, Kinkade?”

  And thus the bonds of affection were re-established to the happy satisfaction of both men.

  “Here.” Kinkade kicked out a chair for Chase to settle into.

  The pleasures of whatever had happened the night before showed in the shadows and sagging skin beneath Kinkade’s eyes and his gray face. He no doubt had enjoyed a proper debauch last night. Which was a contradiction in terms, Chase supposed. Nevertheless.

  Chase took the chair while Kinkade remained stand
ing, because his scars from the war were on his back, and sitting too long made him uncomfortable.

  He’d always thought he looked more appealing to the ladies when he stood, anyway.

  “How was your assignation, Eversea?”

  “Surprisingly satisfying.” Not entirely a lie.

  “Are you going to share the name of this woman?”

  “I don’t intend to share her at all,” he said cryptically. This, he suspected, wasn’t entirely a lie, either. He patted the table loudly; a barmaid who seemed made of more bosom than anything else wended her way over to them.

  “Ale, luv,” he decided. “The dark.”

  He knew a brief yearning for the magical stuff on tap at the Pig & Thistle. Perhaps the Final Curtain had something drinkable.

  Kinkade was disdainfully sniffing a cigar. “Foul thing. Gift from a friend, but now I suspect it was more of a fobbing off than a thoughtful act. Reminds me of Colonel March. Remember that foul blend of tobacco he insisted on smoking? A singularly acquired taste. You could smell the man from across a room.”

  Chase remembered too clearly. “I remember. I couldn’t persuade him to any other kind, though. Quite set in his ways, March was. A good man.”

  Such a pointless platitude. Then again, platitudes were an effective way to keep residual guilt at bay and to prevent the man in question from entering the conversation.

  “Speaking of those days,” Chase continued smoothly. “Kinkade, I heard about Lucy Locke. Is it true she was arrested? An unfortunate incident involving a bracelet? I imagined you’d know something about it, given your position in the Home Secretary’s office.”