Golden Hill (27 page)

The part of the Common chosen for the duel was at the western end, away from the town, towards the pot-bank and the poor-house. The snow had melted back to a ring of scorched turf immediately around the kiln, but otherwise lay a foot deep, and where they were had been trampled to a compacted strip, dirty-white and crunching, bumped and socketed by the refrozen prints of boots going to and fro. It was a clear, cold dawn, with an intermittent icy breeze blowing, and a transparent flush of colour in the east, beyond the pale steeples of the snow-bound city. By this period of the winter a regular traffic of merchandise across the frozen East River had been established, and from the slight rise of the Common, black dots of humanity could already be seen out in the jumbled ice-field, slowly dragging sacks and boxes toward the city along a winding route where the going was smoothest. They seemed as remote as mites, and few other specimens of humanity were present. The cold and the hour had kept away most onlookers. Apart from the party assembled for the combat, a few curious paupers had come out from the poor-house gate and were standing in the snow in their foot-cloths, waiting to see what there might be to see, with Achilles near them, much better-dressed in the Governor’s livery, yet keeping the distance apt to his servile status. The nearest sentry had stepped over from the palisade to watch, with his arms hugged tight round him under his greatcoat, and clouds of exhaled breath steaming out of him around the thin trickle of smoke from his pipe.

Everyone wore a grave, somewhat church-going expression, even Smith’s improvised second, who seemed sobered into timidity
by the reality of the occasion, now it had arrived. Lieutenant Lennox, acting for Septimus, was as grim as Cato as he checked that his principal’s blade and Smith’s sabre bought on credit were of a length, and secured the agreement of the parties that, on account of the cold, they would not strip to shirt-sleeves in the usual way, and might fight in their coats. Septimus’ face was as hard as china as well as as white; and a lizard would have seemed less impassive.

‘I take it that there is no possibility of compounding this with an apology?’ asked Lennox for the sake of form.

‘None,’ said Septimus instantly.

‘Very good,’ said Lennox. ‘Then the quarrel must be submitted to the arbitrament of arms. To first blood, or to the greater extremity?’

‘To satisfaction,’ said Septimus.

Smith, seeing in the obscurity of the term a faint glimmer, said at once, ‘I agree.’

‘Very well,’ said Lennox, after a fractional hesitation. ‘Gentlemen, step back; ready yourselves; commence at the fall of the handkerchief; break at the command “Break!”’

Smith stepped back, until perhaps twenty feet separated him from Septimus’ stare. The fervid confusions of the night had gone: he seemed to be breathing in clarity with the bitter air. His feet were cold, yet had fallen into the fencer’s position without him choosing it, ready for the dance. His friend unsheathed his sword: he unsheathed his, and held it before him, awaiting his cue. The kerchief dropped. They advanced.

Smith adopted the first guard, or
guard of prime
, with his hand
pronated
. Septimus, seeing this, struck fiercely at his unprotected head, which Smith countered, but barely, with a rattling move into
tierce
. Septimus disengaged with a rasp of steel, and lunged lower, in
seconde
. Smith replied in
quarte. Quinte! Sixte! Prime! Seconde!
– But really, this is useless, and no more enables the reader to see the battle, than if I shouted numbers at you; which, indeed, I appear to be doing. The truth is, that I am obliged to copy these names for sword-fighting out of a book, having no direct experience to call upon. I throw myself upon the reader’s mercy, or rather their sense of resignation. Having previously endured this tale’s treatment of the game of piquet, and of the act of love, they may with luck by now expect no great coherence in the reporting of a sword-fight. And yet it must be rendered somehow as Smith experienced it, panting, with blade skreeking against blade and the snow dragging at his feet; and the formal beauty of it too, for if you had had no stake in the outcome, and hovered just above, as disengaged as a seagull from the good or ill of the parties, you would have seen an order in the stepping, the leaping, the gathering, the falling-back, fit for the muses. Elegant, desperate, ridiculous, wilful spectacle of mortality! Come, we can do better than a stream of Gallic numerals.

The essence of stage-fighting is, to achieve a series of clashing parries, as noisy as possible; and though the parties usually co-operate in this, with their blades coming together in this place or that place in the air, by agreement; yet Smith, whisking his sword at what always seemed the last possible moment into the un-agreed path of Septimus’, at least had half the familiar task to execute. So long as he did not try to attack, but only countered, and countered, and countered, he found he could (just) keep off the whistling onslaught, at the price of being driven back, and back, and back. Soon they were off the trampled pathway selected as the ground, and Smith was backing into deeper
snow toward the spot more or less where the great bonfire had burned, but where now a surface whipped to peaks like dirty egg-whites let through each foot into floundering softness. Smith was wading backward into it, slowed as if by molasses, his swordarm wavering with his balance; yet Septimus laboured under the same disability, and his attacks too were retarded and as it were thickened, both moving to a slower rhythm. Even so, the impetus was considerable, and they temporarily left the seconds and onlookers lagging behind. Smith, for the moment finding he still possessed fingers, limbs and head all intact, seized the chance of this peculiar privacy to say, or rather gasp: ‘Did it really. Have to be you?’

‘Would you rather,’ panted Septimus, ‘that it had. Been someone. Who was trying. To kill you?’

‘Do you mean you’re not?’ said Smith, forgetting to step back. Septimus’ steel, scarcely deflected, cut past his ear so close he felt the cold of it razoring by, like a concentration of winter itself, a wicked grey finger of the ice. He could imagine that if it touched him, he would crystallise around the wound.

Septimus disengaged, took a half-step back, caught his breath.

‘I really am very angry with you, Richard,’ he said, not loudly. ‘I am severely tempted to cut off your ears just to make a point; so keep your guard up, for God’s sake. But no, I am not. The idea is to contrive some safe piece of humiliation.’

‘Oh,’ said Smith. ‘I see.’

‘You don’t approve? I am open to the alternative.’ The seconds were lumbering up.

‘No – no – please – proceed. Is there anything I must … do?’

‘It will all be done for you,’ said Septimus grimly, raising his sword again. But then, in a rapid mutter, in the last seconds left
them: ‘You could work your way round to the left. No, idiot,
my
left. Watch out for the briar!’

Cut and parry, cut and parry, slash and clash. Septimus drove Smith round in a loop, back to the flattened strip whereon they had begun; Smith, his movements a trifle hectic and approximate with relief, tried his best to play his part properly, and indeed the slashes at his guard still came with alarming verisimilitude. A few more onlookers had gathered, drawn by the prolonged music of metal against metal. ‘Skewer him, Juba!’ cried one of these, having apparently recognised the duel as some sort of reprise of the play’s battle; but Smith was very conscious that he was, by now, putting up little of a show. Sweat was trickling down his back, the sword seemed to be gaining in weight with each movement, and he hoped that whatever Septimus had in mind, he would do soon. He took it as a considerable mercy when Septimus, glancing left and right and clearly judging his audience to be adequate, interrupted the sequence of blows. As if suddenly forgetting what he had been about, in fighting with Smith, he withdrew his blade and absently inspected its tip, like a man who finds the cheese has unaccountably fallen off the end of his toasting-fork: the whole leisurely performance exuding a speaking disdain for any conceivable peril that might be afforded by his hot, heaving opponent. – An enemy so pitiful, said the gesture, that it was safe to ignore him at will. Unlike Smith, Septimus, though breathing hard, was still cool, unruffled, collected, precise. He flipped his point down again, and planted it in the snow at his arm’s length, so the weapon become dismissively pacific, a steel walking stick on which he happened to be leaning at an elegant angle, rather like one of the more balletic-looking woodcuts of the French king. The onlookers tittered uncertainly.

‘It seems our seducer here,’ he declared, ‘is more apt for the bedroom than the battlefield.’ The titter grew louder and more confident. ‘In which case, he is surely … overdressed.’

The sabre flowed up again into his hand seemingly without effort, on the instant a tool of war once more, and he cut towards Smith’s side at waist height with a demonstrative rapidity that made it all too clear he had been only toying with him till now. Smith’s feeble, late parry he easily eluded, and Smith felt a bright line of pain scored across his hip, as Septimus sliced neatly through the band of his breeches, his drawers and (to the depth of a scratch) a curved arc of his skin. Deprived of buttons on that side, his breeches sagged down. This is going to end with me bare-arsed in the snow, Smith realised. A whoop came from the direction of the poor-house, the nature of the entertainment having revealed itself. Septimus acknowledged it with a bend of the head and a graceful rotation of the fingers on his spare hand. Then he prepared to do it again on the other side.

Smith knew he might as well wait stock-still while Septimus concluded the comedy, but some point of pride, some residuum of stubbornness, made him lift his blade into guard, to at least attempt a lurching counter. But with his cloven clothes impeding him on the right, he threw his weight clumsily onto an advanced left foot, while Septimus was still poising himself like a matador, and discovered with his toes, under the snow just there, a patch of ice as slick as glass. His foot shot out from beneath him; he pitched suddenly forward, his sword still held out before him. Septimus, not expecting this stumbling lunge any more than Smith had, had no time to do more than to snatch his own blade out of the way, lest Smith impale himself on it as he fell.

It seemed Smith’s point had passed harmlessly between
Septimus’ legs, and as Smith scrambled to his knees, his face again snow-caked, his sword lost beyond his reach, he was already giving a grin of furious embarrassment and apology. But a spot of dark red appeared on the grey silk at the top of Septimus’ inner thigh, then expanded in the blink of an eye into a soaked red circle big as a saucer.

‘Ouch,’ said Septimus.

Another blink, and the circle stretched into a waterfall-shaped stain down to his knee. Another, and blood ran out in a glossy cascade over his stocking.

‘Break!’ cried Lennox, and ran forward. The Lieutenant, knowing what he was seeing, in a trice had Septimus on his back on the snow, and was tugging off the crimsoned, already sticky breeches, to get at the gash right up in the white hollow of Septimus’ groin, between the tendons, where a jet of dark blood as fat around as a fence-nail was pulsing regularly. Smith stared stupidly. Lennox pulled off his own neck-cloth; studied it; discarded it as too short.

‘Something for a tourniquet,’ he roared. ‘Scarf? Shirt? Something!
Now!
’

A muffler was passed. Lennox wrapped it round Septimus’ leg as high up as he could, and twisting the loose ends together at the outside of the hip endeavoured to tighten it. But the hurt to the artery was so high up that there was no room above it where the flow might be squeezed and arrested. Twist and grip as Lennox might, the blood still came oozing, trickling, very soon streaming through the folds. The muffler served only as a bandage, and a bandage was quite insufficient to the force with which the blood was leaving Septimus. Lennox’s hands were scarlet.

‘Ouch,’ said Septimus again. He did not cry it, he did not groan it, he did not wail it; he still uttered it, controlledly, as a word, but
this time through gritted teeth, with great conscious effort, and a victory over a proximate panic in it.

Achilles, coming up fast with a great double-armful of fresh snow, elbowed Smith out of the way, and throwing himself to his knees began, with Lennox’s help, to try to pack a mass of snow hard into the wound, as a species of frigid barrier where the blood might clot. They pressed and leant and heaved and struggled for leverage, but through each hopeful tight-moulded cold poultice they balled around his leg, the crimson came creeping, white crystals turning inexorably to burgundy along an advancing front, until there was only a white fur left sprinkled atop dark pink, and then the whole thing melted to wine-coloured slop. It looked like one of Lord ––—’s ice-house puddings, thought Smith, sick and dizzy: except for the smell, the hot salt smell, the butcher’s-shop smell. The flow began to slacken, but not for any reason to be rejoiced over.

Smith found himself at Septimus’ head. His eyes were wide and rolling, like a frightened horse’s, and a very shocking change had come over his skin. It had turned to a dingy grey, with yellow in it, as if not redness but his accustomed whiteness were leaving him; as if what he was losing in gouts were his polish, his lustre.

‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ he said, in a voice without force.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Smith.

‘All I had to do was run you through and go home for breakfast. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I look like a warning of the dangers of childbed.’

And indeed, he lay now in a spectacular claret-stained circle on the white of the Common. A crow had flapped in from somewhere, interested, and was being kicked away by the sentry.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Smith again. ‘None of this was my intent.’

‘Who cares what you intended. Come closer.’

‘What?’

‘Come down here. Come. Now.’

Smith bent low and Septimus turned lips the grey of charcoal toward his ear.