Honor's Kingdom (31 page)

The ladies had more petticoats and crinolines and skirts than they wanted for clambering up on the seats. Clouds of pastel colors they were, and I feared the snake might disappear into their underclothes.

Its hood began to swell. Then it rose, all sudden.

I had no time to unsheathe the sword, but used the cane to parry the creature. For horrible seconds we faced off in that tiny box of a compartment. Then Blue Girl lost her footing and dropped with a scream.

The snake punched into her skirts. It is always a shock to see the force they have. They hit a man near as hard as a bullet does. The screaming became general.

I brought my cane down on the back of the snake’s hood in the frozen moment its fangs spent in her garments. I hoped to snap its backbone. But the creature only recoiled with a vivid hiss. I slapped the book toward it and the serpent struck the cover in midair.

Blue Girl fainted. I did not know if it was from fear or because of the poison.

Mr. Dickens rescued me. The fangs had gone through the binding and into the pages. The book stuck to the cobra’s snout and the creature struggled wildly to free itself. For every creature on earth desires to live. The novel kept the snake occupied just long enough for me to crack its head.

Twas either dead or stunned.

I unlatched my cane. When the sword emerged, Miss Organdy gasped.

I made short work of the cobra after that. Although its body twitched about the compartment.

I had just turned my attention to the lass in blue, when Miss Organdy shrieked,
“There’s another one!”

And so there was. Slithering out of the basket.

I chopped its head off. With nausea rising in me. My breath labored to excel the locomotive.

I did not think the basket would hold another serpent, but I pierced it through with the sword a pair of times. I could tell by the basket’s weight on my blade it was empty.

“Careful!” I told Miss Organdy. “The poison’s a danger, even when they are dead.”

She was weeping, near hysterical. “She’s dead, Harriet’s dead! She’s dead! My God! She’s dead!”

“No,” I said, in a voice that wanted to calm her but was too wild by half, “she is not dead. Not yet. Stand you back. And help me lift her.”

The girl seemed afraid to touch her friend. As if the poison—or death—were contagious. The dead snakes twitched at our feet, in bits and pieces.

“Oh, my God,” she cried, “she’s dead, she’s dead . . .”

I was losing the lass in organdy, as well as the girl in blue. The way you lose a soldier who has broken, surrounded by imaginary terrors worse than the enemy before him.

I slapped her across her pretty face, although it was ungentlemanly.

“Help me, lass. Or your friend will die, and you will have failed her properly.”

She declined to a whimper. But the intelligence had come back into her eyes. I made her help me, gingerly, as I lifted the sprawled girl across the bench of cushions. Then I had Miss Organdy climb onto the seat again while I undid the door and scooted the remains of the serpents out into the night. I got rid of that basket, too, although I could do nothing for the blood.

I shut the door again and told her, “Help me.”

“What . . . what do you want . . . want me . . .”

Now this was hard for a married man and a Methodist, I will tell you.

“We must get her unmentionables from her. So I may see where the serpent struck her leg.”

She looked at me, aghast.

“It is that, or her death,” I said.

The girl began to quake again. I gripped her by her upper arms. Beneath the cloth they were but lengths of bone. I fear the thinness favored by ladies has become a thing unhealthy, for they are little more than walking skeletons. With fair faces, I grant you.

After a proper shaking, she bent to help me without another word. There was good. For I would never have made my way through those avalanches of starched cloth and stiffeners without irreparable destruction and much delay.

I fear I reddened in mortification as we neared the sanctuary of her flesh. Despite the obvious need for our urgent actions. In India, we cut into the flesh and did what little we could to drain the poison, although it only rarely saved a life. Had Mick Tyrone been with us, he might have taken off the lass’s leg.

Blessedly, we did not need to shame her completely. But forced we were to draw her stockings off, and to fuss up to her stays.

Her flesh was absolutely clear, with only golden down upon her thighs, where the snake had plunged into her skirts.

A wonder it was! It seemed an English lady’s garments were of sufficient depth to absorb a cobra’s strike. Although they are not always so resistant to two-legged serpents, if you will pardon my frankness.

I did not touch her the slightest bit more than necessary, you understand, and I fear her companion and I were equally distraught at finding her most private of garments in need of a bit of a wash. But a grace and a glory it was that the girl was safe and had but fainted.

And only a faint it was. Just as I was finishing my inspection, she awoke. And spied me rooting deep within her petticoats.

She screamed worse than she did when she saw the snake. For death is not so frightful as dishonor, to a proper lady.

I must have jumped a yard, if I jumped an inch. I lost my balance and tumbled back into my seat.

There was a bit of confusion after that. Fortunately, Miss Organdy had mastered herself and, once she had calmed her friend, she explained the situation we had faced.

Blue Girl shut her eyes in shame, but she had been brought up proper, except for the importance of always wearing clean underthings, and she told me—eyes still shut to avoid mine own—that she was grateful for her rescue and my solicitation. Her voice trembled, and she did not say much more. I only hoped she did not think me nasty.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. The young ladies dismounted at Edinburgh. Thank me again, they did, the two of them. But I suspect they did not mind our parting. The one in blue never did recover her color.

The folk getting down from the next compartment gave the three of us a proper looking over. I blushed to think how they had deciphered the screaming. But we cannot undo a thing that is done, so I waited until the passengers had changed over, then switched myself into an empty compartment. Away from the bloody mess the cobras left. Relieved I was that the police had not taken an interest—and glad when the train began to move again.

I
longed
to get to Glasgow. For I faced pressing discomforts of the body after my sequestration in the train. And I half expected tribesmen with spears to drop through the roof and vault in through the window.

Despite all that, I will make a small confession. I had swept that novel out along with the serpents and the basket, for the first snake had not fully recovered its fangs from the pages. I believe we have an American expression about “sinking one’s teeth into a book,” and that the creature had done. But I fear I had sunk in a tooth or two myself.

I do not like to compromise my principles, and know that we must ever be on guard, yet I wanted to know what happened to young Pip, and if the convict fellow would make good his threats, and what the lad would have to do with the pretty little girl, and what the disappointed old woman meant to do. That decrepit, jilted bride put me in mind of a certain Mrs. Fowler, a lady of Philadelphia whose pride had killed her son. I feared I would succumb and purchase another copy. To give the Devil his due.

Well, fair is fair. Given the advantage the book had brought me in the struggle with the serpents, I felt I owed a debt to Mr. Dickens.

TWELVE

THAT FIDDLER WANTED A TALKING TO, AND I WAS THE man to give it to him. Cobra snakes on trains are bad enough, but music played off-key will madden a Welshman.

At my morning prayers I was, in my room at the Hotel Clarence, which Mr. Adams himself had recommended, when the worst scraping on strings that ever was heard ensnared my words of thanks to my Redeemer and turned them into complaints at the ways of the world. I believe the fellow was attempting to perform a Highland reel of sorts, but it sounded to me like a battalion of cats undergoing torture.

The man played badly is what I mean to say.

I called “Amen” to Him above, and took myself below. I had slept well enough, and longer than usual, despite the poisoned air that come in through the very window glass. I could not say whether Glasgow stank like the bowels of a factory, or whether it reeked like a factory of bowels, begging your pardon, but the stench of the place was worse by half than that of Murder Bay in Washington. And that was an odor, indeed. Even my dreams smelled of sulfur and sewage and soot.

Out I went into the prompt and early bustle of George Square, with my cane fair thrashing the cobbles and the morning all teeming with bankers and high men of business and such. All set I was to make my complaint to the very source of the infraction, when the girl’s voice stopped me, sure as the Hand of Heaven.

When we are led into that final garden, to receive our just reward—should such be our lot—the angel that calls us to come will sound like her. I do believe it.

She gave the passersby a fetching tune, a ballad soft as down, and gathered a crowd. I crossed the street into the square, chased by carriages carrying Scotsmen stingy of their time, and joined the audience in time to hear the girl’s light soprano gentle into “Annie Laurie.” Oh, the fiddler was dreadful as ever he had been, and out of tune, as well, with his high string flat by nearly half a tone, but his bowing was no more now than a lesser devil’s scratching at Heaven’s doors. We all of us heard the angel, and not him.

I got me through to the front of the throng, and met a sharp surprise for all my fussing. No, I would not complain of the fiddler’s doings, after all. Let other men insult him, if they had the heart. He was a veteran soldier, with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves, his face burned half away and his two eyes gone. His scalp was raw, but for a few tufts on the left side, and his regimental walking-out cap seemed a very mockery, as if he were still young and jaunty, strutting off to the Saturday parade. What flesh he had was purple from his scalp down to the worn collar of his tunic, and the cloth on his breast was faded from the scarlet. His kilt hung limp and ragged as his stockings. Just at his feet, a rough sign spelled out:

INKERMAN

There are homes and hospitals for veteran soldiers, see. But those beds are never enough, and the waiting lists are long, and preference is given to the elder men who have served out full careers. Perhaps it must be so and should be so. But such a one as this would be pensioned on pennies, and left to scrape his living with his bow. The Crimea left old England with more maimed sons than anyone cared to manage. No common soldier finds his thanks when the war is over and done, though generals will have no end of handsome honors.

Perhaps that ruination of his visage, the blast or fire that had taken away his eyes, had done a damage to his hearing, too. For out of tune he was, and there is true. But the girl, who I assumed to be his daughter, had a pitch as sure as a good wife’s heart, and satin and velvet where the rest of us have tonsils. Oh, a Welshman loves a well-sung tune, and there is no denying it. I listened to that girl—twelve or thirteen I thought her, although the poor show small—I listened to her with the deep attention we ought to reserve for sermons. And, really, that performance was improper. For “Annie Laurie” is no song for a lass, but meant for a man and a tenor. And at the end, singing that, for the love of Annie Laurie, “I’d lay me doon and dee,” the little thing stretched herself out on the pavement, as if expiring of a broken heart.

Now, I have never been to an opera house, where all is gilt and finery, but I doubt if ever there was a more heartfelt round of applause than we gave that girl. And to the brave soldier of Inkerman, though his music deserved no praise.

But applause was nearly all the listeners gave, for the Scots go about with their purses sewn shut and their souls are as strict as the lines of a well-kept ledger. A pair of ha’pennies was all the lass had for her brightening up of our morning. Until an old man come forward, limping worse than me, with the sidelocks of the Jew about his ears. Poor he looked himself, and bent, and a close record of his recent meals adorned his lapels. But he cast an entire shilling into the brass bowl the girl carried round.