Lawless (67 page)

“Show your face, you cuckolding bastard!” the Duke of Tichfield shouted in his phlegmy voice, and things were comical no longer.

Matt didn’t bother with his drawers. He jumped to his feet, jerked on his pants and flung a glance toward the open French windows overlooking the garden perfumed with roses. Some instinct said that if he ran that way, a bullet would find his back.

In desperation, he chose the surprise of a frontal assault. He doubled his shoulder as one barrel of the old-fashioned pistol discharged, spitting smoke and sparks. The Duchess shrieked and slid down in bed and yanked a sheet over her face. The ball whistled over Matt’s lowered head and thunked into the wall. The Duke took more careful aim.

Matt ran like a demon, outraged by circumstances.
A promising career may be cut short here, damn it!

He charged in beneath the muzzle the Duke was attempting to reposition for a close-range shot. His bare shoulder hit the Duke’s waistcoated paunch. The pistol thundered. Something—powder?—stung his cheek, and he actually felt the bullet or ball scorch past his ear as he knocked his would-be murderer head over trousers into the wall. The Duke fell with a yelp of pain. Matt kicked the pistol away from the Duke’s clutching fingers.

The Duke’s right leg seemed bent at the knee, and his calf and boot folded beneath him in an unnatural way. That evidently accounted for the Duke’s steerlike bellows. Matt had to shout to be heard.

“Toss me my shirt, Armina.”

It came sailing from the far side of the bed. “I don’t know why he came back unexpectedly—” The Duchess’ apologetic cry was barely audible above the caterwauling. Matt shoved his shirt into his waistband and swung toward the blinding spread of candle-flame. Men in the dark behind the small haloed lights were voices without substance.

“Don’t let him through, Alf!”

“Listen ’ere, Lysander, his lordship don’t deserve no favors from me, the nasty old son of a bitch. This way, laddie—”

One of the candelabra appeared to float aside. A dark portal opened in the wall of light. Matt sprinted through it, and on to the staircase, and the main floor, and then the white and black of the moonlit summer midnight.

He ran so hard his chest hurt. He ran till he felt he couldn’t run any more, but he did. A sudden cloud hid the moon and he didn’t see the stable wall until he bounced off it like a ball of India rubber.

Inside, rubbing his dizzy head, he roused a stable boy and demanded a saddled horse. The boy had seen Matt around the estate on other occasions and knew he was the Duchess’ current lover, so there was no quibble. But the boy’s eyes rolled when he heard alarms from the great house. All at once he acted uncertain about releasing the horse.

“Sounds like ’is lordship’s callin’ for you to ’old up, sir.”

“You’re mistaken,” Matt barked, shoved the boy backwards over a hay bale, and fairly leaped into the saddle.

He kicked the animal with his bare heels and went galloping away through a barricade of wildly swinging lanterns, a storm of oaths and the roar of an old fowling piece. If his head hadn’t been down over the neck of the racing horse, it would have been shot away.

But desperation carried the evening, and Matt was soon clattering north through the Kentish countryside, wondering why he indulged in such stupid escapades. Affairs with married women were frequently dangerous and always futile.

The trouble was, whenever he met a woman who reminded him of Dolly, he wanted her. In fact the only women with whom he trifled were those who resembled Dolly in one way or another. He’d realized it consciously only a couple of years ago.

The realization hadn’t put a stop to the behavior, though. He continued to chase women who were always Dolly and could never be Dolly. He did it, he supposed, because she was the only true love of his life, and because she was forever lost to him. He knew she was lost because, when she wrote to him, she refused to make reference to lines in his letters in which he begged her to come back.

Her letters were friendly, polite, full of news of India and her teaching and of their son. But they contained not so much as a grain of sentimentality. If she felt any, she hid it. So his pursuit went on.

With each woman, he hoped anew. With each he was disappointed and saddened. He supposed the pattern would keep repeating until he withered into senility or got shot to death by some outraged husband whose aim was better than the Duke’s. What a damned depressing future, he thought as he jogged on through the moonlight toward London.

Two nights later, Matt went to Jim Whistler’s for supper. His friend was in a lather about a new commission he’d received. He was to redecorate part of the Hyde Park town house belonging to his patron Frederick Leyland.

Leyland was a self-made shipping tycoon from Liverpool. His mother had once hawked meat pies in the streets of that city, and the man was inordinately proud of his rise in the world. He threw fistfuls of money around to dramatize it—and as part of this largesse, he’d given Whistler permission to refurbish the town house dining room.

Whistler had known Mr. and Mrs. Leyland for some time. He’d painted stunning full-length portraits of the couple in ’73. There were gossips who said the artist was more interested in Leyland’s wife than in his money though.

The new commission had developed in an unusual way. Whistler’s painting called
La Princess du Pays de la Porcelaine
already hung in the Leyland dining room. The artist had complained that the setting was all wrong for the picture. Very well, Leyland replied, create the right sort of setting.

Whistler had instantly accepted the offer. Perhaps for more than artistic reasons; Matt knew his friend was still seeing Mrs. Leyland. He didn’t bring that up during supper, though. Whistler’s newest mistress was also at the table.

Whistler enlivened the meal by showing and discoursing on his sketches for tall window shutters in the dining room. Great fan-tailed birds done in gilt would decorate each one. He’d already settled on a basic color scheme of blue and gold, and referred to the project as his “peacock room.”

The new mistress seemed somewhat impatient with him, uninterested in peacocks or the Leylands. She tended to be haughtier than the departed Jo, but Matt had observed that she had Jo’s reddish hair. Perhaps Whistler, too, pursued and loved only one woman.

The thoroughly enjoyable evening was spoiled when Matt got back to his quarters. His landlady presented him with a note that had arrived by messenger while he was out. He recognized Armina’s handwriting. The landlady then said four gentlemen, well dressed but quite unfriendly, had called and asked for him. He didn’t understand who they could be until he retired to his rooms and read the note from the Duchess. The essential passage said:

He is incapacitated with a broken bone, but rants that the moment he is up again, he will kill you. I think he is just enough of a silly fool to attempt it, my dearest—or to persuade some of his army cronies to do it for him. Britain is not safe for you for a few months, I think. Have no fear for my well being. As long as the old curmudgeon wants to keep me around him like an expensive watch fob ornament, he knows he daren’t lift a hand near me—except, of course, to present me with some little bauble or other. Lovers, alas, are not so favored. Do be careful, and make haste to leave if you can possibly do so.

He read the note twice more, thought of his landlady’s description of the quartet of callers, and made up his mind. What the hell was there to keep him in England anyway? Nothing.

As he was packing a portmanteau and considering where he might take a holiday, his eye fell on Gideon’s letter.

In it, his brother had described some nonsensical project involving a lot of quick sketches of Americans baking bread and threshing wheat and potting at the redcoats on Breed’s Hill a hundred years ago. Patriotic twaddle. Or commercialism inspired by the American centennial, he didn’t know which.

He had no intention of lending himself to such an infantile project. But, unexpectedly, he realized he had a strong desire to see his brother again. Talk with him. Find out how he was faring with his family, and with the newspaper. Perhaps it was because he felt rootless now that the affair with the Duchess was over. They’d enjoyed an intense month and a half together—so intense, he hadn’t had time to answer Gideon’s letter or do any work except for some pornographic sketches of aspects of Armina’s naked body. He’d presented her with one of the sketches and locked the rest in a closet.

He definitely had no desire to see America again. Still, as long as it was advisable for him to get out of England for six months, he might as well pay that visit Gideon was always writing him about.

He didn’t care for the circumstances attending the departure. He had to race back to Whistler’s next day to make arrangements for shipping certain of his belongings, and for forwarding of mail. He had to confer with his landlady, and book passage—and do it all while skulking through obscure courtyards and dingy mews, in case anyone was watching.

“Just like Paris all over,” he grumbled, but it was not. Dolly was far away in Lahore with their son Thomas, who would be seven at the end of the year. She’d sent Matt a small daguerreotype he treasured. Tom was turning out to be a sturdy, handsome boy who resembled his mother. Matt hoped his son didn’t waste his life on some dog’s profession, as Paul Cézanne so aptly called theirs. Where did being a painter get you?—except into a sooty compartment aboard a late train for the Southampton docks. A compartment where you sat alone, skulking like a damned fugitive.

A dog’s profession, by God. No doubt about it.

July storms plagued the uphill passage of the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship
New York,
which had called at Southampton to take on passengers. The Germans were giving the Americans as well as the Cunard Steamship Company fierce competition on the transatlantic run. But the bad weather restricted the
New York’s
speed this trip. She was fourteen days en route to a North American landfall—some kind of record for slowness in this age of steam, Matt thought on the morning they were supposed to sight the coast of Maine.

He stood forward on the boat deck, awaiting the first glimpse of land. Leaning into the wind at the rail, he cut a dashing figure despite his wretched internal state. It was a steamy day, with the sun hidden behind a thin haze. Yet the sun’s light was painfully evident in the metallic highlights on the slopes of the high waves. The light hurt his eyes. His head throbbed and his stomach ached.

Matt’s shipboard conquest, Miss Trautwein of Omaha, was still asleep in her suite. She claimed to be a stockyards heiress, but this morning she was also a disappointed lover. Last night, after kissing her long blond hair and embracing her pale body for the last time, Matt had told her he was a married man.

Miss Trautwein threw things, then cried and said it didn’t matter. But they’d parted anyway, at Matt’s insistence. He’d paid the man on duty in the saloon bar to keep it open, and keep the whiskey flowing, so he could watch the sunrise while drunk. The sun didn’t rise—visibly, anyway—and the barman fell asleep and all he could think of was how idiotic it was for a man to forever search for the same woman within different ones.

Now, several hours later, a short sleep and a shave had restored him at least outwardly. He looked trim, even natty, as he peered toward the west. He’d thrown on an assortment of summer clothes, but they fitted him well. His summer outfit, of the latest English fashion, consisted of a navy blue flannel jacket with breast pocket handkerchief, white flannels and sporty shoes of sailcloth and leather. A straw boater with a striped band was tilted over his forehead to keep the light out of his eyes and prevent an intensification of the headache.

He pondered what he’d do when he reached New York. His chief objective when he boarded the steamship was to take himself out of the Duke’s reach until the old idiot came to his senses. He wasn’t going
toward
anything, he was running
from
—and as a consequence, he didn’t know how he’d occupy his time for the next month or so. Oh well, he’d think about it in New York. Probably there were blond, blue-eyed women there, too.

Of course there was always that book of Gideon’s, nonsensical as it sounded.

He went below to his outside stateroom and rummaged in his belongings till he found the letter. Back on deck, he reread it. He’d forgotten all the pressures Gideon had applied. He was half angry, half amused.

“Save the family farm. Save the family honor. Save the country and come home to your brother’s arms. You dirty bastard.”

Several promenading ladies eyed him with alarm as he uttered these remarks to the open sea. He crumpled the letter into a ball and consigned it to the wind. It was carried far off to port, and plummeted out of sight between tall whitecaps.

“Are there any other heart wringers you could have used, Gid? I don’t think so.”

Suddenly the ship’s whistle sounded. The noise nearly blew his head apart. Passengers crowded up on either side of him, pointing and exclaiming in English and German and several other languages.

The steamship was swinging to run parallel with the coast. Thus the thin, dark line smudged the starboard horizon. How featureless the coastline was there in the haze. How unforbidding compared to the nights he’d searched for it with one eye, and for Federal gun ships with the other.

America. He almost felt sentimental for a moment.

Then he sniffed, brushed his nose with a knuckle, and called himself a fool.

From high at the rail of the
New York,
Matt saw his brother down on the teeming North River pier. Gideon waved. Matt grinned and tipped his summer hat.

All of his uneasiness about getting along with someone he hadn’t seen for years—all his carefully marshaled arguments against joining Gideon in the publishing project—faded the moment he saw how pale and emaciated his brother looked. What had happened to him? The mere passage of time didn’t explain such strain.