The Last Crossing (4 page)

Addington did not deign to reply. He was gazing off above Barlow’s straw hat to the horizon where the heat of the day was drawing a finger of haze. There were deer emerging from it.

Barlow, who expected the Captain to exchange flattering comments on their respective prowess and so elevate him in Miss Venables’s eyes, was forced to continue solo. “Captain Gaunt always gets the better of me,” he said to her. “But all winter I studied Mr. Horace Alfred Ford’s scientific treatise on archery in the hope it will give me a leg up.”

Addington was still fixated on the progress of the deer. They were edging over the meadow, towards the house, moving cautiously, timorously. Walker, on Father’s orders, must be up in the woods, stalking the deer out of the copses, where they were vulnerable to depredations by the poachers.

“Mr. Ford, Mr. Ford …” mused the vicar, searching for the significance of the name. Suddenly his face brightened alarmingly. “Yes, of course. Mr. Ford. He renounced the archery championship of England because of the nicety of his religious principles. Admirable
fellow! And I seem to recall another sportsman who did likewise. The prizefighter who left the ring to preach Christ. Who was that chap? What was his name?”

Addington, a ring fanatic, could stand no more of this bumble and blather. “Bendigo,” he said curtly.

“Bendigo, yes, Bendigo!” cried Venables. “There you have it! Two worldly champions become champions of Christ!”

“Like knights of old,” Miss Venables murmured. During the past months she had been reading and rereading Tennyson’s “The Last Tournament” in a back issue of her father’s
Contemporary Review
. The dolorous music had got into her blood, investing it with a pleasurable melancholia as she contemplated the decay of high ideals and chivalry. Reading Sir Tristram’s challenge to the other knights and finding that “so many of those / That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque / Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds,” Ellie Venables had fairly sickened with indignation at their pusillanimity. How would she feel if her champion, carrying her favour, chose to withdraw from the field? Fiendishly humiliated.

How delicious it was to wander in her father’s garden, pretending the chill of early spring was really winter’s onset. Mr. Tennyson’s verses stirred her romantic depths. “And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf, / And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume / Went down it.” Wonderful.

“The knights of old,” said Barlow, who liked to play iconoclast, “were apt to champion their own interests and pay precious little attention to anyone else’s. Brigands they were, at heart.” To emphasize his point, he went briskly up on his toes, once, twice, smirking at his own dash.

“Nonsense!” Miss Venables chided him. Mr. Barlow had spoiled her contemplation of Sir Tristram. On the cold field of his armour a hundred silver deer were engraved. The berries of a holly spray fastened to his helmet were as bright as drops of blood. Of course, she could not see his face. It was hidden by his visor.

Barlow hurried to correct himself. “My dear Miss Venables, my remark was not meant to give offence. I beg your forgiveness.” It was
well-known Miss Venables brooked no contradiction, not even from her father.

“Forgiven,” she said sharply. Addington found her spirit, her indignation exciting. Especially when it was directed at Barlow. With a rosy flush climbing her throat, she said, “It may be silly of me to believe that in some distant time men wore their ladies’ favours upon their sleeves, as a pledge of love and protection. But that, sir, is a belief in
ideals.”

Barlow was humbled, struck to the dust. “How right you are. How very right.”

“Froissart?” chirped Reverend Venables. “Did you have in mind Froissart, Mr. Barlow? Knights and such. Froissart’s
Chronicles
perhaps? Was that it, my good man?”

Addington lowered his eyes from the timid deer. “Miss Venables,” he said, “would you do me the honour of allowing me to wear your colours in the contest?” Smiling persuasively, he gently drew the glove from her compliant fingers. “I would be honoured to sport your favour.”

Slowly, as the glove slipped free from her grasp, Miss Venables saw Sir Tristram’s visor lift, saw the bones of his face knit themselves into a shape.

Addington was gazing intently into her eyes, as intently as he had gazed at the deer.

T
he match crackled, stuttered fire, flared into life in the darkness of Addington Gaunt’s bedroom. Addington groped his way to the dressing table, lit two candles resting there, and stared into their flames reflected in the glass, an unsteady brilliance that waxed and waned like the beating of a weakened heart. When wakened by his Dunvargan dream, he needed a fiery mirror in which to see his face. It was the only way to banish the grey horse from his mind. No matter how early the night-frights came, he never returned to bed, but remained alert and wakeful, a sentry at his post. It was well past midnight, the last of the guests having waved their goodbyes long ago.

At the beginning of it, the dream never diverged from what actually occurred that day in 1865 in the Irish town on the borders of Cork and Wexford. A troop of horse drawn up at one end of the narrow, cobbled street, a Fenian mob at the other.

His regiment, the 12th Royal Lancers, had been sent from Leeds to deal with discontent in Ireland, to put an end to years of outrage at the hands of dirty Irish potboys who flung stones at officers, intimidated magistrates into dismissals of charges or derisively lenient sentences. With the legal authorities so craven, regimental tempers had been on edge.

That afternoon in Dunvargan, he was determined to teach the rebels a lesson. So he held his troops steady in the face of a barrage of cobbles clattering down in the mean little street, allowed the
rioters to creep closer and closer, emboldened them to howl and jeer. Bloody savages. On they came, their missiles falling nearer and nearer, the Lancers’ mounts growing restive, tossing their heads, champing their bits, making the roadway ring with the stamp of iron-shod hooves.

Until this moment of testing, he had not understood how much he despised the Irish, their cowardice, their unmanliness. Starved, dark peasant gnomes who arrayed their women in front of them, a blowsy barricade behind which they felt safe to hurl stones and curses. Men cowering behind the skirts of red-faced bitches; it was enough to make you sick. See if it did them any good. He did not care a fig for a packet of skirts.

The Irish had drawn within range. Stones began to strike the ranks. A horse reared. Behind him, a man cried out in pain, tumbled from the saddle. He paid it no mind. What was required was coolness, and that he possessed in full measure. A few men done an injury would heat the blood of their fellow Lancers to pay the Irish skulkers back. Hold the men in check until they were seething, brimful of wrath.

“Steady, lads!” he called out, as the cobbles rained down around him. “Steady!” The Irish sluts were stooping to gather up the ammunition that had fallen short, cradling it in skirts and aprons, passing it back to their men.

Another soldier groaned, reeled in the saddle. Addington fastened a taunting smile to his face. Let the Irish bastards see him smile; they were close enough now. What did the trulls make of him? A fine figure of a man, tall, straight, well-knit, with a cavalryman’s narrow hips, his long legs booted in soft leather. Let the muck hate him, hate his blue double-breasted tunic with scarlet lapels, hate the double gold stripe on his trousers, hate his lance cap with scarlet top and cock-feather plume. Hate him, because those below always hate the one above them, the man on the horse.

A bit of pale sun broke through the clouds and rinsed the Lancers with light. His sorrel quivered, anticipating the spurs. Addington caressed its neck, choked with instinct, with blind, passionate eagerness for the fight.

It was at this moment, with this caress, that his dream always departed from the reality of that day in Dunvargan. Because in Dunvargan he had torn his sabre from its scabbard, held it at the ready, and all about him had heard the men’s answer, a slithering of steel unsheathed. Forward they went at a trot, then a canter, the narrow street beginning to fill with screams. Women scrambled away from sabres; shrieking, they stumbled under the hooves of horses. Mouths gaped terror, the hands of the men clutched shapeless hats tight to heads, the mob splintered like a rotten fence with the impact of maddened horses, bodies skittered across the street. Fingers clawed at his thighs, scrabbled at his boots. Standing in his stirrups, he wielded the bright blade, scythed uplifted hands, ducking heads.

Then he was clear of it, had chopped clean through the clinging rottenness of fetid breath and stinking clothes. His horse galloped crazily down the street, iron shoes clacking on the cobblestones as he sawed and jerked the bit, foam spattering his sleeves. Bringing the sorrel to a wild stop in front of a tobacconist’s, he shattered the window glass with a triumphant kick of his boot, wheeled about to have a go at the rioters again.

Others had broken free of the mob. Sergeant Tompkins and four Lancers cantered towards him. A blond-haired boy had lost his cap in the melee; another lad streamed blood from his nose. Back up the street, the rest of the Lancers bobbed about on milling horses, hacked at a swarm of Irish.

“Again!” he screamed to his men, pointing to the Irish with his sword. The five of them charged back up the street, heels braced in the stirrups, ready to meet the shock of collision. A whirl of hands below, straining fingers spiking the air, horrible cries, cowardly begging as the blades descended.

How quickly it was over. Bodies splayed on the cobblestones, wives clutching their dead and injured husbands to their breasts, wailing like banshees, calling on Christ and Mary, a few with faces buried in shawls or hugging the planks of barred doors.

But in the dream, when his hand touches the arched neck of the sorrel, the past alters. He feels himself astride a skeleton horse, bony
ribs bulging between his legs. He looks down and finds the glossy, muscular red horse transformed into an ashy-grey beast, a nag only fit for the knacker. He snatches back his hand in terror and disgust; the neck he has caressed is crusted with scabs and running sores. This is when he wakes, filled with horror.

Addington pads silently across the room. The white, muscular body glides over the windowpanes, over the burning mirror, as he goes to a large walnut armoire. Here he rummages among the clothes, retrieves a long tubular bundle wrapped in chamois that he carries to the dressing table. Seated, flanked on either side by a burning taper, surrounded by the hot scent of melting beeswax, he remains motionless, shallow blue eyes intent on his own image in the glass.

Finally, he moves, nervous fingers touching the ends of his moustache. What would a stranger make of such a face? What words would apply? Calm and severe, perhaps. He is thankful to see no resemblance there to his brothers. Strange, how very different in appearance they all are. Even Charles and Simon, despite being twins, do not look alike.

But Addington has inherited his father’s features. He wishes it wasn’t so, wishes he could find something of his beloved mother there, but fails. Instead, he is stuck with the face of the man who ruined her, the man who poisoned his life.

He passes a hand over the flat, hard muscles of his breast, a lingering gesture, then drops it to the bundle, shakes out six clothyard arrows onto the dresser top, their barbs gleaming. He begins a thorough, deliberate examination of the arrows, sighting down the shafts to ensure they are true, checking the fletcher’s work, delicately smoothing the vanes with gentle fingertips. At last satisfied, he opens a drawer, removes a small whetstone.

Thinking of Walker, a smile parts his lips. Father has ordered the gamekeeper to muster the tenants, to arm them with guns loaded with swan shot, to command them to fire upon any trespasser. He knows Walker is mystified. Never the report of a poacher’s gun heard while they lie in wait, only a single haunch taken from a slain deer, the rest of the carcass left to spoil.

Addington spits on the whetstone, works his saliva into the gritty surface with the ball of his thumb, sets to sharpening an arrowhead. The spittle grows dark, thick, soapy as it polishes the steel to a cruel, razor brightness. Demand the best and get it. Sabre steel. The archer’s muscles beneath the shoulder blades twitch as he lovingly draws the stone back and forth over the three-inch cutting edge.

“I want heads,” he had told the London cutler, “that’ll spring a fountain of blood. Go deep, bite, hold.”

As he works, anticipation builds. He thinks of tonight’s hunt, the last before he leaves for America. He imagines the pearl-grey light he is about to go into, pictures the mist rising out of the hollows of the drenched earth, threading through the beeches, tumbling over hedges like smoke from a serene, soundless battle. Swaddled in a shroud of vapour, a spectre wrapped in dank, grave clothes, the marrow of his bones ice, the drear mist distilling on cold arrowheads, every sound lost to him except the ponderous thudding of his own heart, he runs the risk of capture and discovery by Walker and Father’s minions. So arousing in every way.