I, Libertine Read online

  “You’re losing your sight with your wits in your old age,” said Lance. “Next they’ll have the wheels while you sit on the box a-gossip with some other old swine.”

  “By God we’ve crossed the river and it’s your turn to keep a civil tongue in yer ’ead, ye little wart.”

  “This bargain is beginning to be over-costly to me,” said the young man icily.

  “Then strike a bargain with some other ’ackney. There’s upwards o’ five ’undred on the streets today, a good third cast-off privates like this’n. Among so many, surely to God ye can find a fool like me, but by my dangling breek, it must be a greater one.”

  “The more fool I,” returned Lance. “Ye’d be back in the stables standing in muck whilst the other hostlers curried your face, taking it for the hind end of a spavined mare, weren’t it for me. Who found ye this trap? Who paid to dress and paint it? Who flogged ye into a decent livery and taught ye to blow your nose on your sleeve instead of snapping it in your lap? Who but me?”

  “Ye found the coach, I’ll grant; but ’oo paid for it? Ye bought paint; ’oo laid it on? Ye prettied me up along of the trap, and I’ll grant a quality fare say twice a fortnight for that, but ’oo gives up ’is ’ackney money masquerading as a popinjay’s pimp, ay, and stands for yer ’igh an’ mighty insults the while?”

  Reverting to the cadences of a Courtenay, and with an imperious gesture, Lance said. “We have arrived at the dissolution of our partnership, Higger-Piggott. You may drive me to my inn, and thereafter you may find your own perdition.”

  Even in the dark, Lance could see the black furious flush crossing the old man’s face. His voice was thick with anger as he snapped his whip out of the brace and set foot on the step. The carriage leaned and creaked with his weight, he loomed over the young man like a breaking sea, he sprayed and spat as he growled. “Ay, sir, ay, sir, that I will, sir; drive ye to yer inn, and on the instant; but I faithfully promise ye, God rot me, that I shall tie up these ruddy ’orses ’ere and now and do my driving with this cat,” and he whistled his lash close to the crown of Lance’s newly slouched hat.

  Now it has been recorded that all of this young man’s teeth were beautiful, but that one of them was extraordinary. It was the right upper incisor, and its uniqueness lay in a subtle concavity, from gum to bite and from edge to edge, so finely wrought by nature’s lapidary that its difference from the other teeth was invisible on the closest inspection. And like most other wonders created by man or God, this one was meaningless out of its context. Its context was, of course, the man himself, specifically the musculature of his upper lip, and generally, his emotional makeup. The latter reacted, in all its complexities, most extremely under the impact of terror. The numbness in the back of the knees, the palpitation which struck at the base of the throat like a heavy fist, the aching hollowness in the solar plexus need not concern us here. The drying of the mouth, occurring instantly and completely, does. For this resulted in an adhesion of the concave tooth to the inside of the upper lip—an utterly unbearable sensation. Simultaneously the lips expanded as the cheeks contracted, increasing the hardness of the vacuum which married flesh to enamel.

  The net result was a spastic smile, tight over the teeth and very wide, a narrowing of the eyes so sudden that (though they held only squeezed tears) they glittered like polished steel, and, directly over the tooth, just to the right of the median line, a slight, unceasing movement, as the imprisoned lip fought to free itself from the vise of vacuum. It was not a twitch, but rather a writhe, a ripple. Such a movement may be seen on the lips of the great cats just as they are about to attack. Such a shift of the lip might result in a sneer, if allowed to complete one; this, however, did not; the combined forces of smile and suction contained it too well for that.

  Men who sneer at their potential attackers may cow a few but are more often attacked. Men who smile in the face of danger are more rare, and are less often attacked. Men whose sneer is there to be seen, and all but eclipsed in a smile, send a message of such confidence that the enemy must turn into himself, find himself face to face with the fear of inferiority which lurks, to some degree, in every man; and with shocked eyes filled with this, will ask himself in frightened wonderment, “How did he know?” A more intimate question cannot be framed, a more vital one may not be imagined. In that instant the urge to attack is replaced by something greater—the desire to have that question answered; and whatever his urgency, whatever his reasons, whomever else he might ever attack, this one man is safe from him, especially because he will never answer.

  So it was that the great grizzled coachman hung over the youth who smiled up at him; and when Lance, in purest terror, began to rise, and because of the confines of the carriage, brought this towering enigma of an expression closer and closer to his enemy of the moment, Piggott’s rage dissolved into another thing which ran saltily down his cheek. He stepped back to the curb.

  “Eh,” he grunted, his features all a-pucker and his hands fumbling with the forgotten whip, “we ’ave no quarrel, thee and me, lad. I’ll not deny I need thee more than thou needest me and one day thee’ll fly up and away and leave me forgotten in this mud I dwell in.” He swallowed hard, and from the way his features wrung, one might think it burst something in his throat.

  Then in a rumble more normal for him, he said, “I curse ye, Lanky, myself, and sometimes God that this should be so, but …” He raised his heavy hands and let them fall … “It is so.”

  He climbed up on the box while Lance sank weakly back, shaken to the marrow as he always was by this sequence. It had happened many times before, and always it looked like the end of the world, and then like a swirling faint, and then like a miracle, wherein he emerged from his shameful paralysis to be hailed as victor. He was well loved for it, too; always unbelieving, utterly incognizant of the forces he had displayed (even in facsimile) he would wear his laurels gently, treating his defeated enemy with a residual fear which looked exactly like humility and compassion.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he said as the coach drummed on the cobbles of the Borough High Street, “At times I do go on like a smarmy little prig.”

  “Na,” said the old man, “and I’ll thank ye not to talk so about yerself. I might; ay, I might again, too, but I’ve a right to be ill-mannered, being what I am.”

  “I shall always be myself, this side of the river,” said Lance contritely.

  “This’ll not be your side very long,” growled the coachman, scowling at the filth and squalor, the clutter and clabber of these late silent streets; even deserted, they seemed to ring with the press which had abandoned them and which would tumble out in the morning, stinking of its sweat and pots and poverty. “Look ye, fold yer cloak over yer mouth, lad; I swear this city’s not fit for a gentleman to breathe in; ye can get the bloody pox from a gulp o’t. … ’Ere’s Long Lane now, and we’ll ’ave Bermondsey and ’ome directly.”

  “I’ll get us a new crest, Piggott.”

  “Na. Y’eve a look about ye that can’t be covered by a slouch ’at and a journeyman’s cape, Lanky, and ever’ groat’s worth will cost ye a thr’pny bit. Leave it to me; I’ll get old ’Omber to cut us a ’scutcheon for summat less than a bishop’s tithe.”

  “Very well, but I’ll pay it.”

  “Na, na, lad. ’Twas not your doing. …What did you say was the name of that brazen bit who chased ye out of Blanton ’Ouse?”

  “Miss Axelrood.”

  “Ah. I knew it minded me of summat.”

  “You know anything about her?”

  Piggott chuckled. “Na, Lanky. The name made me think I need some tallow on these journals or we’ll be a-shriekin’ like a oxcart and I’ll be loadin’ thatch instead o’ quality folk.”

  “Now, Piggott. I know you. What else?”

  “What else could there be?”

  “What about Miss Axelrood?”

  The old man scratched his head. “A mere thought, like. About ’er and, you know, ’er Ladyship the
Countess-Duchess of Almost.”

  “Miss Chudleigh?”

  “Ay. Now there’s a woman ’as a natural gift for hoorin’. She was a great beauty at the start—but so were those poor silly Gunning sisters, them that married Hamilton an’ Coventry. D’ye know seven ’undred people waited up all one night to see those two come out of an inn in the morning? Yet there was nothin’ hoorish about them. Then mayhap it ain’t beauty, but gall, what you call brazenness. Well, that poor mad Hannah Snell what joined the army and was wounded at Pondicherry, and dug out ’er own bullet lest the surgeon find ’er out—she ’ad more gall than anybody but ye can’t rightly call ’er a hoor. Or ye might say the talent lies in ways and means, like.

  “Na, bein’ that kind of a hoor takes more gifts than Dr. Johnson, Dame Jezebel and a gypsy juggler could trot out together. Like the way Lib magicked King Fred of Prussia, ’im they call the Great. Did she do it with ’er sparklin’ wit? She did not. Did she do it even by waggin’ ’er bottom? Not ’er. All she did was drink ’is ’ealth in fine strong Rhenish—a full English quart of it at a gulp; ay, and another like it to wash it down, one-two, less than half a minute, so they say. One of ’er gifts—part of the ’ole gift of hoorin’.” He wagged his head reverently.

  “Piggott, what the devil are you talking about? Miss Axelrood?”

  “At the moment,” said Piggott with considerable dignity, “hoorin’. And the gift. The gift.” He drove in thoughtful silence for a time. “I ’ad a dog, a splendid spaniel bitch, ’oo—”

  “Good God!”

  “Ye’re not ’earing me out, Lanky. She ‘ad a gift—rats. She could whip out rats where no rats were, snip-snap-snorem, an’ fill the air with flyin’ dead rats. Bring ’em ’ome, she would, and stack ’em up like faggots in the ruddy dooryard. An’ proud? I ’ad a tanner make me a hanger belt so wide, all o’ braided rats’ tails, two ’undred an’ three of ’em approximate. I never wore it but the first time; she come at me like a fiend wi’ th’ fistula.”

  “Piggott, what has this to do with—”

  “Hush, laddy-buck. As I was sayin’, it was a gift. The thing to remember about ’er an’ ’er rats, as with ’er Ladyship, is that with both the pretty bitches the gift come natural in all its parts. An’ it used to come to me often as I sat admirin’ ’er grace—it’s the spaniel I’m speakin’ about now—’er grace an’ skill, that if she’d ’ad the company of some older rat-hunter since she was weaned, why ’er talents might’ve been cultivated instead of growin’ wild as they did. Wild, they were splendid; what might they’ve been with a bit o’ tutorin’?”

  “Ridiculous, Piggott! She caught more rats than you knew what to do with as it was!”

  “So she did, and ye’ve put yer finger on the point about ratters; good enough is good enough. But what must a hoor be that she couldn’t be better? What could she get that she was stopped from more? Ye see, if ye consider it careful there’s a difference after all, between bitches and hoors. Now take Lib Chudleigh for one; she ’as a enviable freedom far as it goes, but when ye use yer longest-handled muckrake, ye’ll understand she’s boxed. She’s got to a pretty spot indeed, but it’s one she can’t move from. She can’t marry Kingston for being wed to Hervey; she can’t divorce Hervey for fear o’ losing her share of ’im, in case ’e gets to be the Earl o’ Bristol. What she should do is marry Kingston first and then despatch ’er Augie, but that might smack o’ bigamy. Hennyway, that’s Chudleigh, and it’s not ’er I’m discussin’.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Ain’t ye been listening, Lanky? Tsk, tsk. All I said was she’s boxed, an’ that shows she ’as a limit an’ she’s reached it. It occurs to me as I’m sure it ’as to ’er, that if she’d ’ad the proper ’ands to guide ’er in ’er youth she might ’ave done more and come farther.”

  “A little late for sore regret,” said Lance in his prim voice.

  “Ay, it is, for ’er; but a woman like ’er ’as a pride in ’er accomplishments, as a fine barrister might ’ave, or a horse trainer or one of them chaps paints pitchers. What might they do in the autumn o’ their life,” he orated with a showy gesture, “with their lives be’ind them and all their great skills still at a peak, leastways for knowin’ ’ow, even if they couldn’t do it? Why, they do what yer friend an’ mentor Simon Barrowbridge did; they indent an apprentice, that’s what, an’ convey to the young all the wisdom of their ruddy mucking years, that’s what they do.”

  Lulled by the rich rough voice and its ready cadences, Lance was perhaps slow to absorb exactly what simple, single thing the old man was saying in these thousands of words. When it came to him he sat up, he stood up, he shouted, “Piggott!”

  Immediately a third-storey casement banged open and twice the voice of a crow screamed down, “Stop thy bloody squealin’, ye shited swine, an’ give a decent lidy a wink o’ sleep!” The decent lady followed her suggestion with a more substantial stream of hints from her slops-pot which Piggott avoided by an adroit gigging of the horses, and they proceeded at a spine-shaking trot. “Savin’ that up for a week,” growled Piggott of their would-be donor, “the old miser.” He drew the horses in and gentled them, until at last Lance could be heard as he said, “What you’re saying is that Miss Axel—”

  “What I’m saying is this alone, Lanky: if Lib Chudleigh ’as apprenticed a gel, and if that apprentice ’as anything like the natural talent of ’er ruddy governess, an’ if that talented apprentice is yer Miss Axelrood—”

  “That’s three ‘ifs’ ” said Lance good-humoredly.

  “And if,” Piggott rolled on, ceaselessly as surf, “—you may ’ave a fourth, Lanky—if this pretty little poiniard of a gel has pointed ’erself your way, ye may call yerself but the bottom tread on a long flight o’ steps, to be tossed aside as someone else wins the palm.”

  Lance threaded his way through the mangled metaphor and then laughed uneasily. “All this, Piggott, because a lass ran out for a forgotten farewell?”

  “Ay, all that, and also to take yer tender thoughts away from the cobbles an’ stinks.”

  “I’d rather the cobbles an’ stinks,” Lance mimicked. “Piggot, I do think you’re mad.”

  “Ay, and so do I, lad, for not wantin’ ye out of yer depth. … ’Ere’s yer ruddy manor ’ouse, milord.”

  “Take care my cloak doesn’t go the way of the ’scutcheon,” said Lance as he stepped down, knowing that the old ruffian rightly read the annoyed affection in his tone. He could be quite sure of it as Piggott swept off his varnished hat and bowed from the box. “If the marster ’as need of me ’e need only ring; I await ’is pleasure.”

  “If the marster ’as need of you he’ll ruddy well walk down to the Purple Hart hoping you’re not to drunk to speak.”

  “Take care, laddy,” rumbled Piggott, and whipped up his horses.

  Lance stood at the curb watching him go, wanting to laugh, wanting to spit, wanting to make a gesture of some kind he wouldn’t make if he could think of it. Then he took the old man’s parting words at their explicit value, standing well back from the arch of the courtyard, looking for shadows any blacker than they should be, any slight movement which did not belong. Over him the sign of the Dirty Beast creaked, once, but that was only a breath of wind. (It had been the Doughty Lion before the Lord Protector changed the fashion.)

  He stepped cautiously through the arch, sidled to the right and got his back to the wall. Footpads usually operated out of their home districts, but sometimes the need was great, and in the dark … but tonight no one was about. Lance crossed the courtyard and tiredly mounted the outside staircase to the second storey. At the top he paused again, but still heard nothing but the impatient thump of a dreaming horse in the stables below. Sighing with weariness, he went back to his room, taking from his waistcoat the great iron key. He unlocked the door, kneed it open, kicked it closed behind him, and with the practiced motion of long habitation, knocked down the bar.

  The pop and sputter of a stinking sulphu
r match caught him between breaths, and in the magnitude of his astonishment, the small sound deafened him. The flame, when it came, gave him only itself and blindness; he saw it half-die as it passed to a taper, and then the candle was lit.

  Seated at his table, with his polished-copper mirror propped against the wall, clad in a shift of fine sheer lawn, sat Miss Axelrood. She smiled into the mirror, a second flame in a copper world, and her eyes held his.

  She began to comb her heavy hair.

  2.

  THE DRUMMING IN HIS ears began to have a visible accompaniment—spots and blotches of black intruding between himself and the night-lit spectre before him. But the spectre said, “You may breathe now, Captain,” in Miss Axelrood’s wicked half-whisper and gave him her half-wicked smile, so he breathed again.

  “Miss Ax—”

  “Shh!” she said quickly, silencing him. “This is not the time for names. They told me down below that this was the room of Master Lancaster Higger-Piggott, a barrister’s apprentice. How little that matters, since my business is with you, Captain.”

  “Y-yes,” he stammered, “H-he has gone to—uh—and will not return until, uh—”

  “Until after I leave,” she finished for him. She turned about to look directly at him; he felt himself blink as at a flare of light, she was so beautiful. He felt trapped, shocked, clumsy and guilty in guilt’s most humiliating hue; it was like being caught cheating at cards, on a Sunday, in a vestry, with one’s nose running. He became acutely aware of his shabby cloak and the drooping brim of his let-down hat, which he now snatched away. He fumbled at the edge of his cloak and abruptly sat on the edge of his bed, very probably because he could no longer stand up. She had put the candle on the tabouret, between them to one side. He could see her body clearly through the shift, yet she moved, she gestured, she held herself as if gowned and brocaded and presentable in a crowded drawing-room. She conducted herself, as it were, outside the obvious, in some made-up world of her own, furnished and populated only by what she chose to have in it. And she had the power to share this universe, wherein everything was as it should be according to her dictates; for she said, “How wise of you, Captain, to change your fine cloak for one like that, when duty calls you into such surroundings!”