Cruel Pink, Tanith Lee [universal ebook reader TXT] 📗

Parted with the carter there, and was roundly cursed by him despite the coin I gave. But this has happened before.

The snow ceased to fall as I climbed the hill, and I was glad to get some warmth by the exercise.

Groves of trees dominate the summit of the slope, and from one such I could make out the smoke of a brazier. What a picture was that, then, when once I got in among the trees, all set up as if for some epic scene at Drury Lane.

For there stood the adjutants and the other hangers-on, and the doctor looking grim, and there the husband, who must probably play the hero.

Jem Templeyard was not a bad fellow, thought I, with the irony of a man dragged from his bed too early, to clash blades in the ice and snow. A handsome youth, not yet twenty-two summers, and shaking enough I could see it, but whether from fright or freezing it would be hard to tell. Certainly he fired up when he saw me.

“You’re late, you damned villain!” he howled at me. “Too afraid to come? Or thought to cheat me?”

I shrugged, and reluctantly took off my coat. It’s better to fight in one’s shirt, I find. “You must allow me to have had some morsel to break my fast.”

“It will have been your last meal, you gutter scrump.”

“I am heartily sorry,” said I, “you term your bed a gutter.”

“What?” cried he, all amaze. “What—you think I meant that? By this it seems you admit you seduced my wife…”

Another of them intervened. “Hush, Jem, comport yourself as a gentleman. Well, Mr Thessaris, you’ve no second, I see.”

“None but my hound, who last night vowed he would come, then cried off due to a long interlude with the tinker’s bitch.”

One or two of them laughed. Which set off the fair Templeyard again. Once more they sternly patted him down. He did not remove his coat. A novice, plainly.

The brazier, meanwhile, which gave less heat than smoke, began to cough as if it had the autumn plague.

The umpire waved us to the centre of the glade, where the ground was flattish, though the snow truly hardened now, and would prove slippy, hiding also roots and other trap-trick delicacies under its mask.

We were next told, as is usual, that we might yet resolve the matter in some gentlemanly way.

“I am willing,” I said, “if Mr Templeyard is willing.”

“You forced my wife,” he snarled, his fine eyes flashing.

“I did not force her. I have never had to force that way in my life.”

“You lie! She swore you misled then forced her.”

“And why did she tell you this?”

“Why? In Christ’s holy name, you feculence, why?”

“Would it be, mayhap, she heard I had—shall I say to content you—misled and forced also the actress, Mis’us Peck? As I have been doing, I must add, and no penalty to it since most of the city is aware of it, and her husband with them, for the past six months?”

“What do you mean, vile debaucher?”

“I mean that jealousy, the green-eyed monster, has urged your wife to invent unkind tales of me.”

Templeyard drew and flourished his polished weapon in the air, nearly taking off with it, in the flurry, the nose of the unready umpire.

Then headlong the brat runs at me, red in the face and yowling.

54

Well, it is nothing but God’s truth, to be an actor is to gain many skills, to dight and diddle with a sword but one of them.

Why, not four years gone, I played the role of Hamlet, albeit in a much foreshortened version, at The King’s Theatre in Covent Garden. And even now, though reduced to strutting about the lesser stage of The Obelisk in Stampwell Street, (off Cartwheel Lane, you cannot miss the place), I maintain my fensive ability.

Nevertheless, it is no quiet thing to contest with a madman, strong with youth, passionate as a girl, and careless of his strokes as a drunken windmill.

Such an adversary may kill one from sheer clumsiness. At the least, take out an eye or off a hand—or choicer part.

As we skidded and lurched about the boards of Hyde Hill I came to think I had better duel with him another way. I spoke of jealousy, and I have seen that work curiously, and something of that too I had, abruptly, on the hill, attributed to Templeyard himself.

Best now to try my luck, for I should like that sport better, certainly, than this.

I lured him soon into an almighty lunge where the ground was at its most glassy. (It is all actors’ moves, I find. Life, that is. Or most of life.)

The blade wheeled wide of me as he staggered, and I, making as if to dart in again, stuck the side of my boot to his so that he skidded worse, and let go his sword in a crazed dance to save himself a plunge.

At this I caught him and wrestled him close, both his arms pinned. The heat of his body against mine, I sincerely own, was a great delight on such a frigid morning.

He struggled, naturally, mad as a boar under a net. The rest were some way off by then, huddled wisely to the brazier. Since Templeyard and I must one kill the other, let us get on with it as quick as able.

“Listen, Jeremias,” I murmured at his ear, “before one of us ends, you’d better hear me out.” He made a gobbling sound but nothing else. Untrained, though far younger than I, he was mightily out of breath, panting like a boy at the hoist of the scenery-shift. “It is you I have my eye upon. You, if you will, I had intended to mislead and—no, not force—but dally with. Your dear little wife, why she was only the means to the end, and I must suppose she guessed as much, and there we are again, before the green-eyed monster.” I had held him close as I said