Lacuna

Issue 5: October 2011

2011-10-15T00:15:00.009-05:00

Much of the history of the world has been lost. How magnificent and confusing what’s left is.
~James Dye

Contents
How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis by Molly Tanzer
il Duce by John Medaille
Moon and Fire by Patricia La Barbera
Chapman by N. T. Brown
neon mayflower by Robert Caporale
The Greatest Pianist in the World by Marko Fong
The Pioneer by B. G. Hilton
Days of the Accord by Isi Unikowski
Colonel Redl’s Knife Sheath by George Berguño
A Boy Like Any Other by Mary McCluskey
An Interview with Alex Epstein

ReviewsThe Circle Cast by Alex Epstein
A Penny Always Has Two Sides by Steffie Steinke
Day of Revenge by Deanna Poach

Questions, comments, or concerns may be e-mailed to the editor at markenberg[at]yahoo[dot]com. If you are interested in submitting fiction, poetry, or nonfiction to Lacuna, please see our submission guidelines.

How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis

2011-10-15T00:10:00.003-05:00

How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis
by Molly Tanzer

“All I shall say for myself on this score is this, if I appear to any one like a counterfeit, even for the sake of that chiefly ought I to be construed a true man, [for] who is the counterfeit's example, his original, and that which he employs his industry and pains to imitate and copy? Is it therefore my fault if the cheat by his wits and endeavours makes himself so like me, that consequently I cannot avoid resembling of him?”

-from Dr. Alexander Bendo’s advertisement of services, 1676

“Client for you, m’lord,” said Henry, poking his head around the door, but the servant quickly withdrew as a book flew at his face. The tome hit the door with a thump and fell open on the wooden floor; the pages rustled softly as they settled.

The esteemed Doctor Alexander Bendo swore as he gazed at the volume lying on the ground—he would have to pick it up, and picking it up meant having to bend over, and having to bend over meant first having to stand, and having to stand meant dizziness, and he could deal with the dizziness, but it also meant pain in every single joint, and he was tired of that—very tired.

Today was bad. Sometimes he was pain-free for weeks, once even for a year, give or take a month—but recently he was spending more and more time distracting himself with work or amusements or drink or drugs, or simply lying a-bed due to the frightful aching mass he called his body through force of habit. It was the weakness annoyed him the most, though, even more than the weeping chancres, more than the rash, the mottled hands, the swollen lymph nodes, the frequent impotence. . . but there was nothing for it. Quite literally nothing for it; he believed that now, as nothing, not even mercury, had helped. He was unaware if he had picked up the French disease while in France or from some slut who’d fucked a Frenchman, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that it wasn’t kidney stones. It certainly wasn’t scrofula.

It was syphilis.

Which was amusing, because syphilis was one of the diseases Dr. Bendo had some reputation for being able to cure.

Which was amusing, because Dr. Bendo had absolutely no ability to cure syphilis, no matter what his advertisements or his patients or his own mouth might proclaim.

“Hey Doc,” called Henry, cautiously opening the door. “She’s gettin antsy, this one. High-steppin sort, satin-and-silk, you know how they are.”

“Get the fuck out,” snapped Dr. Bendo, reaching for his wine glass, only to find it long-drained—he resolved to buy a bigger glass. “I’m not at home to patients—look at me! Surely. . .”

Go down there.

“Surely what, m’lord?”

I’ll cure you if you do.

“Surely. . . ah,” Dr. Bendo sat up, his face as white as almond-milk. “Surely. . .”

Symptom-free. I promise. Just deliver me to her.

“Surely. . .” Henry frowned; he was used to his master’s eccentricities, but absent-mindedness was not usually one of them.

“Surely, Henry, she will wait for such a master of medicine as myself,” said Dr. Bendo, heaving himself to his feet, the momentary disorientation he always felt when getting up dissipating quickly due to his excitement. These dark days, the only relief he got from his malady was through make-believe, play-acting, and thus had the persona of Dr. Bendo, the extraordinarily talented Italian pathologist, physician, and apothecary of London’s Tower Street, come into being in the first place. No one could possibly see the notorious libertine and satirist John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, in the exotic, foreign, and pious Dr. Alexander Bendo. The disguise was absolute. He’d treated noblewomen as Dr. Bendo whom he’d fucked as John Wilmot, and not a one had guessed he was the same man. But after nearly a month the masquerade was wearing thin, and though the initial excitement of playing the mountebank had distracted him most effectively, his symptoms had returned with a vengeance. Dispensing wisdom and medicine had gone from being an amusing diversion to an actual job, and while the honest Dr. Bendo might enjoy an honest day’s labor, John Wilmot certainly did not.

“I’ll go down and tell the bird you’ll be down directly,” said Henry. “Ought to be a tidy packet in it for us. She’s a fine wealthy hag and strumpet.” He chuckled as his master smoothed his robes, brushed his great false beard, and donned the large, bejeweled amulet that had attracted at least as much attention and comment from clients as his cure-all tonics. “Lady S— is known all over town as nothing but a common—”

“Oh, I knowing the lady,” said Dr. Bendo, and that was true, both in the literal and Bibilcal sense. He cleared his throat and winked at Henry. “Did she saying vat the trouble vas?” His favorite part of the Dr. Bendo character was the voice—he knew it veered more toward the German than the Italian way of speaking, but no one seemed to notice.

“Silent as the grave on that account,” said Henry, shaking his head.

No matter. Dr. Bendo waved Henry away and trotted down the hallway to his consulting room. He had only just taken a seat behind his massive desk—bought from a rival whose fortunes had turned, made to look authentic with important-looking papers, the mounted skeleton of a cat, and his old school-boy Latin and Greek texts—when there came a knock, and then Henry threw the waiting-room door open with a flourish. The man had been a barker at some gypsy revue before being hired to play the role of physician’s assistant, and knew how to make a show of it. Lady S— rustled in after, her entrance no less theatrical. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, her aged but still-impressive bosom heaving as if she were in the utmost distress.

“My dear Doctor,” she sighed, her red lip trembling. “I—”

“Vait,” he said. “Let my man pouring the vine, and then he vill leave us in privacy.”

“Oh, of course,” said Lady S—, settling herself on the wooden chair, but as soon as the door was shut, she leaned forward to impart her complaint.

“I—I have need of your services,” she said, running her tongue over her lips, but Dr. Bendo ignored this—unlike John Wilmot, the good doctor never accepted cunt over cash as payment. “The circumstances are nothing short of dire, I assure you.”

“Vat are your symptoms?” He certain they would be similar to his own, or a variation thereof. It was beyond the realm of possibility that Lady S— could manage to escape Cupid’s disease forever, not with her habits, too similar to his own.

“Symptoms?” tittered Lady S—. “Me? Symptoms? No no, Doctor, I’m not here on my account. My. . . daughter.”

“Did you bring ze child vith you?”

“She’s staying with me, in Westminster,” said Lady S—. “She’s come to back to England on account of her, ah, difficulties, and given that one of your cure-alls saved the life of my lady’s maid. . .”

“Oh, ja, ja,” said Dr. Bendo, unsure which wench the Lady S— spoke of. He’d assisted many of the better sort of servants along with nobles, merchants, and beggars the past few weeks with medicines, liquid tonics that were just herbs soaked in booze, or bunk pills comprised of chalk, street-filth, and sometimes his own semen—when he could endure the agony required to obtain it. Thus was his surprise greater than anyone’s when his treatments resulted in success. “I am glad to hearing she is much better, ja?”

“Indeed,” said Lady S—. “But my daughter’s complaint is of a much more. . . delicate. . . nature.”

“Oh?”

“Her husband—a wealthy Dutchman, we should never have allowed a match with a foreigner, beg pardon, but there it is—well, the brute is considering annulling their marriage, claiming she is barren. I suspect, given it has only been some months since the wedding, that the problem is not so much barrenness as, ah, something else. She was a most religious child and fought to remain unmarried, but the match was too good for us not to induce her to accept him. Now this has occurred, but she will not even discuss the problem with me, her own mother.” Lady S— sniffed.

She broke out a fan. Dr. Bendo wished he had one. Despite all he could do his lodgings were too warm. The summer of 1676 had been unusually hot, and as he watched Lady S— fanning herself he was reminded of how abominably he was sweating under his robes and false beard.

“Do you think ze child will discussing vith a doctor, a strange man?” asked Dr. Bendo, refilling his guest’s wine-glass.

Doesn’t matter. You must get to her. The child is the one I want—not this crone.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Lady S—, sipping her wine.

“I vill suggest to you a plan,” said Dr. Bendo, stroking his beard, but carefully, lest the heat had loosened the glue. “My vife—Mrs. Bendo—would be happy to discussing ze problem vith your child this after-noon. She is out doing ze shopping now, but later I vill have her pay a call. Perhaps she can gleaning from your daughter vat the problem is?”

“You’re a professional, and a miracle-worker,” said Lady S—, tossing a small leather sack on the desk, where it jingled appealingly. “The rest of your fee after? With a bonus if they are reconciled?”

“Ja,” said Dr. Bendo, nodding vigorously. “Tell the girl to expect my vife after the dinner-hour. And tell her to eating nothing that might giving her vind, or cramp. If Mrs. Bendo must examining her, she should be fit.”

“Of course,” said Lady S—. “And thank you.”

“Thank you,” said Dr. Bendo.

* * *

“Just what the fuck is going on?”

John Wilmot threw his beard on the bed where it lay like an enormous sleeping weasel. Next came the amulet and the robe, but he retained his gloves despite the warmth. He couldn’t stand the sight of his hands during an outbreak.

You’re getting weaker, pretty Johnny.

“I fucking know that!” Wilmot poured himself another tipple of wine, but his hands were trembling and he spilled more than he managed to get in the cup. He slurped the pool of wine off the table and then chugged the contents of the glass. “But why not just cure me? We’ve had good times, just like I promised, just like you wanted. I’m not even thirty, for Christ’s sake, and now—what—you’re just up and leaving me for some slut?”

She’s not a slut.

“Then what the fuck do you want with her?”

I suppose I should’ve said, she’s not yet a slut.

“You’re a bastard,” said Wilmot, now drinking directly from the bottle. It was soon empty and he threw it out the window, giving a hoarse chuckle as it smashed on the side of the neighboring building, raining glass down upon the floppy, pock-marked bosom of an unfortunate whore who lounged in the alleyway. “Never get tired of it, do you?”

Why should I?

“I hate you.”

Then why so loath to be rid of me? Shouldn’t you be shimmying into your stays, Mrs. Bendo?

“Maybe I won’t go.”

Foolishness.

“Why?”

Spite me at the cost of your own health?

“Cure me first, then I’ll go, if it’s so fucking important to you.”

Silence. Wilmot shouted down the stairs for another bottle of wine, only to have Henry shout up at him that they were out, did he have coin to buy more? Slamming the door, Wilmot threw himself down on the bed but then regretted it. The abused lesions on his back sent thrills of nauseating pain throughout his body. He wiped away an involuntary tear with the sleeve of his linen undershirt only to knock a newer chancre on his arm with his rather prominent nose. An acidic mix of bile and wine rose in his throat as the agony gripped him, but he managed to at least vomit on the floor instead of on his sheets. He sighed as he rested, his heartbeat wild and painful.

You don’t have syphilis, you know.

“What?”

You’ve had it before, yes. You managed to kick it with your natural vitality. As for right now, you’re clean of it.

“Then. . .”

When did we meet, Johnny?

“When—I must’ve been twelve. . .

Oh, yes. That little caper. But I meant more our first meeting of bodies and wills, dear Johnny. When did I take up residence?

“It must’ve been. . . over seven years, I’d say?”

And when did you first see the lesions?

Wilmot was silent, cottoning on.

I—I didn’t want you to find out like this.

Usually, Wilmot’s constant companion sounded self-assured and thoughtful—It was self-assured and thoughtful, by Its very nature, but It sounded unhappy and almost petulant now. Wilmot sighed. He should’ve known, should’ve guessed, but the touch-and-go nature of the malady had made him dismiss the possibility of any sort of causality. For years It had been his best friend and worst enemy, his in-house editor for poems and satires; his frequent muse and more frequent distracter, the voice that said yes when reason said no, It’s suggestions always hilarious but not to everyone, thus getting him kicked out of court and into trouble with the law on a number of occasions—and It was a veritable bloodhound when it came to sniffing out ladies of quality with an inclination to spread or suck. He had once called It his guardian demon, and It had liked the title so much It had adopted it permanently, referring to Itself as such at every available opportunity.

Do you know what a disease is?

“Strumpet’s revenge,” said Wilmot.

When your body plays host to tiny creatures with motives of their own, it can make you sick.

“That’s stupid,” said Wilmot. “That’s not true.”

Suit yourself.

“What the devil are you trying to say?”

I’ve tried, dear Johnny, to correct what I’ve done to you, living here with you, in this body, but. . . well, it’s gotten out of hand. It’s been a time since you’ve had a spell of decent health, hasn’t it? I’ve got to go. I’d like to see my pretty protégé well again.

It made no sense, but Wilmot was the first to admit that he was not a thoroughly sensible man after the better part of a decade living with a spirit-creature who talked to him in a voice only he could hear. “Why this girl?” he asked.

We met her once. She’s pretty. And innocent. It will be fun.

“And I’ll be. . .”

Like I was never here. The chancres will heal, the pain in your joints will ease. . .

Wilmot sat up, unsure how he felt about all this—the prospect of health was tempting, but the notion of being without his guardian demon felt oddly frightening after so long, like taking a place of one’s own after years of living with a friend.

Don’t be an idiot.

“But—”

No.

“But—”

In the end It got its way, as It always did, and Wilmot staggered to his feet, shouted for Henry, and with the aid of his manservant donned shift, stays—loose, his back was too sore to tighten the corset much—then a bustle, the stomacher, petticoats, over-dress, and wig. Over the course of an hour he transformed into a handsome woman slightly past her prime, the esteemed Mrs. Bendo. He wore no makeup—Mrs. Bendo did not paint her face like a harlot, being a good woman and wife—and, only slightly behind schedule, the disguised Earl of Rochester descended from his rooms on high pattens into the coach that bore an advertisement draped from the windows for Dr. Bendo’s Cure-All Tonics.

As he rode to Lady S—’s manse Wilmot chuckled to himself, considering the prospect of a life without pain. He would never again become Mrs. Bendo out of necessity—only design. The disguise started as a lark, a tool for the occasional cheap thrill, soothing when the sores bubbled up on his cock, rendering him more or less impotent, or at the very least disinclined toward any sort of friction on that area. One of Dr. Bendo’s many claims was the ability to read fortunes in birth-marks, but some ladies—often the more virginal, tempting ones—were too shy to reveal a mole or other private imperfections to an older male. They would, however, show such blemishes to a matronly woman, and the wide skirts disguised the occasional limp, itchy cockstands he managed while running his gloved hands over the skin of unblemished, youthful skin.

Wilmot was no stranger to dressing in women’s clothes—he rather liked it, actually. All of his acquaintances learned sooner or later to expect semi-regular visits from odd persons, male or female, who would later be revealed as the Earl of Rochester after he’d had a laugh at his friends’ expense. The latest incarnation of a long-standing tradition, Mrs. Bendo was truly his crowning accomplishment; no act other than his usual rakish persona had gotten him into so many private chambers, and never so easily. Picking his way out of the carriage and up to the door of Lady S—’s fashionable residence he knocked and greeted the flunky who answered the door.

“Is my lady’s daughter in?” asked Mrs. Bendo—her accent was lighter than her husband’s, but pronounced enough when whispered to mask Wilmot’s tenor. “I vas summoned by Lady S— to see about—”

“She’s waiting in her chambers,” called Lady S—, padding into the foyer. “Mrs. Bendo. I presume? How very good of you to come.”

* * *

* * *

“Yes?” The voice from behind the door was high, feminine, and musical.

“Mrs. De Groot?” Wilmot pitched his voice slightly higher. “Mrs. Bendo to see you, my chicken.”

“Oh,” came the response, and the door opened, revealing pure beauty.

Wilmot caught his breath—the pale, lovely creature who looked at him out of mournful blue eyes the color of a summer sky was nothing short of magnificent, a jewel, and Wilmot realized he had indeed seen her before. It was only a year ago, her first court appearance, he had noticed her then and desired her greatly, but just like himself he’d gotten drunk and forgotten about her until months later, only to be informed that she had been snapped up by a Dutch merchant, wedded and bedded and beyond his reach, living in Rotterdam.

Wilmot stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, almost salivating. In the coach It had told him It must leave his body through fluid of some sort, and given the hearty stirring in his breeches, Wilmot knew exactly how he’d best like to bestow his gift upon this girl. He’d never be able to fuck her—such a prospect was impossible if he wanted to avoid dancing the Tyburn jig—but perhaps he could find a privy and rub out a “tonic” that would serve his purpose nicely. It would be worth the pain for all the pleasures to come after.

“Mrs. De Groot?” asked Mrs. Bendo. “I am coming for you, my lady.”

How true that would be, he thought to himself, delighted.

“My mother said you’d call,” said Mrs. De Groot, her shell-pink lips forming the words as if they were pearls and flowers instead of the sort of common speech one might hear anywhere in the street. “I hope your journey was not too hot?”

“Ja, ja, not too hot,” said Mrs. Bendo, seating herself where Mrs. De Groot indicated.

“Excellent,” said Mrs. De Groot. “But it is very warm. Please tell me if you require a drink or a fan, or. . .”

“Are you nervous?” asked Mrs. Bendo, noticing that the young woman toyed with a fan herself, her hands twisting around it as they sat together.

“Why would I be nervous?” asked Mrs. De Groot, though she looked away as she said it, her voice trembling.

“Your husband is vanting an annulment,” said Mrs. Bendo. “Your mother is saying so to my husband. He is claiming you are barren, Mrs. De Groot. But sometimes it can taking several months before child is coming, ja? Any reasonable man is knowing.”

“My husband is not a reasonable man,” said Mrs. De Groot, fanning herself. “I cannot imagine anything is wrong beyond he simply doesn’t. . . doesn’t like me. He married me for my beauty, but any Christian knows beauty is hardly the foundation for a solid marriage. We are. . . incompatible.”

“Oh?” All of Mrs. Bendo’s patients agreed that her chief virtue was her ability to listen; her kindly manners and warm smile loosened the stiffest of tongues. Wilmot, for his part, loved gossip, and could read a face as easily as a book, in or out of character, and he saw a slight melting of the ice that sheathed Mrs. De Groot. Likely the girl’s mother was not the listening ear she needed—buthe could be that ear.

“He likes to drink,” said Mrs. De Groot. “And. . . and he eats to excess. He was very fat in the stomach when we married and has only grown. He entertains no notion of temperance.”

“I have hearing the Dutch are professing much virtue in the chapel, but exhibit little in the home,” said Mrs. Bendo wisely.

“That’s just it,” said Mrs. De Groot, warming perceptibly, her cheeks glowing with pleasure. “My mother. . . my mother thinks little of my desire for peace, and clean living, and prayer. . . and my husband thinks less of it. I am so very alone, and. . . oh, Mrs. Bendo, can I trust you to keep secrets?”

“Ja, ja, of course,” said Mrs. Bendo, patting Mrs. De Groot’s knee with her gloved hand. “Unless it is some symptom, not even my husband shall hearing it.”

“It’s just that. . . my husband is no Papist, or course, but he might as well be the very Pope himself for all he cares about simplicity and virtue! I—I’ve been sneaking out to go to church at night, when he has drunk himself silly and cannot hear.”

“Drunk himself silly?” Mrs. Bendo frowned. “Surely, not more than a few months into matrimony, your husband should be vanting to keeping sober, for the marriage bed, ja?”

Mrs. De Groot blushed and Wilmot had to work hard to keep his countenance—the pretty red shade of her cheeks and the mention of marital pleasures had animated a usually flaccid part of his body. He felt It stirring in his mind, pleased. Soon, thought Wilmot.

Soon.

“I. . . I cannot. . .” whispered Mrs. De Groot. “Please, I. . .”

“Ja?” Mrs. Bendo leaned forward, intrigued.

“I lied to you,” said Mrs. De Groot, her eyes welling. “When I said he didn’t like me. He. . . he is furious with me, I should have said. He wants. . . oh, Mrs. Bendo! We have not done as married people do, not yet. I asked him to wait for my courses to begin, for when we were wed, I had not yet gotten my first sign of them,” she wiped away a tear with a delicate finger. “My mother pushed the match on me when Mr. De Groot proposed.”

“Have you achieved menarche now?” Mrs. Bendo coughed and cleared her throat—Wilmot realized he had dropped his accent at this surprising piece of information.

“No,” came the answer. “That’s the trouble.”

Wilmot froze. He had been accused many times of being a seducer of innocents, not without cause, but even he shied away from assaulting a child. He looked at her again, noticing then how very thin and young she was, how her eyes were so very large in her face, like an infant’s, how her stomacher showed no indication it was flattening a bosom beneath it. He felt cold, and suddenly horrified by the notion of passing his invisible visitor on to this girl.

Don’t be an idiot. And don’t worry about what she’s said. She’ll never achieve menarche. She’s as ripe as she’ll ever be.

“What?”

“What?” asked Mrs. De Groot, confused.

She’s the perfect decoy, Johnny, think of it! A beautiful girl, her body will never be marred by a pregnancy! No need to worry about contraception, can’t you see it? She is an ideal host! What times we’ll have! With you, if you like, as soon as you’re well, as soon as I—

Wilmot felt nauseous. He shook his head, the curls of his wig bouncing, and Mrs. De Groot looked at her companion with surprise.

“Did I offend?” she asked, lip trembling.

“No,” said Mrs. Bendo, standing. “No, I—I—”

Don’t be a fool!

“I won’t!” cried Mrs. Bendo.

“Won’t what?” asked Mrs. De Groot, alarmed. “Mrs. Bendo, I’m sorry, I—oh!”

Mrs. Bendo had collapsed, shaking, twitching as she lay on the floor, froth on her lips. Mrs. De Groot knelt beside the older woman, horrified, ready to call for a servant, call for Mrs. Bendo’s husband, the doctor—but then she noticed the woman’s clothing, the long sleeves, the high neckline, the gloves. Convinced that the doctor’s wife had fainted from the heat Mrs. De Groot poured a glass of wine and dribbled a little into the woman’s slack mouth.

“You must be so warm,” said the girl, as Wilmot managed to swallow. “I’m going to take off your gloves, at least. We must cool you down.”

Wilmot tried to say no, tried to forbid it, but he was too weak, the pain was too potent. It was angry, and It could make Its presence known at such times, raging inside him as he lay there on the floor, prodding him, demanding he do something, anything, to get It out of him and into her, punishing Wilmot with pain, terrible agony, but Wilmot would not. He opened his eyes and saw Mrs. De Groot looking down at him in some distress as she tugged at his glove, and it came away, revealing palms covered in a warty red and white rash, putrid in places, the cracks weeping just as he wept to see her horror.

“Poor woman,” said Mrs. De Groot, distressed. “You’re ill.”

Wilmot nodded, realizing his disguise was still successful—he had to get out of there, despite the anguish in his bones and muscles.

“Is it serious?” asked Mrs. De Groot.

Wilmot nodded again, ignoring Its demands. He would go, he would leave this girl untouched, a mercy she would never know.

“My. . . my husband has left me a great deal of pocket-money for this journey,” said Mrs. De Groot. “If you are in want, please. . .”

“No,” whispered Mrs. Bendo. “No, I—”

“Then I will do what I can in other ways,” said Mrs. De Groot. “I—I shall pray for you, Mrs. Bendo.”

And then she kissed his oozing, rotten hand.

He heard laughter, Its laughter, and felt palpably better in that instant—a rushing feeling and then clear-headedness, emptiness. Startled, he looked up, to see Mrs. De Groot looking alarmed.

“No!” he cried, scrambling to his feet more easily than he had in years.

“I. . . I fear I’m feeling strange, all of a sudden,” said Mrs. De Groot, pressing a hand to her temple. “I. . . think this interview would best be conducted on a cooler day. Is that quite all right?”

“Come back,” he said, pleading, though not with her.

“You may, if you wish,” she said.

There was no other answer.

Wilmot nodded; there was nothing for it. He left as he had come, down the stairs, out into the street without collecting his fee, into the coach that waited for him, Henry chatting with the driver, curious to see his ersatz mistress so defeated.

“Not go well, Mrs. Bendo?” Henry asked, leering at him as they drove away.

“I’m done with all of this,” said Wilmot, tearing off his wig. “We’re closing up shop.”

Upon returning home he burned all the clothing he’d used as Dr. Bendo and wife, and dressed once again as John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, noting as he did so that the lesions on his arms and groin were already shrinking, the guilty rash on his hands nearly healed.

“Back to court,” he told Henry, when the servant looked at him, surprised. “I’m going home.”

The next day, all patients who came for treatment were instead greeted by the sight of furniture being carted away, rooms cleaned, the servants doing so taciturn and unhelpful. All were directed to the note tacked to the door:

Mourn ye the death of Doctor Alexander Bendo, who yesterday was spirited away by a wicked necromancer, offended by the good Doctor’s ability to cheat him of the many deaths the sorcerer attempted by means of his black magics.

With regret,
The Management

* * *

It was lonely without It in his mind, teasing him, correcting his grammar when he wrote, encouraging him against his better judgment to drink or gamble or whore, but he was so long established in those habits, grammar included, that he was certainly capable of such without Its influence, especially feeling so goddamn healthy as he did. He laughed, drinking deeply—he was out with friends who had missed him during his stint as Dr. Bendo, and the crowded tavern in which they made merry was noisy and smoky, just the sort of entertainment he had missed during his illness.

He tried not to worry about Mrs. De Groot. He’d been doing so earlier when his friends came for him. Finding him inebriated and monstrously grumpy, they’d hauled him out into a coach, demanding he cheer up. They’d done a good job at it, though their timing could not account for his tolerance. Wilmot was just entering high spirits as they were falling down drunk, and, leaving his companions face-down in their own drool on the ale-house table he sidled over to where Henry caroused with some of the other servants.

“Do you see that strumpet?” asked Wilmot, elbowing Henry to get his attention, using his flagon of beer to indicate the pretty dark-eyed girl serving meat and drink to the many customers.

“Yessir?”

“I am going to fuck that strumpet,” said Wilmot, draining his mug and tossing it to the ground, feeling as virile as he had as a boy at Oxford, or while abducting and making violent love to the woman he’d make his wife when he was only nineteen, or countless other lusty incidents involving boys and girls, men and women, whores and virtuous girls, and once, just once, a sheep.

A fortnight later, Wilmot untangled his limbs from the gently snoring, angelically beautiful pageboy he’d plied with wine and then deflowered after meeting him at Whitehall. In the dark room he rose to use the chamberpot, but, fiddling with his breeches, he touched a painful bump on his cock. Startled, he forgot his need to piss entirely and lit a candle. After his watering eyes adjusted to the sudden light, he saw a telltale lesion in the process of forming.

“Have you come back?” he whispered into the darkness. “My guardian demon? Are you there? Have you come home?”

There was no answer. Only a silent, throbbing ache.

* * *

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

When I write historical fantasy, I often I find myself most inspired by real history. "How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis" actually grew out of an abandoned novel project. While researching John Wilmot's early life, I ended up reading onward (because he was such a fascinating individual!) and learned about the history that informs this story--that he once disguised himself as a mountebank, and treated people as "Dr. Bendo," and also furthered the disguise by pretending to be Dr. Bendo's wife, "Mrs. Bendo," in order to make his young female clients more comfortable. I have a weakness for charlatans, quackery, and patent medicine, so, for me, such a dirty and ridiculous farce fairly begged to be incorporated into a story!

What inspires you to write and keep writing?

When I write, I get to do all sorts of fun things--create characters, give them life within their worlds, and, with historical fiction, I get to mess with the historical record, which is always fun! Also, with historical fantasy, sometimes I can (like with this story) highlight something unusual about a famous historical person, but it's also fun to take someone, be they real or imagined, who would have existed on the margins of history, and give them life.

What it comes down to is that I know what pleasure reading good fiction gives me--that's why I so enjoy my work with Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed--and I hope to give that same pleasure to others!

What do you think is the most important part of a historical fiction story?

I would say mostly the same sorts of things that are important to any story--strong characters, good worldbuilding, a plot that starts and remains interesting, and attention to detail. That the attention to detail is often (but of course not always) research-based presents a different set of challenges for the author. I remember a friend once chided me because I'd written something set in Victorian England that referenced a "can" instead of a "tin"--those little details are super-important. Lack of attention to those things can jar readers familiar with the period in which one is writing, the same as getting cultural details wrong when writing outside one's direct experience.

What do you think is the attraction of the historical fiction genre?

There's so many! How can I pick? Reading stories that aren't those you get in history books! Hearing from people on those aforementioned margins! With historical fantasy, adding in ghosts and monsters and demons and whatever writers can dream up! Clothes! Adventures! "Watching" people deal with the unique challenges associated with their era! Different styles of speech! Swords! Bizarre firearms! Battles! Salons and armories and boudoirs and battlefields and privies and castles and forests and firepits and weapons. . . I need to stop. Everything!

When you read something that really captures the "feel" of an era, it's totally delicious reading. . . at least for me.

What advice do you have for other historical fiction writers?

Read whatever you can about the era in which you wish to write! Research is crucial, and can consist of any and everything. If you don't love something enough to learn about it, it's possible you don't love it enough to write (well) about it. Read books written during the era, and read modern-day historians who write about the period, too. Find online dictionaries of slang. Anything! It should be fun! Also remember. . . there's nothing worse than bad pastiche. I say this having done it!

Moon and Fire

2011-10-15T00:09:00.004-05:00

Moon and Fire
by Patricia La Barbera

The soldiers did not bother to tie me up. They left me in the belly of the ship with many of my parents' possessions. I saw my mother's jewelry, gold bowls, and vases. The sword with the jewel-encrusted handle that my father, the king, had held to defend us lay on a pile of gold coins. Moon and Fire, my leopards, languished in a cage.

At night, I lay down next to them, and Fire reached to me, the claws of one paw curling around my hair, just like he did at home. But home was no more. The Romans killed my family as I watched. The leader of the army stopped a soldier from killing me. He pointed to my eye, which has a slit of black instead of a circle. My father had been delighted when I was born and declared that I was an oracle. I wanted to make him happy, so I learned the art of ambiguity very early. Sometimes even I believed I could see the future, but I never saw this happening. Because of my amber cat's eye, he gave me Moon and Fire when they were eight weeks old.

When the ship landed, I watched the leopards leave me on a cart after they were auctioned. They slowly became smaller as they advanced down the road, and the last of my previous life disappeared. I cried, and the soldiers told me that leopards were worth more than the daughter of a king. From that day on, I craved one more independent act.

They brought me to the Colosseum, and threw me in the dark cellar. The lions that killed the Christians and fought with the gladiators looked out of their cages at me. I don't think I imagined the look of resignation that I saw in many of them. No doubt believing I had some power over animals, the soldiers made me care for them.

Every night I dreamed of my mother's eyes and my father's laugh, how happy I had been with my five brothers and Moon and Fire. In my dreams I was still the daughter of a king. But each morning I'd awaken to scrape dung and feed the lions their victims.

For a while, some rich women of Rome visited me, a curiosity. They asked me to prophesy for them and left me with a trinket, which one of the guards always took. Rich people are fickle, though, and in time no one came to visit.

Each night I dreamed my wonderful dreams. But first, before I fell asleep, I thought about one more independent act. I was still the daughter of a king.

Time passed slowly. One day, many years from when I was captured, I knew I would die soon. The cats were roaring and restless. With arthritic fingers, I opened one of the cages and walked inside. I was old and sick, and the beasts were hungry.

* * *

Patricia La Barbera, MFA, has had poetry and prose published in various magazines. She is also an editor. Her mystery novella is titled The Celtic Crow Murders. Ideas for her stories emerge from words, dreams, and pictures. She lives in Florida with her husband.

il Duce

2011-10-15T00:09:00.002-05:00

il Duce
by John Medaille

* * *

John Medaille has been published on Pseudopod, Escape Pod, Dunesteef and Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine and is working on a short story collection called: Hideous Tales of Doomed Spacemen, Demonic Cameras, Protoplasmic Flesh-Eaters, The Supernatural, U.F.O.’s, Interdimensional Beasts, Evil Children, Misunderstood Robots, Telephone Calls from Beyond the Grave, Mayhem, Murder AND THE MACABRE!

Where do you get the ideas for your work?

This work was inspired by the notebooks and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci and speculation as to what would have happened if he had turned his genius to Mussoliniesque world domination.

What do you think is the most important part of a historical fiction story?

I like to think of history as a progression of personalities, rather than as a progression of events or ideas.

Chapman

2011-10-15T00:08:00.000-05:00

Chapman
by N. T. Brown

1.

Chapman, in the schoolhouse, stares through the open window at the orchards. On a distant hill, the boughs move in the breeze as though a gentle hand is guiding them. And indeed, Chapman thinks, there must be one—the hand of God. No movement without purpose. Even if he doesn’t know what that purpose is.

The schoolmaster’s rod slams down on Chapman’s open book, and the boy nearly jumps out of his seat. Everyone in class is looking at him. The schoolmaster’s oversize nose with its tufts of black hair sticking out of each nostril dips down to within an inch of Chapman’s face. His mouth opens to reveal his rotted tooth. “Perhaps, Mr. Chapman, you think you can find that sum out in those fields?”

On the blackboard, a multiplication problem. Chapman scratches an answer onto his paper and the schoolmaster sighs, goes back to the front of the class. “You forgot to carry the two,” he says. On the board, he works the problem out to its end. “How,” he says, whirling back around, “will you ever be able to transact business if you can’t make computations? How will you keep yourself from being cheated? I know your father, Mr. Chapman. Do you think, when he takes his crops to market, that he doesn’t know the exact amount he should receive?”

Chapman blinks a few times.

“How will you make money?” the schoolmaster asks.

I don’t care about money, Chapman thinks.

* * *

Outside, boys and girls pour into the late afternoon sun. Someone shoves Chapman from behind. “Hey, big eyes!”

Chapman turns back.

“Hey, hoot-owl, where’d you get those eyes? They’re the size of dinner plates!”

“And you’re skinnier than a scarecrow. I thought your father was a farmer. Don’t you have enough food?”

“You leave him alone!” Nancy Tannehill, brown hair, blue eyes, freckles, stands between them. “Look at your own snub nose. You’ve got no right to talk!”

The boys lean back, thumbs hooked in pockets. “Let’s go,” they laugh. “Leave these two lovebirds alone.”

“We are not lovebirds,” Nancy calls after them. Then, quietly: “Where are you going, John?”

“Out to the orchard.”

“What for?”

Chapman kicks a pebble with his bare toe. “Sit under a tree, read my Bible.”

“Can I come? Will you read to me?”

On the hill, his back against a trunk, Chapman reads from the book of Matthew: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about what you will eat or drink, or what you will wear. Is life not more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds: they neither sow nor reap nor store away into barns, and yet your Father in Heaven feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?”

“Is that why you don’t wear shoes?” Nancy asks.

Chapman holds his finger on the page.

“You’re not poor,” she says. “I know your father can afford shoes. But you won’t wear them. Why?”

“They cramp my feet,” Chapman says.

“Let me feel them,” Nancy says. Lying on the grass beside him, hair splayed like pine straw, she twists around to examine his soles. Her tiny hands rub them up and down, a sensation Chapman has never felt. “They’re like leather,” she says. “They’re harder than any shoe.”

Chapman smiles.

“You’re a strange boy, John Chapman,” Nancy says. She starts to weave blades of grass into a design. Chapman lets an ant climb up his arm.

“I had the dream again last night,” he says.

Nancy sits up. “Tell me.”

“My mother in bed, coughing blood. Choking on her own blood. Begging me to help her. Blood coming out of her nose.”

Nancy squeezes his hand, looks into his eyes, says nothing.

The sun drops behind the hill and darkness falls over the orchard as though someone covered it with a blanket.

Chapman gets to his feet. “We should go,” he says.

* * *

The schoolmaster’s gelding is tied outside Chapman’s house. Autumn’s first chill slices through the air. Chapman steps through the dark like a cat and peers through the window, where, by light of a candle, his father and the schoolmaster sit talking.

“It’s not that he’s incapable,” the schoolmaster says. “He just doesn’t apply himself. He’s a daydreamer.”

Father smokes his pipe, strokes his beard.

“And he’s a good lad,” the schoolmaster says. “I don’t mean to imply that he’s not. I just worry about his future, is all.”

Father exhales. “Perhaps Johnny isn’t cut out for school. He’s more of an outdoorsman. Quite a talented horticulturalist—an arborman if I’ve ever seen one. In fact”—he leans forward and says something too low for Chapman to hear.

The schoolmaster rocks back with a loud snort. “He communicates with trees? Listen, sir, I graduated second in my class from William and Mary, and if you think for a second I’ll believe such twaddle—”

“And I fought with General Washington,” Father says menacingly. “While you were nestled by the fire with your books, I was freezing my balls off at Valley Forge. So you just watch what you say when you enter my home.”

The schoolmaster stands up. “I came here out of concern for the boy. I can see that my efforts were misplaced. Goodnight, sir.”

Chapman flattens himself against the wall as the schoolmaster brushes past. Halter bells jingle as the gelding whinneys and then trots away down the road. Chapman can’t go inside now—his father will know he’s been eavesdropping. Instead he walks around to the barn. He enters silently and sees, by starlight coming through the slats, his brother Nat stretched out on the hay, pants around his ankles, jerking himself furiously.

“Nat,” Chapman says.

“Hold on,” his brother says, and continues, until he makes a gruff noise. Then he wipes himself on a piece of sackcloth, buttons his pants, and sits up.

“Why do you do that?” Chapman asks.

“Because I have to do something.”

“You’re eleven years old,” Chapman says.

“Why don’t you do it? You think it’s wrong?”

Chapman leans in the doorframe. “No. I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s not. I don’t care what your Bible says.”

“The Bible doesn’t say anything about it, as far as I know.”

Nat stands beside him and claps him on the shoulder—with the same hand, Chapman thinks, the same hand he was just using. “You’re not normal, brother,” Nat says. “Those big eyes of yours see too well in the dark.”

Together they walk back to the house. Father hasn’t moved from his spot. “How do the orchards look, son?” he says as they enter.

“Ready to harvest,” Chapman says. “Those apples will drop and rot soon, if nobody gets them.”

The old man tamps down more tobacco. “How would you like to quit school this fall and help out with the harvest?”

“Yes,” Chapman says.

“I’ll have to speak to Mr. Gordon about it. I’m sure he could use the help.”

“What about me?” Nat says. “Can I drop out too?”

“A noble effort,” the old man says. “But you must finish primary, at least. When you’re Johnny’s age, then we shall see.”

That night, lying on the top bunk as Nat snores beneath him, Chapman has another dream—not the usual one, not his mother’s death. This time he dreams of Nancy Tannehill in the woods, rubbing his feet, and then his calves, his knees, his thighs—and then—

He awakens violently to a sticky mess in his sheets. Falling back into sleep, he imagines Nancy as his wife, and the two of them, accompanied by a gaggle of children, armed with ladders, harvesting the orchards together, as a family….

* * *

* * *

Chapman moves his ladder in a circle, around the scaffold of branches, and drops the hard fruit into a sack. Voices of other pickers carry through the woods. Songs of the Revolution, still lodged in men’s minds nearly twenty years later. Songs of freedom, expansion, of endless possibility. They also speak of lands to the west—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois.

Old Gordon walks by and comments on Chapman’s bare feet. “Jesus, son, it’s getting nippy out here. You’ll get frostbit.”

Chapman smiles down at him. “Not me,” he says.

Gordon sighs. “I have some bad news, John. A few of my investments this year didn’t pan out.”

Chapman blinks a few times.

“I can’t pay your wages this year. Don’t worry, you’ll be compensated—but not before the New Year. I’m sorry, John.”

Chapman nods. The money itself means nothing, but he had planned to use it on a ring for Nancy Tannehill. He even chose one from the selection over at the silversmith’s. Now he will have to wait until spring.

That evening he walks with her along the hill, under a pink and orange sky. Nancy runs her hand over the low wooden fence. A flock of geese floats past, heading south for winter. “How are things at school?” Chapman asks.

“There’s a new boy from Finland,” she says. “His name’s Kai.”

“Finland. That’s a long way off. Wonder how he ended up here.”

Nancy balances on top of the fence with her arms outstretched. “You won’t be back, will you? Even after the harvest. You’re never setting foot in that schoolhouse again.”

“I can’t say.”

She jumps down. “Can you plant me an apple tree? In my backyard? Just one. I’d like to have my own apples.”

“You won’t get apples with just one. Apple trees don’t self-pollinate. You need at least two in order to get fruit.”

“Well, two, then,” she says, and skips ahead of him.

“In the spring,” Chapman says, and thinks: The spring. It will happen in the spring. Until then I will wait. I will hibernate. I am a bear.

* * *

On Christmas day, Father gives Nat a new knife, and Chapman a tattered copy of The Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. “That book has seen better days,” Father says, “but I thought you might be interested.” He and Nat eat quail while Chapman chomps roasted chestnuts. Snow drifts keep them indoors. In the evening, Chapman studies the book and can scarcely believe what he reads: there is a New Church, with new beliefs. The Second Coming has already arrived. Nature belongs to God now. Charity will be rewarded. There will be no Armageddon. Everyone, regardless of religion, can go to heaven.

* * *

It’s early April, first spring thaw, by the time Chapman gets his money. Old Gordon delivers it up to the front porch. Twenty-five dollars. Chapman could have sworn the other pickers got twice as much. He tries to remember the rate per bushel and how many bushels he collected, but can’t. Gordon rides away and Chapman goes straight to the silversmith. The original ring he wanted is gone, but he finds another, slightly tarnished one, forks over twenty-two of his twenty-five dollars, and starts down the road to the Tannehill house.

Nancy lives down a muddy lane with a stone wall on one side. A crow perches at the far end, cawing as Chapman approaches. He kicks through slushy snow, jostles the ring in his pocket.

At the house, no one answers. It’s Saturday, and Mr. Tannehill is likely out with his horses, but Chapman can’t imagine where Nancy and her mother might be on a grey day like this.

He strolls around back to survey the yard. Where would Nancy like her apple trees planted? They need a high spot, or else standing puddles will rot the roots. Apples are delicate. The least little thing will kill them—or at least render them fruitless.

But the yard’s highest ground already has a stand of birches. Perhaps they’ll have to come down. Chapman loathes the thought of destroying trees, but if apples are what Nancy wants….

“John!”

Chapman whirls around. Coming out of the woods in a long blue dress and a hat with a flower sewn onto the front is Nancy—hand in hand with a tall, serious-looking boy. Chapman’s fist closes around the ring in his pocket.

“What are you doing out here?” Nancy says. Her cheeks pulse red from romping in the snow.

“Looking for a place to plant those apples.”

“Oh, aren’t you sweet!” Nancy says. Then, to her sturdy friend: “I told you he’s the sweetest boy I’ve ever met. Kai, this is John; John, Kai.”

The Finn’s hand feels like granite against Chapman’s. He doesn’t smile, but says in a deep voice, “Hallo.”

“Where is everyone?” Chapman asks. “Your family?”

Nancy prances from foot to foot, almost hopping with energy. “They’re all in town. Oh, John,” she squeals, “no one knows—you’re the first to know—Kai just asked me to marry him! We’ll be married this summer!”

Chapman blinks a few times.

He recalls Nancy at the schoolhouse last year, calling out, “We are not lovebirds!”

Kai nods but still does not smile. Nancy unlocks her hand from his and flashes Chapman a ring—not a better one than his, either. “Isn’t it lovely? Aren’t you happy for me?”

“I didn’t know you were planning marriage so soon.”

“Neither did I.” She wraps an arm around the Finn’s waist. “Kai just surprised me. It’s funny how sometimes the thing you want most is right under your nose and you can’t even see it!”

Chapman shakes the Finn’s hand again, mutters something about coming back with some saplings when it gets warmer, and starts back down the road. The same crow sits on the stone wall, and this time two more join it before they all flap away.

On the way home, Chapman stops at a house he doesn’t know. An old washerwoman with a kerchief on her head answers the door. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Chapman says. “I found this ring on the road outside. Someone must have dropped it.”

The woman cocks an eyebrow and says, “Why, yes, I surely did. I’ve been looking all over for this. Bless you, son.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Hey,” she calls, and Chapman looks back. “Don’t you need any shoes?”

Chapman smiles and waves, waves like it means nothing to him, like he can’t even feel it.

* * *

Announcing his departure to Father turns out to be easier than he expected. He catches the old man in the dark, returning from the outhouse, and corners him there so Father won’t see his tears. He mentions nothing about Nancy Tannehill but says he’s tired of Massachusetts—he’s heard about open, untamed lands to the west—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Father doesn’t seem surprised, but rather acts as though he knew this was coming. “You don’t have a horse,” he says when Chapman finishes his speech.

“I can walk,” Chapman says.

“You need a destination. It isn’t wise to just wander aimlessly, with ‘the Ohio territory’ as your only goal.”

“I’ll know my destination when I get there.” No movement without purpose, he thinks. “God will put me where he wants me.”

“How will you live? Where will you sleep?”

“You know me, Father.”

“Take one of my guns. Then, if you get desperate, you can bring down a deer, or at least a quail.”

“I would never use it, Father, and you know it.”

The old man puts a hand on his son’s shoulder. Chapman studies his father’s features in the scant light, knowing his father can barely see him at all. “You will take shoes,” Father says. “That much I insist upon.”

“All right. I’ll take shoes.”

“I want to come too,” Nat says in the darkness beside them. Chapman nearly jumps out of his clothes, but again, Father seems unsurprised.

“I told you that you have to finish primary first.”

“But Father,” Nat says, stepping into view. “What’s a real education? Sitting at a desk all day, or exploring the wilderness? Didn’t you learn more under General Washington than you would’ve if you’d stayed home where it was safe?”

These lines sound rehearsed—as if his brother, too, foresaw him leaving. What did they know that he didn’t? “I don’t remember inviting you,” Chapman says coldly.

“You can’t stop me.”

“You two would leave me here?” Father says, yet behind his words Chapman hears a certain pride.

“I’m going tomorrow,” Chapman says, by way of warning.

Nat spits onto the icy ground. “Shoot, I’m ready to go tonight.”

* * *

By the middle of the third day Chapman’s shoes dangle from his hands by their strings. He tosses them to a traveler going the other way, a man with a bindle over his shoulder, who catches them against his chest. “Barely worn,” Chapman calls.

“Thanks,” the man says, and Chapman continues on his way.

“Are you some kind of idiot?” Nat says. “We could’ve gotten at least two dollars for those.”

“And do what with two dollars?”

“Anything. Buy food.”

Chapman laughs. “There’s food all around us.” As if by providence, they come upon a blackberry thicket and Chapman plucks off several clusters.

“It was stupid anyway,” Nat says. “You’re not going to last long, you keep doing things like that.”

The forest thickens as they head west. Horses and carriages become less frequent, until the boys find themselves alone on the road for nearly a week. Something unfolds inside of Chapman, something he never knew was there—he imagines an accordion, or a piece of paper unfolded to its full size for the first time. His strides become easier, his heart lighter. The more distance between he and Nancy Tannehill, the better.

“Feels like I can stretch out now,” he says.

Nat, cooking pot clanking on his back, says nothing.

* * *

* * *

One warm evening they come to a farm carved out of the forest. A man in sweat-drenched overalls stands in the yard drinking water from a pail. A little girl waits beside him, and when he drains the pail, she takes it and scampers away. Chapman and Nat each hold a hand up as they approach.

“Well, you two look tired and dirty enough,” the man says.

“We are,” Nat says.

“Where you headed?”

“For the Ohio territory,” Chapman says, and the man bursts out laughing.

“This is only New York. You’ve got a ways to go.”

“We’re moving. We’ve got all summer to make it there, before it turns cold again.”

Newly-planted fields stretch out behind the house. Chapman recognizes the tiny green shoots of young corn. “We can work,” he says. “For a bed and a meal. We can do whatever you need.”

“Today’s work is done,” the man says. “I wouldn’t charge a man for a plate of beans and a spot on the floor. Welcome to a bath, too, if you want it.”

As the sun sets over the fields, Chapman finds himself naked in the back yard with Nat, taking turns in a wooden barrel filled with cold water. Chapman borrows a razor and shaves his beard, which has grown thick. At dinner he sits at the table with slick hair and a fresh-looking face.

“You’ve lost ten years,” the farmer says. He shovels potatoes into his mouth. The house has only one dark room, with a fireplace at one end and a curtain separating the farmer’s bed at the other. His wife sits silently alongside three young girls. Candlelight throws shadows across the walls. Nat lowers his head and clears two plates before anyone else can finish one.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to help out,” Chapman says. “If we’d been an hour or two earlier, we could have earned our keep.”

“We could do something tomorrow,” Nat says through a full mouth.

“I wouldn’t keep you boys. I imagine you want to get a full day’s travel. Every day counts if you’re trying to make Ohio by fall.”

“There must be something we can do,” Chapman says. “Does your family keep any books around? I could read something to these ladies. I could read from my Bible.”

Nat gives him a sharp look.

“It’s not much, but it’s something I could do to show my gratitude.”

“You some kind of preacher?” the man asks.

“I think it would be lovely,” the wife says—her first spoken words that night. Every head turns her way. A long pause.

“Well, there you have it,” the farmer says.

After the meal, Chapman sits by the fireplace and reads from the book of Matthew. The women sit before him, while the farmer leans against the back wall and smokes his pipe. Nat, on the side, seems just as rapt as the females. Chapman realizes that his brother has never heard him read like this before. He did it with Nancy Tannehill a thousand times.

“Then the Lord will say to the righteous, ‘Come, take your inheritance, take the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of time. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me water, I was a stranger and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer, ‘Lord, when did we feed you, or give you drink? When did we take you in and clothe you? When did we visit you?’ And the Lord will reply, ‘I tell you the truth: whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did for me.’”

The wife’s face trembles on the verge of tears. Behind her, the farmer says, “You’re one of those Swedenborgers, aren’t you?”

“I am of the New Church, yes,” Chapman says.

“What?” Nat says.

“You think everybody goes to heaven,” the farmer says. “No matter what they do.”

“Well,” Chapman says. “The New Church teaches that everyone can go to heaven.”

The farmer points his pipe. “You’re telling me a Mohammedan, or some Hindoo in the jungle somewhere, is going to heaven the same as me and you?”

“Christ welcomes all,” Chapman says. “Even those who call him by a different name.”

“Do you have any extra Bibles?” the wife asks. “I can’t read, but maybe”—she looks over her shoulder—“Henry, maybe you could read to us now and then?”

“I don’t have any more,” Chapman says. “But you can keep this passage.” Carefully, he tears the page out and hands it to the woman, who stares at it for a moment before folding it into her pocket.

The farmer nods a grudging respect.

* * *

The next morning they rise with the farmer, shake hands in the dark, and leave without breakfast. Chapman can sense his brother’s discomfort after last night’s scene. Nat wasn’t expecting anything like that. They walk in silence most of the morning, and pass through a cluster of buildings in the afternoon—not enough to call a town. More like an outpost.

One of the buildings is a cider mill. Its open doors reveal an apple-crusher bigger than a carriage. Pulpy brown pomace covers the ground around it. A few men lean against barrels in the shade. “Now’s our chance,” Nat says, “to know if we’re going the right way.”

The mill workers are affable, but they give the boys one stringent piece of advice: take the river. “Walking all the way to Ohio is a fool’s quest. You might get lost, you might run into a damned bear. Why, there might even be some Iroquois still out there. Take the Susquehanna, get there fast and safe.”

“Can’t you get no horses?” someone says. “Even if you had to share a horse?”

“We don’t have any money,” Nat says.

“What do you do with all this pomace?” Chapman asks. Nat rolls his eyes.

“How hungry are you, son?” The men all laugh. “Those leftovers are no good for eating. We just throw it away.”

“Good for fertilizer, though,” Chapman says. “And full of seeds. Can I take it?”

The men laugh again. “Sure, scrape up as much as you want.”

* * *

The Susquehanna is another week’s trek. During the walk, Chapman works seeds out of handfuls of pomace, dropping the gooey pulp along the trail. He hears the river’s whoosh one night as he and Nat are settling down, and the next morning they reach it—not too wide, but swift-flowing with early-summer runoff. He and Nat stand on slippery rocks and peer downstream.

“What are we supposed to do?” Nat says. “Swim?”

Chapman points to a fallen tree. “We could make a dugout.”

“From that scrawny pine? You think that would work?”

“Worth a shot,” Chapman says.

“But we don’t have a hatchet,” Nat says. “Or an adze, or nothing.”

“You’ve got Father’s knife—that should clear away the bark, at least.”

“Hell, we could just straddle this thing and ride it down the river like that.”

Chapman starts to denounce such a foolish plan, but then recognizes his brother’s sarcasm. He rubs his chin with his hand. “We could burn it out,” he says.

“Hey now,” Nat says.

They take turns stripping the bark, a task which consumes most of the day. Nat tears into the work with a zeal that surprises Chapman. In the afternoon, they flip the log over and, using sharp rocks, cut an outline. Chapman files down knots in the trunk. He boils some oatmeal from his pack for their lunch. The sweet smell of fresh-cut wood hangs in the air. By nightfall, the tree is ready to be gutted.

“Let’s wait until morning,” Chapman says. “If we try to do it in the dark, we might burn up the whole log.”

The next day they pad the sides of the trunk with wet moss and ferns, and start a slow burn down the middle. Chapman keeps the cooking pot full of water nearby. As the middle section crumbles into ash, Nat scrapes away the blackened chunks until, late in the day, the log begins to resemble something like a canoe. “By god, this might actually work,” he says.

When they finally push the log into the water, Chapman realizes the flaw. “The bottom needs to be flat. This thing is going to capsize.”

“Nah,” Nat says. He stands waist-deep and rocks the log back and forth. “Might be a little wobbly, but I think she’ll hold.”

They shove off with their rear ends wedged into the crevice and their feet hanging out the sides. Chapman looks back and notices the cooking pot still sitting on the bank. “Wait,” he says, and slides back into the water. Nat thrusts his oar—a long pine branch—into the riverbed to stop the boat, while Chapman swims to shore, plunks the pot onto his head, and swims back.

“That looks terrific,” Nat says when Chapman climbs in. “That’s the best hat I’ve ever seen.”

Chapman smiles and, to humor his brother, wears the pot the rest of the day.

* * *

In three days the boat dies. Chunks of the log start to break off, and capsizing becomes more frequent. Eventually, with all their gear soaked, the boys admit to each other that they are basically clinging to a piece of driftwood. They wade ashore, and after clambering through some brush, find themselves at the edge of a homestead.

Chapman knocks at the door, but no one answers. He and Nat wander around back. An old man kneels over a wooden bench, whittling something with a knife. The blade flashes in the sun. Several figurines line the table before him. Yellow fields lay untended, rising to a hill covered in poplars. A flock of birds wheels around the sky, then disappears in the woods. “He’s no farmer,” Nat says. “Look at these fields.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Chapman says. “We’ve been traveling for a while now—whereabouts are we?”

“Just outside Freeport,” the old man says. “About three days from Pittsburgh.”

“Pennsylvania?”

“That’s right.”

Chapman gestures to the fields. “This your land?”

“Sure is,” the man says. “I’m a veteran—served under General Knox, fought at Trenton and Yorktown. They give me this land for my service.”

“Our father served under General Washington,” Chapman says.

“Is that so? Does he know about the land grants? The government is giving all veterans a parcel of land—a hundred acres—provided they can prove that they served. Can your daddy prove it?”

“He has his discharge papers,” Nat says.

“Pennsylvania’s full, though—they’ve opened up the Ohio territory now. Won’t be long before all that land is grabbed up too. If he wants to claim his, he better get moving. Me, I don’t even plow mine—I’m a woodcarver, not a bean-picker. I earn my living selling these figurines.”

“We’re headed for Ohio,” Chapman says. “How far is that?”

“Never been that far. I hear it’s a farmer’s paradise. But the hunters and trappers, they usually keep going west, into the deep woods, to a land called Wisconsin. Nobody knows how far that stretches—it could go all the way to China. We’re just scratching the surface of this continent. No telling what’s out there.”

Chapman eyes the section of hill beneath the poplars. “That would be a perfect place for an orchard.”

“Apples?” the man says. “I haven’t eaten an apple in ten years.”

Chapman reaches into his satchel and comes up with a handful of seeds. “I can start some for you. You won’t get fruit for two or three seasons. But once they mature, you should get apples every year.”

“You’ll plant me an orchard—for what in return?”

“Nothing,” Chapman says, but at the same time Nat says, “A place to rest.”

The man laughs. “You’ll have to show me how take care of the saplings. I don’t know the first thing about apple trees.”

“It’s easy,” Chapman says.

* * *

The next day they walk into Freeport proper. Ramshackle buildings flank a muddy street, where horses and people scurry back and forth. They pass a large white building with pillars out front, labeled CITY HALL. Nat gets excited—he presses his face against every shop window. “Look at that candy!” he says. “If only we had some money—if only you hadn’t given away those shoes.”

Chapman, meanwhile, only sees opportunities for trees. “Right here, between these buildings,” he says. “That would be a great place to plant two or three apples. The drainage here is great. I don’t think it’s too shady, either….”

As they wander through town, Nat says, “You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to settle in a place like this.”

“Really?” Chapman says. He thinks of this town as a novelty, an interesting way station, but not a permanent residence.

“Don’t you get tired of sleeping in the woods with the snakes and bugs?”

“I guess not,” Chapman says.

* * *

A mustached man hawks tickets for a fair, to be held that night along the river. Paper lanterns have already been strung up; workers are assembling tents and booths. “Get your tickets now,” the salesman says. “Only a nickel. You’ll see one-of-a-kind acts, marvels found nowhere else on God’s green earth—magic and mystery—hurry before we’re sold out!”

“Isn’t there some way we could get in on credit?” Nat asks.

“Cold hard cash is the only credit, son.”

Nat walks away grumbling, and he and Chapman find a tree to lie under by the riverbank. Skiffs push off from shore, loaded down with cargo, operated by men who laugh and shout from raft to raft as they zip downstream. “We could hire on to one of those boats,” Nat says.

“I doubt they’d hire me,” Chapman says. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, Nat is gone. He left his pack behind, which means he didn’t abandon Chapman—he just went to explore the town. Chapman eats an old biscuit he’s been saving and, to kill time, reads from the book of Proverbs. Down by the water, workers set up the fair. One of them walks over and leans against the tree, wipes his face with a rag. “You better get in there behind that screen,” he says. “I bet they don’t want people getting a free glimpse before the show starts.”

“Excuse me?” Chapman says.

“You one of them, aren’t you?” the man says. “The ones in the show?”

Chapman blinks a few times. “I’m just passing through.”

“You’re not in the show?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chapman says.

“I just figured with those eyes of yours,” the man says. “And how skinny you are. Never mind, kid.”

The afternoon grows hot, and Chapman brushes mosquitoes away from his ankles. The fairgrounds lay in deep shadow, the sun just an orange glow in the west, by the time Nat returns. He has a young girl with him, maybe thirteen or fourteen. “This is Lizzie,” Nat says. “She got us free tickets.”

“How’d you manage this?” Chapman says.

“My ma gives me money,” the girl says.

Reluctantly, Chapman rises and follows them down the bank. The paper lanterns, strung from tree to tree, rustle in the breeze. As they walk, Chapman takes Nat by the shoulder and whispers, “Where did you meet her?”

“Outside one of the stores,” Nat says. “She has a great big family. She said we can spend the night at her house.”

People congregate around the tents. Chapman hands his ticket to the same man who spoke to him under the tree earlier, but this time the man isn’t paying attention. “No re-entry!” he calls to the crowd at large. Chapman wades into a throng of people, and they move down a long row with tents on either side. Nat and Lizzie duck into one, and Chapman loses them. He works his way over to a tent and pokes his head through the flap. There, on a makeshift stage, is some kind of monster—a person so mangled and deformed that it can scarcely be called a person. Chapman quickly retreats, and realizes that each of these tents contains some abnormality, some poor, freakish being. He doesn’t care to view the rest, but stops with his head bowed for a moment and wishes the blessings of Christ on all of them, indeed on everyone here.

Up ahead, Nat and Lizzie emerge from one tent and scamper across the aisle, into another one. At the end of the row, close to the water, sits the main attraction—a large cat of some sort. A rotund man with a top hat and waxed mustache claims it to be a tiger captured in Sumatra and brought to America on a perilous journey. The animal paces its cage with glowering eyes. It looks well-fed, but Chapman pities its life. He slips out of the fair, back onto the moonlit riverbank, and starts walking. To be different is one thing. To be caged is quite another. He fingers some loose seeds in his pocket.

At a high spot, he pushes them into the spongy soil.

* * *

Sometime during the night, Nat finds him under their tree. “Come on,” his brother says. “We got a roof over our heads tonight.”

Chapman is comfortable where he is, but shrugs on his pack and walks two or three miles across Freeport to Lizzie’s house—an old British-style mansion, shaded by oaks, probably built twenty years before the war, now handed down to a family of women. “Their father died,” Nat says. “And now they just roam and do what they please.”

Lizzie’s feet are black with dirt as they walk up the lane. “You don’t wear shoes, either,” Chapman says. The girl smiles up at him.

The house is cavernous—Chapman figures the original owners were Loyalists and the place has been ransacked, refurbished, trashed again, handed down through various parties. Lizzie leads them by candlelight to a room with some blankets on the floor, beneath a window. Whispers come from other rooms and Chapman gets a sense of people shuffling about. “How many sisters do you have?” he asks.

“Eight,” Lizzie says. “We always got to tend mama. She’s too fat to get out of bed.”

Someone down the hall coughs loudly.

“What happened to your father?” Chapman asks.

“Kicked by a mule,” Lizzie says.

Chapman expects Nat to bed down beside him, but Lizzie leads him away to another room and he doesn’t come back. The moon floats halfway across the window before it occurs to Chapman why. His little brother, eleven years old, is dominated by urges Chapman has felt only rarely, and in passing. By moonlight, he studies Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “All other sins are committed outside the body, but the man who sins through sex sins against his own body. Do you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? You are not your own—you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

* * *

Nat comes to him before dawn and says: “I’m staying here.”

Chapman sits up. He is utterly dumbfounded. So much time passes before he answers that Nat thinks he’s still asleep, and shakes him: “Hey! Wake up. I’m not coming with you today, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Chapman says.

Nat puts his hand on Chapman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’ve found something here that I can’t walk away from. Lizzie and I are going to get married.”

“You’re only eleven—”

“I turned twelve last month. Don’t you know your own brother’s birthday?”

“Nat,” Chapman says, but before he can say more, his brother says:

“Johnny, you know how you’re always searching for something?”

“No,” Chapman says.

“No? What’s so special about Ohio? Why are we going there? Why do we live like animals? What are you looking for, Johnny?”

Chapman blinks a few times.

“Listen—I found what I was looking for. These girls don’t have a man around here. I can help them. You could stay too—maybe you can marry one of Lizzie’s sisters.” Nat looks hopeful, then adds, “Lizzie’s the oldest, though, so you’d have to wait a few years.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Chapman says.

They sit for a moment, and then Nat dives forward to embrace him.

By first light he is back across Freeport, back to the river road, which he walks all morning as the sun rises behind him. Birdcalls fill the air. Travelers on horseback tip their hats. To Chapman’s right, flatboats skim lightly down the river.

He doesn’t stop to eat until dark, when he boils some oatmeal and mixes it with nuts and berries from his pack. The first night without Nat, the old dream returns: Chapman’s mother, lying in bed coughing blood, blood coming out of her nose, until Chapman runs screaming from the room—but this time, when he jumps awake with a shout, no one is there to reassure him. No one snores softly beside him, or even down a hall. He is alone, and chilly, lying on a bed of pine needles in a glistening forest. There is a certain purity in this.

* * *

Dear Father,

After a long journey, I have reached the Ohio Territory and am happy to report that it is a beautiful country. There is much farmland and wildlife here. Autumn is nearly upon us, and I have completed my journey just in time.

Nat and I parted ways in Pennsylvania—he met a family there and stayed on to help. I’ve been walking alone these many weeks. I wouldn’t have known I was in Ohio, had I not come across a lonely post office, which is where I now sit, in the gloaming, writing this letter.

This journey has been remarkable. People everywhere are friendly and happy to offer help. There exists a spirit of optimism amongst our countrymen that I never knew about. Perhaps you recognize it, Father, from your time in the war—everyone seems to be looking forward to something. I don’t fully understand this but it gladdens my heart to see it.

Ohio is an empty country, but not for long. The rumors of land grants are true. If you show your discharge papers, you will be granted no less than one hundred acres of prime farmland. According to locals, even the native Shawnee honor these grants, and don’t resist new settlers. This could be a splendid opportunity for you.

I do have one request: my Bible is quite worn, with some pages missing, and I would like to have another, if you could send it. You may respond at this address; I’ll likely stay around these parts for the winter. Nat’s address is also enclosed, though I can’t attest to how accurate it is.

If I don’t hear from you before spring, I will leave a notice with the postmaster that you might be headed this way. On horseback, the journey should not take long. I may be somewhere else by then.

You are in my heart daily. I think of you and pray for you often, and trust that you know that I love you very much, Father, and eagerly anticipate a good word from you. Until then, I remain,

Your son,
John Chapman

2.

Moonless night. Chapman—skinny, dirty, with crow’s feet around his eyes and a beard that stretches past his collarbone—sits hunched over a fire with wild potatoes skewered on sticks. Early June, chilly. He’s been in the woods for over a month, and can’t recall the last time he spoke to another human being.

Down the trail, a slight noise. A twig snap, a shuffle of dirt. The smell of another traveler. Chapman’s senses are like an animal’s. Soon a figure emerges from the shadows: long cloak, gun across his back, canteen slung over one shoulder.

“Howdy,” the voice says—high-pitched, like a child’s, and for a moment Chapman imagines Nat, whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years. “Mind if I share your fire?”

“Sit down,” Chapman says, and the figure enters the circle of light. His face is almost cherubic in the flickering glow. “You want a potato?” Chapman says. “I’ve got plenty.”

“Obliged,” the kid says. “I tried all day to nab a deer but they’re too quick. Or else I’m too poor a shot. You couldn’t get no game, neither? Ain’t there any wild boars around here?”

“I’m not even sure where here is,” Chapman says.

“Why, you’re in Indiana,” the kid says. “Don’t you even know where you are?”

“No,” Chapman says simply. He feels the kid waiting for further explanation, but he doesn’t have one. “No,” he says again.

“Well, hell, you’re on the Ohio border. You’re just south of Fort Wayne. That’s where I’m headed. Where you headed, mister?”

“Nowhere in particular,” Chapman says.

The kid bites into a potato and chews. “My daddy beat the hell out of me two days ago and I’ll be goddamned if I stay around there. I’m going to sign on to fight Indians.”

“Why do you want to fight them?”

The kid snorts. “Hell, you got to fight somebody.”

Chapman blinks a few times.

“You don’t have any meat here, do you?” the kid asks. “Dried jerky or anything?”

Chapman almost says, “I don’t eat meat,” but fears the kid would only react with derision, so he says, again, “No.”

The kid spits into the darkness. “Lean times, I guess. Well, I appreciate you sharing your fire. All right if I bed down here?”

“Of course,” Chapman says. “But I’m about to douse this fire, so bundle up.”

“What? What in the hell for?”

“It draws insects.”

“Aw, they dive right into the flames. They ain’t going to pester you none.”

“That’s precisely why,” Chapman says. “I don’t want to be responsible for killing anything. Even bugs. Christ was against it.”

The kid cocks his head. “Are you crazy or something?”

Chapman takes another bite.

“You’d rather lay here in the damn cold than kill a couple of flies?”

“It’s not that cold,” Chapman says.

“I never heard of nothing like this before,” the kid says.

Later, after the potatoes are gone, Chapman kicks dirt onto the fire so that he and the kid are sitting in pitch darkness. “By god, wait till I tell them about this in Fort Wayne,” the kid says. “You know, I could just as easy go off a ways and make my own fire.”

“You could,” Chapman says. In the dark, he can see only outlines of things—which means the kid can’t see at all. But the kid doesn’t move.

“You some kind of preacher, or what?”

“Sometimes.”

“You know any of them old Bible stories?”

“Most of them, yes.”

“Is it true what they say about the End Times—God’s going to send a wave of fire over the Earth and burn everything up?”

The kid’s voice sounds vulnerable all of a sudden, young and scared lying there in the dark woods. “No,” Chapman says. “That’s not true at all. The End Times have already come and gone. We’re already living in the New Earth. People just aren’t aware of it.”

At dawn, Chapman rises and slinks away through the woods, leaving the kid on his back, open-mouthed, shiny drool running down one side of his face. In the grey light he looks even younger than Chapman thought. He takes a portion of cornmeal from his pack, leaves it beside the kid, and heads toward the rising sun, back into the Ohio territory, a land he has crisscrossed a hundred times, but which always seems to have something new in store for him.

* * *

One evening at dusk he rounds a bend and comes face to face with a black bear. The animal has its front paws halfway up a tree trunk, grasping for something, and it jumps back when Chapman appears. The little bob tail twitches. It’s at least six hundred pounds.

Chapman raises his arms above his head and looks the bear directly in the eyes. It gives an agitated growl and backs up a few steps. If he flees, it will chase—Chapman knows this much. So he steps forward, and echoes the bear’s growl right back at it.

They eye each other for a full minute before the bear makes a noise like a dog’s whine, a noise of frustration, as though it’s being pulled back by an invisible hand. It slinks away without breaking eye contact. Chapman keeps his hands raised and walks slowly past, singing an old battle hymn, one of the songs the apple-pickers back home used to sing. Anything to make noise, anything to show the animal he isn’t afraid.

* * *

On a ridge, looking down at a stream, he sees an Indian: buckskin clothing, feathers woven into long hair. Over his shoulder the man carries a type of satchel. He kneels down at the stream, cups water in his hands, drinks. Birds flit back and forth over the rocks.

Something inside Chapman says: Don’t pass this up.

So he climbs over a rock and then down the ridge, through the trees, kicking leaves and shaking branches to make as much noise as possible. The Indian leaps up. Chapman stands with his arms outstretched, just as he’d done with the bear—but this time in a gesture of conciliation. The Indian is unarmed.

They stare at each other. The Indian says something in French. Chapman can’t help but smile. He expected a wild man, a savage, but this Indian wears boots, appears clean—and speaks more languages than Chapman does. He says the French phrase again.

“I only speak English,” Chapman says.

“English,” the Indian repeats thickly. “My English not as good.”

Chapman’s heart pounds. “You understand me?”

“Understand yes, not speak as good.” His mouth twists to form the words. “Even my grandfathers speak francois. English, this is something new. But I learn fast.”

“You’re Shawnee?”

“Shawana,” the man says. He touches his chest. “Abukcheech. The little mouse.”

Chapman repeats the name back slowly. “Ah-book-cheech. My name is John.” He isn’t sure whether to offer his hand or bow, so he does both. The Indian squeezes Chapman’s fingers for a moment.

“Do you know where you are?” the Indian asks.

“I think I’m in Ohio somewhere….”

“You are in Shawana lands. This place is not safe for you.”

“I’m just passing through.”

Abukcheech’s face is smooth, cheekbones like boulders under his skin, eyes wide-set and placid. “You are lucky you saw me first. My uncle would have killed you. The francois leave us alone, but you English clear our land, you chop down our trees.”

Chapman shakes his bag of seeds. “I plant trees.”

The Indian peers into the bag and then up at Chapman with a strange glint in his eyes. He mimes eating an apple, and a thrill of excitement shoots through Chapman, stronger than anything he’s felt in years. “Apples,” he says.

“Yes. Apple.”

Abukcheech kneels down and opens his satchel, which is full of herbs and dried mushrooms. Chapman recognizes most of them. He points to cornflower, which eases colds and fevers—the purple petals now crispy and curled up on themselves. “And that yellow one is St. John’s wort,” he says. “That relieves pain.” He names Klamath root, Pokeweed, Skunkweed, stinging nettles, thistles, blackberries, and for each one, Abukcheech provides the Indian name.

They crouch over the sack and Abukcheech holds up a handful of brown mushrooms. “For talk with Great Spirit,” he says.

Chapman pulls out his Bible. “I talk to him through here.”

The Indian takes the Bible and leafs through the pages, though it’s obvious he can’t read. “In Shawana, I am healing man,” he says. He hands the Bible back to Chapman. “You are healing man?”

“I’ve never healed anyone,” Chapman says, and the Indian smiles.

“You are man of Wakan Tanka—of Great Spirit.”

“I call him Christ,” Chapman says. “But I believe we’re talking about the same thing.”

Abukcheech squints at him. “You cannot travel these lands alone. Follow me, I will show you to my uncle. He will grant you passage.”

Chapman blinks a few times. “Lead the way,” he says.

* * *

* * *

A cluster of tents around a creek. Horses dip their snouts into the water. Laundered buckskins flap on lines. Women pound flour into thin cakes. Children scamper.

“This is only summer camp,” Abukcheech says. “Temporary camp.”

He leads Chapman to a group of men standing apart from the village. No one down by the creek notices Chapman’s presence, but the men in this group grow animated and shout when they see him. “Wait here,” Abukcheech says, and goes forward to speak with them. One of the Indians, a fierce-looking man with only one eye, gestures wildly and has to be restrained by his fellows. Chapman’s knees shake as Abukcheech comes jogging back.

“They want to see you. Come.”

Chapman approaches the group and bows. The one-eyed man spits at his feet. These Indians are old, older than Chapman, with impenetrable faces. The one who restrained the one-eyed man—a tall, fine-featured fellow wearing a red cap with a feather—steps forward to grasp Chapman’s hand. “This is my uncle,” Abukcheech says. “Tecumseh.”

The man says something in Shawnee and Abukcheech translates: “He says he has heard of you. The Apple Man. You have roamed these lands for twenty years.”

Chapman nods. Tecumseh says more.

“He wants to know why you do not align yourself with the other whites,” Abukcheech says.

Chapman stammers. “I—I travel alone. I don’t align with anyone.”

Tecumseh nods, but the one-eyed man shouts a long slew of watery language and several others murmur agreement.

“This is also my uncle,” Abukcheech says. “Tenskwatawa—the Prophet. He says all white men come from the Serpent, the Evil One, and they must be burned. For him it is great insult that I bring you to this village.”

Chapman lowers his head and says, “I’m not here to fight anyone.”

Abukcheech and the Prophet exchange words. Their voices grow more and more heated, until Tecumseh steps between them. He holds a finger in Chapman’s general direction and says a few words, then walks away. The Prophet, clearly upset, spurts some last invective and stalks in the other direction. The group of men break apart, leaving Chapman and Abukcheech alone on the little rise.

“Tecumseh gave you permission to cross our land,” Abukcheech says. “I knew he would. He knows you are man of Wakan Tanka.”

“The Prophet didn’t seem quite as happy about it.”

“They are brothers—but they will never agree. The Prophet claims all white men are evil. Tecumseh is too smart for that. He knows the difference between the government and a person like you.”

“A person like me,” Chapman repeats.

“There are no people like you,” Abukcheech says, and smiles.

* * *

A week later he comes upon a homestead with a young orchard out back, and realizes it’s one he planted four or five years ago. The farm has since changed hands—the new owner a young man in a straw hat who complains to Chapman that he can’t yield any apples.

“You haven’t been pruning enough,” Chapman says. The young trees aren’t even as tall as him, though they should be much bigger by now. “Or you’ve been pruning during the wrong time. If you prune during winter, you’ll get a big harvest the next summer. Prune in the summer, your tree will stop growing.”

“I’ve been pruning every summer,” the man says.

Chapman bends a branch and inspects it. “These might be stunted permanently. But maybe not. See, your branches should be two feet apart. That way the fruit will have room. And your trees ought to have a scaffold shape—these limbs should grow out perpendicular. They should have been weighted with rocks during their first year. Now they’re all over the place. And you have far too many buds on here.”

“I wanted as many as possible,” the young man says. “To sell the leftovers.”

“The fewer the buds, the bigger the fruit,” Chapman says. “Those buds should be six inches apart. Otherwise you’ll get nothing worth selling.”

The man offers Chapman a meal and a place to sleep by the hearth. His log home is bigger than most of the others Chapman has seen in these parts: the man and his wife actually have separate sleeping quarters from their children. The little ones sit rapt as Chapman reads from the book of Genesis—the story of Noah and the ark, something he figures will entertain their young minds. When he finishes, he says, “Remember, it doesn’t matter if the story really happened or not. It’s the lesson that’s important.”

Five little heads nod, and Chapman is amazed—this married couple looks far too young to have so many babies. The woman is skinny as a scarecrow, with large shimmering eyes like Chapman’s. They look so much alike that Chapman can’t stop staring at her, and fears the farmer will get the wrong idea. She might have been his sister.

After the Bible story they eat biscuits and honey—a treat for the children, Chapman surmises, brought out in honor of him, the visitor. He asks the wife: “Do you see well in the dark?”

“Like an owl,” her husband answers. “She can look out the window and see a fly flap its wings a hundred yards away at midnight. It’s those big eyes.”

“That’s right,” the wife says.

“I’m the same,” Chapman says.

“Is that so? Well, I can see it now, though I didn’t notice before. You two have got the same eyes.”

Chapman flips to the Book of Acts, to the passage about Saul getting blinded on the road to Damascus. Carefully he tears out the pages. “Here,” he says, handing them over. “This story always reminds me that true sight comes from our souls, not our eyeballs.”

In the morning, the farmer scribbles an address on a piece of paper and says, “Write to us sometime—I’ll keep you updated on that orchard.”

When Chapman reaches a hill on the road, he looks back. The entire family, man, wife, and children, stand waving to him. He waves back until they’re out of sight.

* * *

In the town of Mansfield, at a one-room post office, a group of burly men surround him as he scratches out a letter to his brother Nat. Chapman glances up from his paper. The men cross their arms over their chests.

“You been out in the woods,” they say.

“We know who you are.”

“You been out to Indiana. You seen the Shawnee.”

“I’ve been living in the woods for some time, yes,” Chapman says.

“You know their trails,” the men say. “You know where their village is.”

“No,” Chapman says.

“What do you know about their ways?”

“No more than you, I’m afraid.”

One of the men points a finger at Chapman. “Just mind you know which side you’re on when the fighting comes. If we find that village and you’re in it, you’ll get cut down with the rest of them.”

The men start to walk away, but Chapman calls out: “The Shawnee are angry. They say you’re taking their land.”

The men come back. “They signed away that land to the United States government under the Treaty of Fort Wayne. My Pa fought in the war, so I know. And now these goddamn animals think if they swoop down and kill women and kidnap babies, we’ll just turn tail and run. They’ve got another thing coming. We’ll hunt down every last one of them.”

This encounter leaves Chapman so shaken he can barely finish his letter.

* * *

He meets Abukcheech by the stream and tells him how unhappy the settlers are. “They claim your tribe steals babies and murders women.”

Abukcheech casts his eyes down. “This is true,” he says. “I am ashamed at certain things the Shawana have done. But there is no stopping my uncle. When the Prophet speaks, the people listen. They follow him. He says to burn Christian artifacts, we burn artifacts. He says to burn any Shawana who has converted to Christianity—and so we burn people. Now he says all white men must burn.”

“How did he lose his eye?” Chapman asks.

“The gods took it from him during a vision. In exchange he can see the spirit world.”

Chapman doesn’t know what to think of this. “Those townspeople are looking for you,” he says. “Your tribe should just relocate—move west with the others.”

“This has been our home since the beginning,” Abukcheech says.

“The beginning of what?”

“Of everything,” Abukcheech says. “Come, I want to show you something.”

He leads Chapman away from the stream, into a hidden thicket where a black-and-white mare stands silently, her rope bridle looped over a branch. Chapman climbs behind Abukcheech and they trot away through the forest. He hasn’t been on horseback in years and is amazed at how much ground they cover so quickly. Soon they crest a hill where he can see the entire town of Mansfield below.

“We can slaughter them at any time,” Abukcheech says. “Yet we do not, because Tecumseh does not believe in slaughtering innocents. Nor do I.”

“It would be harder than you think,” Chapman says, pointing to the walled fortress, a circle of upright spiked logs toward the back of the town. “They could hunker in there for weeks.”

“We would starve them out.”

“Maybe there’s a compromise,” Chapman says.

Abukcheech sighs. “I once hoped for such a thing. But for the Prophet, there is no compromise.”

“Maybe I could talk to your uncles.”

“You do not understand what you are saying. They will kill you for insulting them.”

“I don’t mean any insult. I just want to prevent a massacre—to either side.”

Abukcheech gives him a hard look. “Why do you not speak to your own people?”

“I’ve been trying for twenty years,” Chapman says. He slides off the mare and Abukcheech wheels her around. The Indian’s face is heavy, melancholy, as he starts back down the trail.

“Meet me at this spot on the new moon,” he says. “If there is a time my uncle will listen, it is then.”

* * *

Chapman stays in the town and observes. The men form hunting parties. They arm themselves with rifles, muskets, swords, ropes. They leave at dusk, carrying torches. Chapman, under awnings, leaning in alleyways, crossing muddy streets at dawn, sees them return from their midnight searches. They want blood.

At night he can’t sleep. The nightmare returns: his mother, coughing blood, blood coming out of her nostrils. Lying in a field under an oak, he jerks awake again and again. Never did he think the frontier would be like this, with groups of men hunting other groups of men like animals. Twenty years ago, he felt a spirit of optimism pulsating from this land. Now it’s on the verge of descending into madness. He thought the continent was limitless—but apparently it is not large enough.

He tries to read his Bible, but it’s too dark. Instead he sits with his back against the tree and thinks about his father, the revolution, the orchards, the river, the chain of events that led him to be here tonight, the Earth rotating on its axis.

He thinks of the northeastern beach, which he hasn’t seen in so long.

* * *

Abukcheech’s face appears from the shadows, painted red and white. An uneasy feeling churns in Chapman’s stomach. It is the new moon. The fires of Mansfield burn below. “Why are you painted like that?” Chapman asks.

“Tonight we make war. I warn you so that you may escape.”

“You said I could speak to your uncles.”

“If they see your face tonight they will remove it from your body. The Prophet’s blood is boiling. He has the tribe in a rage. Tonight the Shawana kill.”

“You plan to kill as well, Abukcheech?”

The Indian nods. “For you to kill is against your nature. But for me it is different. The little mouse will do what the Shawana require.”

“Your English has gotten better,” Chapman says.

“And still you have learned no Shawana at all.” Abukcheech places a hand on Chapman’s shoulder. “I am sorry to make violence on your people. But the Shawana have a saying: There is time for peace, and time for war. This, John Chapman, is time for war.”

“The Bible says the same thing,” Chapman says.

“Then you understand.”

“No,” Chapman says. He starts back down the hill, leaving Abukcheech’s glowing face behind as though it were the absent moon. “No, I don’t,” he says.

* * *

Halfway down the hill, stumbling in fear and disgust, rusted cooking pot clanking on his back, he agonizes. If the Shawnee leaders won’t listen to him, and the white men won’t listen to him, then what can he do? Flee into the forest and allow the slaughter to happen? What would Father do? What would Swedenborg have done? Anything, Chapman decides—anything to stop the killing. He sprints into town, leaping over gullies and hedges, and pounds on the door of the first house he comes to. A man’s voice calls out: “Wilson, I already told you, the damn thing ain’t for sale!”

“The Shawnee are coming,” Chapman yells. A moment later the door swings open and a bearded man—one of the men who cornered Chapman at the post office—says: “You.”

“Get your family inside the fort,” Chapman says.

“Why should I listen to a damn lunatic like you?”

“Get your children behind those walls. They’re going to kill everybody.”

“Everybody but you, I guess,” the man says, but Chapman doesn’t stay to argue. He runs to the next house and repeats the message. The man at this door rebukes him outright.

“I don’t give a good goddamn how many are coming,” he says, and brandishes a long bolt-action rifle. “I’m staying right here.”

“You don’t understand,” Chapman says. “They’ll burn this house to the ground.”

A woman in a bonnet appears. “How many are coming?”

“What in the hell kind of question is that?” her husband says.

“I don’t know,” Chapman says. “But we don’t have much time.”

“Janice,” the woman calls behind her. “Diana. Get your sisters.”

“Now hold on just a goddamn minute,” the man says. But the woman pushes past him, outside with Chapman, leaving the man standing there holding his rifle, with a dumbfounded expression.

“I’m going to tell the Yorks,” she says. “And the Marcums.” She runs down the road with her dress billowing behind her.

“I ain’t never had control of that woman,” the man says in a low, confidential voice.

“If there’s ever a time to listen to her, it’s now,” Chapman says. “The Shawnee are out for blood.”

“So am I,” the man says, and slams the door.

Chapman runs through the town shouting warnings, until candles flare in every window. The streets overflow with people carrying bags and provisions. Mothers drag children by their wrists. Everyone floods toward the fort, whose spiked walls stand in mute defiance. Men gather in groups amidst the chaos, guns dangling at their sides.

Panting, Chapman stops at a corner and leans with his hands on his knees. Disaster may yet be averted. Just as he catches his breath, he finds himself once again surrounded by a group of angry men.

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“You been out there living with them Indians?”

“Hell, he’s probably trying to trick us in there, so the sons of bitches can come loot our homes. I say we stand and fight!”

“You’ll need a militia for this,” Chapman says. “There’s too many of them.”

“What are we supposed to do? Hide like cowards while they run wild through town?”

“There’s a garrison over at Mount Vernon,” someone says.

“It would never get here in time.”

The men make some quick calculations. There are fewer than two hundred men in the town, and a third of those are too old to fight. Suddenly, all at once, like a flock of birds changing direction, the men become frightened. “We’re about to get scalped, gentlemen.”

“How far is it to Mount Vernon?” Chapman asks.

“About twenty-six miles,” a man says. “South, through Fredericksburg.”

“Well, if Philipides can do it, so can I,” Chapman says. He grins at the men. “Of course, he dropped dead afterwards.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ll go rouse the garrison. They can make it back here by dawn.”

“None of us is loaning you a horse, you damn fool. Hell, you’d probably run right into the damn Shawnee and get chopped up.”

“No,” Chapman says. Already his calf muscles are twitching, his feet are moving. “I can see in the dark. Get your women and children into that fort,” he says, breaking through the circle of men. “And don’t do anything stupid.”

Soon he is out of the town, running down the dark road. His bare feet skim over briars and rocks. His mind detaches from his body and he imagines Swedenborg, sixty years ago, scribbling at a table by candlelight, somewhere in Europe, trying to capture the visions he had just received. He imagines himself, Swedenborg, and Abukcheech sitting down to dinner together. The road widens and he passes through sleepy Fredericksburg without waking anyone. When he reaches Mount Vernon, in the darkest pre-dawn hours, he starts shouting again, but his voice comes out a croak. He pounds on a door and someone opens, a dark figure, and Chapman hears himself babbling about Indians and garrisons and forts and help, but now his legs buckle. His lungs burn, his tongue swells in his mouth, and he falls to his knees at the doorstep. Boots clomp around him. Shouts, torches. The jingle of halter bells. A soft female hand touches his face, drips water into his mouth. His body trembles as with cold, though the morning is quite warm now. Something occurs to him: the soldiers whom he has roused will descend upon the Shawnee with the same vengeance the Shawnee had for those settlers. Violence for violence. Death for death. “Why,” he moans, as the woman pours water over his head. “Why?”

“Because you’re burning up, honey,” she says. “You need to rest.”

“Wars and rumors of wars,” he says, thinking of the Book of Revelation.

“That’s right,” the woman says. She pushes him gently back. “You’re all right. Just lie still now.”

Chapman rests his head on the dewy grass, and sleeps.

3.

Chapman, in the woods, crouches down to scoop walnuts. Liver spots decorate his hands. His beard, almost completely white, hangs halfway down his chest. Blue eyes blaze from within a network of lines. He moves slowly, fills his satchel with nuts, makes his way back to the road. His wooden staff swirls dust before him.

He has no idea where he is.

* * *

At the edge of a town, a preacher stands on a hickory stump and addresses a crowd of several dozen men and women. Chapman approaches from the back, his bible clutched in one hand.

“My friends, you are on the path to evil. That’s right, every one of you. This great country of America had a chance to steer itself the right way. It had an opportunity to do something no other nation had ever done. It had the chance to turn toward Jesus. But it failed. It failed, friends, because all of you got caught up in material wealth. That’s right, you.” The preacher points at individuals in the crowd. “And you. And you.”

Chapman squints at the man. He’s young—no more than thirty—and dressed in a ratty jacket and patched trousers. He shakes a bible in the air, and Chapman marvels at how thick the book seems—much thicker than his copy. Then he remembers: most of his pages have been torn out.

The preacher goes into a mock falsetto voice. “How much land can we grab? How many clothes can we buy? Where do I get those fancy new boots? What about toys for the children? A new horse, a new cow, a new slave, a looking glass? Jewelry?” He raises both hands to the sky. “Friends, Jesus Christ himself told us that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The way you’re headed is the way to Hades, let me tell you. Where can I find a man who, like the early Christians, is traveling to heaven bare-footed?”

“You’re wearing shoes, yourself,” someone calls out. The crowd murmurs around him.

The preacher lowers his head for a moment, then looks up and speaks in a low voice. “I am a traveling minister, friends. I travel in the name of Christ. But you—you farmers and mill workers and shopkeepers and horse dealers—give up your wealth, give up your possessions! Come to God as he made you! I ask again: who among you is like the early believers? Who here is journeying to heaven clad only in what the Lord provides?”

“You want us to walk around naked?” someone calls. General laughter. The preacher reddens.

Chapman seizes this opportunity. He nudges his way through the crowd, to the hickory stump, and plants one bare foot upon it. His toes are black with grime, the toenails hardened and yellow. “Here I am,” he says. The audience howls.

“Why, sir,” the preacher stammers. “Sir, I—you—well—I do believe I stand corrected.” He gestures toward Chapman. “Only one man here today is living as he should. Let him be an example to you all.”

Chapman turns to the crowd. “Jesus doesn’t care what you wear. Just treat each other well. That’s all that matters.”

* * *

* * *

Chapman is confused. He can’t remember the last time he ate, but he doesn’t feel hungry. A sort of numbness has overtaken his body. He rambles through rocky fields—is this still Ohio? Is he going east or west? Low clouds make it impossible to tell.

High above, a vulture circles.

Chapman feels a presence beside him. Someone walking with him. He stops in the middle of the field and turns around and around. No people—only a distant orchard on a hill. He heads toward it, laboring slowly. Footsteps again fall beside him. His mind playing tricks. Unless—is it Nat? Is it one of the children he read to? Is it Abukcheech? Is it that woman, that farmer’s wife, who had eyes just like his?

It’s no one, he decides. It’s everyone. It’s God. He’s walking with God.

* * *

This orchard feels familiar. Chapman walks among the trees and touches their trunks, caresses each one. Whoever planted these did so expertly. Then he realizes: this orchard is his father’s, he’s back in Massachusetts somehow, and there’s Nancy Tannehill—white hair, blue eyes, old skin, sagging bosom. Walking now with a stoop. She clutches the hand of a small girl, her granddaughter, and as Chapman approaches, she smiles. “I knew you would come back,” she says.

“Have you stayed here all this time?” Chapman says.

Nancy nods. “Eight children will keep a woman at home.”

“What about your husband?”

“Kai can’t venture out much these days. He’s almost blind now. But you, Johnny—you still have those same eyes.”

Chapman blinks a few times.

The little girl runs after a squirrel. Her blonde pigtails whip around. Nancy places a hand on Chapman’s cheek. “Are you all alone, Johnny? Didn’t you ever find someone?”

“I found a lot of people,” Chapman says.

“You know,” she says, “solitary trees won’t bear fruit. Someone wise once told me that.”

“My reward is in heaven,” Chapman says.

A fog rolls through the orchard and seems to carry Nancy away with it. Her granddaughter remains, squealing as she scampers through the heavy-laden trees. A fat apple plunks down beside her—just a few more weeks and the season will be over, the fruit will rot, the harvest will be wasted. Chapman looks for a ladder, but there isn’t one. Weariness washes over him, and he finds an old tree to sit under. The little girl skips over his outstretched legs, laughing. A sweet sound—indeed, the sweetest sound he can imagine. He will rest for a little while, and then he’ll help her pick some apples—bring them back to her grandmother—maybe he could finally plant those saplings in the back yard. But first a nap—just a small doze—just enough to regain his energy—just a short break before he gets moving again….

Chapman closes his eyes.

* * *

Dear Sir:

I am writing to inquire about your orchard, and to remind you of the particulars of its upkeep. First of all, remember to prune during winter only. That way, when spring arrives, your trees will distribute their energy into fewer branches, thus making those branches bigger. You will reap much more fruit in this manner.

Remember also to keep the buds at least six inches apart. The more room your apples have to grow, the bigger they will be.

If you ever plant a nursery of your own, make sure to do it on a hill with good drainage. The root systems of apple trees are especially delicate and susceptible to water damage. Tie your saplings to stakes and weigh down the young branches with rocks to give the tree a handsome scaffold shape.

It would also behoove you to place your young orchard near a windbreak—a barn or wall, or better yet, a cluster of full-grown trees. This way, during storms, you will not lose too much of your crop.

I am heading northeast at the moment, but whenever I venture your way again, I shall stop by to examine the orchard and offer any new advice. However, I am fully confident that you will be able to raise fruitful trees that will provide for your family, and even your town, for years to come. Apple trees will keep producing fruit for decades, if you take proper care, so even your grandchildren will be able to enjoy them.

Give my regards to your wife, and know that I think of your family often, when I am on my solitary rambles, and look forward to the day when I can sit at your table again. Until then, I remain,

Your friend,
John Chapman

* * *

N. T. Brown lives, writes, and teaches in Orlando, FL. His work has appeared in Matchbook, Nanofiction, Gulf Coast, Pebble Lake Review, and elsewhere. He has a dog named Seven and a cat named Mrs. Mia Wallace.

What do you think is the attraction of the historical fiction genre?

In most historical fiction, there is a sense of dramatic irony---the audience knows things that the characters don't. We love Napoleon's cameos in War and Peace and Baron in the Trees because we know precisely what will happen to him, and his army, someday. We enjoy Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter because we all know what John Brown's ultimate fate will be. Even the movie Titanic falls into this category---we all know the boat will sink, though the characters don't. I think readers enjoy knowing what will happen to certain characters, and watching those characters advance inevitably toward their fates.

neon mayflower

2011-10-15T00:07:00.007-05:00

neon mayflower
by Robert Caporale

The Mayflower is in full-tilt sail bearing down on Provincetown, Massachusetts.

High up in the crows nest, the young lookout, William Bradford, keeps a sharp eye along the western horizon. The Puritans are anxious to hear “land ho.” They are stressed from dealing with the unknown and sick of sucking on limes and eating porridge.

The lucky Puritan who spots land first wins the raffle.

Every now and then William Bradford catches a glimpse of something way off on the horizon that he cannot explain. It looks like tiny particles of pixie dust floating up and popping. He attributes these phenomena to tired eyes squinting into a sunset.

While William stands watch, Captain Myles Standish entertains William’s wife Priscilla in his cabin.

* * *

The Algonquians are a particularly fierce tribe of Indians living along the eastern seaboard.

A group of them are preparing their evening meal overlooking the North Atlantic. They’re lounging around and joking and smoking dope from clay pipes high up on a dune at Long Nook Beach. They have a fire simmering in a deep hole lined with seaweed and stones. They are steaming crabs, clams, lobster, corn and sweet potatoes. Dusk settles in on them and a stiff offshore breeze kicks up into their faces as the sky darkens into shades of pink, orange and gray. The Algonquians gather in closer to the fire and pass around the pipe while poking at the rocks with driftwood sticks and tripping out on the happy trails of sparks floating up and away on a offshore breeze.

* * *

Below deck in the flickering candle light Priscilla tells Captain Miles Standish that she’s in love.

It’s just the swaying of the boat that makes you feel that way, Miles tells her.

* * *

William Bradford pulls up the collar on his wool turtleneck sweater to ward off the chill. He yells down to Endicott the helmsman for the running lights to be engaged. Endicott waves up to William and flicks a toggle switch by the brass sextant and the Mayflower bursts into twinkling lines of light that ungulates across the choppy waters like a carnival midway.

* * *

It doesn’t take long before one of the buzzed out Algonquians spots the neon trimmed Mayflower shimmering out along the wispy horizon. The Algonquians flip out. They have never seen such an aberration before. A medicine man called Cadillac tells the panicky Algonquians that the vision is a ghost ship full of vanquished adversaries on their way to exact retribution. The Algonquians go wild and try to ward off the “Ghost Ship” by dancing around the fire hole chanting ancient spiritual entreaties.

But the Mayflower is relentless; it bears down on them with its lights glowing brighter as the neon silhouette of the “Ghost ship” eerily reveals itself.

The elder Algonquians huddle up. Cadillac assures them their world is about to change forever if the vengeful ship is allowed to make shore. The elders decide the only hope they have to save their sorry asses is to make a sacrifice. Cadillac chooses the young virgin Sweet Rain. Sweet Rain is well aware of what is about to happen to her and grateful for the opportunity because it is a far far better thing she does today than she has ever done before, and the tribe will surely transform her into a legend with full chorus harmony and a dance.

The Algonquians move fast. The fire hole is quickly emptied of their evening meal and more driftwood is added to the flames until the fire pit is a towering inferno. Sweet Rain’s leathers are stripped from her tender body and her bronze skin is painted in crushed blood-red Bayberry juices depicting lightning bolts, a crescent moon and the sun. Just as a precaution against a last minute change of heart, Sweet Rain’s arms and legs are lashed with corn husks. Two braves take hold of Sweet Rain and swing her like a hammock while the rest of the tribe chants her name until it begins to sound like a frenzied roar.

Cadillac signals to release her.

The two braves let her fly.

The tribe silently watches Sweet Rain float in a dream-like slow motion sequence before she drops into the center of the white hot fire hole, sending an eruption of sparks up into the darkening sky.

* * *

Off in the distance the plume of sparks is easily spotted by William Bradford. He rubs his eyes and focuses until he can make out the flames from the funeral pyre. He puts a long telescope to his eye and adjusts it. His heart starts pumping when he sees the wavy images of the dancing Algonquians.

William takes a deep breath and yells at the top of his voice, land ho!

* * *

Captain Myles Standish stumbles out onto the deck pulling up his pantaloons. He looks up to the crow’s nest. What is it, William? he shouts.

Fire, William gestures to the starboard side.

Are you sure?

I am.

Congratulation, Miles yells up to William. You win the two pound box of chocolate covered cherries.

The crew cheers.

Priscilla steps out onto the deck adjusting her petticoats.

Myles Standish points and orders Endicott to steer a course towards the flames.

Endicott spins the wheel hard starboard.

The neon Mayflower creaks as it lists severely in the choppy North Atlantic.

Hold on tight.

* * *

Robert Caporale lives and writes in Northampton, Massachusetts and has over thirty published stories to his credit. Check out his web-site at www.robertcaporale.com.

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

Some just follow me around and make my life miserable until I write them.

The Greatest Pianist in the World

2011-10-15T00:06:00.009-05:00

The Greatest Pianist in the World
by Marko Fong

1 : Prelude and Verse

For forty years, before a Vladimir Horowitz concert tour, a crane appeared outside the pianist’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Workmen would load the thousand pound black Steinway Concert D onto the crane to float from the maestro's sixth story practice studio to sidewalk. Horowitz was notorious for canceling concerts unless his personal instrument was available and tuned to his specification. He often happily played another piano in the actual concert.

He even had a personal tuner who traveled with him to set the octave intervals just a little wide and forgiving with the A above middle C tuned slightly flat at 436 cycles per second for solo recitals. When playing with orchestra, Horowitz insisted on 444 to make the piano sound brighter and faster than the string section's usual 440, which made the string section sound less competent than the soloist. This was unless he was playing for Fritz Reiner who would personally take a tuning fork to the piano five minutes before concert time. As a gesture of respect, Horowitz also consented to let his father in law Toscanini articulate the piano's tuning settings with the rest of the orchestra. Of course, Horowitz only played with Toscanini before he became enough of a star to demand billing above the conductor.

When the crane appeared, a crowd would gather to watch the eleven foot long box of stressed mahogany and steel wire strings journey to street level. "Horowitz's piano" they whispered to one another.

Once the instrument touched sidewalk, the onlookers observed an unspoken fifteen foot perimeter from the instrument as if mortals, even New York mortals, had no right to interfere with the master's microphone to heaven.

It was expected that a virtuoso as great as Horowitz would possess an artist's temperament. Horowitz's practice studio always bore the faintest smell of the freshest filet of sole to be found in Manhattan. Wanda Horowitz made certain that her husband got his favorite lunch within seven minutes of twelve thirty either on the balcony adjacent to the practice studio. If she didn't, the pianist brooded for days.

I remember two other items from Horowitz's practice studio. The first was a dark velvet cloth that the maestro used to wipe his keyboard before playing. No other hands could touch his keys unless the ivories were cleaned thoroughly in between. I saw the maestro forget his own fetish twice.

The second was an Ampex reel to reel tape recorder. Horowitz listened to his own concerts and practice sessions repeatedly. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he never learned to operate the machine. He was the same man who took his first big check from an American tour producer in 1936 and used it to buy a brand new Studebaker sedan for five thousand dollars, despite the fact that he didn't know how to drive and never learned. Wanda hired a chauffeur so that they could get some use from their purchase. For many years, Columbia records supplied an intern who took on the job of cueing and replacing the reels four times a week. In the absence of the intern, Mrs. Horowitz would inveigle the chauffeur, butler, or in an emergency even the superintendent. The couple never had luck keeping servants.

For close to two years, the task of tending to the maestro's tape recorder fell to me. Before it was added to my duties, I had the opportunity to watch Wanda make her tape recorder requests to others. As she walked them through cueing, changing reels, setting levels, and even splicing damaged tape on the 32 inch per second Ampex, it became clear that Wanda knew perfectly well how to operate the machine. She simply hid it from a husband who never noticed. Little in their marriage was as it appeared.

Why am I telling this now? For the first twenty five years, the reason to keep quiet was simple enough. I signed a non-disclosure agreement drafted by a deaf-Brooklyn attorney hired because he literally had no connection to music. In 1951 when I took the job, six hundred dollars a month was a lot of money for part-time work that didn't interfere with my piano studies at Juilliard. Now, I am eighty years old.

My music bio consists of one ASCAP credit, a piece called “Blues for Sonya” that was recorded then disappeared. Six years ago, arthritis took away my capacity to play the piano. I failed to make it in any significant way as a musician. This may be the only thing I contribute to the music world .

I was first tempted to break the secret in 1979. Horowitz was celebrating the 60th year of his career as a soloist and was slated to return to play in Moscow for the first time since 1919. A popular TV news magazine did a segment on the Horowitzes. At this point, Horowitz's detractors had disappeared and the word "legendary" appeared in all his liner notes. His concerts now sold out weeks before the announcement appeared in the paper. The show's anchor played straight man to a comic Wanda as she walked them her regimen of supporting her husband-diva. As the zoomed in on the fresh squeezed orange juice served at 9:45 AM, the anchor delivered the setup line, "What if he gets a few seeds in the juice?"

The tiny Wanda gave a practiced theatrical stare and deadpanned. "If he complains, I throw it at him."

"So who's the real boss of this marriage then?"

"I am the managing partner. He just plays piano a few hours a day. A good life, you think?"

The camera cut to Horowitz practicing then a montage of the couple walking in their garden at their Connecticut home, Wanda dressing him for a concert, and the two sitting and laughing as they traded barbs and charm with the anchorman.

One would never guess the real nature of the marriage. In their contract with the network owned by the same corporation as Horowitz’s record company, the couple insisted on conditions. The forbidden topics began with Horowitz's homosexuality, their daughter Sonya's suicide in 1974, and went on for two pages.

The show, which then had a reputation for investigative journalism, did ask one probing question. "Maestro. They say you never left this apartment for twelve years from 1954 to 1966. Tell us about that."

Horowitz's answer did not stray from the one Wanda had coached him to give for the camera: "It's a really beautiful apartment. Why would anyone want to leave such a place?"

I didn't think the world needs to know that the maestro went into treatment in 1951 to have his homosexuality eliminated or that he underwent electroshock treatments for depression in the early sixties. People don't need to know that Wanda rarely spoke to her husband for seventeen years even as she prepared his lunches, dealt with tailors, managed their social schedule, and coached him on how to present himself to his public. Still, the world should know what happened to make the world's greatest pianist quit performing for so long.

I wanted to come forward, but even as late as 1979 I still imagined that the Horowitzes might help me get a teaching position at Juilliard or a job running rehearsals at Columbia records. I was still deluded about my real prospects in music. After that, I gave little thought to the secret for some twenty five years.

A few weeks ago, my niece came to my assisted living facility and brought me a DVD of that 1979-news-magazine segment. "It's Horowitz, Uncle, the greatest pianist in the world…You said you knew him."

The show kept calling the maestro, "Russian" and the concert in Moscow a return home. One of the oddities of Horowitz's life is that he was Ukrainian. It just happened that his career coincided almost exactly with the Soviet Union. He gave his first concert at 17 in 1919 (the official year of his birth was 1904 because his parents lied to keep him from being conscripted). The Ukraine was a separate country from then. It regained sovereignty in 1991. Horowitz died the year the Berlin wall came down, 1989. Horowitz was from Kiev. He had lived outside the Soviet Union after 1929 for a simple reason. For a Ukrainian Jew in the Soviet Union, pogrom and purge were much bigger P's than pianist.

My thumb is stiff and I struggle to find the pause button on the remote of the DVD player. I repeat the words to myself, “I am the holder of Horowitz’s secret.”

Here’s the simple version. From 1951 to 1953, it was my job to keep the fact that the world's greatest pianist was taking piano lessons a secret from the world. If you know classical music, you would know that it is not unusual for well-established musicians to continue lessons with a mentor or coach. There wasn't any shame in taking lessons even for Horowitz. What made them different was that he was taught by a man whose only formal studies took place at the Ohio School for the Blind. Horowitz’s teacher had performed only once in his life in a public concert hall recital and that opportunity had only been the result of Wanda calling in a favor. The rest of the time, he had made the bulk of his living by playing in bars on mistuned pianos. In 1951, jazz musicians knew who Art Tatum was but hardly anyone walking down 5th Avenue would have recognized that the black man walking into the Horowitzes’ apartment house was anything but a delivery boy.

Part 2 : Choruses

Some biographers have documented that there was something of a respectful friendship between the world's greatest classical and jazz pianists. One famous story claims that Horowitz, so impressed with one of Tatum's versions of the song “Tea for Two”, transcribed it and played it for the jazz master during to show that he too could play what Tatum had played. Legend has it that Tatum responded by sitting down and improvising yet another even more dazzling version of “Tea for Two” then announcing, "You can copy it, but it doesn't matter until you understand it."

In another story, Horowitz and Stokowski both visited Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where Tatum had a regular gig in Harlem, and Stokowski allegedly told Horowitz in front of witnesses "That man is the greatest pianist in the world."

I had ties to both men. Horowitz had once visited my performance class at Juilliard in 1946. I was in my early twenties, straight from Gaudalcanal and the GI Bill, eager to resume my efforts towards a performance career. I was also good looking. When Horowitz showed an interest in my playing that day, my musician's ego was blind to other motives. Obviously, he wouldn't pretend with a complete clunker of a pianist, but I was naïve enough to tell myself that his interest was musical.

He came to my recital once. He took me to lunch on two occasions. One time while I executed a chromatic run in Beethoven's Diabelli variations, he began showing me how not to arch my hand by stroking it ever so lightly. Nothing was said, I simply didn't respond. I may have tightened ever so perceptibly. I'm pretty sure Horowitz had ferreted out the fact that I was also gay in the way that those of us who are detect and send clues. This may have made my rejection of him even worse. His invitations and interest in my performing stopped.

In 1947, I took a part-time bartending job at Jimmy's Chicken Shack. At this point, I had figured out that my future as a classical soloist had limited prospects. I was fascinated by jazz, especially the controversial-emerging form called Bop. A few years earlier, Charlie Parker washed dishes here and had listened to Tatum play two nights a week. Jimmy's thought that having a white bartender gave the place respectability. As the bartender, especially as a bartender who didn't mind pouring the better stuff for the help, I got to know Art Tatum or Art got to know me quickly.

It was easy to understand why Tatum drank so much. He was a mostly blind black man who happened to be a genius on the most classical of instruments, the piano. He played with a speed and technique that matched any classical soloist. In order to play, he had to live on the road where he fought with club managers who tried to cut his share of the house, endured bad hotels, and suffered nasty patrons. His one joy was playing after hours well into morning and drinking as he played. In general it was two fifths a night interspersed with an occasional stein of beer and a cocktail or two. The drinking never seemed to affect Tatum's playing, just his health. Even in 1947, the uremia was beginning to affect him. Although still working, Tatum couldn't tour and because of the ASCAP strike he couldn't record. He didn't record in a studio from 1945 until 1953. Essentially, the world's greatest jazz piano player was supporting himself as a cocktail pianist.

Even musically, Tatum was being left behind. He was a two-handed jazz pianist who played solo at a time when all the talk was about Bird and the new thing. He might have inspired Bird, but most hipsters would tell you that Tatum was too old school, a swing guy who just happened to play faster and more adventurously harmonically than anyone else. Even in 1947, the one-handed style with the bass and drums taking over the rhythm while the piano player played fleet single-note-horn-like lines like a horn was taking hold, because no one could follow Tatum anyway.

One night after one AM, Horowitz and Wanda walked into Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. The two must have come from a society party uptown. He wore a tux, mirror black shoes, and a top hat. Wanda was in an evening gown. They couldn't have looked more conspicuous. Nonetheless, the couple took a table in the back and ordered two glasses of champagne.

Art was playing Ellington's “Caravan”, a fast piece that relies on a middle eastern riff and a rhythm that openly imitates a beating drum. In the second chorus, Art had turned it into a sly rhumba, quoted from three or four other songs, then dropped straight back into the groove by switching from minor to major while interpolating the “Beer Barrel Polka.” With anyone else, it might have seemed gimmicky once you got past the sheer amazement. With Tatum it was sublime and seemingly endless. By chorus five, the customers were hooting, "Go Art…" "Whoo…" "Swing it man."

They had barely noticed Horowitz in their midst. Just as Tatum hit the tonic and dropped his Caravan just short of some Parisian Thoroughfare, a guy, clearly drunk, yelled from the back, "Hey Art, how about the Stars and Stripes Forever?"

I looked closely at the Horowitzes. Art could not have seen the formally-dressed couple in the back and no one from the club had had a chance to let Art know. Art was surprisingly good about requests. I heard him play “Melancholy Baby” three times and had heard him play Andrews Sisters' songs on at least half a dozen occasions particularly when there was a tip involved. I think he drew the line at Jimmy Durante, but I couldn't swear to it.

This is the deal. In 1944, Horowitz had played at Carnegie to celebrate his American citizenship. Ever the showman, after two hours of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Schumann, the maestro came out and did an encore of variations on the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” With the war still on, the reaction was thunderous. A 78 of Horowitz's version even made the charts.

Art started straight with Sousa's melody and a firmly established march tempo in the left hand. In fact, it sounded like he purposely wasn't going to show off at all. When Art was on there would generally be silence, I started to hear the clink of glasses and murmured conversation as Art hit the bridge a third time. I hadn't noticed, but Art's rendition subtly shifted from march to blues and suddenly the Stars and Stripes, the ultimate martial music, had transformed into a spiritual, but the fastest spiritual ever. I had always been amazed by Tatum's playing, but this was composition. It was deep, stunningly beautiful, a meditation on being black, patriotic, suffering, and proud all at once. The audience went silent. Horowitz sat there his head down. I saw him wipe away a tear with his napkin. At the end, the house didn't even have the presence to applaud. They just sat in mute worship.

The Horowitzes came back three times in two weeks and each time Vladimir and Wanda invited Art to join them for drinks. I had kept a careful distance from the Horowitzes. I paid respects. He would greet me by name, but we did not speak beyond that. It seemed that this was going to be the way we would deal with mutual awkwardness.

It was Wanda Horowitz who asked me to meet her for lunch at Tavern on the Green. "I have a job for you," she announced after the preliminaries but before the clam chowder.

I would have five basic responsibilities. I had to get Tatum from his room in Harlem three times a month to Fifth Avenue. I had to make sure that Art never told anyone else. I would get the thousand dollars a lesson to Art. I had to keep anyone from ever noticing our regular visits. During the lessons, I was to see that Art always had a full bottle of scotch available. In addition, Art was going to get a concert in a music auditorium with a program. It seemed that Wanda also said something about helping my career.

For thirty seven visits, Art Tatum and I dressed up as piano tuners. On a couple occasions, Wanda even arranged for us to tune the Baldwins and Steinways of residents in the building. Art could tell you just which keys were off by playing a couple scales.

Part 3 : Scherzo and Cadenza

Art and Vladimir concentrated on a single song, “Tea for Two.” Horowitz would usually play first. Most would wonder why the loudest-fastest-classical pianist in the world would even consider the possibility of lessons. Horowitz’s “Tea for Two” was filled with arpeggios, quadruple speed sections, counter melodies, and dazzle. Art always sat next to the piano, poured himself a glass, and would shake his head, "That's nice, but it still doesn't swing."

The first few times, Horowitz had this puzzled look. "I am not a jazz player. Why must it swing? I am improvising, yes?"

"All music that's worth listening to has to swing."

Art would motion for Vladimir to move aside and Art would play sixteen bars of “Tea for Two” or was it “Tea for Two Hundred and Twenty Two?”

One time when Art was playing, he caught Horowitz tapping his foot.

"What you doing there man?"

"Doing vere?"

"I might be blind, but I hear you tapping."

Art had this huge laugh when he was genuinely in a good mood. He had enormous hands that he used to gesture when he talked. "So you do know what swing is, then?"

"Yah, I guess."

Horowitz couldn't hide his smile.

"Okay, then. You show me."

Horowitz might have known what it was, but he couldn't quite do it. I did, however, notice one other thing. Horowitz forgot to wipe down the keys after Art played.

Sometimes, the two talked through the lesson. Once between choruses, Horowitz, never especially tactful particularly without Wanda, said, "You have no idea how difficult it is to be a Jew in Europe. You Americans don't understand the suffering."

Art wasn't an arguer. He slipped over to the piano bench and played two quick choruses of the blues. I'm not sure that Horowitz caught the joke. Like Art, his hands sometimes seemed bigger than his body. Instead of saying anything, he raised them as if to play fortissimo then went back to Tea for Two, one of his better versions, but it still didn’t swing.

Horowitz would show Art antique desks, give him tastes of vintage cognacs, and let him feel the material of his perfectly-tailored suits. One day, Horowitz was showing off a diamond ring bought from a single royalty check and Art joked, "Maybe you should be the one giving me piano lessons."

Horowitz’s answer with a riff from one of his radio interviews, "America has been so good to me just for being able to play the piano. I came as a refugee and this is the kindest nation in the world."

I only wish that Art Tatum had responded by playing the blues that day. Some moments are subtle but portend huge changes. Not long after Horowitz said that, the saddest thing in the world happened.

Tatum hadn't recorded in six years at that point. Even though Wanda had gotten him a concert in what she called a "proper hall", little had come of it. The Times and the Herald chose not to review. To be honest, Art's music always sounded better when there was a bottle on top of the piano. I was still bartending at Jimmy's and Art was still playing there. I don't know if anyone else noticed, but Art's playing in public began to change.

He was still fast, the harmonies were still dizzymaking, yet something about Art was gone. It was getting just a little bit predictable, as if he were playing from arrangements instead of improvising or creating at the keyboard. He was playing more like Horowitz.

By contrast, Horowitz's playing took on a looser quality. He sounded fresher in concert than ever before. Various critics attributed it to health regimens, a new seriousness about musicianship over showmanship, competition with Rubenstein. One critic wrote,

Horowitz has always been the great soloist in the romantic tradition. He plays to the hall, sometimes takes liberties from the score in the tradition of Liszt and Hoffman. Some now insist that the musician's job is to interpret the composer's intentions. The romantic understands the composer's intention.

Last week, the Russian unleashed a fresh phase of his career in a program that included Scriabin, Liszt, and Horowitz's own spectacularly inventive transcription of Bizet's Carmen. Where Horowitz once seemed mechanical and merely showy, he has now become a serious interpreter…

As Horowitz's public playing flourished, Art’s began to falter. It was as if the Eastern European were a musical vampire. Even odder, Horowitz never quite learned to swing “Tea for Two.”

Art remained the gentle teacher and when he played during the lessons, his little asides were as feeling and inventive as ever. The biographers say that Art's uremia got even worse around this time. His fingers were stiffening. Every now and then I could see the signs that he would shorten runs or hit a double note that he couldn't instantly resolve harmonically.

Part IV : Finale

In 1953, Art got a call from Norman Granz to come to Los Angeles to record. Granz, a Jewish attorney from Brooklyn, had a special talent for promoting jazz musicians. He was the first impresario to get jazz musicians big money to play in concert hall venues. Granz encouraged his stars to play to the crowd, encouraging them to play faster,louder after playing written melody at least once. He packed his concerts with sax players like Illinois Jacquet who hit the high squealy notes and Oscar Peterson, a Canadian who idolized Art and who played uncommonly fast and complex even if it was neither particularly original nor surprising. Art took the first train to Los Angeles and Granz recorded him for forty two hours. Art never saw Horowitz again nor did I.

On his way to California, Art stopped in Toledo to visit his son and first wife. He was never especially close to Art Junior, but he bought him a piano and set aside five thousand dollars for him to go to school or buy a house. No one knew how Art happened to be so flush.

The resulting recordings with Granz, though still wonderful, aren't the real Tatum. Some insist that the drinking had caught up with him. Others insist that he'd just lost it at age 45. Tatum was dead by 1956 from kidney complications. It remains the only extended set of studio recordings of Tatum’s playing after 1945. In the mid-70's someone tracked down an air check of Tatum playing after hours in the early forties. The critics dubbed "God is in the House" a revelation, “the lost evidence of the greatest jazz pianist to ever flat a fifth or empty one.” If you have a really good ear and listen to the Granz recordings, you'll hear that Tatum is playing on a piano with the octaves voiced just a little low and the A above middle C set to 436.

After Art left New York, Horowitz practiced at manic levels as he prepared for a sixteen city international tour. Then one morning, he stopped. Three days befor the tour, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Some say he spent thirty-five days in a row staring out the window telling the doctors that he would never perform again until he could play on his swing. Others claim that he would lament that he was not truly the world's greatest pianist, that he was an impostor, and that he dared not face the public again.

In 1954, with no income from concerts, Wanda Horowitz sold the paintings by Raphael and Titian passed to her by her father. Horowitz did not play in public for twelve years and during that period barely spoke to his daughter Sonya. He did record on three occasions in Columbia's Long Island recording facility. After his return in 1966, there were many stories of Horowitz experimenting at the piano with an extraordinary set of variations on “Tea for Two.” The producers, sensing a hit similar to “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Carmen”, tried to convince Horowitz to put it on record. He adamantly refused. His 1989 will included a provision that no record company ever release any version of his playing “Tea for Two.” No one ever found the tape anyway.

In a chest in dry dark closet in my niece's home in Walnut Creek, inside three layers of plastic bags, there is a 9 inch reel of tape which I now pack with the tape I record now. I remember the afternoon I made the recording all too well. Art and Vladimir were joking around, as they sometimes did. He was most of the way through his second bottle of bourbon and Vladimir had yet again not quite gotten Art to tap his foot when he took on “Tea for Two.” It was 1953 and I don't know if either man was aware at the time that this would be the last lesson.

"It's close though?"

"Yeah, it's close."

"Maybe I can't swing?"

"Nah, everyone swings, we just haven't found it yet. It's there somewhere, it always is. Maybe if you had to play an instrument with bad hammers and three unvoiced octaves in bars full of drunks for a few years…."

I remember the place still smelled like fish. Sonya slipped into the practice studio and tried to get her father’s attention. I smiled at her, but he pushed her away.

“Pappa’s busy, go find your mother.”

I offered to keep Sonya amused as I sometimes did during the lessons, but Horowitz shook his head. His mind was on other things and he wanted me in the room for some reason. He turned to Art with a challenge that he must have considered for some time.

"Maybe I can't swing, but can you play like me?"

Art took a seat at the piano and I taped every second of Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat minor. I could swear he was staring at the keyboard before he set his hands in place. The notes danced from the piano, stately, graceful, and soft. It was music so pure that even now when I listen to it I wonder if there’d ever been an instrument or a pianist involved.

* * *

“Carmen Variations (Horowitz)” created by Etincelles

* * *

Marko Fong lives in Northern California and published most recently in Emprise Review, Brilliant Corners, Eclectica, and Memoir (and). He is also the fiction editor of E-chapbook. This is his second story in Lacuna.

What was the inspiration for this story?

This story was based on reports that Horowitz sometimes went to see Art Tatum play and that the two pianists were at least acquainted. I had noticed that both had well-known arrangments of "Tea for Two." Supposedly, Horowitz really did forbid anyone to release his version on record. This story atempts to fill in the missing notes.

The Pioneer

2011-10-15T00:05:00.002-05:00

The Pioneer
by B. G. Hilton

Aha, you say you want to hear my story? I know the one you mean. Not one of the stories about standing firm in the face of foreign musketry! Not one about bedding some fair maiden and then having to duel her brother! Not even about living on snow and horsemeat in the Eastern winter, where each night was a day long. No! Any old fool here can tell you stories like that. You want the other story. You want to know about how I was first.

Yes, I was a pioneer, which is to say that I did something incompetently. Like the first time one makes love c’est non? Oh, the awkwardness! Oh, the uncertainty! Oh, the – dare I say – the brevity? And yet even though near every time afterwards is better, it is important merely because it is first. The first matters! Tell me about the two hundred and fifty third time you made love? You cannot, can you? You simply cannot.

First. I need not have been, if the wonderful aerostat had possessed a basket suspended beneath it. Then the pilot could have gone alone. But the Brothers had not thought of such a thing, brilliant though they were – the mistakes of the first, as I say. There was a kind of platform around the bottom, so there had to be two aeronauts to balance the load.

At first, there was talk of sending two condemned criminals aloft. Yes, there was danger, but could you imagine that? The greatest feat of our National science piloted by robbers and murderers? Aha! They could have used their chains as ballast! No, the good doctor – the pilot, the man of science and sang froid – convinced the King that he should go, and the King selected a man of position and substance as his passenger. This was me, of course.

How well I recall the day! That said, I don’t quite remember if the sun was out, but I know that the wind was not strong, which was quite some relief. The King and Queen were there – he in blue silk, and she in a wig like a wedding cake – sitting on a platform before the great, brightly coloured globe of hot air. (By this I mean the balloon, of course, not the Duc D’Ansieurs, aha, although he was there too). And there were great nobles, and generals, and people cheering and laughing. These were the last days in which we nobles could stand before a crowd of peasants without pissing our pants, aha, the last for a long time. Who else was there? Oh, the ambassador, of course, that rough-hewn savant from across the seas, who peered approvingly over his spectacles. He and brave, foolish Leilokua were each trying to chat up the Countess de la Trieux, which would lead... ah, but I digress. We old aristros gossip like washerwomen, and you are not here for gossip.

The doctor and I bowed before the King, and took our places on the platform. The doctor was in charge, my task was to feed hay into the burner that produced the heated air that would keep us aloft. He was a brave one! Braver than I, certainly. I am an old soldier, you see, and to an old soldier the enemy you can see is infinitely less worrisome than the enemy that you cannot, aha! But Dr. d'Apeau, ah, the doctor was a man of science, and to such men the unknown is a lover to be wooed, not a foe to be fought. A dangerous lover, granted, but – well – we’ve all been there, have we not? Not all our scars come from sabre cuts, aha, no indeed!

Where were we? On the platform, yes. On the platform under the balloon, with Mother Earth about to drop out from beneath us. Then the King nodded to the Brothers, who waved to the workmen, who released the ropes, and for the first time since Icarus, man was airborne! At first, I felt no fear. We rose slowly. It was as if I was standing on a chair. Then a table, then the top of a ladder, then the roof of a high building. And then the roofs were beneath me, and the fear set in. The good doctor had to remind me to keep shovelling, as I could scarcely keep my mind even on this mundane task as the streets and houses drifted by beneath me.

Yes, I was scared, but true terror waited. As we passed over the cathedral, I looked down upon its towers from above. I remembered standing before that cathedral as a boy, seeing those towers rising, oh, so very high above my head and imagining that God himself was looking down from them. Now I was a hundred feet or more above those towers, and my mere physical terror was overtaken by a supernatural dread. If the balloon had not obscured the view, I believe I would have scanned the sky above for thunder clouds, aha! Oh, I laugh now, but if you had seen me then...

Now it was in this state of terror that we crossed the river. Oh, how the balloon rocked! Any aeronaut today will tell you that when you cross from land to water, this can happen. It is to do with the heat of the air they tell me, aha, and then seem so surprised that I do not know. Why? I say. Do you think the first man to build a house must perforce have known of plaster cornices and flock wallpaper? We were first, and flew on luck and guesswork. In my ignorance, I thought that the platform wobbled so because the doctor, delighted by our ascent, was dancing a jig! Stop dancing! I cried. Shovel harder, he replied, or we'll be in the river. And so I shovelled, not wishing to be – in Seine! Aha! Aha! Oh, forgive me, I could not resist.

The shovelling? I shovelled straw into the burner, to create the heated air that gave the balloon its power of aerial suspension. I had never in my life done anything like it. I do not mean merely that I had never flown, I mean that I had never attended a burner that was not fuelled by wood or charcoal. So I was doing two unprecedented things, while simultaneously trying to enjoy the view, and repressing the urge to soil myself. But then, you knew that this story could not end well, could it?

The streets beneath were thronged with people, and even at our altitude I could hear some of the cheering. Never trust cheers! Oh, practice a thousand lesser follies, but never trust cheers! In later years, I soldiered for a man who so loved the sound of cheering that he let it destroy him, aha, and half of Europe with him. The Romans knew not to trust cheers. Remember, thou art mortal, they would tell their heroes as they accepted the plaudits of the crowd. One has to admire the Romans, a people of equal parts wisdom and madness. They were almost French, really.

At any rate, I could hear the cheering, and young cockerel that I was, I thought all was going well. In fact, we were losing height dangerously. Nowadays, aeronauts use a barometer to measure altitude, but we had none. The doctor and I were judging our height by eyesight alone. What we had both neglected was that we had begun amongst the great buildings in the centre of the metropolis, passed over the lesser houses close to the river, and were now heading over the small houses and cottages of the suburbs. This created a sort of illusion; a barrier to our estimation. We had been so high above the rooftops before, we were almost as high above them still.

Perhaps we should have seen that the people on the ground looked larger than before. Doubtless, we would today. But we were first, you see. Before us, men had seen Paris from above from high towers or hills, or other stationary positions. We had the streets moving, moving beneath us, like a huge map unrolling. The perspective was so alien... but I have made excuses enough already. I shall make no more! The fire was not as hot as it should be and we did not realise how rapidly we were sinking, until the platform s-c-r-a-p-e-d – skkkkkkkkr! – on the high branches of a tall tree. The doctor shouted at me to shovel more, though he need not have. I was shovelling like an English sapper, aha, like an English sapper with a Prussian sergeant! Too late, of course, too late. We slipped lower, lower across the fields. The ground, that had seemed to unfold so sedately before was galloping by like a racehorse.

Unable to rise, the doctor ordered that I extinguish the fire to prevent it spreading when we made our impact – our landfall if you will, aha! No sooner had I done so, then the platform caught on a hedge on top of a low rise. We fumbled for the grapnel, but the platform tilted forward too quickly to make use of it. I can still remember the smell the grass as it came up to meet me, and then all was stars and blackness.

I was not unconscious for long. I awoke, and paused for a moment. It is unwise to make rapid judgements upon opening one's eyes. Sometimes one awakes in a feather bed with bowing servants bringing coffee, and sometimes in a dismal trench full of dying grenadiers. C'est la vie. But I did not seem to be in any great pain, and I rose to my feet with but little discomfort. I surmised that I had tumbled down a fairly steep slope, but one comprised of very soft ground. I had no worse than some bruises and a chipped tooth to show for my troubles. Up the hill, I could see the great balloon, caught hopelessly in the hedge, ignored by incurious sheep as a thing of no consequence. The doctor – usually a man of the most temperate language – was tangled in the ropes, and cursing me blue and calling me every name under the sun.

The farmer who owned the field riding up, and with his help I cut the doctor free, but his leg was broken and we could not move him, so the farmer sent his boy for a cart. And in amongst the hedge, miraculously preserved, was the wicker basket containing our lunch, which had been completely forgotten when we were aloft. So the three of us dined upon roast capon, champagne and a somewhat inferior Roquefort cheese until the cart arrived.

And that, ami, is my story. As I say, I have other stories, everyday stories, stories I have in common with many others. This story I shared with one only, the good doctor; and since he died in his second balloon crash, I am alone. There were many more balloons. A mere week after ours a new one was launched; this one powered by the hydrogen gas, rather than by heated air. In the years since, balloons have become far better, and aeronauts far better prepared – in tools and in mind – for the rigours of flight. But since they have not yet learned to steer the things, they are deemed to be of limited practical value, and I fear that in this new age practicality is valued far and away above its worth. Perhaps we shall put aside these childish things until we find some way to make them practical – or until learn to temper our pragmatism.

Ah, listen to this old fool. These matters are for the world and for the young. I am but one man, and I am old.

But I was first.

* * *

B. G. Hilton has lived in Australia his whole life, and studies at the English and history at the University of Newcastle. He has worked at every boring and unpleasant job that there is and - quite understandably - would prefer to be a writer. This story is based on an assignment he did for his creative writing class.

What do you think is the attraction of the historical fiction genre?

I think good historical fiction is the ideal blend of escapism and realism. It presents world different from our own, and which are yet very grounded in reality.

Days of the Accord

2011-10-15T00:04:00.001-05:00

Days of the Accord
by Isi Unikowski

Because it was wet and neither of us felt like working
we traced concessions on the greasy table and negotiated borders.
I was ready to relinquish epochs. You, to my fury,
quibbled over neighbourhoods. I’m sorry:
what you called contours were, for me, terraced facades
wary with washing, child- flitting alleys
that led to the old port and the sea, an imperial coin
embossed by clouds, the vaults and cardos
a proscenium for intrigues, zealots, dialectics.
The Ghibelline towers stranded in sunshine
stapling a welted sky to the orchards’ green ledgers
seem to admonish these empty enterprises. Lacking
the specified detail to replace the lack of intent,
we fall back on studied courtesies, merest chords,
slivers of sound dispensed from the crenellations.
Accompanied, hectored and lectured between
the fallen columns, how could you understand
the double demerit of our haruspicy –
that it was used and what it portended?
Now that I have conjured you beside me in the lamplight,
take off that toga, or those spats, these antique graces:
all our mosaics proclaim we advance
by accommodation, for all that ancient bluster.

* * *

Isi Unikowski is a public servant who works for the Australian Government. He lives in Canberra where his poetry is currently circulating as part of a 'poetry on the buses' program instigated by the Australian Capital Territory Government.

What do you think is the most important part of a historical fiction poem?

I think the most important part (and I express this as an aspiration, not with any conviction that I have yet achieved this to my satisfaction) is to find the right balance between the historical reference and its contemporary resonance; in other words, not to bury the history by the overwhelming weight of one's contemporary values, perspectives and language, nor to crush it by the inevitable way in which we turn history into allegory. I think of Cavafy as an example of a poet who has found this balance, or space in which each element of the polarity is given its weight; and perhaps, using a smaller timescale, our own Les Murray.

Colonel Redl's Knife Sheath

2011-10-15T00:03:00.006-05:00

Colonel Redl’s Knife Sheath
by George Berguño

[1]

In the autumn of 1941 I left my home in Basel to spend quiet days in Gandria, a remote village carved into the Swiss Alpine cliff that overlooks the southern arm of Lake Lugano. German troops had crossed the Russian border; the Red Army was outflanked; the siege of Leningrad had just begun. And although I lived in a peaceful island amidst a sea of brutalities, the thought of the millions that were destined to die weighed heavy on my mind.

I took a room in the only hotel in the village – a modest place run by a Spanish widow, a woman in her sixties with melancholic dark eyes and a deep-set jaw who, however, was an excellent cook. She had another quality that, in my despondent state of mind, proved to be a gift from heaven: she had little interest in her guests, and her questions were confined to inquiring whether I had slept well or if the meal had pleased me. And so I spent my days wandering along the lake, breathing in the odour of pine and rosemary, and thinking only of my next meal.

There was one other guest at the hotel, a man of about fifty-five or fifty-six, immaculately dressed at all times, who exuded an air of refinement and knowledge. But I soon learned that he too wanted to be left alone, and indeed, although we saw each other at breakfast, lunch and dinner, we made a ritual of eating at separate tables with only the occasional nod of recognition exchanged between us.

One night, the warm damp air pressed down upon my breath such that my bedroom seemed to be shrinking to intolerable proportions. At last, I gave up the struggle for sleep. I wandered down the stairs and onto the long balcony that looked onto the lake. There, I spied my lonely companion sitting at a small table, absorbed in his thoughts. As I had no wish to intrude upon the man’s intimate solitude, I turned to make my exit. Suddenly, he saw me, and to my astonishment, he rose and greeted me.

“I hope you will not think me a bad host,” he said. “Will you join me? I have just opened a bottle of Barolo.”

His speech was accompanied by elegant gestures that gave the impression of old-fashioned manners. I was charmed and intrigued by his invitation; I sat at his table and accepted the glass of deep-red wine. Now that I was sitting close to the man, I took a moment to study his features. Despite his middle age he was dark and handsome. A grim determination pervaded his jaw and forehead; but his hands were restless, suggesting a peculiar nervousness or premonitory fear.

“You strike me as a wanderer,” I said at last, “or a homeless scholar.”

He laughed heartily. “I certainly enjoy my own company and I’m also something of a modern Odysseus. But I have never sought knowledge or erudition. I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me.”

“So you are a man of action?”

“Once upon a time, yes – but what about you?”

“I often wonder about the futility of all action,” I said with profound sadness.

“The futility of all action: an intriguing idea. Perhaps you are the person I have been seeking...”

I shot him an inquiring glance.

“I have wandered the continent and lived in many countries,” he went on, “but my search has been guided by one aim only: to find a confessor. I’ve been observing you for some days and I feel an unaccountable compulsion to tell you my story.”

I turned my gaze to the moon’s silvery light rippling on the lake. I had come to Gandria to escape all tales of death and destruction. Yet, against my will, I felt sympathy for my unknown companion of the night. Taking my silence as acquiescence, he embarked on a long story – the strangest tale of guilt I ever heard.

[2]

My name is Ebinger – Carl Josef Ebinger; and I am a native of Vienna.

I completed my military training in 1909; a year later I joined the Intelligence Bureau of the Imperial and Royal Army. My commanding officer and trainer was Colonel Alfred Redl. No doubt, you are familiar with the name: I am referring to the Colonel Redl who was decorated with the Order of the Iron Cross for his outstanding services to Austrian Intelligence and who, perhaps, became the most brilliant military officer of his generation. I might add that Colonel Redl was the most humorous, kind and gentle officer I ever met – a graceful, elegant and compassionate person who launched me on my career and acted as a mentor and spiritual father to me.

In 1912 I was appointed to the rank of Detective Sergeant. But my story really begins in the spring of 1913, when, together with Detective Sergeant Steidl, I was assigned to a mysterious case, one that had baffled Austrian and German counter-espionage agencies since 1911: someone in Austrian Intelligence was relaying vital military secrets to Russia. But there were as yet no clues with which to launch an investigation.

Then – it was in April 1913 – we got our first lucky break. A letter arrived at Vienna’s General Delivery Office on Fleischmarkt Square, addressed to a certain Herr Nizetas. The postmark was from Berlin and as the letter went unclaimed, it was returned to Berlin, where it was opened by German secret police. At that time Germany and Austria were in agreement to exchange information that might be crucial to the security of both countries. On inspecting the contents of the letter, German police concluded that it was imperative to contact Austrian Intelligence; for the envelope contained 6000 kronen and two addresses – one in Switzerland, the other in France – addresses which had, moreover, been identified as contact points for Russian spies.

This was the break that we had been waiting for and Austrian Intelligence conceived a plan that was brilliant in its simplicity. The letter was resealed with its contents intact and returned to General Delivery. Detective Sergeant Steidl and I were appointed to stake out the post office; we took up residence in a small room across the square. We waited and watched. Sooner or later the recipient of the letter would turn up. We had instructed the post manager: as soon as Herr Nizetas collected his letter, he was to contact us by means of an electric bell whose wire ran from under the counter of the post office right into our room.

Days, weeks trickled by and Herr Nizetas did not appear. Meanwhile, two more letters arrived in his name. We opened both letters and found 6000 kronen in one and 8000 in the other, along with mysterious notes that did not further our knowledge of the case. But the new letters gave us an incentive to continue our long siege. We resealed the new letters and returned them to the post office.

Six weeks later, a few minutes before six o’clock on the evening of May 24 1913, our patience was rewarded in a way we could not have foreseen.

When my mind flies back to that magnanimous day, I remember details which, over the years, have taken on an importance that I cannot fathom. I remember that it was a Saturday evening and a cold one at that. It was the coldest May evening that I can recall, and yet, it was a clear day with a sky so blue it had the effect of mesmerising me into forgetfulness. I remember also that, for once, we had not been expecting anything to happen. But it did. The bell rang and we nearly missed it. Steidl had gone downstairs to relieve his bladder, while I had gone to the kitchen to prepare coffee. So when the bell sounded there was only an empty room to greet its warning. Steidl had just emerged from the privy and I was carrying my cup of coffee in one hand when we met in the corridor and heard the bell ringing through the door. The cup slipped from my grasp and splintered on the floor, coffee splashing my shoes and staining my trousers.

We shot down the stairs, bolted out the building and raced across the square, arriving at the post office with our arms flapping. Herr Nizetas had arrived, yes, but he had already departed. We ran outside in time to see a cab speeding around the corner and I was granted a miraculous fraction of a second in which to make a mental note of the license number – A3313. There was a moment of near-silence between Steidl and I; the only sound to reach our ears was the sound of our rapid breaths.

“We have him!” Steidl exclaimed.

“Our man has got away!” I cried.

“But we have the cab number. We can track him wherever he goes.”

“It may be hours before we find the cab and by then – who can say where our fugitive will be? We don’t even know what he looks like.”

We ran back to the post office and quizzed the clerk for vital clues, but there was little in the way of information. Herr Nizetas had entered General Delivery wearing a hat pulled over his face so that it had been impossible for the clerk to get a glimpse of the man’s features. The hat itself was a typical one – of medium brim – and the man’s height was medium too. The man’s voice had no distinguishing characteristics: a typical male voice with a typical Viennese accent. In brief, we had nothing to go on and nothing to show for our six weeks of waiting.

As we walked out of the post office my mind was already working on an explanation to give headquarters for our failure to catch our man. Imagine our surprise when, upon exiting onto the square, we saw a cab rolling along with the license plate A3313! We lost no time in hailing the cab and showering the driver with questions. Our emotions had run away with us: we were screaming and gesticulating, pushing our badges into the driver’s face. All these emotional expressions on our part only served to astonish the driver and delay our search. When the driver had finally understood what we wanted, he informed us that the gentleman that we were searching for had not gone very far: he had stopped a few blocks away at the Café Kaiserhof. And it seemed that the passenger had been anxious to get there as soon as possible, for in his haste he had left the sheath of a penknife with which he had used to open the letters.

We confiscated the sheath and made our rapid way towards the café and within minutes we were facing what seemed like another dead end. The headwaiter assured us that no one had entered the Kaiserhof in the last fifteen minutes. But having got this far we were not going to admit defeat without a struggle. We began asking questions, and, as chance would have it, a cab driver waiting outside was able to identify our man. A gentleman with a grey hat over his face had got out of one cab and immediately into another and had asked to be taken to Hotel Klomser.

At Hotel Klomser we asked the concierge to direct us to Herr Nizetas.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, gentlemen,” he said, “we have no one staying with us by that name. And I can assure you that I always remember our visitors” names.”

“Has anyone come into the hotel in the last half hour?” asked Steidl.

“Yes, certainly – at least half a dozen persons have asked for their keys. We are a very busy – “

“We need the names of everyone who has entered the hotel in the last thirty minutes,” I commanded.

“Well, if it’s absolutely necessary…about half hour ago Herr Felsen asked for his keys, as well as two ladies. What were their names? Ah yes, there was Frau Kleinemann, who is the wife of Bank President Kleinemann, with Frau Lüchow, who is married to Director – “

“Forget the ladies,” I snapped, “– we’re just interested in the men.”

“I see. Well, after Felsen there was Herr Doctor Widener and Professor Zank and Colonel Redl…”

When Steidl and I heard that name we gave each other a significant look, but I was the first to recover my wits.

“Did you say Colonel Redl?”

“Yes.”

“Colonel Alfred Redl?”

“I don’t understand why you find that surprising. Colonel Redl has stayed with us before. In fact, he always stays with us when he arrives from Prague and always in Room One.”

“Let’s talk to Redl,” Steidl suggested, “I’m sure he’ll be able to clear up this coincidence.”

I turned to Steidl and gave him a severe look. “We’re under strict instructions to consult no one except our contact at headquarters. Besides, we need to determine for ourselves whether Colonel Redl…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Steidl and I stood gazing at each other for some time before we recovered our composure and made further enquiries of the concierge. We soon learned from him that Colonel Redl had entered the hotel in civilian clothes some fifteen minutes earlier, holding a grey hat in one hand. He had asked for his keys and gone up to his room. As the concierge assured us that Colonel Redl always dined out in the evenings, we decided to wait in the hotel lobby.

“When the Colonel comes down,” I instructed the concierge, “would you ask him if he has lost this knife sheath?”

An hour later, we spied the Colonel as he came down the stairs, dressed in his officer’s uniform and with a well-groomed moustache. As he handed his keys at reception the concierge carried out our orders.

“Good evening, Herr Colonel. Did you, by any chance, misplace your knife sheath?”

“Why yes, as a matter of fact, I was looking for it only a moment ago,” said Redl, reaching for the sheath.

At that moment, I witnessed the gesture that has haunted my life ever since. The Colonel’s hand hovered over the knife sheath like a bird of prey that senses a trap. All at once, he pulled back his hand as if he had been burned by the Trojan gift. He glanced at the concierge and swung round and swept the lobby with fearful eyes. Then, with bowed head, he walked out of the hotel.

“He didn’t take it,” said Steidl.

I shook my head. “His hand betrayed him. Colonel Redl is Herr Nizetas.”

Steidl and I realized that we had to act fast; a decision would have to be taken about Colonel Redl that same evening. And it was a painful decision for us to make. You see, Colonel Redl had trained us; he had made us what we were; he embodied all that was worthy and respectable about our profession. Colonel Redl had betrayed his country, yet Steidl and I experienced his betrayal as if it had been directed at our very souls. Thus, we contacted headquarters at eight o’clock and two hours later the course of history had been forged. When Colonel Redl returned from dinner and asked the concierge for his keys, he was approached by four men who requested to speak with him on an urgent matter.

I was one of those four men.

The Colonel invited us to his room and there we sat and discussed his dealings with Russian Intelligence. At first, he denied our accusations, speaking in an agitated fashion. But when I pulled the knife sheath from out of my jacket, I saw him turn pale and weak. Shortly before midnight Colonel Redl resigned himself to the inevitable: he admitted his guilt. We made it clear that in the interest of public morale and the honour of the military, it was imperative that his actions remained a secret. And so, we struck a deal: we promised to preserve his honourable name in exchange for his immediate signed confession and self-execution. Accordingly, we left the Colonel’s room at one in the morning, leaving a loaded revolver and his knife sheath on a small mahogany table by his side.

Twenty minutes later, the concierge brought me a confidential message in the form of a sheet of paper folded in a triangle and carried on a silver tray – it was from Redl. I read the message in the lobby and reflected on the wisdom of a private parley with the Colonel. At length, I made my way to Room One, knocked once and entered.

Colonel Redl was sitting in the armchair where I had left him. A cigarette was balanced delicately between the second and third fingers of his trembling left hand.

“What do you want?” I said, in a hostile tone.

“I want to warn you against the sin of pride, or, as the ancient Greeks called it – Hubris. I take it you have read Herodotus?”

“I didn’t have the privilege of a classical education.”

“In that case, let me refer you to Book One, Chapter Thirty-Two of The Histories. It’s the section in which Croesus, the king of Lydia, demands to know of Solon why he holds happiness in such contempt.”

Crushing his cigarette in an ashtray the Colonel continued, “And Solon replies that anyone who lives for a long time will sooner or later experience forces beyond his control. Placing the limit of a man’s life at seventy years, Solon calculates that such a life comes to 26,250 days.”

“Is there a point to your little history lesson?”

“Ah, spoken like a true Croesus. As a matter of fact, the point is plain for anyone to see: since no two days bring with them events that are exactly the same, it follows that human life is entirely determined by chance.”

“So?”

“So, if I do not congratulate you for discovering my secret activities, it is because in this matter of spy against spy you have been favoured by a series of lucky breaks and nothing more.”

All at once, the Colonel leapt to his feet and shot me a defiant glance. He went on, “If you want to know how I feel about this moment, in which I stand at the brink of the end – I feel relieved. Yes, relieved that I no longer have to live like a hunted animal. Oh, I behaved foolishly – like a gambler on a winning streak who keeps betting, all along knowing that it cannot last. Well, if there is one lesson that spying has taught me, it is that the individual is always crushed in the end.”

“Herr Colonel, I was under the impression that you called me to make one last request.”

“Yes, that is still my intention. I want you to give me your word of honour that you will do all you can to defend my good name.”

“But – we have already agreed on this!”

“We have made a formal agreement – that is correct. But I do not trust the other officers who came here tonight. I trust you Ebinger, and I’m asking you for the sake of our old friendship if you will give me your word of honour to preserve my reputation as an Imperial Officer.”

We were standing close to each other; I could feel Redl's breath; I saw the faint quiver of his lower lip and – I gave my word of honour. No sooner had I made my promise than a strange, elusive feeling of disquietude assailed my being. But I could not give this emotion a name.

Suddenly, the Colonel thrust an object into my hands and said, “I believe this belongs to you now.”

I saw to my horror that he had forced the knife sheath into my grasp. I looked up at him and there, written on his countenance, was an expression I had never seen before, but one that I now recognize as infinite despair. Then, with brutal swiftness he grabbed me by the shoulder with one hand – with the other he flung open the door – then he hurled me into the hallway.

I heard the slam of the door and the click of the lock.

Several hours later, and shortly before sunrise, a shot rang out from Room One: Colonel Redl had kept his side of the bargain.

[3]

If you had bought the Neue Freie Presse on Monday, May 26 1913, you would have perused on its front page a series of articles discussing the tension between Serbia and Bulgaria, as well as a long and detailed account of the wedding ceremony of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter to Prince Ernst August von Braunschweig. But you would have had to turn the page to read the short paragraph announcing Colonel Redl’s death from a gunshot to the mouth. The Colonel was described as a talented officer on the verge of a great career; a man who had gained popularity in the military; but a man who had been suffering from mental overexertion and severe neurasthenia. There were no other details – not even the name of the hotel where he had met his end.

I wish I could tell you that the story of Colonel Redl’s treachery ended in this quiet manner. It had been my intention to spread a mantle of respectability over Redl’s painful deeds. It is my great regret that there was one event I overlooked; if my attention had not wavered for that critical moment, the course of history would have flowed along a different path. This is how it happened.

I had left the Colonel’s room at about two o’clock, but hours went by before he swallowed the fatal bullet. In that time, the Colonel must have paced his room and looked back upon his life. When a man surveys his life he oftentimes reflects on the persons he has loved. Our love is embodied in the objects that we treasure and seek to preserve from the ravages of time: letters, photographs, gifts. In those silent hours between our ultimate conversation and his death, Colonel Redl brought forth the private embodiments of his many loves and left them for the world to see.

At sunrise and in another part of the city, a locksmith named Hans Wagner was preparing to play halfback for the Club Sturm soccer team against another amateur team, the Club Union Holleschowitz. But the match was scheduled to take place a hundred and thirty miles northwest of Vienna. Wagner was about to leave his home and make his way to the Westbahnhof when a convoy of soldiers arrived at his front door and commanded him to accompany them to Hotel Klomser. Having gathered his tools, he was thrown into a military car and driven at an unprecedented speed across Vienna to the hotel where I was standing guard to Room One.

“Force the lock,” I said to Wagner when he arrived, “but be quick and do as little damage as possible.”

He was an efficient little man this Hans Wagner, for he forced the lock with a minimum of effort and at lightning speed. I was the first to dash into the room; the first to see the lifeless body of the man who had been my mentor; I was the first to glimpse the secret current of Redl’s past – for scattered across the room were bizarre objects: heavily-perfumed garments, photographs depicting men in erotic poses, hair dyes, scents, cosmetics and letters – love letters – that revealed all. I gave orders to my men to remove the body and commanded the concierge to gather the strange objects littered about the room into one bundle. On everyone I impressed the need for secrecy.

Suddenly, a vague feeling of something-not-quite-right began to oppress me.

“Where’s Wagner?” I asked a soldier standing at the door.

“He’s gone, Sir.”

“Why did you let him leave?”

“We only brought him to break the lock. I thought – “

“You blundering fool!” I cried.

I plunged out of the room, raced down the stairs and out into the street – Wagner had vanished. Would he speak about what he had seen? I reassured myself that even if he were to reveal what he had witnessed, it would never amount to more than a cheap rumour.

The next day Wagner paid a visit to Egon Kisch, the captain of the Club Sturm soccer team, and gave his apologies for having missed the match. He also surrendered an explanation for his absence. Kisch was in a foul mood, for Club Sturm, a strong team and the favourite to win, had lost to the challengers and Kisch waved the blame at Wagner. At first, Kisch threatened to throw Wagner out of his office, but as the locksmith insisted in giving his account of the strange call-out to Hotel Klomser, the captain gradually became pacified.

To Wagner’s surprise, Kisch extracted a notebook from his jacket and began taking copious notes and asking questions.

“So, the man who shot himself was in uniform?”

“Yes. It was an officer’s uniform. You know: sky-blue with gold choke collar, three stars…”

“A Colonel! Wait a moment…” said Kisch, flicking through the pages of the Neue Freie Presse.

Kisch was a shrewd investigator and it didn’t take long for him to gather the pieces of this mystery. True, he couldn’t be sure that the man who had died at Hotel Klomser was Colonel Redl, but Kisch was also a professional journalist and he knew how to tease the truth out of the most unpromising materials. Realizing that Redl’s obituary was a carefully crafted narrative lie, he wrote his own very subversive account and published it in a Berlin newspaper. Before long, questions were being raised at all levels, like hound dogs in pursuit of an elusive fox.

Three days later, on May 29 1913, the War Ministry was forced to print a new official statement of events in the Military Review: Colonel Redl had been in severe financial difficulties for several years because of his outlandish homosexual activities. Moreover, Austrian Intelligence could now confirm that Colonel Redl had sold official secret information to a foreign power.

The revelation that Colonel Redl had betrayed his country sent scandal scurrying through every echelon and corner of the military; and shame descended on the Austrian nation like the plagues of biblical lore. In time, it became apparent that Redl’s career as a spy for Russia had extended some ten years and that his name would be chiselled into the pantheon of the greatest traitors that history would ever know. Egon Kisch's ruthless investigations uncovered the horrific facts that Redl had informed the Russians of Austria’s military designs on Serbia; that he had given false accounts of Russia’s military plans to the Austrian generals; and that all these actions had brought death to hundreds of thousands of Austrians.

I could supply you with the names of those who were crushed under the weight of this national disaster, from Redl’s lover, Lieutenant Stefan Hromadka, who was found guilty of unnatural sexual practices, to Colonel von Urbanski, chief of the Intelligence Bureau, who was forced to take early retirement. What matters are not the minor casualties that swept the military but the verdict that history would pronounce if my story ever came to light; for if there was one person who could have spared Austria the moral catastrophe that Colonel Redl had set in motion, that person was none other than Detective Sergeant Ebinger.

In recognition of my guilt I have carried Colonel Redl’s knife sheath with me all these long years and I carry it still. I know you have been watching me; now and then you have caught me looking at some object that I pull from out of my jacket. No, it’s not a book, not a wallet, not a diary. It’s a battered piece of leather in worn-out beige and despite its age you can still distinguish the letter R stamped in red on its back. I carried that knife sheath on the day I offered my resignation in June 1913 – a resignation that was rejected. An Imperial order arrived granting me unlimited leave to reflect upon my decision and after months of wandering the gloomy streets of Vienna, I left home never to return.

Of my life from that day forth there is not a single event worthy of recounting; I have travelled the continent like the Wandering Jew of legend. As for Redl’s knife sheath, it is the only material possession that links me to Austria’s past; it is the sole remaining visible manifestation of the person I once was. And now, as I approach the end of my story, I fear you might extend me a word of kindness; that you might attempt to appease my guilt; or that you might wield logic to demonstrate that Austria’s downfall was not my doing. I beg you – do not speak! Still, I have one last request to make of you: that you sit here with me a moment longer. The sun will soon be climbing over that mountain peak – there – and the light, you’ll see, will dart across the lake, painting red and orange waves in a conflagration of startling beauty, the kind of beauty that jolts the soul into forgetfulness. Perhaps I may forget my tragic past for a breath or two; and together we may forget that beyond the mountains war still rages.

* * *

George Berguño was born in Princeton, New Jersey; and grew up in Virginia. He has lived and worked in many countries, including Chile, France, England, Austria and Russia. He has published extensively in a wide variety of forms, from academic articles on psychology and philosophy to short stories, narrative nonfiction and personal essays. As a writer of fiction George is particularly fond of writing historical-fantastic tales in the tradition of Herodotus, Leo Perutz, Danilo Kiš, Jorge Luis Borges and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. George’s debut collection of short stories, The Sons of Ishmael, was published by Ex Occidente Press in 2010. This was followed by a second collection, The Exorcist's Travelogue, also published by Ex Occidente Press in 2011.

A Boy Like Any Other

2011-10-15T00:02:00.004-05:00

A Boy Like Any Other
three legends, from a different perspective
by Mary McCluskey

Without Will

I’d got my hands round his neck, see. Got my hands so tight round his neck and squeezed hard and I could have killed him then and there if he hadn’t looked me right in the eyes, then gone limp, slid a bit, as if giving in. All the anger gone from his face, as if he was saying do it, do it. His mouth soft, his face too close. I felt the shiver go from him to me and dropped him, left him on the ground.

No pretty words from him that day. No. None of the little rhymes he sang to himself, chanting his made-up stories in the Stratford woods. I left him, went back to my girlfriend.

“I nearly killed the toe rag for what he done to you,” I told Lizzie.

“You kill him, Joe,” she said. “And we’re finished.”

Hard to believe he’d been my best friend all those years, poaching and fishing. We felt like the Avon was our river. My ma told fortunes for the village women and Will’s mother, Mary, came often to our cottage. I listened in the back scullery while she talked about her son. She worried about his strange ways, his head in the clouds dreaming, his stories.

“He’s not right, our Will,” she said. “He’s an odd lad.”

“He’s just a boy like any other,” my ma said, looking into the tea-leaves. “He’ll go far, let him be. Let him grow.”

* * *

He grew fast, got into trouble fast. He had a way with the girls, no question. He had a steady, the Hathaway lass over at Shottery, but others met him in the woods, listened to his fancy talk. If there were other babies, I didn’t hear of them. Lizzie was mine, my girl. I had never touched her. He was the only boy who had.

He left for London with a bunch of roving actors and just as well, too, because he was wanted for poaching over at Charlecote.

The baby was born the following Spring, a boy. He’s a quiet lad but I won’t let him get dreamy, oh no. I’ll teach him to hunt, to fight, and when he’s old enough I’ll teach him a trade he can use in the world. No pretty words for him. Lizzie and me, well, we never mention Will, though we hear stories of him in London, tales of affairs with actresses and with actors too, and I pretend not to believe that, though sometimes I remember how his mouth looked that day, so close to mine.

Yeah, I could’ve killed him that day and good riddance. No loss.

The Future for Alex

We knew Cleo would be a beautiful bride but she takes the breath away. Silence falls as she walks towards Philip. Her gown is cut low, displaying her breasts; her eyes, green and wide, are bright with happiness. She is slender as a reed, taller than some of the men. Every woman looks at her with envy, every man with lust. Philip, the bridegroom, smiles. She is his already; he has no need to gloat.

I am not focused on the bride and groom. I wait with the serving girls and I watch Alex, Philip’s son. He scowls as stepmother and father join hands. She is barely older than he is. He is thinking, I know, of his mother. Abandoned now.

His best friend, Heff, touches his arm. I have had them both in my bed. Heff just a few months ago, an eager virgin. I took him because Alex asked me to. Alex, well, he visits whenever he needs a warm body or there is something on his mind. He pumps fast, like an animal, as if this alone will exorcise his demons.

Sometimes, afterwards, we talk and play our game. I read his palm, tell his fortune. I do not tell him everything.

I watch him now as the laughter echoes and I can feel, in my own gut, his anger burning. Heff offers him wine but Alex watches his father. When the bridegroom makes another toast to his bride, Alex pounces.

“Hey, father,” he shouts. “Go easy on the wine, old man, or there won’t be enough steel in the sword for Cleo.”

Philip leaps from the table and rushes towards his son as if he means to kill him. I am holding a tray as he roars like a wounded animal across the room. There is a crush of people in front of me so I step back, just one step. And he trips.

As Philip falls, sprawling on the stone floor, there is some muted laughter, but mostly there is concern. Only Alex laughs out loud; Heff loyally joins him.

“Here is a man who was ready to cross from Europe to Asia,” says Alex. “And he cannot cross the room without losing his balance.”

They guest laugh then; the music starts up. It could have turned into a brawl, like so many weddings.

That night Alex undresses fast, pulling at his clothes and he is inside me within seconds of entering the room. And then it is over. It is a joyless joining. I turn him onto his back.

“Sleep. You’re exhausted.”

“It’s so hard for her – to see him with that whore,” he says. I know he is worrying about his mother again.

“Move her away. She’ll be happy eventually.”

“How do you know these things?” he asks. “Tell me. Tell me what you see for me.”
“No.”

“Please, please,” he says, kissing my face. He knows I will give in. I laugh when I speak so that he will think it is invention.

“I know you will own the world. And unite Europe and Asia, the largest empire ever. You will marry two beautiful women and love many more.”

“The world and beautiful women, eh?” he says. He is drifting off to sleep, to dream of the worlds he will conquer.

I do not tell him what I see so clearly in my mind. See every day.

That on July 13, 323 at the age of thirty-three he will scream in pain for long hours. And the face he will see will not be of a wife, nor even his lifelong friend, Heff, the man for whom he will have grieved for one whole year. No.

The man they will call Alexander the Great will see my face, only mine, as he dies.

A Different Path

They told me his father would come to take him away. They whispered it to me, like a secret, but I knew. I’d always known. I waited anxiously, watching my boy as he played. He was five years old and moved like a shadow through the vines, swift on his feet, graceful as a cat. He stared up through the leaves, squinted through the rays of light that dappled the woods near our cottage. He could be quiet for hours, breaking off vines with his child fingers, creating arrows that would soar through the air. Then he would smile and begin again with a longer branch. Higher, higher.

As a newborn he opened his eyes at once. He wanted to see everything, all of the world. He slept so little. I would leave him in the shadow of the olive tree so that he could look up the branches to the sky. The light and shade of the olive grove would keep him quiet for hours.

That night before his father was due I knew that I must take my boy away. Take him far from Vinci and the pressures that would bear on him in his father’s house. His body was strong but his spirit so gentle. How would he survive? He needed solitude and peace and nature around him.

Tomorrow, an adventure my little lamb, I whispered to him, as we prepared for sleep. We will go an adventure. His eyes lit up, as I know they would. At dawn I dressed him. I had a plan. A man who had come through Anchiono months ago had a vineyard just fifty kilometres away. He had leant against a tree, watching me as I tended to my chores and he had said he needed a strong woman. Bring the boy, he said. He will be useful.

Mine was a simple plan. I would make it work. We would have a good life.

At the first birdsong, I touched him gently and he woke at once. Just half a mile from our home I stumbled and cried out. My foot had caught in a tangle of undergrowth and the pain shot through me. I yelped and tried to hop, but he held onto me, wrapping around my leg, clinging so tight, a limpet in his distress. I thought of the miles ahead and, almost at once, I heard the voices beyond me. One was immediately recognizable: Ser Piero calling my name: Caterina, Caterina. Leo heard it too.

Papa! he shouted, wriggling out of my grasp, and ran straight and fearless into the darkness, without faltering, without looking back.

When his father took his hand and he realized I was not to come too, a shadow crossed his face, but did not cry, he never cried. Instead, he hugged me.

* * *

Now, I wait outside the house that is called Verrocchio’s Workshop in Florence. I want to see my boy. He is fourteen now, almost a man. I know him at once, he stands tall above the others and although beauty is common in this province, still he stands out. He shouts with surprise as he sees me, moves fast to place his arms around me and hustles me to a corner, a crumbling wall. There, he talks. He tells me of things I cannot understand, will never understand, about color and light and the stars and man and his place in the world. And I lose my place in his. I think - how can a boy who thinks so much find contentment?

I walk away, leave him to a life his father has chosen for him and I imagine the life we could have had. We would have been so happy in our vineyard. We would have lived peacefully. If only I had not stumbled that night, if only I had taken a different path, we would have been happy.

* * *

Mary McCluskey is a British born writer who lived for some years in Los Angeles and now regularly commutes between California and Stratford-upon-Avon in the UK. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines in the US, UK, Australia and Hong Kong and included in a number of anthologies She has just completed a novel which may or may not be published, depending on the whims of agents, publishers and the gods.

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

Anywhere! From news stories, family memories, friends' gossip, people on the streets, bus and train conversations. I'm a shameless eavesdropper.

The idea for this story came easily. I've just moved to Stratford-upon-Avon and here in the Bard's 'hood it's impossible not to be constantly reminded of Shakespeare. I like to imagine Will as a boy, can visualize him with his friends, larking around by the river all those years ago. Who would have guessed that his name would eventually be known to millions of people all over the world, generation after generation? Did anyone realize then that there was something special about him? Or was he just a boy like any other? That's what fascinates me.

Interview with Alex Epstein

2011-10-15T00:00:00.004-05:00

An Interview with Alex Epstein
Author of The Circle Cast

While The Circle Cast stands out from many Arthurian retellings in its thoroughly historical Irish setting, it also reminded me of two of my favorite Arthurian novels: Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, with its focus on the women of Arthurian myth, and Douglas Clegg’s Mordred, Bastard Son, with its focus on the hero’s childhood far away from Arthur’s Britain. Do you read a lot of Arthurian retellings? Did any of them inspire aspects of The Circle Cast?

The versions I love are T. H. White’s Once and Future King, The Sword In the Stone and The Book of Merlyn and John Boorman’s movie Excalibur. John Steinbeck, of all people, wrote a pretty good Arthur book, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. And, of course, there’s Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which is the original medieval romance.
I didn’t get into The Mists of Avalon. I think it bothered me that Morgan seemed like such a reasonable, nice person in that book; and of course I see her as not a reasonable person at all. For me, the story of Morgan was always about a young woman whose anger gives her strength, but also destroys what she loves – a great tragic hero.

The source documents for Arthurian legend say practically nothing about the early life of any character but Arthur. With such a wide blank canvas, how did you begin shaping Morgan’s life experiences for The Circle Cast? What inspired you to choose Ireland as the setting?

In legend, Morgan is from Tintagel, on the West Coast of Cornwall. Morgan’s mother had to get her daughter to safety in a hurry. She had to send her to some place she’d be safe from the High King of Britain. Uter could find her anywhere in Britain, and probably anywhere in the Roman world, too. But Ireland is just across the Irish Sea, and Morgan could completely disappear there. So it makes sense.

But also, I was reading a lot of Irish legends. When I started writing the book, my then wife was writing her Ph. D. dissertation on the Irish war goddess, the Morrígan. So I was reading a lot about the pagan Irish and how they lived and how they fought. (Which was “as often as they could.”) I was reading a lot of stories about their heroes, particularly Cú Chulainn. And I wanted to use all that great material.

How did you decide on the historical period (approx. 400 CE)? Did you do a lot of research before beginning the novel, or did you gather details as you wrote?

I did a lot of research. I couldn’t tell you whether I did it before or during my first draft. But I read a ton of material on post-Roman Britain. And my first wife and I spent our honeymoon roaming around Ireland, Wales and the English West Country, seeing everything from Tintagel to the Hill of Tara. I climbed the mountain called Arthur’s Seat (Caer Idris), and we went to a bunch of stone circles. The best was Butser Ancient Farm. It’s a working recreation of an Iron Age Celtic farm, complete with a charcoal iron smelter and four-horned Manx sheep.

I chose 470 CE based on Geoffrey Ashe’s Discovery of King Arthur. It made a very convincing argument that the original Arthur was a post-Roman war leader known as Riothamus (which means “High King”). He flourished about the same time that the Saxon Chronicle stops having any victories over the British to mention, and about the same time that the hillfort at Cadbury Castle was renovated in the Roman style. It seems plausible that a dedicated band of Roman-style cavalry could have pushed back the Saxons for a while. The British problem wasn’t lack of valor, it was disorganization.

It’s a really fascinating time. Everything was up for grabs. A new religion was coming in. An empire was dying out. These illiterate pagan barbarians, the Saxons, were wiping British civilization off the map while Arthur was trying to revive the corpse of Roman Britain. I like to think that Morgan grew up among the old pagan values, where pride was a virtue and forgiveness a sin, while Arthur tried to make Christianity work for him and Camelot. But his faith and his heart were going in opposite directions.

Some of my favorite passages in The Circle Cast are the ones about Morgan’s magic and her deep connection with the land. How did you develop Morgan’s magic system?

Morgan’s religion comes from my readings about the Morrígan, but her magic comes from contemporary Wicca. I was doing a lot of spiritual searching when I was writing the book, and I wound up being initiated into a Wiccan circle. I’ve seen someone draw down the Moon, and it was a pretty awesome experience.

The thing about writing about magic is it’s sort of impossible. Magic wouldn’t be about the words, any more than painting or dancing is about words. The words help the witch focus her will, but the places from which she draws her power are nameless. So I tried to write words that invoke what’s going on in Morgan when she draws on those powers.

Conflict between Christianity and the ancient religions of Britain appears frequently in modern Arthurian retellings. The Circle Cast presents a broad picture of both beliefs, with both heroic and villainous characters belonging to each religion. Morgan herself seems to feel that both religions can be valid ways of life; it is the individual believer’s goals and values that make one path a better choice than another. Is this the message you see emerging in the scenes at the Christians’ village? What do you think about Arthurian legend’s relationship to the conflict between Christianity and paganism?

Morgan’s a pagan, and from a pagan point of view, there are multiple ways to invoke God. Christianity is what Béfind and Luan need; and Salvatus is a true saint who can raise more power than the druids can. It’s right for them. It’s not what she needs.

I wanted Morgan to be offered grace, just as she’s offered love. She has three paths out of the jam she’s in: grace, love and vengeance. They all had to be true paths or it wouldn’t be a good story.

I think we use the Arthur legend to look at a lot of things: honor, and love, and grace. It’s natural we use it now to look at paganism and Christianity. If Arthur really lived around 470 CE, that would have been a time when Christianity was a New Thing and people were unsure of it. Some people were pagan, some were Christian, and some were Christian on Sunday morning and pagan on Saturday night. (Hmmm, some of us still are.) I think the reason the Arthur legend is so powerful is that it’s a palimpsest in which every generation can read its own themes.

Can you tell us a bit more about your current and upcoming projects? Can readers expect another novel about Morgan le Fay, or any other Arthurian characters?

I know what the sequels would be. The Spell Woven would be about Morgan’s fraught romance with Arthur, and Mordred’s birth. The Circle Broken would be about Morgan’s fraught romance with Merlin, and the battle of Camlann.
And then I’m also working on some TV projects, one of which updates Morgan into the world of the superrich today; and a sort of Xena-esque fantasy series where Morgan roams around the British Isles using her powers…

All of those sound very intriguing! Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!

Read a review of The Circle Cast in our current issue.

Reviews

2011-10-15T00:00:00.003-05:00

The Circle Cast by Alex Epstein ★★★★★

It began with a look.

Morgan le Fay remains one of the most fascinating, and the most puzzling, characters in Arthurian legend. She appears as Arthur's sister and sometimes lover, a Queen of Orkney and sorceress of Avalon, sometimes Camelot's enemy yet, at the end of Arthur's life, one of the queens who escorts him to his sleep on the Blessed Isle. In his debut novel, Alex Epstein imagines the "lost years" of this enigmatic woman, after her childhood is violently disrupted by Uter Pendragon's seduction of her mother, Ygraine, and before she reappears as a powerful sorceress at Arthur's court.

To protect her daughter from Uter's jealous violence, Ygraine sends her young daughter Anna, newly renamed Morgan, to live with an Irish ally, Ciarnat of the Deisi. But just as violence broke up Morgan's life at Din Tagell, the tribal wars in fifth-century Ireland make it difficult for her to find a safe place in her exile. Morgan becomes a slave to a witch-woman in a village on a lake, masquerades as a convert in an outcast community of Christians, and finally finds love—and a measure of power—as the wife of an Irish war chief. But all the while, her true desire is to return to Britian, and take revenge on the man who destroyed her childhood.

Woven throughout the daring escapes and fierce battles are Morgan's experiments with magic. Epstein borrows heavily from modern Wiccan tradition to create a magic system where the sorceress's relationship to the land is as important as, if not more important than, her allegiance to a particular god or goddess. As Morgan's beliefs and desires change, so does the strength of her magic, and the spell-casting passages provide a beautiful and mystical look at Morgan's emotional life.

The night before, Morgan had prepared a circle. She did it to calm herself, and to feel the land. When she travelled to new lands, she felt disconnected until she scribed a circle and reached into the land. It would not work for her until it knew her. […]

She let fear into her heart. She let fear and desperation become an empty vessel inside her, drawing strength into her. She thought of her years of slavery, and the destruction of the Deisi, and Gabran and his cruel iron collar. She thought of the storm that had tried to sink her boat before she reached Ireland. She thought of the man with Bretel's face, and the torches in the woods outside of Din Tagell, and how her mother had cried with passion.

Fire rushed into her from nowhere and everywhere. Her breath was the air and her veins were fire, her blood was water and she was part of the earth she was standing on. She was angry, and scared, and she would not let her lover's people lose this battle.

Unlike many recent retellers of Morgan's story, Epstein does not attempt to rationalize or defend his protagonist. Morgan is a strong warrior and sorceress who is nevertheless a deeply damaged person, repeatedly choosing her revenge over a chance at happiness and peace. The ending of the novel brilliantly addresses the question of if and how a life dedicated to revenge can be turned to other purposes, while leaving the gate wide open for a possible sequel.

For fans of Arthurian reimaginings, The Circle Cast is a must read, and even readers who have been disappointed by vague historical settings and authors more interested in defending their characters than developing them will find this novel a welcome departure from the norm. The Circle Cast is a quick read, but one that will stay with you long the closing image .

Please see the interview with Alex Epstein in the current issue of Lacuna, where the author answers questions about research, religion, magic, fifth-century Ireland, and where readers can expect to see more of Morgan!

The Circle Cast by Alex Epstein. Published by Tradewinds Books. Purchase from the publisher, Amazon.com, or a bookstore near you.

Day of Revenge by Deanna Proach ★★☆☆☆

Dusk is rapidly turning into night. Dark shadows loom over every corner of the parlor in the La Font manor. Emmanuel shudders in response to the cold shivers than run up and down his spine. Where is Samuel? He was supposed to return over two hours ago. Is it possible that he met Monsieur La Metz? Or did something terrible happen to him and I do not yet know about it? Emmanuel nervously twists a lock of his thick, wavy hair around his index finger. Nausea grips his stomach. The only sound to be heard is the soft murmur of servants' voices in the kitchen and the bustling of Madame La Font's skirts as she walks to and from the library and drawing room. The noises in the background intensify his anxiety.

Since at least the time of Dickens, there has been an unfortunate tendency in novels of the French Revolution to flatten the complex, dynamic, and philosophically-rooted politics of the era to two sides in a conflict of brute force; on one side, the mob of bloodthirsty revolutionaries, and on the other, the upright and unjustly assaulted aristocrats. Despite the wealth of studies and biographies available to the modern researcher, Deanna Proach's Day of Revenge accepts this two-dimensional Revolution at face value, and the emotional drama of her aristocrat protagonists is never quite enough to overcome the novel's historical inaccuracies and prose faux pas.

Day of Revenge follows a fluctuating cast of aristocrats, centered around Emmanuel d'LeVasque and Samuel La Font, as they seek to lead a Corsican army against "the Robespierre government" that is butchering innocents throughout France. An ex-Jacobin named Henri Varennes leads a smaller, parallel counterrevolutionary conspiracy in Paris. Equally prominent, though not clearly connected to the counterrevolution plot, is the love story of Emile d'Voliere, a young nobleman and friend of Emmanuel, and Elle, a servant who is cruelly abused by her master.

To point out the most egregious historical errors—for example, the novel begins on "25 July 1793" in a France already in the grip of "the Robespierre government," while in actuality, Robespierre wasn't elected to the Committee of Public Safety until July 27 of that year; later, Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins are mentioned as allies of Robespierre on the Committee, while the real Danton could hardly be conceived of as Robespierre's ally, and Desmoulins was never on the Committee to begin with—is actually somewhat beside the point, since the novel's copyright page contains the following disclaimer:

…In certain cases incidents, characters, names, and timelines have been changed for dramatic purposes. Certain characters may be composites, or entirely fictitious. This story is created for entertainment purposes. Opinions, acts, and statements attributed to any entity, individual, or individuals may have been fabricated or exaggerated for effect. The opinions and fictionalized depictions of individuals, groups and entities, and any statements contained herein, are not to be relied upon in any way.

But, while the author has established her right to rewrite history, I have to wonder why she choose to do it in this particular fashion. Why take a vibrant and intriguing historical period and reduce it to a Revolution=bad, Aristocrats=good simplicity that negates the point of reading about the French Revolution in the first place? In particular, why take as protagonists a group of privileged aristocrats, for whom the most onerous demand is: "Hide your fortune. Bury it, and dress like citizens of the working class. Pretend that you are on the side of the revolutionaries" (p. 26)? After watching the abuse Elle endures from her master, and even from the aristocratic friends of her lover, I for one did not feel a lot of sympathy for Proach's aristocrats, no matter how "tough" it is for them to bury their fortunes.

Admittedly, these are the rather subjective reactions of one particular French Revolution aficionado. If you accept Proach's revolution as one taking place in an imaginary France, completely divorced from the actual French Revolution, you have a reasonably effective suspense novel. Proach makes a good effort to create an atmosphere of paranoia around Samuel and Henri, and her occasionally faltering plot keeps the illusion of motion through her use of present tense. Samuel's 'off-screen' conflict with his brother Maximus, Elle's difficulties with Emile and his family, and Emmanuel's courtship with the Corsican Lisabetta at the end of the novel all contain moments of real emotional drama.

Unfortunately, this drama is often obscured or overshadowed by Proach's flawed prose style. Day of Revenge contains numerous blatant grammar errors, even spelling mistakes. Question marks are dropped, singular verbs are used for plural subjects, you're/your and their/there confusion abounds, "Marquise" is spelled once "Marquais," and "violas" grow in a garden in place of violets. In one particularly gruesome case of preposition confusion, a rug is "handmade from a young Russian woman" (p. 24)! Proach's physical descriptions can go on for pages, and include repetitive phrases like "blond haired" and "the color of pastel peach." Within a paragraph, narrative, dialog, and italicized quotes of characters' direct thoughts frequently repeat information: "He knows exactly what Samuel is thinking and it has everything to do with Maximus and his two sons. 'I know who you are thinking about,' he says" (p.17).

I suspect that how much you will enjoy this novel increases in direct proportion to your lack of interest in the French Revolution. If you have spent time researching the historical revolution and the real people involved, then the historical imprecision and flat characterization of men like Robespierre, Saint-Just and Danton will probably be provoking and distracting. If, however, you prefer a simple novel of intrigue and human drama, and can forgive or overlook some less-than-expert prose, Day of Revenge may be just the book you're looking

Day of Revenge by Deanna Proach. Published by Inkwater Press. Purchase from the publisher, Amazon.com, or a bookstore near you.

A Penny Always Has Two Sides by Steffie Steinke ★★★★☆

As I sat beside my mother's hospital bed, holding her hand, trying again to be close to her, I couldn't help thinking about my foster mother and asking myself why I hadn't been with her when she needed me, when she was at the end of her life.

In some ways, A Penny Always Has Two Sides is not an easy book to read. Steffie Steink'es memoir of growing up in wartime Germany relates difficult experiences that most of us are lucky enough not to have faced, from an unstable and sometimes abusive mother to the bombings and abuses of the second World War and its aftermath. Despite the grim subject matter, Steinke maintains a warm, conversational tone, and her striking observations and powerful story make this book a must-read.

Steinke was born in 1936, the daughter of an unwed mother named Rosi and a married S.S. officer. Since Rosi and her grandmother were unable to care for the baby, Steffie spent the first four years of her life with her beloved foster parents, Meta and Herman Pech, only to be taken back by her birth mother when she married in 1940. In only a few words, Steinke deftly portrays the distinct personalities of the parental figures in her life, especially her two mothers.

I never got close to my mother. She was very strict and unforgiving, and I think the bond a mother has with her baby from teh first day she holds it was simply never there. She had no understanding or consideration for a child. For instance, if she told me I should do something and I didn't do waht I was told at once, I would get a slap right away...

After the war broke out, Steffie and her mother were evacuated to Poland, where they shared a town house with the Mueller family. Steffie befriended the daughter, Renate, who soon died of scarlett fever, and the grandfather, called Opa. When the Russians liberated Poland, Steffie, her mother, and the Muellers faced nightmarish months of imprisonment and ill-treatment, including the rape of Steffie's mother and Frau Mueller. This memoir forcefully reminds us that war hurts the innocent on both sides of a conflict.

With the help of a kindly Russian officer and a Jewish pharmacist, Mr. Anaszevich, Steffie and her mother survived and returned to Germany, where they became citizens of West Berlin. Steinke continues her story up until the time she met and married her husband, Deitmar.

If this book has a flaw, it is only that Steinke marks out themes at the beginning that don't quite reach a conclusion at the end. Despite from its importance in the opening, her relationships with her birth mother and her foster mother become less emphasized as the book progresses, until in the last chapters she seems to be ending a different book from the one she began.

Nevertheless, this memoir is insightful, inspiring, and vividly paints a face of WWII history few non-Germans have considered. As the title reminds us, there are two sides to every story, and Steinke's story is one worth listening to.

A Penny Always Has Two Sides by Steffie Steinke. Published by Inkwater Press. Purchase from the publisher, Amazon.com, or a bookstore near you.

Thank you to Alex Epstein and Inkwater Press for generously providing review copies.

Issue 4: April 2011

2011-04-15T00:09:00.006-05:00

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
~Anatole France

Contents
Bride of the Water by James Lecky
The Elder Brother Washing His Hands by Adrian Van Young
Anne Boleyn to the King by Jean Hollander
Newgate Jig by D. J. Cockburn
Edgar Cayce by Jack Peachum
Centurion’s Choice by R. S. Pyne
The Painting Called Love Victorious by Gabriel Malloy
Ethel Rosenberg on her Trial and Execution for Treason by Liz Dolan
Ben Johnson Day by Ricky Ginsburg

Reviews
A Penny Always Has Two Sides by Steffie Steinke
Day of Revenge by Deanna Poach

Bride of the Water

2011-04-15T00:08:00.000-05:00

Bride of the Water
by James Lecky

That I knew Abramo Della Casa may come as a surprise to many. That I alone know the true circumstances surrounding the great artist’s disappearance may be even more unbelievable.

You would not think to see me now that this grey, bent old man with rheumy eyes and withered hams fought under the Duke of Terranova at Pavia or that by the end of that terrible day in 1525 my sword, armour and even my very hands were stained with blood. Abramo Della Casa was there too, my comrade in arms and sword-brother until a Spanish arquebus ended his military career and, almost, his life. A blessing in disguise, perhaps, since it turned him from the way of sword and pistol to the path of chisel and brush.

I was in the prime of my life at Pavia, a swaggering condottiere with sharp wits and an even sharper blade, able to drink all night and fight all day when the situation demanded. It was a different time, of course, not like the pallid age we now live in, where the pen not the sword has become the chief instrument of politics and the young men have become peacocks rather than hawks.

And even though almost twenty years have passed since Abramo Della Casa vanished, I still remember every detail with stark and terrifying clarity.

* * *

The Year of Our Lord 1546 found me in Venice in the employ of Alessandro Tocatti, a merchant of the city and staunch patron of the arts. Fanciso Donato had been elected Doge and Venice herself was about to enter a time of peace and wealth. But even so there was work to be had for a skilled swordsman since not all quarrels between the merchant houses were settled through talk alone.

Abramo Della Casa had found his way to the City of Masks some years before I arrived there, and quickly gained a fine reputation for his work. We met but rarely since his time was occupied by sculpture and painting and mine with the task of protecting the interests of the house of Tocatti. Still, on those occasions when we had time to drink a bottle or two of Montefalco Rosso our talk invariably turned to times gone by and past triumphs. One such conversation remains foremost in my mind since it was the precursor to all that followed, although I did not know it then, when we sat with our wine in the Locando della Luna watching the high, sluggish water of the canal.

“You were a holy terror in those days, Teodoro. There were moments when you even frightened me.”

“If I did you hid it well, old friend,” I said. “And, in truth, I spent most of my time trying not to piss my codpiece with fear.”

“A little fear is good for a soldier, it keeps him sharp.”

“For a soldier? Yes. But for an artist? What good is fear to an artist?”

He smiled enigmatically and I noticed for the first time how haggard he had become even though at forty he was five years my junior. The pain of his old wound, perhaps, from the shattered thighbone that caused him to walk with a pronounced limp and gave him the nickname of ‘Più Molle’ with which he signed his canvases.

“Fear?” he said. “Everyone should know a little fear, for without the darkness what good is light.”

“A philosopher now as well,” I said, only slightly mocking him.

“Every man is a philosopher after the first glass of wine.”

“And a fool after the fifth.”

“That is so.”

Even by the standards of the day, Abramo Della Cassa was considered to be something of an oddity. Although not exactly reclusive he was withdrawn by nature and given to morbid subjects in his work. You have seen, no doubt, his painting La Carica A Pavia with its strange, skull-faced riders and misshapen carrion birds amidst the pageantry of battle. Or perhaps you have been one of the few privileged to view La Sposa Delle Acque – The Bride of the Waters – and seen for yourself the esoteric skill he brought to his work in marble. Despite his solitary ways, he was nonetheless in high demand and even my master had expressed an interest in commissioning him. But when I mentioned it Della Casa dismissed the notion with a curt shake of his head.

“I will paint no more portraits of fat merchants or ugly dowagers,” he announced, and poured another glass of wine.

“Why so?”

“I have found myself a muse.”

I almost laughed, but the look on Della Casa’s face curtailed me. “I thought the city herself was your muse.”

“Once. But no longer.” He took a sheaf of papers from his doublet and spread them on the table before us. They were a series of drawings, quickly but expertly rendered in charcoal, showing the squares of the city, her canals and palaces, rendered in that particular style that characterised Della Casa’s work, the angles somehow wrong, as though the subjects had been viewed through a prism of warped glass. And in each one, sometimes in the background but more often the focus of the drawing, there was the image of a young woman, her face a study in melancholy.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“The Signorina Velia Pellame. She is beautiful, is she not?” Despite his words I knew it was not a question. Moreover, I had witnessed Abramo Della Casa’s temper at first hand on more than one occasion and was aware that he sought confirmation rather than an opinion.

“She is comely enough,” I said, although, in truth, her features were a little too sharp for my tastes, her eyes too large and her figure lacked curves.

“My muse. And soon to be my wife.”

“Congratulations, my friend,” I said, and raised a glass. “When is the happy day?”

“Soon,” he said. ”I have yet to ask her formally for her hand, but I know she will not refuse me.”

“I wish you good fortune,” I said. “For a home is poor without a woman.”

“Indeed so.”

We parted we a promise to meet again soon and I made my way back to my home close to the Campo dei Frari. The waters were high that season, bringing with them the threat of plague and cholera, but the City of Masks was well used to disease and life continued much as it had always done.

For my part, my days and nights were kept busy with what we called il lavoro della limierina – the work of the blade – and only rarely did I see Abramo Della Casa, limping through the Rialto markets with his beloved by his side, a man blind to the world, and to the appearance of an old friend.

I did not resent his happiness, but I confess that the charms of the Signorina Velia Pellame were lost upon me. On our first, somewhat hurried, introduction I found her cold and aloof; hardly the portrait of a woman in love. Still, a man must find joy where he can.

Late one evening, returning home after a scuffle with the bravos of Gianluca Contarini, my master’s fiercest rival, I was surprised to find the Signorina waiting for me in the doorway of my house.

“Teodoro Zangari.” She spoke my name in no more than a whisper and at the sound my stiletto was half way from its scabbard.

“Stay your hand, Captaino, I mean you no harm.” Her accent, foreign to those parts, was flat and harsh, utterly unlike the musical speech of Venice or my own native Lombardy.

She moved from the shadows and I saw her clearly. Her sharp face the colour of parchment, shadows marking the hollows of her cheeks, and eyes burned with a feverish intensity.

Despite myself I took a step backwards. My first thought – plague.

As though she read my thoughts she said:

“Do not concern yourself, Captaino, there is no risk of infection. Unless heartbreak is contagious.”

“What has happened to you?”

She shook his head. “Not here,” she said. “May we go inside?” As she spoke she glanced down at the waters of the canal and her right hand made an involuntary gesture which may have been a blessing or a protective sign.

Once inside she sat primly in a chair and I poured her a measure of sweet malvasia which she drained in two large gulps, holding out the glass for more. The second draft revived her somewhat, and the fire dimmed in her eyes, though her skin remained pallid.

“You are Abramo’s friend,” she said. And the way she said it, without inflection, left the meaning clear – his only friend. “I do not mean to trouble you,” she continued, “but I do not know who else to turn to.” Her gaze strayed to the shuttered window of the room. “We are secure here?”

“As secure as anywhere in Venice.”

“Good,” she said. Then, as though the thought had just occurred to her: “You must keep Abramo away from me, I cannot marry him.”

My spine stiffened. “So you would toy with his affections, Signorina.”

She rose from the chair and crossed the room to me. “You misunderstand me, Captaino Zangari,” she said. “I love Abramo with all my heart.”

“Then you have a curious way of showing it.”

“Please,” she said, and for the first time there was genuine emotion in her voice. She placed her hand upon mine, her skin was cold to the touch, faintly clammy. “I am promised to another and have been since the day of my birth.”

“Is Abramo aware of this?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said.

“You did not think to tell him?”

“Because I did not think to fall in love.”

“And the man you must marry, what does he think of this?”

She inclined her head slightly and the lamplight caught her eye, the pupil somehow too large. “He does not know, nor would I have him know. He is…. a lord of the sea.”

I knew the kind of man she spoke of, a Dalmatian pirate, no doubt, seeking legitimacy by marrying into a Venetian family. Such marriages were common then – and for that matter they are common still – yet another way for the City of Masks to protect herself and her interests.

“This will break Abramo’s heart,” I said.

“Do you not think I know this?” she snapped. “I have no choice in the matter. The bargain was made a long time ago.”

“I will do what I can,” I promised. “When do you marry?”

“Tonight,” she told me.

“So soon?”

“It has been arranged,” she said, as if that were an end to it. “Afterward, I leave Venice on the midnight tide.” She crossed to the door and opened it, allowing frigid night to spill into the room. “Abramo will never find me. In time his heart will heal, even if mine will not.”

And with that she was gone

I waited for a while, mulling over a glass or two of malvasia , then made my way to the Saca Della Misericordia and Della Casa’s studio there.. The tide was high that night – higher than I have ever known it before or since – spilling out from the canals and onto the walkways, the lower storeys of houses, covering the city squares.

Della Casa’s studio was situated on the upper floor of what had once been a grand house now sadly fallen into disrepair. The courtyard outside was under nearly two feet of filthy water, for we were close to the lagoon here and there was little to stop its ingress.

I found him in his workroom, slumped on a divan, his attention fixed upon the figure that stood in the centre of the room – a life-sized figure rendered in marble. I recognized it at once as the Signorina Velia Pellame. But it was not the woman I had seen only an hour since. Rather it was a strange travesty of womanhood, the cuts in the marble made only recently to judge from the chips that littered the floor at her feet.

The sharp face had been altered making it more angular, giving it a somehow piscine aspect; a hint of scaled skin, the merest suggestion of gills marring an elegant neck. It was beautiful and terrible all at the same time.

“La Sposa Delle Acqu,” Abramo Della Casa said. “The Bride of the Sea.” Despite the brandy his voice was steady and level, only the shining vacancy of his face betraying the agony of his soul. “It is how I see her now.”

“So you know of her marriage?” I said.

A bitter smile twisted his lips. “Of course I know,” he said. “Venice holds no secrets from me. Do you think me a complete fool?”

“All men in love are fools,” I told him.

“Do not mock me, Teodoro.”

“I am sorry, my friend,” I said. “I meant no disrespect.”

“She marries her sea lord tonight on the Lazzaretto Nuovo – a fitting location , don’t you think?”

“The Signorina came to me this evening and asked me to keep you away,” I told him. “She fears for your safety.”

“It is not my safety she should fear for. Do you have your sword and pistol?”

“Always,” I said.

He looked up. “Velia loves me,” he said, and the pain was evident in his voice and face. “This man, this sea lord whoever he is, is not worthy of her. He will never love her as deeply and completely as I do.”

“So what do you propose to do?”

He rose, his crippled leg making his movements akward, and strapped a sword to his waist. “I propose to put a handspan of steel through the bastard’s liver and claim my love back again. Will you stand beside me?”

I thought of the Signorina Velia Pellame and of her parting words to me- his heart will heal, even if mine will not’ Had they been a tacit plea for help?

My whole life has been governed by the work of the blade, I am a man for whom action has always been easier than words. Moreover, Abramo Della Casa was my friend and comrade, there was nothing I could say that would stay his hand and I was not prepared to keep him at the point of my blade. How could I?

“I will stand beside you,” I said.

* * *

* * *

There are few who visit the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo willingly, even now. In times of plague the sick were taken there in droves. Not so hellish, perhaps, as the Lazzaretto Vecchio where the hopeless cases found themselves, but hardly the place for a wedding.

We rowed there in Della Casa’s little skiff, through waters as black as the sky above us. A mist had risen, thin and acrid, dulling the lights of the city behind us and blurring the outline of the Lazzaretto Nuovo as it loomed out of the night. We hardly spoke to each other – old soldiers have ways of communicating that do not always require words – but I believe that each of us knew the folly we embarked upon.

“What now, Abramo?” I asked when we had beached the skiff and stood on the shingle beach.

“Now we find Velia.”

Then, from somewhere in the darkness, we heard a voice, distant but still intelligible.

“Lord of the Sea, I beseech you to come. To accept this offering and bestow your protection upon our city. Keep us from the waves, o mighty Dagon.”

It was Velia Pellame’s voice, strangely high and sibilant, rising and falling as if in the words of a litany. I thought again of that strange blessing she had delivered to the waters of the canal earlier that night.

“Take me as your bride, mighty Dagon, that the sea may be kept from us.”

Something roared in reply.

Della Casa set off at a hopping run, dragging his crippled leg behind him. He did not turn to see if I followed. But I did not follow. At least not at once.

Something in that sound, in the utterly inhuman timbre of the voice that made it, kept me rooted to the spot. It was more than fear - for I am no stranger to fear and have faced it before and since – rather it was deeper than that.

Think of the awe the first man to make fire must have felt; the unleashing of a primal force capable of transforming the world. Or destroying it.

The roar came again, and this time it seemed to call directly to me. So I followed in Della Casa’s wake. As I crested a small hummock of sandy soil I saw something that will stay with me until my dying day, haunting my nights and plaguing my days.

The Signora Velia Pellame was there, standing in the misty shallows where the Adriatic lapped at the shores of the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. She wore her wedding gown – white velvet with a speckled bodice –her hair held in place with a garland of dying flowers. She should have been beautiful, all brides should be beautiful on their wedding day, but her face had changed somehow, in response to that terrible call, resembling nothing so much as the statue that stood in Della Casa’s studio. The dull moonlight played across her mottled skin, accentuated her opaque eyes, the marks on her throat. Again, I thought of gills and scales and a dreadful thought struck me, that the woman known as Velia Pellame did not belong to the land on which we stood. Rather she belonged to the sea and to this sea lord, this Dagon, who claimed her as his bride, transformed by the arcane power of that dreadful roar.

Abramo Della Casa limped towards her, his rapier drawn. I could not see his face, but his breath came in great ragged gasps and at each step his leg threatened to give way beneath him.

“Velia!”

She turned at the sound of his voice and for a moment she was the same frightened woman who had come to me earlier that night.

“Abramo! Dear God, you should not have come.”

He splashed through the water and fell at her feet, already drained by his exertions.

“Return to me,” he said.

“I cannot. My duty will not allow it.”

And again the roar that drove all thoughts from my head, that caused Abramo Della Casa to cry out and clasp his hands to his ears, that wiped the last vestiges of humanity from Vellia Pellame.

Somewhere in the misty night the water heaved, sending a vast wave rolling towards the shore, and I saw – or thought I saw – the creature that caused it.

Vast and dark it was, made more terrible by its resemblance to a man; long arms swept the waves, eyes as large as shields glittered with malevolent idiocy, a great crest that decorated its skull and back; row after row of yellow teeth in a cavernous mouth.

Dagon. Lord of the sea.

As the wave crashed against the shore I saw Della Casa and Vellia Pellame knocked from their feet then dragged further into the water as the wave retreated. They clung to each other, lovers after all, as the tide took them, pulling them towards that nightmare shape as it reached out with weed-mottled hands.

It plunged back beneath the surface and the last I saw of Abramo Della Casa was the silver flash of his rapier as the water dragged him down.

* * *

Of my return to the city proper and the journey in that little skiff back from Lazzaretto Nuovo I will not speak of overmuch, other than to say that each ripple, each tiny wave filled me with terror. With each stroke of the oar I expected the water to erupt beneath me and long, scaly arms to drag me into the depths. But in time I reached Venice and the relative safety of her bridges and walkways, falling into a deep sleep the moment I collapsed upon my bed: I had supped too much of horror and my mind sought oblivion.

It was not to be, for in my dreams I saw Della Casa once again, his face fish-belly white beneath the water of the Adriatic and beside him Vellia Pellame, transformed utterly into a thing of the sea, still holding her lover’s hand. Yes, she was the bride of the water now - the bride of the thing called Dagon, sacrificed that mighty Venice might live in harmony with the sea – but her heart still remained true to Abramo Della Casa.

Although it was the cause of much gossip for a month or so, few people cared to analyse the artist’s disappearance. Some posited that he had simply moved to another city – to Florence or Rome perhaps – at the insistence of the Signorina Vellia Pellame, others that he had simply slipped and fallen into the canal whilst in his cups.

For my part I offered no explanation, preferring to keep my own counsel on the matter lest I be thought mad.

In the years since his disappearance, Abramo Della Casa has been called a genius by some - his paintings and sculptures grace the halls of many fine and noble houses - the mystery surrounding his final days adding to the allure of his work

For my part, the passing of time has treated me well enough, I am a man of substance and if I have been known to quaff a little too much wine of an evening it is merely as an aid to sleep.

But sometimes, when a thin, acrid mist rolls in from the Adriatic and the waters of the lagoon wash over the streets and squares of the City of Masks I sometimes believe I can hear a faint roar in the distance. More than that, there are times when I swear that I can see faces in the dark waters of the canal, pallid creatures with large eyes, their shape vaguely human. The children of Vellia Pellame and the sea lord Dagon, perhaps, or merely the drunken fancies of an old man who has lived too long and seen too much.

* * *

* * *

James Lecky is a writer and actor based in Derry, N. Ireland where he lives with his wife and cat. His short fiction has appeared in various publications both online and in print including Mirror Dance, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Innsmouth Free Press as well as the anthologies Emerald Eye, The Phantom Queen Awakes, Arcane Whispers 2 and Through Blood and Iron.

What inspires you to write and keep writing?

Enjoyment, pure and simple. I love to wander around in new worlds. I love language and the way words fit together. The thing that draws me back to the page or the keyboard again and again is that sense of the infinitely possible, the way that sometimes a word or a phrase can send a story in a completely unexpected direction.

The Elder Brother Washing His Hands

2011-04-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

The Elder Brother Washing His Hands
by Adrian Van Young

In the early hours of morning, in the State of Virginia, in the summer of 1862, a light could be seen on a dark staircase as a brother and sister ventured down. The brother’s name was Grady. He was thin and wire-strung. His pale, thin face was crowded with freckles. He went ahead of his sister down the stairs laden with a tangle of her things: valises, petticoats, strops hung with shoes, a leather-bound brace of books. The sister, who was younger, held a candle in a dish, which lit the stairs for only her, and she picked her way down one step at a time lifting the hem of her dress out before her, while the brother, up ahead, had to toe his way down, weaving for balance between the banisters, leaning on one to adjust his load and going blindly on. From a distance she appeared to descend alone, enclosed in a private haze of light, making small sounds of surprise or hesitation when her feet got ahead of her eyesight. Her brother was waiting for her at the bottom in a tight atoll of travel-things.

You walk as if you’re made of glass, the brother called up through the dark to his sister.

So what if I am? she said, concentrating. Leastways I won’t knock my head.

When he had her situated among her things, the brother told the sister he’d return in a minute. Going into the parlor, he left her to wait beneath a huge portrait of their great-grandfather, a pale, whiskered man decked in serge and epaulets who surveyed the front hall with a tragic intensity. The girl made a game out of whipping around to catch the painting unawares, or raising her candle to the height of its chin and turning away in horror.

Devil take you, Grandpappy, she said with a giggle, awaiting her brother’s return.

In the parlor, the brother climbed up on the couch and parted the curtains on the drive. His father and the houseboy Aloysius were loading up the family coach, the young Negro holding a lantern to see by while the father overburdened the luggage train. The brother’s older sister and mother stood near in pale but ill-considered dresses, fanning themselves against the heat like fey refugees of the season in Charleston. The Negro tracked the father at an uncertain distance and his lantern fell short of the axel-tree. The father had to feel the suitcases into place, wrenching them out when they would not fit, cursing Aloysius and vanishing again beneath the raised hood of the train. When he’d found a good geometry he stood, gulping breath, and let his gaze wander up the house’s façade, but the thick parlor curtains had since swayed to and the rest of the windows were blind with night.

Back in the foyer, the brother found the sister peering up at the portrait between her fingers. He put a hand on her shoulder and she startled around with the fingers still raised in front of her face.

Go on outside. It’s safe, he said.

Aren’t you coming?

I ought not to.

What do you mean you oughtn’t?

I can’t.

What do you mean to prove?

He did not answer.

Then where are you fixing to go? she said.

Up north, I guess.

To the war?

No ma’am.

Don’t ma’am me, Grady, she said. I’m a Miss.

He smiled at her pluck and smoothed her hair.

All right, Miss. Around it then. I figured I’d shimmy on by just for fun.

She stared at him intently in the dark of the hall. I do insist you write me, Grady.

I will, he said. I’ll write you silly. Now get out there before you’re stranded.

She took a couple steps towards the door, then turned. What would the rest of them say if they knew?

Nothing good, he said. But you can tell them if you want.

I won’t, she said. But they might ask.

He smiled at her again but did not speak.

What about all my things? she said.

Pa’ll get them, he said.

I’ll ask Aloysius.

No, he said. Ask Pa.

All right.

He opened the door and stood behind it, but she dawdled in the doorway with the candle in her hands.

Did the rest go to fight in the war with Cal?

Cal didn’t go there to fight. He’s a doctor.

Well maybe they’re doctoring too. Helping folks.

I don’t reckon so. He urged her forward. They’ve got enough trouble just helping themselves.

Can niggers be doctors like white folks can?

It’s looking that way, said the brother. We’ll see.

She appeared to consider this for a time. Her face was long and dull with sleep.

Go on, he said. You hear that whistle? You’ll want a window seat on the way out to Auntie’s.

He gently nudged her through the door and she tottered outside with the candle still lit. She looked back once, then twice, over her shoulder, and turned around as if to speak, but a voice called her name and she began to run towards it and her candle extinguished as she ran. A thin reef of smoke hung over the drive. The brother closed the door.

He’d roped a bindle sack full of food and loose matches to the upper brickwork of the hearth. At once he went to fetch it down and rushed through the house with it cocked on his shoulder, the rest of the rooms as dark and still as the stairway and hall had been. As stricken.

He walked outside through the kitchen’s back door to a shrill explosion of cicadas, allowing its springs to bend only so far and muffling the clap of the wood with the sack. Between the kitchen door and the old slave-quarters was a stretch of twenty yards or so and the brother went half-sized through the dark, stopping sometimes on all fours in the grass to investigate the way ahead, his face oddly feral in the haze of moonlight and his spine knuckled up beneath his shirt. Near the slave-quarters, he stopped again while an instance of shadow evolved on the grass. Voices came too growing steadily louder, voices the brother recognized, and five large men emerged from the alley that ran between the shacks. Each of them carried an unlit torch. The brother knew this by the smell of lampoil and the sheen of the wicks in the moon. The men talked back and forth in unhurried tones, though what they said he could not hear. Cyrus nudged Tom and Tom nudged back and carried the motion down to Jim and Jim, at the end, clapped Simon beside him, who muttered, Lawd, lawd, and craned to see Tom. At the back gallery of the house, they stopped. A match was struck and passed among them. One by one the torches fired and hunted along the house’s trellises, showing the woodwork higher up where a Secessionist flag hung limp from the gables. But the brother did not wait to see. He had risen from his crouch and was weaving through the buildings. He turned down the alley where the men had emerged, pursued by the light of the burning porch.

Near the final outbuilding where the property sloped and tended away into limitless trees, the brother saw a figure sitting high on a stump busy with something in its lap. He approached with his hand fumbling at his waist for the knife he’d brought to skin his food.

I know where you going, said the figure.

Who’s that?

Yessuh, it said. I sholly do.

The stump was chest high on the brother and thick, with a bole at its center and squid-like roots. The legs of the figure swung down in his path, scooting the air around. They were shoeless.

Stokely? said the brother.

Yessuh. It’s me.

What you doing crouched up there like a bobcat?

Biding my time, said the figure. Hounddogging. Hate to be the Negro to tell you suh, but in case you ain’t noticed your house is on fire.

I know it, said the brother. I saw them coming.

Well suh, I awful sorry, but yonder she burn.

You still haven’t answered my question, said the brother.

I ain’t got a answer but the one I done told.

The brother picked a match from the box in his bindle and dragged it to life down the side of the tree. Within its flare, the Negro sat, wood-shavings piled in his lap. He’d been whittling.

We a sorrowful whip scarred lot, said Stokely. Can’t blame us much for the houses we burn.

I don’t, said the brother. I believe it’s your time.

Stokely laughed softly. Yessuh. It seem so.

The matched had burned down to the brother’s finger-pads. He shook it dead and let it drop.

So where do you think I’m headed? said the brother.

You on a dark path, Lawd bless you, suh.

And you’re on the path to freedom, I reckon?

Stokely gave a whistle and kicked his legs. Close as I can get, he said.

Well aren’t they the same but dressed up different?

Young Marse got notions of his own, he do.

I’m going where I’m needed, said the brother. And you?

You going where you think you is needed, said Stokely.

And who’s to say I’m not? said the brother.

I know for a fact you ain’t.

They were silent.

Moving on tomorrow, I expect? said the brother.

Moving on something fierce, said Stokely.

Best loot the house before it goes, said the brother.

He could feel the Negro searching out his eyes in the dark.

Yessuh, he said. I’ll pass the word.

Good luck to you, Stokely, he said and reached out.

But the Negro had moved down off the stump and stood out of range of the brother, staring at him. He stared at him a moment more and then he walked away.

The brother walked to Maryland because he knew that the war would be there to greet him. He forsook the state road where his family had gone and where his eldest brother had gone before them, a road that ran north and then forked east up the kindly plateaus at the hem of the mountains, and one that would have brought him across the state line with a minimum of danger. He was for the mountains that would cradle him up to the top of the state as far as Leesburg, and there, at the mouth of the Potomac River, he could follow the fighting north. They were thin and ragged mountains, like the spine of a lizard, and riddled with spruces peak to base. The brother gained a ridge where he crouched chewing bread and watched his birthright smolder in the valley below, the wind drawing huge bloats of smoke up the cut that broke against the base of the mountains. In the blueness of dawn, the fire burned brighter; an island of flame, impossibly orange. He could see figures milling in the field, among the shacks, and within sparking distance of the fire, in three groups. No one there came on with water. Pity the man who would have tried. The last potential water-bearers had quit that place the night before.

Then the brother noticed a trio of figures who were walking away from the fire, right toward him. They were as dark and anonymous as the shrubs that grew downgrade of the ridge where he crouched, and they moved in a processional, one by one, in a manner ceremonial and militant both. He watched them make across the fields and across the plateaus to the mouth of trail, but did not wait to watch them climb for fear of being spotted. He shouldered his bindle, stretched, and went on, up the rock-studded spine of the mountains.

* * *

* * *

Night of her birth, a violent storm. Rain sluicing off the eaves, down the gutters. Wind full-throated in the trees. The moon reticent behind the rain like a fortuneteller’s face behind a curtain of beads. Old Negro spirituals carrying up from the glowing doorways of the shacks, contrapuntal to the cries of a difficult labor and the drumline of the falling rain. Then sudden silence among the shacks. Hallelujah’s and Hosannah’s from the birthing room, new clamor. The stooped Negro doctor emerging in his shirtsleeves, treasuring the newborn aloft to the storm.

* * *

Roundabout dawn he stopped to rest in a meager plot of grass by the side of the trail. He had not been eating nor had he been drinking in accordance with the strain that his travels took on him, and his decision to rest, just one day out, was one that his flesh had made out of necessity. He fell into slumber so complete it seemed refined of even dreams, and when he awoke in the bright afternoon it was only with considerable effort. But scarcely had he forced his eyes than dust from the trail convulsed them shut. A confusion of horses’ hooves stormed past; he rolled over sneezing to hide his face. When at last he was able to see again, a horseman sat above him, tin-stamped against the sun.

He was one of a company of six, the other five waiting ahead in the trail. He was grizzled, red-eyed, unwashed to negritude. His hat looked like something that had died in the road.

What’s your company?

I’m not enlisted.

Want to be?

No, but I thank you.

All right.

The horseman spit, removed his hat, and clawed his fingers through his hair.

We’re going to rendezvous with Lee. Most of us just joined up this morning. What’s your business round this way if it ain’t with them blue-suited mott-lickers North?

I’m hunting somebody, said the brother.

Blue or grey?

He’s an independent agent.

No such thing these days, said the horseman. Every man’s got to take a side.

Well, technically he’s blue, said the brother. He’s doctoring under McClellan.

How’s that different, to your thinking?

Not much different, I guess. It’s complex.

Sounds pretty simple. Your man’s a backslider.

It’s personal business between him and me.

Well, said the horseman. My offer stands. If you’ve a mind to, you can ride on with us.

The brother nodded sharply. I thank you, but no.

The horseman regarded him for a moment. How are you for food and drink?

I’ve still got a couple of mile’s worth yet.

The horseman grinned and shook his head in a kind of wondrous disbelief. He withdrew his canteen, dislodged the rubber stopper, and reached it to the brother, who nodded his thanks.

Good luck to you, then, said the horseman, while he drank. I’ll commend your stupidity on to the General.

The brother stopped the canteen and handed it up. I’ll commend it to him myself, if I see him.

Long live the south, said the horseman.

All right.

And long live brothers of the cause. The horseman gave pause. Are you at least one of those?

I’d be hard-put to decide just yet.

Well, come on to Maryland when you do. We’ll skewer some Union boys together.

He tipped his hat, toed his mount and rode double-time to gain his fellows, who were now advancing in single-file along the bluffs to the east.

The brother surveyed the country round. His legs had done well for him thus far. The staggered rock-faces, the spruce-choked gulleys, and the narrow mountain passes of the land he had crossed, looked ugly and fierce, inconceivably treacherous. Yet there were the figures, ranked and solemn, sure-footed as goats on the lower escarpment, making across the ground he’d covered with a grace that suggested their feet never touched. A family of Negroes who had not stayed to watch their prison fall to ashes, or perhaps refugees from the languishing guard, old knights of the South who had traded their linen for a penitent’s cloth befitting the hour. And the brother could see now it was day that they were cowled from head to toe, and that the one in the middle was shorter than the others, its vestments dragging on the ground. They seemed to be walking in remembrance of something, though what this was he could not say.

I see you, the brother said. Can whoever it is you are see me?

* * *

Congruent upbringings, his and hers. He in the house, and she in the shacks. Butterfly chases and firefly hunts throughout the milder of the seasons, he among the trellised bougainvillia and wisteria, she among the kudzu and the weeds between the shacks. Mason jars and corkboard squares, perched in like arrangements on their windowsills and bedsteads. She of the explosive hair, skin cooked smooth like exposed saddle-leather. He of the cowlick, unaccustomed white hands, well-fed rolls above the belt. Aunt Berenice, his soft Negro Mammy, making out the limits of his play on the lawn. Sometimes Margaret with him too, driving her shadow abreast of his, while Cal sat collected and strange on the porch, learning his anatomy. She with her mother Antoinette in whatever hours the woman was afforded for this office, her little brother Stokely capering through the tall grass, clapping his small cushioned hands. Hemispheres aligned but separate. The old questions mounting between them like song. One light, one dark, observing each other, across a field of nascent cotton.

* * *

That night he came into a dry, wooded valley that lay in the void between two mountains. A place where the moonlight could not reach, and by the look of it, the sunlight neither, for the trees were arthritic, the shrubs desiccated, the ground as featureless as a pan. Mindful of the local character, he found himself drawing in shallower breaths. The trees were more tangled the further he went, growing all which ways but up, and in the absence of moonlight a soft phosphorescence seemed to radiate from the ground itself. Up ahead, a sort of throne made by two embroidered oaks, from the low boughs of which hung a cast-off robe that the brother only noticed when it brushed along his forearm. He stopped in the darkness, fingered the robe, and made to pass between the trees, but the voice of a woman spoke his name from the black recesses of the throne. He froze.

Grady Earl Coontz, the strange voice said. Rest your bones a while with me.

Show yourself, he said. Who’s there? I’ve got a knife here, and it’s needing some work.

Now the voice did not respond. He approached the wooden throne with his knife at the ready. An ancient woman sat cross-legged, faintly luminous, like an idol in a niche. She was totally nude, very pale in the ground-light. Withered paps and ropy arms. White hair parted either side of her face like a thicket she’d emerged from. Behind her long and knotty head, a colossal armature of spine, as if she possessed the bone structure to fly great wings now shorn from her body. A foul archangel cursed to walk, or was he cursed to walk with her.

He asked the canopy above him, Am I asleep by any chance?

But the woman was real, for the woman was speaking.

The Vengeful are ugly, in thought and in deed. Share we this, in spite of age, in spite of origin and sex, in spite of sundry opposites that present circumstances vex, and thus am I disposed this night to speak to you of what may come that you might come yourself, and soon, to curse the day or see it won. For Vengefulness will take you far, from mountains high to valleys low, through heat unholier than hell’s and darkness darker yet than death, across doldrums where no winds blow, and through limbos of life bereft. Despite dead men laid in your path, and war-scarred regions in your wake, where fires burn and structures lean such as the fire could not break. Against the omens of we three, your vengefulness will drive its prow, and trammel too your soul’s unease, or such of it you will allow. But be you vehicle of hate, or architect of just design, I cannot say, for know I not. This shall you yourself define.

You could just as well save me the trouble, he said. Or the headache of listening to you, at that. He scrubbed at his face with his palms and stepped back. Now I’m going to blink my eyes.

When he opened his eyes, the hag was gone. Likewise the tree-branch of her robe. He was crouched absurdly in the alcove, scarring the wood of the tree, like a lover, when suddenly the moon appeared to show him where he was.

* * *

He walked through the night and through the coolness of the morning until the land greened and then leveled out, and he slept off the hottest of the day in a sheltering thicket of spruce, undreaming. He woke as the last of the afternoon sun was threading itself between the trees, and rose with the sweat still drying on his face. Leaves and dirt clinging to his cheeks. Sore feet. He ate a bleak sandwich of white bread and chocolate, rationing sips from his canteen to chase it.

On a ledge of limestone by the side of the trail he stood to watch the sun’s decline, and the valley below seemed a volcanic waste in the brilliance of the moment when it dropped behind the hills. Going across the lower climes was the band of pursuers diminished by one; a twosome now, one tall and one short, their staggered shadows gliding across the rocks and stretching out in front of them like taller, leaner selves. The hag was no longer among them, it seemed, if hag there had ever been at all, for when the brother tried to fasten on last night’s events they seemed more plausibly ones he had dreamed. And indeed, sometimes, the figures wavered, grew closer to him and then more distant, seemed solid enough to block the light that wrought their shadows on the ground and yet other times seemed shadows themselves, projected up slant from the earth of their making. He wondered again if they were real and then he wondered did it matter.

I’ll be waiting for you, the brother said. A few pebbles skittered down the grade; he had kicked them. I’ll be waiting for you. He was shouting it now. The cliffs to either side pitched his voice back.

* * *

* * *

Tragedy in his fourteenth year when his Bay, Thurgood, tore a hole in the fence, half-disembowling itself in the process. The ragged edges of its belly where it had failed to clear the jump. Eyes rolling white and muzzle frothing for him to deliver it peace. But he could not. Him sitting down among the leakage, smoothing its fearful ears flush, crooning to it. She emerging from the shacks, not eleven years old, but attuned to his misery. A harrow cradled in her arms, sharp edge shining down the furrows. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘My horse is done for.’ ‘I can see that, but are you all right?’ Now she was there, he was, and he said so. Inordinate beauty for just one soul. Hair a mist above her head, copper in the afternoon. Her eyes seeing him and yet through him at once. ‘I brought this here for you. He’s hurting.’ ‘I don’t think I can do what you’re saying I should.’ ‘You’ve got to do it. It’s only what’s right.’ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I can’t.’ ‘ Then I’ll help you.’ Handing him the harrow. ‘On the count of three,’ she said. ‘Maybe the count of ten.’ ‘No, three. You’re not the one losing blood by the quartful.’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘I’m twelve,’ she said. ‘You’re keen for twelve.’ ‘So I’ve been told.’ Eyes meeting for an instant, then shying away. ‘Where am I supposed to strike?’ ‘Right about here,’ she said. The horse’s temple. Skin twitching gently with the soft engine of it. He brained the horse quickly, and it lay still. ‘That was even harder than I thought it would be.’ ‘But you did it,’ she said, ‘And now it’s done.’ ‘What’s your name?’ he said. ‘It’s June.’ ‘I’m Grady,’ he said. ‘I know your name.’ ‘Well, now we know each other’s.’ ‘So we do.’ And he was hers.

* * *

In the higher altitudes, things greened. Creepers, kudzu, weeping willows, Japanese wisteria. It was the middle of the night but it might have been noon for all the unique smells and birdcall. Lilies-of-the-valley by the side of the trail like diminutive ghosts in the moonlit haze, not unlike the ground-fog in the valley of the hag, but with something frenetic, unhealthy, unnatural. Hares and foxes streaked the path. Owls interrogated from on high, looking famished. Rodents tunneled through the bramble, fleeing from death on the wing.

After a while he came into a clearing which was just a slim crescent among the trees. At the opposite end, with its back to him, a figure rooted in the dirt. About the size of a child were it not for its head, which was, at a glance, twice the size of his own. It appeared to be digging something up, digging something under, or maybe just digging. The muscles of its naked back were dense and electric with strain.

The figure noticed him, and turned. An odd feral jerking of the head, waist twisting, hands curled up at the chest, like a lizard’s. He thought that it would spit at him but then it drew upright.

The child stared at him for a time. The brother stared back, a bit sick in his stomach. Its head was so huge that it might have belonged to a heftier child who now went around headless. Below the neck it was hairless, and below the waist sexless, with thin, double-jointed-looking legs, like a foal’s. Its eyes were coin-sized pools of black without any iris to speak of.

The thing made a dash for a nearby tree and scurried up among the boughs. It took up a crouch, staring down the brother, with its long toes twisted around the branch. The mouth in its face, when it opened to speak, was a perfectly black and toothless hole.

I was never born, but am. And I follow on the heels of the Vengeful, for she made me.

Well, I’m sorry to hear that, said the brother, and started to approach the tree, but the child disappeared in a chaos of leaves and emerged through a parting five feet higher up.

Vengefulness will take you far and long sustain you with its heat. So far have you come, Young Coontz, and two of us yet chanced to meet. But Vengeance is a second savored, perpetrated in half that, so weigh you carefully its merits before you serve it, tit for tat. But alas where Vengefulness propels, Vengeance must needs issue forth, so who are we, mere agents three, to reroute you upon your course? Which brings us to the hour of Vengeance, verily, an hour of death, though in your case, midst war and waste, death, like blood, will call to death. Indeed, Vengeance may warp and pale, as I have warped and paled myself, though hasten judgment must we not, humble agents three, one less. And yet less two, now I have spoke; our last remaining minion comes. Recognize his face will you by the fact that he has none.

Slowly, the brother shook his head. His palms, outstretched, began to tremble. And then with a howl of disbelief that had the while been boiling in him, he ran to the base of the tree, where he stopped. The child’s face was gone and the canopy dark. There was only a tossing of shadowy boughs to suggest it had been there at all.

* * *

Through the following day, a poisonous heat. Mirages of water and shade on the trail. Gnats and mosquitoes, in the nighttime voracious, wallowing by in disinterested arcs. Every half-mile the brother stopped to wipe off the sweat from his brow with his shirtfront. He had taken to turning around when he did this to count the miles that he had come, although he had promised himself before leaving that this was a thing he would not do. But he stopped to count the miles regardless, subtracting them from the miles ahead, and found that he was either too close to the war, or too far from home to turn back.

He went along a mountain pass where there was barely room to walk. The trail spiraled upwards, and then funneled down, as if undecided which way it should tend. Going around another bend, a pair of feet resting in the middle of the trail. On closer inspection it was one of the company that the brother had encountered on his second day out, and this ragged stranger dead for days, with none but the flies grouped there in remembrance. The man’s leg was swollen to outlandish dimensions; suggestive, he thought, of an untended wound, or a run-in with a deadly snake. There were coins upon his sightless eyes, though one of them slightly less in value, as if those who he rode with had emptied their pockets, unable to find two coins the same. The brother read the man’s name-tag. Ennis McHolister Sage, it said.

The corkscrew passage channeled straight at what the brother judged to be the summit of the ranges, and now the sun was cooking into twilight below, he stopped for a while to feel the breeze on his face. The last and tallest of the figures was making up the grade behind him with a slow and effortless locomotion, with nothing whatsoever of the clumsiness of man. Its black robe fluttered out behind it with such voluminosity it might have been wings, or a dark ectoplasm that it labored at the center of, bearing it up against gravity’s custom.

The brother hailed the figure. Ho, there. It did not waver. Ho, there, he repeated, you laggard spook. But then it was lost to the hills.

He went on.

* * *

From Thurgood’s death onward, contrary polarities. He fascinated, then enraptured by her, this siren of the garden hanging laundry out to dry, or by the river of an evening with the other washerwomen as they slapped out the bedding from soaking to damp. No rest for these laundresses, these shiners of brass, these fillers of decanters and platers of meals; no more than there was for the lovesick, this boy, crouched in the thicket for a fleetness of thigh, or the quiver of a backside through the cloth of a dress. ‘Hello June,’ he would say. ‘Massah Grady,’ she would answer. ‘Your hair looks powerful fine in braids.’ ‘I thank you, Massah.’ ‘No need. And it’s Grady.’ ‘Well, I thank you Massah. Most girls got braids.’ ‘Not like yours, they don’t,’ he said. Days of her kneeling in the garden, skirts hitched up past her knees while she weeded. Nights of her passing through the rooms, on this or that errand in the hours before sleep, when the fires stretched their spines on the manicured hearths and the kerosene lamps burned low in their niches. Cal taking notice along with him much to the detriment of his studies, and the two brothers rising from their chairs, or craning around where they stood to observe her, or shadowing her, even, at the minutest distance, as if they themselves were unaware of desiring her, for they often found themselves within an inch of her person, mutually blind as to how they had got there, or wherefore they had been propelled, knowing only that here was a creature to contemplate, and with her, a whole way of life. Cal putting down his anatomy book and sliding his pince-nez down his nose, the same two motions every evening and to think the brother noticed neither. June pretending not to see, but not unwelcome to it, either, this awkward, foolish, forthright passion that Cal had conceived for the house nigger’s daughter, and one that he planned to see out to its end, little had the brother known. And then when Chestnut hit Fort Sumter and Cal suited blue as he’d promised he would, the younger brother ran to find him, wanting to ask him was he scared, wanting, again, to hear his reasons why he would not fight for Dixie, even though he knew that Cal would never fire a musket but was looking to tend to those that did, so that he, in a way, was the loftier hero, in his very disdain for such gory romance. Not just Cal he found, however, bursting unannounced into the parlor off the kitchen, having searched every inch of the house and the grounds and this the one place he’d not looked. Hair, her hair, pressing under the shelf where the sacks of biscuit flour were lined, and Cal was driving up inside her, using the backs of her shoulders for leverage. Even worse, the brother felt, was that he could not see her face. In the moment their crisis came upon them Cal clapped his hand over her mouth, and with the other one wrapped around her stomach, guided her through their cycling down. The brother watching them with such immense force of feeling that gradually they turned around. But the brother had gone—was out walking the fields, and walking through the bloody cotton, with the image of their violent coupling returning to gall him again and again. There in the drive when he got back, his brother’s midnight coach departing, and nothing from Cal in the way of farewell but what he had seen in the parlor that night. Figures at the edge of the slave barracks, watching, murmuring among themselves.

* * *

Along the northern ridges, long views of the country. Forsaken tracts of farmland, grotesquely overgrown. Wooden plows appointed to stand in the corn like pointless contraptions of torture. Along an isthmus of rock, the brother crept, looking to the west for any sign of recent life. Pebbles trickling down the grade, the rough, corroded sound of his breath in his throat and now a dry wind among the birch-boughs were the only natural sounds in hearing. Soon the air grew clogged with smoke that densened and darkened down the valley, and suggested low fires that could not be seen for the sheer amount of it they spewed, so that the smoke appeared, from where he stood, to be emanating from the earth itself, as if the Negroes and the Yanks had gone so far as to set their blazes at its core. What land he could see through rifts in the smoke was vaingloriously ravaged after Carthage or Cannae, with the furrows tossed and leveled, and in places scorched fallow, and with the galleried houses and outbuildings chewed and ransacked to their girders. Even the gaunt, sporadic slums that leaned from the hills surrounding the houses had been met with the same itinerant violence. And not a soul in sight.

A night to redefine the word. Black and still beyond all reckoning. So dark, in fact, that he began to disbelieve in the world he had witnessed by daylight. Branches, shrubs, and hanging moss made a gauntlet of the trail, but the brother tore free of their claws and loped on without nothing but his fear to guide him.

Then he passed a curious shape. At first he took it for a birch with uncommonly white, reflective skin, but then he saw there was no moon, so how could it be shining? On closer inspection, it was a man, standing idly in his path. Or maybe not idly, the brother considered, for the man was too still to have no purpose, but seemed to be awaiting the arrival of something, there in the limitless dark. To make matters stranger, he appeared to be blind, for he did not mark the brother coming, and stood with an aspect of blindness about him, listing slightly to one side.

Grady Earl Coontz, he said, without affect. Come and stand a while with me.

You’re number three, I expect? said the brother.

Indeed, said the man, with a nod. I am he.

He was in a sorry state of nature. Piebald chest and withered shanks. And as the brother drew closer, he was chilled to discover that the pale stranger’s face was entirely featureless. While the body was that of an ancient man, with its collapsed musculature and general gauntness, the face was like a wall of gauze; he could scarcely imagine where the voice was coming from. The horrid figure’s cast-off robe had been spread on the ground beneath its feet, and here he stood, as on a dais, suspended in the element around him.

Where Vengefulness will drive you long, and Vengeance satiate your gall, it is I, the Avenged, at cycle’s end, who shows withal an inkless page, upon whose regions yet are writ the dicta of one damned or saved. For the Avenged, his hatred slaked, or thirsting still within his breast, may live to see his enemy against all odds become a friend. But lo for pride he will see lost a part of him to which blood beats, and taste of his hypocrisy with all nature imparts, one less. The path remaining wants your toe. Or else the path behind your heel. Give it fore or aft, young Coontz. Smear the wax or the plant the seal.

The man passed a hand over its face to illustrate the blankness there, and the shadow of its fingers rippled and raked an instant behind the hand that made it.

At once the forest bloomed with moonlight. Footlamps reigniting on a vaudeville stage. The trees revealed themselves as such, then the shrubs and hanging moss. The man without a face was gone, though where the brother could not guess, for certainly one so strange as he had no way to live among men unmolested; materializing, prophesying, standing naked in the dark, preceded always by the hag and the malformed child—for him the brother felt, unexpectedly, a kind of misdirected pity; but none, contrarily, for himself, because what was he doing standing here with so many miles yet to cover? But he stood there for a good while longer, pivoting dreamily in the glade, wondering not what he should do, but how he should go about doing it.

* * *

First weeks of Cal’s absence, the summer in earnest. The bushes releasing their berries, all skin. Lovesickness, boredom, and bitter frustration became for him states cooked down by heat into one paranoid master-state, and caused him to appear to lurk even in places natural for him to be in. She hurrying through the fog of his stare, sometimes with a frank disgust, so that occasionally he would order her to clean or mend things just to hear her acquiesce. In the meanwhile came letters she could not read, but that she got the old doctor to read aloud to her, and then in the halting, emotionless tone of one accustomed only to reading prescriptions and procedurals from outdated medical books so that the elder’s account of doctoring for McClellan had all the impact of a Sunday school pamphlet. Nothing the doctor had said or inflected, hopeless as he was at imparting a subtext, but through a certain over-length in the telling of events and the way their author tried to parse them, rationally, surgically, inside and out, with a poverty of likeness that haunted the diction. The younger one starting to intercept, first experimentally, then as a rule. As glad of the elder’s pronouncements of love as he was of the hardship and trauma of war, because he could not decide which brought him more pleasure, to feel his hatred justified or to know his older brother suffered, and since the letters dealt in both, he read and reread them again and again. And abusing those letters more practically now, not for their content but places of origin, plotting the postmaster’s seal from each city in between predictions from the Herald in town, and when he could get it, The Richmond Dispatch, as to which way the tide of war would presently pitch its bulk, and when. These latter marks with headless pins, the former with ones tipped black to mean certainty. Courses emerging like spirit-trails across the map’s contested regions. But which to take, he agonized, for a course once taken would be set, and he knew this. Across the Appalachians to collide with Lee’s army, or around the base of them to melt in with Hood’s? Then one day while she stood washing dishes at the big metal sink that abutted the scullery he crept up behind her on hasty feet, wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his nose in her hair. ‘Nom, Massah Grady. Ain’t what you think. Ease off now,’ she said, ‘Ease back.’ But him clinging to her, absorbing her smell, such a rare, garden smell, but also mammalian. He could not remove his poor, drunk nose from the hair at the base of her skull. So she levered herself around to face him and launched from the sink to drive him back, shouting at him, ‘Off. Get off, I said.’ Which was left reverberating in the kitchen. Releasing her startled, ashamed, enraged. Walking from the kitchen towards a place where she wasn’t, but no place existed, he found soon enough. Stumbling around for the rest of the day, he forgot to intercept the mail, and with it a letter from his brother, the fifth unanswered of its kind, calling for her to quit the house and join him in Kentucky.

* * *

The brother reached Sharpsburg just after dawn, on the fourteenth day of his journey. The woods outside the town were hung with smoke and the murderous percussion of cannons and muskets could be heard in the cornfield beyond. Only where the woods began to thin, did the brother first encounter the fallen. They lay in the dirt in grim disarray, blue coats and grey coats alike, unbreathing. Some of them prone, and others upright, and yet others still who sat slumped against trees in an audience of wordless sorrow. He found no living soul among them. Muskets and cavalry swords lay strewn. He availed himself of a stray Enfield and began to creep around the corn. He watched a Union volley and a Rebel response, hasty and smoke-blinded shots to the man. The battled was divided into narrow vignettes between the spaces in the trees as he passed along the field, and not until a ball chewed into an oak after shaving along his hairless cheek did the brother come back to himself and remember the bedlam in which he’d fetched up. He found he could not fathom such a simple contention resolving itself in such chaos, but lo. Gaps opened up along both lines after another reciprocal volley and men knelt silently in the dirt and pitched face-first out of formation, while the horses of the cavalries reared and plunged, trying to buck their cursing riders. Cannonballs also broke the lines, atomizing some and raining dirt upon others, while the officers aft of these unlucky few steered their horses round the flank and glassed the field to count the fallen. The center of the field was a smoky limbo where only the stubble of cornstalks remained.

Then, up ahead of him, small drama. Two boys tussling in the leaves. One of them blue, brass-buttoned, bugle-hatted, with a rusty blue sash around his waist, and the other one not grey, per se, but clearly allied with the stripe of that army, for the rags that he wore had been leached of their color like the grave cerements of a beggar. They were strangely isolated from the battle at large, in a glade where the sun filtered down among the trees, and the brother crouched down to watch their struggle with a look of scientific curiosity. Too close to charge muskets and fire with any accuracy, they had opted for their bayonets, and were currently locked in an awkward seesaw with the bores of the muskets pitted tensely together, their boyish arms shaking with the strain of the impasse, and their dirty faces twisted up. Trading curses back and forth as to which would be off to the Summerland first. But if either of them knew what the other one threatened, the brother would be damned—they were children. The Yankee boy slipped in a silk of pine needles and the Reb, caught off balance, slipped forward in turn, whereon the blade of the latter sank into the former, and he fell with the gun sticking out of his gut. But owing to the suddenness of his kill, the Reb fell forward along with him, and after a moment of dangling high in a pantomime of schoolboy antics, the Reb let go of the butt of his gun, and pitched over backwards with a startled expression. In the following silence, while the Union boy died, both of them sat in the dirt.

By the time he reached the Union line, his ears were ringing something awful. No one paid him any mind, Confederate though he might have been, as if any man mad enough to reconnoiter with such a traffic of lead in the air as there was would have neither the wits nor wherewithal to sabotage their camp. He passed along the rampart with his commandeered gun like a child in a spirit photograph, and as silent, while all around him muskets flashed and men fell down the whole field over. Since there was little correspondence between shots fired and men who fell before the shots, death was occurring in no right pattern, and the skirmish seemed happen much slower than it did. A cannonball carved a long fatal valley into the Union’s western flank, and a bright red mist hung there for a time while soldiers in the area yelped, took cover, dusted off bits of their brethren and marched. But a survivor broke rank running forward with his musket in a fog of violence so intense that he scarcely resembled a man any longer with his mouth twisted wide, his dark eyes agog and his limbs swinging crazily all which ways, yet stopped in his charge when he saw, looking down, that one of his legs had deserted him. He he fell beneath his comrades’ boots, who passed over him with indifference, and marched. Meanwhile a Reb on the opposite side veered like a drunk amidst the smoke while his fellows tried to pass him to the margins of the battle for the piece of shrapnel lodged in his neck, but they could not. Like the Yank without a leg, he was cordially trampled, and the brother could not see what happened to him after that. And in the meantime Rebs and Yanks alike were picked apart slowly by minie balls until they were all but racks of bone to which sinew and vitals clung, left there to teeter among the scorched corn like mutilated scarecrows.

Then behind the breastworks, off among some trees, the brother saw a medic’s tent. There were men queued up for fifteen yards to gain admittance at the flap, some of them clipped of arms or legs, or bleeding from the ears, or disfigured by shrapnel. For every man who went inside there were three carried out by the feet, or on stretchers, most of them dead and others close to it who gibbered old names that no one knew, or tried to make their peace with God. The brother sat against a spruce with the musket bridged over his knees and waited. After a while he took up the gun and started to load it as best as he recalled. He cloth-wrapped the cartridge and jimmied it down, once and then two times, with the ramrod; he pressed the primer into place, then dusted the barrel and breach with gunpowder. He hefted the gun and drew a bead on an adolescent bugler to the left of the tent, but when the boy walked out of range he propped it stock-first in the ground at his feet.

A man in a bloody surgeon’s apron parted the flap of the tent and stepped out to direct the flow of traffic inward. The brother stared intently at this man, who was distant. He reassessed his weapon’s readiness. The man had the same thin face as the brother, but ending in a long and imperious chin, and the same ropy muscles as him too but less haphazard and twisted together. He made more sense in his skin overall. His apron was dyed to the hem with blood and he held in his right hand a bright bonesaw that he absently started to gesture with, indicating to a corporal where the dead men should go, where the fatally wounded, where the barely intact, three different camps up ahead in the trees that were staffed, the brother saw, by yet other surgeons. The corporal nodded at him and the man spoke onward. The corporal seemed to hang on his every word. When the man was done speaking they just stood there and regarded one another through the thick drifts of smoke, their worn, dirty figures hunched in on themselves, and their faces very pale.

The brother drew a bead on the man in the apron. He cocked the hammer into readiness. His hands began to shake, which made the muzzle waver. He sat it in the dirt and raised it again.

Goddamn you, you meddling spooks. He canted his aim to the left, and fired.

The shot spent wide of the man in the apron and a puncture wound opened in the canvas of the tent. The man in the apron looked wildly about him but the brother was hidden among the trees, and the corporal, who was halfway in front of the man as if to take the bullet for him, had instinctively drawn his long carbine and described the clearing with it. The brother reloaded without meaning to. It was all he could think to do at the moment. The corporal advanced across the grass to see about this hidden scout.

A pretty Negro woman came out of the tent and reached awkwardly for the man in the apron. She was wearing an apron herself, just as bloody; her hair was tied up in an old ragged scarf. The woman reached and reached again, a frail, stunted motion, like the gathering of air, but no matter how close she got to the man, no matter how wide she spread her arms, it was never close or wide enough, as if she were poised on a spindle. Then the brother saw she could not stand, was staggering with the effort to, her arms not level at her sides but clutched around her ribs. She started to fall, past the man in the apron, who turned around and caught her up. He tried to make her stand but she would not. So he laid her in the grass and knelt down above her.

On seeing her, the brother dropped his musket and walked mechanically out from the trees. He walked despite the snooping corporal, who had judged his position from the shot. The man had a Spencer repeating rifle. He riddled the brother’s whole left side. The brother veered crazily on his path and fell into the thin, scorched grass. He stared across the clearing with a long, titled vantage towards the body of the girl who had fallen near the tent, but the boots of the corporal stomped into view. The man’s dirty face, with its trailing mustaches, leaned over close into his.

Hand of war stings a good bit, don’t it, son? Sure can deal you backhand, he said.

When the brother lost consciousness his left side was numb, but a numbness that promised great pain, given time. The last thing he saw were the corporal’s hands lowering onto his collar.

He woke in the gloom of the medic’s tent with the man in the apron standing above him. The man was looking at him with profound concentration, as if he could not make him out. The tent’s inside had an aqueous look, and a warm, metallic smell abided. Every so often the relative calm was distressed by the cries of other wounded, but no one demanded the surgeon’s attention so much as the brother himself. The sounds of the skirmish were strangely muffled, as if it were happening miles away. The brother felt pain burrow down along his arm and into the gaps between his ribs, as if a living creature were eating its way from the top of his shoulder inward.

He lurched up suddenly on his palette, gripping aproned man’s wrist.

I was aiming for you. But I missed, he said.

You never were much of a shot, said the man.

Where is she laid up? said the brother. Take me to where she is. I can walk.

The man in the apron shook his head. You think you can walk, but you can’t, he said.

But she’s all right. She’s got to be. Just tell me she’s all right, he said.

When the aproned man said nothing and continued to stare, the brother did a shallow laugh.

Take me to where she is, he repeated.

It’s not something you want to see.

If you’re sparing me, then don’t, said the brother. I don’t need to be protected.

You’re about to lose your arm. You’re in no condition to go anywhere.

The brother let his eyes drift down to where the cob of his arm lay stretched alongside him. Portions of bone were showing through, glaringly white, with a finely wrought grain. There was a big swath of cotton soaking blood on his ribs and bandages wrapped around and around him to keep the pressure constant.

She’s dead, isn’t she?

She is, said the man. She was standing right behind me when you fired. You heart-shot her.

I didn’t see her.

I reckoned as much.

The brother sat up. Someone’s got to tell her people.

You’d be the logical choice for that. As soon as you’re fixed, you can go on and tell them. But first things first, he said. That arm. It’s got to go soon if you want to keep breathing.

When this arm is gone, I will still have the other. And men have done worse, with just one arm. Besides, said the brother, eyes softening some. To let me off easy is the worst you can do.

If it gladdens your twisted sense of right, I reckon I’ll go it without anesthetic.

You do that, the brother said. And wake me up if I pass out.

Though he appeared on the verge of responding to this, the man in the apron shook his head. He set the freezing saw-teeth in a deep groove of muscle just below the brother’s shoulder. When the brother looked up he was gritting his teeth and tearing up a little in the corners of his eyes. But the man regained composure with a powerful stroke that freckled his face and smock with blood.

How long he slept he could not say, for he woke in unspecified dawn, alone. The man in the bloody smock was gone, and the only other presences that he could detect were those of the men laid up to either side of him. He rose on the cot and scanned the room for something to help him take his bearings, but all he saw were supine figures half-submerged in pale blue light. His posture felt off and he looked himself over. A mummified stump where his left arm had been. He willed the stump twitch, and it did. He lay back. Then sat up again. He was sweating profusely. A dull, diffuse pain, or the specter of pain, was running up and down his side. He lowered his feet to the floor with a grimace, settled himself against a stake, and strategically leaned left—right, right—left, to get a sense for his new equilibrium. He emerged from the tent on a crutch at his right, a Union issue blanket cowled about him in the heat. Woodsmoke and gunsmoke and spirits and blood encumbered the air now the battle was through. The field was hot, festooned with bugs, and windless as a bayou.

Medics of both allegiances trolled through the slaughter on foot or by deadcart, scaring up weapons for redistribution. They collected stray rations, compasses, telescopes, spurs, saddle-winches, shot-pouches, horseshoes, odds and ends of uniforms as small as gold braids, brass buttons, and tassel, or as integral as riding boots, cavalry jackets and three-cornered hats. The solider’s kit they tossed en mass into huge sacks hanging over their shoulders; with the uneaten rations they did the same, unless they could be made a meal of; and with the effects of the deceased they let their consciences contend, for there was many a man among their party who knelt to bite an unclaimed ring, or to slip a fob-watch from a cavalry jacket and twine it around his wrist, with four others. Weaving among their legs went hogs, and scurvied dogs, and plume-tailed foxes, flirting with the meals that they would make of the unburied before the day was out.

The brother watched these scavengers, cold despite the heat. One-armed and lucky to be, all considered. And he expected to see among these men, resplendent in their robes of doom, the hag and the child and the faceless man come to claim his soul. But they were nowhere. He looked for them and looked for them, scanning the field twice over, then thrice. First among the medics, then the dead, then the field officers smoking their pipes beneath canvas tents pitched along the perimeter, then the haggard infantry fanning themselves, crouched in their blood-stiffened clothes, drinking coffee, while a chaplain in his wide, blue sash gathered some men around for prayer. And here was his brother, crouched over a bucket, washing the blood from his hands in the dawn. They were the hands of a surgeon, strong and dexterous, twice the size of Grady’s own. He was watching the battlefield in profile, not aware of Grady yet, and he seemed to see nothing but what was in front of him: the humdrum blasphemy of war. But what else did he see in that broad killing field? What manner of angel? What manner of man? What did he see that his brother could not, who now crutched back inside the tent? His brother, who lay on his cot in the heat, and tried to conceive of what he’d done.

* * *

Adrian Van Young teaches writing and literature at the Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School, Boston College, and Grub Street, in Boston. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Lumina, Gigantic, and The Believer. He is currently writing a historical novel based on the life of William H. Mumler, the father of spirit photography, and his clairvoyant wife, Hannah Mumler.

What do you think is the most important part of a historical fiction story?

Having your characters speak not only out of the past, but out of the present as well.

Anne Boleyn to the King

2011-04-15T00:06:00.000-05:00

Anne Boleyn to the King
by Jean Hollander

My lord, when last I saw your face you frowned
and then you spurned me, though I asked
to come before you many times. Others I heard
singing and laughing in the dance
I used to lead, dressed in my favorite bright
yellow: junctures of love, Henry, my Henry,
the torches sizzling in the hall outside
with Ann a vixen flame in your bowels.
No question then of infidelity when we defied
your wife, your kingdom, and all Rome.

Come to me one last time--
I promise not to plead
for love or life, but go
a vixen still to that brute festival.

But no, I would not have you see
me haggard, aged, as I'm now,
the prison time drawn out by my large space
of suffering. Just send me word, trinket,
some fond remembering. Or bid them bring
Elizabeth--how she must grow--
to hold against these breasts that held
a king, her father, captive for a thousand days.
Let me embrace her quickly, and her smile
will brazen me to laugh into the hooded face
of executioners.

Yet stay--
bring her not near me, lest her fate
sicken with mine. Let her still remain,
your daughter, and my fallen head
from hell shall see her crowned.

* * *

* * *

Jean Hollander’s first book of poems, Crushed into Honey, won the Eileen W. Barnes Award. Her second collection, entitled Moondog, was a winner in the QRL Poetry Book Series. Her third book of poems, Organs and Blood, appeared in 2008. She has published hundreds of poems in many literary journals, as well as in Best Poem anthologies and other collections. She has won many prizes, grants, and fellowships. Her verse translation of Dante’s Commedia was published by Doubleday to enthusiastic reviews.

What inspires you to write and keep writing?

Ever since I studied Shakespeare at graduate school, I have been fascinated by the dramatic history of Henry VIII and his wives and the final result: Queen Elizabeth.

I write poetry because I cannot help it.

Newgate Jig

2011-04-15T00:05:00.001-05:00

Newgate Jig
by D. J. Cockburn

Le Méridien's Hackney carriage shuddered to a halt on Gracechurch Street. Through the side windows, he saw people looking toward a commotion ahead so he stepped out to see for himself. A draper's wagon had broken a wheel while turning across the street and completely blocked one of London's main thoroughfares.

The driver of Le Méridien's Hackney was one of half a dozen people gathered to shout advice and imprecations at the hapless draper's assistant examining the wheel. The Hackney driver hurried over when he saw Le Méridien. "Not to worry sir, we'll 'ave it shifted in two shakes. You just wait here."

He glanced around the gathering onlookers. "And look to yer pockets, if you follows my meaning sir. I'll just give him a hand and we'll be on our way." The Hackney driver turned back to the draper's assistant, who was still peering at the broken wheel. "It's broken, you great ninny! We can all see that so get it off the bleedin' road before you swing at Newgate for blocking the King's highways!"

Le Méridien smiled but stayed beside the carriage door. He was returning from giving fencing lessons at a Bond Street club and his foils and plastrons would be a rich haul for a footpad. He glared at a pair of urchins sidling toward him, but their looks of slack-jawed astonishment showed more interest in the novelty of a black man wearing a burberry jacket and waistcoat than any larcenous intent.

He noticed a couple of other boys quartering the crowd. One slipped toward a well-dressed tradesman enjoying the altercation. The tradesman's fist shot backward and sent the boy sprawling. The other boy joined the crowd's bellow of laughter.

Le Méridien's eye was drawn to a man whose broken nose and uneven teeth made him look more like a pugilist than the gentleman he was dressed as. The few boxers who had become wealthy were well known but Le Méridien did not recognize this man. Le Méridien turned his face to the stricken wagon but kept his eye trained on the man, who was edging toward a young woman. He walked with a feline grace that belied his broad frame and confirmed Le Méridien's first impression that he was a fighter of some sort. He would make an excellent swordsman, but the scars on his face told of fists and knives rather than the gentile blood-letting of the dueling ground.

The fighter glanced around, checking that everyone's attention was occupied. Le Méridien watched him slide a deft hand toward the girl and withdraw. The girl did not start as she would have done if the hand had insulted her, and the hand left open and empty. The man disappeared around the corner of Fenchurch Street as quickly as a pickpocket anticipating a hue and cry. Whatever the man had done, the girl did not seem to have noticed.

Le Méridien turned back to scrutinize the girl, who was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Her jacket and shift could have been worn by a Duke's wife or an actress's maid, but a lady of wealth would not be walking alone and there was something a about the stoop of her shoulders that spoke of someone more accustomed to receiving orders than giving them. He shook his head. No small incident in London ever failed to draw a crowd, and no crowd of Londoners could gather without spawning intrigues worthy of the Prince Regent's court.

He was about to forget the matter when the fighter strode out of Fenchurch Street, pointed at the girl without breaking stride and bellowed, "There she is! Hold the thief!"

The girl's head turned to him with the rest of the crowd.

"Hold the thief!" shouted the fighter again.

Le Méridien saw the look of perplexity on her face when she saw the fighter was pointing at her. She had not even tried to run when someone seized her arm, almost jerking her off her feet. Someone else grabbed her hair, which spilled from under her bonnet in a brown cascade. Her wail of pain was drowned by shouts of triumph.

Now, Le Méridien told himself, was the moment to allow sense to triumph over curiosity and stay by the carriage door until he could go back to his salle in Southwark. He sighed a lament for his feeble sense and pushed into the crowd that was ebbing from the wagon and flowing toward the fresh drama of the seized girl.

"My name is Jonathon Norbury." The fighter's tone was conversational but he spoke loudly enough to carry over the chatter of the crowd. "Warranted thief taker of the city."

That got everybody's attention. Thief takers were unpopular but they could be counted on to add drama to any situation. Norbury snatched at the girl's jacket and drew a fistful of silver spoons from a pocket inside. Le Méridien, standing at the side, saw the shock on her face that would be hidden from the men holding her from behind.

Norbury offered the crowd a broken-toothed grin. "Don't think a kitchen maid can afford the likes of these but I think your master might recognize them, eh?"

The girl shook her head but Norbury spoke over her. "Thank you for your help, sirs." He dug in his pocket and handed coins to the men who held the girl. "Now if you'll hand her to me…"

Willing hands pushed the girl to Norbury and Le Méridien saw more than one squeeze her bottom before surrendering her to a short fate that could only end with a shorter rope.

Le Méridien spoke over the buzz of conversation. "A moment, Mr. Norbury. Was it not you whom I saw lingering by this young woman before you dashed into Fenchurch Street, only to return a few moments later?"

Norbury's grip on the girl's arm made her wince, and he did not slacken it as he turned to Le Méridien. Norbury did not speak immediately and people began to back away from the ground between them as though to clear a line of fire between two duelists. Norbury slowly raised his eyebrows. The unspoken meaning was as clear as if he had shouted it. Who put a big black bugger in those fancy clothes and taught him to speak like the quality? Le Méridien heard a couple of sniggers as others noted the mockery, but he knew that Norbury was drawing out the moment to make sure no one else would say they had seen him.

When Norbury spoke, it was with a courtesy that could only exaggerate the ridiculous figure he was making of Le Méridien. "Begging your pardon sir, but you must be mistaking me for some other gentleman. If, that is, I may have the honor of naming myself a gent before so fine a gentleman as your good self."

Laughter bubbled around him. Le Méridien saw how Norbury's coins and wit had drawn the crowd to his side, thief taker or no. It would take more than simple truth from Le Méridien's thick lips to change their minds. Le Méridien bowed his head. "No doubt you are right, sir. May I offer you the use of my Hackney to take her to Newgate? I presume that is where you are going?"

Norbury's expression did not change, but Le Méridien saw discomfort in the shift of his weight from one foot to the other. Norbury could have no desire to share a Hackney with Le Méridien's suspicions, but to refuse would be to risk someone asking why and probably raising London's traditional distrust of thief-takers.

Norbury nodded. "Thank you kindly. I'd be glad to accept your offer."

The row over the draper's wagon raged on as Le Méridien's Hackney turned around toward Newgate. Le Méridien opened the door and Norbury half lifted and half threw the girl before him. Norbury sat beside her and Le Méridien opposite. The girl cast her eyes to the floor and made no sound beyond an occasional sniff that betrayed barely suppressed hysteria. Norbury fixed his eyes on Le Méridien's and backhanded the girl across the face. "Enough of your noise, girl. You'll disturb this kind gentleman who saved us a walk."

As a fencing master, Le Méridien taught his pupils to read what an opponent's body unwittingly betrayed, and how to choose what they communicated themselves. He knew that he was engaged in such a contest now so he stifled the cry of protest that Norbury's violence dared him to utter and kept his face impassive. He opened his handkerchief and mopped the blood from the girl's lip. "What is your name, my dear?"

He sensed Norbury shift, confused by his failure to monopolize Le Méridien's attention. The girl shrank away from the handkerchief so Le Méridien placed it in her hand and raised it to her mouth. "Your name?"

"Carrie Barlow."

"Tell me Carrie, why is this man so interested in you?"

Le Méridien saw Norbury's knuckles whiten as his hand tightened on her arm. Carrie gasped with pain but did not speak.

"Stuck her fingers in her master's cutlery draw, didn't you girl?" Said Norbury.

Le Méridien looked for defiance or denial in Carrie's face as she raised her head, but saw only bewilderment. Norbury's fingers shifted on her arm and dug between bone and bicep. Carrie's back arched. "Yes! Yes I did!"

Le Méridien did not believe it for a moment.

* * *

Le Méridien stood in the public gallery of the Newgate magistrate's court when an usher manhandled Carrie Barlow into the dock. Some impulse made him look at his watch to time the proceedings. It took Mr. Justice Chatterton forty seconds to read the charge and persuade Carrie to plead loudly enough for the court recorder to hear the words 'not guilty'. It took two and a half minutes to hear Norbury's evidence. It took twenty seconds to pronounce a sentence of death by hanging. Three and a half minutes in all.

Le Méridien left the gallery, strode to Newgate Street and stood for a moment before the place where the gallows stood every Monday morning. He looked at the gates of Newgate prison, and found himself imagining the wheeled scaffold stored behind them, awaiting its next tribute of life. He sighed a last lament for sense and rapped on the keeper's door. A hatch opened and an unshaven face appeared. The keeper's eye travelled from Le Méridien's dark face to his apparel and his jaw sagged with the effort of deciding which to adjust his manner for.

Le Méridien spoke first. "Good morning to you."

"Morning."

"I wish to visit an acquaintance in the women's quadrangle." Le Méridien held up a shilling.

"Not allowed."

Le Méridien held up a crown.

"Billy!" The keeper opened the door and took the coin as Le Méridien came in.

Clumping footsteps announced the appearance of a young man who looked too thin for such a heavy step. "What is it, Tom?"

"Take this, this gentleman, to the women," said Tom the keeper, "and mind they don't clout his purse while he's in there."

"Who are you visiting?" asked Billy the turnkey.

"Her name is Carrie Barlow. She was sentenced not half an hour ago."

"Sentenced for what?" asked Tom.

"Theft."

"She'll hang then?" asked Tom.

"In three days."

"Not allowed," said Billy.

Le Méridien gave him a crown. Billy pocketed it and led Le Méridien down a tight corridor and unlocked the door at the end. They emerged into the daylight and a couple of women looked up from the water pump in the middle of the open quadrangle.

"Bleedin' hell Billy, what's this? The black baron of Newgate?" The shrill voice echoed around the quadrangle and women appeared in the empty doorways to stare at the newcomer.

"Oi Billy, leave him in here will you? We'll look after his grace!" A woman in one door yanked down her blouse to expose underfed breasts. Laughter cackled from the room behind her.

A voice from the other side of the quadrangle took up the challenge. "Nah, bring him here and he'll thank you. Long as you don't mind carrying him home, that is!"

More women joined the fun and Le Méridien was caught in a hailstorm of laughter and obscenities. Billy touched Le Méridien's elbow. "Beg pardon, sir. They're for Botany Bay in a couple of weeks and serve 'em right. We're for this ward here if she's a thief."

A woman with grey-streaked brown hair stood in the doorway with her back to them, wagging her bottom. Billy slapped her and she stepped aside. "Ooh Billy, I wish it weren't just your hand you could do that with!"

Cheers drowned her voice as their ward won the contest for Le Méridien. The stink of the room burned into his nostrils and it took a moment to gather himself enough to see Carrie sitting against the wall with her knees against her chin. For a moment, he thought she was utterly unaware but her face turned to him as he stepped toward her.

Something brushed his side and he saw Billy grasping the wrist of a woman who had tried to pick his pocket. Billy punched her and she landed on her back. She flung open her arms. "Come to me, Billy love, come down here!"

Le Méridien closed his eyes and tried to clear his head. "Billy, could you give us a few moments alone? We have a few things to discuss and, excellent as the company is, we would prefer confidence."

Billy opened his mouth to speak. Le Méridien patted his purse. "I know. Not allowed."

Billy's lip twitched in something like a smile and he raised his voice. "All right, you ain't in Drury Lane no more! The gent says out, Billy says out, so out you goes!"

Billy swore and cuffed and the women shrieked and laughed, but they filed out. Le Méridien squatted in front of Carrie. He spoke her name. She looked up, but there was no comprehension in her unfocused eyes.

"Carrie, do you remember me? I brought you here after Norbury slipped the spoons into your jacket. I'd like to talk to you."

"They’ll hang me," she said. "I'll dance the Newgate jig. For a bunch of spoons I never took."

"That's what I'd like to talk about."

Carrie's face showed no sign of understanding. "Didn't do nothing and they'll hang me."

Her jaw quivered. Le Méridien watched as facts she must have been hiding from her consciousness burst forth in one howling sob after another. He took her hands in his and she fell forward into his arms, clinging to him as though he was a stout tree in a storm. He held her tight and tried to restrain his impatience. He would learn nothing until the storm passed, but Billy's forbearance would not be infinite. He waited for the worst convulsions to pass.

"Carrie," he said, "Carrie, you must listen."

She showed no sign of having heard him. He prized her arms from around his neck and seized her face in both his hands. She tried to shake him off but he held her with a grip that must have hurt. "Carrie, will you listen?"

He felt her try to nod in his grip and released her.

"I didn't steal them spoons," she said at last.

"I know. I saw Norbury put them in your jacket, though I didn't know what he was doing at the time."

Her eyes focused on him and for the first time, he saw something other than despair in her face. "You did?"

"I did. But as you see, I don't have the sort of face that commands the respect of magistrates."

"Cos you're a coon?"

"If you want to put it that way. The point is that perhaps if I know why he did it, I can find a way to prove it. But first you must tell me why, if you know."

Her eyes dropped. "You a devil?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I heard the devil's black and you got a funny name. Now here you come offering temptation cos if you can show I didn't steal the spoons, I won't hang. But the devil always wants his due. I heard that too."

"My name is French, not diabolical." Le Méridien allowed irritation to creep into his tone. "My father was an aristo, my mother was his slave and the only devils I know are the Jacobins who guillotined them. Now are you going to tell me whatever it is that you're ashamed of, or would you prefer to hang?"

Her head jerked back as though he had slapped her, but he saw her register the sense in his demand.

"He must of put the spoons there because my master paid him to."

"And who is your master?"

"His name's Theobald Gudgeon. You heard of him?"

"I've been spared the pleasure. Would you like to explain the charade with the spoons? Most employers simply dismiss their maids when they tire of them."

"Oh he's tired of me, that's for sure." She dropped her voice to a mumble that Le Méridien could hardly hear. "Not just as his kitchen maid."

Le Méridien's lips formed a silent 'oh' but he did not speak. Words poured out of her in a torrent. "I needed the extra money. My sister got the consumption, me dad's dead of it two years back, me mum's on the gin and we've had no wages for six months. He weren't so bad. Then he said he were getting married and I shouldn't come back. I told him I'd starve without the wages I were waiting for and I'd had to borrow money, which weren't nothing but the truth, and I told him about me mum and me dad and me sister. He says he weren't giving me no more money and I said he would if he knew what was good for him and he didn't say nothing then and I kept coming to work like nothing was different. I thought I'd keep the job till he paid up and we'd say no more about it, but he must of sent that man instead."

It was all spoken in one breath and she stopped talking when she ran out of wind. Le Méridien was gratified to see defiance in her glower. She would need all the courage she could muster in the next two days.

She dropped her gaze. "You're still here."

"I am."

"You still going to help me now you know I'm a whore?"

"I am."

"How?"

"I don't know yet."

They regarded each other for a silent moment.

"Tell me," said Le Méridien, "why did you tell me your father is dead?"

"Sounds better than run off with another woman, don't it?"

* * *

* * *

Sarratt sipped his coffee and regarded Le Méridien with a raised eyebrow. "My dear Le Méridien, we've been here ten minutes and you haven't asked me about the latest Royal Society meeting once. I can only surmise that you are in thrall to your Quixotic muse again."

Le Méridien had to smile. Sarratt's fascination with natural history was usually a welcome diversion from the drudgery of raising the rent for his salle, but today he could not deny that his mind was elsewhere.

"You have me," he said, and told the story of Carrie Barlow's impending execution.

Sarratt frowned when he finished. "You say her employer is Theobald Gudgeon? There's a name I've heard."

Le Méridien's interest stirred. "You've met him?"

"No, he's very much one of the Fancy so our paths haven't crossed."

"The Fancy. He's something of a rake, then?"

"No more than is usual in the Fancy, which would make seducing his maid more or less compulsory. But it's rumored that his real vice is gambling."

Le Méridien nodded. One of his pupils was an heir to an earldom who had gambled so heavily on how far an acquaintance could throw a stone that he could no longer afford lessons in Harry Angelo's fashionable salle and had to depend on Le Méridien to keep him in preparation for the duels that the Fancy was so fond of. "As his gambling is a subject for rumor, I presume it is usually unsuccessful?"

"Disastrous by all accounts. He's said to be a good enough player who never knows when to stop. The man's more or less ruined himself and nearly taken his family with him. His father, by some sleight of hand that we can only guess at, has arranged a good marriage for him but only on condition that he swears off gambling and shuns the Fancy."

Le Méridien was conscious of well-fitting cogs beginning to turn. "And presumably off kitchen maids?"

"I imagine that went without saying. His unfortunate bride-to-be is Miss Henrietta Burnfield."

"Related to the Burnfield wool merchants?"

"Old man Burnfield's only surviving child. Henrietta's a widow with two daughters and she's already thirty-five, so Burnfield must be in a hurry to marry her off while there's still a chance of a son and heir. Though the more I hear about Gudgeon, the more desperate I think Burnfield must be."

"Probably not desperate enough to weather the scandal Carrie Barlow would stir up."

"So Gudgeon seems to think. He would probably buy her off if he could afford it, but you say he isn't even paying his servants' wages and paying her after the marriage might involve explanations he'd rather avoid."

Le Méridien nodded. "While he could come up with all sorts of reasons for needing to pay Norbury. All the same, he could face some very uncomfortable explanations if he doesn't have the money when Norbury wants it."

The two men shared a smile, but Le Méridien's mind was already forging ahead. He reached for his coffee and became aware of the resignation in Sarratt's smile.

Sarratt spoke first. "Before you ask me what you are going to ask me, may I ask what this girl means to you?"

Le Méridien's cup froze in mid air. He could not help but laugh at himself. He was so used to depending on his inscrutability that he forgot how long Sarratt had known him. "Shall we say that she is a fellow traveler who has fallen and requires assistance?"

"And you to her?"

"She asked me if I was a devil."

"Then you may depend on me."

"I intend to. You have the sort of face that will be believed when you give your word of honor that Carrie Barlow is innocent."

There was a hint of concern in Sarratt's reply. "My word of honor is not something I give lightly."

"That is why it will be necessary for Gudgeon to confess to you before you give it."

"Ah. A plan with the virtue of simplicity. There is but one complication."

* * *

"We are not assaulting the Bastille," said Le Méridien.

Sarratt snapped the pistol's lock to check the flint. "Humor me, Le Méridien. I don't intend to shoot my way into a Berkeley Square house but I will find it easier to look Mr. Gudgeon in the eye with these in the gig. It will offset the knowledge that he's already tried to kill to hide what we threaten to bring to light."

"To kill certainly," said Le Méridien. "To spill blood on his own carpets I doubt."

Sarratt loaded the second pistol and returned it to its box under the seat. Le Méridien held himself motionless and watched furrows of tension ease from Sarratt's brow while Sarratt's mouth assumed the firm line of purpose. Sarratt had been one of Le Méridien's best pupils before he discovered that defeating fear before a duel was far easier than defeating remorse afterward.

Sarratt's gig bumped to a halt outside Gudgeon's house and Le Méridien stepped down. The afternoon's still air left a shroud of coal smoke over the city and brought near twilight to three o'clock. Sarratt told his driver to wait and rapped on Gudgeon's door. The valet who opened it was identifiable as such only by his manner, for his jacket, breeches and cravat would have passed inspection by Beau Brummell.

Sarratt gave him a card. The valet gave it a glance and tipped his head back to a patrician angle. "May I enquire Mr. Sarratt's business?"

"Quite so. Please be so good as to inform Mr. Gudgeon that Mr. Sarratt does indeed have business." Sarratt's voice was low and level and only a man who knew him as well as Le Méridien could hear the tension in it.

The valet managed to convey insolence without actually glowering as he showed them into the parlor and left them to find Gudgeon. A hint of perfume tickled Le Méridien's nose. He shared a look with Sarratt. Gudgeon's finances may have been in a perilous state but he was determined to maintain the façade of opulence to the last.

The valet returned. "Mr. Gudgeon will see you now, Mr. Sarratt. Perhaps your footman would care to wait in the kitchen."

Le Méridien turned his whole body toward the valet but kept his face blank, letting the valet torture himself by guessing what he was currently suffering in Le Méridien's imagination.

Sarratt waited until the valet began to visibly shrink before he spoke. "Mr. Le Méridien is my particular friend and is as anxious as I am to see Mr. Gudgeon. Now if you please."

The valet practically scurried ahead of them to the drawing room door. "Mr. Sarratt and Mr., er, Lemennon."

Le Méridien strode in first and stretched out a hand. "Le Méridien. Your servant, sir. Delighted to meet you."

In the two steps from the door to Gudgeon's hand, Le Méridien recognized a considerably less formidable opponent than Norbury. Gudgeon's slight stoop made him look as though he was in his mid-forties, but the debauched red of his cheeks spoke of a man younger by several years who was aged by ill-usage. Gudgeon's feet shuffled with surprise at seeing a six foot black man in his drawing room. Gudgeon took Le Méridien's hand before knowledge could restrain habit and his mouth curled slightly as he realized that he had just accepted a black tradesman as his guest.

Le Méridien stepped aside and allowed Sarratt his turn with Gudgeon's hand.

"Please take a seat, Mr. Sarratt." Gudgeon pointedly ignored Le Méridien. "Tell me of your business."

Sarratt exuded affability as he sank into an armchair. "Carrie Barlow."

There was no change in Gudgeon's demeanor. "I'm sorry?"

"Carrie Barlow. Your kitchen maid who will be executed at Newgate the day after tomorrow."

"Ah. Yes. Carrie Barlow. Now I remember."

"I imagine you do," said Sarratt. "I doubt you hang a kitchen maid every day."

Le Méridien would have kept silent and let Gudgeon realize for himself how foolish his denial had sounded, but Sarratt had succeeded in unbalancing Gudgeon. The turmoil behind Gudgeon's smile was as plain as if he had been thrashing on the floor.

"No, no, of course not." Gudgeon managed a chuckle. "But look, I can't leave my guests dry. Brandy? Good, good. One moment, one moment."

Gudgeon left the room for a little longer than seemed necessary to tell the valet to bring brandy, but then he could have called the valet into the room and given the order in front of Le Méridien and Sarratt. Gudgeon returned with his shoulders relaxed and his stoop gone. Le Méridien saw he had anticipated the arrival of the brandy by a glass or two. Gudgeon sat opposite Sarratt and darted a glance at Le Méridien, who had placed himself at a right angle to the two of them.

"Mr. Sarratt," said Gudgeon, "You were speaking of Carrie Barlow."

"Actually, Mr. Gudgeon, I came to discuss a hundred guineas. I merely mentioned the Barlow girl by means of illustration."

Gudgeon confined his reaction to a single raised eyebrow. He had assumed his card-table manner. "Blackmail is it?"

"Good heavens, no! What possible grounds for blackmail could there be?"

Another glance at Le Méridien showed that Gudgeon was as unsettled by Le Méridien's silent presence as by Sarratt's abrupt changes of direction.

"What indeed?" asked Gudgeon.

"Of course, some might consider your liaison that you ended by having Jonathon Norbury send the girl to the gallows."

Gudgeon said nothing. Le Méridien's stomach muscles tightened. The critical moment was approaching and Gudgeon's thoughts were hidden behind his face.

"You're not going to waste our time by denying it, are you?" said Sarratt. "I had understood that you are a man amenable to business."

Gudgeon smiled the thin smile of a gambler trying to hide the crippling damage that the last hand had cost him. "If you know this much about my affairs, you know I do not have a hundred guineas. I may raise a little perhaps, but a hundred is entirely beyond my means."

Le Méridien relaxed.

"Then we may indeed discuss business," said Sarratt.

"Business be damned. You people came here to blackmail me so let's call the devil by his name." Gudgeon threw another glance toward Le Méridien.

Or did he? Without moving, Le Méridien summoned the map of the room he had committed to mind before he sat down. He remembered that the door was behind him and immediately to his right. Had that been the real focus of Gudgeon's nervous glances? Had he half heard a rustle of cloth or the brush of a boot on a carpet? Had the brandy been the only thing that Gudgeon had ordered from the valet, or had there been a summons as well? He found himself as convinced of a presence outside that door as if he had heard a knock.

Sarratt was reacting to the suggestion of blackmail with theatrical mortification. "Dear me, a horrible accusation. I don't ask a penny for myself but I'm sure you would not deny Carrie Barlow a pension after the ill treatment that she has suffered. Ill treatment that will end directly when you tell the Justice that the spoons weren't yours, or whatever you choose to tell him before I speak to him myself…"

Le Méridien cut him off. "Please come in, Mr. Norbury."

Silence fell. The door opened and Norbury's lithe step carried him to the middle of the room. He looked utterly feral, a piece of the violence of the rookeries among embroidered table cloths and chairs covered in faux-chinoiserie. Sarratt, Gudgeon and Le Méridien stood.

"Course he ain't here to blackmail you." Norbury's words were to Gudgeon but he did not move his gaze from Le Méridien. Although Le Méridien had not spoken since he sat down, Norbury showed no doubt as to who his principle adversary was. "Mr. Le Méridien ain't the blackmailing sort. Leastways, that's what them what know him say, and one or two who only heard of him. I been asking. The sort to take the part of a poor girl sent to hang by the likes of you and me, but not the sort to blackmail you over it."

Le Méridien saw both the respect to himself and the implied insult to Gudgeon in Norbury's refusal to acknowledge anyone else in the room. He also recognized a man who was likely to show respect for a worthy opponent by waiting for him to turn his back before he struck.

"So now Mr. Le Méridien's mate here can go tell the magistrate that he put it all before you and you didn't deny it. And because he's white and he'll give his word of honor with a straight face and a clear conscience, the magistrate will believe him. You bloody, bloody fool."

Le Méridien nodded politely. "Actually, Mr. Gudgeon will be as delighted to tell the magistrate himself as he will be to pay Miss Barlow a pension of a hundred guineas. He is very keen to spare the Burnfield family the embarrassment of reading about Carrie Barlow in Town and Country before his marriage."

Le Méridien's hands were by his sides, but Sarratt caught the wave of his finger and made for the door.

Norbury nodded, some of the tension easing as he saw a way to keep the money promised to him. "He's very keen indeed."

"Then you gentlemen must have things to discuss. Good day to you." Le Méridien strode round Norbury without touching him. He followed Sarratt out of the house and into the hazy gloom of the street.

Sarratt opened the gig door. "Home, Johnson, quick as you please."

Johnson the driver looked dubious. "She might manage a trot, sir."

"Well be a good fellow and make it a brisk trot."

Le Méridien climbed in beside Sarratt. Sarratt let out his breath. "Damn it, I was enjoying myself before that bruiser turned up. You certainly have some interesting friends, Le Méridien."

"I meet them in coffee houses."

Sarratt shook the gig with his laughter. Le Méridien saw the strain of the last half hour leave him as he laughed much harder than the joke warranted. Finally Sarratt slumped back and the two men pulled on their cloaks against the cold of the approaching evening. A clatter of horseshoes on cobblestones preceded the blur of a galloping horse past Sarratt's window. Le Méridien saw several pedestrians scatter out of the way.

"A pity we can't just go to the magistrate now," said Sarratt. "I'd like to finish this wretched business."

"I too," said Le Méridien, "but Chatterton is not bound to believe us while he can hardly fail to heed Gudgeon if he says there was no theft in the first place."

Sarratt nodded and they both lapsed into silence. The sound of galloping approached from ahead. There was a whinny of pain and the gig stopped dead and lurched backward.

"What the devil?" Sarratt reached for his door.

Le Méridien gripped his shoulder. "Gudgeon is a gambler who doesn't know when to stop and your word of honor could cost Norbury his thief-taker's warrant. Stay inside."

Le Méridien pulled a pistol from the box under the seat and cocked it as the gig lurched back again. He slid out of the cart and slipped the pistol under his cloak. Johnson was trying to calm the horse that was rearing between the gig's traces. Men and women were gathering, drawn by the disturbance, but there was still enough light for Le Méridien to be sure he recognized none of them. "What happened?"

"Damned galloping blade on his fancy horse!" said Johnson. "Begging your pardon, I mean some gentleman come galloping past and gave Strawberry here the end of his crop on her nose. She ain't used to it, are you my dear?"

Le Méridien was no longer listening. He worked his way around the bucking gig, slowly enough to scrutinize every figure his progress revealed.

A man much nearer than anyone else appeared around the gig's corner. Le Méridien just had time to note that he slouched and walked with a shuffling gait unsuited to approaching a panicking horse before the man straightened up and leveled a pistol at him. There was no triumph on Norbury's face, just the concentration of a craftsman at a challenging task.

Sarratt, thought Le Méridien. Sarratt was the reason he was still alive. It was Sarratt's word of honor that must be silenced, and Sarratt who was out of clear sight and could be pointing a pistol of his own at Norbury.

Le Méridien turned side on to Norbury like a duelist presenting the smallest possible profile to an opponent's fire. Norbury was a fighter but not a fencer so he did not see the significance of Le Méridien's feet shifting into the stance of en garde, nor the way he placed his weight over the front leg.

Both men stood still, waiting for Sarratt to perpetuate a situation he may not even have been aware of. Le Méridien focused every sense on Norbury until it was as though they were alone in the grey smog. The rocking gig and the people shying away from Norbury's pistol could have been on another continent.

A click from the gig's door announced that Sarratt was coming out. Norbury's pistol swung to the gig as though attached to his eyes. Le Méridien flicked his cloak aside from his own pistol. The half-inch eye of Norbury's pistol jerked back to glare at Le Méridien. The flint snapped and priming powder flared. Le Méridien did not try to point his pistol but threw his front leg straight and hurled himself forward in the fleche. Two pistols banged. A ball plucked at Le Méridien's cloak.

The fleche carried Le Méridien three steps before he arrested his momentum and swung back to Norbury. He just had time to see Norbury crumpling to the ground before vanishing behind the smoke of Le Méridien's own priming powder a moment before the kick of the discharge.

Le Méridien stepped through the smoke to see Norbury sprawled on the street. He looked around to see Sarratt half out of the gig, his pistol sinking to his side. Sarratt's pistol was still cocked.

"Hesitated," said Sarratt to nobody in particular. "I hesitated and then he dropped."

Le Méridien thought back. He was sure he had not been mistaken when he heard two reports, yet Sarratt had not fired. Le Méridien looked at the gathering crowd and his eyes were immediately drawn to the one man who was moving away while everyone else had decided that the shooting was over and was coming closer. Le Méridien saw that the man was making his way toward a horse that was ambling away. He felt everything fall into place.

"Mr. Gudgeon. A moment of your time." Le Méridien's voice cut through the growing buzz of conversation. The man walking away stopped in his tracks. "We'd like to thank you for shooting this…footpad…in the back."

The man appeared to abandon the idea of furtive escape and strode toward Le Méridien and Sarratt. Le Méridien nodded to himself when he saw it was indeed Gudgeon

"Thank God I was in time," said Gudgeon when he was close enough that only Le Méridien and Sarratt could hear him. "I tried to persuade him to accept your terms but he seized one of my horses and took off after you. I gave chase of course, but it was a damned near thing. A damned near thing indeed."

Le Méridien could detect nothing in Gudgeon's manner to show he was lying. If only the man had known when to cut his losses, he could have been a very successful gambler but even now he could not resist trying his luck against the clear evidence of his actions.

"Then you had no reason to slip away," said Le Méridien, "and I only see one horse wandering off."

"I beg your…"

"I'm sure Norbury carried on abusing you after we left. That must have dented the pride of a man who feels free to dispose of anyone who doesn't wear silk whenever they become inconvenient to him." Le Méridien kept his voice as low as Gudgeon's.

"This is ridiculous…"

"You saw a way to solve all your problems at once. Norbury was ready to accept our terms so you must have offered him more money. Whatever you offered, you rode us down with Norbury on your own horse, probably because he couldn't ride. You dropped him ahead of us and turned back to whip Sarratt's horse and stop the gig. Norbury was waiting for Sarratt to step out so he could silence his word of honor. You probably didn't care about me, but Norbury would have shot me even if you didn't tell him to. He knew both of us couldn't outlive Sarratt for very long."

Gudgeon's mouth opened and closed in a face set in an expression of denial, but no words came out.

"But you had an idea you didn't share with Norbury. Perhaps he offended you or perhaps you woke up to the fact that you can't let a man like that into your life and expect him to quietly walk away when you finish with him. Either way, you stayed back so you could shoot him down as a footpad as soon as he shot Sarratt. You're not a bad shot, Gudgeon, but if you've ever fought a duel, you're still alive by sheer luck. You had him covered because you knew he'd shoot you if he even suspected what you had in mind. But you panicked when he fired and shot him before you made sure he'd hit anyone. You probably didn't even mean to shoot, did you?"

Le Méridien sniffed Gudgeon's breath. "I'll give you this. You're a much better dissembler after your fourth drink than when you're sober. If you had been as transparent as when I first met you, Norbury would have seen through you in a moment and you would be a very dead man by now."

Gudgeon looked as though he had contracted a sudden bout of ague. "This is…absurd. You're insane."

"Do you give me the lie?"

Gudgeon's protests died in his throat. Le Méridien watched the thoughts chase each other through Gudgeon's mind. Gudgeon had accepted Le Méridien as a guest so could not insist on a difference in class. Gudgeon's gaze dropped to Le Méridien's warm pistol, then rose to regard the cool expression and consider the clear thinking in the aftermath of mortal danger. He glanced at Sarratt, who was within hearing of the deadly sleight on Le Méridien's honor that he was on the brink of making.

"No, no. Dark. Easy to make a mistake."

"Quite. The dark often affects my hearing as well. Now go and get your horse before the watchmen decide it's safe enough to come and find out who was shooting at whom. You'll need it for you visit to Mr. Justice Chatterton tomorrow."

Gudgeon backed away, nodding like a clockwork bird.

"Mr. Gudgeon," said Sarratt. "Carrie Barlow's pension now stands at two hundred guineas."

* * *

* * *

Le Méridien was putting away foils and plastrons after a class when he heard the knock. He went down the stairs that connected his salle to the street and opened the door. The girl outside gave him a hesitant smile and it took him a minute to recognize her as Carrie Barlow. There was a healthy flush to her complexion that had been bleached out by fear and dismay whenever he had seen her before.

"Come in, Miss Barlow."

Her face showed a moment's confusion at being addressed as 'Miss', but she stepped in and allowed him to take her cloak as she climbed the stairs.

"Please have a seat, Miss Barlow. Would you care for some brandy? "Brandy? Not 'alf!" She grinned like a child offered a special treat. "I mean, I'd love some, sir."

She looked around the salle. "This is where you work? I thought Mr. Sarratt said you live here."

"I have a small room at the back." He handed her a glass of brandy.

"Oh, I thought you was a gent. I mean a gentleman."

Le Méridien pulled a chair opposite her. "I'm afraid I have no debts to anyone. A most unfashionable condition among the gentry."

"Oh." She sipped the brandy and squinted at the glass. "Funny taste. Well, so much the better. I haven't done very well with gents."

"How is Mr. Gudgeon?"

"Married, and looking ten years older." She grinned again. "Looks like he had a right scare. Perhaps it was Mrs Gudgeon. I do hope so."

"I hope the poor woman can give him a scare as well. I'd have tried to confound his marriage plans, but I had to offer him a way out to be sure he would see you released.

"He's a gent. He'll always get what he wants in the end. It's the rest of us who have to make do."

"Very true. But I trust he gave you a generous pension."

"I'll say. He sent for me and gave me two hundred guineas. I couldn't believe it. I mean, why'd he come over so generous all of a sudden?"

"Why indeed."

"Perhaps it were that Mr. Norbury. Heard he got shot trying to rob some gent. Typical bloody thief-taker." Her hands shot to her mouth. "Oh I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Le Méridien inclined his head. "As you said, I am no gentleman."

"No, s'pose not. Anyways…" She tilted her head on one side and gave him a different sort of smile. "I came here to thank you for…well, for everything you done to keep me from the Newgate jig."

She stood up and slipped her shift down to her elbows. She was fashionably naked underneath. Le Méridien stood and pulled it back up.

Carrie's smile faded into open-mouthed confusion.

"If you please." Le Méridien could think of nothing better to say.

"Why not?"

"It is not why I did what I did."

"It weren't? But it's like I said in Newgate. You must want something, don't you? I asked a few people and they put me right, said you black fellows ain't devils but that you can't never get enough of white…"

"Nevertheless."

"Right. Well." Carrie drained the brandy in one swallow. "Reckon I prefer beer. You don't want no thanks then?"

"You have already thanked me."

"Right. I'm taking my sister to my Dad's cousins in Bristol. Going to buy a pub with Mr. Gudgeon's money, so I don't think I'll see you again."

"Thank you for coming."

"You was right. You ain't no gent." Le Méridien thought she meant it as a compliment, but she was gone before he could be sure. He sighed and put the rest of the foils away.

* * *

D. J. Cockburn says: I have been publishing occasional stories for several years now, in between receiving a long monologue of rejections and earning a living through medical research on various parts of the African continent. Other phases of my life have included teaching unfortunate children and experimenting on unfortunate fish.

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

When I'm in a receptive mood, I find ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. However it takes several different ideas to make up a story, and they usually come from different sources. When I decided I wanted to follow up Steel in the Morning with a second Le Méridien story, things slotted into place quickly enough. A walk around the City of London is always good for setting, as you can't escape the sense of the centuries built on top of each other. As usual, much of the premise came from reading about the Regency period, in particular the description of the corrupt thief takers in Fergus Linnane's London's Underworld and the tales of the Fancy in Peter Radford's The Celebrated Captain Barclay. Once I had created enough corruption and decadence, I could trust Le Méridien to find his own way through it.

Edgar Cayce

2011-04-15T00:04:00.000-05:00

Edgar Cayce
by Jack Peachum

Truth be told– I'm a crude soul-- unrefined–
Kentucky born and bred, rudely schooled–
versed in rural speech and country manners,
not well read– nothing of the classics,
nothing of the great world beyond my own eyes,
knowing little and forever guessing less
– then these trances come, I leave myself–
go into another person and read them,
swimming through the thick soup of life itself!
Here we have the body– for our own use
(supposedly, for that’s the theory),
– for pleasure, for dream, for transport, for sentience–
Death looms large in the imagination,
and flesh must suffer a variety of ailments–
disease, injury, cancer and dire famine,
not to say– blindness and suffocation–
– and, always, a thousand small physical pains–
though not so small as to go unnoticed!
Nor should we forget to mention accident
– who habitates far from cause and effect–
propinquity’s most unlovely stepchild!
And beyond all that– who is this person here,
this spirit dressed in fleshy clothes?
Where do we find the psyche, the engine,
the driver that makes this body live and move
in some realm of coexistence with God and Man?
I’ve visited the lungs and liver, the spleen,
swam the blood in all the veins, head to toe,
I’ve traveled through the intestines and out,
been one with nerve, cartilage and bone–
I’ve mapped the heart, viewed the ventricles, aorta,
looked out through the pupils of another’s eyes
– experienced both sets of genitals-
and, yes– even seen the brain while it was at work!
But yet– yet– I can tell you nothing!
My Presbyterian soul hungers for some sign
– an infinitesimal spark of divine light,
a quality that makes the essence of man immortal
– and I must confess– I have not found it!
No, I have not found a single sign of it!
Only once, whilst dreaming in the pineal,
I glimpsed a long parade of empty carts
that traveled quickly down the darkening centuries
to be filled by an unknown unseen hand.

* * *

Jack Peachum is a widely published poet, both on the internet & in print magazines. He lives in The Venable's House on The Venable's Lot, a haunted manse in southside Virginia, with wife Julia, a lovely bulldog named Eleanor, a cat named Scratch, and many many ghosts. He is the author of a volume of poetry, Polyamory, and a p.i. novel, Tempest, which takes place in D.C. during the Watergate era.

What do you think is the most important part of a historical fiction poem?

Since I write from the inside of a character, I think the most important part of the process is to find the person at that level-- this means locating an individual characteristic, either physical or psychological, through which the one speaking may reveal themselves.

Centurion's Choice

2011-04-15T00:03:00.000-05:00

Centurion's Choice
by R. S. Pyne

Centurion Marcus Flavius Quintus of the Second Augustan Legion cursed the British weather as he did every morning and felt every one of his fifteen years with the Eagles. Roused out of a vivid nightmare by the daybreak buccina, he drifted through the staff officer’s meeting like someone still asleep and heard barely a word.

Back in his quarters now, he broke his fast with oil and bread warm from the ovens and wished there was some garum to go with it. Stocks of fish sauce had dwindled so low that only the camp Prefect and Chief Centurion Commander could still use it. At least another five days before a resupply column arrived. Curse the Quartermaster’s crooked soul down to the Underworld and back again; the fat slug sold more supplies than he issued using his position to grow rich at the Legion’s expense. He could picture the man; an enormous belly stretched tight against a perpetually grease stained tunic. Spindly legs barely supported his weight, could not walk a hundred steps without resting; he let his assistants do all the work and then blamed them whenever things went wrong.

“Damn rain,” he said and drained his cup. He spat it out just as quickly. The wine was a second rate Falernian, the sort of thing usually given to natives. They refused to dilute it with warm water like civilized people and did not need to check for wildlife. Perhaps that was the best way. Soldiers far from home thrived on news, gossip or scandal and camp opinion still held the newt in a tribune’s goblet had been no accident.

A grim faced shadow stopped him from brooding.

“Pass it over.” Caius Lucius wrung water out of his cloak and muttered a greeting. “I need a drink and I hate to see it wasted.” The two were old friends who had served together for long enough to relax usual protocols when nobody important would object.

As duty centurion, Quintus had drawn the short straw for the third day in a row, taking out a patrol of the legion’s dregs on punishment detail. “Make your report,” he said, pulling on his helmet and made sure he looked presentable when all he wanted to do was go to the bath house and soak the chill of Britannia out of his bones.

It had leached deep into the marrow, the warmth of Ostia long forgotten. Those had been lazy sun baked days of wine and honey, two weeks of leave at his brother-in-law’s villa. The children, he would happily drown in the sea; they were a nuisance, even if they shared his blood. The oldest boy, Lucius, demanded tales of blood and battle and then had nightmares about it afterwards. The girl, Livia, was pretty as her mother and would break as many hearts; she had mastered sincere apologies to the Household Gods with fingers behind her back. In Ostia, the skies were blue and cloudless.

It was raining outside. It always seemed to be raining. The weak sun had not shown his face in days, chased away by lowering storm clouds and a damp, gray mist that hovered like an inconvenient uncle at a wedding feast.

Quintus thought once more of Ostian sunshine, the smell of the sea and of sun baked streets and wine shops, fresh cooked seafood, meats and exotic spices. The great and the good of Rome paraded the paved main streets in their best clothes, but Ostia came alive at night when abandoned to the lesser ranks.

His optio pulled him back out of the daydream.

“The men are all formed up and waiting. Two more have deserted without trace and another lost an argument with a loaded bullock wagon so will not be joining us again in this world. Aulus the Rat is swinging the plumb-line again. He said he was too sick to march anywhere when all he had was a slight sniffle. I kicked his arse back into line and threatened to put him on three months latrine duty. I might just do it anyway.”

“Good. Walk with me,”

The two men fell into step, easy in each other’s company, walking as equals until it was necessary to do otherwise. A sorry looking column waited for them, the sky above them heavy with the promise of a thunderstorm. He smelt oily wet wool and stale posca – the mixture of water and sour wine that made up a soldier’s daily ration mixed with the sweet native brew that took some getting used to. An acquired taste but soldiers never wasted a chance to get drunk.

“Stand up straight,” Caius Lucius savaged one of the men for lounging on his shield while the others snapped to attention and tried to look keen. They did not make much of an effort.

Several of them had rust spots between plates of their lorica segmentata, the scale armour that should have been mirror bright.

“Next time, more polishing and less drink,” Lucius snarled, using his vine stick to point out a large rust stain. The optio had spent years waiting for a vacancy among the centurionate; competent and loyal as any hunting dog. He deserved his promotion and, by the Gods, was sure to get it sooner or later – stepping into dead men’s hobnails as easily as a high born lady put on a new stola.

He glared down at the malingering filth that called itself a Roman citizen and dragged the section down to ever lower standards.“What do you want now, maggot?”

It raised a hand and refused to be silent. “I need to see the medic.” Aulus had a face like a slapped fish head kept more than three months in the fermentation vat. The Gods in their wisdom ensured that he found his way into the legions; a rich relative ensuring he passed the medical even when he was unfit to serve. A liar, bone idle and unreliable, the best thing that could happen to him would be a Celtic spear in the gut but he was indestructible. Where much better men fell in battle, he survived without a scratch, when most soldiers obeyed orders, he avoided them.

“I am ill, Sir.”

“Shut your mouth.” Caius Lucius roared his impatience, but it was not enough to stop the protests.

“Think I have foot rot, Sir, and everything aches. My head hurts. I was sick this morning.”

“That is how the rest of us feel about you.” A vine cane bounced off the man’s helmet, sound echoing across the valley. “Another word and you will empty Latrine Number Three with a number three ear scoop.”

The threat worked and nobody else tried to claim they were ill.

They shouldered their packs, loaded down by digging tools, cookware and everything else thought necessary for campaign life, almost looked like soldiers as they marched through the gates at fast pace. Scouts reported nothing that morning, no hostiles or events worthy of attention. Just another routine patrol; the dregs brought together to spare better men from boredom. They slowed to campaign step, the mile eating stride developed by the legions and learned by even the dullest recruit.

Both Centurion and Optio had worked their way up from the ranks and spent enough time as Marius’ Mules to know the weight. They had marched in full armor under stronger suns than Britannia and did not miss the extra ninety pounds of kit and a need to build the camp before they could sleep in it or fight a battle afterwards. Half way through the circuit, the men had lost what little enthusiasm they started with. They muttered curses, any excuse to slow down. Centurion Marcus Flavius Quintus had heard it all before; he strode away and forced them to run to keep up with him. He listened to the swear words dying away to be replaced by heavy breathing, savored the sound for a heartbeat until his optio gave him something else to think about.

“Guess who is missing?” His weather beaten face split in a humorless grin.

Quintus could guess. Damn him.

He looked around into the dark forest that bordered a newly made road as if waiting to strike and felt eyes staring back at him. Worse things than wolves lurked among the ancient gnarled oaks, rumors of druidic sacrifice and dark rites still strong in the forest depths. He decided not to send men to look in case they got the same idea and wandered away. Aulus always turned up again like a bent copper piece on an offering plate.

Their lost sheep fell back into step with the patrol as if he had never been away from it, had the gall to look surprised when questions were asked.

“Where have you been?”

“Sir, I found something.”

Quintus was not in a tolerant mood. “What?” he snapped, “A backbone?”

He raised his vine cane and saw the ill-starred runt flinch. “No, Sir – look.” The worst soldier in Second Augusta tried to show he had done something right for a change. The centurion and his second in command looked at what Aulus was pointing at and saw a bedraggled shape between two men unused to crying children. She was filthy, a little girl no older than six, bare feet cut by sharp stones and thorn bushes. Fresh blood ruined a once finely woven tunic of soft yellow dyed wool decorated by bright tablet woven braids. Someone had cared for her once with a mother’s love but now she was lost and alone.

Bleeding, Quintus noted two widely spaced puncture marks in her neck and could not tell what made them. Wilted oak leaves had been pinned to the front of her tunic with a bronze pin; it meant something to someone but not to any man of Rome.

He spoke quietly, repeating the word for friend in the language of the local tribe. His Celtic vocabulary could be counted on the fingers of one hand but, since his interpreter walked into a bog last full moon, he had to try. Nothing was ever found of the man, not much of a soldier truth to be told and as trustworthy as the skin on a bowl of cold barley porridge. The child’s eyes widened, perhaps at the terrible accent. Caius Lucius reached over and pulled a dried fig out of her ear, a sleight of hand trick that won a little more trust. He straightened the oak leaves and brushed some dried moss out of her hair with an uncharacteristically gentle hand.

“We should take her with us,” he said and waited. “She needs looking after, not even you would leave her out here with nothing.”

As Centurion, Quintus had the final word. He did not like children but wolves would not feel the same way. Little more than a mouthful, something was sure to eat her before night fell on a country that still rang with the cries of the dying. Only a few years before, the Iceni warrior queen of fell on Camulodunum and washed a beautiful town in blood. Londinium went the same way before Governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus marched back from victory against the druids to fight the final battle. Ten thousand men, the Legio XIV Gemina, parts of the XX Valera Victrix and any auxiliaries that could be found stood against a reported eighty thousand warriors. Second Augusta had been elsewhere on that bloody day, held back by a prefect who fell on his sword to end his shame.

Boudicca almost won but baggage wagons proved her undoing in the end. When the rebellion failed, thousands already lay dead on the last battlefield, many more put to the sword in the punitive raids that followed. For his part, Quintus did his duty and was not proud of it, drank to drown out the unquiet ghosts that haunted him. The last visit had been to a dirt poor village of three roundhouses where the only warrior last raised a spear twenty years ago and was now too decrepit to feed himself. They declared the place dealt with and marched on, against orders but nobody need know. He studied the child and refused to be rushed into a decision.

“It could be a trap,” he said. “This feels wrong.”

“No Sir,” Aulus gave a sloppy salute. “There was nobody about. I looked.”

That meant nothing but there had been enough death and he could not leave a small girl in the wilds. The marks on the child’s throat were unsettling. “This is a patrol of soldiers, not babysitters.”

Caius Lucius repeated his magic show, producing a fig from his superior officer’s left nostril. A deft trick but hardly dignified. “Julia will take her,” he said with certainty. He had been seeing a lot of the veteran’s widow recently, a childless, large hearted woman who had followed the Eagle for twenty-five years and now lived in the vici that grew up around any camp. She deserved a chance to be happy.

“The child is your responsibility. You carry her. Enough time has been wasted.”

They fell into step with the economy of effort typical of one so long with the Eagles. The little girl perched high on the optio’s shoulders spoiled the effect, but he had always had his own way of doing things. “There will be freshly baked honey cakes, little one, and a very nice lady waiting for you,” he said, even though his passenger did not understand a word. “A kind lady to teach you a civilized language and who will love you like her own daughter. I might well ask her to marry me one day and then you will have to call me daddy.”

The camp loomed, looking even less imposing from the outside. Caius Lucius took his leave, peeling off from the column in the direction of the vici.

Just as his tall, angular frame disappeared from view, the child turned around and stared directly at Centurion Marcus Flavius Quintus as if issuing a challenge. Her eyes turned black as pitch until he had to look away to clear the sensation that something crawled around in his mind. Quick as a traitor’s execution, the otherworldly stare vanished leaving only a guileless blue and the suspicion he had imagined it.

“You are dismissed”. The men did not have to be told twice and disappeared in search of drink and a dice game. Quintus tried to follow their example, thwarted by a newly made centurion who clearly had more noble blood and ambition than common sense.

“Sir, the Commander wanted to see you, as soon as you got back in.”

Quintus nodded, knowing that it was better to get it over with.

He walked to the Old Man’s office and waited outside until the officious little secretary said he could go in, stood to attention until given the at ease command. The Centurion Commander hated unnecessary paperwork and gave his officers more freedom than was usual; a strategy that worked because he knew when to rein them in and when to relax the leash. An iron-hard man with the direct stare of an eagle, his keen eyes missed nothing and he wasted few words on rhetoric. He scratched a signature on a wax tablet, shoving a pile of scrolls to one side and then looked up.

“Enjoying the sunshine while it lasts?”

“Yes, Sir,” Quintus knew it would soon start raining again. He ran a hand through cropped hair, tracing the scar where a British sword almost split his skull. “What are your orders?”

The Commander smiled, respecting someone who got straight to the point.

“I want you to take a patrol out at dusk. We lost three soldiers last night; two of them good, steady men who would never desert, the third’s barrack mates swear they saw him taken by shadows. No clear description except ‘shadows with teeth’. “Find out what is going on and stop it.” He paused, his smile genuine. “I want you to see what these shadows are and bite them back. If anyone can do that, Centurion, it is you.”

A rare moment of praise indeed, it was one to be savored in private. Quintus saluted and left

his commanding officer to draft another letter to a deceased legionary’s relatives. The Old Man handled this duty in person, carefully checked each man’s name and wrote every letter himself when he could easily have left it to his secretary.

Quintus walked back to his quarters and slumped onto the narrow cot, closed his eyes but found no comfort there. A parade of flickering images danced through a troubled mind and the nightmares would not let him rest. “Hell with it,” he poured himself a cup of wine, cursing at the taste which had not improved since the morning. Dusk fell quickly on a soggy little island which thrived on twilight tales of monsters and heroes who held off entire war-bands with just a small fruit knife. He would find the truth behind the disappearances, if it really was desertion or something far more sinister. Knowing Britannia, the latter seemed far more likely. Deserters deserted, they did not leave behind witnesses to swear that something had taken them.

“It is time to go.” Caius Lucius turned up all too soon. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I will ever be.”

The optio grinned. “And you are as convincing a back street whore when she tells you she is clean and still has all her own teeth.”

They marched out in tight formation, the lowering British skies heavy with the promise of more rain. It brought more immediate problems that would not be solved by waterproof hobnails, no matter how well oiled. A strange legionary blocked the road by a milepost shrine as if waiting for them, a silent watcher who did not salute or move aside.

“You there,” he said, “answer me.” The senior centurion hit the soldier with his vine cane, unused to being ignored, wondered why Caius Lucius had just made a sign to ward off evil. He looked into a dead face, the pallor heightened by a pale grey wolf head tied in place above the man’s own. The animal’s pelt hung down over the brightly polished armour, its fur shining as if it recently brushed. As a rule, standard bearers did not leak blood from newly made holes in their throat, their skin cold as marble in a Caledonian winter. Their eyes did not snap open and burn with a death light. They did not snarl at a superior officer with fangs better suited to a wolf than a man. Shadows with teeth, the reports said.

“What the hell is that?”Caius Lucius said. The optio was a battle hardened veteran but inclined to listen to native superstition. They had both been on this island long enough to have heard the tales of Gods and monsters, shape shifting heroes or villains and Druid princes.

“Shut up and deal with it,” Quintus said as he drove his gladius into the nightmare.

Shadows with teeth still bleed, he thought, thinking of the lost soldiers as he faced what had taken them. He struck at the unprotected armpit, the only vulnerable spot in chainmail armor that covered both chest and back, drove the sword upwards towards a heart that had long stopped beating. The Gods were not with him that night and the sword blade missed its mark. He cursed as the thing that had once been a good and trusted soldier spoke to him.

“Join us,” it said. “Together, we will rule this island.”

“I am not interested.”

“Then die.”

A well thrown pilium hissed through air heavy with blood and smoke, burying itself in the standard bearer’s chest. "He is not interested in that either.” The optio ripped the javelin out, elbowed his superior out of the way when he did not move quickly enough.

Quintus felt the paralysis lift, forced himself to ignore every instinct to run. He rallied the men, their training holding, ordered them to finish this quickly so they could go back to camp. They had been well drilled and drew courage from the way their second in command screamed obscenities with a berserk rage that seemed more barbarian warrior than Roman. Jupiter- why would it not die? A little voice at the back of his mind suggested that it was dead already. He silenced the nagging influence, for how could you kill something that no longer breathed. Another wolf head loomed out of the night, pale lips snarling as it tore at a soldier’s throat. The man’s mates took that personally for he still them owed money from last night’s dice game. They stabbed out with their swords and hit the thing in the face with the bosses of their shields, fought as a unit as they had been trained to do. The first standard bearer went down at last, his dark heart pierced by more than one blade, the head still mouthing curses.

His companion stepped forward. “Join us,” it said again. “It is your choice. Join us or we will drain you dry.”

“Have a drink,” Caius Lucius uncorked a leather bottle, clearly regretting the waste, and threw it in the snarling face. He snatched a torch, shrugged at his commanding officer and explained. “Falernian, un-watered and it is the good stuff this time”. He might as well have thrown lamp oil; the wine’s alcohol content such that it caught fire easily.

The standard bearer blazed, screaming that it would rise again even as it burnt to ashes, sharp fragments of bone and links of fire blackened mail. The helmeted skull yawned wide, light from the dying flames making its canine teeth even longer. Quintus stabbed out with his sword, bit into an exposed throat and severed the head; did it all again as the voice of a long-ago drill instructor roared in his ear. Once learnt, never forgotten and the things that came out of the night marched onto his blade until his arm ached, his throat raw from shouting orders. When the last of the resurrected finally lay down again, he still did not believe what his eyes told him.

He ignored the dead, the way his men whispered behind him, their eyes wide and wondering. He was just over-tired, nothing more than that - all logical explanation failed; he simply stated the facts in his report and left the mystery to his superiors.

He walked in to his quarters, removed helmet and armor, splashed water over his face before he realized he was not alone. The tall woman finished reading a letter from a friend who had served his time in the Legions and retired. She did not hurry and seemed interested in every word, less by the details of a new baby and married life in general than the references to the old days of wine, women, battles and blood. She had changed her calcei for gilded sandals of soft leather; the everyday shoes placed neatly by the door for no respectable Roman would do otherwise. No respectable matron would visit an army camp at night, but there she was.

The gates were guarded, but somehow she had slipped in unchallenged.

Someone should have stopped her.

“Lady, you should not be here,” he said, embarrassed by the state of his office.

Discarded kit and a pile of paperwork filled the small room, the wax writing tablets spilling over a low wooden table that still bore the remains of last night’s dinner. Senior officers usually shared a mess hall and had done so up until last month when a direct lightning strike ended that arrangement. Rebuilding work was slow, the novelty of eating alone for the first time in fifteen years still not worn off. Usually, his body slave did not leave dirty dishes lying around for the master to throw at him. He looked around for the little Brigantian who had once been a charioteer and could not see him anywhere.

“Vindex, where the hell have you got to? Bring more wine and another cup, a dish of good olives and some bread and oil. There must be some of that roast boar left.”

His guest smiled and dabbed at her mouth with a linen cloth. “Thank you, but I have already eaten.”A married woman by her dress, she came from one of the important families and used to being obeyed. Her raven hair had been arranged by a skilled ornatrix to fall to the face in an abundance of glossy, perfumed ringlets. Gold jewels shone at her throat, the face fashionably pale without the need for either paint or powder.

No white lead, however finely ground could equal the alabaster evenness of her skin. She wore a pale blue stola of finely woven Tarentum wool, worn shorter than the under tunic to show she was rich enough to afford layers and further complemented by a wide ornamental border of Tyrian purple. Her crimson palla draped elegantly over one shoulder, pinned with a gold fibula brooch that showed a cat stalking an unsuspecting sparrow. Quintus looked into her dark brown eyes and knew that she was the cat and he the sparrow, about to be pounced on.

She smiled. “The guards made a mistake; they tried to stop me. I hope you will not miss them too much, but I hate being told what to do.”

He tried to remember who had been posted to the gate that night. Aulus the Rat and another equally useless man: no great loss to the legion.

“Where is Caius Lucius?” He had not seen his optio all night, probably with one of his women.

“Was that his name? A fine looking man, he would adapt well to my world.”

“What have you done to him?” Quintus said, watching her eyes change color until they were almost as red as the palla.

“Nothing yet.” She drew him nearer, a deceptive strength closing like a trap. “I have searched for a companion for a long time, longer than you could possibly imagine.”

“What would your husband say?” He tried to pull away, unsettled by the sudden urgency in her voice, the longing on a beautiful face that no longer looked human. The naked hunger in her eyes unsettled him. “You are a respectable married woman and you bring shame on him and your family by saying such things.”

“Rome still had kings when I was young and those days are long forgotten. My husband, the poor sweet fool is no longer in any position to object; my surviving children are grown and share the Dark Gift. This is one of the Mysteries of Isis, Goddess and Mother to the golden land of Egypt.”

He drew his dagger, the oiled metal adding its own whisper to the background noise of rain outside and guttering oil lamps. She raised an elegant eyebrow, green malachite shadows part of her carefully applied make up, black kohl lines on each lid.

If he shouted, he could have eighty men to escort his strange visitor to the lock up, hold for questioning by the Camp Prefect and Senior Centurion Commander.

She smiled again, her pale face beautiful, terrible and still as death itself and the shout died in his throat. White arms embraced him, the scent of expensive perfume intoxicating. It almost masked the twin odors of blood and fear, but after a while, that no longer mattered. He lost himself in her beauty, the spell sealed by a kiss, and the dagger dropped to the floor.

A sandal-clad foot swept the weapon out of reach as she reached up to unpin the ornate brooches that held her wardrobe together. Expensive cloth whispered as she peeled tunic and under tunic away from a body made for making love. He smelt the essences of lavender and rose as she drew a pair of ivory pins out of her elaborate hairstyle and let the ringlets cascade over her naked shoulders. Both seducer and predator, she had the confidence of a woman who was comfortable in her own skin and not afraid to show it off to strangers.

“Do you like what you see?” she asked. Soft as a ripe sun-warmed peach, skin rippled over lithe muscles more suited to a panther than a noble born lady.

Quintus could not answer, drawn to her in spite of his instincts and unable to think, let alone speak. It had been almost a year since he was last with a woman and an urgent drumming of pure lust filled his head as they came together. Cold lips caressed him, sharp nails leaving bloody trails down his back that were quickly licked away. He could feel the thunder of blood in his ears as she moved under him with a sinuous, eel-like grace.

For a short time, they were as one, a single being united by animal lust and she whispered to him, speaking of future glory and power.

“All this can be yours,” she said afterwards, her beautiful face shining with possibilities as yet unspoken. “We can be together forever and our love will never die or grow old. Accept what I can give to you, my love, for I offer eternity.”

“You speak in riddles,” Quintus reached for his wine cup, seeing the familiar hunt scene of hounds and a wild boar at bay. A gift from his favorite uncle, the figures pressed into the wet red clay and modeled by an artist who really knew their business, but the animals had never chased each other around the rim before. Lithe bodied hounds snarled as a man with a spear prepared to strike.

The huntsman was an unexpected addition, never before seen, and for some reason looked like the camp Prefect. The boar had a strangely human face – his own. He blinked and the new additions faded away, dogs and wild pig kept their stations as the artist imagined them. Something occurred to him then, the memory of the puncture marks in a small throat.

“What did you do with the child?”

“My optio took her to a friend.” He did not bother to hide his surprise, had already guessed she had something to do with leaving a little girl alone in the wilds. Her silvery laughter confirmed it.

“Her name is Rigohena, youngest daughter of a minor chieftain of the Trinovantes not fated to get any more important.”

“You make no sense.” he said.

“I warned him not to interfere but the British have always been a stubborn people. A proud warlike nature and a childish sense of their own place in things; you know what they are like. He objected when I took his child away from him. He died and his village lies in ruins, his warriors and women just as dead as he is. I spared no one I found there, save the chieftain’s pack of hunting hounds. They will eat well tonight.”

She did not seem like someone who took no for an answer. Long fingers brushed the pommel of his gladius; half drew the sword from its scabbard before laying it down again. She had no need for weapons. Quintus saw the flash of iron in her eyes and knew that anyone who crossed her, Roman or Celt, would find their way to their respective Gods sooner than expected. The chieftain was dead, better not to ask how.

“It would not be right to turn someone so new to the world. There are rules even for Higher Ones such as myself but I can still see through her eyes and whisper to her in the darkness. When she is old enough to make the choice, we will meet again. That girl has an important part to play in the history of this island.”

And she would guide that destiny and seek to use it to her own advantage.

Shadows with Teeth did not seem to care who they fed on or exploited, it was in their nature like wolves and any trace of humanity had long since fled.

“Who are you, Lady?”

“My name is Julia of the Bloody Hand.” A hunter who killed without mercy, took what she wanted and moved on. “I offer a chance to live forever. Every patrol might be your last for, whatever they might say back in Rome, the tribes are not yet fully pacified and the great Suetonius Paulinus is too busy building his career to care what happens next. Their Goddess of Victory; Andrastre may send them another Boudicca to sweep the Eagle back into the sea. Rigohena was born to be a druid priestess but she shares the same spirit as the Iceni warrior queen. I can guide her on the path of blood and it will be glorious. If you take what I offer, you can stand at my side and share the spoils.”

She touched his face, a caress that lingered long after she had moved her fingers. “You will never grow old or know pain or illness and you will never find a grave on this miserable little island.”

“I am a soldier, Lady. It is my duty to take that risk.”

“You will die and be forgotten,” she said.

“If that is my fate, so be it.” He shrugged, seeing the blood lights fill her eyes, replacing the chestnut brown with crimson. She smiled again, white teeth glittering in the lamplight as she bent her head to his throat and kissed him; the lover’s caress given an edge by the press of sharp teeth against his skin. Her voice took on urgency, hypnotic.

“Then I make the decision for you. Eternity is painless, I promise.”

She never got the chance to prove it, interrupted by a buccina greeting the dawn. A second trumpet added its voice to soar above a camp that would soon wake to duty.

Julia hissed like a frustrated cat cheated of its sport. She paused, as if torn between escape and getting her own way.

Centurion Marcus Flavius Quintus of the Second Augustan Legion watched her drift away like smoke from a dying watch fire. All that remained was a pair of long ivory hairpins and the stalking cat and sparrow fibula, the lingering scent of perfume and the promise she would return to finish what she had started. There was a little girl in the vici camp groomed as the next Boudicca, leader of a rebellion planned by something that had not been human for centuries. Quintus did not expect to live long enough to have to kill a child.

In Britannia the nights came all too soon and seemed to last forever.

* * *

Rebecca Sian Pyne is a freelance writer and science journalist from West Wales with a strong interest in prehistoric to medieval history. Published fiction has appeared in: Albedo One, Delivered, Neo-opsis, Tainted - Anthology of Terror and the Supernatural, Star Stepping Anthology, Pen Cambria, Hungur, Crimson Highway, Orphan Leaf Review, Apollo's Lyre, Twisted Tongue and others.

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

I live in area well known for its sightings of ABC’s ('Alien' Big Cats) and some of my fiction draws on Welsh history and folklore. Membership of Prytani - a Celtic re-enactment group has been useful for writing fiction set in Iron Age and post Roman Conquest Britain. The basic idea behind “Centurion’s Choice” came while filming a documentary on the Boudiccan Revolt of AD 60/61. Some characters are loosely based on people met during that exhausting week in 1994 when we worked with a Roman Legionary group – The Ermine Street Guard. The idea went cold for years until I read about another less well known uprising in AD 69. What if someone (or something) engineered a similar revolt? As our druid used to say to the audience at the end of every battle – “Let the dead arise!”

The Painting Called Love Victorious

2011-04-15T00:02:00.001-05:00

The Painting Called Love Victorious
by Gabriel Malloy

Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori.
~Virgil, Eclogues

The muffled commotion worked its way in between the slats of the window, shuttered against the fierce Sicilian noon, and even through the thick walls, Mario Minitti could recognize the voice of his housekeeper, suggesting that the fuss was on his own doorstep, and not just a couple of donkey-drovers colliding in the narrow street outside. The devil make away with the lot of them – all he'd wanted was a quiet meal at home – he might just as well have stayed at the workshop for all the peace he was getting. He put down his wine cup, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand (one of the coarser habits his new and gentle wife had been unable to break him of) and went out to join the battle.

There was a donkey, after all, and a man, and Signora Ottavia was cursing the both of them impartially, touching upon their parentage, personal grooming, and likely motivations for rousing a respectable and god-fearing household during the hour of rest. The donkey had dropped its head nearly to its small hooves and appeared to slumber, no doubt well-used to shouted abuse; the man was leaning against the flaking plaster of the ornate portico and the half-smile on his bearded face suggested he'd heard a certain amount of it in his time, too.

Signora Ottavia turned at the sound of reinforcements arriving behind her. "This misbegotten ruffian," she began, waving her bunch of keys about like a miniature, irate St. Peter in skirts, "refuses to give his name or his business and insists that he must see the maestro despite the inappropriateness of the hour. He also," she added, dubiously, " says you'll be so delighted to see him that you will fall upon him weeping tears of joy, which I do not believe for a moment, particularly as I can see the fleas hopping off that donkey and I know where at least some of them must have ended up…"

By this time, Minitti's eyes had become accustomed to the brilliant glare of the street, and he was able to see beyond the heavy beard, the dirt, the filthy shirt and red bandit's neckcloth of his visitor.

"Santa Maria degli Angeli. Michele." His accent made it into Mih-guy-yeh-ley.

The man straightened, grin widening, putting out his stained and grimy hands. "You never could say my name properly, you little Sicilian hack. Come, I want my weeping now. And at least two kisses."

Signora Ottavia took a deep breath to protest further, but lost it again as her respectable master shouldered her aside and took the ruffian into his arms. He was, indeed, weeping.

* * *

Washed, in a clean shirt, with one cup of wine inside him and another in his hand—safe—Michelangelo Merisi stretched like a cat in the sun and watched his host's wife through half-closed eyes.

Sixteen, if that – and far enough along in pregnancy to be clumsy with it. Not a great beauty, but pretty as a kitten with her soft little chin and dark hair with a blue shine to it. She hadn't raised her eyes once since she had joined them at the table under the arbor, murmuring politely in answer to his thanks for her gracious hospitality. You are welcome, Signore da Caravaggio. Please treat my husband's house as your own. And not another word out of her as she sat in her cushioned chair, playing with the pistachio-shells on her plate. Shy, perhaps, poor little thing - or just stupid. Or frightened. He wondered if it was her money that had bought her husband's house, this respectable house, so far from Rome and its bad men and poisoned river and enticing streets and courts and alleys, from confusion and accusation and violence. Here, where it was safe. Sicily, safe. We'll see, Mino.

He turned his head just enough to see Minitti, who sat beside him on the bench under the shade of the neatly-twisting grapevines, splitting a fig with a silver fruit-knife. The heavy black curls had been cut, almost tamed, but the small frown of concentration that drew the curved lower lip up into a half-pout was exactly the same as it had been. So how far have you come, Master Mino, from the boy with the dirty fingernails? If I asked you to kiss me again – here in front of your wife, would you do it? The words balanced on his tongue, unspoken, pressing against his lips with a taste like figs and honey. Say it – no, don't.

* * *

A burst of singing echoed brassily down the alleyway, and the naked boy, balanced half on and half off one of the workshop's bancas, twisted around in response, trying to look out of the window.

"Is it a procession? I want to see –"

A pomegranate flew across the room and bounced off the side of the boy's head, making him yelp and toppling him off the bench into a battered collection of musical instruments, cushions, animal skins, paint-rags, pots, and mismatched pieces of armor. Merisi watched him flailing around in the dusty junk, admiring for a moment his model-apprentice's command of invective in three dialects, then ducked behind his easel, evading the return fire.

"Missed."

"Fuck you up the ass, Merisi –"

"Maestro."

"Fuck you up the ass, Maestro. That hurt." Minitti kicked aside a broken basket that had got tangled around one ankle and climbed to his feet.

"You shouldn't have moved. You spoiled the pose, you buggered up the drapery, and you ruined my last chance to get any work done on this today, you little ape – the light'll be gone soon." Merisi slammed his paint-knife back into its box as if it had been a rival's heart.

"Pfff. The drape's pinned to the wood in eight places – I did it myself earlier – and the sun will come up again tomorrow." The younger man shrugged. "So stop whining." He fished around in the mess on the floor and found his shirt. "It's time to eat, anyway."

"All you ever think about is your belly. And if it's not your belly, it's your cock. You might as well be a priest." Merisi's blasphemy was almost mechanical – he'd stepped a few paces away from the big canvas and was eyeing it, scrubbing his palm over his bearded chin. Even in the lowering light, the painted flesh seemed to separate itself from the surface in luminous curves, suave and sensuous, dominating the composition, turning everything else around it into toys and trash. Kings, courts, war, art, science, music, the world and the stars, made nothing by the simple fact of the transcendent body. And the body itself, balanced between child and man, between human and divine. He'd caught it somehow - or perhaps it had caught him. Amor vincit omnia…

The owner of the body pushed up in front of him, the ragged hem of his shirt flapping around his bare knees. "Madon'. I hope you're not going to fuck around with it much more, Michele. You'll only ruin it. " A fingertip, black-rimed around the nail, touched the wet paint, making a tiny erasure.

Merisi almost thumped the back of Minitti's head, but since it was a good erasure, he couldn't with any justice carry out the impulse and had to be content with saying, "Don't you have your own work to poke at, ragazzo – or colours to mix or something useful?"

Minitti stood, sucking his lower lip, eyes still on the transformed image of himself. "It's like seeing your reflection in a god's mirror. And no. Nothing but a figure study. And finishing the background for that hack-work you're doing for that fat Lombard's dining-salon. Where are the pillars, Maestro da Caravaggio? I wanted pillars. " The boy's imitation made the merchant sound like a goat with a Milanese accent. "And maybe a horsie."

"I don't do pillars."

"Because you're shit at perspective. And you don't do horsies very well, either."

"That's why I keep you round the place, Mino - to daub for your board and keep and pay me for the privilege."

The young Sicilian turned, brows drawn together, the black eyes under them signaling a storm-warning, close enough now for Merisi to hear the changed rhythm of his breathing. He smelled of linseed oil and terebinth, wine, sweat, summer dust, new bread. Like the street, like the workshop itself. Like the breath of God.

"That's the reason, is it?"

"And to stand very still while I make pictures of you for rich old men to buy."

One angry, indrawn breath – and then the smile, delight and wickedness and impossible to resist; the smile that said You liar, Michele, and in its triumph made everything else into toys and trash.

* * *

* * *

That is why I painted you with an eagle's wings, Mino, and not a dove's… and this is where they've brought you.

"Famous in Sicily," he said out loud.

Minitti glanced up from the fruit on his plate. "Better than dead in Rome. Isn't that why you're here, Merisi?"

Still trying to outrun the hand of God and the anger of powerful men? Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, genius, murderer, excommunicate, fugitive, raised his hands in the manner of a tennis-player graciously conceding the final point at the net.

"I'm grateful for your generosity, Maestro Minitti. Ports and storms."

Minitti licked the sticky fig-juice from his thumb. "Go into the house, gioia," he said to his wife.

Signora Minitti rose from her chair, opening her pretty fingers to let a last nutshell, crushed to fragments, fall to her plate. She said nothing, but the small soft chin came up, and her eyes met Merisi's for the space of a breath; they were black and sea-deep and held a cold hate. She turned and moved away, carrying herself and her unborn child a little awkwardly, the green-gold brocade of her best gown whispering across the tessellated paving of the courtyard.

Safe? No.

The spout of the jug clinked against the lip of his cup as Minitti refilled it. "A harbour? Sanctuary? Is that the reason, then?"

"Of course. " Merisi looked into the red heart of the wine, then back up at the man beside him, saw the suave curves squared, the rough line between the fine, angled brows. "I was surprised you let me past the front door, Mino."

Then the boy's smile came into the man's face, wickedness and delight, saying, You liar, Michele.

Et nos cedamus amori.

* * *

Gabriel Malloy is a professional freelance writer and amateur housekeeper living in Los Angeles. His interests include reading, PG Tips, BBC Radio 4, mythology, history, haiku, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, working on his long-term speculative fiction project Dharma*Gun, and trying to find a laundry detergent that REALLY IS mountain-fresh. His fiction has appeared in Collective Fallout and his poetry debut will be in the May 2011 edition of Petrichor Machine.

What advice do you have for other historical fiction writers?

Get the details right. If you do your research, which is half the fun of writing historical fiction anyway, you pick up a huge amount of what looks like trivia but isn't, actually - curse words, snacks, underwear, the problems of getting from one place to another, how much to tip the servants, heresy, floor-coverings, street-songs, obscure holidays, weather, geography, what donkeys smell like, close up. Even if you don't use it all, it helps you feel your way into the period and the lives being lived in it. As Mr. Gilbert said, it's the corroborative detail that lends verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative - as well as helping you avoid anachronisms that make discriminating editors and readers go "Oh, COME ON" and taking you and your readers right where you want to go.

Ethel Rosenberg Reflecting on her Trial and Execution for Treason

2011-04-15T00:01:00.003-05:00

Ethel Rosenberg Reflecting on her Trial and Execution for Treason
by Liz Dolan

I can hear my spoiled baby brother now
prattling about my typing of the secrets he stole,
flaunting the jigsaw pieces of the Jell-o box as evidence.
I told him to deny everything. Instead,
the moon-like man of inconstancy,
loose-lipped and waning,
babbled like a waterfall.
I read Tarkington to him,
taught him French,
mailed him cookies at Los Alamos.
He cut a cushy deal to protect his wife,
accused me of seducing him,
Eve-like, with my candy-coated ideology.
For God’s sake, I was a housewife in a floury apron
dragging my boys to the littered playground,
living in subsidized housing on the Lower East Side.
The capitalists housed me in Sing Sing
for 801 days @ $ 38.60 a day,
more than my Julius made in a week.

      After he was executed,
my rabbi begged me to save myself for my sons,
who clung to me on Valentine’s Day.
Don’t you want to make a better world for them?
            Tell them there wasn’t enough time.
            Tell them I was innocent.
I didn’t die easy.
upset their time table, needed a second jolt,
spun three minutes into the Sabbath
on that bloodless June Friday,
while my brother dissolving like ice
at Mama’s green enamel table
dipped rugala she baked into his tea
before she lit candles
for the vigil, desecrated,
as they desecrated me, masking the burns
on my forehead with a silk scarf.

* * *

Liz Dolan’s second poetry manuscript, A Secret of Long Life, which is seeking a publisher, was nominated for the Robert McGrath Prize and she has been published in On the Mason Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers. A five-time Pushcart nominee, she won a $6,000 established artist fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, 2009. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, was recently published by March Street Press and can be purchased through the press or at Amazon. She is most proud of the offsite school she ran in The Bronx and her nine grand children who live on the next block in Rehoboth.They pepper her life.

Where did you get the idea for your poem?

I wrote quite a few poems about Ethel Rosenberg afer I read a book in 2002 called Brother which told about how her brother's testimony sealed her fate. I can still remember her picture in the newspaper and, as a child, I was horrified for her two little boys who were orphaned.