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Click hereCopyright Oggbashan May 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
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At dawn, in a couple of hours from now, I have to fight a duel. Major Simon has chosen pistols and he's a deadly shot. I will die. He insulted my wife by calling her a whore. I challenged him to a duel. It would be easier and quicker to blow my own brains out.
It doesn't matter that my wife behaves like a whore. She does. But telling me to my face that she is one is a deadly insult for which I will die, defending her soiled honour.
At Manton's Major Simon often demonstrates his skill by shooting out a pip on a playing card. My best ever shot was a foot away from the card. He has survived half a dozen duels. I have never challenged anyone before and even with swords my skill is barely adequate. With pistols at ten paces? I might hit him if I threw the pistol.
I was only at the gentlemen's club because my wife had gone out again with her dubious friends to Vauxhall Gardens. I had tried to tell her that it isn't a suitable resort for a newly married lady, even if she went with her husband. She upbraided me for being an antique bore with odd ideas about a wife's place. That hurt. I'm only five years older than her.
When I courted her she seemed so demure. She is a daughter of one of my father's oldest friends and we had known each other since we were children. Although I'm a younger son with a minor title of nobility I own my country seat and London house and have a sufficient income to support a wife and family. When I sought her father's consent to court her he approved of my suit. She had seemed less enthusiastic but I had hoped she could grow to love me as much as I loved her.
I valued her independent intelligent mind. I wanted her for my life's companion and eventually the mother of my children. But once married her independence led her to some less respectable friendships. They claim to be blue stockings just wanting better opportunities for women. It seems that better opportunities mean defying Society's conventions and acting in a way that would make me ashamed of a brother, let alone a wife.
After dinner Emily had announced that she was going out with her female friends to Vauxhall Gardens. I objected strongly, forbidding her to go. She had laughed at me before making the antique bore remark. I could have stopped her physically, I suppose, but that would have really damaged our fragile relationship. I let her go hoping that she would learn sense in a few weeks time.
I won't have that few weeks. I'll be dead shortly after dawn because Major Simon saw Emily in a bower in Vauxhall Gardens, not just with her women friends but in male company as well -- men who weren't eligible for polite society.
I love Emily. I think she is being thoughtless and too inexperienced in London to know what is reasonable behaviour and what is not. She had been a country girl most of her life, only coming to London as a debutante already engaged to marry me.
I will never know whether Emily will learn to be more cautious in choosing her friends. I will never see her again because she had announced that she would breakfast with one of her friends and come home for luncheon. By then I will have been dead for hours. My second will come to collect me an hour before the due time. We will walk to the agreed duelling ground near the River Thames. After the duel the participants, principals and seconds, will leave by boat to avoid capture by the authorities. One of those leaving, me, will be a corpse to be delivered to Emily.
"Oh, Emily!" I say aloud. "I love you, Emily. I want you here, for one last kiss."
But there would be no last kiss, not even a loving word. Emily's last words to me, calling me an antique bore, still stick in my brain. Would she regret those words when I was dead? I'll never know.
Captain Arthur is here. I pick up my gloves and cane to leave with him. I'm not leaving a note for Emily. What's the point? Unkind people will tell her soon enough about my challenge and the result of the duel. Perhaps it might comfort her to know that I died defending her honour that she doesn't seem to value.
Our footsteps echo in the empty streets. Captain Arthur has sense enough to know that no words will help me. As soon as I asked him to be my second he knew that I would be going to my death. Nothing said now can change that. Major Simon has never accepted an apology, and I wouldn't give one. If I did I would admit that Emily IS a whore. She's not, and I would never say she is. I love her too much.
Captain Arthur isn't carrying pistols. Neither am I. I don't own any. We'll use Major Simon's well proven pair. The seconds will choose which pistol each of the principals is to fire, and a few seconds later the duel will be over.
Only another hundred yards and we'll be at the site. It is shielded from the landward side by warehouses and is only vacant grassland because it floods frequently. It won't flood now. The Thames tide is ebbing and our boat will run quickly downstream after the duel.
There won't be an 'after the duel' for me, just a hurried burial and I'll be forgotten.
We turn down the lane towards the field. As I expect there is a closed coach waiting. Major Simon wouldn't have walked. But where is his second? We have five minutes until the due time. Perhaps his second is still in the coach.
I give my coat, gloves and cane to Captain Arthur. I shiver in the dawn mist. Emily? I love you. I miss you.
The coach door opens on the side away from us. I look up at the dawn light touching the tree tops on the other side of the Thames, the last dawn I will see. I hear a set of running footsteps. Running? I turn back to be met by Emily, my wife, hurling herself into my arms.
She kisses me again and again. I hold her nearly as tightly as she holds me. I have seen Emily for the last time, and kissed her for the last time. It is so sad that our reconciliation should be within moments of my death.
But who is this speaking urgently to Captain Arthur? He can't be Major Simon's second. His clothes are not that of a gentleman. They walk towards me, and Captain Arthur is smiling.
"Viscount Hugh? This officer had come to arrest you for arranging to fight a duel. However since I told him you had come for a romantic assignment with your wife, and that there are no weapons here, neither pistols nor swords, he has agreed that an arrest is unnecessary."
I had to disengage my lips from Emily's.
"Thank you, Captain Arthur."
"Viscount Hugh?" the officer spoke. "We had information that you were to fight a duel with the notorious Major Simon today. We went to his house. His butler informed us that Major Simon had left for Calais last night, leaving a message for you. Here is that message."
He passed a folded note to me. It had obviously been opened. It read:
"Tell your wife not to be so foolish. Simon."
It wasn't an apology but it was life for me. Life with Emily. I showed her the message. She blushed.
"I've been an idiot," she said. "You love me enough to die for me, and I didn't know you cared that much. You didn't tell me..."
"I love you, Emily," I said.
Her lips gave her answer.
The End
Note: Lensky's Aria from the opera Eugene Onegin is a regret for loss sung before Lensky is killed in a duel.
As a competitive fencer and fencing instructor one of my students often mentioned that in sale d’arms in Europe one also had the opportunity to practice with pistols. They were essentially single shot paint guns with short barrels but allowed the practice of pistolry for the duel. Touching story and true to the code duello and life at that time for the Gentry.
A nice little story, with the ending that one hoped for. However, although there were plenty of places in Regency London where a woman should not go, I never thought that Vauxhall Gardens would be one of them. Although the company that Emily supposedly kept may have been inappropriate, Georgette Heyer would be mortified to read that one of her favourite romantic settings should be so besmirched.
As for the duel itself, they must have been very brave (or foolish) to stage it within London itself, rather than going out to somewhere like Richmond.
A very enjoyable romance, Og. The brevity is good - just about as long to read as to hear an aria in one's mind. I'd have liked a little more of Major Simon's character to ease the unexpected, but that's me, not you. Thanks again for the read.
Although Lucia Di Lammermoor would work too. Thanks for the nice private message. I am afraid I have no clue how to answer that one.