“That’s fine,” I said to her. “I don’t really care. I’m moving on already, toward another carnal impulse.”
“What impulse?”
“I want to beat Leif Sedgewyck until he shits blood, and it’s a desire I’ve got every intention of indulging.”
Chapter 26
First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point, and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.
Insulting a man is a lot like seducing a woman. Both arts share similar linguistic structures and are, at their essence, tests of one’s cleverness. The same kind of insight helps one spot a man’s pride and a woman’s longing. I’m good at insults. I can gently mock my friends, sting my rivals, and devastate my enemies. But there comes a point in any seduction when charm has run its course, and circumstances demand action. Insults, too, exhaust their function.
One of the first things you learn at Harrow is that one must never talk when one should be punching somebody. Past that barely perceptible threshold, language, no matter how quick or facile or magnificent one’s tongue may be, is no longer appropriate. A man’s skill at talking his way around violence is a good measure of his wits, but so is his ability to recognize the point when talking is of no further use. When diplomacy fails irreversibly, one must make a preemptive strike. Linger too long taunting or bargaining or cajoling, and you’ll catch a mouthful of knuckles.
You don’t give a warning. You don’t make a threat. You don’t tell a man you’re about to hit him. He’ll figure it out when his vision goes white and his brains slosh against the back of his skull and his nose smashes like a beam of rotten timber. You talk about fighting only to women. They tend to dampen their petticoats when somebody handsome regales them with tales of violent exploits. Among men, however, violence is its own vernacular, and it delivers its own messages.
So, when I found Leif Sedgewyck nursing a pint in the Modest Proposal, and I punched him in the side of the head, it meant: “I’ve learned of your schemes and depredations, and will have you punished for your sins, you blackguard.” He twisted around and fell off his stool, which I took as a confirmation that my point was well received.
Another thing most boys learn quickly at Harrow is that one shouldn’t wait for a response or a conversation after punching somebody. The ideal fight is more of a monologue than an exchange. While it may seem polite to wait for one’s opponent to take his turn after drawing first blood, to do so is folly and, moreover, bad for one’s complexion.
So, I let Sedgewyck get only halfway to his feet before I punched him again, full in the face. His head snapped backwards, and the rest of him followed it to the floor. I kicked him in the mouth, with my weak foot. It hurt, but I enjoyed the irony. I kicked him with it again and he gasped and spat blood.
“You rotten sod,” I said. “These boots must be specially ordered, and now you’ve stained them with your putrid juices.”
“Byron,” he said.
“It is I. I came here all by myself, navigating the cobbled streets with surprising agility, considering my lameness.” As a sort of punctuation, I aimed the toe of my boot at his belly and kicked him again. I think the sound he made was supposed to be a scream, but it was more like a rattling gasp.
I looked around the barroom. The place was emptier than usual; nighttime activity had slowed because of the murders, and people were avoiding the Modest Proposal specifically, because Professor Fat Cheeks had met his end there. Nonetheless, six or seven drinkers were present in the bar, as well as the barkeep, a delightful fellow named Richards. He had a fine case of Calvados in his cellar, which he’d acquired before the war with France, and he kept a bottle of it under the bar, even though nobody but me ever asked for it.
As I stood over the battered wreck of Leif Sedgewyck, though, Richards’s expression was anything but friendly. The spate of recent violence was ruining his business, and I was contributing to it.
Apologetically, I grabbed a handful of Sedgewyck’s white-blond hair and dragged my foe out the tavern’s front entrance. In the better neighborhoods of London, the streets were illuminated at night by gaslights, but such luxuries had not yet come to Cambridge. A few of the buildings nearby had oil lamps hung next to their doors, but those weak, guttering flames barely cut into the darkness of the thoroughfare.
“What do you want with her?” Sedgwyck said. He still hadn’t found a proper voice in his bruised throat, but he was managing to whisper. “Will you give her what I intend to? She deserves more than your passing fancy. I would make her my wife.”
But this wasn’t about Olivia anymore. She had deceived me and played a role in my humiliation. My desire for her had been as furious and urgent as a summer storm, and it had passed just as quickly.
“Are you vrykolakas?” I asked him.
“I am Sedgewyck,” he said.
“Are you vrykolakas?” I repeated. “Are you a vampire?” I grabbed him by the hair with my left hand, and punched his head again with my right.
He looked up at me with wide eyes. The white part of one of them was turning pink from the injury I’d inflicted upon it. “I don’t know those words. Please, no woman is worth this trouble. I don’t want to die. Stop hurting me, I beg you.”
“What do you know about Mad Jack? Does he live?”
“Mad Jack?” he said. “I don’t know who that is. I will admit I plan to propose marriage to Olivia.” He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced a gold betrothal ring. “I’ve made arrangements with her father and accepted her dowry only last week. I can tell you, her parents will be most disappointed if our promised nuptials do not occur.”
I kicked him in the stomach again, and he curled up into a ball. “Why would you marry Olivia? Her father possesses no inherited title. A match with her confers no respectability upon your family.”
Sedgewyck spat more of his blood onto my shoes. “The arrangement with Felicity was my parents’ doing, not my own. I found the prospect of marriage to her untenable, and made other plans. My father’s ideas of the social order are outdated-so are yours. There’s no respectability left in moldy old titles granted by the ancestors of a king who can’t even control his own colonists. The aristocracy is hollow. You people are a bunch of beggars. If I’d wed my fortune to the rotten Whippleby estate, Felicity’s damned fool family would have spent my father’s wealth on foppery and excess and valets and maids to powder their arses, and we’d all have a share of their noble poverty in half a generation. Money confers respectability in this new age, Lord Byron, and if you marry money to more money, you get a lot of respectability.”
“So you hung Felicity by her feet and bled her like a sow.”
“I swear to Christ, I never did. I only meant to jilt her, to break the engagement. And maybe have a roll with her first; I’m only a man, and you can surely understand the urge. But someone else has killed her. Truth be told, I thought it was you.”
I believed him. Sedgewyck was not the monster I’d read about in my ancient vampire tomes, nor was he the sort of monster that could have slain Jerome Tower in hand-to-hand combat. This was a man who, despite an advantage of six inches of height and twenty-five pounds of mass, was groveling in the street before me, begging for mercy. He was a coward, and that was why he had been unable to end his engagement with Felicity even after he’d lost interest in her. His grief over her death had been false; a polite charade, since mourning was appropriate, given their arrangement. But he hadn’t killed her. He lacked the capacity to solve his problems with violence.