23

Blessington’s Last Stand

IT IS A REMARKABLE FACT THAT SINCE BELLA had pulled her hand so abruptly from his, the General had lain perfectly flat and still, apart from the movements of lips and tongue, eyelids and flickering eyes: thus when old Mr. Hattersley had called him “three-quarters dead” it seemed more of a diagnosis than an insult. Now he asked softly, “What is your opinion, Harker?”

“They cannot win a divorce action against you, Sir Aubrey. Your alleged adultery with Dolly Perkins is irrelevant. A husband’s adultery is no ground for divorce unless it is unnatural—committed anally, incestuously, homosexually or with a beast. If they appeal on grounds of extreme cruelty their own witnesses must testify that you locked Lady Blessington in the cellar because she was raving mad, and to keep her safe while you fetched medical help. A divorce action will end with Lady Blessington taken into protective custody as a ward of court. Were it not for the scandal we should welcome it.”

“No scandal, please,” said the General smiling slightly. “I am leavin, Harker. Go down and bring the cabs to the front door. Make sure me own cab is directly opposite the door, and send up Mahoun to help me downstairs. I find goin down harder than comin up.”

The solicitor arose and left the room without a word.

A moment later General Blessington sat up, swung his legs to the floor and, placing his hands on his knees, looked smilingly round the room, nodding to each of us in turn. There was a sudden touch of colour in his cheeks, a mischievous brightness in his glance which I thought wonderful in a man accepting defeat.

“Would you like tea before you go?” asked Baxter. “Or something stronger?”

“No refreshments, thank you,” said the General, “and I apologize, Mr. Baxter, for wastin so much of your time. Parliamentary methods always waste time. Are you ready Grimes?”

“Yessir,” said Grimes with a promptness suggesting he had served in the army.

“See to McCandless,” said the General, and taking a revolver from a pocket, clicked off the safety-catch and levelled it at Baxter.

“Sit down please, Mr. McCandless,” said Grimes in a polite and friendly voice. I sat in the nearest chair, more hypnotized than terrified by the little black hole at the end of the weapon he so steadily showed me. I could not look away from it. I heard the General saying cheerfully, “There will be no killin Mr. Baxter, but if you do not stay where you are I promise to put a bullet into your groin. Are you ready with the chloroform, Prickett?”

“I—I—I do this with the gugugreatest—reluctance Sir Aubrey,” said the doctor. He was sitting beside Grimes and I saw him struggle feebly to stand up while fumbling a bottle and cloth out of inner pockets.

“Of course you’re reluctant, Prickett!” said the General with genial force, “but you’ll do it because you are a good man and a good doctor and I trust you. Now Victoria, you love Mr. Baxter dearly because he saved your life and did you some other little services. Come and sit beside me and let Prickett put you to sleep. If you do not, I will disable Baxter painfully with a bullet before stunnin you with the butt of this weapon GET OUT OF THE WAY WOMAN!”

I looked sideways.

And saw Bella had stepped between Baxter and Blessington and was going toward Blessington with her right hand outstretched for his gun. He slid along the sofa to aim at Baxter round her but with a light leap she landed before him, gripped the barrel and pointed it to the floor. It fired. I think the General was as shocked by this as everyone but Bella. She easily pulled the gun from his hand by the barrel and put the butt of it into her left. Like Baxter she was (is) ambidextrous, so naturally held the revolver as it was designed to be held, and this pointed it straight at the General’s head.

“You silly soldier,” she said, rubbing the palm of her right hand (scorched by the heat of the barrel) against the side of her wedding-dress, “you have shot me in the foot.”

“The game is up, General,” said Seymour Grimes, and with an apologetic shrug to me he locked the safety-catch of his revolver and pocketed it.

“Is the game really up, Grimes?” said the General, without taking his eyes off Bella’s thoughtfully frowning face. “No, Grimes, I do not think the game is quite up yet.”

With an effort he suddenly stood erect, to attention, like a soldier in a parade inspection, and now the point of the barrel pressed into the cloth of the coat over his heart and was an inch from it.

“Shoot!” he said, staring coldly ahead. A moment passed then he smiled benignly down at Bella who returned his look with wonder.

“Victoria me dear,” he said in a soft, inviting voice, “squeeze the trigger. It is your husband’s last request. Please oblige me.”

Another moment passed then his face flushed crimson.

“SHOOT! I ORDER YOU TO SHOOT!” he cried, and to my ears the order rang backward in history through Balaclava, Waterloo, Culloden and Blenheim to Agincourt and Crécy. I realized General Blessington truly wanted to be shot, had wanted it all his life, which was why he had been wounded so often. This historical command and passionate plea were so powerful that I imagined all the men killed in his battles rising from their graves to shoot him where he stood. Bella partly obeyed him. Half turning her body from the waist she fired the remaining five shots into the back of the fireplace. The detonations half stunned us; the smoke of it made my eyes water and other people cough. She blew fumes away from the reeking barrel in a gesture I later recognized when we went to see Buffalo Bill’s circus during the Great Glasgow East End Exhibition of 1891. Then she put the revolver into the General’s coat pocket and fainted.

After that several things happened quickly. Baxter lumbered across, lifted Bella up, laid her on the sofa and stripped shoe and stocking from the foot. Meanwhile I sprang to a cupboard containing a medical cabinet and brought it over to them. The bullet had luckily gone clean through into the carpet, puncturing the integument between the ulna and radius of the second and third metacarpals without even chipping a bone. Meanwhile old Mr. Hattersley was clapping his hands and shouting, “Eee she’s a wonderful lass! Did you ever see anythink so brave? No never! A true daughter of Blaydon Hattersley, that’s who she is!”

The door opened and two surprisingly different figures stood in it: Mrs. Dinwiddie and a tall brown turbaned man in an overcoat reaching from neck to ankles. I took this to be Mahoun, the General’s manservant.

“Will I get the police Mr. Baxter?” asked our housekeeper. “No, fetch some boiling water please, Mrs. Dinwiddie,” said Baxter. “One of our visitors has just conducted an unsuccessful experiment, but done no great damage.”

Mrs Dinwiddie left. The General stood to one side, gloomily tugging a corner of his heavy moustache.

“Time to leave, sir?” suggested Seymour Grimes smartly.

“O please, please let us leave!” begged Dr. Prickett, and had General Blessington left at once I believe he would have lived for several more years and been honoured with a state funeral and public monument.

I think what kept him beside us was his bafflement at being neither victorious nor wholly defeated. Bella, though not chloroformed, was now unconscious, and Baxter and I knelt with our backs to him behaving as if he did not exist. With the butt of the pistol in his pocket he could easily have stunned me and perhaps Baxter, and carried off Bella to the waiting cabs with the help of Mahoun. But that would have been a cowardly action and the General was no coward. Maybe he lingered because he was seeking a short, fierce, gentlemanly phrase to attract our attention before he strode out, for he was not used to being ignored. Meanwhile we gave Bella morphine, poured iodine into the wound and bound gauze round it. Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at the General and said to him thoughtfully, “I remember you now, from the Dungeon Suite of the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, in Paris. You were the man in the mask—Monsieur Spankybot.”

Then between bursts of laughter she cried aloud, “General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Spankybot V.C., how funny! Most brothel customers are quick squirts but you were the quickest of the lot! The things you paid the girls to do to stop you coming in the first half minute would make a hahahahaha make a cat laugh! Still, they liked you. General Spankybot paid well and did no harm—you never gave one of us the pox. I think the rottenest thing about you (apart from the killing you’ve done and the way you treat servants) is what Prickett calls the pupurity of your mumarriage bed. Fuck off, you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker hahahahaha! Fuck off!”

I drew my breath in sharp. I have since been told that only in English is the word for bodily loving—whether used as noun, verb or adjective—an evil, unmentionable word. I had heard the hired men round the Whauphill farms use it from my earliest years, but both my mother and Scraffles would have knocked me senseless had they heard it from me. Yet Baxter now smiled as if at a magic word solving all our problems. The General’s face went so pale that his grey moustache and beard looked dark against it. With half-shut eyes and gaping mouth he staggered sideways until he bumped into Prickett, reeled the other way until upheld by Grimes, then supported by both was moved on trembling legs toward the door which Mahoun held politely open for them. Mr. Hattersley followed with the dazed movements of a sleep-walker, but before Mahoun shut the door behind him he turned and in a singsong moaning voice said, “That woman is no daughter of Blaydon Hattersley.”

And then they were all gone.

“Good,” said Baxter a moment later, having found Bella’s pulse and temperature satisfactory. “I think the General will agree to a legal separation without the publicity of a divorce. Of course that means you and Bella cannot marry, but a divorce would seriously injure the career of woman doctor starting work in Scotland. A discreet private understanding will be the best thing for Bella and you until General Blessington dies of natural causes.”

But two days later the papers announced that General Blessington had been found dead on the gun-room floor of his country house at Loamshire Downs. The revolver in his hand and angle of the bullet through his brain ruled out accident. The coroner said he had died “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”, so he was given a Church of England burial service, but not a state funeral. The obituary in The Times of London said that perhaps political disappointment had made him choose “a Roman end”, and implied that Gladstone was to blame.