Knight's Gambit

  But before his uncle could reach for the box of cigarettes which his uncle himself didn’t smoke, she had produced one from somewhere—no platinum-and-jewel case as you expected, but a single cigarette bent and crumpled and already shedding tobacco as if it had lain loose in her pocket for days, holding her wrist in the other hand as though to steady it while she leaned the cigarette to the match his uncle struck. Then she expelled that one puff and laid the cigarette in the ashtray and put her hands in her lap, not clenched, just lying tight and small and still against the dark fur.

  ‘He’s in danger,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Your brother is in danger.’

  ‘No no,’ she said, almost pettishly. ‘Not Max: Sebas—Captain Gualdres.’

  ‘I see,’ his uncle said. ‘Captain Gualdres is in danger. I’ve heard he rides hard, though I’ve never seen him on a horse myself.’

  She took up the cigarette and drew on it twice rapidly and mashed it into the tray and put her hand back into her lap and looked at his uncle again.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I love him. I told you that. But it’s all right. It’s just one of those things. That you cant help. Mother saw him first, or he saw her first. Anyway, they belong to the same generation. Which I dont, since S—Captain Gualdres is a good eight or ten years older than I am, maybe more. But no matter. Because that’s not it. He’s in danger. And even if he did give me the run-around for Mother, I still dont want to see him hurt. At least I dont want my brother locked up in jail for doing it.’

  ‘Especially as locking him up wouldn’t undo the deed,’ his uncle said. ‘I agree with you: much better to lock him up before.’

  She looked at his uncle. ‘Before?’ she said. ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before he does what he might be locked up for having done,’ his uncle said in that bland immediate quick fantastic voice which lent not only a perspicacity but a sort of solid reasonableness to the most fantastic inconsequence.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She looked at his uncle. ‘Lock him up how?’ she said. ‘I know that much about law, myself: that you cant keep anybody locked up just because of what they are planning to do. Besides, he’d just give some Memphis lawyer two or three hundred dollars and be out again the next day. Isn’t that true?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ his uncle said. ‘Remarkable how hard a lawyer will work for three hundred dollars.’

  ‘So that wouldn’t do any good at all, would it?’ she said. ‘Deport him.’

  ‘Deport your brother?’ his uncle said. ‘Where? What for?’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop it. Dont you know that if I had anyone else to go to, I wouldn’t be here? Deport Seb—Captain Gualdres.’

  ‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Captain Gualdres. I’m afraid immigration authorities lack not only the will-to-succeed but the scope of movement too, of Memphis or three-hundred-dollar lawyers. It would take weeks, maybe months, to deport him, when if there is food for your fears, two days would be too much. Because what would your brother be doing all that time?’

  ‘Do you mean that you, a lawyer, couldn’t keep him locked up somewhere until Sebastian is out of the country?’

  ‘Keep who?’ his uncle said. ‘Locked up where?’

  She stopped looking at his uncle, though she hadn’t moved.

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she said.

  His uncle gave her one from the box on the table and held the match and she sat back again, puffing rapidly at it and talking through the puffs, still not looking at his uncle.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘When things finally got so bad between Max and him, when I finally realised that Max hated him so much that something bad was going to happen, I persuaded Max to agree to—’

  ‘—to save your mother’s fiancé,’ his uncle said. ‘Your prospective new father.’

  ‘All right,’ she said through the rapid smoke, holding the cigarette between two fingers with pointed painted nails. ‘Because there was nothing really settled between him and Mother—if there ever had been anything to settle. And so at least it wasn’t Mother who wanted anything settled about it because … And he would have had the horses or at least the money to buy new ones, no matter which one of us …’ She puffed rapidly at the cigarette, not looking at his uncle nor at anything. ‘So when I found out that sooner or later Max was going to kill him if something wasn’t done about it, I made a trade with Max that if he would wait twenty-four hours, I would come with him to you and persuade you to have him deported, back to the Argentine—’

  ‘—where he wouldn’t have anything but his captain’s pay,’ his uncle said. ‘And then you would follow him.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Yes. So we came to you, and then I saw that you didn’t believe us and were not going to do anything about it and so the only thing I could think to do was to let Max see with you watching that I loved him too, so that Max would do something to make you believe that at least Max meant what he was saying. And he did it and he does mean it and he’s dangerous and you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’

  ‘And you’ve got to do something too,’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got to start telling the truth.’

  ‘I have. I am.’

  ‘But not all of it. What’s wrong between your brother and Captain Gualdres. Not—as they say—chewing gum this time.’

  She watched his uncle for just a second through the rapid smoke. The cigarette was almost gone now, right down to the painted finger-tips.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s not the money. He doesn’t care anything about money. There’s plenty of that for Se—all of us. It wasn’t even because of Mother. It was because Sebastian always beat him. At everything. Sebastian came without even a horse of his own, and Max rides well too but Sebastian beat him, beat him on Max’s own horses, the very horses that Max knew Sebastian was going to be the owner of as soon as Mother came to taw and said Yes. And Max had been the best pupil Paoli had had in years and one day Sebastian took a hearth-broom and parried through two ripostes until Max jerked the button off and went at him with the bare point and Sebastian used the hearth-broom like a sabre and beat down the lunge until somebody grabbed Max—’

  She was breathing, not hard so much as fast, rapid, panting almost, still trying to draw on the cigarette which would have been too short to smoke even if her hand had been steady enough to hold it steady, sitting huddled in the chair in a kind of cloud of white tulle and satin and the rich dark heavy sheen of little slain animals, looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain.

  ‘That was afterward,’ his uncle said.

  ‘What? After what?’

  ‘That happened,’ his uncle said. ‘But it was afterward. You dont want a man dead just because he beat you, on a horse or with a rapier either. At least, you dont take actual steps to make the wish a fact.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ his uncle said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  She leaned and put the cigarette stub into the ashtray as carefully as if it was an egg or maybe a capsule of nitroglycerin, and sat again, her hands not even shut now but lying open on her lap.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I was afraid of this. I told—knew you wouldn’t be satisfied. It’s a woman.’

  ‘Ah,’ his uncle said.

  ‘I thought you would,’ she said, and now her voice had changed again, for the third time since she entered the room not ten minutes ago yet. ‘Out there, about two miles from our back door. A farmer’s daughter.—Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know that one too: Scott or Hardy or somebody else three hundred years ago: the young lord of the manor and the villeins: droit du seigneur and all the rest of it. Only this time it wasn’t. Because Max gave her a ring.’ Now
her hands were lying on the chair arms, clenched again, and she wasn’t looking at his uncle now either. ‘A good deal different this time. Better than Hardy or Shakespeare either thought of. Because there were two city lads this time: not only just the rich young earl but the young earl’s foreign friend or anyway houseguest: the dark romantic foreign knight that beat the young earl riding the young earl’s own horses and then took the young earl’s sword away from him with a hearth-broom. Until at last all he had to do was ride at night up to the young earl’s girl friend’s window, and whistle—. Wait,’ she said.

  She got up. She was already walking before she got onto her feet. She crossed the room and jerked the door open before he could even move, her heels clapping hard and fast in the hall. Then the front door banged. And still his uncle just stood there looking at the open door.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

  But his uncle didn’t answer; his uncle was still watching the door and then almost before his uncle could have answered, they heard the front door again and then the hard brittle girl-heels in the hall, two pairs of them now, and the Harriss girl came in fast and crossed the room and flipped one hand backward behind her and said,

  ‘There she is,’ and went on and swirled down into the chair again while he and his uncle looked at the other girl—a country girl, because he had seen her face before in town on Saturday, but that was the only way you could tell them now because their mouths and faces were painted too and sometimes their fingernails and the Sears, Roebuck clothes didn’t look like Sears, Roebuck now and sometimes they were not even Sears, Roebuck even if they were not trimmed off in thousand-dollar mink;—a girl about the same age as the Harriss girl but not quite as tall, slender yet solid too, as country-bred girls can look, with dark hair and black eyes, looking at him for a second and then at his uncle.

  ‘Come in,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m Mr Stevens. Your name is Mossop.’

  ‘I know it,’ the girl said. ‘No, sir. My mother was a Mossop. My father is Hence Cayley.’

  ‘She’s got the ring too,’ the Harriss girl said. ‘I asked her to bring it because I knew you wouldn’t believe it any more than I did when I heard it. I dont blame her for not wearing it. I wouldn’t wear anybody’s ring either that said to me what Max said to her.’

  The Cayley girl looked at the Harriss girl—a look level and black and unwinking and quite calm—for about a minute while the Harriss girl took another cigarette from the box, though this time nobody went to strike the match for her.

  Then the Cayley girl looked at his uncle again. Her eyes were all right so far. They were just watchful.

  ‘I never did wear it,’ she said. ‘On account of my father. He dont think Max is any good. And I’m not going to even keep it, as soon as I can find him to give it back. Because I dont think so too now—’

  The Harriss girl made a sound. It didn’t sound to him like anything she would have learned in a Swiss convent either. The Cayley girl gave her another of the hard black contemplative looks. But her eyes were still all right. Then she looked at his uncle again.

  ‘I didn’t mind what he said to me. I didn’t like the way he said it. Maybe that was the only way he could think of to say it at the time. But he ought to have been able to think of a different way. But I wasn’t mad because he felt he had to say it.’

  ‘I see,’ his uncle said.

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded his having to say it, anyway,’ she said.

  ‘I see,’ his uncle said.

  ‘But he was wrong. He was wrong from the beginning. He was the one that said first that maybe I better not wear the ring out where folks could see it for a while yet. I never even had time to tell him I already knew better than to let Papa find out I even had it—’

  The Harriss girl made the sound again. This time the Cayley girl stopped and turned her head quite slowly and looked at the Harriss girl for five or six seconds while the Harriss girl sat with the unlighted cigarette between her fingers. Then the Cayley girl looked at his uncle again.

  ‘So he was the one that said we better not be engaged except in private. So since I wasn’t to be engaged except in private, I didn’t see any reason why Captain Golldez—’

  ‘Gualdres,’ the Harriss girl said.

  ‘Golldez,’ the Cayley girl said. ‘—or anybody else couldn’t ride up and sit on our gallery and talk to us. And I liked to ride horses that didn’t have trace-galls for a change too, so when he would bring one along for me—’

  ‘How could you tell whether it had a trace-gall or not, in the dark?’ the Harriss girl said.

  Now the Cayley girl, and still without haste, turned her whole body and looked at the Harriss girl.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Here,’ his uncle said. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You old fool,’ the Harriss girl said. She wasn’t even looking at his uncle. ‘Do you think that any man except one like you with one foot already in the grave, would spend half the night every night riding a horse up and down an empty polo field by himself?’

  Then the Cayley girl moved. She went fast, stooping and hiking up the hem of her skirt and taking something from the top of her stocking as she went, and stopped in front of the chair and if it had been a knife, he and his uncle would still have been too late.

  ‘Stand up,’ she said.

  Now the Harriss girl said ‘What?’ looking up, the hand still holding the unlighted cigarette in front of her mouth. The Cayley girl didn’t speak again. She just rocked back onto her heels, slender and solid too, and swung her arm back and his uncle was moving now, hollering ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ but the Cayley girl had already swung, slapping the Harriss girl’s face and the cigarette and the hand that held it, all together, and the Harriss girl jerked in the chair and then sat with the broken cigarette dangling between her fingers and a long thin scratch down her cheek; and then the ring itself, a big diamond, tumbled winking down the front of her coat and onto the floor.

  The Harriss girl looked at the cigarette a moment. Then she looked at his uncle. ‘She slapped me!’ she said.

  ‘I saw her,’ his uncle said. ‘I was just about to, myself—’and then jumped too; he had to: the Harriss girl coming fast out of the chair and the Cayley girl already rocked back onto her heels again. But his uncle got there first, between them this time, flinging the Harriss girl back with one arm and the Cayley girl with the other, until in another second they both stood there crying, bawling, exactly like two three-year-olds who have been fighting, while his uncle watched them for a moment and then stooped and picked up the ring.

  ‘That’ll do now,’ his uncle said. ‘Stop it. Both of you. Go to the bathroom and wash your faces. Through that door yonder’—saying quickly ‘Not together’ as they both moved. ‘One at a time. You first,’ to the Harriss girl. ‘There’s styptic in the cabinet if you want it, fear hydrophobia rather than merely believe in it. Show her the way, Chick.’

  But she had already gone on into the bedroom. The Cayley girl stood wiping her nose on the back of her hand until his uncle handed her his handkerchief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffling, snuffling, that is. ‘But she ought not to have made me do it.’

  ‘She ought not to have been able to,’ his uncle said. ‘I suppose she had you waiting out there in the car all the time. Drove out to your house and got you.’

  The Cayley girl blew her nose into the handkerchief. ‘Yes sir,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’ll have to drive her home,’ his uncle said to him, not looking back. ‘They both cant—’

  But the Cayley girl was all right now. She gave her nose a good hard wipe right and then left and started to hand the handkerchief back to his uncle and then stopped, letting the hand drop at her side.

  ‘I’ll go back with her,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of her. It wont be but two miles home even if she wont take me any further than her gate.’

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Here’: holding out the ri
ng. It was a big diamond; it was all right too. The Cayley girl didn’t hardly look at it.

  ‘I dont want it,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t either,’ his uncle said. ‘But you owe yourself the decency of letting your own hand be the returner.’

  So she took the ring and then the Harriss girl returned and the Cayley girl went to bathe her face, still carrying the handkerchief. The Harriss girl looked all right again, with a glazed swipe of styptic on the scratch; and she had the platinum-and-jewel box now, but it was powder and such. She didn’t look at either of them. She looked into the mirror in the box’s lid, finishing her face.

  ‘I should apologise, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But I imagine lawyers see all sorts of things in their trade.’

  ‘We try to avoid bloodshed,’ his uncle said.

  ‘Bloodshed,’ she said. She forgot her face then and the platinum-and-jewel box too and the flipness and the hardness both went and when she looked at his uncle, the terror and dread were in her eyes again; and he knew that, whatever he and his uncle might think about what her brother could or would or might do, at least she didn’t have any doubts. ‘You’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to. If I had known anybody else to go to, I wouldn’t have bothered you. But I—’

  ‘You told me he made a pact with you to do nothing for twenty-four hours,’ his uncle said. ‘Do you think he will hold himself still bound to it, or will he do what you did—make an effort of his own behind your back too?’

  ‘I dont know,’ she said. ‘If you could just lock him up until I—’

  ‘Which I cant do, any more than I can have the other one deported before breakfast. Why dont you deport him yourself? You said that you—’

  Now there was terror and despair both in her face.

  ‘I cant. I tried. Maybe Mother is a better man than I am, after all. I even tried to tell him. But he’s like you: he doesn’t believe either that Max is dangerous. He says it would be running from a child.’

  ‘That’s just exactly what it would be,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s just exactly why.’

  ‘Exactly why what?’