On this late Friday afternoon, the editor was entertaining a visitor from the neighbouring town, whose newspaper, the Chalmsbury Chronicle, had been Mr Kebble’s charge until recently.
The two men were giving Cartwright’s pistols close scrutiny, Mr Kebble with the aid of a jeweller’s glass that he had taken from one of the multitudinous pockets in his gingery tweed waistcoat.
He looked up, plucked out the glass, stretched his face once or twice, then pushed a pair of heavy-framed spectacles to the bridge of his button nose. “Aye,” he said, “they look all right, Barry. Who knocked them off for him, I wonder?”
Hoole was sitting side-saddle on the edge of the desk. “No knowing,” he said. “Someone blessedly ignorant, I’m relieved to say. Enoch did not try very hard to contradict my naïve assertion that the things were just common saddle pistols, so obviously he doesn’t really know one way or the other.”
“Has he never heard about the loony earl?” Mr Kebble wore his most benign grin. It divided his exactly spherical face like a split across a ripe pumpkin.
The optician emitted one of his hums, which then turned into speech. “Mm...Mr Cartwright is scarcely one of our local luminaries in the matter of history. He’s picked up some guff from somewhere about Purdy’s the gunsmiths and the seventh earl of Flaxborough...”
“James Scarbeck?” Mr Kebble interrupted.
“Scarbeck, yes. They were all crackers from him on, of course, but Jamie had the style that the rest of the barmy oafs lacked completely. And if Cartwright really knew the story about these pistols, he couldn’t have resisted telling it.”
Mr Kebble sniffed the barrel of one. “Never been fired, they say.”
“So the account goes.” Mr Hoole peered into the percussion cap recess. “Ah—except for the one famous occasion.”
“But he’s supposed never to have lost a duel.”
“Only because no one was ever crazy enough to accept a challenge from the fellow.” Mr Hoole clucked and hummed. “Well, would you? Blunderbusses at ten paces? These things would mow half a cricket pitch on one charge.”
He regarded the weapons a little longer, then lovingly replaced them in their case. He tapped the engraved silver lozenge representing the Scarbeck family crest.
“The only bell-mouthed duelling pistols ever made, my dear Joss. Apart from their value as collectors’ items, which is enormous, utterly vulgar, and a great deal more than poor Cartwright is going to ask for them, I think I shall cherish them mainly on account of the dear old Duke of Wellington.”
Mr Kebble beamed in pleasurable anticipation and rubbed a pencil between his palms so that it produced a rhythmic clicking noise against the two heavy gold rings that he wore. “He was the one exception, was he?”
“He was. As one might expect. Our lunatic seventh earl got round to him in time and sent him one of his cartels...”
“His what, old chap?”
“Cartels. Challenges. Carried personally by one’s second, who was supposed to be able to help negotiate an honourable settlement. Except that Scarbeck always sent a most fearsome drunken illiterate with a great black beard, who insulted everyone in sight but couldn’t be called out himself because he wasn’t a gentleman. And invariably he took along the earl’s bell-muzzles. The mere sight of that great case was enough to get an apology—even from some wretched fellow whom the loon had picked at random.”
At this point of the narrative, Sylvie approached bearing two cups of tea with slow and painful concentration. The offering pleased Mr Hoole so much that for a long time he lapsed into a mere intermittent hum while he stirred the tea and gazed vaguely through its steam.
The editor waited patiently, having pushed his own cup aside to cool. At last, “And the Duke of Wellington?” he prompted.
Hoole stared at him for several seconds, then seemed suddenly to recall what he had been talking about. “Ah, Old Nosey. That gentleman was not going to take any nonsense from some seedy, half-crazed aristocrat out of the sticks just because he carried a brace of cannon about with him. He accepted Scarbeck’s challenge and came over from Stamford, where he’d been staying the weekend. You know where they’re supposed to have met, don’t you?”
Mr Kebble shook his head and made a few more clicks with his pencil-rolling.
“In that low meadow-land on the other side of the river from the harbour. Quarrel Green, my dear fellow. The name tells all.” And Mr Hoole hummed in celebration of this piece of logic.
“But they didn’t fight a duel, surely?”
“Not in the accepted sense, no. It was a notably effective encounter, though. The Iron Duke made two vital stipulations that seemed, at first sight, to be very favourable to our James. He insisted that the seconds put a really generous charge of powder into each pistol. And also that the loony earl accept the privilege of first fire. Well, you see where that put Wellington.”
“In the shit,” suggested Mr Kebble.
Mr Hoole grinned. “All the rules of honourable behaviour,” he said, “plus the fact that not even an earl, crazy or not, could get away with blowing the head off the country’s top national hero with a concessionary shot, obliged our James to delope.”
“De-what?”
“Delope. The duelling term for fire in the air.”
“And that’s what he did?” Mr Kebble looked less than impressed.
“That’s what he did, Joss. And the seventh earl of Flaxborough never sent out another challenge.”
“Too shamed?”
Mr Hoole’s face grew even shinier. He was nodding with good humour. “Lord, no. He made such a nice gesture of firing into the air with a dead straight arm that the recoil from that thundering great charge of powder smashed his wrist, fractured his elbow, and permanently dislocated his shoulder.”
There was a tinkle of laughter somewhere behind them. The editor swung his chair through a quarter-circle and peered over the tops of his glasses towards part of the area beyond the counter that was in the shadow of a tall display board. A young woman was standing there.
Mr Kebble stood at once, the plump and courteous uncle, friend of all “totties”, as he termed the whole of womankind from fourteen to fifty. He grinned a good morning and ran his fingers back through silky, daisy-white hair. “Can I help you?”
“What a lovely story,” gurgled Miss Clemenceaux. “Absolute blissikins. This the way in?” She had raised a flap in the counter and was side-stepping through the gap into the editorial enclosure.
Mr Kebble found a chair for her. She spiralled into it as if sitting down was a notable sensual accomplishment.
The optician regarded Birdie fixedly for some moments, his hands cradling his belly like a priest’s.
“Mmm...are you a collector of Wellingtonia?” he asked.