Lewrie swivelled to see what Hugh Beauman made of his brother's hapless expression, but that worthy was implacable. Hugh Beauman stood far back, hands clasped behind his back, heaving a great, resigned sigh of parting. A brief farewell grin creased his granite features.
He turned back to the principals, making a quick prayer for his old friend's success and safety, that he'd shoot straight and true and put a quick end to this, and a mercifully quick end of Ledyard, too. A man so foppish, petulant, and weak couldn 't win! The world would be a boresome place, did Kit fall and leave this Mortal Coil.
Kit had been gazing out to sea, savouring perhaps his last precious taste of Life, but he did turn briefly, saw Lewrie's concern, and rewarded him with a quick lift of his chin, a faint grin, and even a wink!
"Ready, Colonel Beauman?" the doughty Hendricks called over the mewing of the gulls. "Ready, Colonel Cashman?" Some seabirds glided down near the duellists, some flapping in place against the faint wind, as if begging for tossed morsels.
"Ready," Cashman cried.
"Er… yes," Ledyard Beauman managed. "Ready."
"Cock your locks! Begin your pace. And one, and two…"
Kit marched in short parade steps; Ledyard took childish giant strides, as if to turn fifteen paces into a furlong. "And four, and five, and six…!"
" "Ware!" Lewrie cried as Ledyard lost his nerve and turned too early, boots skidding on the hard sand, and levelling his pistol. The shout made Kit jerk to a stop, flinch, and start to turn about, and… Blam!
Ledyard had fired at Kit Cashman's back!
"Damn you!" Lewrie shouted, cocking his pistol and bringing it up to aim, with a quick plea for permission from Mr. Hendricks.
"Shit!" Cashman grunted. A pistol ball had struck him 'twixt his neck and the end of his left shoulder, bursting a bloom of scarlet on his white shirt!
"Well, damme!" Mr. Hendricks barked, his pistol now cocked and ready, but unsure of how to proceed. "Shame, sir! Now, stand and…"
"Stand and receive, ya bastard!" Cashman roared as he completed his hunching turn and straightened his back.
"He's wounded, wait, wait!" Ledyard demanded, dancing from one foot to the other. "Examine him, he has t'stop, mean t'say. Wait!"
"You must stand and receive, first, sir," the disgusted umpire Mr. Hendricks ordained, his voice gone disdainfully formal.
"God above, you said, no/" Ledyard wheedled as Cashman raised his pistol, his body turned sideways-on as if Beauman still held shot in his locker, a practiced, instinctive pose. He grimly took aim…
Lewrie was dumb-struck, and enrapted. One couldn't look away from such a shameful cock-up! Ledyard's terror-dance, the mounting horror in his whitened face, benumbed him. Would Ledyard drop to beg, or simply break and run?
And Kit was taking slow, careful aim, savouring Ledyard's fear, his teeth bared in the smile of a snarling wolf, making him suffer, as Ledyard was forced to look down that wide, fateful bore!
Sellers broke position! His left hand clawed under his uniform coat for a hidden pistol, sprinting toward Ledyard Beauman and tossing him the ready-cocked, silver-chased "barker," who gawped at it like a drowning man would stare desperately at an offered rope-end.
Blam!
The pistol flew toward Ledyard, who stopped shuffling, stretched out to catch it, but his shirt billowed at the waist as a ball punched him backwards, blood sheeting in an instant eruption, driving him down to fall on his rump with his arms still out-stretched for the gun like a stiff porcelain doll, legs and feet splayed heel-down in a vee!
Captain Sellers switched hands, flung up his right with his illegal pistol cocked, and aimed at Kit Cashman.
Blam-blam! as Lewrie shot quickly, he and Hendricks firing at nigh the same time, and Ledyard's cousin jerked and grunted as life was hammered from him, to drop lifeless across the lap of his kin he'd hoped to save!
"Disgusting," Mr. Hendricks hissed, outraged. "Despicable!"
A gruff cry of pain from behind, from Hugh Beauman, to see both slain, then a brief silence, even from the gulls.
"Oh, Charlie," they could clearly hear Ledyard Beauman weakly say to his cousin, giving him a shake or two. "Ye fell down."
Ledyard noticed his own wound, at last, the gout of blood that stained his breeches and shirt, that trickled from his fingertips as he probed the hole in his belly, just below his waistband, and began to moan, fret, and pluck at the cloth, still numbed.
"Damn my eyes, sir, but never have I witnessed such a craven, ungentlemanly…!" doughty Hendricks was declaiming as Surgeon Mister Trollope and his assistant rushed to Beauman's side to drag away Capt. Sellers's body. Ledyard at last toppled on his right side, his knees drawn up in fetal position, whimpering with realisation.
Kit! Lewrie dropped his pistol where he stood and sprinted to Cash-man's side as he strode up-beach, himself. He held his pistol in his right hand, that hand pressed to the top of his left shoulder, his left arm dangling rigid at his side.
"Alan, ol' son. The bloody idiot winged me, can ye feature it? Look-see how bad it is, will you, there's a good fellow." Cashman was grinning; now a stoic rictus of manful self-control… and a bemused puzzlement.
"Uhm… ragged, but clean through yer meat," Lewrie announced after a long look under the torn shirt where two plum-coloured holes, front and back, almost made a single bear-bite. "Don't think he struck bone, but you'd best let that Trollope fella ascertain that. They're a tad busy at the moment, don't ye know, but if needs must, I could do a fotherin' patch over it 'til they're free." Lewrie made it a jape, equally manful and dismissive of suffering, to perk him up and "play up game." He offered his pocket flask of brandy. "I could get your man-servant, or Andrews, do a little obeah witchy-work. Make a poultice… herbs and fish-guts?"
The very idea made Cashman dry-retch and wobble on his pins, a cold sweat popping out on his face as he staggered.
"Here, son, yer lookin' peaky. Sit ye down for a spell and be easy," Lewrie said, helping him down, taking his pistol. "Here, one of you! Mister… Geratt, is it?" he cried for a saw-bones.
The assistant surgeon came running, and Mr. Hendricks trundled down to see to him as well. "Your wound is grievous, Colonel Cashman?"
"Not a bit of it, sir," Cashman shrugged off, seconded at once by Mr. Geratt's pooh-poohing noises, and the assurance that no bones were broken as he swabbed, probed for cloth and such in the trough of the wound, and snipped away the odd ragged edge or two before binding and bandaging him and rigging a sling to immobilise Cashman's arm.
"Must apologise, Mister Hendricks," Cashman said, making a moue of regret. "Had we known such would occur, I'd have never…!"
"Not your fault, sirs," Hendricks quickly disabused him of all blame. "Mister Ledyard Beauman, in the end, was no gentleman, nor was his cousin. This will redound to no good credit, or credence to their cause. Rest assured that a factual account of this morning's scandalous doin's will be known far and wide. Uhm… I've always been partial t'dark rum, m'self, when revival is needed. You will allow me, Colonel Cash-man?" he said, fetching out his own red leather bottle of heady-smelling dark rum, from which Cashman gratefully sucked. Geratt insisted on a tincture of laudanum be mixed with the rum, in a small silver two-dram cup.
"God, their poor family, though," Hendricks sadly intoned.
The rum (rather a lot of it) and the laudanum availed Kit most wondrous. Within minutes he was on his feet again, his pain muted and his colour back. Lewrie, Andrews, and the man-servant packed their paraphernalia and began to assist him towards his waiting carriage, a last gracious adieu said and conge made to the referees and surgeons for their good offices.