“Clarence,” his mother wailed.
He threw her a drowning look, but she was powerless to save him.
Clarence had had his mother with him on the occasion of that ridiculous fencing match, when he was ten and Jasper was thirteen. Jasper, who had never had a fencing lesson in his life or ever even watched the sport, had lunged at him a number of times and would have speared his spine via his stomach each time if the rapiers had not been capped. But each time the hit was declared to be an illegal one. There were more rules in fencing, it had appeared, than there were stars in the sky. Clarence, in the meanwhile, had pranced about him like a damned flat-footed ballerina, and every time his waving rapier had whistled within a few inches of a contemptuous Jasper, his mother had declared it a hit and a wondrously skilled one at that-as well as being squarely within the rules, of course.
Everyone’s attention turned to the wrestling, which was a worthy final and lasted all of ten minutes before Lenny Manning tipped Willy Tufts over his shoulder and headfirst into the mud to score a three-to-two victory.
The crowd went wild, Katherine presented Lenny with the ten-guinea first prize, laughing as she held her skirts well clear of him while she did so, and Lenny tossed the coins to his sweetheart before dashing off to the lake to wash and into the boathouse to don dry clothes. He would be the hero of the village for weeks to come, Jasper did not doubt.
The tug-of-war was to have been next as a grand finale to the fete. But no one had forgotten the jousting bout, and Barker stepped forward as soon as Lenny had disappeared to set the two specially cut planks across the mud-there had been no need to add more water to the mud, of course, because water flowed there from the lake. A few other men helped him to position them a suitable distance apart and to make sure that their ends were set firmly into the ground on either side.
There was a swell of excited anticipation.
Jasper removed his coat and his boots. Katherine had come to stand in front of him. She was looking steadily at him.
“Hold my coat, if you will, my love,” he said. “It would be a pity to ruin it. I would not need to remove either it or my boots, of course, if I could only be confident of not landing in the mud. Clarence need feel no misgivings, alas, though he may want to be overcautious anyway. Those boots would never be the same, would they, if he went in.”
“If he removes them,” Merton said, “he will be telling us that he is not so confident after all and I might change my wager. But I think my money is safe.”
“I have every confidence in the world,” Clarence said, and the silly idiot walked to the edge of the mud hole dressed in all his Bond Street finery.
Barker was fetching two oars.
“Whoever can knock the other off the plank and into the mud is the winner, then?” Jasper asked of no one in particular as he stood at the edge of the hole and frowned down into it. “I will try to make the bout last as long as ten seconds, but I cannot promise. If Clarence was that good as a boy, one can only imagine what he is like now. Should we perhaps just proceed to the tug-of-war after all?”
There was a loud chorus of protests, and Jasper took an oar from Barker’s hand, stepped up onto one of the planks, and crossed it to the middle. Clarence followed him on the other plank. He almost lost his footing even before he was in position. What an anticlimax that would have been!
A hush fell over the crowd.
“Get set,” Barker said.
Jasper raised his oar and touched it to Clarence’s.
The gun fired.
Clarence swung wildly and would have taken Jasper’s head off if the latter had not ducked out of the way. Jasper had to reach out smartly with his oar to hold it against Clarence’s side and prevent him from falling off his plank. It would not do for him simply to fall in.
It was a game of thrust and parry for a while-or a game of cat and mouse-with Jasper blocking wild swings and administering taps and pokes that were sufficient to send Clarence swaying from side to side and back and forth and to cause his eyes to bulge with fright but were not designed to pitch him in too soon.
The crowd might as well be given a decent show to watch.
And Clarence might as well be made to wait before being put out of his misery-or into his misery.
But the fool must have thought that Jasper was finding it impossible to dislodge him. He grinned suddenly and began his silly dancing to impress the crowd. He held his oar in one hand like a rapier and prepared to spear Jasper in the stomach with it.
Jasper lowered his own oar as if in surrender, nudged Clarence’s aside with one elbow, and caught his opponent just below one prancing knee.
Clarence performed a few desperate steps that were in no way balletic, flailed with both arms as if he were a windmill, roared with alarm, and then shrieked like a girl as he fell forward between the two planks and landed facedown and spread-eagled in the mud.
There was one companion shriek from the crowd-probably from Lady Forester-and one jubilant roar from everyone else.
Jasper discovered that he was liberally spattered with mud.
He found Katherine with his eyes and made her an elegant bow.
“For you, my love,” he said aloud, though he doubted she or anyone else actually heard the words.
She read them on his lips, though.
She smiled dazzlingly.
“Thank you,” he read on her lips. “My love,” she added.
Jasper turned his attention to the brown, slimy creature that was wrestling with itself in the mud below him, presumably in an attempt to gain a footing. He leaned down and possessed himself of one of Clarence’s slippery hands.
“Come on, old chap,” he said. “I’ll help you out and we will go for a swim. You are a good sport.”
Clarence pawed at his muddy face with an equally muddy hand while the roar died down around them.
“That was deliberate, Jasper,” he wailed. “I will never forgive you for this. Mama will never forgive you. Great-Uncle Seth will never-”
“Prunella,” Seth Wrayburn said in thunderous tones, “I am not master here and so cannot give orders. But I would strongly suggest you take your sniveling apology for a son once he has cleaned himself up and convey him back to Kent. And it is my fervent wish that I never have to set eyes on either one of you ever again.”
There was a smattering of applause from those gathered about him.
“Come on, Clarrie,” Jasper said for his ears only. “Have some dignity. At least I have not broken your nose again. Let us go and get cleaned up before the tug-of-war.”
“I cannot swim!” Clarence wailed-loudly enough to raise something of a jeer from the bank.
The tassels on his Hessians looked like two drowned rats clinging to the slime of his boots.
26
“HAPPY?” Jasper asked, smiling down at Charlotte as they waited at the top of the long line that was forming for the opening set of country dances at the ball.
She had been toasted more than once at dinner and wished a happy birthday more times than anyone could count in the course of the day. And now there was the final grand moment of celebration as she led the first dance of the evening with her brother.
“I am,” she said. “Oh, I am, Jasper. I do not think anyone could possibly be happier than I am at this moment. I am so very glad that you and Kate between you were able to persuade Aunt Prunella to stay until tomorrow. Uncle Seth spoke out of turn after you pitched Clarence into the mud. He deserved it, of course, and I am very glad indeed that you did it-it was quite, quite splendid-but he is my cousin and Aunt Prunella is my aunt and I really could not bear any great unpleasantness on my birthday. Do you think Clarence really has a headache?”