Death on a Pale Horse (9 page)

“But there must have been a charge?”

“Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, I should think. It doesn't sound much on its own, but they can tie a lot more to it.”

“Such as?”

“Is there such a thing as constructive murder in the common law?”

“I daresay.”

“Look,” said Frank, “why should it matter what they called it? Her death was his crime. Of course, it could have gone to a general court-martial. But what good would that do? He might have got off Scot-free. Whatever old Josh Sellon thinks, better deal with it quietly and not let the poor woman's name be dragged through a court. As though the inquest wasn't bad enough.”

There was a horrible fascination in the tale, if it was true. I looked at Jock.

“What could they do to him? They couldn't sentence him to death or imprisonment.”

I then listened to an extraordinary account. It was easy to picture the closed velvet curtains drawn against the deep silence of a sleeping world, oil lamps casting their glow on regimental portraits and silver. Elegant dining chairs were set at long tables draped in green baize. The five members of the court in dark blue mess jackets, with Captain Canning as president, sat along the top table, the prosecution and defence on either side. Volumes of military law. Decanters of water and glasses. The president's gavel and “Colonel” Moran's surrendered sword. All these made up the high table's setting. A junior second lieutenant sat by the door to the ante-room, beyond which the witnesses waited.

As my two informants described it, the outcome of the case was never in doubt. Captain Learmont had been left to construct a defence of bricks without straw. Moran refused to answer for his association with Mrs. Putney-Wilson, but he had boasted of it to his toadies. To them he preached a simple gospel of worldly experience—all men are scoundrels at heart and every woman will sell herself if the price is high enough.

I shall have so much to say of “Colonel” Rawdon Moran that I had better describe him at once as my two lieutenants depicted him to me.

He was plainly older than the misguided young men who looked to him for wisdom. Perhaps about forty, with dyed whiskers. He posed as a jolly, rollicking fellow who had knocked about the world. He took little care to hide his viciousness. In appearance, he was tall with a well-developed chest, broad shoulders, muscular arms, and heavy square hands, a vigorous growth of fiery red hair on the backs of his fingers. It was his prematurely wrinkled face that betrayed the coarseness under the easy manner and jovial laugh.

No one got the better of him, he promised them that. Good old Randy Moran could turn his hand to anything. He had been everywhere and knew everything—and everyone. Was there a successful West End play? He knew the leading actress. Was there a sensational divorce suit or a murder trial? He knew the leading counsel on both sides. In any conversation about game-hunting, foreign cities, money, the law, great families and their houses, he was there before you, always knowing more than you did.

Moran had several times lent money to younger officers, perhaps to keep them under his influence, but those who accepted his good-natured offer would never have dared to delay repayment. There was something within the good-humoured look that inspired fear—no less than that. The very way in which he cut a cigar or scraped his boot suggested the act of a man who would stick at nothing, once he felt himself cornered. As for meeting women, however playful his introduction, it was not long before his arm was round their waists.

Such was the defendant in the subalterns' court. The evidence against him was proven. He never bothered to deny that he had taken his pleasure with a foolish, lonely wife who was flattered by his notice. She was not an innocent child, after all. All her evangelical gentility counted for nothing against that. Unbalanced as she became, her fault was merely a failure to understand that all good things must come to an end, as Moran described it to his cronies. She gave way to some innate moral hysteria that was none of his making. Her mind distracted, she destroyed herself. He invited the world to show him where his fault lay, in law or common sense.

However noxious he might be, the procedure of the so-called subalterns' court was no match for his wickedness. According to the account now given to me, evidence was admitted in this midnight court which any English judge would have ruled out as mere hearsay. There was ample testimony which blackened Moran's character, but it proved nothing. He had ridiculed women as creatures who would dance at a court ball one night and abase themselves before a money-lender on the following morning. If a husband could not support them, they would readily sell themselves. If that was impossible, they would rip the clothes from their own mother's back and tear the jewels from her throat in order to shine as the stars of the next evening party.

But men were no better. Moran assured his young friends that a pillar of the community would sell his wife and children, his own soul, to get money for some favourite lechery. It might be the gambling saloon, the stock exchange, a particular woman who could offer a special gratification not to be found elsewhere. Such men would sell the coats off their backs to gratify themselves with the sort of women whom they knew would take their money while regarding them with contempt.

I was a young man when I heard all this. The portrait of Rawdon Moran seemed to me hardly less evil than that of Satan. And if such a repellent form of Satan were at the bar of subalterns' justice, perhaps I would not have cast my vote strictly according to the rules of evidence.

Of course, the midnight court found him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman—absurdly underrating his crime! It also convicted him, in some form, for causing the poor young woman's death. But then what was to be done with him? In one view, death itself would hardly be excessive. In another, it was doubtful whether they had grounds to do anything at all. In their enthusiasm to avenge Emmeline Putney-Wilson, they had not considered the dilemma in which they would find themselves.

And so Captain Canning and the four other members of the lamplit court had withdrawn to consider the verdict and sentence. It was late by then. Indeed, it was almost two o'clock in the morning. When they came back, Moran stood up even before they could command him to do so. Then Captain Canning looked him directly in the eyes. The so-called colonel was now found guilty of causing the death of the young woman by a means far crueller than many forms of murder.

Had he anything to say? He had not, except to deny the authority of these “boys,” as he chose to call them.

What of the sentence? He might deserve to die, but officers of a British regiment cannot murder such a man in his turn. As they faced each other, Captain Canning had the courage not to be daunted by the ferocity of Moran's savage glare. Indeed, the captain continued to look the criminal in the eye and denounce him for conduct unbecoming a British officer and for moral homicide, whatever that might be. There was no sentence this court could pass which would be adequate to that crime—but pass a sentence it must.

It was therefore the judgment of his comrades that Rawdon Moran, sometime colonel of the Rajah of Kalore's Militia and now captain in the 109th Albion Fusiliers, should be required to send his papers in forthwith and leave the regiment. Within that regiment, meanwhile, he was to be outlawed. Whatever retribution was inflicted upon him, no officer would contribute to the detection, detention, or punishment of the person who carried it out. So long as he remained within their reach, he should be a target for their vengeance.

It was an extraordinary sentence, vindictive but surely ineffectual. There was one thing more. Should Moran ever again make application to serve Her Majesty the Queen, in a military or civil capacity, any member present would be absolved from his oath of secrecy. The proceedings of the present tribunal would be communicated to the unit or body considering such application. From respect to the late Mrs. Putney-Wilson and Major Henry Putney-Wilson, those proceedings should not otherwise be made public. An oath of secrecy would presently be taken by the members of the court and the other officers in attendance. Unfortunately, with so many excitable young men present, these oaths were not worth the breath expended in uttering them.

This promised to be a comprehensive destruction of Rawdon Moran's career. If ever there were an outcast, it would be he. But standing there at that moment, he looked round at what he seemed to regard as a litter of yapping puppies. His words were smoothly contemptuous and he almost spat the syllables in their smooth young faces

“In time, gentlemen, I may take my leave of this regiment. Meanwhile, I have no intention whatever of sending in my papers. Now that this pantomime is over, I shall be obliged for the return of my sword. If not, I shall report, as a matter of honour, that it has been stolen by a common thief among you here.”

Honour was soiled in the mouth of such a scoundrel as this! But the bluff of the subalterns' court-martial had been called. These young officers had applied justice intended for minor social misdemeanours to a form of murder—and it had failed them. Then, before any of them could speak, a tall, pale, dark-haired man stood up at the far end of the prosecutor's table. He had sat quietly and almost hesitantly throughout the proceedings without once offering to take part. This was Major Henry Putney-Wilson.

“Mr. President, sir, I am not a member of this court. However, if you will allow me, I will lay aside for a while my obligation to the manual of military law and even, as some will think, my regard for the Christian religion. Since he scorns common decency and common justice alike, I require Captain Moran to afford me that satisfaction which one gentleman owes to another.”

The onlookers watched in silence. This formula had only one meaning. Major Putney-Wilson had challenged Moran to a duel. By this date, duelling was illegal and seldom heard of between British officers. Such exchanges as occurred were invariably fought with pistols. But Major Putney-Wilson was no kind of shot. Moran could cut the heart out of the ace of spades at thirty-seven paces. If ever a man deserved the cliché of signing his own death warrant, it was the major at that moment.

Captain Canning was about to intervene, but Moran was there first. The mess-room rang with a short burst of scornful laughter.

“Duelling, sir, is a game for schoolboys. A game of chance. At twenty, I could shoot the buttons from a man's epaulettes at thirty paces and never singe his tunic. But I was once challenged in my Oxford days at Magdalen College, and I fought a duel. We met in Christ Church Meadows at dawn. I shot at this idiot who had called me out. The distance was not thirty paces. Yet I missed. The other fellow was a milksop who had never truly handled a pistol in his life. Look at this!”

He pulled back his tunic cuff and undid the link of his shirt. There was a small track upon the skin over the bone where no yellow hair grew, rather as if it had been shaved. He buttoned his sleeve and looked round at them all.

“I knew no better at twenty, gentlemen. A close-run thing indeed! But now? Duelling? No, thank you very much! Let us rather roll a pair of dice or cut the cards!”

Though he was fierce enough in his humour, the worst of Rawdon Moran was a terrifying moral chasm in his character, a bottomless depth of hate and harm.

So they stood motionless for a moment, like actors taking a curtain call at the end of a play's final scene. He had the whip hand over them. Everyone was looking at Moran, scarcely noticing one another. While they hesitated, he took his sword and thrust it into its scabbard. He swung round and walked towards the door that led to the ante-room. No one tried to prevent him leaving. Despite his contempt for duelling, they knew he would kill at that moment if he had to. And the law might find in his favour. The second lieutenant who was standing by the door closed it behind Moran and then, in an unexpected movement, stood with his back to it and with his arms folded, as if to prevent anyone else from following.

Presently there was a shout from beyond the closed door and the members of the subalterns' court looked at one another. They heard a gasp and trapped-animal sounds of a struggle which lasted a full minute. The lieutenant standing at the door remained quite still with his back to it, to prevent anyone from following. Then their hearts jumped as there came a terrible cry and a roar of anger pierced by pain. A second roar followed that might have been agony in another man but was fury in this one. So long as Moran was in the mess room, almost all eyes had been upon him. Only now did most of them realise that Putney-Wilson was no longer there. He had not been part of the proceedings, and no one had thought his quiet departure important.

The door of the ante-room swung open awkwardly. Two powerfully built soldiers, not wearing regimental insignia and unfamiliar to the onlookers, were standing over a figure lying on the floor. A military farrier, also from some other regiment, stood upright with a branding iron in his hand. The bright heat was fading rapidly from the dull metal. Major Putney-Wilson, having seen justice done, had begun walking away into the night.

The figure on the floor struggled to his feet. Moran's tunic had been torn where the buttons and epaulettes were cut away. They had “played the rogues' march” with him after all. But the tunic had also been stripped from his right arm and the shirt torn from that shoulder, which was not part of the custom when a man was drummed out of his regiment.

On the yellow-white flesh of the upper arm and shoulder, there was a crimson swelling, two or three inches across. Moran's face was mottled red and white with anger and shock. He swung round as if he might knock down the lieutenant who had guarded the door. But that guardian had now drawn his Webley service revolver from its holster and was holding it in Moran's full view.

The junior lieutenant by the door could see what his comrades could not. The crimson swelling on the upper arm bore an imprint, a brand. The farrier's iron customarily carried three digits, one for the number of the regiment and two for the number of the horse. Major Putney-Wilson was a devout man, and the insignia which the glowing iron left behind was one that the world might recognise. It was “666,” the Mark of the Beast from the Book of Revelations. If memory served, those who bore the mark of the Beast were condemned to the lake that burns with everlasting fire and brimstone. Meanwhile, until the day of his death, Moran's own body would burn before the world, proclaiming him for what he was.