Highgate Rise (39 page)

Lally had reached them now and her mind seized the situation immediately.

“Oh, how stupid,” she said in exasperation. “I never thought you’d be so very childish—and now you’ve really hurt each other. And does that prove which of you is right? It only proves you are both extremely stubborn. Which all Highgate knew anyway.” She swung around to Shaw, her face very slightly flushed. “What can I do to be of assistance, Doctor?” By that time Josiah Hatch had also reached them, but she disregarded him. “Do you need linen?” She peered in his bag, then at the extent of the bloodstains, which were increasing with every minute. “How about water? Brandy?”

“Nobody’s going to pass out,” he said sharply, glaring at Dalgetty. “For heaven’s sake put him down!” he ordered Clitheridge, who was bearing most of Dalgetty’s weight now. “Yes, please, Lally—get some more linen. I’d better tie some of this up before we move them. I’ve got enough alcohol to disinfect.”

Prudence Hatch arrived breathlessly, gasping as she came to a halt. “This is awful! What on earth possessed you?” she demanded. “As if we haven’t enough grief.”

“A man who believes in his principles is sometimes obliged to fight in order to preserve them,” Josiah said grimly. “The price of virtue is eternal vigilance.”

“That is freedom,” his wife corrected him.

“What?” he demanded, his brows drawing down sharply.

“The price of
freedom
is eternal vigilance,” she replied. “You said virtue.” Without being told she was taking a piece of clean cloth out of Shaw’s bag, unfolding it and soaking it in clean spirit from one of his bottles. “Sit down!” she commanded Pascoe smartly, and as soon as he did, she began to clean away the torn outer clothing and then the blood till she could see the ragged tear in the flesh. Then she held the pad of cloth to it and pushed firmly.

He winced and let out a squeak as the spirit hit the open wound, but no one took any notice of him.

“Freedom and virtue are not the same thing at all,” Hatch argued with profound feeling, his face intent, his eyes alight. To him the issue obviously far outweighed the ephemeral abrasions of the encounter. “That is precisely what Mr. Pascoe risked his life to defend!”

“Balderdash!” Shaw snapped. “Virtue isn’t in any danger—and prancing about on the heath with swords certainly isn’t going to defend anything at all.”

“There is no legal way to prevent the pernicious views and the dangerous and degrading ideas he propagates,” Pascoe shouted across Prudence’s instructions, his lips white with pain.

Lally was already setting off again towards the road on her errand. Her upright figure, shoulders back, was well on its way.

“There should be.” Hatch shook his head. “It is part of our modern sickness that we admire everything new, regardless of its merit.” His voice rose a little and he chopped his hands in the air. “We get hold of any new thought, rush to print any idea that overturns and makes mock of the past,
the values that have served our forefathers and upon which we have built our nation and carried the faith of Christ to other lands and peoples.” His shoulders were hunched with the intensity of his emotion. “Mr. Pascoe is one of the few men in our time who has the courage and the vision to fight, however futilely, against the tide of man’s own intellectual arrogance, his indiscriminate greed for everything new without thought as to its value, or the result of our espousing it.”

“This is not the place for a sermon, Josiah.” Shaw was busy working on Dalgetty’s cheek and did not even look up at him. Murdo was assisting him with considerable competence. “Especially the arrant rubbish you’re talking,” he went on. “Half these old ideas you’re rehearsing are fossilized walls of cant and hypocrisy protecting a lot of rogues from the light of day. It’s long past time a few questions were asked and a few shoddy pretenses shown for what they are.”

Hatch was so pale he might have been the one wounded. He looked at Shaw’s back with a loathing so intense it was unnerving that Shaw was oblivious of it.

“You would have every beautiful and virtuous thing stripped naked and paraded for the lewd and the ignorant to soil—and yet at the same time you would not protect the innocent from the mockery and the godless innovations of those who have no values, but constant titillation and endless lust of the mind. You are a destroyer, Stephen, a man whose eyes see only the futile and whose hand holds only the worthless.”

Shaw’s fingers stopped, the swab motionless, a white blob half soaked with scarlet. Dalgetty was still shaking. Maude Dalgetty had appeared from somewhere while no one was watching the path across the field.

Shaw faced Hatch. There was dangerous temper in every line of his face and the energy built up in the muscles of his body till he seemed ready to break into some violent motion.

“It would give me great pleasure,” he said almost between his teeth, “to meet you here myself, tomorrow at dawn, and knock you senseless. But I don’t settle my arguments that way. It decides nothing. I shall show you what a
fool you are by stripping away the layers of pretense, the lies and the illusions—”

Pitt was aware of Prudence, frozen, her face ashen pale, her eyes fixed on Shaw’s lips as if he were about to pronounce the name of some mortal illness whose diagnosis she had long dreaded.

Maude Dalgetty, on the other hand, looked only a little impatient. There was no fear in her at all. And John Dalgetty, half lying on the ground, looked aware only of his own pain and the predicament he had got himself into. He looked at his wife with a definite anxiety, but it was obvious he was nervous of her anger, not for her safety or for Shaw in temper ruining her long-woven reputation.

Pitt had seen all he needed. Dalgetty had no fear of Shaw—Prudence was terrified.

“The whited sepulchers—” Shaw said viciously, two spots of color high on his cheeks. “The—”

“This is not the time,” Pitt interrupted, putting himself physically between them. “There’s more than enough blood spilled already—and enough pain. Doctor, get on with treating your patients. Mr. Hatch, perhaps you would be good enough to go back to the street and fetch some conveyance so we can carry Mr. Pascoe and Mr. Dalgetty back to their respective homes. If you want to pursue the quarrel on the merits or necessities for censorship, then do it at a more fortunate time—and in a more civilized manner.”

For a moment he thought neither of them was going to take any notice of him. They stood glaring at each other with the violence of feeling as ugly as that between Pascoe and Dalgetty. Then slowly Shaw relaxed, and as if Hatch had suddenly ceased to be of any importance, turned his back on him and bent down to Dalgetty’s wound again.

Hatch, his face like gray granite, his eyes blazing, swiveled on his heel, tearing up the grass, and marched along the footpath back towards the road.

Maude Dalgetty went, not to her husband, with whom she was obviously out of patience, but to Prudence Hatch, and gently put her arm around her.

10

“I
SUPPOSE
we should have expected it—had we bothered to take the matter seriously at all,” Aunt Vespasia said when Charlotte told her about the duel in the field. “One might have hoped they would have more sense, but had they any proportion in things in the first place, they would not have become involved in such extremes of opinion. Some men lose track of reality so easily.”

“Thomas said they were both injured,” Charlotte went on. “Quite unpleasantly. I knew they said a great deal about the subject of freedom of expression, and the need to censor certain ideas in the public interest, but I did not expect it to come to actual physical harm. Thomas was very angry indeed—it all seems so farcical, in the face of real tragedy.”

Vespasia sat very upright and her concentration seemed to be entirely inward, as if she did not see the graciousness of the room around her, or the gentle movement of the bronzing beech leaves outside the window, dappling the light.

“Failure, disillusion and love rejected can all make us behave in ways that seem absurd, my dear—perhaps loneliness most of all. It does not lessen the pain in the slightest, even if you are one who is able to laugh while you weep. I have thought at times that laughter is man’s greatest salvation—and
at other times that it is what damns him beneath the animals. Beasts may kill one another, they may ignore the sick or distressed—but they never mock. Blasphemy is a peculiarly human ability.”

Charlotte was confused for a moment. Vespasia had taken the thought much further than anything she had intended. Perhaps she had overdramatized the scene.

“The whole quarrel was about the rights of censorship,” she said, starting to explain herself. “That wretched monograph of Amos Lindsay’s, which is academic now, since the poor man is dead anyway.”

Vespasia stood up and walked over towards the window.

“I thought it was the question as to whether some men have the right to make mock of other men’s gods, because they believe them to be either vicious or absurd—or simply irrelevant.”

“One has the right to question them,” Charlotte said with irritation. “One must, or there will be no progress of ideas, no reforming. The most senseless ideologies could be taught, and if we cannot challenge them, how are we to know whether they are good or evil? How can we test our ideas except by thinking—and talking?”

“We cannot,” Vespasia replied. “But there are many ways of doing it. And we must take responsibility for what we destroy, as well as for what we create. Now tell me, what was it Thomas said about Prudence Hatch being so mesmerized with fright? Did she imagine Shaw was going to let slip some appalling secret?”

“That is what Thomas thought—but he has never persuaded Shaw to tell him anything at all that would indicate any secret he knows worth killing to hide.”

Vespasia turned to face Charlotte.

“You have met the man—is he a fool?”

Charlotte thought for several seconds, visualizing Shaw’s dynamic face with its quick, clear eyes, the power in him, the vitality that almost overflowed.

“He’s extremely intelligent,” she replied frankly.

“I daresay,” Vespasia agreed dryly. “That is not the same
thing. Many people have high intelligence and no wisdom at all. You have not answered me.”

Charlotte smiled very slighüy. “No, Aunt Vespasia, I am not sure that I can. I don’t think I know.”

“Then perhaps you had better find out.” Vespasia arched her brows very gently but her eyes were unwavering.

Very reluctantly Charlotte rose to her feet, a quiver of excitement inside her, and a very real sense of fear which was getting larger with every moment. This time she could not hide behind a play of innocence as she had done so often in the past when meddling in Pitt’s cases. Nor would she go with some slight disguise as she had often done, the pretense of being some gentlewoman of no account, up from the country, and insinuate herself into a situation, then observe. Shaw clearly knew exactly who she was and the precise nature of her interest. To try to deceive him would be ridiculous and demean them both.

She must go, if she went at all, quite openly as herself, frank about her reasons, asking questions without opportunity of camouflage or retreat. How could she possibly behave in such a way that it would be anything but intrusive and impertinent—and hideously insensitive?

It was on the edge of her tongue to make an excuse, simply say all that was in her mind; then she saw Vespasia’s slender shoulders stiff as a general commanding a charge to battle, and her eyes as steady as a governess controlling a nursery. Insubordination was not even to be considered. Vespasia had already understood all her arguments, and would accept none of them.

“ ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ ” Charlotte said with a ghost of a smile.

A spark of laughter lit Vespasia’s eyes.

“Quite,” she agreed relentiessly. “You may take my carriage.”

“Thank you, Aunt Vespasia.”

Charlotte arrived at the lodging house where Shaw was temporarily resident exactly as the landlady was serving luncheon.
This was ill-mannered in the extreme, but most practical. It was probably the only time when she could have found him present and not either in the act of repacking his bag to leave again or trying to catch up with his notes and messages.