Dewey Lambdin - Havoc`s Sword

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.

"Well, damme," Kit sighed, gritting his teeth as they shoved him to a seat on the coach's rear leather bench. " 'Twas such a good shirt, too… the most cunning lace-work, and all. That shit was so cross-eyed 'foxed,' I didn't think he could even hit the ground in one shot, much less…"

"Your shot was a good'un, though, and he's done for, so put it down to blind beginner's luck," Lewrie said, tucking the rolled cape and other stuff to either side of him to bolster him from sliding back and forth. "Three, four days o' Hell, he has t'look forward to. You did good work, Kit."

Lewrie's last sight of Ledyard Beauman (a wolfishly satisfied one, thankee!) he was curled up and gasping like a landed fish, agony beginning to course outward from his wound with each pulsing beat of his heart, the raw fire in his belly stoking hotter and hotter as the numbness that follows wounding wore off. Belly wounds were fatal and inflicted the sufferings of the Damned before the victims departed the Mortal Coil. Cashman should have been cackling with glee over his long-awaited victory.

"Won't be much joy at our breakfast, Alan, sorry," Cashman said. "Might cry off, just go home and…"

"You can't, and you know it," Lewrie countered, still fussing, with the man-servant's assistance. "Laudanum, rum, and brandy on your empty stomach? A hearty breakfast's the best thing for you. And in public, where you put on the proper airs, else folk'll think that he's succeeded at something for once in his miserable life."