India: The Second Colonial War: Chapter Seventeen: "Arête, part II"
Unable to control his anger, Lord Cornwallis brought his fist down on the desk so hard that the floor shook. The wine in Victor Alexander Carrenworth's glass, which was sitting on a nearby table, rippled lazily. The desk, however, was unaffected. It still stood a solid as the day it had been built. Some things are always constant. Some things are built to last.
"Why can't people be like that?" Lord Cornwallis wondered. "Why can't people be constant in their loyalties?"
He hit the desk again.
"Will you kindly cease with that absolutely pointless banging?" Victor snapped irritably, raising his blue eyes for a better look at the governor- general. "I have the most dreadful head ache and you are only making it worse."
"Forgive me, your lordship," Cornwallis said apologetically. "It's just that."
"O'Hara?" Carrenworth volunteered.
"Yes, O'Hara."
Victor had heard of O'Hara but hadn't met him until the Weeping Maiden had come upon the remains of the Green Dragoon's ship several days before. Overall he had been impressed, O'Hara carried himself with dignity despite the company he chose to associate with. He had a certain percentage of noble blood. The old Duke of Fairenvail had said he was the illegitimate son of some baron. The old man had never bothered with the names of barons, considering them too close to commoners. Though Victor imagined that being half-noble was better than being completely common. Tavingtons were completely common.
"He was your former aide, correct?" Victor asked, remembering the British Army organizational chart his father had forced him to memorize. How many hours of his mortality had he spent on that filthy chart?
The sun had been up for a couple of hours and the heat was just beginning to become oppressive. Lord Cornwallis peeled off his dress jacket.
"Yes, you could call him that. He was always so loyal, so eager to serve the crown. Now all of that talent has gone to waste. He's in the service of that. that."
"Barbarian?"
"Yes, precisely."
Victor sipped his wine and observed the governor-general over the rim of his glass. He looked very much the same as Victor remembered him. The Golden Dragoon had been ten, hiding in the small sitting room attached to his father's study, watching the scene unfold through the slightly opened door.
Despite the fact that there were many women who considered him the most handsome man in Britain, Victor Carrenworth had not been a pleasant-looking child. A miraculous transformation had seemingly occurred between the ages of sixteen and eighteen that made him the dashing duke that sat in the office of Governor-General Cornwallis. As a child he had a head that was altogether too large for his body and a pair of too large eyes to go with it. His pale complexion was subject to producing a dreadfully thick crop of freckles regardless of how little time he spent out of doors.
"So, we agree then?" his father asked, winding his serpentine body around the chair where Lord Cornwallis was sitting.
"Yes, my lord. He is the one responsible for what happened to my dear niece, Eleanor, so many years ago."
Victor Alexander Carrenworth V toyed a bit with the golden dragon pendant he always wore. "Then you will see to it that this Tavington never achieves any sort of military glory for as long as he serves under you?"
"Yes, my lord. I will see to it personally. If not for you, seeing as I don't believe in this ridiculous holy war. it's little more than a feud, then for Eleanor."
That was all of the conversation he had seen before being whisked back upstairs by his dreadfully overprotective nursemaid, but he had stowed away the information in one of the many small compartments that made up his massive brain, in the event that it would ever prove advantageous.
Deciding the time was right, the governor-general was in a sufficiently poor mood, the Golden Dragoon set his glass aside and met Cornwallis' gaze with his own.
"Forgive my saying this, and do not think me a traitor, but I must say that I find it absolutely appalling the way the government is treating you."
"What do you mean?" Cornwallis asked rather disinterested, his mind still caught up in thinking about O'Hara.
"I mean simply this. You are General Lord Cornwallis, and they treat you as though you were an ignorant child. They send this Tavington, a commoner, to supervise your work. As a fellow aristocrat, I am appalled!"
These statements somehow managed to pierce through the swirling turmoil and into the governor-general's brain. He looked at the duke with renewed affection.
"Do you mean that?"
"It would be an insult to your dignity for me to lie to you, and trust me, my dear Lord Cornwallis, the last thing I want to do insult anyone's dignity. I know how it feels. That is what this whole thing is about, after all. Dignity. Though there are those who consider the ancient struggle between the Golden and Green Dragoons nothing more than a petty feud, I see it as something more. I see it as a struggle centered at the very core of English society. It is, fundamentally, a struggle between the nobility and the peasants who must be kept in their place. I do not oppose Tavington because of a conflict between brothers that occurred in generations past. I do so to ensure the superiority of the few. To maintain the universal truth that some where born to rule and other were born to follow. Men like you and I, dear Cornwallis, were born to lead and as leaders were are trusted with the sacred obligation to maintain stability, to maintain the order of things as they should be, not as men like Tavington desire them."
The words had been exactly what the governor-general had wanted to hear. Victor smiled almost unnoticeably, impressed by his own performance.
"Well," Cornwallis said after allowing the speech a while to soak in. "You most certainly are not your father."
Victor smiled, very much prepared to continue.
* * *
The first full night of sleep that Gen. William Tavington had been granted in the past week was interrupted by the nightmare. He often wondered about the strange dream, which he had at first attributed to his brief dependence upon opium, but now knew to have more truth than he would have liked.
It was exactly what the interior of a sanitarium looked like. He had spent several days in one when he was nine. William Tavington XII had gone insane, some said it was grief, others said it was hereditary, and still others whispered of darker things. It was where he had died, locked away in one of those wretched places, to prevent him from hurting anyone else.
The doctor who owned the place, whose name Tavington no longer remembered (perhaps another aftereffect of the drug), and his wife had been a rarity in the world, genuinely thoughtful people but only when it came to sane children. The boy had lived with them for a week, the length of time it took his Aunt Morganna to travel to London. He had seen very little of the sanitarium aside from damp stone walls and locked doors. There was the screaming though, and not seeing the sort of beings that could produce such mournful cries allowed his imagination the full run of the grotesque and horrible.
"Such things," the doctor's wife had said, "are not suitable for the eyes of innocent children."
As though I was ever innocent, Tavington thought. The dream was always the same as the first time he had experienced it, during the early, very painful, part of his recovery. He was nine years-old again, a neglected little shadow with the eyes of one who had experienced too much in too short a time.
He didn't know who the man was who led him through the dismal hallways. He didn't have a face; he was just a voice, and a body that ended in a neck with a white lace collar and a pendant in the shape of a golden dragon. The walls were made of roughly cut stone, the mortar between them worn away by moisture and the thick green moss that grew in sporadic little patches. They would pass various doors form behind which emanated the most blood- curling of screams. The man kept a hand firmly on William's shoulder. Whoever he was, he was wearing red gloves. William had seen many colors of gloves, but they were usually various shades of black and brown. Red was an oddity.
"Do you know why your father is here?" the man asked.
"Cause he killed a bunch of people," William would reply automatically, trying to suppress the flood of bloody images that washed over his eyes.
They would pass many of the doors lining the hallway, doors made of solid wood with tiny windows set with thick metal bars. Then they would come to a hallway even darker than the previous ones. The man would remove his hand from William's shoulder and bit him, "Go forward and look."
The windows were set so high in the doors that the boy had to stand on tip toe to peer inside.
The room on the right was inhabited by a man who was always praying. He had numerous self-inflicted cuts peppering his exposed flesh. The inhabitant of this room was the most easily recognizable, Capt. Henry Bordon.
Directly across the hall, in the room on the left, lived what was left of the two Carrenworth sisters, Anna and Karenna. There was little left of Karenna besides a full skeleton of fleshless bones. Anna stood in a corner, her blond hair a mess of knots and tangles, blood dripping eternally from the gashes across her wrists.
Then there was the final door, a door that opened of its own will. A door that once opened young William found himself on the other side of. The dream was always sketchy at this point. He wasn't quite sure how he had come to be locked in the room at the end of the hall. He hadn't walked in and the man with red gloves certainly hadn't shoved him in. All he knew was that he was locked in and there was nothing to do but bang on the door. It didn't budge. It never would.
William got up on his tip-toes so he could see outside of the little window. There was the familiar face, the face he had never been able to put a name to until six months ago. It was the face of Victor Alexander Carrenworth framed by his thick, red curls.
"Poor little William," Victor cooed. "Just look at where all your lovely ambition has gotten you."
The smoke filled the room slowly. Then bright orange flames began licking the edges of the door. William backed against the wall. He was trapped, and he was going to die. The air grew thicker. It caught in the boy's lungs. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He began to grow dizzy, then sleepy. The last word he uttered before the darkness claimed him was always, "Mother."
He awoke sweating, gasping for breath; his shoulder and neck throbbing. O'Hara stood in the doorway holding a candlestick, a worried expression on his face.
The dragoon became suddenly aware of a terribly burning sensation in his right arm. Glancing to the side he found one of the surgeons working intently, wiping blood away from a small incision near the joint. Furious he jerked his arm away and sat up. The wound immediately began leaking blood again. Tavington's head spun, but anger prevented him from losing consciousness.
"Who ordered this!" he demanded of a shocked O'Hara.
"Do be still, sir," the surgeon begged.
Having had a previous experience with the effectives of massive blood loss, Tavington lay back down. The surgeon wiped away the excess blood again and began threading a rather large needle. Seeing the oversized sewing implement O'Hara winced, Tavington seemed unaffected.
"You had quite a fever, sir," O'Hara explained. "You've been in bed for three days, raving about all sorts of things. To be perfectly honest, sir, you gave us all quite a scare. No one thought you'd live, especially Dr. Greystone there."
"You do indeed have quite the constitution, sir. You must," he indicated the scars on Tavington's neck and shoulder, "to live through something like that."
"That's our Tav!" Ox, the giant of a dragoon exclaimed coming up behind O'Hara. "Here, have a pint!"
O'Hara took the drink and a cautious sip. Ale, he discovered, and very cheep ale at that.
They were silent while Dr. Greystone finished his sewing. O'Hara did his best to look away. He had always been repulsed by such things, but he was fascinated by Tavington's seeming immunity to pain. In truth, the dragoon commander had been in pain so much worse that this was barely verging on discomfort.
"There you are, sir," Greystone announced, repacking his supplies in a black medical bag. "I would recommend that you remain in bed for the next few da."
Tavington gave the doctor a look that informed him that such a thing would be entirely impossible.
"Very good, sir."
When he was gone, O'Hara stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind him.
"How are you feeling, sir?"
"I feel fine," Tavington replied, personally unable to believe that he had really been ill. He did, in fact, feel fine. There was a little dizziness from the blood letting but that was all.
"I'm glad, sir. I have arranged transportation to Calcutta. We should arrive within a few days if we leave tomorrow."
"Very good, O'Hara. Perhaps you aren't so worthless after all."
Ignoring the insult, O'Hara continued. "And that assassin, de Fleur, wants to speak with you."
"Is that all?"
"Yes, sir."
Tavington closed his eyes. "Are you armed, O'Hara?"
"Yes, sir," the general replied thinking it a strange question.
"Then I will see M.* de Fleur now."
*Yes, I do mean M. de Fleur, he is French after all.
Unable to control his anger, Lord Cornwallis brought his fist down on the desk so hard that the floor shook. The wine in Victor Alexander Carrenworth's glass, which was sitting on a nearby table, rippled lazily. The desk, however, was unaffected. It still stood a solid as the day it had been built. Some things are always constant. Some things are built to last.
"Why can't people be like that?" Lord Cornwallis wondered. "Why can't people be constant in their loyalties?"
He hit the desk again.
"Will you kindly cease with that absolutely pointless banging?" Victor snapped irritably, raising his blue eyes for a better look at the governor- general. "I have the most dreadful head ache and you are only making it worse."
"Forgive me, your lordship," Cornwallis said apologetically. "It's just that."
"O'Hara?" Carrenworth volunteered.
"Yes, O'Hara."
Victor had heard of O'Hara but hadn't met him until the Weeping Maiden had come upon the remains of the Green Dragoon's ship several days before. Overall he had been impressed, O'Hara carried himself with dignity despite the company he chose to associate with. He had a certain percentage of noble blood. The old Duke of Fairenvail had said he was the illegitimate son of some baron. The old man had never bothered with the names of barons, considering them too close to commoners. Though Victor imagined that being half-noble was better than being completely common. Tavingtons were completely common.
"He was your former aide, correct?" Victor asked, remembering the British Army organizational chart his father had forced him to memorize. How many hours of his mortality had he spent on that filthy chart?
The sun had been up for a couple of hours and the heat was just beginning to become oppressive. Lord Cornwallis peeled off his dress jacket.
"Yes, you could call him that. He was always so loyal, so eager to serve the crown. Now all of that talent has gone to waste. He's in the service of that. that."
"Barbarian?"
"Yes, precisely."
Victor sipped his wine and observed the governor-general over the rim of his glass. He looked very much the same as Victor remembered him. The Golden Dragoon had been ten, hiding in the small sitting room attached to his father's study, watching the scene unfold through the slightly opened door.
Despite the fact that there were many women who considered him the most handsome man in Britain, Victor Carrenworth had not been a pleasant-looking child. A miraculous transformation had seemingly occurred between the ages of sixteen and eighteen that made him the dashing duke that sat in the office of Governor-General Cornwallis. As a child he had a head that was altogether too large for his body and a pair of too large eyes to go with it. His pale complexion was subject to producing a dreadfully thick crop of freckles regardless of how little time he spent out of doors.
"So, we agree then?" his father asked, winding his serpentine body around the chair where Lord Cornwallis was sitting.
"Yes, my lord. He is the one responsible for what happened to my dear niece, Eleanor, so many years ago."
Victor Alexander Carrenworth V toyed a bit with the golden dragon pendant he always wore. "Then you will see to it that this Tavington never achieves any sort of military glory for as long as he serves under you?"
"Yes, my lord. I will see to it personally. If not for you, seeing as I don't believe in this ridiculous holy war. it's little more than a feud, then for Eleanor."
That was all of the conversation he had seen before being whisked back upstairs by his dreadfully overprotective nursemaid, but he had stowed away the information in one of the many small compartments that made up his massive brain, in the event that it would ever prove advantageous.
Deciding the time was right, the governor-general was in a sufficiently poor mood, the Golden Dragoon set his glass aside and met Cornwallis' gaze with his own.
"Forgive my saying this, and do not think me a traitor, but I must say that I find it absolutely appalling the way the government is treating you."
"What do you mean?" Cornwallis asked rather disinterested, his mind still caught up in thinking about O'Hara.
"I mean simply this. You are General Lord Cornwallis, and they treat you as though you were an ignorant child. They send this Tavington, a commoner, to supervise your work. As a fellow aristocrat, I am appalled!"
These statements somehow managed to pierce through the swirling turmoil and into the governor-general's brain. He looked at the duke with renewed affection.
"Do you mean that?"
"It would be an insult to your dignity for me to lie to you, and trust me, my dear Lord Cornwallis, the last thing I want to do insult anyone's dignity. I know how it feels. That is what this whole thing is about, after all. Dignity. Though there are those who consider the ancient struggle between the Golden and Green Dragoons nothing more than a petty feud, I see it as something more. I see it as a struggle centered at the very core of English society. It is, fundamentally, a struggle between the nobility and the peasants who must be kept in their place. I do not oppose Tavington because of a conflict between brothers that occurred in generations past. I do so to ensure the superiority of the few. To maintain the universal truth that some where born to rule and other were born to follow. Men like you and I, dear Cornwallis, were born to lead and as leaders were are trusted with the sacred obligation to maintain stability, to maintain the order of things as they should be, not as men like Tavington desire them."
The words had been exactly what the governor-general had wanted to hear. Victor smiled almost unnoticeably, impressed by his own performance.
"Well," Cornwallis said after allowing the speech a while to soak in. "You most certainly are not your father."
Victor smiled, very much prepared to continue.
* * *
The first full night of sleep that Gen. William Tavington had been granted in the past week was interrupted by the nightmare. He often wondered about the strange dream, which he had at first attributed to his brief dependence upon opium, but now knew to have more truth than he would have liked.
It was exactly what the interior of a sanitarium looked like. He had spent several days in one when he was nine. William Tavington XII had gone insane, some said it was grief, others said it was hereditary, and still others whispered of darker things. It was where he had died, locked away in one of those wretched places, to prevent him from hurting anyone else.
The doctor who owned the place, whose name Tavington no longer remembered (perhaps another aftereffect of the drug), and his wife had been a rarity in the world, genuinely thoughtful people but only when it came to sane children. The boy had lived with them for a week, the length of time it took his Aunt Morganna to travel to London. He had seen very little of the sanitarium aside from damp stone walls and locked doors. There was the screaming though, and not seeing the sort of beings that could produce such mournful cries allowed his imagination the full run of the grotesque and horrible.
"Such things," the doctor's wife had said, "are not suitable for the eyes of innocent children."
As though I was ever innocent, Tavington thought. The dream was always the same as the first time he had experienced it, during the early, very painful, part of his recovery. He was nine years-old again, a neglected little shadow with the eyes of one who had experienced too much in too short a time.
He didn't know who the man was who led him through the dismal hallways. He didn't have a face; he was just a voice, and a body that ended in a neck with a white lace collar and a pendant in the shape of a golden dragon. The walls were made of roughly cut stone, the mortar between them worn away by moisture and the thick green moss that grew in sporadic little patches. They would pass various doors form behind which emanated the most blood- curling of screams. The man kept a hand firmly on William's shoulder. Whoever he was, he was wearing red gloves. William had seen many colors of gloves, but they were usually various shades of black and brown. Red was an oddity.
"Do you know why your father is here?" the man asked.
"Cause he killed a bunch of people," William would reply automatically, trying to suppress the flood of bloody images that washed over his eyes.
They would pass many of the doors lining the hallway, doors made of solid wood with tiny windows set with thick metal bars. Then they would come to a hallway even darker than the previous ones. The man would remove his hand from William's shoulder and bit him, "Go forward and look."
The windows were set so high in the doors that the boy had to stand on tip toe to peer inside.
The room on the right was inhabited by a man who was always praying. He had numerous self-inflicted cuts peppering his exposed flesh. The inhabitant of this room was the most easily recognizable, Capt. Henry Bordon.
Directly across the hall, in the room on the left, lived what was left of the two Carrenworth sisters, Anna and Karenna. There was little left of Karenna besides a full skeleton of fleshless bones. Anna stood in a corner, her blond hair a mess of knots and tangles, blood dripping eternally from the gashes across her wrists.
Then there was the final door, a door that opened of its own will. A door that once opened young William found himself on the other side of. The dream was always sketchy at this point. He wasn't quite sure how he had come to be locked in the room at the end of the hall. He hadn't walked in and the man with red gloves certainly hadn't shoved him in. All he knew was that he was locked in and there was nothing to do but bang on the door. It didn't budge. It never would.
William got up on his tip-toes so he could see outside of the little window. There was the familiar face, the face he had never been able to put a name to until six months ago. It was the face of Victor Alexander Carrenworth framed by his thick, red curls.
"Poor little William," Victor cooed. "Just look at where all your lovely ambition has gotten you."
The smoke filled the room slowly. Then bright orange flames began licking the edges of the door. William backed against the wall. He was trapped, and he was going to die. The air grew thicker. It caught in the boy's lungs. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He began to grow dizzy, then sleepy. The last word he uttered before the darkness claimed him was always, "Mother."
He awoke sweating, gasping for breath; his shoulder and neck throbbing. O'Hara stood in the doorway holding a candlestick, a worried expression on his face.
The dragoon became suddenly aware of a terribly burning sensation in his right arm. Glancing to the side he found one of the surgeons working intently, wiping blood away from a small incision near the joint. Furious he jerked his arm away and sat up. The wound immediately began leaking blood again. Tavington's head spun, but anger prevented him from losing consciousness.
"Who ordered this!" he demanded of a shocked O'Hara.
"Do be still, sir," the surgeon begged.
Having had a previous experience with the effectives of massive blood loss, Tavington lay back down. The surgeon wiped away the excess blood again and began threading a rather large needle. Seeing the oversized sewing implement O'Hara winced, Tavington seemed unaffected.
"You had quite a fever, sir," O'Hara explained. "You've been in bed for three days, raving about all sorts of things. To be perfectly honest, sir, you gave us all quite a scare. No one thought you'd live, especially Dr. Greystone there."
"You do indeed have quite the constitution, sir. You must," he indicated the scars on Tavington's neck and shoulder, "to live through something like that."
"That's our Tav!" Ox, the giant of a dragoon exclaimed coming up behind O'Hara. "Here, have a pint!"
O'Hara took the drink and a cautious sip. Ale, he discovered, and very cheep ale at that.
They were silent while Dr. Greystone finished his sewing. O'Hara did his best to look away. He had always been repulsed by such things, but he was fascinated by Tavington's seeming immunity to pain. In truth, the dragoon commander had been in pain so much worse that this was barely verging on discomfort.
"There you are, sir," Greystone announced, repacking his supplies in a black medical bag. "I would recommend that you remain in bed for the next few da."
Tavington gave the doctor a look that informed him that such a thing would be entirely impossible.
"Very good, sir."
When he was gone, O'Hara stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind him.
"How are you feeling, sir?"
"I feel fine," Tavington replied, personally unable to believe that he had really been ill. He did, in fact, feel fine. There was a little dizziness from the blood letting but that was all.
"I'm glad, sir. I have arranged transportation to Calcutta. We should arrive within a few days if we leave tomorrow."
"Very good, O'Hara. Perhaps you aren't so worthless after all."
Ignoring the insult, O'Hara continued. "And that assassin, de Fleur, wants to speak with you."
"Is that all?"
"Yes, sir."
Tavington closed his eyes. "Are you armed, O'Hara?"
"Yes, sir," the general replied thinking it a strange question.
"Then I will see M.* de Fleur now."
*Yes, I do mean M. de Fleur, he is French after all.