By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

concrete way, the idea of femaleness had absorbed and fascinated young James Lindsay since he could remember. But there had been nothing to fix his curiosity upon. The aunties were too far away, and there were no cousins of a similar age close at hand to play with. And certainly no beauties, when he’d reached an age to appreciate them, in the world where he lived. The only women he ‘knew’ were creatures from literature. The covey of ageing, sexless and physically remote aunts, and the females among their pudding-faced progeny, really hadn’t counted.

Then he had moved to Glasgow, where the lowland ladies were very pretty and plentiful. But a wall of strict Presbyterian restraint surrounded them, precluding even the merest hint of social intercourse. The move did, however, reveal to him what an unprepossessing breed Highland women-folk had been. And then he arrived in Paris, where everything turned out to be permis. And no comparison made any sense.

Paris, where he had encountered Ségolène, Comtesse de Boufflers, a true beauty, and where he had found his way to the depth of her charms. The headiness of it all would have been enough to un-man the stoutest heart. For, as he was coming to realise, he was being un-manned, by every aspect of his current circumstance, so that every time he thought on it, it sucked the joy out of him.

‘I have been betrayed by love!’ he would exclaim aloud to himself, from time to time, when the weight of his own inexperience became too heavy. He was a young man, and keen to dramatise his own romantic tragedy. And of course, being the age he was, and entangled in all that luxury and emotion and sex, he had not the faintest idea what to do. All he knew was that he wasn’t turning out to be the man he’d always wanted to be, and he didn’t like it.

As for Ségolène, she’d started off being charmed by the way he looked at her, drank her in; this young man, so nakedly besotted. She was no stranger to that – but she was to the total lack of selfishness in him. My goodness, he’d been a lover without art or subtlety, but time went by and she discovered she wasn’t becoming bored as usual. Instead, she found herself basking in his attention, mesmerised by the sheer, unalloyed joy it seemed to give him attending to her considerable needs.

It had started off being amusing to her, the way he never seemed to tire, and then it became something different, when she realised this young man was taking his time getting to know her. How unfair for the boy she’d always dreamed of meeting when she was a girl, to come along, now, after marriage and the older, bloated, richer Comte de Boufflers. After she’d learned so much about the world. How thoughtless he was, to come dragging with him his youth and pureness of spirit and that something ineffable she’d always yearned for, but was now too jaded, too corrupt, to fall completely into its embrace.

These days, when he looked at her in that way she loved, all she knew was that somewhere, out there, there was a young woman he did not know yet, nor she him, who one day would get it all, instead of her. Unless, of course, she destroyed him first.

There was no salon that night. The sniping started early. It followed a familiar routine; his lack of conduct dissected; his lack of social ambition disdained. And she was damned if she was going to let him go swanning off again to the Café Procope to spend another evening drinking coffee and consorting with that disreputable little scribbler, Voltaire. She even told him he was getting fat. Which, needless to say, was not true.

‘Promise me sir, you will never swim in the sea,’ she’d said, ‘lest you emerge from the waves with harpoons protruding. Thrust there in error by some misguided whaler confused by your commodious girth!’

There was to be a salon the following night. ‘You will have to wear a corset, if one can be found that will encompass you,’ she said. And then a detailed itinerary of the conduct expected of him followed.

In nature, in human engineering, so in human society, there are structures. When they fail, they seldom give any warning, so one might prepare oneself for the catastrophe about to unfold. Façades might be maintained, but behind them weakening forces will have long been at work, chipping, eroding, exhausting … until everything holding it all together is down to but a thread, a filament.

And so it was with James and his comtesse that night. No special reason, no outrageous excess, just a tiredness in his restraint. He decided, this time, he would reply. Something he seldom did.

‘Madame, sometimes I fear you presume too much.’ That was all he said, and not even loudly or with menace.

‘Presume, sir?’ she whipped back, steel in her voice. ‘And why should I not? I pay for you!’

*

Crawford and Dillon were in deep confab, in a booth at the back of Procope’s, one of Saint Germain’s more popular coffee shops. Crawford looked up and saw James Lindsay come barging through the door, like a man on a mission. The young man briefly scanned the crowded room, spotted them and came immediately to their table, sitting down without waiting to be invited. He was in uniform, and Crawford couldn’t help but notice the young man was toting a sabretache attached to his sword belt. The ’tache looked unusually stuffed for a mere night’s carousing.

‘I have a service to request, Mr Crawford and Mr Dillon,’ said James, without preamble. ‘One that you may find stretches the understanding of our friendship.’

‘And good evening to you, young James,’ said Dillon, archly.

James’ fingers drummed on the table. ‘I make such a sweeping statement, sirs, as my request