by Mary Balogh
Arbitrary rules had been set for the wrestling. In each bout, the contestant who could send his opponent sprawling full length into the mud three separate times was the winner. Mud being what it was, it was not easy for any man to keep his footing in it for very long. The first round of bouts was over within ten minutes, but they were minutes of intense excitement for the crowd of spectators, who roared and squealed and groaned and cheered every time one of the men went sprawling and splashing in the mud. All eight were covered with it from head to toe before the round was over-and all eight went dashing off to swim in the lake before the semifinal round began among the four winners.
“Ah, this brings back happy memories of childhood summers, does it not, Clarence?” Jasper said rather loudly. “We had good times, though they were often happier for you than for me.”
Clarence looked at him suspiciously.
It was not difficult to draw the attention of people who were merely waiting for the fun of the mud wrestling to resume. A number of people half turned to listen.
“Sir Clarence Forester,” Jasper explained to them, “was younger than I, but he was always somehow more nimble and sure of foot. If ever we climbed a tree, it was always I who fell out and tore my clothes. And if ever we climbed to the balustrade on the roof of the house-it was considered unsafe for boys and so was forbidden, of course-it was always I who was not fast enough to get down before being caught.”
He laughed.
So did a good number of the people close to them.
So did Clarence.
“But it was always your idea to climb, Jasper,” he said. “It was only right that you were the one to be punished.”
“And so it was,” Jasper said, and laughed again.
Jasper had fallen out of the tree because he had dared Clarence to follow him up, and Clarence, standing on the ground, had pulled at his heel-before running home to tell on him. Jasper had been caught up on the balustrade because Clarence had run away and bolted the door leading down before running to tell on him.
Once a weasel, always a weasel.
The wrestlers were back for the next round. They had all learned something from the first round. This one lasted much longer as the slimy brown figures of the wrestlers pulled and pushed and clawed at one another and struggled to maintain their own balance. The crowd shrieked and moaned and cheered and jeered through it all. But inevitably there were just two men left standing in the end.
There was another break in the action while the four men loped off to dive into the lake again.
“Some of these men,” Jasper said loudly enough for a large number of people to hear, “have about as much sense of balance as I have-which is not a great deal at all. Do you remember the time, Clarence, when we wrestled in the boat and I ended up in the water while you were left standing solidly on your feet? I learned my lesson that time. I do not believe I ever wrestled with you again.”
He laughed.
So did a crowd of his guests.
“Yes, well, Jasper,” Clarence said, puffing out his chest and speaking loudly enough for their audience to hear, “my father saw to it that I had the proper instruction in all the manly sports at a young age. You always thought to get your way with brute force, but brute force is never a match for practiced skill.”
“Alas, that is true,” Jasper said.
He had been about to take the boat out without first going back to the house to change out of his good clothes and to get permission, which would doubtless have been denied. He had been standing in the boat, about to sit down, his back to the bank. Clarence, standing solidly on the bank, had taken an oar and tipped him in.
“What other sports did you learn, Sir Clarence?” Hortense Dubois asked. “You must be very good indeed if you can defeat Lord Montford. He has a reputation for winning everything he tries-or so Mr. Gladstone was telling us just yesterday, was he not, Marianne?”
“Well,” Clarence said, “I am handy enough with my fives, Miss Dubois. I have gone a few rounds with Gentleman Jackson himself.”
“With Gentleman Jackson,” a young man from the village said. “I have heard of him. He is said to be one of the best.”
“Not one of the best, young man,” Clarence said. “The very best.”
“Clarence is too modest, Miss Dubois,” Jasper said, “to tell you how good he is at fencing. I take it you are still as good at it as you used to be, Clarence?”
“Well-” Clarence said.
Jasper clapped a hand on his shoulder again.
“Now don’t be modest,” he said. He grinned about him. A large crowd was listening now, including-at some distance-a wide-eyed Katherine. “Remember the afternoon when you routed me in every single bout? And at the time you had only just started learning. I would say it was a good thing the rapiers were tipped or I would have looked like a fountain of blood. Sorry, ladies, that is not a pleasant image, is it?”
“Oh, do tell us about it, Lord Montford,” Miss Fletcher begged. “I love to watch two gentlemen fencing. There is no more manly sight.”
“I simply could not get past Clarence’s guard,” Jasper said. “Yet he could get past mine with ease every time. It was really quite lowering for me-but a grand display by Clarence. I daresay he was his fencing master’s star pupil.”
“Well,” Clarence said, “he did say I was the best he had ever had, but he had been teaching for only five years or so at that time. Perhaps later he discovered someone who was better.”
“I most certainly doubt it,” Jasper said with a sigh.
“Devil take it,” Merton said, exchanging a pointed look with Jasper, “if we had known Sir Clarence was coming, Monty, fencing could have been added as a sport for today. Is it too late?”
“I have no rapiers in the house,” Jasper said. “You do not have any with you by any chance, Clarence, do you?”
“I do not,” Clarence said, sounding rather as if he had almost swallowed his tongue. “Unfortunately,” he added.
“Very fortunately for me,” Jasper said with a laugh. “Of course, you were just as good with an oar.”
“One can hardly fence with oars, Jasper,” Clarence said, and looked about him, smiling at the laughter his words provoked.
“It would have to be something more creative than simple fencing,” Jasper said. “Not a jousting match with oars while standing in the boats-that would put too severe a strain on my lamentably poor sense of balance. Although having to keep one’s balance would add spice to such a jousting match, would it not? What is a little more solid than boats but not quite as solid as the ground?”
The head groom-the only person whom Jasper had taken into his confidence-spoke up on cue.
“There are these planks, my lord,” he said, pointing to them. “The ones we set across the mud pit so that we could get right over it to add more water. They are eight inches wide.”
“You are suggesting, Barker,” Jasper said, aghast, “that Sir Clarence and I stand on one of those planks each-over the mud-jousting with oars? When I am wearing a white shirt?”
“It is a mad-” Clarence began, equally aghast.
“And against a star fencer?” Jasper added.
“I will wager, Monty,” Merton said, looking very deliberately at him, “that you cannot win a bout but will be tipped ignominiously into the mud.”
“Now wait a minute,” Jasper said, holding up a hand. “This is foolish. I wish I had not said anything about Clarence’s fencing skills. Much as I find any wager hard to resist, this one-”
“I will wager against you too, Jasper,” Uncle Stanley said, looking at him with narrowed eyes.
And suddenly there was a chorus of voices, all urging this impromptu jousting bout between Lord Montford and Sir Clarence Forester. The two wrestlers who were returning from the lake ready for the final bout were almost forgotten.
Jasper held up a hand.
“Now wait a minute here,” he said again. “For very pride’s sake I will feel forced to take on the c
hallenge and suffer a proper dunking in the mud for my pains. But perhaps Clarence is more sensible. Indeed, I am sure he is. And perhaps he does not allow pride to cloud his judgment as much as I do. Perhaps he will not mind if half the guests here believe he must have lost the skills he used to have. What do you say, Clarence? Do say no, old chap.”
“If any nephew of mine proves to be such a sniveling coward,” a thoroughly irritated voice said from the crowd, “I swear I will disown him.”
Seth Wrayburn!
“Uncle Seth!” Lady Forester said. “Can you not see what is happening here? Do you not see that Jasper is deliberately-”
“Silence, woman,” Wrayburn said. “Clarence? What is it to be?”
Clarence attempted nonchalance, but Jasper could see that the hands he clasped behind his back were trembling.
“If Jasper insists upon taking a mud bath and humiliating himself before all his houseguests and neighbors,” he said, “then there is nothing I can do to stop him, is there?”
“Clarence,” his mother wailed.
He threw her a drowning look, but she was powerless to save him.
Clarence had had his mother with him on the occasion of that ridiculous fencing match, when he was ten and Jasper was thirteen. Jasper, who had never had a fencing lesson in his life or ever even watched the sport, had lunged at him a number of times and would have speared his spine via his stomach each time if the rapiers had not been capped. But each time the hit was declared to be an illegal one. There were more rules in fencing, it had appeared, than there were stars in the sky. Clarence, in the meanwhile, had pranced about him like a damned flat-footed ballerina, and every time his waving rapier had whistled within a few inches of a contemptuous Jasper, his mother had declared it a hit and a wondrously skilled one at that-as well as being squarely within the rules, of course.
Everyone’s attention turned to the wrestling, which was a worthy final and lasted all of ten minutes before Lenny Manning tipped Willy Tufts over his shoulder and headfirst into the mud to score a three-to-two victory.
The crowd went wild, Katherine presented Lenny with the ten-guinea first prize, laughing as she held her skirts well clear of him while she did so, and Lenny tossed the coins to his sweetheart before dashing off to the lake to wash and into the boathouse to don dry clothes. He would be the hero of the village for weeks to come, Jasper did not doubt.
The tug-of-war was to have been next as a grand finale to the fete. But no one had forgotten the jousting bout, and Barker stepped forward as soon as Lenny had disappeared to set the two specially cut planks across the mud-there had been no need to add more water to the mud, of course, because water flowed there from the lake. A few other men helped him to position them a suitable distance apart and to make sure that their ends were set firmly into the ground on either side.
There was a swell of excited anticipation.
Jasper removed his coat and his boots. Katherine had come to stand in front of him. She was looking steadily at him.
“Hold my coat, if you will, my love,” he said. “It would be a pity to ruin it. I would not need to remove either it or my boots, of course, if I could only be confident of not landing in the mud. Clarence need feel no misgivings, alas, though he may want to be overcautious anyway. Those boots would never be the same, would they, if he went in.”
“If he removes them,” Merton said, “he will be telling us that he is not so confident after all and I might change my wager. But I think my money is safe.”
“I have every confidence in the world,” Clarence said, and the silly idiot walked to the edge of the mud hole dressed in all his Bond Street finery.
Barker was fetching two oars.
“Whoever can knock the other off the plank and into the mud is the winner, then?” Jasper asked of no one in particular as he stood at the edge of the hole and frowned down into it. “I will try to make the bout last as long as ten seconds, but I cannot promise. If Clarence was that good as a boy, one can only imagine what he is like now. Should we perhaps just proceed to the tug-of-war after all?”
There was a loud chorus of protests, and Jasper took an oar from Barker’s hand, stepped up onto one of the planks, and crossed it to the middle. Clarence followed him on the other plank. He almost lost his footing even before he was in position. What an anticlimax that would have been!
A hush fell over the crowd.
“Get set,” Barker said.
Jasper raised his oar and touched it to Clarence’s.
The gun fired.
Clarence swung wildly and would have taken Jasper’s head off if the latter had not ducked out of the way. Jasper had to reach out smartly with his oar to hold it against Clarence’s side and prevent him from falling off his plank. It would not do for him simply to fall in.
It was a game of thrust and parry for a while-or a game of cat and mouse-with Jasper blocking wild swings and administering taps and pokes that were sufficient to send Clarence swaying from side to side and back and forth and to cause his eyes to bulge with fright but were not designed to pitch him in too soon.
The crowd might as well be given a decent show to watch.
And Clarence might as well be made to wait before being put out of his misery-or into his misery.
But the fool must have thought that Jasper was finding it impossible to dislodge him. He grinned suddenly and began his silly dancing to impress the crowd. He held his oar in one hand like a rapier and prepared to spear Jasper in the stomach with it.
Jasper lowered his own oar as if in surrender, nudged Clarence’s aside with one elbow, and caught his opponent just below one prancing knee.
Clarence performed a few desperate steps that were in no way balletic, flailed with both arms as if he were a windmill, roared with alarm, and then shrieked like a girl as he fell forward between the two planks and landed facedown and spread-eagled in the mud.
There was one companion shriek from the crowd-probably from Lady Forester-and one jubilant roar from everyone else.
Jasper discovered that he was liberally spattered with mud.
He found Katherine with his eyes and made her an elegant bow.
“For you, my love,” he said aloud, though he doubted she or anyone else actually heard the words.
She read them on his lips, though.
She smiled dazzlingly.
“Thank you,” he read on her lips. “My love,” she added.
Jasper turned his attention to the brown, slimy creature that was wrestling with itself in the mud below him, presumably in an attempt to gain a footing. He leaned down and possessed himself of one of Clarence’s slippery hands.
“Come on, old chap,” he said. “I’ll help you out and we will go for a swim. You are a good sport.”
Clarence pawed at his muddy face with an equally muddy hand while the roar died down around them.
“That was deliberate, Jasper,” he wailed. “I will never forgive you for this. Mama will never forgive you. Great-Uncle Seth will never-”
“Prunella,” Seth Wrayburn said in thunderous tones, “I am not master here and so cannot give orders. But I would strongly suggest you take your sniveling apology for a son once he has cleaned himself up and convey him back to Kent. And it is my fervent wish that I never have to set eyes on either one of you ever again.”
There was a smattering of applause from those gathered about him.
“Come on, Clarrie,” Jasper said for his ears only. “Have some dignity. At least I have not broken your nose again. Let us go and get cleaned up before the tug-of-war.”
“I cannot swim!” Clarence wailed-loudly enough to raise something of a jeer from the bank.
The tassels on his Hessians looked like two drowned rats clinging to the slime of his boots.
26
“HAPPY?” Jasper asked, smiling down at Charlotte as they waited at the top of the long line that was forming for the opening set of country dances at the ball.
She had been toasted more than once at
dinner and wished a happy birthday more times than anyone could count in the course of the day. And now there was the final grand moment of celebration as she led the first dance of the evening with her brother.
“I am,” she said. “Oh, I am, Jasper. I do not think anyone could possibly be happier than I am at this moment. I am so very glad that you and Kate between you were able to persuade Aunt Prunella to stay until tomorrow. Uncle Seth spoke out of turn after you pitched Clarence into the mud. He deserved it, of course, and I am very glad indeed that you did it-it was quite, quite splendid-but he is my cousin and Aunt Prunella is my aunt and I really could not bear any great unpleasantness on my birthday. Do you think Clarence really has a headache?”
“I would not be surprised,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “all the flowers, Jasper. The ballroom looks like a garden. And it smells like one too. And look at how the mirrors multiply them all many times over.”
He smiled at her.
Dressed all in white, she looked delicate and very young-something that would doubtless dismay her were he to say it out loud. All her dances for the evening were already spoken for, though.
Next year she was going to be mobbed by suitors. He and Katherine were going to have a busy time of it keeping an eye on her.
“I am glad you have been able to reassure me about Lord Merton,” she said, glancing at the orchestra, which was merely awaiting his signal to begin playing. But a few couples were still joining the line.
Katherine had had a word with him and he had had a word with Charlotte. How he would have despised such maneuverings even just a few weeks ago!
Charlotte liked Merton exceedingly well, she had told him. Jasper suspected that she was even a little in love with him-she had compared him to the sun again. But she did not really want him to be in love with her. She wanted to be free to enjoy the excitement of her first Season next year. And she still intended to reach the age of twenty-clearly some sort of magic age to her-before fixing her choice upon any particular gentleman.