The Amazing Marriage | Page 9

Who, then,
was the gentleman who stopped the chariot, with his three mounted
attendants, on the road to the sea, on the heath by the great
Punch-Bowl?

That has been the question for now longer than half a century, in fact
approaching seventy mortal years. No one has ever been able to say for
certain.
It occurred at six o'clock on the summer morning. Countess Fanny must
have known him,--and not once did she open her mouth to breathe his
name. Yet she had no objection to talk of the adventure and how Simon
Fettle, Captain Kirby's old ship's steward in South America, seeing
horsemen stationed on the ascent of the high road bordering the Bowl,
which is miles round and deep, made the postillion cease jogging, and
sang out to his master for orders, and Kirby sang back to him to look to
his priming, and then the postillion was bidden proceed, and he did not
like it, but he had to deal with pistols behind, where men feel weak, and
he went bobbing on the saddle in dejection, as if upon his very heart he
jogged; and soon the fray commenced. There was very little parleying
between determined men.
Simon Fettle was a plain kindly creature without a thought of malice,
who kept his master's accounts. He fired the first shot at the foremost
man, as he related in after days, 'to reduce the odds.' Kirby said to
Countess Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she
would be afraid, 'The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to mangle,'
for they had been arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on the
Continent, and Simon Fettle to do the washing. She could not help
laughing outright. But when the Old Buccaneer was down striding in
the battle, she took a pistol and descended likewise; and she used it, too,
and loaded again.
She had not to use it a second time. Kirby pulled the gentleman off his
horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess
Fanny to crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor
gentleman in the breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and
Simon and he disarmed the servant who had fired. One was insensible,
one flying, and those two on the ground. All in broad daylight; but so
lonely is that spot, nothing might have been heard of it, if at the end of
the week the postillion who had been bribed and threatened with
terrible threats to keep his tongue from wagging, had not begun to talk.

So the scene of the encounter was examined, and on one spot, carefully
earthed over, blood- marks were discovered in the green sand. People
in the huts on the hill- top, a quarter of a mile distant, spoke of having
heard sounds of firing while they were at breakfast, and a little boy
named Tommy Wedger said he saw a dead body go by in an open
coach that morning; all bloody and mournful. He had to appear before
the magistrates, crying terribly, but did not know the nature of an oath,
and was dismissed. Time came when the boy learned to swear, and he
did, and that he had seen a beautiful lady firing and killing men like
pigeons and partridges; but that was after Charles Dump, the postillion,
had been telling the story.
Those who credited Charles Dump's veracity speculated on dozens of
great noblemen--and gentlemen known to be dying in love with
Countess Fanny. And this brings us to another family.
I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we
have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of
trying to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she
had bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.
About eleven miles distant, as the crow flies and a bold huntsman will
ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the
mounds and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who
intermarried with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the
wealthiest of the old county families until Curtis Fakenham entered
upon his inheritance. Money with him was like the farm-wife's dish of
grain she tosses in showers to her fowls. He was more than what you
call a lady-killer, he was a woman-eater. His pride was in it as well as
his taste, and when men are like that, indeed they are devourers!
Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose
offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain
Kirby's children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear. And these two
brothers were sons of Geoffrey Fakenham,