The Ballad of Gregoire Darcy (34 page)

“Could get in trouble,” he whispered.

“But you would win!”

That was enough incentive for Mugin, who passed her to Nadezhda. “Don't get yourself killed. Because if you do, we're running. We're not taking your corpse with us.”

“Ha. I know.” He stepped into the ring, still mostly covered.

This was not the kind of place where they wrote down (or even asked) the names of the challengers. Mugin got into the same pose as the champion—two balled fists up in front of his face, and the bets were being shouted against him, especially when they saw him in stilt sandals.

“Listen, Dutchman, I ain't gonna be respons'ble fer ya,” said the champion.

Doing his best impression of an English accent, Mugin said, “Me neither.”

“Well, little man, let's see what you can do!” said the announcer, and rang the bell.

The champion gave Mugin a moment—perhaps he felt like being a bit nice—but Mugin did nothing. So the man—apparently his name was Harry, or so the announcer called him—charged forward.

That was when Mugin dropped his hands behind his back and fell to the floor, holding himself up by his palms and letting his raised foot meet the approaching fist. Knuckles hit metal and the crunching was audible. Mugin pushed himself up, taking the fighter down with his foot, and stood over him. “Give up,” he whispered.
“Or I'll break both your hands.”

“That wasn't fair!”

“You are bigger than me. I do what I can.”

Harry looked up at the man he was facing, but the light obscured much of his face. He pulled away, and Mugin gave him a chance to get to his feet. One arm he held up, but it was bloodied and red. The other was still fine.

“Round one for the Dutchman!” said the announcer. “Round two!”

Mugin still held his arms behind his back as the bell rang. He stood there, unmoving, before his opponent. The crowd was torn between booing and waiting to see what the wily foreigner would do. Mugin was much smaller than his opponent, and would have been a whole head shorter if not for his
geta
shoes. He was not muscular. He did not have a lot of weight.

“Fight like a man!” Mugin said nothing. He waited. He was in front of Harry, but when the muscled Harry charged, he wasn't there. He leaped on his shoulders, and then over him, landing on the ground as Harry went into the audience. There were no barriers, so it was not unheard-of for the first row to get injured. Harry barely had time to reorient himself before Mugin kicked one of his legs out from under him at the knee. Mugin grabbed the man's hair so he would not fall forward onto some smaller audience member and tugged his hair so he fell backward, flat onto the dirty floor with a thud. Mugin put a shoe on his chest again. “Hurt me, not audience.” He kicked him, and Harry rolled away. Slowly, he got to his feet.

The announcer approached Mugin. “Look, Mister, if you can understand English, you have to use your hands. All right? None of this foot stuff.”

Mugin kicked off his sandals. Only then did Harry get back into stance. This time, Mugin drew one of his hands up behind him and the other out flat in front of him, palm up.

“Man, I'm never goin' to Dutchland!”

“Fight like an Englishman!”

Mugin ignored his detractors and stayed in position. This time, when Harry came charging, he stepped sideways, caught the man's arm, and twisted the wrist so hard it turned Harry over and he hit the ground again. Mugin towered over him.

“All right!” Harry shouted. Mugin offered him a hand, and he painfully took it, as one hand was broken and the other wrist badly sprained. Compared with how the previous combatant had fared against Harry, beaten to a pulp in the head, Harry was still relatively intact.

Mugin bowed to a dizzy Harry, and the announcer raised Mugin's arm. “Winner!” There were both cheers and jeers, and after collecting his prize money, Mugin made a hasty exit while Nadezhda and Georgie made their own. They met up half a mile away, and began a more leisurely walk back to the house.

“You count,” he said, handing the pile of bills and the coins to Nadezhda. “Well, Jorgi-chan, what did I do right?”

“You threw him down three times!”

“And how did I do that?”

“With your legs!” As they reached the edge of the small estate, Mugin stopped. “How did I really beat him? I was smaller than he was. I was weaker than he was. I was shorter than he was.”

“You got out of the way.”

“Right, little
ookami,
” he said with a playful pat on her head. “The others, they stood up against him. One heavy object hitting another heavy object until one goes down—always the smaller one. Stupid gaijin. If your opponent wants the wall behind you so badly, give it to him.” He leaned over. “You always remember that.”

“What if I'm fighting someone smaller than me?” He smiled. “Then just be kind.That poor person.”

Darcy felt something in the pit of his stomach as their little boat approached the island. After they had left for the Isle of Man, he
had felt pangs of remorse for subjecting Grégoire to this—no, for subjecting
himself
to this. The last time he had been here was when he was five and ten, but he remembered everything, for it seemed as if nothing had changed.

The solicitor was there to greet them on the bright fall morning. “Hello, Mr. Darcy. Mr. Bellamont. We've cleaned up the place—both for the sale, and for your own inspection. It had been closed up for years, so there was a bit of work to do.”

Behind them was the house, that long, strange one-level dwelling. The previous owner (before the Darcys) had just kept adding room after room, instead of building another level above. It was one long hallway all the way to the end, where his uncle had spent his days and nights.

“We brought in some food and a cook.You'll be staying how long?”

“Not more than a few days, at most,” Darcy said, already wanting to leave. “Thank you.”

In the immediate rooms they heard the cook singing to herself. She hurried out, curtsied to them, and asked them when they wanted dinner. Then she made herself scarce.

It was just room after room as Darcy opened the first set of doors to reveal a sitting room that had been recently dusted, but the furniture was as he vaguely remembered it. Was this the room he had sat in while his father talked with his uncle, undoubtedly about
him?
He could not remember. The next room looked the same, almost exactly—except for a pile of books in the corner that had not been dusted. “He liked to read,” he said to Grégoire.

The next room was the same, except that there were more books; all in piles, none on shelves. It was not a room meant for bookshelves, just another sitting room. How much sitting could a person do?

It went on and on. In each room were more books, to the point where there were actual cases of them, and furniture shoved aside to make space. Everything looked the same—they had changed
nothing, just abandoned it. There was even a chair overturned for some reason. Grégoire set it up properly before they moved on.

“This is it,” he said. “They might have cleared it out, I don't know.” But he opened the door, and discovered that they had not. They both stepped in, the silence impenetrable.

His uncle's room was exactly as he remembered it, except that there was no longer a mattress, just the wooden frame of the narrow bed. All the walls were bookshelves, except the one with the window, facing out to the sea. There were books piled up on the dresser, beside the bed, and under the bed—everywhere, as if he had just been finishing up a few novels the day before. But Gregory Darcy was long dead. There was a closet full of clothes, but they both coughed when the closet door was opened and the dust burst forth. The ancient garb of their father's generation hung before them, half eaten by moths.

“Brother,” Grégoire said. Darcy turned around. Grégoire focused on the desk before the window, where their uncle undoubtedly had sat for hours on end. He lifted the lid and opened it. Inside, aside from the pens and bottles of now-dried ink and the knickknacks, were piles and piles of paper, all filled with writing. Some were even in hand-bound notebooks. Grégoire picked up a bound one. The title read
November 1778—October 1779
. “He wrote.”

What mysteries were contained in there? Did he really want to know? Darcy avoided the question by instead opening the dresser drawers.Aside from the yellowed shirts and hair powder, there were portraits. “Look at this,” he said, calling Grégoire away from the journals. He held up two portraits, connected by a metal bracket. “Our father and uncle.” They looked very similar, with only their names inscribed on the back to identify them. Each one looked maybe one and ten or two and ten; they were about the same age as Geoffrey was now. Geoffrey resembled both of them, but Geoffrey also took after his mother in many ways.

Darcy looked down at the journal in Grégoire's hands. “Do you think he wanted someone to read them?”

“His death, he planned. He could have burned his writings beforehand if he chose.”

“Are you so sure he wanted them to be read?”

“No,” Grégoire said. “I wish to find out.”

CHAPTER 23

DARCY BUSIED HIMSELF with the solicitor for the rest of the morning and most of the early afternoon. He was willing to sell, but he needed time to remove some personal items from the property—boxes and boxes of books. He authorized the hiring of men to package them, and wrote a quick letter to his wife, saying that they were safely arrived and would be staying for perhaps a few days to finish up some business. Only after seeing that everything was in order did he return to his brother, who was still at the desk, papers piled everywhere.

“Our uncle was quite prolific,” Grégoire said. “Here.” He passed Darcy some yellowed parchment.

“Were I him,” Darcy said, “I would not want this made public.”

“We are hardly the public,” Grégoire said. “I am not proposing to paste it on the wall at Pemberley.” Looking up at Darcy, he reclaimed the papers. “You need not read them, Darcy.”

Darcy nodded numbly and left Grégoire alone as he returned to his sorting of the book collection.