No Good Deed 88 (WMDN)
By Ewan
- 221 reads
I had woken with worse headaches in the past, but never without having earned it through debauchery, drink or similar diversions. I lay in one of the hand-carts being pushed by a smirking Miss Pardoner and stern-faced Lapin. My transportation came to a halt when I sat upright and my bearers indicated that I should dismount.
‘The Indian?’
‘Gone. He left an arrow pointing the way.’
Lapin pointed himself, indicating the Mint at a distance of a about a mile.
‘How long was I… indisposed?’
I looked to Miss Pardoner for answer, but it was Lapin who replied,
‘’Bout an hour more than the rest of us.’
Ellen Pardoner’s lips flattened and it was clear she was – once more – trying to suppress a laugh at my expense.
We continued toward the rear of the Mint. My enquiry as to how we had found our way back was met with a shrug from Lapin and a saloon girl’s wink from Ellen. There was silence as we approached the rear of the Mint building. I could only assume that the others felt as disoriented as I, although I knew that they had not suffered the cranial inconvenience that I had. The large doors at the rear-entrance were still open and there was no immediate sign of Holzbein. We wheeled the carts into the courtyard.
Holzbein stood by the dilapidated barrows in one corner of the stone-flagged yard. I made to dash for the old man, but Miss Pardoner’s arm held me back. Lapin was looking keenly at the Mint’s last employee, but made no move. I began to speak, but Lapin held up a hand for silence, just as Holzbein toppled forward onto the dusty stones. Miss Pardoner was first to the corpse, for Holzbein had expired before our very eyes. She knelt and rolled the cadaver so that his face was uppermost. Lapin knelt beside her, while I preferred to keep my trousers free of dust. Despite this I noted that the deep furrows in Holzbein’s face had softened to mere tracery. His eyes,though red, stared upward to the heavens, if not to Paradise. He did look very pallid and I said as much to the others.
‘That is on account of the exsanguination.’ Miss Pardoner pointed at the pool of blood which seemed to have flowed out from a hole in the sole of Holzbein’s solitary boot. The upper part of his trouser leg was sodden with blood.
‘I hardly think someone stabbed him in the leg and left him to bleed.’
Ellen looked up,
‘They did not, Sir. Kindly remove his boot.’
It was a high boot of the kind favoured by the westerners and it came off most remarkably easily. So much so, that I fell in a heap onto the dust I had been trying to avoid. Furthermore, a large quantity of his vital fluid, hitherto contained in said boot, saturated my own apparel to the degree of his trouser leg.
‘Look at the man’s veins, Sir.’
Lapin and I peered closer at the late Holzbein’s lower limb. The veins were many, raised and angry. I looked at the Negro and shrugged.
Miss Pardoner’s exhalation was a measure of her exasperation,
‘Varicosity!’
I confess I felt that this might have been a word she had encountered on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, since it sounded quite as outlandish as “hornswoggle” or “pale-face”. She must have seen the disbelief writ large on my countenance, for she went on,
‘If untreated, a man might easily bleed to death at any moment. Professor Jedermann had a cousin who expired from the very same in Ghent. He showed me the sketches he made of the corpse. Those of his acquaintance in the medical sphere mocked him most roundly, but he claimed he had proven it beyond all doubt with some experiments on indigent seamen.’
Lapin looked up, but refrained from inquiry as to who Jedermann might be. I was glad of it, for I rarely cared to think of that lunatic. The polymath dwarf who had believed himself to have resurrected me until the very moment of his fiery demise in the ruins of Gibbous House. Even so, I was struck by just how much my own life had turned on first encountering Ellen Pardoner, although I was not sure whether I felt regret or gratitude.
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Comments
Such quality.
Such quality.
Parson Thru
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