Summary:  The second of a two-day what-happened-before, what-happened-in-between, and what-happened-later for the first season episode “The Last Trophy.”
Rating:   G (2,010 words)

Bonanza
~*~*~ Advent Calendar ~*~*~
* Day 21 *

The Last Trophy? – Part 2

The touch on Adam’s shoulder woke him at once. He unrolled himself from his blanket expecting to find Joe hovering above him, but to his disgust it was Lady Dunsford, persistant and unwanted. No question of kissing this time, thank heavens; he was able to deal with her as coolly and rationally as if it had been Joe asking some question tangentially critical to their situation. Perhaps that was how Lady Dunsford had regarded her conduct all along. Once he’d made his refusal unmistakable, she’d gone away. If only he could have done so earlier….

The memory of her brief kiss was still fresh and hot and humiliating–I don’t want I don’t want I DONT WANT hammering everything else flat, even though what he did want he still couldn’t have said. No doubt something like that had happened to Lord Dunsford as he faced the charging mountain lion. Not lack of courage, or he’d have turned and run. Just…trapped in the moment. Frozen. Oh, they had understood each other, once Lord Dunsford had begun to flay himself open later on.

Now it was obvious why even praise of his marksmanship burned Lord Dunsford’s soul like acid. If not for that reputation, he would not have been invited to the Crimea, would never have seen the battles that had destroyed his pleasure in “a good day’s sport.”

Adam might have left the comment, “That man passed out of existence five years ago,” to go by in silence, but there had been something so precise about the “five years” that he had to believe a specific event was involved. It took him longer than it should have to think of Tennyson’s poem, and the agreement of the dates. “Were you at the charge of the Light Brigade?” he finally asked.

“Only as an onlooker,” Dunsford answered wryly. “Although that might have been the worst place. Once you’re in a charge, your mind is on what you’re planning to do, and when a cannonball hits–well, that’s that. For most of them, anyway. Certainly for most of the horses. To make the return, riding with the guns still firing at your back and all the carnage spread before you…that had to take real courage.” The Englishman had shuddered. “But that’s not what troubles me now.”

“It’s not?” Adam said in honest surprise.

“You never heard about Inkerman? It was only eleven days later.”

“We weren’t following the war too closely, here in the Territory.”

“No, of course not,” Dunsford conceded. “Well, the trouble, you see, was that we were besieging Sebastopol, and in all honesty, our lines were overextended the whole time. The terrain was in our favor, as much as we could manage it, but of course the Russians knew the landscape far better than we did, knew where there might be weak points in our defenses. They also had a great many more soldiers–but we had the better guns. That’s why I was there at all…to assess the effect of our new rifles in combat. The army had never issued so many rifles to regular soldiers before this; it wasn’t clear the extra expense would be justified. Inkerman proved that it was. Inkerman proved a great many things.”

Adam nodded and left it to Dunsford to decide whether or not to continue.

“No one could see much, with the rain and the fog…the Russians wore gray overcoats, which blended in too well, but some of our men had greatcoats too, at least at first. Everywhere was confused. When the ammunition ran out–and of course it did–it went to bayonets on both sides. No one outdoes the British soldier when it comes to bayonet work, but the Russians came close. Too close. They targeted the officers by design, they never showed anyone mercy, and the noise…I will never forget the noise. I hear it again every time I shoulder a gun. If I’m facing a motionless target, I can push it aside, but not when the quarry is moving. Especially not if it’s charging. That’s what Beatrice can’t understand. I wouldn’t want her to.”

“If she ever went through something like that herself, I’m sure she’d understand.”

“Who could want to inflict something like that on anyone, let alone his wife?”

Who indeed, Adam conceded as he drifted back to sleep.

~*~*~

“Don’t do anything to attract his attention,” Lord Dunsford said urgently to his wife.

“You think I don’t have his attention already?” she replied, and went on with the meal he had saved for her.

However well-meant the Englishman’s warning had been, Adam knew it was the wrong advice–doubly wrong. It wasn’t just that trying to make her husband jealous had become second nature to the lady; it was that Adam suspected she was deliberately holding Belcher’s attention to prevent it from falling on the injured Adam, or on her husband. From the first moment the renegade had singled her out she’d done her best to keep him intrigued with a difficult mixture of disdain and what Belcher called “spunk,” while somehow also creating a sullen rapport with Touma, the stout Indian woman who looked after the camp. Perhaps Lady Dunsford was why all three prisoners were being fed and allowed to move around a little, even if under constant guard. Perhaps she was why they were still alive at all.

As the camp–with the continued exception of the gun-toting guards–settled down for the night, Adam’s mind drifted back to another part of the discussion he’d had on the second evening of their expedition, while his father’s friend had been doing his best to explain the inexplicable.

“Your wife said you’d been to India and Africa in the past few years–after you were in the Crimea. Why did you keep mounting these hunts?”

“Because I had to try…because those soldiers at Inkerman kept on fighting through it all….” Finally Lord Dunsford had pursed his lips and admitted, “But mostly, of course, because Beatrice wanted me to.”

Some response had seemed required. Adam managed, “Ah.”

“You won’t believe me, but she’s worth it.” A taut pause. “Worth every bit of trouble, absolutely.”

A faded cheerful memory had made Adam’s lips twitch. “Oh, I believe you…I’ve said the same thing to my father about a lady myself. Did he ever tell you I fought a duel over a sweetheart once–not a street draw-down, but a formal duel right outside Placerville?”

“What happened?”

“The other man fired at the word, and missed. I let him sweat for a minute or two, then shot in the air.”

“Deloping usually means admitting fault,” Marion said dryly. “Besides being forbidden by the Code Duello.”

Instead of feeling abashed, Adam had grinned. “I didn’t know that–either part. I’m not sure John Henry did either. I suppose we were both play-acting the whole time, though it felt serious enough to us then. He was reckoned the best assayer in town, so it wouldn’t really have done to kill him…she was that lovely, you see.”

“I see.” Marion had almost smiled himself. “And after the duel?”

Adam’s pleasant reverie had dispelled abruptly. “She–died. Not much later.”

Remembering that memory of a memory had the same chilling effect now. He might as well have been back in that Placerville jail cell after Sue Ellen’s murder; he was in no state to wrestle, had no chance to get hold of a gun, and had run out of ideas. Or, rather, his ideas chased themselves around in a hopeless circle. Marion didn’t think he could win–wasn’t sure he could fight, which was no state to take on a man like Belcher–but Belcher was steadily driving him to the point where his love for Beatrice would do what his own self-respect could not. He would come up to scratch because leaving Beatrice at Belcher’s mercy was intolerable; and, barring an act of God, Belcher would kill him. In Adam’s considered opinion, acts of God didn’t occur on demand. Shakespeare had said it himself, in Henry V: “Miracles are ceast.”

Marion deserved better. Beatrice deserved better. Heavens, poor old Touma deserved better. But he couldn’t see a way he could provide a better outcome.

And yet…the soldiers at Inkerman had fought on, even after their “better guns” had been reduced to nothing but shafts for bayonets. Marion was right, he supposed. All you can do is try….

~*~*~

Flat on his face, to all eyes hors de combat, Lord Dunsford felt limp and winded and strangely content. His body throbbed in unmentionable places; he couldn’t tell if he had two broken ribs or four, but his mind was clear and his vision unimpeded. Time flowed in the familiar slow, silent way of absolute crisis. Old “oak-jaw” Marion, who’d never been knocked out by a haymaker to the chin in all his years of schoolboy boxing, who could make one lungful of air last for three minutes or more, still had it. Or some of it, anyway.

Not five feet away stood Adam, still as a hunting cat, intent on everything around him. Adam, who could pounce like a tiger, who could take a snap shot and make it count.

Between them was Belcher’s second-in-command, admirably focussed on his duty. Keep the prisoners daunted, unable to interfere. Make it clear even a twitch could summon forth a shotgun blast that, at this range, couldn’t miss. Couldn’t fail to kill. The closer he came, the more certain the outcome.

Their guard knew something was about to happen, but couldn’t guess what.

There was nothing on earth but the three of them.

One more step, he silently urged the Indian. Just one more step….

And, miraculously, it came.

~*~*~

The following Christmas (well, Epiphany, to be precise) brought not one card from England to the Ponderosa, but a packet of six. Each of the Cartwrights had one to himself, along with one for Hop Sing, and one to pin up in the bunkhouse for all the hands to enjoy. Considerable thought had gone into each card’s selection: the ranch hands had a lavishly decorated Christmas tree, Hop Sing a gigantic roast turkey beside a flame-wreathed plum pudding, Joe a prancing horse (its connection to the holiday unclear, but unquestionably well suited to the recipient), Hoss a cheeky English robin, Adam the wise men following their star, and an illustration of “I saw three ships come sailing in” for Ben, presumably in reference to his maritime past.

Inside each card, increasing the necessary postage quite considerably, was a hand-tinted carte de visite. From Ben’s card they learned that Lord Dunsford had taken up photography as a hobby, so it came as no surprise that three of the images showed himself, Lady Dunsford, and a charming family group including all three of their children. Unlike his commercial counterparts, however, the lord did not limit himself to making studio portraits. “Beatrice and I challenge each other to find novel places to set up our cameras, and unusual subjects to capture,” he explained, and so Joe’s card contained a blurred but lively impression of racehorses assembling for the start, Adam had one of a centuries-old oak tree on the Dunsford estate, and Hoss–to his great delight–received a startlingly clear rendition of an albino peacock with lacy tail feathers spread in a perfect semi-circle. This one alone had been left in its original black-and-white. Lady Dunsford evidently took pleasure in embellishing the rest of her husband’s prints, using a delicately restrained touch on the portraits, while turning the other two scenes into miniature works of art which begged to be examined under a viewing-glass.

The written elements of the cards were equally personalized, but it was Adam’s card that contained the most remarkable news.

“I’m sure you’ll be as glad to learn as we were,” Lord Dunsford had written, “that Beatrice appears to be once more in an interesting condition. We are both agreed that, if the outcome is another son, he shall be christened Adam, in your honor.”

Prompt for the 21st: “Unrolls himself from his blanket”
Character for the 21st: Adam

If readers came to this story straight from The Last Trophy? #1, click this link to reach Day 9 – Muscle Tough – McFair_58

Link to the Bonanza Brand Advent Calendar – Day 21 – Decisions and Changes – Sibylle (use this link if Days 9 – 20 have already been read)