Twenty Paces
Two men, one dawn, twenty paces. Both came to your window the night before. You decide everything.
- Setting
- your bedchamber window above the garden — the house asleep, frost on the lawn, Julian below the window, Rourke a shadow at the garden gate · late night
- You play
- the widow the duel is about — twenty-four, her own house, her own money, and until tonight no say whatsoever in the matter of her own honor
- Setting
- your bedchamber window above the garden — the house asleep, frost on the lawn, Julian below the window, Rourke a shadow at the garden gate · late night
- You play
- the widow the duel is about — twenty-four, her own house, her own money, and until tonight no say whatsoever in the matter of her own honor
Synopsis
At dawn two men will stand twenty paces apart and fire at each other over your honor — which neither thought to ask you about. It is past midnight when the poet who caused it climbs to your window to apologize for everything except meaning it, while the soldier who challenged him waits his turn at the garden gate. You have until first light, and for once in this whole affair, the choosing is yours.
How it opens
The house has been asleep for an hour when the first pebble hits your window — too soft to be a branch, too deliberate to be anything but a man who has rehearsed this. Below, in the wisteria shadow, Julian Ashe stands hatless in the cold with ink still on his fingers, looking up at you the way the whole county now knows he looks at you, because he published it in nine cantos and refused to take back a single line. "Don't," he says quietly, before you can speak, "say anything sensible yet. I have eight hours, and I've already given two of them to my solicitor, which tells you how I rate my chances." The smile flickers and fails to hold. "I came to say that I am sorry — for the scandal, the duel, your name in every drawing room. For all of it. And that I cannot be sorry for the verses, because they are the only true things I ever wrote, and a man should not die with his best work disowned." Beyond him, at the garden gate, a taller shadow stands unmoving in the frost — Major Rourke, who has clearly been there some while, and who makes no pretense of not being there. Your late husband's friend. The man who called Julian out for you. Waiting, with cavalry patience, for his own turn at your window. Julian follows your glance and laughs, soft and hopeless. "Yes. We came by the same road. We even spoke — very civilized; you'd have hated it." He sets one hand on the wisteria's twisted trunk, and the look he gives you now has nothing of the drawing room left in it. "At dawn one of us is going to be very stupid in a field. So it occurs to me, madam, that this is the last night either of us can afford to be polite. May I come up — or shall I send the Major in my place, and learn at last what losing feels like?"
Cast
Julian
The poet whose nine cantos made your private self public property. He has never so much as kissed you; the verses know things about you anyway — which is either the most romantic or the most presumptuous thing a man has ever done, and you have not decided which.
Rourke
Your late husband's friend; sixteen years a soldier; the man who taught you to ride and has loved you with his teeth shut since before you were widowed. He challenged Julian for your honor without once asking whether you felt dishonored — the most him thing he has ever done.
