"FIve Things" Wimseyfic
I Have A Sin of Fear
(Four times Lord Peter Wimsey denied he was afraid, and one time he didn't)
1.
"For God's sake, Peter!"
Mortimer, Duke of Denver, can feel his temper beginning to fray. It's a perfectly simple fence he's asking his younger son to take, the mare would fly over it like a bird if only the boy would stop dragging at her mouth. But she won't get over a molehill if he clings to the reins like that.
"Sit up straight. You look like a hunchback! And soften your wrists, they're as stiff as bloody boards."
The child's face is as white as the hawthorn in the hedge behind him. Mortimer suppresses a groan of irritation. His wife is always telling him he's too hard on the boy. But surely it can't be good for him to indulge these unmanly fears?
"Then give her a whack," he says, as encouragingly as he can. "Not like that! Harder!"
"But what if she b-bucks?" says his son, and clutches frantically at the reins as the horse plunges sideways.
"Then you'll go straight over her head!" says the Duke. "And with a seat like that, you damn well deserve to. Shoulders back, hands down, back straight. That's better! Now let me see you take that fence. You're not frightened, are you?"
"N-no, father," stammers the child, and brings down the crop on the mare's flanks.
2.
The sun hasn't been up long enough to warm the air, and Lieutenant Wimsey's hands shake as he does up the buckle of his holster. He has only few moments left before he has to give the order.
I want to go home, I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more
Where whizzbangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar ...
His hands will grip the crumbling earth at the top of the trench. His knees will scrabble for purchase. He'll stand up and start to run, the men close behind him, a whole platoon of men, running towards the wire. And on the other side the machine guns will wake up from their night's slumber and resume their grim work.
Take me over the sea
Where the Ally-men can't get at me ...
Time has acquired a peculiar crystalline quality. Every second between him and the order sparkles, as bright and hard as a diamond. One could cut oneself on it. Perhaps that's why he feels so bloodless; it's all been drained out of him. The faces around him are as grey as his own.
Oh my, I don't want to die
I want to go home ...
He screws the monocle into his eye and glares at the platoon.
"Remember, men. If you see a bullet coming, duck. Anyone who doesn't duck, see me afterwards."
The wave of laughter that greets this feeble joke is more warming than a shot of whiskey straight into the veins.
3.
The mud has reached his thighs now. He stopped floundering as soon as he realised this was making him sink faster, but there is a horrid insubstantiality to whatever his feet are resting in, and the clammy grip on his legs is reaching up towards his hips. He can't see it, not with the night pressing down on him as thick as the mud, but he can feel it. Besides, he knows mud. He's intimately familiar with its character and habits. His weight will drive him ever deeper until his mouth and nose are sucked under and his airways are blocked and he won't be able to prevent himself from flailing in the struggle for breath, and then -
Grunts, somewhere away to the right. Bunter. It has to be. Close enough to hear him.
"Lord!" he calls out, forcing himself to take slower breaths. "This is rather a beastly way to peg out."
4.
He has seen corpses that had died by strangling. Women, too. He's familiar with the symptoms. The purple face, the bulging blood-shot eyes, the protruding tongue, swollen too big for the mouth. He knows the contusions round the neck, the stench and stain from involuntary soiling.
"Peter?" She's laughing now. "You're a gruesome companion for a day's outing."
His throat is dry. He has to swallow saliva before he can speak, but his voice, when it comes, is as light as air.
"Come, Harriet. I am very civilly pretending that I don't care what dangers you run. You don't want me to howl at your feet, do you?"
5.
The first thing a principle does is to kill someone. Which doesn't mean principles are a bad thing. On the contrary, it means if one believes in something, one has to be prepared to see it through, whatever the consequences.
The trouble is, Peter isn't certain he believes in his. People shouldn't be able to go around murdering other people with impunity, that much he's sure of; but it can't be the mere act of killing he objects to. He was a soldier, after all. He has shot men outright, and ordered countless others into the line of fire. They may not have been murdered, but they are just as dead. Nor does the body count end with the war. As an investigator, he has provoked deaths that would have been avoided, had he not poked his long nose in where it had no mandate to be. And as a witness for the prosecution, he has been directly responsible for several hangings. So many corpses rotting in the earth before their time because the world happens to contain Lord Peter Wimsey.
But service to a principle is not murder.
His principle is truth. At the beginning of a case, when the pieces and the players are nothing but an intellectual puzzle, veritas super omnia seems to him so self-evident that he feels no need to state it as an axiom. But towards the end, faced with the inescapable knowledge that if he proceeds someone will die, he clings to that principle as a drowning sailor clings to a spar, unsure if it will float or sink.
What if he's wrong?
It's not that he feels pity for Crutchley. If ever a man was the architect of his own demise, that man is Frank Crutchley - greedy, calculating, deliberately cruel. Not like Tallboy, poor devil, who had lashed out in desperation; or even Mary Whittaker, who had - at least until Lord Peter Wimsey poked his nose in - merely hastened a process already well under way. Crutchley had coldly planned and implemented the crushing of an old man's skull. He chose with open eyes the path that led to his sentence.
But what if he's wrong?
He doesn't want to think about Crutchley, but he can't seem to stop. The light is growing stronger in the east. Any minute now. Part of him is dimly aware of Harriet's arms around him, but his mind is with Crutchley, listening for the footsteps outside the cell door. They will be coming in now, binding his hands, leading him out. The other prisoners are banging on their doors and howling. Trapped in their separate cells. Now he's walking down the corridor, one step after another, one breath after another, until the rope tightens around his neck and -
- and a principle kills someone.
"Oh damn," says Peter, and starts to cry.
(Four times Lord Peter Wimsey denied he was afraid, and one time he didn't)
1.
"For God's sake, Peter!"
Mortimer, Duke of Denver, can feel his temper beginning to fray. It's a perfectly simple fence he's asking his younger son to take, the mare would fly over it like a bird if only the boy would stop dragging at her mouth. But she won't get over a molehill if he clings to the reins like that.
"Sit up straight. You look like a hunchback! And soften your wrists, they're as stiff as bloody boards."
The child's face is as white as the hawthorn in the hedge behind him. Mortimer suppresses a groan of irritation. His wife is always telling him he's too hard on the boy. But surely it can't be good for him to indulge these unmanly fears?
"Then give her a whack," he says, as encouragingly as he can. "Not like that! Harder!"
"But what if she b-bucks?" says his son, and clutches frantically at the reins as the horse plunges sideways.
"Then you'll go straight over her head!" says the Duke. "And with a seat like that, you damn well deserve to. Shoulders back, hands down, back straight. That's better! Now let me see you take that fence. You're not frightened, are you?"
"N-no, father," stammers the child, and brings down the crop on the mare's flanks.
2.
The sun hasn't been up long enough to warm the air, and Lieutenant Wimsey's hands shake as he does up the buckle of his holster. He has only few moments left before he has to give the order.
I want to go home, I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more
Where whizzbangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar ...
His hands will grip the crumbling earth at the top of the trench. His knees will scrabble for purchase. He'll stand up and start to run, the men close behind him, a whole platoon of men, running towards the wire. And on the other side the machine guns will wake up from their night's slumber and resume their grim work.
Take me over the sea
Where the Ally-men can't get at me ...
Time has acquired a peculiar crystalline quality. Every second between him and the order sparkles, as bright and hard as a diamond. One could cut oneself on it. Perhaps that's why he feels so bloodless; it's all been drained out of him. The faces around him are as grey as his own.
Oh my, I don't want to die
I want to go home ...
He screws the monocle into his eye and glares at the platoon.
"Remember, men. If you see a bullet coming, duck. Anyone who doesn't duck, see me afterwards."
The wave of laughter that greets this feeble joke is more warming than a shot of whiskey straight into the veins.
3.
The mud has reached his thighs now. He stopped floundering as soon as he realised this was making him sink faster, but there is a horrid insubstantiality to whatever his feet are resting in, and the clammy grip on his legs is reaching up towards his hips. He can't see it, not with the night pressing down on him as thick as the mud, but he can feel it. Besides, he knows mud. He's intimately familiar with its character and habits. His weight will drive him ever deeper until his mouth and nose are sucked under and his airways are blocked and he won't be able to prevent himself from flailing in the struggle for breath, and then -
Grunts, somewhere away to the right. Bunter. It has to be. Close enough to hear him.
"Lord!" he calls out, forcing himself to take slower breaths. "This is rather a beastly way to peg out."
4.
He has seen corpses that had died by strangling. Women, too. He's familiar with the symptoms. The purple face, the bulging blood-shot eyes, the protruding tongue, swollen too big for the mouth. He knows the contusions round the neck, the stench and stain from involuntary soiling.
"Peter?" She's laughing now. "You're a gruesome companion for a day's outing."
His throat is dry. He has to swallow saliva before he can speak, but his voice, when it comes, is as light as air.
"Come, Harriet. I am very civilly pretending that I don't care what dangers you run. You don't want me to howl at your feet, do you?"
5.
The first thing a principle does is to kill someone. Which doesn't mean principles are a bad thing. On the contrary, it means if one believes in something, one has to be prepared to see it through, whatever the consequences.
The trouble is, Peter isn't certain he believes in his. People shouldn't be able to go around murdering other people with impunity, that much he's sure of; but it can't be the mere act of killing he objects to. He was a soldier, after all. He has shot men outright, and ordered countless others into the line of fire. They may not have been murdered, but they are just as dead. Nor does the body count end with the war. As an investigator, he has provoked deaths that would have been avoided, had he not poked his long nose in where it had no mandate to be. And as a witness for the prosecution, he has been directly responsible for several hangings. So many corpses rotting in the earth before their time because the world happens to contain Lord Peter Wimsey.
But service to a principle is not murder.
His principle is truth. At the beginning of a case, when the pieces and the players are nothing but an intellectual puzzle, veritas super omnia seems to him so self-evident that he feels no need to state it as an axiom. But towards the end, faced with the inescapable knowledge that if he proceeds someone will die, he clings to that principle as a drowning sailor clings to a spar, unsure if it will float or sink.
What if he's wrong?
It's not that he feels pity for Crutchley. If ever a man was the architect of his own demise, that man is Frank Crutchley - greedy, calculating, deliberately cruel. Not like Tallboy, poor devil, who had lashed out in desperation; or even Mary Whittaker, who had - at least until Lord Peter Wimsey poked his nose in - merely hastened a process already well under way. Crutchley had coldly planned and implemented the crushing of an old man's skull. He chose with open eyes the path that led to his sentence.
But what if he's wrong?
He doesn't want to think about Crutchley, but he can't seem to stop. The light is growing stronger in the east. Any minute now. Part of him is dimly aware of Harriet's arms around him, but his mind is with Crutchley, listening for the footsteps outside the cell door. They will be coming in now, binding his hands, leading him out. The other prisoners are banging on their doors and howling. Trapped in their separate cells. Now he's walking down the corridor, one step after another, one breath after another, until the rope tightens around his neck and -
- and a principle kills someone.
"Oh damn," says Peter, and starts to cry.