The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma

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      Chapter I

      Andrew Harrington would gladly have died several times over if that meant not having to choose just one pistol from among his father’s vast collection in the living-room cabinet. Decisions had never been Andrew’s strong point. On close examination, his life had been a series of mistaken choices, the last of which threatened to cast its lengthy shadow over the future. But that life of unedifying blunders was about to end. This time he was sure he had made the right decision, because he had decided not to decide. There would be no more mistakes in the future because there would be no future. He was going to destroy it completely by putting one of those guns to his right temple. He could see no other solution: obliterating the future was the only way for him to eradicate the past.

      He scanned the contents of the cabinet, the lethal assortment his father had lovingly assembled after his return from the war. He was fanatical about those weapons, though Andrew suspected it was not so much nostalgia that drove him to collect them as his desire to contemplate the novel ways mankind kept coming up with for taking one’s own life outside the law. In stark contrast to his father, Andrew was impassive as he surveyed the apparently docile, almost humdrum implements that had brought thunder to men’s fingertips and freed war from the unpleasantness of hand-to-hand combat.

      He tried to imagine what kind of death might be lurking inside each of them, lying in wait like some predator. Which would his father have recommended he use to blow his brains out? He calculated that death from one of those antiquated muzzle-loading flintlocks, which had to be refilled with gunpowder and a ball, then tamped down with a paper plug each time it was fired, would be a noble but drawn-out and tedious affair. He preferred the swift death guaranteed by one of the more modern revolvers nestling in their luxurious velvet-lined wooden cases.

      He considered a Colt single-action model, which looked easy to handle and reliable – but he had seen Buffalo Bill brandishing one in his Wild West Adventures: a pitiful attempt to re-enact his transoceanic exploits with a handful of imported Red Indians and a dozen lethargic, apparently opium-sated buffalo. Death for him was not just another adventure. He also rejected a fine Smith & Wesson, the gun that had killed the outlaw Jesse James, of whom he considered himself unworthy, and a Webley specially designed to hold back the charging hordes in Britain’s colonial wars; he thought it looked too cumbersome.

      His attention turned next to his father’s favourite, a fine Pepperbox with rotating barrels, but he seriously doubted whether this ridiculously ostentatious weapon would be capable of firing a bullet with enough force.

      Eventually he settled on an elegant 1870 Colt with mother-of-pearl inlay that would take his life with all the delicacy of a woman’s caress. He smiled defiantly as he plucked it from the cabinet, remembering how often his father had forbidden him to meddle with his pistols. But the illustrious William Harrington was in Italy at that moment, no doubt reducing the Fontana de Trevi to dust with his critical gaze. His parents’ decision to leave for Europe on the very day he had chosen to kill himself had been a happy coincidence. He doubted that either of them would ever decipher the true message concealed in his gesture (that he had preferred to die as he had lived – alone), but for Andrew it was enough to imagine the disgust on his father’s face when he discovered his son had killed himself behind his back and without his permission.

      He opened the cabinet where the ammunition was kept and loaded six bullets into the chamber. He supposed that one would be enough, but who knew what might happen? After all, he had never killed himself before. Then he tucked the gun, wrapped in a cloth, inside his coat pocket, as though it were a piece of fruit he would eat later. In a further act of defiance, he left the cabinet door open. If only he had shown this much courage before, he thought. If only he had dared confront his father when it had mattered, she would still be alive. But by the time he had, it was too late. And he had spent eight long years paying for his hesitation. Eight years, during which his pain had only worsened, spreading its tendrils through him like poison ivy, wrapping itself around his guts, gnawing at his soul. Despite the efforts of his cousin Charles and the distraction of other women’s bodies, his grief over Marie’s death refused to be laid to rest. Tonight, though, it would all be over.

      Twenty-six was a good age to die, he reflected, contentedly fingering the bulge in his pocket. He had the gun. Now all he needed was a suitable spot in which to perform the ceremony. And there was only one possible place.

      With the weight of the revolver in his pocket comforting him like a good-luck charm, he descended the grand staircase of the Harrington mansion in elegant Kensington Gore, a stone’s throw from the Queen’s Gate entrance to Hyde Park. He had not intended to cast any farewell glances at the walls of what had been his home for almost three decades, but he could not help feeling a perverse wish to pause before his father’s portrait, which dominated the hall. His father stared down at him disapprovingly from the gilt frame, a proud, commanding figure, bursting out of the old uniform he had worn as a young infantryman in the Crimean War until a Russian bayonet had punctured his thigh; the wound had left him with a disturbingly lopsided gait. William Harrington surveyed the world disdainfully, as though in his view the universe was a botched affair on which he had long since given up. What fool had been responsible for the untimely blanket of fog that had descended on the battlefield outside the besieged city of Sebastopol so that nobody could see the tips of the enemy’s bayonets? Who had decided that a woman was the ideal person to preside over England’s destiny? Was the east really the best place for the sun to rise?

      Andrew had never seen his father without cruel animosity in his eyes so could not know whether he had been born with it or had been infected with it when fighting alongside the ferocious Ottomans in the Crimea. In any event, it had not vanished, like a mild case of smallpox, leaving no mark on his face, even though the path that had opened in front of him on his return could only have been termed a fortunate one. What did it matter that he had to hobble along it with the aid of a stick? Without having had to enter any pact with the Devil, the man with the bushy moustache and clean-cut features depicted on the canvas had overnight become one of the richest men in England. Trudging around in that distant war, bayonet at the ready, he could never have dreamed of possessing a fraction of what he now owned. How he had amassed his fortune, though, was one of the family’s best-kept secrets, a complete mystery to Andrew.

      The tedious moment is now approaching when the young man must decide which hat and overcoat to pick from among the heap in the hall cupboard: one has to look presentable even for death. This is a scene that, knowing Andrew, could take several exasperating minutes and, since I see no need to describe it, I shall take the opportunity to welcome you to this tale, which has just begun, and which, after lengthy reflection, I chose to begin at this juncture and not another – as though I, too, had to select a single beginning from among the many jostling for position in the closet of possibilities.

      Assuming you stay until the end, some of you, no doubt, will think I chose the wrong thread with which to begin spinning my yarn, and that for accuracy’s sake I should have respected chronological order and begun with Miss Haggerty’s story. Perhaps so – but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and this may be one of them.

      So, let’s forget about Miss Haggerty for the moment, forget that I ever mentioned her, even, and go back to Andrew, who has just stepped forth from the mansion suitably dressed in a hat and coat, and even a pair of warm gloves to protect his hands from the harsh winter cold.

      Once outside the mansion, the young man paused at the top of the steps, which unfurled at his feet like a wave of marble down to the garden. From there, he surveyed the world in which he had been brought up, suddenly aware that, if things went to plan, he would never see СКАЧАТЬ