The Talisman

just that second.
    ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to introduce me to your . . . ah . . . son.’
    The Captain turned, turning Jack with him. Standing halfway across the paddock area, looking unsettlingly out of place there, was the skeletal courtier the Captain had been afraid of – Osmond. He looked at them from dark gray melancholy eyes. Jack saw something stirring in those eyes, something deep down. His fear was suddenly sharper, something with a point, jabbing into him. He’s crazy – this was the intuition which leaped spontaneously into his mind. Nuttier than a damned fruitcake .
    Osmond took two steps toward them. In his left hand he held the rawhide-wrapped half of a bullwhip. The handle narrowed only slightly into a dark, limber tendon coiled thrice around his shoulder – the whip’s central stalk was as thick as a timber rattlesnake. Near its tip, this central stalk gave birth to perhaps a dozen smaller offshoots, each of woven rawhide, each tipped with a crudely made but bright metal spur.
    Osmond tugged the whip’s handle and the coils slithered from his shoulder with a dry hiss. He wiggled the handle, and the metal-tipped strands of rawhide writhed slowly in the straw-littered mud.
    ‘Your son?’ Osmond repeated, and took another step toward them. And Jack suddenly understood why this man had looked familiar before. The day he had almost been kidnapped – hadn’t this man been White Suit?
    Jack thought that perhaps he had been.

3
    The Captain made a fist, brought it to his forehead, and bent forward. After only a moment’s hesitation, Jack did the same.
    ‘My son, Lewis,’ the Captain said stiffly. He was still bent over, Jack saw, cutting his eyes to the left. So he remained bent over himself, his heart racing.
    ‘Thank you, Captain. Thank you, Lewis. Queen’s blessings upon you.’ When he touched him with the haft of the bullwhip, Jack almost cried out. He stood straight again, biting the cry in.
    Osmond was only two paces away now, regarding Jack with that mad, melancholy gaze. He wore a leather jacket and what might have been diamond studs. His shirt was extravagantly ruffled. A bracelet of links clanked ostentatiously upon his right wrist (from the way he handled the bullwhip, Jack guessed that his left was his working hand). His hair was drawn back and tied with a wide ribbon that might have been white satin. There were two odors about him. The top was what his mother called ‘all those men’s perfumes’, meaning after-shave, cologne, whatever. The smell about Osmond was thick and powdery. It made Jack think of those old black-and-white British films where some poor guy was on trial in the Old Bailey. The judges and lawyers in those films always wore wigs, and Jack thought the boxes those wigs came out of would smell like Osmond – dry and crumbly-sweet, like the world’s oldest powdered doughnut. Beneath it, however, was a more vital, even less pleasant smell: it seemed to pulse out at him. It was the smell of sweat in layers and dirt in layers, the smell of a man who bathed seldom, if ever.
    Yes. This was one of the creatures that had tried to steal him that day.
    His stomach knotted and roiled.
    ‘I did not know you had a son, Captain Farren,’ Osmond said. Although he spoke to the Captain, his eyes remained on Jack. Lewis , he thought, I’m Lewis, don’t forget –
    ‘Would that I did not,’ the Captain replied, looking at Jack with anger and contempt. ‘I honor him by bringing him to the great pavillion and then he slinks away like a dog. I caught him playing at d—’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ Osmond said, smiling remotely. He doesn’t believe a word , Jack thought wildly, and felt his mind take another clumsy step toward panic. Not one single word! ‘Boys are bad. All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.’
    He tapped Jack lightly on the wrist with the haft of the bullwhip. Jack, his nerves screwed up to an unbearable pitch, screamed . . . and immediately flushed with hot shame.
    Osmond giggled. ‘Bad, oh yes, it’s axiomatic, all boys are bad. I was bad; and I’ll wager you were bad, Captain
    Farren. Eh? Eh? Were you bad?’
    ‘Yes, Osmond,’ the Captain said.
    ‘Very bad?’ Osmond asked. Incredibly, he had begun to prance in the mud. Yet there was nothing swishy about this: Osmond was willowy and almost delicate, but Jack got no feeling of true homosexuality from the man; if there was that innuendo in his words, then Jack sensed intuitively that it was hollow.