star cross'd

As I came home last night, through the crowded Farmers Market on Temple Street, I beheld a peasant man praying to a home-made shrine of St. Ananovanatasjia, the patron saint of True Love. This brought an old and familiar pain to my heart, as well as a story which I will now tell to you.

I had just purchased a new Italian shotgun and was out hunting ptarmigan behind my lake cabin estate when the weather took a turn for the worse. The sky grew prematurely dark and lightning began clawing at the horizon. I decided to take my clutch of game-birds and return home. I was still a mile or two from shelter when the storm hit. Through the rain I heard the unmistakable sound of a lady in duress and was able to make out a vague white smudge, a silhouette at the base of the hill. I made my way over to her, navigating quickly across the rocky slope that had become quite treacherous in the downpour. I came upon a lady who identified herself as the Countess Svetlana Lidotchka Sonechtka. She had been out picking the wild violets that grew along the hillside and had slipped and twisted her ankle.

I removed her shoe and gently checked for broken bones, luckily there were none. Still, she was in no condition to walk and I had no choice but to leave the shotgun and the brace of fat arctic hens behind as I carried her to my cabin. Upon reaching home, I sent my man-servant Impetigo the sixty-plus miles into the nearest town to fetch a doctor and to notifiy the young Countess's father of what had happened.

She soon recovered but it was a long time before she was able to make the long trip into town, even on one of my prize Circassian stallions, a stable of which I kept as one of my lesser passions. In those weeks we came to learn much of each other. She was some six years senior to me, a woman of the world, well-read and well-traveled. We would take picnics near the forest edge or in my sailboat and at night we would drink tea on the veranda. She would read aloud to me in any one of the five languages she was fluent in and I would surrender myself to her voice, watching the grey ribbons of smoke drift from the end of one of my fine cigars. We fell in love that summer. It was passionate but also was it more akin to a deep and blissful contentment. It was not until that perfect season that I truly knew how sweet it was to live and also to love.

Our time was sweet, yes, and bitter the sorrow when time came for us to part. I am not ashamed to say I wept a little as I watched her father's coach take her away. I am not ashamed because it was then turning fall and the trees wept with me. Then my heart rejoiced, I would join my love in the city! I had Impetigo put my things together and ride to town immediately to purchase me quarters there. I picked the last handful of violets and placed them into a Chinese vase, a present for my beloved. How I was to wish later that I would have brought my dueling saber as well.

I was never much of a city-dweller but with the visits of my beloved Lidotchka the large apartment seemed as small and cozy as any of the hundred rooms of Pemberley, my woodland estate. I became fast friends with her father the Count Dima-Belyakova who in recompense for the loss of my shotgun and the care I had shown his youngest daughter gifted me with a deed of ownership to a fleet of his Aleutian gold-sloops. It was not all joy in the city however, for it came to my attention that by winning the heart of the fair Lidotchka I had made a powerful and terrible enemy.

It seems Bishop Layman had coveted the virtue of the lovely Lidotchka and had been scheming long on how he may best wrest her from me. He spread the rumor, during his sermons, that my love and I had lain in sin during the time she spent recovering in Pemberley. While this was not in essence untrue (for true love is its own holy covenant) it was dastardly of the Bishop to utter publicly and the effect of his utterances were wholly ruinous to the virtuous Lidotchka. Bishop Layman increased his libels against my beloved until one day, as she was going to market, the townspeople captured her, stripped her of her fine silks and paraded her through town as a strumpet and a woman of loose virtue. They jeered and threw rotten foodstuffs at my beloved until Bishop Layman intervened. He masqueraded villainously as her saviour -a trick, the whole monstrous display orchestrated by him to bring Lidotchka down to his level. It was that night, under the auspices of holy sanctuary that he attempted to force himself on my beloved.

Meanwhile I was on a day-trip back to Pemberley to put in order my affairs there. I was selling my estate, the proceeds of which I intended to put forward for my upcoming wedding with Lidotchka. Impetigo had rode from the city to tell me what was happening there, but alas, it was too late. I sunk to my knees there, in front of the tall walls of Pemberley hot tears of shame streaking my face and the acrid taste of acid hate in my belly. I rode for the city as hard as I could, driving my poor stallion Hector into blood-frothed exhaustion. I was indeed too late. Lidotchka had left for a nunnery in Malta and the Count with her. I was without friendship or succour in the cold city. No longer was I lachrymose, hate had hardened my heart past all hope of tears. I made for the house of Bishop Layman.

I found him there, a gloating smile on his thin face. It was all I could do to submerge the glowing iron of anger into the cold forging waters of civility. But when he suggested mockingly that I join Lidotchka in Malta I, in turn, suggested that instead he himself join his ancestors in hell. In front of half a dozen of his servants I shrugged my sleeve from out of Impetigo's imploring grasp and slapped the black-hearted Bishop across his face. Such was the force of the blow that it toppled Layman into the dirt and knocked spittle down his ruddy jaw. I was imprisoned on the spot. While I was in gaol I heard that the cur of a Bishop had used his connections in the Vatican to have me excommunicated. In a vicious double-blow I also recieved a letter from the Count telling me that Lidotchka had succumbed, she slipped away in her sleep after contracting consumption from the privations of her journey.

I swore vengeance, the hate in my heart eating up all former happiness as a plague of locusts eats away the fruits of the soil. Vengeance, against a god blind to my suffering. Vengeance against the Bishop and vengeance against myself for not being able to rescue my beloved Lidotchka.

I am able to say, now, after long years of lonely travellings that I no longer rage against a distant God. I no longer loathe and torment myself with "what-ifs" and "could-have-beens." The former Bishop Layman? He now rules as Arch-Baron of the principality of Sparrowsgate. Dick Layman, thy name is cowardice!