BLACK HEARTED VILLAIN

Lord Blackheart paused and narrowed his eyes, the silver letter opener hanging in mid-air like a duelling blade or perhaps an irritated Cobra, poised and ready to strike.

Was that a waft of some kind of scent that he detected?

He quickly flitted through the large pile of plain buff envelopes that was the bulk of his morning correspondence, all those cheques for pitiable amounts that he would cash regardless of the ability of the writer to afford it, all those pleas for mercy that he would instruct his agents to ignore, all of the endless demands for payment that he would pass on for his accountants to procrastinate endlessly over, and all of the legal documents that bombarded him daily with regard to the subsequent disputes.

He spotted the envelope that was the source of this bizarre odour immediately. A simple pink creation that his butler had hidden far down in the pile before doubtless going off to have a good old chuckle with the housemaid about the perceived foolishness of his otherwise stern and predictable employer.

“Well” thought Blackheart wickedly, “I’ll deal with him later…” and with the self-satisfied air of knowing that he would be flogging his faithful old retainer within an inch of his life sometime later that day, he allowed the slightest of smiles to twitch momentarily on his lips before flinging this interloper, this inappropriately colourful container for communication, this letter of levity, across the room and returning to the business of the day.

But he remained distracted by the mere presence of the wretched thing. It sat there, calling to him from the dark corner of the study in which it lay, and consequently quite ruined his morning. Even the prospect of giving old Brampton a bit of a beating was beginning to lose its lustre, and even the tiresome paperwork, despite all its implications of the suffering of others, soon began to seem like a chore.

Eventually, he could bear it no longer, and, checking about himself that none of the servants had slipped unnoticed into a position where they might observe him, threw down the letter opener onto his blotter, raised himself up from his old leather chair, slipped across to the door and slid the bolt across, before he scuttled across to where the envelope lay.

He picked it up. The scent seemed strangely familiar, although not as familiar as the impertinent sender, he quipped silently to himself.  He looked about the study again, just to make absolutely certain that there was still nobody around, and risked a quick glance at the window to make sure that no one had taken it upon themselves to wash down the windows this morning.

Quickly he tore open the envelope and extracted a greetings card of a fanciful nature, all hearts and flowers and bows and bells, quite obviously the ridiculous fancy of some feeble-minded girl.

He opened up the card and found naught but a solitary question mark in place of a signature.

“Hah!” he exclaimed “Anonymous!”

He thought as much, and the question mark rather implied that it had been sent by an anonymous illiterate as well. He turned over the envelope, and the handsome copperplate handwriting dismissed that conclusion until he decided that the postal service must have written the address for the unfortunate slattern whom had decided to send the bewildering item.

“And…” he mused, “Why indeed had they sent him such a thing?” He was fully aware of the date, of course, and how it led once a year to feeble-minded folk making declarations of love or some other sort of nonsense to their sweethearts, but he couldn’t quite think why anyone should imagine that he would be interested in such fripperies.

Once more he caught a waft of that familiar perfume as it drifted from the paper in front of him. A face sprang to mind, a young, fair-faced girl, whom he had met so many summers ago. Memories of an all-too brief dalliance that had left him feeling hurt and foolish. Darker recollections of then angrily branding the girl a “harlot’ and a “strumpet” and a “harpy” for even having suggested that he do such a thing to her in that long-grassy meadow. Especially afterwards when he had failed, he thought, to please her, and even more so later still, when it seemed to him that she had turned her attentions towards another, some young farm worker no doubt, the very next week.

He’d seen her at the fair, just before he had returned home from his trip, walking along arm-in-arm with the fellow, quite brazenly, and she had seem him too. Their eyes had locked just for a second, but he had turned away, tears pricking at his eyes, the very last tears that he could remember weeping, and fled back to his accounts books and his ledgers and the safety and simplicity of hard work and rigid thinking.

He looked at the card for a moment, and then cast both it and the envelope into the roaring fire that burned in the grate, and went off to find some servants to beat.