“This place is like something out of a fairy story,” said my mother. She flexed her fat ankles and then lifted her bulk into a sort of clumsy pirouette. She spread her arms and wiggled her thick fingers, and tried to spin around but stumbled halfway through her rotation.
“Come dance with me, George!” The sleeves of her dress slid back, so I could see her white, dimpled elbows. The flesh of her arms was like raw bread dough.
“I am not your little George anymore,” I said. “I’m Lord Byron.” I stretched my back, trying to look taller. I was nine years old.
“Dance with me, Lord Byron,” said my mother. I had a great, unwieldy iron brace on my leg, and no intention of trying to dance in it, but she lifted me off my feet and twirled me in the air.
Newstead was a decrepit ruin. The great drawing room had an inch of dirt on the floor, and mold growing up the walls. Shafts of sunlight poked through fissures in the ceiling, for the roof above was mostly blown away. The room was otherwise fairly dark; most of the lamps along the walls were unlit, and many of them were broken.
“There’s no music, Mother.”
Most days, Catherine was beset by melancholia and consigned herself to isolation, and she wept ceaselessly for her dead parents and her lost castle at Gight, and for Mad Jack. On such occasions, I was left mostly to my own devices, and to the depredations and abuses of whatever unsavory sorts I encountered. But when my mother was boisterous, she was inescapable.
“I hear music! The most wonderful music. An elegant chamber quartet; oh, waltz with me, Lord Byron. Do me the honor.”
In the dark recesses of the great long hall, I saw the stooped figure of Joe Murray appear in a shaded doorway. His pale face seemed to glow in the dim light.
Joe Murray had come with the house. He’d been a longtime servant of my great-uncle, and funding had been set aside in the old man’s will to provide a salary for him, as long as he wished to serve whoever was Lord Byron. This was more likely a scheme of some sort rather than an act of generosity, for William Byron was always a schemer and never a benefactor. I suspect that Joe Murray would have been a malevolent presence in the house if the Wicked Lord’s hated son had inherited Newstead, as expected. But the old Byron had borne no particular animus toward me, and so Joe Murray was mostly benign; a servile wraith always hovering at the edge of my perception.
My gaze met his, and he cocked an eyebrow as if to ask if I needed assistance. I waved him off, and he vanished. Catherine never saw him; she was too busy dragging me across the floor, my brace squeaking and scraping through the thick layer of rot and filth caked on the swollen floorboards.
“I had a castle,” she said. “And I lost it unjustly, and my man went away. And I was left all on my lonesome. I was a pretty, pretty princess, consigned to filthy, squalid exile. But my own, only laddie love turned out to be a secret heir to a magnificent fairy palace, and now we will live happily ever after together and never be lonely.”
“You know I must go away soon. To school. I cannot stay here.”
“But today, we dance! And when your father returns, he’ll be so happy to see what we’ve got that he’ll take us both in his arms and never leave again.”
“Father is dead. Everyone says so.”
“Of course he isn’t. He’s traveling on business. You mustn’t believe every naughty thing you hear.”
I was willing to cling to whatever hope my mother gave me, though I’d learned of my father’s death, indirectly, from Catherine. While we were still in Aberdeen, she received a black-bordered letter and retreated into her room to weep for weeks. Concerned by this deep and extended fit of hysteria, I crept into her chambers while she slept, and read the bad news. But I didn’t want to believe it, and looked for any excuse not to.
So my mother and I denied it, and we danced in the dim and cavernous hall of our ruined fairy castle to music only she could hear.
The next day, she was morose again, and wouldn’t leave her bed, so I took my little shovel and went treasure-hunting in the graveyard. Other than the occasional glimpse of Joe Murray peering at me through one of the dirty windows of the house, no adult interrupted my activities until I returned to the house at nightfall, for supper.
I was lucky to have had the stern, corrective influence of my lawyer, Mr. Hanson, in those days, or I might have grown up to become some kind of degenerate.
Chapter 13
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
If I learned one thing from Catherine and her maudlin tendencies, it is this: One must never respond to adversity by retreating into solitude. Others may make untoward imputations; they may think one is ashamed of oneself. Like my father before me, I am proud of my every sin, excess, and abomination, and I respond to rebuke in the only appropriate way: I fling myself headlong into hedonism. It is incumbent upon the unrepentant sinner to flaunt his debauchery.
So, as a means of throwing off the humiliation of my disciplinary hearing and my shabby treatment by Mr. Knifing, I resolved to do precisely that.
I was also emboldened by my congress with Professor Tower’s wife, and I was primed for more ambitious pursuits. Specifically, I had devious designs upon Olivia Wright. I wanted to see if she might tell me more about what had happened to Felicity Whippleby, and I wanted to know what she looked like naked. As the world’s greatest poet, lover, and practitioner of the deductive art, I was amply qualified to solve the mystery of that woman.
And I had acquired a lovely and unexpected piece of furniture. The feet of it were carved like eagle talons, and the armrests were lions’ heads. The upholstery was velvet. This was an object worthy of cradling my noble and talented arse. Such a thing deserved to be celebrated.
Moreover, I’d learned by virtue of painful experience, when I was taken by one of my black moods, I had the most urgent medical need to surround myself with laughter and music and clinking glasses. Otherwise, the whispers inside my head would poison my thoughts and drag me into the abyss, from which I could emerge only with great difficulty and after a prolonged period of convalescence.
For all these reasons, it was requisite upon me to throw a bacchanal.
Since the invitees had barely an afternoon’s forenotice of the hastily planned party, only about thirty people showed up, a smallish crowd by my standards, but the celebration was commensurate to my reputation for excess. I’d hired laborers who carefully disassembled and removed the dining table from my banquet room, and they’d rolled up the rug to reveal the polished hardwood floors.
The curtains and linens and window dressings were replaced with velvet and satin, all black, to signify the unhappy course of recent events, as well as my own dark mood and current state of disreputability. I was clad similarly; wearing a crisp, high-collared bespoke black shirt, a deliberate affront to conventional tastes, beneath my evening jacket. I disdained the customary cravat and waistcoat, choosing instead to wear a black silk scarf over my shoulders.
I wore the shirt open at the throat to expose the dramatic concavity of my clavicle, and my jutting collarbones. I was proud of my starved physique, and intended to display it at every opportunity until it softened and swelled from indulgence. When that happened, I would have to quit eating again for a while.
I’d brought in some passable musicians, and the cleared room was a fine space for dancing. Cooks had been busy in my kitchen all afternoon, preparing French and Continental delicacies under the watchful eye of Joe Murray, who was quite competent with a saucepan in his own right. My rooms were bedecked with fresh flowers to an even greater extent than usual.