It was because I was unworthy of Mary Chaworth’s love that I began swimming miles in icy waters in wintertime, and running great distances in layers of heavy clothing in hot weather.
I ought to drown you in the river.
It was because I was unworthy of Mary Chaworth’s love that I stopped eating and started drinking. It was because I was unworthy of Mary’s love that I began serially fornicating with near strangers.
Deformed. Useless.
It was because I was unworthy of Mary’s love that I spent lavish sums, often borrowed, buying custom shoes that hid my clubfoot.
A physical manifestation of my failings and inadequacies.
So, if anyone ever wonders why it is that I am the way that I am, it’s because Mary Chaworth couldn’t love me.
Chapter 28
I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality. I have renounced hazard however, but I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage.
A woman’s undergarment is an intimidating device to confront when one is very drunk. After fumbling with Noreen’s corset for a few minutes, and finding my situation growing extremely urgent, I solved the problem with my knife. The taut laces popped under only a little pressure, and the restraining mesh of quilted linen came free. I threw it to the floor, where it fell in a sad little heap. Mastery of the thing gave me a grim sense of satisfaction; it reminded me of the torturous contraptions that quack doctors inflicted upon my poor leg when I was a child.
“Byron,” she protested, “those are quite expensive. Why must you ruin everything?”
“Because I don’t care about things,” I said. “And it isn’t ruined. It merely needs relacing.”
Her body smelled of powder and female excitement, and her skin was damp and flushed. I pulled her to me and kissed her hard upon the mouth as I pressed my hand beneath her skirts. She was fumbling with my trousers.
“You must remove your boots,” she murmured.
“Of course,” I said. But first, I blew out the lamp so she would not see my shriveled right foot.
I climbed on top of Noreen and moved to kiss her, but she pushed me away. I swore a nasty oath at her as I covered my leg with the blanket and reached down to the floor, feeling around in the darkness for a shoe.
“No, it’s not that,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck and pulling me back onto the bed. “It’s just that he’s watching us.”
I turned around and saw the hulking form of the bear, who had wandered into the room. He was nudging the girdle around on the floor with his nose.
“Darling, I assure you, the Professor’s interest is purely academic.”
But her protests continued, and so I climbed out of the bed, taking the blanket with me to hide my leg from her. I coaxed the bear out of the bedroom, down the hallway to his study. He grumbled with protest at his exclusion from the evening’s recreation.
“I know,” I said. “But the girl requires privacy.”
He nodded, and rubbed his bristly haunches against my great-uncle’s sinister black cabinet before retreating to his pile of bedding in the corner of the room.
“Thank you, Professor. That is a fine idea, and you are gracious to suggest it, under the circumstances.”
I unlocked the cabinet. On the highest shelf was my green absinthe bottle. In a hidden drawer, there was another bottle; a small gray one with a glass stopper. I knotted the blanket around my waist and carried both bottles back to the bedroom.
“I come bearing delectable treats, sure to expand the mind and excite the senses.” I handed Noreen the bigger bottle.
She examined it and ran her fingers over it, peering at the opaque glass and the heavy cork jammed in the neck of it. “I’ve never tried absinthe,” she said, looking at the peeling, yellowed label. “I wouldn’t even know how to drink it.”
I relit the lamp so she could appreciate summer-green color of the liqueur as I poured it into crystal glasses; glasses like the ones my father had smashed against the side of my mother’s long-lost castle at Gight.
“It’s very simple,” I told her. “You drink it with laudanum.”
The stopper extended into the little gray jar, serving as a long, thin implement for ladling out the precious fluid, one drop at a time. I let a fat, clear bead run down the glass arm and hang briefly on the end before falling onto a cube of sugar, which I held in the palm of my hand.
“When the Greeks spoke of the Muses, they must have been referring to opiates,” I said. “Without drugs, I think there would be no poetry.” I let seven drops of laudanum soak into the sugar, dispensing it like some pagan rite. I flourished the glass rod as if it were a magic wand.
She stretched her arms over her head and splayed her naked form before me. “Am I not inspiration enough for your poet’s soul?”
“Of course you aren’t,” I said. “My flesh yearns for you, but my mind needs to get twisted.” I placed the drugged sugar cube upon a slotted silver spoon and balanced the spoon over the rim of one of the glasses. I had a decanter of cool, fresh water, and I let it trickle over the cube so that the sugar and laudanum slowly dissolved and mixed with the absinthe.
This ritual, sacred to a certain, discerning sort of drunk, is called la louche. The water turns the emerald liqueur a pale, milky color, and it is said, as well, to release the mystical properties of the star anise and wormwood from which the absinthe is brewed. If one wishes merely to get drunk, absinthe served neat will oblige; its alcoholic content is nearly twice that of most other spirits. But absinthe, properly louched, is a different kind of experience. It fucks with your soul. Especially when you mix it with laudanum.
“Drink this, and you’ll understand,” I said as I gave her the glass.
“You are a wicked and dangerous man, if I may say so, Lord Byron, and I fear your influence will bring me unto ruin.”
“Ruin comes whether we court it or whether we cower,” I said. “We must sin while we can so that when ruin finds us, we deserve it.” In my head, Mad Jack’s voice: Mortality is only for the foolish and the poor.
I mixed a second glass, and we sat naked in the near dark, holding our green sacraments, staring at each other.
“To ruin, then, Lord Byron,” Noreen said, and we partook. Then I kissed her. She tasted of sugar and of the anise in the absinthe; like licorice candy. Her lips quivered with some fevered urgency as she pressed them against mine. Her heart fluttered beneath my caressing hand. That much is clear in my memory, though the rest slips into haze.
Rationality, I think, is the enemy of romance. It grounds one in one’s flesh and anchors one to the earth. This sad condition is inevitably fatal, and its devastating effects can be delayed only by the regular consumption of powerful intoxicants. I know writers who never partake; who put pen to paper in a state of stony sobriety. They’re terrible. Banal.
Whatever would happen afterward, my dim and shifting memories of that night assure me that what transpired between us was transcendent; the kind of awed experience that language can merely describe, but can’t fully communicate.
In that flickering lamplight with Noreen, I forgot about the murders and about my debts. I forgot my academic troubles and my clubfoot. I forgot about Olivia and about Sedgewyck and even about Violet. We tangled and disentangled, we merged and separated. Flowers bloomed from the wall and exploded into clouds of butterflies. But our idyll could not be prolonged: our elegiac now turned into a grim later; the echoes of Mad Jack’s voice grew louder, until his fury was like thunder; a storm raging inside my skulclass="underline" Disappointment. Deformed. Vrykolakas. Ought to drown you in the river.