Riot Most Uncouth

by Daniel Friedman

  “Well, our affection has become tempered with frustration at your erratic behavior,” Old Beardy conceded.

  “So, this is an inquisition, after all.”

  “Of course not, Lord Byron. But we do intend to give voice to our concerns. Your class attendance has shown a marked decline this period. Your instructors feel you have become contemptuous toward them and toward your studies since the publication of your book.”

  I nodded. “In light of my recent accomplishment, I do find the classroom to be small and provincial and an impediment to my artistic development. My great talent carries with it a moral duty to experience the world; to live, to love, to never deny any impulse.”

  Fat Cheeks snorted.

  Old Beardy leaned forward and placed a hand on mine. “There will be time for all of that. But the academy has value you’ve been rash to discount. We provide the frame of reference through which you may filter your future experience. We provide the tools to examine the pleasures of life and to find meaning in them.”

  “What use have I for your frame of reference, when my own is already so refined?” I asked. “I am, after all, the finest romantic poet in the history of the world.”

  “Mr. Shakespeare would dispute that contention,” said Fat Cheeks.

  “Seeing how Mr. Shakespeare is quite dead, I’d be extremely surprised if he did,” I told him. “And, anyway, Shakespeare was a man of no imagination who cribbed all his stories from old novels. He was also a limp-wristed cross-dresser who probably spent his evenings getting buggered in alleyways.”

  Fat Cheeks’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve heard unsettling rumors of your own immoral predilections, especially in regard to your relationship with young Mr. Edleston.”

  My fingers twisted around the thin silver ring I wore on my left small finger. “Mr. Edleston did not return to Cambridge this term.” Little needs to be said about John Edleston, except that he was my protégé, and I loved him. His voice was honey-sweet, his features were pleasing to look upon, and by the fall of 1807, he had been ejected from Trinity, which was part of the reason I, too, wished to take leave of Cambridge.

  Edleston was an orphan of modest means, brought to the College to sing soprano in the choir. When his voice changed, the College revoked his scholarship. Thus, we parted. I could not draw enough credit against my holdings to fund his education as well as my own, and he never would have taken my charity. Love blooms in the spring and dies in the fall. My fallow period would not last. My ardor was rarely dormant, and some new infatuation would soon quench my heart’s grief and rage. But none had yet.

  “That’s not what I asked you,” said the fat man.

  My burning gaze locked with his. Old Beardy, stuck between us, squirmed a bit. “Like many gentlemen of my class, I went to boarding school at Harrow,” I said. “A boy there, especially one of small stature and clear complexion, must learn to fight with his fists and feet and teeth, or else he must learn to savor whatever dubious pleasures are foisted upon him.”

  “I hope you’re telling us you learned to fight, Lord Byron.” His voice was low and his jaw was clenched, and his shiny pinched features squished together from the sheer force of his contempt toward me.

  “I shall happily punch you in the face, if doing so will alleviate your concerns,” I suggested.

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” said Beardy.

  “You still haven’t answered my questions.”

  I bit my lower lip. “If you and I were to meet in one of Mr. Shakespeare’s alleyways, it would not be I who would end up buggered.”

  He rose from his big chair. “Is that a threat, Lord Byron?” The tension of confrontation set his whole body jiggling.

  “Think of it as a compliment,” I said. “You have very lovely skin. Has anyone ever told you that? You are like a ripe piece of fruit.”

  Fat Cheeks remained standing but turned his rage upon Beardy. “I don’t need to hear any more of this. My recommendation regarding this matter remains unchanged.” He pivoted on his heel and turned to Shar-Pei, who had not spoken at all. “And you’ve been thoroughly useless today, Sharp, so, congratulations.”

  Then he heaved himself out of the room, the aged floorboards complaining about his ponderousness each time he brought a stumpy foot down upon them. When, at last, the oak door at the far end of the hall slammed closed, Shar-Pei turned on his stool to make sure Fat Cheeks was indeed gone.

  “What a colossal twat,” he said.

  Silence shrouded the three of us, until Beardy cleared his throat.

  “Lord Byron,” he said, resting a patrician hand on my shoulder. “You are one of the most brilliant boys any of us has ever encountered, but you are also intemperate and arrogant and disrespectful. You have the potential within you to be a great man. It is our mission to help you, if you are willing to pursue a righteous path. The question we must address is whether you really wish to be here at the College.”

  “I think I do not,” I said.

  “To leave would be a rash decision, and a regrettable one,” Beardy said. “Take some time to think about your future, and we will speak again at the end of the term.”

  He stood and departed. Shar-Pei trotted out after his master, leaving me alone in that dim, cavernous space.

  I waited a few minutes, and then I stole one of the chairs.

  Chapter 7

  But first, on earth as vampire sent,

  Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

  Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

  And suck the blood of all thy race;

  There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

  At midnight drain the stream of life;

  Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

  Must feed thy livid living corse

  —Lord Byron, The Giaour

  My father threw a china plate straight up. Its gilt edges glinted in the sunlight, and its painted pattern, pale pinks and greens, swirled as it spun near the top of its arc. Mad Jack drew his pistol and fired at it, but he was too drunk to aim properly, and the shot was far to the right of its mark. The plate fell to the ground and shattered. I covered my face with my arms to protect my eyes from errant shards.

  He rose and flung the spent weapon as far as he could. Then he staggered backward a step and collapsed into his high-backed chair.

  “In the East, little George, the dead are not content to remain in their graves,” my father said. “They rise, and they walk, and they hunt and feed upon the living.” His church bell voice was rusty and jagged, like he’d swallowed a fistful of gravel.

  I was six years old and delighted by his attention, but he was talking to me only because he required an audience and his friends had deserted him. The money was almost gone. Men had been coming into the house over the last several days to carry things away. They’d taken all the paintings off the walls. They took away my mother’s jewelry, the pretty things she told me had once belonged to her own mother and would one day be my wife’s. My father, having finally exhausted all the credit he could draw, was powerless to protect himself from such indignities. The significance of these events quite escaped my comprehension.

  “Tell me about them, Father.”

  He was drinking whisky from a crystal glass. The bottle sat open next to his chair, along with the china, which he was entertaining himself by destroying. He had taken to imbibing in the daytime lately, as well as at night. He had hauled his chair, the last of the heavy high-backed ones, onto the lawn so he could look out at the garden. It had been weeks since he let the groundskeeper go, and the landscape was turning wild again. The shrubbery had grown tangled from lack of pruning, its carefully maintained shapes dissolving into chaotic messes of brambles. The beds of flowers were choked with weeds, and the once-manicured carpet of grass had grown long and uneven.

  “The gypsies pin corpses into coffins with wooden stakes, through the heart and the mouth so they will stay where they are put. If they are improperly secured, those who make a bargain w
ith the Devil can arise as vrykolakas, as vampire. And the vampire would dearly enjoy the blood of a plump boy like you, if you weren’t so damaged.”

  My father, too, had grown unkempt and wild in those last dire weeks. His beard was shaggy and mottled with patches of white, though he had yet to reach his thirty-fifth year. His hair was lank and dirty, and his clothing was tattered and stained. He had not been sober in days.

  “Mother believes I can get better,” I said. “I am going to see a doctor.”

  I’d been to lots of doctors, in fact. As my father’s health and the family finances deteriorated, my mother had become increasingly preoccupied with fixing my clubfoot. The treatments hurt. The braces the doctors screwed onto my leg caused constant pain. But I tried not to cry; I wanted to be better, to be worthy in my father’s estimation. I wanted to be a soldier one day, to follow in Mad Jack’s path; to thrive in the family business of war-making.

  “The doctor is a charlatan,” he said. “Your mother is stupid, and so are you. Nothing can fix you; you’re a physical manifestation of my failings and inadequacies, a curse from God. He wants me to stare at your misshapen form every day as punishment for my sins.”

  My mother, overhearing this, swept me up and lifted me away from him with her plump round arms. “Why are you so cruel to him, Jack? He’s only a child.”

  “His flesh isn’t worth the price of what I feed him. If I could swap him for a cask of low-end whisky, I would. But nobody wants a defective child, not even the vrykolakas. He’s thick and stupid, like you, Catherine, and so is his damned gimpy blood. He would offend the tastes of even the most ravenous ghoul.”

  Just then, four men carried a heavy armoire out of the house to load it on the back of a cart drawn by two big draft horses. Mad Jack winged a plate at them but missed. One of the men swore loudly, but my father ignored this and just swirled his whisky glass. “Me da’ was an admiral,” he said. “He had to earn his rank in the Navy because his no-good brother got Newstead. Foul-weather Jack, they called my old man. He knew how to keep his keel level through twenty-foot swells. And look at me. I had to marry a disgusting cow like you to get the funds to keep myself soaked in spirits. And the son you gave me: he’s worthless, ain’t he?”

  My mother braced my weight against her ample hip and pouted at my father. “I don’t see why you’re so horrible to me and the boy, so bent on destroying yourself. We had everything we needed to be happy, before things started falling apart.”

  “Nothing fell apart,” he said. “I ruined it, intentionally and out of spite. None of it was worth preserving in the first place.”

  “You ruined us, Jack.” She brandished me at my father. “What sort of future will there be for him?”

  “There isn’t any future, not for him or anyone else.” He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the side of his glass; his nose webbed with broken red veins, his brown teeth protruding like desiccated stumps from the infertile clay of his purple-gray gums. “Ruin comes whether we court it or whether we cower. Might as well drink while we can afford a bottle. We’re all just staggering toward death.”

  “Not you, Papa,” I said. “You’re going to live forever. You know the gypsy secrets. You know about the vampires.”

  One of the workmen approached. “We’ve got to take the chair, too, Mr. Gordon,” he said.

  “Mr. Gordon,” my father repeated, and he laughed. “I wasn’t born Gordon; I was Byron. Gordon is hers.” Here he pointed an accusing finger at my mother. “I had to take her surname to get her money. And now, of course, the money’s gone, and I’m left with nothing but a fat wife, a crippled son, and somebody else’s name.”

  The man rubbed his hands across the front of his canvas trousers as he tried to decide what to say. He came up with: “Your name ain’t no concern of mine, sir. I just need the furniture.”

  My father stood, his motion remarkably smooth and deliberate, considering his drunkenness. He drew his second pistol and fired it at the chair. The ball struck the place where the back met the seat, sending an explosion of slivers and cushion fluff into the air. My mother was hit by shrapnel in several places, and I got a thick chunk of wood stuck in my forearm, and another in my side. I began to cry.

  “Have the sodding thing, with my blessing,” said my father to the workman, and he threw his crystal glass against the side of the house. Then, to my mother: “Take the child away. I can’t stand to look at it any longer, or listen to the sound of its mewling.”

  At sunset, she brought my supper to my bedroom, and I ate it alone, as the governess had left several weeks earlier for want of pay. I did not see my father again that night, and when I awoke the next morning, he’d left us and fled the country. Had he stayed, he would have been imprisoned for his unpaid debts.

  The castle at Gight, which had been Catherine’s inheritance, went to my father’s creditors. When she met Mad Jack, she was a wealthy heiress with a substantial income. Now, all that was gone. My mother was willing to give up everything for love, so love found her a match who was willing to take everything from her. My father, despite his other flaws, was not lacking in imagination, and he put his creative faculties to good use, devising new ways to spend money and accumulate debt. Once he’d stripped away her assets, my mother was no longer of any value to him.

  Soon after he left, I heard he had died. There were rumors that he was murdered by the husband of his mistress. I never believed it, though. My father always said that only foolish men die. Whatever else he was, Mad Jack was no fool.

  Chapter 8

  I loved—but those I loved are gone;

  Had friends—my early friends are fled:

  How cheerless feels the heart alone,

  When all its former hopes are dead!

  Though gay companions o’er the bowl

  Dispel awhile the sense of ill;

  Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,

  The heart—the heart—is lonely still.

  —Lord Byron, “I Would I Were a Careless Child”

  When I returned to my residence, the man from London was waiting there for me.

  “I am Sir Archibald Knifing,” said my new friend as I entered. Joe Murray looked irritated; it was his customary duty to introduce guests, and it was rude of Knifing to dispense with proper etiquette. But Knifing didn’t seem like a man with much respect for protocol or much tolerance for inanities. He didn’t seem like the kind of man one wants to meet when one has just lugged a heavy wooden chair up several flights of stairs after stealing it, either.

  I shrugged off my greatcoat, which Joe Murray retrieved from the floor, and I pushed the throne against a wall in the parlor. I draped my body over the seat, trying to look as impressive as I could under the circumstances. My clothes and hair were damp and clingy.

  Knifing remained almost unnaturally still as he watched me arrange myself. He had a sallow and waxy complexion; skin like that of an embalmed corpse, except for a puckered pink scar that sliced diagonally across his face, from the middle of his forehead, through his milky left eye, and down the side of his cheek. His clothing bore the hallmarks of the finest London tailors, but his suit was black, which was out of fashion for social calls during daylight hours, and so snug around his emaciated, cadaverous form that I was surprised the man could draw breath. In his hands, he held a wide-brimmed black rabbit-felt hat, and a long-handled umbrella hung by its curved handle from his forearm, though it had not been raining. Joe Murray would certainly have offered to take charge of such objects upon a guest’s arrival. I assumed Knifing had refused to relinquish his accouterments, which was curious.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “Get what?” I asked in as nonchalant a manner as I could.

  “The chair.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I got it at the store.”

  “What store?”

  I knit my brow and let my mouth hang slack, in an expression of baffled innocence. “Well, the chair store. Obviously.”

 
He stared at me with his dead eye. “You don’t have the furniture you purchase delivered to your residence?”

  I paused. I should have recognized the flaw in my explanation. But I was a poet, and possessed of uncommon mental agility. “Vigorous exercise is beneficial to a gentleman’s health,” I said.

  He frowned and didn’t say anything.

  “So, Mr. Knifing, that’s a fascinating name you’ve got,” I said, trying to control my heavy, ragged breathing. “Where does that come from? Is it Welsh?”

  “I am here from London, at Lord Whippleby’s considerable expense, to investigate the murder of his beloved daughter, Felicity,” he said, curtly ignoring my question.

  “Is it ordinary for knights to be engaged in the investigation of crimes?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched with irritation. “I don’t concern myself with the ordinary,” he said.

  “What should I call you, then? Sir Archie?”

  “Mr. Knifing suits my purposes.”

  “Very good, Mr. Knifing. You may refer to me as the Honorable George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron.”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about the murder.”

  “Leif Sedgewyck sent you, didn’t he?” I asked. “He’s the one who you should arrest.”

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Sedgewyck, and he told me about your strange preoccupation with this matter. I’m also aware of his interest in the decedent; an interest in her continuing to be alive. Angus the Constable mentioned you as well, and I’d like to know why you were loitering around my murder scene this morning.”

  “I was feeling heroic, and thought I might catch the killer.”

  “You don’t catch killers,” Knifing said. “I catch killers.” As he said this, he pointed, for emphasis, at his concave chest.

  “I see.” I decided not to explain to this gentleman that I was the world’s most gifted poet and, thusly, skilled at nearly every intellectual pursuit. He’d learn this for himself, soon enough.

  “Your intrusion into this matter is unwelcome. Now the task has fallen upon me to figure out whether you are merely a dilettante, or something more sinister.”