A Victorian Gent (The Making of a Man Series, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  Biting back his exclamation, the sergeant explained away his surprise – it was early days yet, most girls waited till second or third month to be certain – but he was quite sure Mrs Jane knew exactly what she was about. Congratulations, and when did they expect the happy event?

  Dick did not know, had not understood there to be a particular time span apt to such processes, but when nine months was mentioned he supposed it would be a June baby.

  “Early summer or late spring then, Mr Richard,” Sergeant Bill briskly commented as he rode away, keeping his inevitable comments on just how late a spring for his horse’s ears alone. A pity, the sergeant thought, he was coming to like, even respect, the little rabbit; he had done his utmost to break the boy, to make him run, but he had stuck to it, and kept his good manners. The boy was a milksop, no doubt, but he was no coward, and he said as much to Old Burke that night as he made his weekly report, telling him also the joyous news of Mrs Jane’s interesting condition.

  “We knew that much, Sergeant Bill. One look at ‘er would have been enough, even if ‘er father ‘adn’t demanded an immediate wedding. If it’s a boy then my Will excludes ‘im; a girl don’t matter anyway. At least ‘er father ain’t got any black men as servants – thank Christ we ain’t in the Sugar Islands!”

  The possibility of Saxon blondness – common in Dorset – did not occur to the Old Man, though it raised any number of eyebrows in succeeding years.

  Sergeant Bill had given the matter of Dick’s marriage some little thought – it did not require a lot – knew that it could only lead to trouble of a more or less public nature. The woman was ill, mentally sick, suffering from some kind of nymphomania – though those were not the terms he used – and she would surely commit adultery, repeatedly and carelessly, driven by her needs to ignore any discretion, and she would inevitably be discovered. If the partner of the particular moment happened to be of the gentry then Dick might well find himself out on the grass at dawn, duelling pistol in hand. Duelling was unlawful, strictly forbidden in Victoria's England, but still took place not infrequently, the blind eye turned except where a death occurred and then the police normally only appeared after the survivor had left for France.

  As it stood, Mr Richard would have no chance, and that was not right. Just once in his life, Sergeant Bill decided, the boy should get a fair crack of the whip; he requested, and was instantly given, money to buy a pair of good, well-balanced pistols.

  Dick was intelligent, so he could fire a handgun with reasonable accuracy, the skills involved being more intellectual than simply physical. He could estimate distance, allow for windage, compensate for light and declining or ascending line of sight in instant decision without laborious calculation; he could feel the pattern of numbers involved. Sergeant Bill, as expert with a pistol as with his hands, taught him the trick of pointing rather than aiming so that he quickly became a good snapshot.

  “Look at the target, not at the pistol. Hold the tool on the line of your forefinger – you can point at anything. Go to the vertical, drop the barrel to the point, thumb back the hammer and squeeze so gently the shot surprises you. Always remember, Mr Richard, there’s nothing special about a handgun – it’s a tool designed to kill men, that’s all, and like any tool there’s a craftsman’s way to use it. You won’t be a perfect shot this way – you don’t need to be – these fire a ball weighing three parts of an ounce faster than you can see – that don’t need to hit plumb centre in the bull, any part of a man’s belly or chest will do. Set a pair of diagonals, shoulder to hip, on your man, point at where they cross – hit a handspan either side or up or down of that and your man will drop.”

  They used a target a foot square at twenty paces, and Dick came to fire from the hip, both eyes open on the point of aim, and he could guarantee to place his round on that piece of paper.

  “It ain’t pretty, Mr Richard, but it kills men – and that’s the only reason for picking up a pistol. Remember the rule – never load a pistol except you are going to fire it; never fire a pistol unless you want to hit a man; never hit a man unless you want to kill him; never kill a man unless you have a good reason.”

  “And if I don’t want to kill him, Sergeant Bill?”

  “Don’t use a pistol!”

  “So, if I am challenged…”

  “Then it is 'is problem. Don’t you challenge nobody, Mr Richard, except you got no choice. But don’t ever back off if some pushy little bugger wants to fight – you’ll be doing the world a favour by settling 'is hash for 'im!”

  Dick wondered whether he would be able to kill a man if it came down to it – there must, surely, be another answer – Christ had not died on his Cross for men to kill each other.

  Mrs Jane showed her pregnancy early, her belly growing apace, but this often happened, they assured Dick.

  “Wind, Dicky-dido! You must be pumping ‘er full of air, boy,” his father laughed on the only occasion he nerved himself to raise the topic. “Never thought you ‘ad it in you, boy – but you surely got it into ‘er!”

  Dick never asked again.

  Maskelyne would say nothing, was wooden, unresponsive, coldly efficient; he did not expect to stay beyond his twelvemonth. Sergeant Bill simply carried on with his job of making a man out of some of the commonest clay he had ever come across. Mrs Jane continued to imitate a bitch in heat – she itched and she had to be scratched, at frequent intervals.

  Dick was intelligent, even if ignorant – he knew only Greek, Latin and Divinity, but he was capable of using his brain. His house employed his man, three maids and a cook, a gardener and his boy and a groom outside, a minimum staff for the residence of a gentleman. Inevitably they talked to each other, often unaware of Mr Richard sat with a book, hidden in his wingchair in his little library or taking the winter sun in a sheltered corner of the garden. He could not help but overhear speculation, gossip, rumour and vulgar wit; naïve as he was, he had to recognise that his sixteen year old bride was either highly experienced or possessed the most remarkable genius of salacious invention. He was an innocent, could not hope to comprehend his marriage; he knew only, and believed devoutly, that it was of God, a sacrament to be dissolved solely by the Lord calling one of the partners to Him. Dick prayed, very privately, for understanding and patience for a few more months – not for long, for his lady was soon to become a mama and would then, of course, be utterly transformed by her miraculous, maternal love for their child.

  Dick could barely remember his mother, but knew that she had loved and valued him and that his father would have been less of an animal with that good woman at his side. It never occurred to him that she might have been a gin-rotten harridan, responsible for a good part of the Old Man’s sour nature.

  Early in March, six months after his wedding, Dick was running easily at Sergeant Bill’s side, a mile past Burke’s and heading out towards the Newbury road, when his father passed them in his travelling chaise and pulled to a stop.

  “Get in, boy.”

  The carriage moved off.

  “You look like a ‘uman being, anyway. What thought ‘ave you given to your future lately?”

  “Not very much, sir, because I do not know what I can do. Could I be of value in the firm, sir?”

  Only a few months before Dick had been horrified by the idea of work, had known that he could not do it; now he could, at least, raise the question. Burke was hopeful – he could not love his son – perhaps he was incapable of the tender emotion – but he could respect honest self-confidence in any man, and his son was a man now, in his terms.

  The boy was no longer a weakling and he could probably accept Sergeant Bill’s assertion that he never had been, that he had merely never had the opportunity or calling to display his strength. If that was so then he had failed in his duty as a father. Not a pleasant thought, Godby Burke did not fail, but not a thought to run away from. Perhaps he could work with the man, make a beginning on a different footing.

  “No. You could be useful, b
ut it’s better not – I want you out of the Counting House, don’t want you smelling of Trade; not like I do, anyway. I can ‘ire on managers to do my work, don’t need you for that. Parliament, maybe – my lord ‘as got a couple of safe seats and it would be easy enough to set you up in one when you were of an age. You’d get to know the powerful men that way, learn where the strings are and ‘ow to pull ‘em. I’ll ‘ave the newssheets sent to you – read ‘em and get an idea of what’s going on in the world, and ‘ow it might be used to ‘elp us.”

  He tugged the string to stop the carriage. As Dick got out the Old Man suddenly raised himself in his seat. “Good day to you, my son.”

  “Good day, Father,” Dick correctly replied, almost overcome by the first common courtesy his father had ever offered him.

  The newspapers duly arrived and Dick read them attentively, initially with almost no understanding, for they dealt familiarly with ongoing issues he had never heard of. After a very few weeks he found himself tending to sympathise with the Radicals, for both Tories and Liberals were shabby sorts of opportunists. He kept his views to himself, however, feeling his father might be unsympathetic to them.

  There were advertisements, as ever, for books and pamphlets and Dick would have written off for many of them were it not that he had no money – his father paid all of their household bills and his wife spent all of their not ungenerous allowance on her frequent shopping expeditions.

  In the seventh month of their marriage Mrs Jane felt her pains, slightly to Dick’s surprise, he being reconciled to another eight weeks of waiting. He had heard of seven month children and was considerably distressed because they were, he had been told, tiny and weak and even more likely than a full-term baby to die. It was a fact that babies died, it happened and was the working of the Lord’s providence and must be accepted as such – perhaps one boy in five and one girl in six among the wealthy failed to reach their fifth birthday. Among the poor, of course, the chances were much worse, which was also the appointment of the Lord – a labouring woman would expect to fall pregnant at least twenty times after fifteen years of age, come to a dozen live births and bring maybe five children to adulthood; her final pregnancy at age forty or more commonly killed her. Mrs Jane would be at little risk herself, but her premature baby stood less than half a chance of growing to healthy adulthood and she would need all of the comforts that religion and her husband could provide.

  Twelve hours of anxiety passed in the normal activities of a husband – pacing up and down, drinking too much, in Dick’s case four whole glasses of wine over the day, and listening for noise from the bedroom. Sound there was in plenty: Mrs Jane was not renowned for her self-control and discovered giving birth to a baby to be considerably less amusing than making it – she screamed.

  Soon after dark Dick was called to see his son and was presented with a vast, blond-haired, bellowing abomination, red-cheeked and huge-handed. The midwife, misreading his expression, assured him that he had a fine, healthy boy, a ten pounder, no less! Doctor and maids, better informed, stared at the ceiling, busied themselves about the mother, looked anywhere except at the legal father.

  Both of the grooms he had seen had been fair haired, Dick recalled, but they had been slightly built horsemen; perhaps he should scour the fields for a ploughman with mighty chest and thews, Saxon-gold hair his only wealth. Perhaps, he thought, he should not bother – it might be difficult to winnow through the plethora of candidates. He wondered whether he would vomit, fought back the bile – he had been humiliated sufficiently for one day.

  A glance round the room at the tight faces, the careful absence of knowing smiles, and he realised just what a fool he was – they all knew, all except the midwife who had come out from Bridport, and she would be told soon enough. All of his father’s insults were true – he was contemptible, a useless milksop, fit only to give a name to gutter-bred bastards. A last look at the whore asleep in his bed and he stumbled from the room, minded to kill himself and be done with the charade that was his life. He entered his dressing-room in time to see the door shut on Maskelyne, pistol case under his arm.

  They would not even allow him rest.

  He dragged on frock-coat and boots, ran out of his house in silent despair. The doctor's gig was drawn up outside the house; his elderly groom was at the horse's head. He hit the man when he showed unwilling, snatched the reins and set off down the road.

  Book One: The Making

  of a Man Series

  Chapter Two

  Where to go? It was easy enough to flee, and futile – there had to be a place to run to, he had to go somewhere. He would need to make a decision as soon as he reached Newbury where the Great West Road led to London or Bristol and the lanes spread north towards the east and west of the Midlands.

  Little thought was needed in the first instance – Bristol was definitely out of the question; the firm of Burkes was big there, shipping hides and fats in from Ireland, and Dick could easily become known. London was big, but the business community was small enough that new men soon came to attention, and London was the home of the Metropolitan Police, renowned for the most efficient detective force in the country.

  He had to go north if he was to stay in England.

  It did not occur to Dick that his father was a proud man, never bested in any deal, never second to any competitor, never, ever, a victim. The Old Man would have died rather than admit that his own son, barely a full grown man in his opinion, had treated him with such contempt, sneered at him in his weakness. From a business point of view as well, he dared not publicly admit physical incompetence. Burke was hated and feared, a bully who had deliberately bankrupted competitors and was rumoured to have had a hand in more than one warehouse fire, to have intimidated other firms’ managers and bookkeepers, to have bribed and bludgeoned his way to the top ranks of the mercantile aristocracy. A sign of weakness would bring out the wolves as well as the vultures, and, as for Officers of the Law, as well let lepers into his counting house!

  A further point escaped Dick for many years – he had done just as his father would have in like circumstances, except that he had neglected to kick the Old Man while he lay unprotected on the floor. The Old Man saw himself in his son, and had sufficient sense of humour to appreciate the joke. There would be no pursuit - revenge was the spite of weaklings, the Old Man believed, and he would move on, assuming he recovered sufficiently to move at all.

  Dick rode steadily, making as good a pace as he could on the potholed tracks that passed for roads – it amused a man of his classical education that the old Roman roads were still among the best all-weather routes in England. He rested in Oxford, picking an inn on the north of the city, ready for the morning. He slept uneasily that night, bitter that he had not been here for the past year, reading in cloistered content in one of the colleges – but that option could never be open to him now, the University was an obvious place for a search to commence. He drifted onto the Banbury road – it was as good as any other - and made no attempt to push his horse, to be seen to be making speed, reaching Northampton late in the day.

  Northwards still, he decided, possibly towards Scotland, or to Liverpool and a passage west to the new lands of Canada, or even to the United States, though America was, from his reading, essentially farming land with a fringe of industry on the East Coast, and he knew nothing at all of agriculture and keeping cows.

  Dick sat over his dinner, took a couple of glasses with it, gave himself to careful thought, the first running panic over. He could go to Edinburgh, there was a university of national repute and he had funds enough to pay his fees and live there for three years and eventually set himself up as a schoolmaster, say. With a private income of even thirty or forty pounds a year from his remaining funds, living in at a school could be very comfortable, an existence of academic monasticism. There was a point, his marriage had been a disaster, but he had learned about a woman, had found his own bodily needs, did not really wish to remain wholly solitary; not
a schoolmaster, then.

  The wilds of America, where a man could be free, rich and happy? He considered that, decided he was free already, by no means poor and had no idea what happiness was, why pursue that particular chimaera?

  Modern civilisation appealed, he decided – if he was to live at all, and he was not entirely decided on the wisdom of that course, then there was much to be said for a comfortable existence, although there were many points against complacency.

  He retired to his chamber, called for tea and sat to plan, to use the powerful intellect he had once been so proud of; he would drift no more.

  First things first – he had committed robbery with violence as far as the law was concerned, and that was a hanging offence. His father might already have set the police onto him, would almost certainly put Sergeant Bill on his trail, and no amount of concealment would hide him from that implacable monster; if not this year then next, one day he would look up to see the sergeant at his door. They could not hang him twice; he reached for his saddle bags, took out the pair of pistols Godbegot had strapped to his saddle, checked their loads, was glad to see they were modern, six inch barrel pieces, not ancient horse pistols. They were still too big to conceal on his person; he would buy a long frieze coat in the morning, he needed warmth anyway. One on the saddle, one at his waist and the good sergeant would regret ever teaching him how to shoot – he would not be taken back to stand his trial.

  He was planning murder, he realised, imperilling his immortal soul.

  “If God there be, then he has some explaining to do when we meet!”

  His father and the whore together had set him free – they had shown him the truth, and it was not to be found on his knees or between the covers of any holy book.