Where the Dead Lie
Page 31
Sebastian knew better.
At the wedding breakfast that followed, while others rushed to congratulate the bride, Sebastian found occasion to pause beside his niece’s new husband and say in a low voice, “I know the part you played in Rowe’s ugly little hobby. Just because I can’t prove it—yet—doesn’t mean I won’t. Make no mistake: This isn’t over yet. I will be watching you. Even when you don’t think I am.”
Ashworth stood at his ease, his brows arching in mock dismay as he looked out over the crowd of wedding guests. “That’s supposed to frighten me, is it?”
“It should. If you think your marriage to my niece will protect you, you’re wrong. It’s my ambition to see Stephanie a widow before the year is out.”
“Well. That should make for some interesting family gatherings,” said Ashworth, a faint, provocative smile on his handsome face as he moved to take his place beside his bride.
Author’s Note
Street children have been a part of cities since at least Roman times and doubtless long before. According to British philanthropist Lord Ashley, thirty thousand runaway, orphaned, or abandoned children were scrambling to stay alive and keep warm on the streets of London by the middle of the nineteenth century. The problem is still with us: UNICEF puts the current number of street children worldwide in the tens of millions, with some estimating the number much higher.
For Britain’s disturbing practice of transporting the mothers of small children, see The Women of Botany Bay: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Women in the Origins of Australian Society, by Portia Robinson.
The ancient monastic area of London known as Clerkenwell takes its name from the famous Clerks’ Well (“clerk” being the Middle English term for a clergyman), which can still be seen there in Farringdon Lane. Victorian urban planning and twentieth-century bombs have destroyed much of what was in the seventeenth century a fashionable place of residence (Oliver Cromwell once owned a house in Clerkenwell Close). But both the Charterhouse and St. John’s Gate, a relic of the vast monastic complex that once served as the English headquarters for the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, are still preserved. Parts of the order’s chapel also survive, as do St. James’s Church and churchyard. The former Middlesex Sessions House still stands on Clerkenwell Green, made famous in Victorian times by Charles Dickens as the site where Fagin teaches Oliver Twist to pick pockets. Clerkenwell has maintained a long association with radicalism, from the earlier Lollards and Chartists to Vladimir Lenin and friends in the twentieth century.
Holywell Street was farther south, not far from the Thames. Named after a long-vanished sacred well of clean, sweet water, Holywell forked off from the Strand before then turning to run parallel to it. The street disappeared completely early in the twentieth century when the Strand was widened. Once occupied by silk merchants, Jewish tailors, and shops that supplied costumes and fancy attire to theaters and masquerade-goers, by the early nineteenth century Holywell was becoming dominated by booksellers and the kind of radical publishers who—inspired by the French Revolution—operated secret presses in hidden cellars. It also became increasingly devoted to what were known as “licentious books,” “libertine novels,” or “bawdy stuff.” England in 1813 did not have censorship laws, but booksellers and printers could be—and were—imprisoned for “disturbing the King’s peace.”
It is from the name of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, that we derive the word “sadism.” Born in 1740, he was very much a child of the Enlightenment, albeit a twisted one, and was imprisoned at various times for many years under the monarchy, the republic, and the empire. Although he was most likely a victim of bipolar disorder and perhaps suffered paranoid delusions (given the extent of his persecution, his paranoia may be understandable), he was imprisoned not so much because of his mental health as for the nature of his writings. His numerous letters from prison to his wife and his valet show an unexpectedly brilliant, humorous man and are worth reading. He died in an insane asylum in 1814, in the midst of organizing his fellow inmates to perform one of his plays.
De Sade did indeed write a work called Les 120 journées de Sodome, ou l’école du libertinage, composed on small scraps of paper while he was in the Bastille. He kept it as a forty-foot roll of glued-together paper hidden in the wall of his cell and thought it lost when the Bastille was stormed and destroyed in the early days of the French Revolution. But someone actually did find it, save it, and smuggle it out of France. It was not, however, published during Sebastian’s time. A nauseating tale of sexual abuse and torture, its first known publication was in 1904, in Berlin. It is now in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris.
The wealthy fifteenth-century nobleman and knight Gilles de Rais was one of the first convicted serial killers. The bodies of some forty of his young victims were discovered in 1437, although he is thought to have killed many more, both male and female. Some believe de Rais the innocent victim of an ecclesiastical plot, but the surviving transcripts of testimony from both his confederates and his victims’ parents conform well with modern understanding of killers of his type.
It is important to note that more than ninety percent of child molesters consider themselves heterosexual, and that while a majority of those target only girls, about one-fifth prey on both boys and girls. I would like to thank Dr. Samantha Brown, a psychiatrist with the U.S. Air Force, for many hours of discussion on serial killers and sexual predators. Any errors I have made in interpretation are my own.
To my knowledge, no one in the early nineteenth century performed Body Farm–type studies of the effect of the passage of time and burial on flesh and bone. But there is no reason Gibson could not have done something similar. He was, after all, a very curious surgeon.
The rather distinctive type of house where Sebastian finds Les Jenkins is what is now known as a Wealden house (unfortunately, since the term wasn’t applied until the twentieth century, Sebastian can’t use it). Although most typically seen in the wealds of Kent, examples can also be found in other parts of southern England. Built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of timber framing infilled with wattle and daub, these houses were originally the homes of yeoman farmers.
Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, known as the Butcher of Culloden, was the third and youngest son of George II. He appears to have had at least one illegitimate daughter, but he never married and suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-nine. He died without legitimate issue.
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