The Family Mansion Read online

  * * *

  Hartley Fudges thought he had a profound philosophical mind. But the truth was that he was as profound as a beanpole. He read a little but misunderstood a lot. What he shared with many Englishmen of his class was an expansive inner world populated by the mythological figures and events that had been beaten into him at Eton.

  The public schools of England, then and now, stamped their graduates not only with the same way of speaking, but with a remarkably similar worldview. Many years after Hartley Fudges had come and gone, anthropologists studying ancient cultures would come to the hypothesis that language not only affected thinking, it also altered reality. This was indubitably true of the upper-class English mind-set and its art form, poetry. Both were pillars of the same exclusive country club—the upper-class point of view—to which intruders were not invited. When John Keats (1795–1821), who had no upper-class credentials, began publishing his poetry, his work was derided by one brainless critic as “the Cockney school of poetry.” Today, the dope who wrote that patronizing review is unknown for anything except that stupidly wrong opinion.

  For Hartley Fudges, what mattered deeply was that the surface gestures and conventional symbols due to his rank be observed. Being a member of the aristocracy, he demanded that the courtesies due to him and his rank in society be respected and upheld no matter how scruffy the circumstances. He once flew into a snit because a whore he was screwing under a bridge in London refused to call him “My Lord” or “Earl” Fudges or any other honorific to which he was entitled. Instead of the proper nomenclature, she was calling him any vulgarity that sprang to her common mind as he held her pinned and wriggling against the damp roughness of the stone undergirding the bridge.

  “Lord have mercy,” she gasped in the crease of his neck as he pumped her vigorously.

  “No mercy,” he hissed.

  “I’m not talking to you,” she squealed. “I’m talking to God. Take that thing out of me or I’ll scream for my pimp.”

  “Not until I’m finished,” he panted without a pause.

  She blasted a scream in his neck and within seconds Hartley could hear the footfalls of someone scrambling toward them.

  “’ere, Milord!” a male voice said gruffly. “You’re hurting ’er. Stop what you’re doing or I’ll hit you with this rock.” And he raised his hand holding the rock high like a club.

  With a sudden jerk, Hartley freed himself from the woman, pulled up his pants, and stalked off from under the bridge.

  “Thank you, Milord,” the man called after him as Hartley disappeared into the night.

  “Milord my ass,” the woman spat bitterly.

  * * *

  Hartley Fudges considered himself a Platonist, a follower of the Greek philosopher. Not that he had mastered the thinking of Plato (427–347 BC). To tell the truth, he found every kind of philosophy a bit on the fuzzy side. He rather liked the idea of Plato’s myth where the cave dwellers mistook shadows cast on the walls by a fire for reality. But, really, he could not say he actually understood what Plato was getting at. However, he also knew that a young gentleman needed a stand in philosophy—a point of view, as it were—that he could talk about in polite company. So when anyone asked him anything philosophical he was ready to answer as a Platonist and had memorized appropriate passages here and there of Plato that he could quote.

  The problem with blinking philosophy was it was so vague and hazy that even when he got the surface impressions of an idea right, he often got its underlying meaning wrong. Ask him a question about anything and he had an answer. But his answers were without understanding. He knew many pretty facts and figures but they were stacked up in his head like stuffy books in a reference library that everyone quoted but no one ever read.

  This much was plain to Hartley: Plato claimed that every object in the world had its perfect equivalent in another world. A comb in this world was a mere imitation of its ideal counterpart in the next. Every horse on earth was the imperfect copy of the ideal horse. It was the same with every stone, every plate, every cow, every dog, and every necklace. Somewhere in the other world was the perfect prototype of which the earthly model was an imperfect copy.

  Exactly where this other world was Hartley did not know, but neither did Plato. Yet Hartley and his classmates liked knowing about the old Greek and his philosophy, even if they thought the whole business a bit dotty. But never mind, it was better if the upper class knew highbrow things that the lower classes did not; knowing a bit about Plato definitely helped make clear the difference between Milord and Milord’s butler.

  * * *

  A damp morning was sponging down the windows of the mansion by the time the two men were ready to go to bed. They made their way through a cavernous ballroom which was being cleaned up by a number of weary servants under the watchful eye of a uniformed butler who bowed slightly as they walked past.

  The elder Fudges was more openly fond of his second son than of his first, whose name was Alexander and was filled with his mother’s pretensions. “Do you know, my boy, what I would do if I were in your shoes?” he said in a paternal voice. “I would go abroad and try my luck in the colonies.”

  Hartley responded with a raucous laugh.

  “And where exactly would you go, dear Papa?”

  “In a word, Jamaica.”

  They mounted the grand stairway and made their way up to the second floor, where they would sleep in ornate bedrooms. On the walls were paintings of more ancestors, all staring out from inside rectangular gold-gilded frames in the stilted poses and humorless expressions usually found in a rogues’ gallery. Neither man took notice. They had seen them many times before and fully expected to one day take their places inside picture frames hung on the wall. The father, at least, was assured of his wall perch because the death of his older sibling and his older sibling’s son had given him the benefits of primogeniture. Hartley, on the other hand, had only a faint chance of ever hanging on the wall.

  “Jamaica, eh?” he murmured just as he reached his bedroom door. He was about to ask the old man why that colony but he decided he was too tired to listen to the long-winded explanation that was likely to ensue. So he simply said, “Good night, Papa,” and slipped into his room, closing the door softly behind him.

  Hartley changed into his pajamas and climbed into an enormous four-poster bed whose bulk and heft dominated the shadowy room like a sneer does a face. He did not wash or brush his teeth. This was 1805. Modern toothpastes would emerge later in the 1800s, and the oral custom of the day, practiced by some people but not by Hartley Fudges, was to keep the mouth clean through the use of chewing sticks much like a dog today with a bone. The dentifrice whose chalky and tangy taste we begin and end the day with would emerge in the mid-1850s, but the chewing stick had been in use as early as 3500 BC in fabled Babylon.

  Moreover, for all its imposing size, the family mansion did not have indoor plumbing and Hartley did not feel like splashing himself with water in the pitcher and washbasin that a butler had left on a nearby table. The room was jerkily lit by a candelabra, which he blew out just before he crawled between the sheets with the grime of the night’s revelry still clinging to his flesh.

  Within ten minutes he was fast asleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  An aristocratic Englishman such as Hartley Fudges was both born and made. Nature had produced a rough draft, social engineering the final one. He had been raised by a series of grim nannies, who potty trained him, bathed him, and kept him clean enough to be turned over to his parents briefly each day so they could play with him like a newly bought dolly. He was characteristically dressed in lacy outfits decorated with flounces and embroidered hems, as was the custom of the day, and sent to public schools, which, in spite of the name, were really private, expensive, and exclusive, where he was grounded in both Greek and Latin mythology in the original languages. He would attend a university whose lectures were given in Latin. The big accomplishment would be to get in—for once in, getting out wi
th a degree, barring commission of a felony, was virtually assured. His education would not be useful, but ornamental like an epaulet, and would help identify him as a member of the upper class.

  That Hartley Fudges was now twenty-three was something of an accomplishment. It was not easy being a child in nineteenth-century England. Infant mortality was staggering and chances were good that you would not live to see your first birthday. Being a child made you smaller and weaker than adults but earned you no special treatment. If you stole anything and were caught, you were hanged in public just like any hardened adult criminal. The modern concept of childhood as a period of innocence did not exist in the eighteenth century or early nineteenth. It was written in the merciless scripture of the day that sin was sin regardless of who committed it, whether an old man or a young child. For example, in 1801 a twelve-year-old boy who stole a silver spoon was hanged. This was not an isolated incident, a case of justice running amok. Instead, it happened regularly. In 1816 a ten-year-old convicted of shoplifting died on the gallows. And in 1831 the same gruesome penalty was applied to a boy found guilty of arson.

  To be born in nineteenth-century London was also to be a target for every random hoodlum living in the largest metropolitan pigsty on God’s good earth. It was to step across the foyer of heaven and into the main chamber of hell. Every grubby germ, every nihilistic virus, every thuggish parasite, every microscopic blob of infection and disease was out to kill you. Typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis stalked your cradle without mercy. The medical profession was next to useless in protecting you. It didn’t even believe in the existence of the microbial world or in the mechanism of infection, and its standard treatment for virtually every illness was to open a vein and bleed you. This was as useless as trying to stop the doomed Titanic from sinking by flushing one of its toilets.

  Partly responsible for the prevalence of infection and disease was the chief method of locomotion throughout the sceptered isle of England, namely the horse.

  The horse was an instrument of domesticity, entertainment, militarism, and everyday transportation, and its fecal imprint was evident in every major city and borough throughout the empire. In 1780 some sixty thousand horses clip-clopped daily through the streets of London. By the mid-1800s, eight million horses a year were annually crossing London Bridge. Raw waste poured into the River Thames, the source of drinking water for the city, from over sixty sewers. Side by side with housing areas existed slaughterhouses and hogpens where daily butchery was done openly. Drains commonly overflowed, plastering the ugly brown stains of sewage scum on the walls of houses and buildings. In some parts of the city, raw sewage was dumped from the windows of houses onto the streets below. You could hire a crier to precede you on the street ringing a bell and crying, “Hold your hand!” Over the entire city a noxious stench from this nastiness hung like a pestilential miasma. Paradoxically enough, the English feared what they desperately needed the most—fresh air and a bath.

  Finished with his schooling, Hartley Fudges would face the world as an English gentleman and be identified as such by his elegant manners and his received pronunciation. His classical education concluded with the grand tour, where the young man was sent for a year or so to sample life in other European countries. (Europeans had a taste for periodically slaughtering each other, but between wars they also liked to visit the foreign battlegrounds of earlier bloodletting.)

  Hartley had only just returned from his own grand tour. He had done the usual circuit of France, Germany, some of the Balkan countries, ending up in Amsterdam where he spent the final three months of his tour courting a rich young Dutch woman. His wooing was interrupted by a summons from his father, who forced him to come home by cutting off his supply of money, which was and is a time-honored way of curbing the self-indulgent wanderlust of young masters. Suddenly penniless, young Hartley had no choice but to return home.

  One month after he arrived in England, his Dutch love sent him a Dear John letter announcing her engagement to a German. Hartley’s response was to laugh and hurl her letter into a blazing fireplace. Since returning home, Hartley had spent most of his time wooing the widow Bentley. And now that she’d decided against him, he had no idea what he would do next.

  * * *

  Hartley woke up around noon, and the first thought that popped into his conscious mind was his rejection by the widow. He lay in bed for at least an hour, sloshing through the swamp of impressions from the night before. He tried his best to think of another approach he might yet use on the widow, but he could come up with nothing. His heart was heavy as he regarded the road ahead. His mind roamed over all the possibilities, and he even began to daydream about his brother becoming sick and dying, which would automatically elevate Hartley to the position of the first son. Since Alexander his brother had no children of his own yet, he had only to die for Hartley to have uncontested rights of primogeniture. If something like that could happen to his father, why couldn’t it happen to him too?

  Well, he didn’t want to start the day with a pessimistic frame of mind, but he thought it highly unlikely that God would intervene on his behalf and strike down Alexander. Yet the prospect was so appealing that he lay in bed going over the grisly details. He ran the scenario lovingly through his imagination, heard his brother coughing one evening, watched as he became progressively worse, until finally he was forced into bed by a debilitating lung ailment. A doctor was summoned who pronounced his brother ill with a virulent pneumonia and bled him of two pints of blood. A day later, the poor fellow had the decency to die.

  There was a funeral that Hartley attended in his imagination looking as grim as a starving vulture. Neighbors and friends of the family expressed their condolences to him, and he mingled among his guests appearing every bit the bereaved sibling and modestly muttering “Thank you’s” to mournful comments directed his way. The next day, he would wake up the first son with every expectation of inheriting his father’s property. It was that simple; it could happen that quickly.

  But as things looked right now, it would not happen if it were left up to God. His brother would not be struck down. And no matter how badly Hartley desired it, there would be no lung ailment, no ornate funeral, no line of sympathizers, and no change in the order of succession.

  Like a wet gray animal, the bleak winter day nuzzled the windows of the room in which Hartley had slept. The prospect was so gloomy and dreary that he began to daydream about giving God a hand by murdering Alexander himself. He lay with his hands folded under his head, stared at the canopy of the four-poster bed, and began fantasizing about the best way of murdering his brother.

  As a second son who stood to most benefit from the crime, he would be the chief suspect. He would need an ironclad alibi, one that put him miles and miles away from the scene of the crime. While he lay in bed thinking about the murder, he saw that the plot was an impossibility, nothing more than a pipe dream. Feeling frustrated and stymied at every step, he rolled himself up in the sheets of the bed like a cocoon and tried to think. But he could not think, and thinking when he was in no mood to think only made him feel peevish and ill-used.

  He rang for a servant to help him dress, and a few minutes later a middle-aged uniformed man rapped on the door and glided into the room smoothly with the oily unctuousness of someone steeped in long servitude.

  “Good morning, sir,” crooned the butler.

  “Good morning, George,” replied Hartley with a yawn. “Is the master at breakfast?”

  “No, sir. He left early this morning.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I’m not sure, sir.”

  “Help me get dressed, will you, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Hartley dressed, with the valet’s help. The process took him nearly half an hour because his clothes were tight fitting and snug, as none of the modern convenient clothing fasteners had yet been invented. Chicago mechanical engineer Whitcomb L. Judson (1836–1909), for example, would
not patent his invention of the zipper for another eighty-six years. So Hartley wore a simple gray outfit that had no fly or zipper and consisted of an ensemble of gray tight-fitting pantaloons—which had become a symbol of democracy since the French Revolution—a simple shirt, and a tailored coat.

  Recently, the two revolutions—the American (1775–1783) and the French (1789–1799)—had contributed to the democratization of fashion reflected in the relative simplicity of Hartley’s outfit. Before these two upheavals, so-called sumptuary laws had dictated rigorous standards of dress to differentiate between an aristocrat and a commoner. Distinctions between the classes were still being signaled in their respective styles of dress, but these differences had become more muted and existed not so much in design as in the use of particular fabrics. The clothing of an upper-class man, for example, was often trimmed in silk and lace, while the lower classes wore simple trousers known as sans-culottes (without breeches), made of homespun fabrics.

  Having dressed, Hartley had breakfast by himself, sitting with a bemused air about him as if he hadn’t quite decided who he was and what he was about to do. He was served by a man who was not particularly conscientious and whose attitude Hartley found annoying. Servants were notoriously sensitive to the power centers in a household and had a keen sense of whom to butter up and whom they could safely ignore. It was plain that the man had decided that Hartley was just another sponging second son.

  Halfway through breakfast, Hartley beckoned to the servant to come to him. The man ambled casually across the room.