The Family Mansion Read online

  “Yes, sir,” he muttered indifferently.

  “Tell the stable boy to saddle my horse,” Hartley said.

  “And which horse is yours, sir?”

  “The same one that was mine yesterday.”

  “Yesterday the stable boy asked me this same question, sir. Which is why I’m asking you.”

  Hartley said through gritted teeth, “Tell the boy to saddle up the horse I rode yesterday.”

  “Very good, sir,” the man replied in a voice whose tone suggested that Hartley was something of a nuisance. Then he loped off toward the kitchen and disappeared.

  A few minutes later Hartley was cantering the horse down a narrow bridle path that threaded through the woodlands of the property.

  * * *

  The English countryside, then as now, was a profuse garden of loveliness that rivaled the biblical splendors of Eden. Spring was still two months away, but by April a gaudy explosion of blossoms and flowers would ignite the land with a spectacular beauty that would make Englishmen scattered all over the globe yearn for their homeland and moan a variation of the plaintive words that would one day be written by the yet unborn poet, Robert Browning (1812–1889): “O, to be in England / now that April’s there . . .”

  It was too cold to be riding, and Hartley knew that the moment he mounted his horse and trotted down the bridle path. But he also knew that to turn around and go back would make him look ridiculous before the servants, which was the one thing in the world upper-class Englishmen most dreaded. So he rode on bravely, his nose leaking, the cold air stinging his lungs, and to take his mind off the wintry conditions, he began once again to rehearse last night’s encounter with the widow.

  The landscape around him looked like it had been shorn; everywhere sprouted the stubble of denuded trees and bushes and twiggy bramble. Now and again a blast of winter air would sweep over the bridle path, making the bare trees shudder as if spasming from the cold.

  As he trotted his horse through the woods, Hartley, with a little effort, might have glimpsed scraps of childhood memories dangling from the bushes and trees. All around him was the stage in which he had reveled during the best years of his childhood. As a boy, he used to ramble through these woodlands, his imagination seeding the dense foliage with fantasy dragons, prowling highway men, knights errant looking for trouble, and in this very spot he had left many a villain bleeding to death after a fierce and savage sword fight. His sword, which the unimaginative world thought was made of wood, to his mind’s eye had been forged from the finest tempered steel, invisible to the probing eye of the intruding adult. But no adult living could have been in the place he was at that time, for then he had been adrift in that estuary of childhood where imagination and reality mingled like river and sea as they do only in the mind of the very young. Those years when he played alone and carefree in this world of make-believe had been the happiest of his life. And now that he looked back and could see the imaginary and playful splendor that was once his, he could no longer partake of it without feeling ridiculous—a certain and dismal sign of adulthood. Then he had been a lighthearted child; now he was a scheming man.

  Hartley broke through the trees at a trot and saw the house towering majestically over the bare fields and felt a pang of regret. If he’d only been born some few years sooner, all of this would be his, and the thought of missed opportunity through blind fate galled him into a rage that shook him like a tremor. The horse, meanwhile, had also got a glimpse of the house and broke into a run for the stables. Hartley pulled brutally on the reins, not wanting to appear as if he were fleeing the cold, and in response, he felt the animal shiver and tremble under him as it slowed down reluctantly with a noticeable muscular spasm.

  “That’s a good girl,” murmured Hartley, patting the horse on the neck and feeling the tendons and striated muscles stretching with the effort.

  A few minutes later, horse and man cantered into the paddocks at a leisurely pace as though the bitter cold did not exist. The horse was emitting steam like an overheated engine, but the man sat on its back looking as if it were a beautiful spring day.

  “A bit chilly, isn’t it, sir?” the stable boy greeted him as Hartley dismounted.

  “Is it?” Hartley responded as if he had no idea. Then without another word, he patted the horse on the withers and headed toward the main house, hoping with all his heart that he would find a brisk fire blazing in the drawing room.

  * * *

  In 1805 the physical world was something of a terra incognito, meaning that much about it was unknown and much of what was known was wrong. Of course, a hundred years from now people will no doubt say the same about us and what we presume to know. Yet there were measurable and major differences between the generation to which Hartley belonged and us.

  Hartley and his contemporaries, for example, had no telephone, no electricity with all its conveniences, no airplanes, no mechanical means of transportation, no television, no computers, and no Internet. The year before, 1804, had seen the invention of the first steam locomotive by British engineer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), who had demonstrated its practical uses for heavy hauling and the transporting of passengers.

  Britain was in an expansive, almost boisterous mood as she acquired dominion over a substantial chunk of the globe. The world had weathered the puffed-up sterility of the eighteenth century, and its chief windbag, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), had gone kicking and screaming into the salons of the afterlife where he could spend eternity hectoring and bullying the saints with his glib opinions on every issue under the sun. The poetry of the day was written in rhymed couplets that to the modern ear would sound like an advertising jingle.

  Not that Hartley could tell a poem from the oink of a pig or cared in the least about either one. What he cared about was London, where he lived as one particle of the floating population in the most populous city on earth. Of London Dr. Johnson said in one of his more memorable apothegms, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Hartley Fudges was neither tired of London nor of life. The wonder was that neither was he tired of wallowing in an overcrowded wasteland of raw sewage, offal, and filth.

  CHAPTER 3

  A few days after his rejection by the widow, Hartley was taking a coach to London. There were some six passengers riding in the narrow cab of a horse-drawn carriage, and although they were crammed together uncomfortably close, four of them were treating each other with the cool indifference of riders in the yet uninvented elevator by staring off into space as though some fascinating show, visible only to them, was taking place just outside the window. Among the passengers were two middle-aged bankers, one bearded, one clean-shaven, on a business trip. Ordinarily, Englishmen thrown so close together in a public conveyance generally had little to say to one another because the enforced intimacy made every passenger an unwilling eavesdropper, but the two bankers were fortified with brandy that gave them an exhilarating chattiness and they were blithely exchanging opinions as if they were alone in a private drawing room.

  They began their chitchat by discussing banking practices and making veiled references to unspecified sums of money invested in risky overseas operations, particularly India. Soon their conversation shifted to dueling—a topic that made Hartley Fudges perk up and listen attentively. The gentleman who had an unevenly trimmed beard was lamenting the death of Alexander Hamilton, who had been mortally wounded on July 11, 1804, in a duel with Aaron Burr.

  “A brilliant chap, that Hamilton,” opined the gentleman. “What a sorry waste.”

  “What was the duel about?” asked his beardless companion.

  “Oh, some nonsense Hamilton said about Burr in a speech. But they’ve always been enemies. Goes back to the presidential election of 1800. Burr and Jefferson got the same number of electoral votes. Hamilton campaigned for Jefferson, who won.”

  “They ought to outlaw dueling,” the beardless gentleman clucked.

  “It’s been outlawed in America for years just as it is h
ere. Everybody knows where duels are usually fought in London, but the authorities still do nothing about blocking access to the grounds.”

  “Southampton Fields, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly. It’s a ridiculous custom. Legalized murder, if you ask me. Point of honor, my foot! You want to kill a chap and take his wife, challenge him to a duel. Make up some nonsense about his insulting you and slap him in the face before witnesses. You present him with two choices, both equally bad. Either he fights you, which gives you the opportunity to kill him, or if he backs down, be branded a coward, in which case his wife will probably be so ashamed that she’ll leave him. You’ve got him either way.”

  “Of course, he could kill you,” pointed out the banker with no beard.

  “Of course,” the other replied gruffly.

  The carriage rattled on with a herky-jerky motion, slapping the rumps of the passengers against the thin cushions that barely covered the uncomfortable wooden seats. Most of the journey took the coach across rutted unpaved roads that meandered through picturesque villages and open pastures with the occasional plunge through a dark forest where the possibility of the odd highwaymen or footpad lurking behind a tree made the passengers uneasy. A highwayman committed his crime of robbery from the back of a horse, which he used to intercept the stagecoach by crying, “Stand and deliver!” or the even more popular threat, “Your money or your life!” The less glamorous footpad, using a similar phrasing, attempted the same wickedness on foot. Against this dual threat many of the passengers were armed and the coachman rode with a loaded blunderbuss—a primitive shotgun—under his seat. The police force was still in its infancy and regular patrols of the highway were rare or entirely absent.

  Adding to a general sense of discomfort suffered by the passengers was a swaying, unpleasant ride which could make even the most hardened traveler sick. Sitting beside Hartley, for example, was a matronly looking woman who was turning as green as a freshly peeled avocado.

  “Thank God nobody has ever challenged me to a duel,” the clean-shaven gentleman said fervently.

  “Oh, I had a debtor challenge me once. I knew right away what he was up to. Trying to escape having to repay his debt, that was his goal. He thought one way to do it was to murder me in a sham duel.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I said to him, Look here, you. That dueling nonsense is for gentlemen. I am not a gentleman. I’m a businessman. And if you slap me again, I’ll knock you across the room.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  “He slapped me again, and I knocked him clean across the room. He went so far as to have his second call on me. I had my men give the second a good thrashing. Of course, if I had been a gentleman, I would have been doomed to fight the duel with him. But as a businessman and a banker, I didn’t have to go along with his stupid rules about honor.”

  This was too much for the green lady. She turned to the bearded banker and said sharply, “Sir, honor is not stupid, nor is not being a gentleman any occasion for boasting.”

  “You may say so, madame,” the banker replied just as caustically, “because you are a female and no one will ever challenge you to a duel.”

  The woman stared out the window as if transfixed and began to turn green again. As Hartley Fudges listened intently to this exchange, an idea seized him like a cramp. For the rest of the journey he sat as still as a sunning turtle and stared out the window at the passing scenery while his brain hatched a plot to rid himself of his brother.

  * * *

  Dueling in 1805 was a vestige of medieval combat when knights in shining armor—whom one writer called “a terrible worm in an iron cocoon”—settled their disputes in hand-to-hand combat. The word duel is derived from the Latin word duellum, which is a blend of the word bellum and duo, meaning a war between two.

  At the basis of the duel was a defense of one’s honor; if the challenger chose to accept the apology of the one who offended him, the duelists would shake hands like gentlemen and leave the field without bloodshed. Indeed, many duelists strongly professed not to believe in dueling—Alexander Hamilton among them—but felt, when challenged, that they had no choice but to stand up for their honor or become social outcasts.

  Like many revolting customs from ancient times, the duel was gussied up with a code of polite conduct and elaborate rituals. Among the requirements of the custom was that professional witnesses and informal umpires called seconds be present to ensure fair play between the combatants. In the event of unsporting conduct, the seconds would open fire on the violator who did not comply with the rules. But so unanimously understood were the ground rules of the duel that regulations independently drafted by the seconds of Burr and Alexander Hamilton were later found to be nearly identical.

  There was, for example, the question of how far apart the combatants would stand—the distance varied but was usually ten paces apart, or about thirty feet—and of what weapons they would use. In earlier centuries the small thrusting sword was widely used, but by the nineteenth century the duel was usually fought with pistols. In the case of the Burr/Hamilton affair, .56-caliber dueling pistols were used from a range of about thirty feet. The pistols were loaded with a smooth oversized ball and fired from an unrifled barrel that made the weapon highly inaccurate. In an attempt to reduce the mortality of duels, the dueling code specifically prohibited the use of the rifled pistol which, from the typical range of thirty feet, would have been far deadlier.

  As a code and practice that applied only to upper-class men, the custom of dueling had become something of a cottage industry by 1805. There were professional seconds available to stand in at duels, and there were reckless young duelists who were quick to issue a challenge at the drop of a hat over any imaginary snub to their honor. The periodic bloodshedding invariably occurred on the same popular dueling grounds. Hamilton, for example, fell in the same site near the village of Weehawken, New Jersey, where three years earlier his eldest son had been killed in a duel.

  Whatever Hartley Fudges was scheming up, his reverie was interrupted by the coach pulling into its terminus, near the present Paddington Station, and the passengers, body sore and weary, clambering out into a swirling, noisy street whose background clatter and din was as perpetual as the roar of a waterfall. Hartley Fudges felt a pang of recognition: he was back in London. He was home.

  * * *

  London in 1805 was a crowded, dirty city exploding with industry and people. The streets were jammed with horse-drawn carriages, and the pedestrians swarming everywhere had the pallor and bustling, scurrying energy of constant motion that might be found in a population of hungry marsupials. Everywhere the eye looked it beheld smokestacks, grimy working men, sidewalk butchers, shrieking hawkers, and peddlers against a backdrop of persistent staccato hoof beats made by overworked horses harnessed to carriages, hackney cabs, carts, and drays.

  Hartley Fudges loved London with the devotion of a foundling. The city teemed with people of every conceivable look, occupation, color, and background, and Hartley included in his acquaintances a wide assortment of characters ranging from old rumpots who spent their days in a babbling whirl of intoxication to a priggish widow woman who kept a boardinghouse during the day while leading marches of the temperance society at night. He knew prostitutes and gamblers and often patronized their services, and he was on nodding terms with many con men, usurious moneylenders, card sharks, pimps, opportunists, and dreamers.

  That night found him in his favorite pub, the Fox and Hounds, where he drank port wine and had a bowlful of greasy stew and bread and butter for dinner. He was in a convivial temper, considering what was preying on his mind, and the hubbub and smokiness of the dingy pub seemed to add to his celebratory mood as he exchanged banter with other regulars. Yet he was obviously looking for someone, and frequently he would pause in the middle of a remark and peer around the crowded, noisy room. An hour later, he found his man among the maze of faces and went over to greet him. Then the two men huddled in a co
rner of the room to have a quiet but intense chat. The pub was candlelit, which intensified its atmospheric resemblance to a burrow and added a smudginess to every face, object, and piece of furniture in the room.

  The man Hartley Fudges huddled with had the street name of Lord Hemmings. He was a small man who wore an air of inviolable dignity and moved with the energetic, scurrying gait of a rat. Like Hartley, who was also entitled to use the aristocratic title of Lord Fudges, Lord Hemmings was another poor dispossessed second son who was always broke. He had no obvious source of income and barely managed to eke by in the live-and-let-live amorality of nineteenth-century London. It was whispered that he had been a clergyman in the Church of England but had been dismissed from his post for having adulterous affairs with married ladies in his congregation. People, however, said about him that he knew everything and everyone abiding among the wilds of London. Through him adventurers and schemers had a pipeline into the hearts of sociopathic henchmen willing to do anything for money. His role in the world was to be a broker of darkness, to bring together willing, bloodstained hands with deranged minds that were bent on vengeance or other depravity.

  After Hartley Fudges had explained what he was looking for, Lord Hemmings grimaced, leading the other to believe that he was racking his brains to find the right man for the job. In fact, his stomach was bothering him, and for the last day or two he had been breaking wind like a fiend. He was now fighting the impulse to fart, which he found disgusting, for like most upper-class Englishmen he despised the intestinal functions and would have rather been created without bowels.

  “Now, let me see if I understand you,” Lord Hemmings said carefully as he stealthily squeezed out his latest fart. “You are looking for someone to kill your brother in a duel?”

  Hartley Fudges looked annoyed. “I wouldn’t put it quite so bluntly,” he groused, adding, “I’m the second son, for Christ’s sake. He gets everything and I get nothing. How can that be fair? You’ve got to do something or you’ll wind up in the poorhouse.”