Riot Most Uncouth (21 page)

Sedgewyck spat more of his blood onto my shoes. “The arrangement with Felicity was my parents' doing, not my own. I found the prospect of marriage to her untenable, and made other plans. My father's ideas of the social order are outdated—so are yours. There's no respectability left in moldy old titles granted by the ancestors of a king who can't even control his own colonists. The aristocracy is hollow. You people are a bunch of beggars. If I'd wed my fortune to the rotten Whippleby estate, Felicity's damned fool family would have spent my father's wealth on foppery and excess and valets and maids to powder their arses, and we'd all have a share of their noble poverty in half a generation. Money confers respectability in this new age, Lord Byron, and if you marry money to more money, you get a lot of respectability.”

“So you hung Felicity by her feet and bled her like a sow.”

“I swear to Christ, I never did. I only meant to jilt her, to break the engagement. And maybe have a roll with her first; I'm only a man, and you can surely understand the urge. But someone else has killed her. Truth be told, I thought it was you.”

I believed him. Sedgewyck was not the monster I'd read about in my ancient vampire tomes, nor was he the sort of monster that could have slain Jerome Tower in hand-to-hand combat. This was a man who, despite an advantage of six inches of height and twenty-five pounds of mass, was groveling in the street before me, begging for mercy. He was a coward, and that was why he had been unable to end his engagement with Felicity even after he'd lost interest in her. His grief over her death had been false; a polite charade, since mourning was appropriate, given their arrangement. But he hadn't killed her. He lacked the capacity to solve his problems with violence.

Vampire or not, however, he was a most loathsome creature.

“I want you to leave town, Leif Sedgewyck.”

“I will, I promise, at first light.”

“There are plenty of stagecoaches available tonight. I see no reason you should wait.”

He rose to his feet, wincing and clutching his injured belly. I squared my shoulders and raised my hands, in case he wanted to swing at me, but he didn't even seem to think about it. He was unmanned and pacified.

“What about Olivia?” he asked. “She deserves better than you.”

“Perhaps she does,” I said. “But you're worse than I, by birth and by merit. Moreover, you're useless in a fight. You're no solution to her problems.”

He looked at the ring, and then he slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Very well,” he said with a bitter laugh. “It seems you have beaten me.” His eyes were turning dark where I had punched him, creating deep hollows against his pale skin, and there was blood in the spaces between his teeth. He looked exactly like a vampire ought to look.

He stalked back into the bar, and I heard him ask Richards to send for a driver. Thus, I had one fewer problem. I considered returning to Olivia, flush with victory over her suitor, to claim her as my own. But I doubted she'd approve of my disposition of Sedgewyck, and anyway, I was angry with her.

I went looking instead for sweet Noreen, Mr. Sedgewyck's pretty housemaid. He would likely no longer be in need of her services, so she was thus available to service me. I didn't love her, but she would do for the night.

 

Chapter 27

Now Hate rules a heart which in Love's easy chains

Once Passion's tumultuous blandishments knew;

Despair now inflames the dark tide of his veins;

He ponders in frenzy on Love's last adieu!

—
Lord Byron,
“Love's Last Adieu”

I first learned about love when I was eight years old, from a governess named May Gray. Her job in the daytime was to look after me. At night, she was a whore. As someone experienced with numerous practitioners of both professions, I can safely say she excelled at neither. She smelled like whisky, and her breasts tasted like old sweat, and she was as quick to raise the strap as she was to lift her skirt. My feelings about her have always been conflicted; though I was never passionate about her, she aroused and awoke my nascent passions for proper and liberal application elsewhere. I suppose I appreciate the education she provided.

Real love, though, would wait another two years, until I met Mary Chaworth. In the interim, my great-uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, passed without surviving issue, and my mother and I moved into Newstead Abbey.

Mary was a distant cousin of some sort; the Chaworths lived near the Byron lands, on the edge of Sherwood Forest, and the convenience of proximity had been the seed of a number of love affairs and marriages between the two families. Mr. Hanson thought she was a fine girl, and he encouraged me to quickly betroth myself unto her. Together, he believed, we might build a productive and upright life. My mother agreed, and conspired to foment a match during the summer vacation after my first year at Harrow.

The day I met Mary, though, she was only really interested in one thing:

“Can I see the sword?”

“What sword?” I asked. We were eating a picnic lunch in a disused sheep-tract between Newstead and the Chaworth lands. We'd found a lovely little rise crowned with a diadem of trees, and we sat on the shaded grass to eat cold chicken and drink hock and soda-water. These pastoral environs, according to my mother's theories, were conducive to burgeoning romance. I still had seven months, at that time, until my eleventh birthday.

“The sword your dad used to murder my grandfather.”

The aspersion against my father tensed my entire body and set my vision double. Blood roared to my ears. How dare this foolish child impugn the honor of one of Britain's greatest heroes, even as he undertook necessary and dangerous adventures abroad on the State's behalf, which kept him away from his devoted son?

“Take it back!” I yelped as I leapt to my feet. The audible creaking of the metal leg-brace beneath my trousers undercut the effect of my rage. “My dad never murdered anybody. He's a soldier and an honorable man.”

“He ain't a soldier anymore,” she said. “He's just dead.”

“He's not dead,” I said. “Only those without imagination ever die.”

“The real Lord Byron—the old Lord Byron—is still alive?”

“Oh. No, he's dead. He wasn't my father. He was my great-uncle.”

“Well, that still means your father is dead.”

I was incensed. “How would you know that?”

“If he were alive, he'd have become the Lord Byron, and not you.”

I tried to stammer something about vampires and the Gypsy legends of the East, but she just laughed at me.

“I can promise you that everyone dies,” she said. “Your father told you a fanciful story.”

I would say that was when I first loved Mary Chaworth. She represented, to me, the allure of adulthood; the stripping away of the pretty lies of childhood to perceive the world as it truly is, even if I had no intention of shedding my illusions.

Clergymen say the desire for knowledge is the Original Sin, and that was certainly the case for me. Like Adam's, my pursuit of Knowledge came at the behest of a woman. Ever since Mary Chaworth, the scent of perfumed flesh and the warm touch of it beneath my fingertips has reminded me of the fact that I would not endure forever. Awareness of death, I think, mingles passion with urgency.

“So, what about the sword?” asked Mary on that sun-dappled afternoon in my distant, formative past, sitting in the grass with her legs tucked coyly beneath her ruffled skirts.

“What sword?”

“You don't know much about Lord Byron, do you?”

“I am—”

“No, the real Lord Byron.”

The sword, as it turned out, was part of a rather comical bit of family lore. My great-uncle had a neighborly dispute with Lord Chaworth, Mary's grandfather, on the subject of whose lands were more abundant with game. My uncle was determined to resolve this argument, and did so in a rather clever manner: He got roaring drunk and disemboweled Chaworth with a sword, in full view of a number of witnesses, at the Stars and Garters tavern in London.

As punishment for the murder, my uncle spent two years imprisoned in the Tower. Murder is a capital crime, of course. But in England, nobility is still respected. Only commoners get executed.

They say Lord Byron felt winning the argument was worth the two years. When he returned to Newstead, he hung the murder weapon above his bed as a trophy, and when my mother and I inherited the place, we left it up there to collect dust and cobwebs. Mary found some sort of macabre delight in looking at it.

“The Byron name has come to stand for cruelty and senseless, remorseless violence,” she told me. “You've got a grand legacy to live up to.”

How could I do anything but love her?

Three summers later, I was somewhat more mature, and I decided that Mary Chaworth was my muse and that I was destined to spend my life with her. I refused to return to Harrow, because I could not stand to be apart from my beloved. But, thanks to the peculiar acoustic qualities of some of the larger rooms at Newstead, I overheard her from some distance away, saying that she cared nothing for “that plump, lame, bashful boy lord.” She was soon after engaged to a gentleman named Musters, a man known for his dubious morals and questionable finances.

This destroyed me utterly. I had given this girl a piece of my heart, and she took it and locked it away in a dusty cupboard. And throughout all my affairs and adventures that followed, I could never again give that piece of my heart to anyone else, for she had it and it was hers forever, though she cared nothing for it.

It was because I was unworthy of Mary Chaworth's love that I began swimming miles in icy waters in wintertime, and running great distances in layers of heavy clothing in hot weather.

I ought to drown you in the river.

It was because I was unworthy of Mary Chaworth's love that I stopped eating and started drinking. It was because I was unworthy of Mary's love that I began serially fornicating with near strangers.

Deformed. Useless.

It was because I was unworthy of Mary's love that I spent lavish sums, often borrowed, buying custom shoes that hid my clubfoot.

A physical manifestation of my failings and inadequacies.

So, if anyone ever wonders why it is that I am the way that I am, it's because Mary Chaworth couldn't love me.

 

Chapter 28

I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality. I have renounced
hazard
however, but I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage.

—
Lord Byron,
from an 1808 letter to John Hobhouse

A woman's undergarment is an intimidating device to confront when one is very drunk. After fumbling with Noreen's corset for a few minutes, and finding my situation growing extremely urgent, I solved the problem with my knife. The taut laces popped under only a little pressure, and the restraining mesh of quilted linen came free. I threw it to the floor, where it fell in a sad little heap. Mastery of the thing gave me a grim sense of satisfaction; it reminded me of the torturous contraptions that quack doctors inflicted upon my poor leg when I was a child.

“Byron,” she protested, “those are quite expensive. Why must you ruin everything?”

“Because I don't care about things,” I said. “And it isn't ruined. It merely needs relacing.”

Her body smelled of powder and female excitement, and her skin was damp and flushed. I pulled her to me and kissed her hard upon the mouth as I pressed my hand beneath her skirts. She was fumbling with my trousers.

“You must remove your boots,” she murmured.

“Of course,” I said. But first, I blew out the lamp so she would not see my shriveled right foot.

I climbed on top of Noreen and moved to kiss her, but she pushed me away. I swore a nasty oath at her as I covered my leg with the blanket and reached down to the floor, feeling around in the darkness for a shoe.

“No, it's not that,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck and pulling me back onto the bed. “It's just that he's watching us.”

I turned around and saw the hulking form of the bear, who had wandered into the room. He was nudging the girdle around on the floor with his nose.

“Darling, I assure you, the Professor's interest is purely academic.”

But her protests continued, and so I climbed out of the bed, taking the blanket with me to hide my leg from her. I coaxed the bear out of the bedroom, down the hallway to his study. He grumbled with protest at his exclusion from the evening's recreation.

“I know,” I said. “But the girl requires privacy.”

He nodded, and rubbed his bristly haunches against my great-uncle's sinister black cabinet before retreating to his pile of bedding in the corner of the room.

“Thank you, Professor. That is a fine idea, and you are gracious to suggest it, under the circumstances.”

I unlocked the cabinet. On the highest shelf was my green absinthe bottle. In a hidden drawer, there was another bottle; a small gray one with a glass stopper. I knotted the blanket around my waist and carried both bottles back to the bedroom.

“I come bearing delectable treats, sure to expand the mind and excite the senses.” I handed Noreen the bigger bottle.

She examined it and ran her fingers over it, peering at the opaque glass and the heavy cork jammed in the neck of it. “I've never tried absinthe,” she said, looking at the peeling, yellowed label. “I wouldn't even know how to drink it.”

I relit the lamp so she could appreciate summer-green color of the liqueur as I poured it into crystal glasses; glasses like the ones my father had smashed against the side of my mother's long-lost castle at Gight.